These days, when the worst of America has been so prominent, I’m happy that today’s #stampoftheday celebrates some of the best of America. Specifically, the 3-cent stamp, which was issued on October 4, 1948, celebrates volunteer fire fighters. The stamp, of course, is especially timely because of the many men and women who are putting their lives on the line fighting the horrific wildfires in California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states. Such people are special because, as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 1958, “I can think of no more stirring symbol of man’s humanity to man than a fire engine.”
The stamp was issued to mark the 300th anniversary of the first fire department in North America, which was established in New Amsterdam on October 4, 1648, about two decades after the first Europeans settled on the site. On that day, New Netherland Director-General Peter Stuyvesant appointed four men to act as “fire wardens” who were charged with inspecting chimneys and given the power to levy fines on people who had not kept their chimneys swept clear to prevent fires. They used the money raised from the fines to purchase fire-fighting equipment such as ladders and buckets. The city’s government later selected eight volunteers who patrolled the city streets at night to keep watch for fires. If they saw a fire, they would spin their wooden rattles to wake up the citizens and then oversee the townspeople as they organized bucket brigades to put out the fires.
About four decades later, officials in Boston hired 13 men to fight fires in the city. Following another major fire in 1711, concerned Bostonians created the Mutual Fire Societies, social and protective associations that established the pattern for organized volunteer firefighting groups. About two decades later, Benjamin Franklin, who had witness some of Boston’s fires, created The Union Fire company in Philadelphia. In addition to Franklin, several other founding fathers – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, John Hancock, Paul Revere, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and Aaron Burr – all served as volunteer firefighters. In 1853, Cincinnati became the first city to have a professional, paid fire department. But even today, about two thirds of the nation’s approximately 1.1 million firefighters are volunteers.
Vonnegut, who was a volunteer firefighter when he worked as a publicist in General Electric and lived in Alplaus, NY, often hailed volunteer firefighters, most famously in “God Bless You Mister Rosewater,” which was published in 1965. Like Vonnegut, Eliot Rosewater, the book’s protagonist, was scarred by his experience of fire during World War II. Vonnegut had experienced the firebombing of Dresden while he was a prisoner of war during World War II. Rosewater had charged with bayonet drawn into a burning German factory complex and, in the chaos, killed three civilian volunteer firefighters -“ordinary villagers, engaged in the brave and uncontroversial business of trying to keep a building from combining with oxygen.”
After the war, Rosewater eschews his family fortune, becomes a philanthropist and also volunteer firefighter. Firefighters, he notes, “rush to the rescue of any human being, and count not the cost. The most contemptible man in town, should his contemptible house catch fire, will see his enemies put the fire out. There we have people treasuring people as people.”
Vonnegut’s views on fire and firefighters never wavered. After the 9/11 attacks, he reprised his 1958 statement, telling The New York Post, “the most stirring symbol of man’s humanity toward man that I can think of is a fire truck.” And, according to Gregory Sumner, author of “Unstuck in Time: A Journey through Kurt Vonnegut’s Life and Novels” a month after the attacks, he joined others from his Manhattan neighborhood at a candlelight vigil to remember those from his local fire house who died in the Twin Towers. “That night,” Sumner wrote in 2011, “Vonnegut recalled how men from that unit had saved his life less than two years earlier, when smoke and flames from an errant cigarette filled his Turtle Bay townhouse. ‘Whether some who did that for me are dead now I have not dared to ask,’ he said.” Vonnegut then read “the list of local heroes who had perished on 9/11, reciting first names to humanize each one, to acknowledge them as family. ‘Tom, Fred, Mike, Dennis, George, Dan, another Tom, Carl and another Dennis. Thank you, sirs. God bless you. Amen.'”
Sumner also recalled that Vonnegut “cautioned his listeners against the temptations of vengeance,” the impulse that soon led us into Afghanistan and then Iraq. “He understood that it was mostly innocents who suffered in modern war, and that air strikes were always tragically imprecise. Vonnegut knew, like few other Americans, what it was like to be under the bombs, what the clean-up operations entailed. He ended his remarks with words on behalf of who suffered far from New York City. ‘It is daylight in Afghanistan. There are many unwelcome fires there, and many, many human beings are trying to put them out.'”
And for their part, firefighters retained their connection with Vonnegut. According to Sumner, he “kept in touch with the Alplaus firehouse to the end of his life. When he died in April 2007, at eighty-four, its bell tolled a 5-5-5 cadence, the traditional salute to a fallen brother. Of all the tributes that came forth from around the world for the celebrity writer, this is perhaps the gesture he would have appreciated most.”
So today, in the midst of all the ways that the worst of America seems to have come to the fore, I step back and honor firefighters and others who are “people treasuring people as people.”
Stay safe, be well, fight for justice, and work for peace.