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Warbling Wobblies! A Singing Union and Its Little Red Songbook

✇ WWUUD?
5 October 2019 at 18:22
By: Patrick Murfin
A vintage edition of the IWW Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent a/k/a The Little Red Songbook.  This version featured a cover illustration by Ralph Chaplin based on the poster for the Patterson Pageant in 1913.
Tonight will be—gasp!—the 33rd annual Music Party hosted by my dear friendsand old Fellow Workers Kathleen Taylorand Hannah Frisch at their Hyde Park apartment in Chicago.  These are song circle gatherings including many former or current members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), friends and co-conspirators, accomplished folk musicians, or folks like me who are content to caterwauler.  Traditionally the evening has been well lubricated with beer and strong drink, but as the attendees have aged and grayed we have become a touch less rowdy—just a touch.

Song party hostess Kathleen Taylor belting it out during the 2010 song circle.
The parties began not long after I left Chicago for the far-off wilds of McHenry County.  I missed a lot of the early parties because I generally worked a second job on Saturday nights.  Later they were regularly held on the eve of the Diversity Day Festival I hosted on the Square in Woodstock.  In recent years I have cleared my calendar to be there, but missed last year after my gallbladder tried to kill me.  Nothing will keep me away tonight.

Although all sorts of songs will be shared, many of them will be ones we learned from the IWW’s famous Little Red Song Book.  There have been at least 38 editions of the working people’s hymnal since it appeared in 1909.  Here is the story of those remarkable little books.
The Wobblies were always a singing union and from the earliest strikes and job actions after the union’s founding in 1905 music was a part of meeting, rallies, marches, and picket lines.  Nowhere was this truer than in the Pacific Northwest where early organizing drives among lumber workers often called timber beasts because of their ragged appearance and often near starving conditions.  
Unable to effectively get to remote logging camps, IWW organizers relied on street meetings in cities like Spokane, Washington to protest the job shark hiring agencies that dispatched men to the camps collecting fees from the ax men and employers alike.  They found that songs helped attract crowds for the union’s soapbox orators. When Salvation Army Bands were often sent to drown out the meetings workers could be sing the old hymns with new words.
The Spokane local issued a song card featuring four selections in 1906.  The sold for a penny, but most were probably handed out for free at the street meeting.  The card featured already familiar labor songs and one original— Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.  McClintock was a former Texas cowboy, harvest worker, and Hobo who had become a lumber worker while also working as a musician in saloons.  The song was originally written in the 1890’s but was popular with all sorts of migratory workers.  McClintock also penned another popular Hobo song, The Big Rock Candy Mountain.  

A rare and battered copy of the Songbook's first edition published by the Spokane, Washington IWW local.
The song cards were so successful that the localdecided to assemble and sell a small songbook designed to easily fit into a shirt pocket.  It sold for 10¢, not an insignificant sum in those days when a dime could generally buy a meal at Skid Road diners, but not a prohibitive one.  The first edition did not have the now familiar red cover, but did have red lettering.  The songbook hit the streets in January of 1909 and was an immediate success. The book’s official title was a mouthful--Songs of the Workers, on the Road, in the Jungles, and in the Shops – Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.  Subsequent editions shortened that to Songs of the Workers and/or Songs of the IWW to Fan the Flames of Discontent.  Three editions were printed in Spokane over the next three years and were bound in heavy red stock, giving it the enduring nickname, The Little Red Song Book.  But that title appeared on only two of the subsequent 38 official editions.
Each new songbook included new songs like the labor standards The Red Flag sung to the tune of  O Tannenbaum and the global Socialist anthem The Internationale, and the easily adapted Civil War song Hold the Fort.
When the Spokane local was under siege during aftermath the 1909 Free Speech Fight, issuing and printing new editions shifted to Seattle.  It was in an early Seattle edition that Joe Hill’s song The Preacher and the Slave was published in 1911.  Mac McClintock claimed to be the first to sing it at a street meeting because Hill was too shy to perform publicly.
   
Carlos Cortez's linocut poster tribute Wobbly bard and martyr Joe Hill.
Joel Hägglund a/k/a Joseph Hillstrom and Joe Hill was a young Swedish and itinerate worker who had been involved with the IWW for a few years.  Several of his songs were added to editions of the Songbook including The Tramp, Stung Right, Where the River Frazier Flows, There is Power in a Union, Mr. Block and Casey Jones Union Scab all of which have become labor standards.  Hill was famously framed on a murder charge in Salt Lake City, Utah.  While being held he was inspired by young IWW orator Elizabeth Gurly Flynn who worked tirelessly on his defense committee and who had visited him in jail to write The Rebel Girl.
After Hill’s execution by firing squad on November 19, 1915 his poem Final Will was included in all subsequent editions of the Songbook.  At least two later versions of the book were officially named Joe Hill Memorial Edition, including one issued by the Cleveland Metal and Machinery Workers Industrial Union 440 in the early 1950’s.  By popular demand later editions have also included I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson which was popularized by Paul Robeson and Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs long ballad Joe Hill.

Industrial Worker editor Ralph Chaplin wrote the enduring labor anthem Solidarity Forever.
Other notable early additions to the Songbook included Dump the Bosses off Your Back by John Brill.  Industrial Worker editor and commercial artist Ralph Chaplin’s rousing Solidarity Forever was included in a 1916 edition and has become the leading labor anthem of all time.  Chaplin’s illustrations were also used on the covers of several editions.  The powerful We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years with words by an “Unknown Proletarian” and music by Rudolph Von Liebich appeared in 1919.
Somewhat surprisingly a song closely associated with the IWW’s 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike did not make it into the Songbook until 1984 although it appeared in the union magazine Industrial Pioneer in 1946.  James Oppenheimer’s Bread and Roses was first published as a poem in the American Magazine in December of 1911 shortly before the strike.  The mostly women mill workers adopted Bread and Roses as their strike slogan.  It wasn’t until the 1940’s that Carolyn Kohlsatt adapted the song to the melody most Wobblies still sing, although an alternative tune by Mimi Fariña in 1976 is gaining popularity.  In the 1970’s the song became a Women’s Liberation anthem as much as a labor one and it has even been included in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal Singing the Living Tradition.
Production of the Songbooks moved to IWW General Headquarters in Chicago and resumed after the great post-World War I Red Scaresent most Wobbly leaders, including Ralph Chaplin, to prison.  The ‘20’s saw the appearance of another notable contributor, Matt Valentine Huhta, who signed is contributions T-Bone Slim including The Popular Wobbly, Mysteries Of A Hobo’s Life, and The Lumberjack’s Prayer.
Editions of the Songbook have also included labor songs from other sources notably Woody Guthrie’s Union Maid with an updated final verse by Nancy Katz, The Banks are Made of Marble by Lee Rice and popularized by the Almanac Singers with more contemporary lyrics added, Which Side are You On by Florence Resse, and the old British rouser The Black Leg Miner as sung by Billy Brag.
The "double tall" 1995 36th edition featured music from around the world as well as old favorites an music for each song.
In 1995 the union issued an unusual “double tall” International Edition, one of only two editions to use the words Little Red Songbook on the cover, which in addition to most of the standard songs included more modern songs and songs from around the world including songs in Spanish it also included for the first and only time the full musical notationof each song.
Wobblies have continued to add new songs and adapted old ones, especially with more gender inclusive language.  Bruce “Utah” Phillips was the union’s popular balladeer, philosopher, story teller, and inveterate agitator who died much loved and mourned in 2008.  His contributions to the book included Larimer Street, Starlight on the Rails, and All Used Up but he introduced the music from the Songbook to a whole generation.  

Bruce "Utah" Phillips introduced the IWW and its songs to a new generation.
Other newer contributors include Anne Feeney, Scabs and Whatever Happened to the Eight Hour Day; Kathleen Taylor, The LIP Song and Soul Stealers; Goddard Graves, Go I Will Send Thee; Leslie Fish, Babylon Updated and Freedom Road; Carlos Cortez, Outa Work Blues; Darryl Cheney, Where Are We Gonna Work When the Trees Are Gone and Who Bombed Judi Bari; and Tom Morello, Union Song.
Hell, even I made an appearance under the monikerThe Irish Cowboy with a rock and roll picket line song Roll the Hours Back and The Dark and Dreary Slum Where I Was Born, a take-off on Woody Guthrie’s Oklahoma Hills.

Rebel Voices was the realization of a long cherished dream to produce a "Little Red Record."
Utah Phillips gathered both touring and Chicago-based member of the IWW’s Entertainment Workers Industrial Union #630 for a concert performance at Holstein’s on Lincoln Avenue to record a long dreamed of “Little Red Record.”  Released under the title Rebel Voices in 1988 by the record include performances by Phillips, Faith Petric,  Fred Holstein, Bruce Brackney,  Marion Wade, Bob Bovee, Jeff Cahill, Kathleen Taylor, J. B. Freeman, Robin Oye, Eric Glatz, and Mark Ross.  It is still available on CD or by Download.

Almost all of the songs included in the first 36 editions of the Songbook are included in The Big Red Songbook.

In 2007 noted folklorist Archie Green published The Big Red Songbook which included 250 songs culled from the various editions of the IWW songbook.  In 2016  a new edition was co-edited by Green, labor historian David Roediger, Franklin Rosemount, and Salvatore Solerno with an introduction by Tom Morello, the Wobbly rocker of Rage Against the Machine and  Audioslave, and posthumous afterward by Utah Phillips.
We will be singing a lot of these songs and remembering many friends and musicians who are no longer with us tonight.

A Beeping Little Ball in Space Struck Terror in America

✇ WWUUD?
4 October 2019 at 12:32
By: Patrick Murfin
About the size of a beach ball and carrying nothing but a rudimentary radio transmitter, the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite threw Americans into a scare.
The morning of October 5, 1957 Americans woke up to news that shocked and frightened them. Late the previous evening—about 11:30 October 4 Eastern Standard Time—the Soviet Union successfully placed a man-made object into earth orbit.  Two objects, actually—a shiny metal ball about 23 inches in diameter with four whip antennae weighing just over 180 pounds, and the protective rocket nose cone from which it had separated when it reach orbital Space.
The ball, Sputnik 1, was essentially a simple radio transmitter encased in a polished aluminum-magnesium-titanium alloy heat shield made in two hemispheresbolted together and sealed with an O-ring.  Its four antennae broadcast simple repeated beeps alternatingly on two broadcast bands that could easily be monitored across the globe by HAM radio operators.  An hour after launch, after determining that it had completed one low earth elliptical orbit Soviet authorities had announced their achievementand released information on how radio transmissions could be monitored and how the artificial moon might be observed from Earth.  Actually only the nose cone was large enough to reflect enough light to be seen from earth by the unaided eye.  The transmitting satellite, however, could be observed by telescope.

