“All in the Family”

In 1776, when the thirteen colonies that were eventually to comprise the United States had decided on their course of Revolution, Britannia very much ruled the waves. Over centuries, the French, the Dutch, the Danes and the Spanish, had all sought to achieve naval supremacy over the United Kingdom, only to find that their adversary was far mightier. It thus came as no surprise to the American colonists that the British viewed the fledgling rag-tag Continental Navy as a small diversion in a larger war that they could not envisage losing. The three years between the beginning of the War of Independence and the morning of the 25th of September, 1779, revealed that the British estimate of the United States Navy had been more or less accurate, with the exception of one important factor, and that factor bore the name Captain John Paul Jones.

	Captain John Paul Jones by George Bagby Matthews from the website of The United States Senate

Born in Scotland in 1747, Jones had come to the United States as a teenager on-board a British merchant marine vessel. He quickly proved himself as a young man of brilliant nautical talent, and of daring. By the time he reached his early twenties, Jones was commanding vessels throughout the Atlantic, and adopted as his new homeland, the America colonies. Clearly the most able of the Captains available to the United States, Jones in 1779 had acquired a reputation for audacity and bravery.

Off the coast of Flamborough Head in Yorkshire, John Paul Jones in charge of the Bonhomme Richard decided to give battle with HMS Serapis, under Captain Richard Pearson of the Royal Navy. There on an autumn morning, in full view of the farming community of Yorkshire who were rambling home after a long day in the fields, the greatest victory of the infant United States Navy took place.

Severely outgunned by the British, Pearson had called out to Jones to surrender, to which in the midst of the frenetic battle, Jones issued forth the now famous retort: "Sir, I have not yet begun to fight". By throwing grappling hooks across to the Serapis, Jones locked the two vessels tightly together in a python-like wrestle to the death. A short time later with the splitting of the mast of the Serapis, Jones who had been on the verge of defeat, accepted the surrender of the British commander. Like the announcement of a virulent plague, news of Jones' astonishing victory spread terror throughout the British Isles, for now the British realized that if Jones could vanquish the best vessels that Britain put to sea, then British homes in British ports were unsafe.

John Paul Jones would outlive the War of Independence by less than a decade. The man who inspired the development of a new naval superpower was to die on the 18th of July, 1792 — alone — in Paris. Jones had fallen foul of a number of political cliques in the United States. Powerful men such as Arthur Lee (1740-1792) and his brother William Lee (1739-1795), along with their friend, Samuel Adams (1722-1803), had seen to it that their friends and relatives reaped the benefits of all that Jones had won. Ironically, the title that Jones so much deserved, that of Admiral, was not bestowed upon him by the United States, but by Imperial Russia, who hired the then 'unemployed' Jones to give battle with the Turks in the Black Sea. There, leading Zaporogian Kozaks in 'chaikas', John Paul Jones fought his last battle. One of the greatest naval commanders of his era, Jones was to fall victim not to a British cannon, nor a Turkish bullet — but to envy and nepotism.

Derived from the Latin word 'nepos' meaning a nephew, nepotism refers to that behaviour in society which sees appointments and opportunities granted on the basis of personal relationships, (that is, family and friends), rather than objectively on a person's qualifications, talents, experience and abilities. In the case of John Paul Jones, history would eventually prove that the indolent and cowardly were promoted and sponsored above Jones by the Lee & Adams triumvirate. The inexcusable appointment of Pierre Landais (1731-1820), a friend of this clique, nearly brought destruction to the United States naval cause, and eventually led to his being court-martialed and a near certification of insanity. The Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of John Paul Jones, Samuel Eliot Morison, in his book, John Paul Jones: A Sailor's Biography, concludes that had Jones been offered the appointments which he applied to, and was qualified for, then the development of the United States Admiralty would have been sped up appreciably.

This is theft!

	“a culture where even in the best case scenario we breed citizens who are semi-deprived — people who are lead to water, but not given the right to drink, a people as enslaved as any in history, but chained not by irons, but by the sly-wink, the apologetic word and the frigid handshake, persecuted by people who liberally quote Walden, but who live like Capone.”

Loyalty to family and friends is good — but not so if the loyalty extends to the deliberate and wanton doing of an injustice in the desire to achieve some family 'end'. If two people seek employment, the first being a family member who is under-qualified for the position, the second person being obviously the best candidate for the position, but bearing no relationship to the employer, not to award the latter the post is not an example of familial love, but an example of theft — taking from someone what is rightfully theirs. God requires that we act justly and discern wisely, and does not ask of us that we appoint our family and friends to their highest levels of incompetence, comforting our consciences by telling ourselves that they will put lucrative salaries to good use, despite their ineptitude.

The child of envy and greed, nepotism if left unchecked also has a tendency to undermine the development of societies and institutions, by preserving and preferring selfish ends over the fostering of the common good. For this reason The Special Assembly for Africa of the Synod of Bishops which met in Rome in 1994 condemned injustice on the African continent, injustice which was perpetuated by a cycle of tribalism and nepotism, that saw power stay in the hands of the politically and economically strong, and little or no opportunity given to those with actual talent or merit. When this occurs we have a situation that the character, Harold Abrahams spoke of in the 1981 motion picture, Chariots of Fire, a culture where even in the best case scenario we breed citizens who are semi-deprived — people who are lead to water, but not given the right to drink, a people as enslaved as any in history, but chained not by irons, but by the sly-wink, the apologetic word and the frigid handshake, persecuted by people who liberally quote Walden, but who live like Capone. In such circumstances we bring to fruition the satirical quip of George Orwell in his work, Animal Farm, that all men are indeed created equal, it is just that some men are created by society more equal than others. Nepotism is a grave sin, for it detracts from justice, a justice based on "the firm and constant will to give God and neighbour their due". (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1995, §1836)

Who is my neighbour?

George Orwell

Nepotism can only continue to exist, when those in power do not believe in the family of man, but rather place the most narrow interpretation on the question: "And who is my neighbour?" For if one actually believed that we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, then one could never contemplate doing an act of injustice over a stranger in order to protect one's kin; for by so doing one is taking the single sheep from Uriah, in order to swell the numbers of David's flock.

In 1905, well over a century after Jones' death, President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) ordered that the American people give Jones his due by burying him belatedly on 'home soil'. After Jones' grave was finally discovered under a housing complex, in what was once the pauper section of the Protestant cemetary in Paris, his body was identified, and thus began his homecoming, a homecoming delayed by the desires of a group of people long-since dead who saw in Jones not the man who succesfully strove to wipe out a powerful enemy, but a threat to their power-base and schemes. Today, that man who at one time was hero to most of Europe, including ironically to the British — the gallant, reckless, but brilliant Chevalier Jones, lies in a marble tomb in the United States Naval Academy building. As for the trimumvurate, well, the best that can be said of them is that ever since 1779, hundreds of thousands of boys have play-acted that they were the Captain of the Bonhomme Richard, out-manned and out-gunned, finding themselves on a fire and smoke-filled deck, facing defeat, but ignoring any call to surrender.

©2007 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

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