The Unsigned Undelivered Letter

In the dying months of my seventy-eighth birthday in the year 2011, something clicked within me. I was remembering a historic undelivered letter and the private and painful burden I bore for a time to keep this letter undelivered. My reflections took me back to the 1985 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) held in Nassau, Bahamas. The Commission of Inquiry was looking into whether or not the first prime minister, Sir Lynden Pindling, had any involvement in drug-trafficking proceeds and was over in late 1983, and its outcome was almost and probably forgotten by the general population.

Rt. Hon. Rev. Dr. Philip Rahming, OBE, JP, a graduate of Calabar Theological College, Kingston, Jamaica; Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville Kentucky; and United Theological Seminary, Dayton Ohio, began his schooling at Sandilands All Age School in Fox Hill New Providence, Bahamas, his hometown. As a boy, Philip always had a love for service and a determination to become outstanding in his endeavors. Nurtured in a Baptist Sunday School where his grandfather was the Superintendent, young Rahming learned that God gave special gifts to individuals and that each person has a particular contribution to make in life. As an adult, the Reverend Doctor Rahming became president of Th e Bahamas Christian Council and served for six years. Later, he became a member of the Ethics Commission of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA). A former secondary school teacher, a lecturer at The Bahamas Teacher's College which became the College of Th e Bahamas and now is The University of Th e Bahamas. He also served as Chaplain to the Honorable Speaker of the right Honorable House of Assembly 1967-1969. Dr. Rahming served in the Baptist World Alliance on the Ethics Commission and Inter-Church Relation. Presently, he served as a pastor of Rehoboth Global Ministries. Reverend Rahming wrote The Bahamas Pledge of Allegiance and the national song of The Bahamas, "God Bless Our Sunny Clime." He is also the author of two books, Martin Luther King Jr.: His Religion, His Philosophy and The Pledge of the Bahamas: Its History. He was recently honored by the government among others in its Annual National Awards and received the Honor of the Most Honorable, October 2019. In January of 1979, the Late Pope John Paul II made a brief stop in The Bahamas on his way home from Latin America. It was evening and the Roman Catholics through the Bahamas Christian Council arranged a meeting for as many to see His Holiness. Dr. Rahming joyfully expressed, "As President of the Bahamas Christian Council, it was my special privilege and honor to welcome His Holiness to the Bahamas."

In the early nineteenth century, when the Hudson’s Bay Company sent men to its furthest posts along the coast of North America’s Pacific Northwest, the letters of those who cared for those men followed them in the Company’s supply ships. Sometimes, these letters missed their objects – the men had returned to Britain, or deserted their ships, or died. The Company returned the correspondence to its London office and over the years amassed a file of “undelivered letters.” Many of these remained sealed for 150 years and until they were opened by archivist Judith Hudson Beattie, when the Company archives were moved to Canada. These letters tell the fascinating stories of ordinary people whose lives are rarely recounted in traditional histories. Beattie and Helen M. Buss skilfully introduce us to both the lives of the letter writers and their would-be recipients. Their commentaries frame, for contemporary readers, the words of early nineteenth century working and middle class British folk as well as letters to “voyageurs” from Quebec. The stories of their lives – fathers struggling to support a family, widowed mothers yearning to see their sons, bereft sweethearts left behind, and wives raising their children alone – reach out over two centuries to offer rare insight into the varied worlds of men and women in the early nineteenth century, many of whom became settlers in Washington, Oregon, and the new British colony of Vancouver Island.

The letters in this volume record an important transition in Brandeis's life. In July 1907, when the letters begin, Louis D. Brandeis was merely an unusually successful local reformer. His earlier victories against the Boston Elevated and the Boston Consolidated Gas Company, even his stunning success in the achievement of the Savings Bank Life Insurance law in Massachusetts, all centered exclusively upon Boston or Massachusetts problems. But by December 1912, when this book ends, Brandeis was one of the best known social activists in the United States. He received regular national attention in popular periodicals and advised the newly elected President of the United States. As these letters show, Brandeis always kept one eye on Massachusetts affairs—supervising the inauguration of the insurance reform, continuing to oppose long-term franchises for the subway, and advising Massachusetts governors on proposed bills and prospective appointments. But he devoted the major part of his energy in this five-and-a-half-year period to a series of crusades of crucial national importance. He attacked the attempt of Mellen and Morgan to gain a monopoly hold over new England transportation as he strenuously and doggedly opposed the merger of the Boston & Maine with the New Haven railroad. He entered, in a leading role, the most celebrated conservation battle of his generation, the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy, and he emerged as a major spokesman for the preservation and orderly development of natural resources. He helped to hammer together an arbitration mechanism to maintain industrial peace within the New York garment trades, a mechanism he believed would have broad implications for the future of industrial democracy in America. He battled the demands of the railroads for increased rates; he joined the crusade for efficiency and scientific management; and he directed repeated blows against the huge concentrations of economic power within the national economy. It should not be surprising that Brandeis and Robert M. LaFollette were drawn together, and these letters will show both the extent of that relationship and the way in which Brandeis's influence spread to other progressives in Congress. Other matters—his earliest Zionist activities, his achievement in defending progressive state legislation before the Supreme Court, his interest in Alaskan development along conservationist lines, his plan for the regularity of employment, his role in the Presidential campaign of 1912—are all part of his work during these turbulent years and are all touched upon in greater or lesser detail in these letters.

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