The New York Times headlines were more restrained than some American newspapers but noted ominously that the USSR got into orbit first with an object heavier than the planned US satellite and that its orbit took it over the States.
Sputnik was launched from a remote base near Tyuratam in the Kazakh SSR, the site for testing of R-7 two stage rockets.  In a final race against time, the launch facility had been completed only weeks before the successful launch.
The Soviets had determined to proceed with a project to launch an artificial satellite in January of 1956 after learning that President Eisenhower had announced plans to launch an American one during the much ballyhooed International Geophysical Year (IGY) scheduled to last 18 months from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958.  What they didn’t realize was that the American effort was lagging due to the unreliabilityof the primary launch vehicle, the Navy’s Vanguard rocket.
President Dwight Eisenhower had boasted that the United States would put a satellite in orbit during the much ballyhooed International Geophysical Year sending the Soviets into a scramble to get into space first.
The project was divided into two parts—the development and construction of the satellite, and the development of a reliable and powerful two stage rocket which would, not coincidentally, be suitably adaptable for use in the creation of an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capable of carrying and delivering a heavy nuclear war head.  
Work on the creation of an ambitious satellite was divided between five industrial/scientific ministries under the loose coordination of the USSR Academy of Sciences.  Original specifications for an object that would weigh between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds including a 700 lb. payload of scientific instruments and experiments.  It was to be able to transmit data to ground stations.  But when the various ministries delivered their parts, they did not fit together due to variations in specifications.  Worse, the heavy package proved to be more than the troubled R-7 rockets could handle
From May 15 to July 12 three attempts to launch an R-7 failed.  A fourth attempt on August 21 was partially successful—the head successful separated achieved orbital space but had to be destroyed upon re-entering the atmosphere.  A fifth test had similar results.    While this meant that the R-7 was not yet ready for use as an ICBM, it was determined that it was capable of deploying a lightweight satellite.

A life size model of Object D--Sputnik--in the Moscow Space Museum shows its simple construction.
Given the problems with the two components, the launch date for Object Dwas pushed back to April 1958 by which time glitches in the satellite itself and the launch vehicle could be ironed out.
But Soviet officials worried that the delay would allow the U.S. to reach space first.  They ordered the hasty construction of a stripped bare satellite with greatly decreased weight.  The only real pay load was the radio transmitter, critical in proving to the world that the Soviet Union got there first.
The Council of Ministers approved a plan to develop the basic devise in February.  Two were ordered.  The first was delivered to the launch site in late September, just as the R-7 rocket was deemed reliable for launch.  Within days it was in orbit.  The second Sputnik was successfully launched in December after the spectacular explosion of America’s Vanguard 1 on the launch pad.
In Washington President Eisenhower took the news with his usual calm equability.  Intelligenceover-flights in high flying U-2 spy aircraft had provided photos of the launch complex and the Soviet defense establishment had even quietly announced the development—prematurely as it turned out—of an operational ICBM after the first semi-successful test of the R-7.  
In one critical way, he was relieved that the Soviets had got their satellite up first—it was a potential slice through a Gordian Knot of international law.  The Soviets were voraciously complaining that over-flight of American high altitude balloonsexploring the edge of space violated their air rights.  He wasn’t sure if the Russians had yet detected the U-2 flights at near the same altitude.  The U.S. wanted to argue that space was beyond air rights, that it was international and free to any nation.  Since Sputnik would fly over the US, Eisenhower was confident he could use that a president for the American position.
The President was also confident that the impending launch of Vanguard I would surpass the Soviet achievement.
Ike was shocked by the hysterical, almost panicky response from the press and public alike who were soon joined by swarms of Congressmen and Senators demanding to know how America had lost a Space Race it didn’t even realize we were in.
America of the 1950’s was awash in two things—paranoia about the Soviet Union and Godless Communism and a fascination with space travel that seemed nearly at hand.  America’s good Germans led by former Nazi V-2 developer Werner Von Braun were assumed to be better than the bad German scientists that the Soviets had dragged into Russia.  Von Braun was a ubiquitous television personality, collaborating with Walt Disney on elaborate animations of a future space station and trips to the Moon and beyond.
Science fiction filmsand the lurid covers of paperback novels and pulp magazines were filled with sleek space ships, all somehow resembling huge versions of Von Braun’s V-2.  The dawn of an American space age seemed inevitable and a hand.  If they thought at all about a Soviet space program it was with the assurance that their science and technology were primitive, years behind the US.
Now here were the Ruskies were, flying high over our very heads with who knows what intentions.  If they could put up a satellite, could they bombard the States with nukes from space, or zap us with death rays.

After the spectacular explosion of a Vanguard launch vehicle on it pad, President Eisenhower went on TV to calm the American people and assure them that the US would rapidly catch up in the newly christened Space Race on December 10, 1957.
In response to the uproar Eisenhower went on TV to reassure the public that the US would soon be back in the game.  He ordered the launch of the Vanguard I moved up.  That launch failed on national television on December 6.
Meanwhile the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was ordered to hastily revive scrapped plans for a launch vehicle and stripped down satellite similar to Sputnik.  Explorer I a 38 lb. satellite was successfully launched on top of a Jupiter-C January 31, 1958—a least within the promised IGY window.

Bill Pickering (left), James Van Allen (center), and Wernher von Braun (right) triumphantly held a model of Explorer 1 above their heads the day after it became the first U.S. satellite to orbit the Earth on January 31, 1958.  Von Braun was America's "good German"  and  was the chief designer of the Jupiter-C rocket.  Van Allen put radiation detecting Geiger tubes into the payload that discovered the Radiation Belt named for him.  The scientific discovery not only one-upped the Russian's essential dumb satellite but briefly threw the Soviets into a panic of their own--they suspected that America may have exploded a nuclear device on the mission, essentially created the radiation belt.
Sputnik 1 had burned up upon re-entering the atmosphere on January 4 after completing 1400 orbits.  Its radio transmitter had emitted those beeps for 22 days, long after the expected failure of the battery.

No Easy Path for Translator of the First English Bible in Print

✇ WWUUD?
3 October 2019 at 11:51
By: Patrick Murfin
Miles Coverdale, maker of Bibles.

On this day in 1535 the first complete printed English translationof the Bible into was published.  Because its translator Miles Coverdale had been on the lam in Europe for some years due to religious turmoil at home, the book was printed on the continent.  For many years the exact printer and his location were in dispute, but has fairly recently been established to be Merten de Keyser in Antwerp.  The book was evidently financedby leading Low Countries Reformers.

Coverdale himself was born in Yorkshire around 1488.  He was ordained a priest in Norwich, a hotbed of religious fervor.  In 1514 he joined the scholarly convent of Austin friars at Cambridge where he was also allowed to pursue his studies at the University.  He was a supporter of Prior Robert Barnes who was sympathetic to the Reformation on the continent.  Barnes was tried for heresy in 1526 and Coverdale was active in his defense.

He left the convent to resume preaching shortly thereafter, but was forced to flee the country in as pressure mounted against dissentersin the English Church.  Whether he had already begun his work on a Bible translation is unknown.  But once in Europe, where making the Word of God available in the languages of the people was considered essential to Reform, he was undoubtedly encouraged and financed in his efforts.  

                                    The title page of the Coverdale Bible.




The trouble for Coverdale was that although scholarly by bent, he was far from well equipped to undertake such a massive translation.  Although proficient in Latin, he was barely competent in Greek and knew only rudimentary Hebrew.  That meant that he had to rely on either Latin texts or other translations intomodern language instead of working from near original material.  He claimed to have consulted “five soundry interpreters” in Latin, English and German as source texts.

His main sources were German texts including Luther’s Bible and the Swiss-Germanversion Zürich Bible of Zwingli.  That meant he was working from sources several times removed from original Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek texts.

In fact Coverdale also drew heavily on both the Latin Vulgate, a more recent translation from the Greek made possible by the research of Erasmus and the early Humanists, and on the translation of the New Testament and a handful of Old Testament books into English by William Tyndale which had been printed in 1525.  

                                                         John Wycliffe, a supressed earlier translator, in his study.




 He did not claim to have used the infamous Wycliffe’s Bible, translated into Middle English way back around 1390.  That had circulated only hand to hand in manuscript and had resulted in the execution several churchmenover a number of decades who possessed or passed it along.

But Coverdale helped himself to big chunks, barely disguised from Tyndale.  Tyndale himself ran afoul of the Counter Reformation and was executed by strangulation as hereticin 1536, the year after Coverdale’s version first appeared.

Obviously things were getting dangerous in Europe for Bible translators.  On the other hand, things were becoming more congenial back home in England.

                       Henry VIII, painted here in 1431, sponsored Coverdale's two Bible translations before turning on him.



 Coverdale had managed to dash back to Cambridge in 1531 to finish his bachelor’s degree at the University and had managed to make it back to Antwerp with his head still attached to his body.  Then in 1534 Henry VIII, the former Defender of the Faith—Catholicism—broke with the Roman Church over certain domestic matters and established a new national Church with himself at its head.

Originally it was expected that the new Church would simply continue Catholic practiceand usage intact.  But almost from the beginning Reformers sought to make the church over in the manner of the Lutheransand other Protestants.  When Henry decided to break up the Monasteries and appropriate their landsand wealth for the Crown, he found more reason than ever to be sympathetic of that trend.

Coverdale arrived back in England to find himself a favorite of the Kingin 1539.  His Bible was printed for the first time in the country in folio and quarter-folio editions, carried the Royal license and was therefore the first officially approved Bible translation in English.  

For better or worse Coverdale's fortunes were linked to his patron, Thomas Cromwell who fell from Henry VIII's favor.


He was already at that time editing on yet another new version of the Bibleknown as the Great Book. This version drew even more strongly on Tyndale than his first effort under the sponsorship of Thomas Cromwell, the king’s first minister. Henry was so enthusiastic in fact that he ordered every parish in England to procure a copy and keep chained but publicly available in every chapel so the any literate person would have direct access to the Scripture in the vernacular.

Despite the success of the newer version, Coverdale’s first version continued to be printed in new editions through 1553.

But favor of the mercurial monarch was a hard thing to hold.  In 1440 Coverdale’s friend and main sponsor at court, Thomas Cromwell, the king’s former first minister lost his head. Cromwell was also the leading voice for remaking the Church of England along Protestant lines.  With the balance of power swinging back to the Anglo-Catholic party, Coverdale had to return to Europe for this own safety.

