Your Weekend Message From The Master

(Editor’s note: Charles Pierce writes daily at The Esquire Politics Blog at Esquire.com. He is an award-winning writer and author, most recently Idiot America. Every weekend, he sends out a weekly newsletter to subscribers, of which, I am one. From now through the election, I will post his weekend musings on here)

August 17, 2024.

Directly across the Charles River from this laptop is the Mount Feake Cemetery in Waltham in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, God save it. It was built in 1857 atop Mt. Feake, which is little more than a ridge, but which so impressed founding ice-sculpture John Winthrop that he named it after Robert Feake, who married one of Winthrop’s nieces. The cemetery was designed by Robert Morris Copeland, whose great gift was his ability to build his projects in a way that employed the natural surroundings and native topography of the land on which he was building what were then called “garden cemeteries.” It was designed with a series of winding lanes that conformed to the terrain that allowed access to all parts of the cemeteries.

One of these walkways is Woodburn Path, and at plot №2042, is the grave of George Henry Maynard, who died in 1929 at the age of 91. Maynard was born in Waltham and he had embarked on a career as a jeweler when the Civil War erupted in 1860. In July of 1861, Maynard enlisted in the 13th Massachusetts Infantry. This was quite a crew. Fiercely proud, the 13th became instantly notorious for its independence of thought. It was, wrote one New York…