For the well dressed breast pocket, or top pocket if you prefer, a hanky has been the traditional go to. But it’s a good place for a little book — and The Good Book in the breast pocket saved the life of Sam Houston, Jr., General Sam Houston’s son, at Shiloh, stopping a musket ball. The General lost his governorship in 1861 for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Confederacy, but understood the younger Houston’s desire to pursue his military career, a student at the Bastrop Military Institute. Injured at Shiloh and imprisoned at Camp Douglas, Sam Houston, Jr. studied medicine after the war, but later abandoned his practice, in favour of writing.
Fifty pages unbound, folded double in his top pocket, along with his metal spectacles case, slowed a bullet fired from a Colt .38 by unemployed saloonkeeper, John Schrank. Written on the fifty sheets was a fifty minute speech, delivered by the Bull Moose Party leader, who showed his bloodstained shirt and bullet holes in the manuscript, after someone shouted “Fake!” from the crowd, in response to a bodyguard having told the audience of the assassination attempt:
“FRIENDS, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet there is where the bullet went through - and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so, that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.
And now, friends, I want to take advantage of this incident and say a word of solemn warning to my fellow countrymen.”
The warning, in part:
“Friends, every good citizen ought to do everything in his or her power to prevent the coming of the day when we shall see in this country two recognized creeds fighting one another, when we shall see the creed of the “Havenots” arraigned against the creed of the “Haves.” When that day comes then such incidents as this tonight will be commonplace in our history. When you make poor men - when you permit the conditions to grow such that the poor man as such will be swayed by his sense of injury against the men who try to hold what they improperly have won, when that day comes, the most awful passions will be let loose and it will be an ill day for our country.”
Three Little Books every good citizen ought to consider for their top pocket rotation ¹ — for inspiration if not salvation:
“I used to live in a sewer. Now I live in a swamp. I've come up in the world.“
—Linda Darnell, No Way Out, The Little Black & White Book of Film Noir, Peg Thompson & Saeko Usukawa (Arsenal Pulp Press)
“Well, I'd like to say right now, we're not gonna give in at all to Satan tonight.”
— Bob Dylan, SAVED! The Gospel Speeches (Hanuman Books)
“Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed....“
The Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert R. Livingston
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
The Constitution of the United States of America
(The Cato Institute)
And, while we can’t say it will save you, we can say it will fit in your top pocket, one more from Un-Gyve Press:
My neighbor’s pine tree
Is easily the best thing
About my neighbor
HAIKU Harry Thomas