He lived in impoverished exile in the German states.  From 1543 to 1547 he was a pastor and schoolmaster at Bergzabern in the Palatinate Electorate. 

Winds of change blew fortunate for Coverdale when Henry’s son Edward VI assumed the throne.  He was made personal chaplain to the boy king and then appointed Bishop of Exeter in 1653.

Coverdale prospered briefly as chaplain to the Boy King Edward VI and as Bishop of Exeter.  The young king's heir, his very Catholic sister Mary, was not ammused.

When Henry’s daughter Mary, who had remained a good Catholic, assumed the throne in 1657, Coverdale was ousted from his See and once again went into exile.  For the next several years he bounced around Europe.

It was safe to return again 1654 but unable to reclaim his Bishopric.  He served a modest parish as Rector of St. Magnus’s, near London Bridge increasingly drawn to Puritanism.  He died, however, still in the good graces of the Church of England.

The Anglican Church still has a soft spot in its heart for the old maker of Bibles.  It still uses his translation of the Psalter in the Book of Common Prayer.

Want to know what Coverdale’s work sounded like?  First here is the familiar VIII Psalm as he rendered it in The Coverdale Bible:

The Lord is my shepherde, I can wante nothinge. He fedeth me in a grene pasture, ād ledeth me to a fresh water. He quickeneth my soule, & bringeth me forth in the waye of rightuousnes for his names sake. Though I shulde walke now in the valley of the shadowe of death, yet I feare no euell, for thou art with me: thy staffe & thy shepehoke cōforte me. Thou preparest a table before me agaynst mine enemies: thou anoyntest my heade with oyle, & fyllest my cuppe full. Oh let thy louynge kyndnes & mercy folowe me all the dayes off my life, that I maye dwell in the house off the LORD for euer.
And here it is in the Book of Common Prayer Psalter:
The Lord is my shepherd therefore can I lack nothing. He shall feed me in a green pasture and lead me forth beside the waters of comfort. He shall convert my soul and bring me forth in the paths of righteousness, for his Name's sake. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff comfort me. Thou shalt prepare a table before me against them that trouble me thou hast anointed my head with oil, and my cup shall be full. But thy loving-kindness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Not yet the majestic cadences of the King James Version but getting there.

The Smell of Impeachment in the Morning

✇ WWUUD?
2 October 2019 at 16:19
By: Patrick Murfin
There has been a steadily rising clamor to impeach Donald Trump over a number of issues.  A solid majority of Americans now support it. What’s that I smell?   It may be the mildew of a soggy Fall in these parts or the dog’s grass pad gone too long uncleaned.   But no, I smell impeachment in the morning.   And this time it is serious.   Some folks have been muttering and calling for the impeachment of Donald Trump almost from the beginning—and he piled up many possible offences—violating the emolument clause of the Constitution, payoffs and bribes to Stormy Daniels and others, possible tax fraud, obstruction of justice in several instances most notably in trying to interfere with or squash the Mueller Report to name a few.  ...

The Elaine Massacre Centennial—Bullets for Sharecroppers

✇ WWUUD?
1 October 2019 at 09:56
By: Patrick Murfin
In 1919 Black sharecroppers in Arkansas who dared to start a union were attacked by posies and mobs.  Some of those rounded up were lynched, others were hunted down and shot.  Hundreds died.

1919 was a hell of a year in America.  In the wake of World War I long pent up tensions boiled to the surfacefrom coast to coast.  The decades long open class war between the employing class and the workers who demanded justice and equity through their labor unions which had been on partial abatement during war effort, reignited with a vengeance.  Bloody strikes erupted across the country—in the steel industry of the Northeast and Midwest; Chicago streetcar operators; harbor workers, tailors, tobacco workers, painters, streetcar operators in New York City, Western miners and lumberjacks, even Boston Police.  The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) despite being suppressed during the War and subject to nation-wide raids that summer was spreading a revolutionary brand of unionism, but even the stodgy American Federation of Labor (AFL) under pressure from their members was assuming a startling new militancy.  Many workers took heart from the revolution in Russia—a General Strike closed Seattle and unions formed a Soviet to manage it.
Employers, government, and the press reacted with predictable hysteria and a heavy hand.  The great Red Scare on and with it the greatest repression of dissent, personal, and civil rights in American history conducted by every level of government and law enforcement from the fledgling Bureau of Investigation of the U.S. Justice Department, through state police and militia, down to municipal police, and county sheriff’s posses—all frequently working hand in glove with company gun thugs and vigilante mobs.  Workers were shot, beaten, and tear gassed.  They were locked out of jobs and fired en masse, replaced with scabs.  They were kidnapped and forced to run gauntlets. Thousands were roundedup and jailed.   Hundreds deported.
At the same time long suppressed racial tensions exploded.  In cities like Chicago, Knoxville, and Washington, DC where Southern Blacks had flocked to find war work, the post-war recession pitted the new arrivals against White workers.  Deadly race riots broke out with White mobs attacking any Black they could find, burning neighborhoods and businesses.  In the Souththere was a resurgence of resistance to the imposition of Jim Crow lawswhich had been restricting every aspect of black civic and economic life since the end of Reconstruction.  When thousands of Black combat veterans of the Great War arrived back home they were less willing to bow down to White supremacy and many became leaders of resistance in their communities.  This terrified the Southern White establishment.  Lynching and night riding were on the rise as were wild rumors of Black insurrections that planned to kill all whites.

Wealth for the landowners, starvation for sharecroppers.  The porch of tenant farmer's porch shack groans under a day's worth of picked cotton.  But they they might not be paid for their crop for months and had no way of either confirming the price it was sold for or the fair and accurate weight of the crop.
All of these forces came together in an Arkansas back water, a rural Delta cotton belt enclave where Black share croppers out-numbered the White farmers who employed them 40-1.  On October 1, 1919 hundreds of members of a hastily raised posse and unorganized mobs from surrounding counties and from across the River in Mississippi began roaming the country around Elaine in Phillips County hunting and shooting down Blacks of all ages and sexes.  The hunt continued for three days.  Battle hardened Federal Troops called in to quell a “Black Insurrection” and separate and disarm both sides, joined in the general mayhem, adding a touch of military efficiency to the operation.  
The total Black death toll remains unknown but was at least 100 and local account put it at closer to 250 based on those who disappeared and were never found.  Hundreds more were arrested, held in a virtual concentration camp until 122 were indicted.  Twelve of these were sentenced to death by hanging.
Things had always been tough for share croppers in the Delta.  But they were getting worse.  The main problem was getting the settlements due them for the crops they raised for their landlords.  The land owners took the cotton to market without the sharecroppers present.  They sold it when convenient—often delaying months hoping from prices to rise—and would not pay their tenants until after that, or when convenient.  Meanwhile tenants with no other source of income borrowed against their crop to make purchases of necessities at stores that accepted script, often owned by the farmers themselves.  By Arkansas law a share cropper could not leave his land until this debt was paid.  
The 1918 crops had generally gone to market in October.  Most sharecroppers in the area were not paid until the following July meaning extra months of borrowing.  Also the plantation owners generally did not provide either proof of the price paid on delivery, or itemized bills of what was owned from the stores.  Sharecroppers were at the mercy of their landlords and held in something very close to slavery.
Local sharecroppers, spurred on by recently returned veterans began meeting secretly in the area during the late summer to discuss their options.  They boiled down to two:  a class action law suit against the owners or the formation of some kind of union.  A law suit—even if the poor sharecroppers could find a lawyer—would be expensive, take a longtime to resolve exposing the plaintiffs to retaliation by the landlords, and have little chance of success in Arkansas courts.  Organizing a union would be dangerous, but solidarity might offer some protection from retribution.  They hoped.
Robert L. Hill of Winchester, Arkansas, himself a Black tenant farmer, had organized the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America.  Several lodges were secretly formed that summer in the Elaine area.  In addition to representing the tenant farmers, it also sought to represent their wivesand daughters who worked as cooks, maids, wet nurses, and “mammies” in plantation homes and in the homes of other local Whites.
The meeting called at Hoop Spur Church three miles from Elaine on September 29 was just the latest of the meetings.  About 100 sharecroppers crowded into the remote church building.  Organizers were aware that by now the Plantation owners had gotten wind of what was afoot.  As a precaution against nightriders, armed guards were posted outside the building.
As the meeting was going on inside three men, Deputy Sheriff Charles Pratt; W. A. Adkins, a Missouri-Pacific Railroad detective, and a Black trustee from the Phillips County Jail, pulled up in a car outside the church.   Some sort of confrontation occurred between the White men and the Black armed guards.  A gunfight erupted.  Who fired the first shot is unknown.  In the end it didn’t even make a difference. When it was over Pratt was dead, Adkins wounded and the trustee was fleeing on foot to the County Seat at Helena.  Knowing what was inevitably coming, the meeting quickly broke up and attendees scattered to their homes, many preparing to flee the area.

Lurid headlines whipped Whites into a frenzy of bloodlust.
By the next morning the Phillips County Sheriff organized a posse to arrest or kill anyone involved in the meeting and shooting.  The core posse was made up of local plantation owners, their overseers and White employees, local businessmen, and what lay-a-bouts could be quickly rounded up.  As the day wore on, fueled by wild rumors and lurid newspaper headlines, hundreds more armed men poured into the area from surrounding counties and nearby Mississippi.  If the posse had ever truly been a law enforcement body under the control of the Sheriff, it quickly deteriorated into a raving mob.

White throng to join the official posse or just set out in mobs of their own to hunt Blacks.
It was a hunting party.  Blacks were shot down in their homes, whole families murdered.  Many more were chased down as they tried to escape on foot.  Some were armed and there was occasional resistance.  Five members of the mob were killed, but some of those were apparently struck by shots from their friends, many of whom had been drinking heavily through the day and following night.
County authorities wired Governor Charles Hillman Brough for troops to help suppress a supposed insurrection.  Brough was a Wilson progressive and like the President a former college professor with a PhD.  He also echoed the Wilson administration’s near hysteria over the Red menace.  In a speech in St. Louis during the War he said, “there existed no twilight zone in American patriotism” and called Wisconsin Senator Robert LaFollete, who opposed the war, a Bolshevik leader.  And he was an unabashed supporter of the Jim Crow system.
Brough pressed the War Department for troops, which somewhat reluctantly agreed to dispatch 500 men from Camp Pike near Little Rock.  Most were Arkansas men awaiting discharge thus they were rather loosely organized for camp life, not in the cohesive units they were used to in France and serving under officers with whom they were unfamiliar and whom, as we shall see, soon lost controlof the men.

Army Col. Isaak Jenks and Arkansas Governor Charles Hillman Brough arrive in Elaine with Federal troops as members of the mob look on.  The Army was supposed to disarm both side.  Instead troops simply joined the hunt.
The troops arrived on the scene during the day of October 2.  Their official mission was to disarm and separate both sides and assist in the arrest of the perpetrators of a riot and members of an insurrectionary cabal.  Many members of the mob were exhaustedanyway and began to drift home, but others continued to arrive and join in the hunt.  The troops, who were fed frightening rumors, joined the hunt themselves.  Colonel Isaac Jenks, commander of the U.S. troops at Elaine, officially reported two Blacks killed by his troops, but the Memphis Press on reported that “Many Negroes are reported killed by the soldiers….”
This was later confirmed by an account by Sharpe Dunaway, of the Arkansas Gazette in 1925 who recalled that soldiers, “committed one murder after another with all the calm deliberation in the world, either too heartless to realize the enormity of their crimes, or too drunk on moonshine to give a continental darn.”
At least the troops were more efficient than the posse/mob in making arrests.  Over the next few days they rounded up hundreds of men, just about every still breathing Black man they could find, and placed them in an improvised bull pen near Helena.  The troops conducted “intense interrogation of the suspects” which often amounted to beatings, torture, and threats to family members.
Meanwhile the Southern press was having a field day passing on the wildest of rumors.  A headline in the Arkansas Gazette on October 3 screamed, “Negros Plan to Kill All Whites:  Slaughter was to Begin with 21 Prominent Men.”  E. M. Allen, a planter and real estate developer who became the spokesmanfor Phillips County’s white power structure, told the Helena World on October 7, “The present trouble with the Negroes in Phillips County is not a race riot. It is a deliberately planned insurrection of the Negroes against the whites directed by an organization known as the ‘Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America,’ established for the purpose of banding Negroes together for the killing of white people.”
Even the New York Times was not immune from the hysteria.  Under a headline that in part read, “Trouble traced to Socialist Agitators,” the paper breathlessly reported, “Additional evidence has been obtained of the activities of propagandists among the Negroes, and it is thought that a plot existed for a general uprising against the whites.” A white man had been arrested, the article added, and was “alleged to have been preaching social equality among the Negroes.”  Of course no such White man was arrested—or ever existed.
The idea sprang from the assumption that Blacks were naturally too content with their lot and too stupid to organize themselves unless led astray and directed by devious revolutionists.
Governor Brough arrived personally on the scene in the company of the Federal troops.  He consulted with a group of local leaders designated the Committee of Seven who passed on every rumor that they heard, or made up.  The Governor appointed the same men to lead his own “investigation” not into what happened or the response to it, but on how to prevent future insurrections.  The Governor told the press, “The situation at Elaine has been well handled and is absolutely under control. There is no danger of any lynching…. The white citizens of the county deserve unstinting praise for their actions in preventing mob violence.”
Violence wound down after three days, although there were sporadic shootings later, and more men were arrested when found in hiding.  Official estimates of the number of Blacks killed hovered around 100.  Local residents believed that the number was two to three times that.  No one will ever know for sure.  Most of the dead were buried quietly by their families, by who ever found their bodies, or mass unmarked graves dug by the troops.
Over the next few days some men who were vouched for by their employers were released from the bullpen.  285 were then transferred to the county jail, which had a capacity of only 40.  More torture was conducted, according to sworn affidavits by two posse members, T. K. Jones and H. F. Smiddy, in 1921, to extract confessions.

The original Elaine 12 were all sentenced to die in the electric chair before being split into two groups of six for re-trial.
October 31, 1919, the Phillips County Grand Jury indicted 122 of the prisoners on charges ranging from murder to, without apparent irony, night riding, a hang-over statue from the Reconstruction Era, aimed at the Ku Klux Klan. The trials began the next week. White attorneys from Helena were appointed by Circuit Judge J. M. Jackson to represent the first twelve black men to go to trial. Attorney Jacob Fink, who was appointed to represent Frank Hicks, admitted to the jury that he had not interviewed any witnesses. He made no motion for a change of venue, nor did he challenge a single prospective juror, taking the first twelve called. By November 5, 1919, the first twelve black men given trials had been convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair. As a result, sixty-five others quickly entered plea-bargainsand accepted sentences of up to twenty-one years for second-degree murder. Others had their charges dismissedor ultimately were not prosecuted.
Meanwhile the case had stirred the attention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP, the leading, and almost only, national civil rights organization.  Field Secretary Walter White came to Elaine personally to investigate, at great risk to himself.  

NAACP Field Secretary Walter White, who could pass for white, went undercover at great risk to investigate the rampage and its aftermath.
White was mixed race with pale skin, blue eyes, and light hair.  He easily passed as a White man.  In this guise he interviewed local leaders and members of the posse and then met secretly with the families of those in jail and with some men in hiding.  Word leaked out that there was a High Yellow from up North snooping around.  White was warned and got on a train where a conductor confided in him about a, “damned yellow nigger passing for white and the boys are going to get him…when they get through with him he won’t pass for white no more!”
As soon as he was safely in the North White wrote articles which were published in the Chicago Daily News, which had provided him with the press credentials he used to interview White leaders; the Chicago Defender, the nation’s leading Black newspaper; The Nation, and the NAACP’s magazine The Crisis.  It was the first time the sharecroppers’s side of the story was told along with revelations of the bloody massacre and persecution.  Local authorities tried to have both the Defender and The Crisis banned from the mails.

Journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett also investigated the case and wrote a widely circulated pamphlet about it.
Black journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett secretly interviewed members of the Elaine Twelve in jail, and wrote a detailed account in her 1920 pamphlet Arkansas Race Riot.
The NAACP launched a massive drive for a defense fund to handle appeals of the convicted men.  They obtained as co-counsel Scipio Africanus Jones, Arkansas’s leading Black attorney and eighty year old Colonel George W. Murphy, a Confederate veteran, former Arkansas Attorney General, and unsuccessful candidate for Governor on the Progressive Party ticket.  Despite his age Murphy was considered still one of the most able men at the state Bar.
Both lawyers performed heroically through a highly complex set of appeals in both state and Federal courts which dragged on for years. They won a reversal of the verdictsby the Arkansas Supreme Court in six of the twelve death penalty cases on the groundsthat the jury had failed to specifywhether the defendants were guilty of murder in the first or second degree.  Those cases were accordingly sent back for retrial.  These six became known as the Ware defendants.

Scipio Africanus Jones defended the convicted men
The Supreme Court upheld the convictions of the other six who became known as the Moore defendants.  In those cases the defense lawyers had argued that the convictions should be set aside because the use of torture and intimidation violated due process.
Several appeals were filed in various courts for both sets of defendants.  Appeals in the state courts were uniformly unsuccessful.  The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that “the defendants' evidence of torture used to obtain confessions or mob intimidation, but the state simply argued that, even if true, this did not amount to a denial of due process.”  Even a Federal Appeals court agreed. 
The re-trial of the Ware defendants finally began on May 3, 1920. During the trials, Murphy became ill, and Jones became the principal counsel. Jones faced enormous hostility, including court room packed with armed White men.  He had to sleep secretly at a different black family’s house every night during the trials. Not unexpectedly despite his best efforts all six were convicted again and once more sentenced to death.  However Gov. Brough stayed their executions until the Arkansas Supreme Court could again review the cases. Ultimately, the Ware defendants were freed by the Arkansas Supreme Courtafter two terms of court had passed.  No attempt was made to retry the men.  
Meanwhile the case of the Moore defendants finally landed in the United States Supreme Court which ruled that the original proceedings had been a mask, and that the state of Arkansas had not provided a corrective process that would have allowed the defendants to vindicate their constitutional right to due process of law on appeal. The High Court sent the case back to the State for a new hearing taking due process into account.
Beyond the immediate effect on the case, the Court decision was a landmark—for the first time it held that the Federal Constitutional protection of due process applied to the States as well and that Federal courts had jurisdiction to enforce it.  Almost all subsequent civil rights cases before the court and many criminal cases were heard under this new standard.
Back in Arkansas Jones concluded that even with the order, a fair trial could not be obtained.  But the State itself was growing weary of the complicated and expensive litigation and of mounting criticism from around the country.  Jones elected to save his remaining clients by making a deal.  In March of 1923 the men pled guilty to second-degree murder and were sentenced to five years from the date they were first incarcerated in the Arkansas State Penitentiary.  
Finally, on January 14, 1925, Governor Thomas McRae in his last hours in office before a sworn member of the Ku Klux Klan would take his place ordered the release of the Moore defendants by granting them indefinite furloughs.  Jones arranged for them to be released under cover of darknessand immediately taken out of state, safely away from expected lynch mobs,
Within a month, Jones also obtained the release of the other defendants who had pled guilty or been convicted of lesser offenses.
Unlike other famous racial atrocities like the Tulsa race riot.  Attempts to reconcile the Black andWhite communities around Elaine have failed.  Many, if not most, local White residents, descendents of participants in the posses, mob, and trials, still believe that there was going to be a bloody resurrection and that their forbearers acted nobly and bravely to save their community.
A 2000 a conference on held at the Delta Cultural Center in Helena was acrimoniousand bitter.

The Elaine Massacre Memorial was dedicated Sunday in Helena, Arkansas amid controversy.
An Elaine Massacre Memorial was finally dedicated in Helena on Sunday in time for the centennial of the tragedy but was marked by controversy.  Many Black residents and activists thought that any memorial belonged in Elaine around which most of the victims were killed, not near the courthouse where the Elaine 12 were placed on trial for their lives.  Some local whites continue to bitterly resent “digging up the past”  and “stirring up trouble.”

Tonto Will Not Ride into Town for You—Murfin Verse for the Water Protectors

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30 September 2019 at 10:38
By: Patrick Murfin
North Dakota authorities used armored vehicles and overwhelming para-military force to attack the Water Protectors at Standing Rock in 2016.  Photo posted by Facebook from the Sacred Stone camp by Rob Wilson Photography.
Three years ago this past week combined, heavily armed paramilitary forces with armored vehicles, helicopters, and sound cannon attacked a large unarmed prayer service at a Construction site on the Dakota Pipeline.  Construction workers had abandoned their equipmentand fled as Native Americans led by the Standing Rock Sioux and their allies approached the site.  There were reports of teargas canisters being dropped from the helicopters.  27 were arrested in one day.  It was a dramatic escalation of the use of state power against on-going protests which resulted in an unprecedented unity between Native nations from across the U.S.A., North America, and Latin America and support from aboriginal peoples across the globe. 

 Photo of a mural taken by my old college pal Bill Delaney at Art Alley Gallery in Rapid City, South Dakota.
Something very important was happeningfor the Earth, the environment, and for the Tribes and Nations who the exploiters and despoilers were once confident had been ground into helplessness.
Now three years later the pipe line was completed and has already leaked and polluted waters.  States are rushing to enact right wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) model legislation to make virtually any protest against energy companiesfelonies with long prison sentences and crush fines for those who even encourage or support the protests.  Indigenous people around the world continue to defend water and the earth and young native leaders have joined Greta Thunberg in her protests and in the Climate Strikes.
It is worth a look back at a poem I committed back then.
Jay Silverheels as Tonto on TV's Lone Ranger.
A note of acknowledgement—The title and the germ of the idea was borrowed from a long-ago monologue by the late, great George Carlin.  I don’t think he would mind.

Tonto Will Not Ride into Town for You
For The Camp of the Sacred Stone 9/30/2016

Tonto will not ride into town for you, Kemosabe,
            and be beat to pulp by the bad guys
            on your fool’s errand.

Pocahontas will not throw her nubile, naked body
            over your blonde locks 
            to save you from her Daddy’s war club.

Squanto will not show you that neat trick
            with the fish heads and maize
            and will watch you starve on rocky shores.

Chingachgook will save his son and lineage
            and let you and your White women
            fall at Huron hands and be damned.

Sacajawea and her babe will not show you the way
            or introduce you to her people, 
            and leave you lost and doomed in the Shining Mountains.

Sitting Bull will not wave and parade with your Wild West Show
            nor Geronimo pose for pictures for a dollar
            in fetid Florida far from home.

They are on strike form your folklore and fantasy,
            have gathered with the spirits of all the ancestors
            to dance on the holy ground, the rolling prairie
            where the buffalo were as plentiful 
            as the worn smooth stones of the Mnišoše,
            the mighty river that flows forever.

They are called by all the nations from the four corners
            of the turtle back earth who have gathered here, 
            friends and cousins, sworn enemies alike,
            united now like all of the ancestors
            to kill the Black Snake, save the sacred water, 
            the soil where the bones of ancestors rest,
            and the endless sky where eagle, Thunderbird, and Raven turn.

Tonto has better things to do, Kemosabe…

—Patrick Murfin




Flushing a Treasured Historic Myth

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29 September 2019 at 11:49
By: Patrick Murfin
Thomas Crapper & Co. toilets are still in common use in the United Kingdom.
As a blogger who covers historical events and personages both great and small, it is my sad duty to occasionally disabuse you of your most cherished illusions.
Like this one:  The standard flush toilet was invented by Sir Thomas Crapper in the Britain in the 19th Century, lending his name to human solid waste disposal, the waste itself, and anything else that stinksfor any reason because it was emblazoned on his products.
Wrong on two or three major counts, but containing the kernel of truth. 
On the other hand the self-appointed myth busters who claim that the whole thing is a lie and that there never was a Thomas Crapper are also wrong.

Thomas Crapper, plumber and "sanitary engineer" became a very successful manufacturer in  the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
The very real Thomas Crapper was baptizedon September 28, 1836 in Thorne, Yorkshire. The exact date of his birth is unknown, but babies were typically christenedabout two weeks after birth.  He was apprenticed to his older brother George as plumber. After completing his training and spending three years as a journeyman, he set up his own first shop near his brother’s Chelsea establishment in West London in 1861.
In addition to plumbing services Crapper advertised himself as a sanitary engineerand a brass foundryman.  He began manufacturing plumbing fixtures and obtained several patents that improved the already existing flush toilet.
The ancient Romans had continuously flushing toilets in their elaborate baths and in villas of the extremely wealthy.  The Dark Ages, however, had pretty well wiped out memory of them. 

Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harrington and a sketch of his Ajax flush toilet invention.
Elizabethan courtier Sir John Harington was credited with a developing a flush toilet called The Ajax around 1596 which had a water shut off device.  The clever devise became the object of political controversy when Harington wrote a book about it, A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax in which he also satirized one of the Queen’s favorites resulting his banishment from court and the languishing of his invention.
Alexander Cumming obtained a patent on an improved flush toilet in 1775.  In 1778 Joseph Bramah obtained a patent on an improvement that replaced Cumming’s slide valve at the bottom of the tank with the familiar flap valve still seen in most toilets. By the late 18th Century water closets, as they were called, were being manufactured and installed in the homes of the wealthy.
Edward Jennings got another patent for further improvements on the flush toilet in 1851.  Thus when Thomas Crapper began producing and marketing his own water closets, he was joining an already established line of business.
In the 1880’s Crapper got the distinction of having Royal Warrants when he won a contract to install several Thomas Crapper & Company water closets in the country seat of Prince Edward.  He also supplied Edward as king and his successor, George IV.  The prestige boosted the sales of his appliances.
But Crapper did hold several patents, including two for key improvements.  The Silent Valveless Water Waste Preventer was actually invented by Albert Giblin 1898 who was either an employee of Crapper or from whom the manufacturer obtained a license.  Crapper also held a patent, probably invented by his nephew on the ballcock or float valve that automatically closed the flap valve of the supply tank when the siphon filled it with water.

An advertisement for the Thomas Crapper & Co improved Water Closet.
Taken together, these improvements made the familiar flush toilet that can still be seen and used throughout Britain—an over-head, wall mounted reservoir tank whose flush mechanism is engaged by a pull chain releasing water through a pipeinto the bowl below.  These were the models were proudly emblazoned with the badge of Thomas Crapper & Sons.
Thomas retired in 1904 and died in 1910.  He was a respected businessman but was never knighted.  The company passed into the hands of his brother and nephew.  Under a succession of owners it continued to produce Thomas Crapper toilets until 1966.
The legend that World War I Doughboys popularized the term crap for excrement based on seeing Crapper’s name on their facilities make so much sense that it is hard to deny.  But entomologiststrace the use of the term as far back as the 1840’s when it first appeared in print.  It was probably in casual slang usage long before that.  Experts believe that it derives from the Old Dutchand German krappe for a “vileand inedible fish” and the Middle English crappy.  Still, it is hard to believe that Crapper’s name, ubiquitous on British porcelain, did not at least contribute to the popularization of the term.
Whatever the case, be grateful for you comfortable indoor plumbing facilities which whisk away your waste to a distant treatment facility.  Life would truly be full of crap without it.

Country Music’s First Hit Was a Train Wreck

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28 September 2019 at 13:07
By: Patrick Murfin
The Wreck of the Old 97 by Thomas Hart Benton.
Watching Ken Burns’ epic six part documentary Country Music over the last two weeks was a god damn religious experience for me.  Except for a couple of brief periods I was never a guy whose ear was glued to country radio and bought over the decades maybe a couple of dozen flat-out country records.  But I realized, sometimes through tears, that the music from the beginning to the end was in my bones and soul.  
Some of it I came to from just growing up in Cheyennelistening to the acts that came in for Frontier Days like Roy Acuff, Red Foley, Patsy Montana, and the Sons of the Pioneers and taking in the old two reel westerns on TV.  We sang traditional Appalachian ballads and folk song in grade school out of Carl Sandburg’s American Song Book. 


Some of it I absorbed as folk music fan.  I came to a lot of it sideways from cross-over radio hits, to cross fertilization with icons like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, The Byrds, and Emmy Lou Harris.  I actually got to see Jethro Burns, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, and Vassar Clemens at Chicago folk clubs.   Porter Wagoner introduced me to Dolly Parsons while I was sitting in Sandstone prison for my draft rap.  TV also brought the Glen Campbell Good Time Hour, Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters, Austin City Limits, and above all the Johnny Cash Show—my god Johnny Cash!
They all touched me—The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Gene Autry and the other singing cowboys, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, of course Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash, George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, Dolly Parton, the Outlaws, Kris Kristofferson,  Guy Clark, Graham Parsons, Emmy Lou Harris, Towns Van Zandt, Rosanne Cash, my daughters’ beloved Garth Brooks, down to contemporary artists just flashed by including The Dixie Chicks, Alison Krauss, and even—some of my readers will want to shoot me for this—Taylor Swift.
But even Ken Burns had to leave something out with barely a passing mention—before the Carter Family or Jimmy Rogers there was an unlikely singer recording major hits in what indisputably belongs in the country music pantheon.  
There seems to be something about a train wreck that inspires a song.  Just about everybody knows Casey Jones.  Just two years after the disaster that inspired that tune, the Southern Railroad express known as the Fast Mail came barreling down a steep grade at a high rate of speed and overshota tight radius turn right before a trestle sending the engine and train to a spectacular fiery crash at the bottom of a steep ravine.
Within 24 hours a witness/rescuer at the scene had penned a ballad set to the melody of a popular fiddle tune, The Ship That Never Returned, the same tune used latter for Charley on the MTA.  Just who that person was later became a matter of great controversy and an epic lawsuit.
The Fast Mail, designated as No. 97, ran on contract with the Post Office for service from Washington, DC to New Orleans via Atlanta.  That made it one of the highest volume mail trains in the South.  To encourage on time performance the contract included penalties for each minute the train arrived behind schedule at several stops along the route, including Spencer, North Carolina.  Railroad officials regularly pressured train crews to make up lost time to avoid the penalties.  As a result engineers often operated trains well above designated speeds.
The need for speed had contributed to a fatal accident in April of 1903 when the engine smashed into a boulder on the tracks near Lexington, North Carolina derailing the train and killing the engineer and Fireman.

Engine #1102 pulled the Fast Mail designated as No. 97.
On September 27 that same year a brand new Baldwin ten wheel 6-5-0 engine, #1102 which had been delivered just a week earlier was hooked up to No. 97.  For some reason, the train was already running behind schedule when it left Washington.  It rolled into Monroe, Virginia, a division point where train crews were changed, a full hour late.  The new engineer, 33 year old Joseph A. Broady, known to his friends and crew as Steve Broady, was handed orders to make up the time before the next Post Office penalty point at Spencer.  He was told to skip one regular junction stop entirely.  Although not explicitly ordered to go over the average 35 miles per hour limit between Monroe and Spencer, his bosses knew that he would have to exceed that.
Besides Broady the crew included Fireman A.C. Clapp, and apprentice Fireman John Hodge, Conductor John Blair, and Flagman James Robert Moody.  Also on board were Express Messenger W. R. Pinckney and 11 mail clerks.  Safe Locker Wentworth Armistead boarded the train at Lynchburg, Virginia making a total of 18 men on board.
The Mail clerks, express messenger and Armistead were all in the Post Office car attached directly behind the tender and ahead of the freight cars.
The scheduled running time for the 166 miles from Monroe to Spencer was four hours, fifteen minutes, an average speed of approximately 39 mph.  To make up the one hour delay, Broady would have to run at an average 51 mph over track known for its steep grades and tight curves.  Witnesses thought he was running at least 55 mph on the downgradeheaded into the 45-foot high Stillhouse Trestle.  Broady applied his brakes but could not reduce his speed enough to make the sharp curve leading to the bridge.  

The wreckage of the No. 97 at the base of the Stillhouse Trestle. 
The engine sailed off the track smashing to the bottom of the gorge next to the trestle.  Fire quickly spread and burned out of control completely consuming all of the wooden cars and almost all of the mail.  A crate of live canaries broke open in the crash and the birds escaped before the fire consumed the car.  Many lingered in the area and became an odd reminder of the crash.
Eleven men died in the crash, including all of the train crew.  The two Firemen were burned beyond recognition and it was impossible to determine which body was whose.  Most of the 7 survivors were injured but survived because they jumped from or were thrown from the wreck.  The distraughtexpress messenger went home and immediately resigned.  Some of the surviving mail clerks did return to service, though none again on the Fast Mail.
Engine #1102 was salvaged, repaired, and put back in service.  It ran for 32 more years before the Southern scraped it in 1935.
The railroad, of course, placed all of the blame on the engineer, and even issued a report exaggerating his speed.  They never acknowledged any culpabilityfor issuing the orders that made speeding inevitable.
The Fast Mail continued to run until 1907 when service was canceled in a re-alignment of mail contracts.
Among the many local residents who flocked to the scene of the accident to assist in rescue efforts was Fred Jackson Lewey who worked at a cotton mill near the base of the trestle and who was the cousin of Fireman Clapp.  He said he sat down and wrote lyrics the day after the wreck.  His friend Charles Noell contributed to the words and suggested the tune.  The Wreck of the Old 97 was widely played in the area and became a standard at barn dances across the South in the next 20 years.
The first recording was made for Victor talking Machine Co. by the nearly blind primitive fiddle player G.B. Grayson and his partner Henry Whitter who played guitar, harmonica, and sang.  Whitter also altered the lyrics.

The label of Dahlarts' Victor recording.


Not long after that in 1924 Vernon Dalhartthat sold more than seven million copiesand his version became the bestselling non-holiday recording of the first 70 years of the industry.  It is the record that is usually cited for the birth of successful commercial country music.
Dahlart was born in 1883 and grew up on a Texas ranch where he cowboyed as a young man.  But he was trained as a classical singer at the Dallas Conservatory of Music.  After moving with his family to New York City and after performing in light opera like H.M.S Pinafore he was signed as a recording artist by Thomas Alva Edison.  From 1916 until 1923, he made over 400 recordings of light classical music and early dance band vocals for various record labels.  Eventually he sang on more than 5000 78 rpm singles for many labels, employing more than 100 pseudonyms.  
Vernon Dalhart was one of the first, and most prolific, early recording artists.  He came to hillbilly music two decades into a career as light classical and popular dance music singer.
But his by-chance recording of The Wreck of the Old ’97 for  Victor using his own Texas accent which he admitted sounded “like a Negro” was an astonishing hit.  The record was the first Southern or hillbilly record to achieve national success.  Naturally Dalhart found more such songs to record.
Victor was eager to expand a new found market and the success of the record led directly to the famous Bristol, Tennessee sessions in 1927 which first recorded the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers.  The rest is history.
Success like that often brings people out of the woodwork claiming a piece of the pie.  In David G. George, 1927 a former brakeman, railroad telegrapher, and week-end musician claimed that he was on the scene for the rescue efforts and penned the original lyrics himself.  He sued Victor and won a judgment for past royalties from Victor $65,295.  The company appealed three times, losing each time until the case got to the Supreme Court, which overturned the judgment.
Today experts are divided between the conflicting claims but most side with Lewey and Noell.
The song has become a staple of country music, bluegrass, and the folk revival.  It has been covered scores, maybe hundreds of time by artists as diverse as Jimmie Rodgers, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Flatt and Scruggs, Charlie Louvin, The Seekers, Carolyn Hester, Hank Snow, Box Car Willie, Johnny Cash, Patrick Sky, and Nine Pound Hammer.


First Colonial Newspaper Quashed as Soon as it Appeared

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25 September 2019 at 13:07
By: Patrick Murfin

Back in the days when I was in school one of the little factoids that I learned that stuck with me was that the first newspaperin the Colonies was Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick which was issued on September 25, 1690 in Boston.
What I was not told in school was that within days of first appearing and before any second addition could be printed, it was suppressedby the Governor and Council of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  

This 20th Century illustration show a boy peddling newspapers on the street which are eagerly being picked up by readers.  No one know is Editor Benjamin Harris employed news boys.  More likely he or apprentices from Richard Price's printing shop circulated them to water-front coffee houses and taverns and at the Public Market.  The gentlemen shown are attired in the garb of the American Revolutionary era, decades after the first newspaper appeared.
It was also, depending how you define it, not really the first newspaper.  Single page broadsides containing local news and reports picked up from merchant ships about affairs in the Motherland and in Europe, were sporadically printed earlier.  What differentiated this effort, which was printed by Richard Pierce and edited byBenjamin Harris, was that it contained multiple pages and was meant to be issued regularly—monthly “or, if any Glut of Occurrences happen, oftener.”—under  the same title. 
The paper had four six by ten inch pages.  Editor Harris could, however, only find enough news for to fill three of them.  Perhaps the need to pad the paper is what got it in trouble.  In addition to local gossip, like the grieving widower who hung himself, epidemics of “fevers and agues” as well as small pox, and a fire that had consumed much of the city, the big news of the day was the war with the French—King Williams War—and attempts by colonial forces and their native allies to invade Canada.

The editor objected to the use of Native auxiliaries in the invasion of Canada during King William's War after he heard reports of them torturing and killing captured French troops.
Harris had to rely on word gathered from travelers and rumor, including reports that native allies of the colonists had abused French soldiers taken prisoner.  The editor was outraged and suggested that colonial forces should abandon the use of native allies—“if Almighty God will have Canada ſubdu’d without the aſſiſtance of thoſe miſerable Salvages.”
Since it was virtually impossible for a European army to effectively fight in the wilderness without native auxiliaries, this report undoubtedly irked authorities.
There were several other reports of skirmishes, ships takenand the like gleaned from visiting ships.  And big news of a victory by William of Orange in Ireland.  To this report was amended a juicy bit of gossip—that the son of the King of France might ally himself with the Huguenots and rise against his father because “the Father used to lie with the Son’s Wife.”
That bit of scandal was too shocking for authorities.  Just four days after the journal hit the streets, on September 29, the Council issued the following order:
Whereas some have lately presumed to Print and Disperse a Pamphlet, Entitled, Publick Occurrences, both Forreign and Domestick: Boston, Thursday, and September 25th, 1690. Without the least Privity and Countenace of Authority. The Governour and Council having had the perusal of said Pamphlet, and finding that therein contained Reflections of a very high nature: As also sundry doubtful and uncertain Reports, do hereby manifest and declare their high Resentment and Disallowance of said Pamphlet, and Order that the same be Suppressed and called in; strickly forbidden any person or persons for the future to Set forth any thing in Print without License first obtained from those that are or shall be appointed by the Government to grant the same.
The paper became the first ever to be banned in Boston.
Some of my friends in Unitarian Universalist history circlesare highly protective of the reputation of our Puritan forbearers.  They will tell you that the Puritans are misunderstood and misrepresented.  If you suggest that the Massachusetts Bay Colony at this late date—three generations from the founding in 1630—was still essentially a theocracy they will react as if you had laced their morning coffee with molten lead.
These historians will point out that the powerful clerics of the Standing Order had long since surrendered their role in civic administration of the colony, that voting and meetings of Townswere strictly separate from the Churches.  Church membership was no longer required for participation in government, although attendance at approved services was compulsory as was support of the Church through taxes.  But whether they held office or not, the clergy of Boston were the power behind any government.  Their relationship was much the same as the council of Mullahs on the Iranian governmenttoday.  
I will go ahead and call that Theocracy and blame the first act of public censorship of the press squarely on the shoulder of the religious establishment.
The action by the Council understandably deterred others from founding newspapers.  It took 14 years for a newspaper to finally be successfully established.  The Boston News-Letter, a single, double sided sheet, finally made its appearance on April 3, 1704.  It continued publishing under variations of the News-Letter name until February 1776.  Because of its Tory sympathies, it was suppressed when the British evacuated Boston and George Washington’s new Continental Army moved in.

The First Powered Flight Came Decades Before You Thought

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24 September 2019 at 11:59
By: Patrick Murfin
Giffard's steam powered dirigible., 1854.
Regular readers of this blog may have noticed a recurring interest in innovations in transportation and communications—the things that have tended to tie togetherour shrinking world.  But sometimes I am stunned to discover an innovation years—decades—before I ever suspected.  Take the notion of powered flight—the ability to propeland control some kind of aircraft over a distance by a mechanical engine.  I assumed that it would require some sort of internal combustion engine.  I never even considered the possibility of steam—the engines themselves were heavy and required quantities of water and fuel, not to mention the inherit dangers of fire, heat, and flying cinders.
So imagine my astonishment to discover that just such a flight occurred on September 24, 1854 and that powered flight was just one of several innovations.

Henri Giffard.
That year Henri Giffard was a 27 year old French engineer.  Two years earlier he had his first experience with lighter than air craft when he collaborated with another engineer named Jullien to build an airship with a propeller driven by clockwork.  That craft had an elongated hydrogen filled balloon with ends that tapered to points.  But the clockwork propeller could not generate enough energy to move the balloon very far in perfectly still conditions—or for very long until the engine wound down.  It was also lacked any means of steering or controlling the movement of the flight.  But the effort had showed that a propeller could indeed, propel if a reliable source of power could be found to turn it.
In 1851 Giffard patented the “application of steam in the airship travel” and a year later built a remarkable small engine weighing just 250 pounds with a boiler and fuel—coke—that added another 150 Lbs.  That was light enough that a gas envelope could be built capable of lifting it and the weight of a single passenger/operator. Giffard built the first ever true dirigible—a term derived from a French word meaning steerable.  That meant an airship with a semi-rigid gas envelope as opposed to an inflatable bag, that could move under its own power, and that could be maneuvered.
The engine was just one of Giffard’s innovations.  It produced 2,200 watts or three horsepower to turn a three-bladed, rear mounted pusher propeller.  To put it in perspective, that is about the same power as generated by a modern steam iron, but it was enough.  The engine was mounted on a platform along with the operator which was suspended from a long beam slung below the 144 foot long envelope.  At the rear of the beam was a moveable triangular sail that acted as vertical rudder enabling the aircraft to maneuver. 
The trickiest problem was what to do with the cinders that would inevitably escape the combustion chamber and rise imperiling the highly flammable hydrogen in the envelope.  Giffard devised a long exhaust tube that pointed down and behind the engine instead of a top mounted smoke stack common in steam engines.  That directed sparks down and away from the envelope and hopefully the forward movement of the air ship would be fast enough to keep them from rising to the rigid bag.  All in all it was a remarkable construction.
Giffard took off from the Paris Hippodromeand flew 17 miles to Elancourt, near Trappes in three hours for an average speed of six miles per hour.  Along the way he made several turns and even flew in short circles to prove that his ship was controllable.  The original plan was to take on more fuel and water and return to Paris.  But Giffard found that his engine was not powerful enough to move the ship against even a light headwind.

Battery powered  La France on her demonstration flight in 1884.
The Giffard Dirigible never flew again.  Attempts to improve on it were stymied by the additional weight of steam engines powerful enough for practical use.   The future of the Dirigible had to wait until the development of light and practical engines.  In 1872 Paul Haenlein flew a hot air craft—a blimp—with an internal combustion engine running on the coal gas used to inflate the envelope.  The La France was launched for the French Army by Charles Renard and Arthur Contantin Krebs in 1884 propelled by a battery powered electric motor.  In its maiden five mile flight it became the first airship ever to complete a round trip.
A hydrogen-lift dirigible powered by the first use of such an internal combustion engine had to wait until 1888 when Dr. Frederich Wölfert built an airship powered by Daimler Motoren Gessellschaft gasoline engines, 36 years after Giffard.
As for the inventor, he had more innovation in him.  In 1858 he invented the injector, a type of pumpthat uses “the Venturi effect of a converging/diverging nozzle to convert the pressure energy of a motive fluid to velocity energy which creates a low pressure zone that draws in and entrains a suction fluid.”  Don’t ask me what that means—it’s all engineering Greek to me, but trust me it was an important technological breakthrough and made Giffard a very wealthy man.

Giffard was photographed over Paris in a captive hydrogen balloon in 1877.
In fact, he became something of a national hero for that and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d’ honneurin 1866.  And he was not done with playing around with lighter-than-air-craft.  In 1876 he made a famous tethered flight over Paris in a hydrogen balloon which was captured in a famous early photograph.
Despondent over declining health, Giffard committed suicide on April 14, 1882.  He left his fortune to the people of France to be used for humanitarianand scientific causes.  He was so esteemed by his countrymen that he is among the 72 great notables whose names are inscribed on the Eiffel Tower. 

Victoria Claflin Woodhull—Con Artist, Feminist, Broker, Presidential Candidate Too Hot to Handle

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23 September 2019 at 17:24
By: Patrick Murfin
Victoria Claflin Woodhull at the height of her fame.
Note—In the 147 years since Victoria Claflin Woodhull became the first woman nominated for president only one woman—Hillary Clinton—earned the nomination of a major political party and despite her fame, long political resume, and declared status as a prohibitive favorite but lost—albeit by Electoral College smoke and mirrors—to a grafter and transparent idiot.  This year there is raising expectations that the Democrats might give the nod to another woman, most likely Elizabeth Warren.  But some semi-respectable pundits still cluck their tongues and warn that it is still not time for a woman President.  Looking back the platform that Woodhull ran on seems strikingly modern and even a preview of current intersessional theory.  
Victoria Claflin Woodhull was nominated for President of the United States on April 10, 1872 almost 50 years before the passage of the 19th Amendmentgave women the right to vote in all of the United States.  Woodhull stood apart from other leaders of the Suffrage movement by her audacity, frank embrace of the most radical social causes, her shocking open challenge to Victorian sexual mores, and her mesmerizing effect on the public and press. 
As early as 1870 Woodhull used the pages of Horace Greeley’s New York Herald to announce her candidacy for President in the 1872 election.  It was a bold move.  Not only were women barred from the vote, but she would not even reach the constitutionally mandated age of 35 until months after the March 1873 inauguration of the next President.  She maintained that while the law forbad women from voting, there was not a statutory ban on women running for, or being elected to office.  In the hubbub created by her announcement over the unprecedented distaff candidacy, her age never became an issue.
She used the pages of her own newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly which was founded the same year, and the lecture platform to keep her name and promised candidacy before the public.  Able to command press attention, which then as now liked a sexy and sensational show, she attracted the support of not only the most daring womanistsand suffrage supporters, but of radical trade unionists, early socialists, prison and death sentence reformers, some former abolitionists, and free thinkers.  She took on a broad range of social issues and took a consistently radical and progressive stance.
On May 10, 1872 a meeting was held at Apollo Hall in New York City where the new Equal Rights Party was formed and announced its intentions to nominate Woodhull.  The meeting consisted almost entirely of Woodhull’s friends and inner circle of supporters.   A formal convention was called and held on June 8 with broader participation.  A platformwas announced drafted by Woodhull, and her personal friend, the great Black abolitionist Fredrick Douglasswas nominated for vice president.  Douglas, however, was not present at the Convention and never acknowledged or accepted the nomination although he never officially renounced it.  In fact that fall he would be elected as a Republican New York Presidential Elector. 

Woodhall printed a campaign poster on her own press.
The issue of Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly dated the same day as the Convention announced the ticket and platform:
The Equal Rights Party has selected Victoria C. Woodhull for the office of President, because it deems that the demand for the personal, social, legal, and political liberties of woman have been better advocated by her actions and in her speeches and writings than by any other woman. Religious liberty is not mentioned above, because it is held that, in the case of woman, it has not been specially infringed.  It is claimed as a right pertaining to all the people; one which the Equal Rights Party hold itself pledged to maintain against any national or State interference with (or infringement of) in any way whatever.
The Equal Rights Party has selected Frederick Douglass for the office of Vice President, because though born a slave, he has himself achieved both his education and his liberty; because he has waged a life-long, manful battle for the rights of his race, in which those of mankind were included; because he has proved that he knows how to assert the liberties of the people, and consequently it is assumed that he knows how to maintain them.
This announcement and its tone of radical defiance were picked up by the press across the country.  And all hell soon broke loose.  The candidate was in for a very bumpy ride. 
Woodhull was born in Homer, Ohio on September 23 1838, the daughter of a ne’er-do-well con artist and patent medicine peddler who may have passed on some of his persuasive flairto his beautiful older daughter. 
At the age of 15 she married a 28 year old doctor—and perhaps a quack—Canning Woodhull.  The couple had two children including a boy with an “intellectual disability.” Victoria soon discovered that her husband was an alcoholic, a chronic womanizer, and was abusive.  Unable, or unwilling, to support the family, he relied on his wife to provide income.    In San Francisco she worked as a cigar girlin rough and tumble saloons, and likely at least occasionally as a prostitute. 
Later in New York she began her long collaboration with her younger sister Tennessee Claflin presenting themselves as clairvoyantsand spiritual healers.  When her husband essentially abandoned the family, the sisters successfully took their act to Cincinnati and Chicago and began touring as spiritualist lecturers.  After 11 years Victoria obtained a divorce from her husband.

Husband Number 2, Col. James Blood.
Her experience would inform her public rejection of conventional marriageas a form of chattel slavery for women.  She became attracted to the Free Love movement that percolated on the very most advanced frontiers of Free Thinking.  Around 1866 she either married or took up a common law relationship with Col. James Blood, a kind and cultured gentleman who subscribed to Free Love. 
They settled back in New York with sister Tennessee and her extended family.  Living in relative comfort and respectability, the sisters established a popular salonwhere advanced thinkers and practical politicians rubbed shoulders.  Among her admirers was Benjamin Butler, the Radical Republican politicianand former Civil War general who espoused both suffrage for women and free love. 
Virginia proved a brilliant and daring conversationalist and advocated by turns and in combinations anarchism, socialism, Spiritualism, and racial equality. 

Victoria's younger sister and partner, Tennessee Claflin.
Sister Tennessee caught the fancy of 76 year old Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who took her for a lover, consulted with her for spiritual advice and returned the favor by offering inside stock tips.  Armed with such information, the sisters invested and reaped fabulous profits.  Vanderbilt helped set them up in the first woman owned brokerage firm on Wall Street, Woodhull, Claflin & Company.  The press hailed them as Queens of Finance. Susan B. Anthonyregarded the venture as “a new phase of the woman’s rights question.”  Victoria, with typical blunt frankness noted that, “Woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.”


A popular men's sporting and gossip newspaper--a competitor of the Police Gazzette--found the Woodhull and Claflin Brokerage house a topic of amusement.

In 1870 the sisters took advantage of their fame by launching their own weekly newspaper, Woodhull and Claflin’s Weekly.  Victoria was the principle editor and writer.  The paper took on and advanced all of the most progressive causes of its day.  But it also pioneered in muckraking and investigative journalism, exposing fraudulent stock schemes, insurance frauds, and shady Congressional land deals.  The newspaper, which was often sold under the counter and was sometimes banned from the mails, had a very respectable circulation of more than 20,000 copies weekly for most of its seven year run.  
In January 1871 Woodhull personally petitionedCongress on behalf of women’s suffrage.  She argued that the recently enacted 13th and 14th Amendmentsextended to women the same rights as newly freed slaves. Her argument attracted wide attention and admiration.  Although a majority reportrejected her assertions, Benjamin Butler filed a minority report in her favor.  Leaders of the Suffrage movement including Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton invited her to address a meeting of the National Women Suffrage Association (NWSA) the next day. 

Woodhull presented a women's suffrage petition to the House Judiciary Committee.  Benjamin Butler with the balding head and mustache is seen at the top of the table and Elizabeth Cady Stanton is seated directly behind Woodhull.
But the spotlight of the Presidential campaign was thrown soon thrown on Woodhull’s most unusual household, which included not only her present husband, but also her first who had shown up penniless and addicted to morphine and was taken in out of charity; her sisters and their liaisons; and her parents including the father who still was running patent medicine scams.  When her mother tried to blackmail Vanderbilt posing as Tennessee, he naturally withdrew his support and advice and turned his significant power against the sisters, who were soon forced out of their mansion ending their Salon. 
Woodhull simply replaced the money lost from her business with speaking fees. 
Taking on the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, the most influential and popular minister in America, and two of three of his powerful sisters, ultimately took down Woodhull even as it tarred his reputation.
The powerful Beecher family, evangelist Henry Ward Beecher and his sisters Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catherine began a concerted campaign against Woodhull for her advocacy of Free Love.  A third sister, Isabella Beecher Hooker, a leader in the NWSA, supported her. 
Woodhull became aware that Henry Ward was carrying on an adulterous affair with the wife of an associate.  She attempted to use that knowledge to get the Reverend not only to back off his attacks, but to introduce her at a major public lecture at Steinway Hall.  Despite the thinly veiled blackmail attempt, Beecher backed out at the last moment and Woodhull was introduced by Theodore Tilton, the cuckolded husband of Beecher’s lover. 
The speech itself went well until Woodhull’s younger sister Utica, bitter over Victoria’s fame and notoriety stood up in a box and directly challenged her sister to publicly proclaim her support of free love.  “Yes, I am a free lover!” Woodhull defiantly retorted, “I have an unalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can, to change that love every day if I please! And with the right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.” 

Woodhull was depicted as Satan for her advocacy of Free Love.

The subsequent scandal rocked the country and split the suffrage movement.  None-the-less the NWSA stood by her and even recommended nominated her for President with Fredrick Douglas for Vice President in January of 1872. 
Woodhull ran against Republican incumbent Ulysses S. Grant and the Democratic nominee, famed maverick editor and publisher Horace Greeley, a former liberal Republican and erstwhile ally.  Victoria attempted to concentrate her campaign on the highly progressive Woodhull Platform.  But her now considerable enemies beset her at every turn. 
Susan B. Anthony broke with other NWSA leaders to support Grant in an attempt to distance the movement from the increasingly scandalous Woodhull.  After the family was evicted from their home, they could not even find a house to rent and for a while had to sleep on the floor of their newspaper offices.  Business deals fell through and speaking engagements were cancelled.  The paper had to suspend publication for four months.  When it returned it ran a full expose of the Beecher/Tilton affair and another on a prominent broker with a predilection for young girls.  While circulation soared, the sisters were sued for libel and prosecuted for pornography. 
Woodhull spent Election Day in jail.  No votes were recorded for her, but it is assumed that some of the 4000 or so rejected ballots in the election were for her. 
Her legal difficulties dragged on.  In 1874 both sisters were finally cleared of criminal charges.  But they had to pay fines and court costsamounting to an astonishing half a million dollars.  All of the sisters’ assets, including their brokerage accounts, printing press, personal papers, and even their clothing were seized to pay the fines.  By 1876 she was divorced from Col. Blood and her beloved newspaper was silenced. 
She turned to the comforts of religionwhile continuing to eke out a living as a lecturer.  After Cornelius Vanderbilt died unhappy heirs attempted to subpoena the sisters for testimony that he was not of sound mind.  Somehow—and speculation runs heavily to the Vanderbilt estate—money was found to send the sisters to England with a comfortable stipend on which to live.  Victoria lectured there, but her message was subdued. 
Both sisters married well and prospered.  
Tennessee married Francis Cook, chairman of Cook, Son & Co., drapers, and also Viscount of Monserrate in Sintraon the Portuguese Riviera. Within months of their marriage, Queen Victoria made Cook a Baronet created a Cook Baronetcy and Tennessee was Lady Cook.  in Portugal was known as the Viscountess of Monserrate. The couple lived at Doughty House in Richmond Hill, Surrey, now part of Greater London and at Monserrate Palace.
Although she never abandoned her radical viewpoints, Claflin lived the remainder of her life out of the public eye. She died in England on January 18, 1923.

Victoria in her later years as Mrs. John Biddulph Martin as a respectable English lady and humanitarian.
Victoria met a wealthy and conservative banker,John Biddulph Martin and married him in 1882 and settled into a life of respectabilityand sponsorship of various humanitarian causes.  On a trip back to the U.S. she joined the tiny Humanitarian Party and was nominated as their candidate for President in 1892.  It was a last hurrah in the United States. 
Back in England Victoria divided her husband’s estates after his death and backed a scheme to rent small plots to impoverished women so that they could become self-sufficient, founded an experimental school, and sponsored an annual agricultural fair.  She was active in World War I relief work.  She died in her sleep on June 9, 1927 at the age of 88 at her estate in Bredon, Worcestershire.

Ellen Church—Nurse, Flyer, First Stewardess, and War Hero

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22 September 2019 at 14:42
By: Patrick Murfin
Ellen Church on her first trip as a nurse/hostess for Boing Air Transport, 1930. Sitting interminably in the crammed boarding lounge of a major airport for an overbooked flight mysteriously delayed, you can almost inevitably overhear a nostalgic conversation between older executives or retired men.   These frequent flyers will lament the passing of the days when stewardesses where hot babes in heels and tight skirts, who lavished them with pillows, cocktails, and TLC.   And if you knew just the right hotels and cocktail lounges you could hook up with the fun loving swingers and the wives need never know.   Those girls were virtually the Bunnies of the air. This image, whether true or wishful thinking, was constantly reinforced in the ...

Calendar Coincidence Verse—International Day of Peace-Autumnal Equinox

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21 September 2019 at 12:03
By: Patrick Murfin
Calendar coincidence--Peace and Autumnal Equinox.

This is another one of the calendar poems inspired by random, or not so random, coincidences of dates, usually discovered as I am in a mad scramble for a blog entry topic.  It first appeared in 2013 but the calendar serendipity is annual.

Tomorrow will be the first day of Autumn but here in McHenry County we will be soaked by the remnants of Tropical Storm Imelda, the same monsoon that has drowned Houston in more than 40 inches of rain so conditions are not just as they were described in the doggerel below. 
Today is the International Day of Peace, so proclaimed by the United Nations every year since 1982.  Since 2001 the date has been fixed to September 21 instead of the original third Tuesday of the month, which was also when the UN General Assembly begins its annual session. 


This year it is also the day after the International Climate Strike which was timed to both reflect the precarious balance which is now tipping us all to ecological destruction just as the Autumnal Equinox tips us irrevocably toward winter and to get the attention of the United Nations Emergency Climate Change Summit.  The rapid deterioration of the environment—melting ice caps, rising seas, hurricanes, heat waves, fires, droughts, and famine—also displaces millions creating international migration crisis, destabilizing governments, and creating conflict over scarce and vanishing resources—the perfect recipe for war and more war.

Those conflicts smolder across the globe and we are also now on the cusp of a possible war with Iran carrying water for both the Saudis and Israel 

Among its grander visions which must have seemed distant even to the founders of the Day of Peace, was at a call for an annual one day cease fire of on-going hostilities.  I can recall no armies ever standing down, but perhaps I missed something.


International Day of Peace/Autumnal Equinox Eve
September 21, 2013

The immanent equinox advertises itself
            this morning with crack crisp air,
            elderly maples beginning to rust at the crown,
            a touch of gold on borer doomed ashes,
            mums and marigolds,
            hoodies up on dog walkers in shorts,
            all under a prefect azure sky—
                        you know the one from the Sunday song 
reminding “skies everywhere as blue as mine.”

The globe teeters on the edge of equanimity,
            ready to balance for an instant between night and day,
            seasons, yesterday and tomorrow,
            a perilous, promising, moment.

The poor creatures swarming over its surface,
            fancying ourselves somehow its masters,
            alas, bereft of any balance….

From the Wishful Thinking File,
            institutional division—
Festooned with doves and olive branches
            brave words on blue banners,
            a speech here, a lovely little vigil there,
            an earnest strumming of guitars,
            litanies sung, mantras chanted,
            kind hearts and gentle people…

The creatures go about our brutal business,
            blithely ignoring it all—
                        proclamation and equinox alike.

—Patrick Murfin




All in for the Global Climate Strike Today

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20 September 2019 at 13:16
By: Patrick Murfin

Young people are leading the global Climate Strike Movement.
Millions of folks from around the world will turn out today for massive actionssparked by the literal life and death crisis of the environment and largely led by students and young people who realize their future has been threatened stupidity and greed.  They are done being polite and will no longer stand to be patted on the head and told how cute or inspiring their actions are.  A lot of people agree with them now and this pointedly intergenerational Climate Strikeis being joined by scientists, labor unions, indigenous peoples, and even some politicians, governments, and business groups most threatened.

Headline grabbing events have lent even more urgency to the call.  The Bahamas lie in ruins from an almost unprecedentedly powerful hurricane as of now seven potential hurricanes are lined up across the Atlantic  each fed and strengthened by warming waters and disrupted currents including the Gulf Stream.  A mere slow moving tropical depression is right now dumping up to 40 inches of rain on South Texas—the kind of monsoon long familiar in South Asia which now threaten to become regular events here, too.  The polar North is losing its sea ice and glaciers from Greenland and Iceland to Alaska are disappearing and raising sea levels.  Those threats have been mirrored in the Antarctic.  Fires continue to rage across the globe eating up crucial carbon sinks that can temper rising temperatures.  Australia is headed into its summer season expecting another year of record breaking heat and drought so severe that swaths of the country may become uninhabitable.  

Yet, predictably, there is pushbackofficially led with zeal by the United States Government under the science denying Trump regime.  Not only has the U.S. withdrawn from international climate pacts and flouted reversal of virtually every American environmental regulation it can lay its hands on.  It does not just deny credible science; it actively suppresses and censors research.  Trade negotiations and even continued support to long-time allies are used to blackmail other nations.

The climate strike is already well underway.  In Australia, which gets a head start, more than 300,000 have taken to the streets already in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, other major cities and rural communities.  The strike is supported not only by students, but is endorsed by most major trade unions many of whose members are taking the day off.

In the United Kingdom, where the student-led Extinction Rebellion is a well-established force, trade unions have called for the first national General Strike since 1926.  Boris Johnson’s battered Tory government, already disintegrating under his Brexit clean break debacle, is in big trouble.

Every participating country has its own story, its own heroes.  Some, like New Zealand, plan their Strikes for a week from today, September 27, the anniversary of the publication of Silent Spring, a foundational ecological document in 1962.  Other countries are planning strikes and marches on both days in a one-two punch.

Greta Thunberg outside the White House last week.
In the U.S. the largest Climate Strike action is expected in New York City, where the United Nations is hosting an emergency climate summit.   Greta Thunberg, the sixteen-year-old Norwegian school girlwho inspired the international student climate strike movement with her solitary Friday strike in Oslo and is now the movement’s most visible symbolwill be on hand supported by US Youth Climate Strike, 350.org, MoveOn, Amnesty International, Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace International, Oxfam, World Wildlife Fund, Indivisible, the March for Science, Women’s March, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Labor Network for Sustainability, Green Faith, the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC) and dozens of others.  New York Public Schools have announced that participation by its students will be considered an excused absence.  A million or more are expected to take to the streets in New York alone.

Other major U.S. actions are scheduled today in Boston, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. They will be supported by hundreds of local actions.
Logo for the Chicago Youth Climate March.

The Chicago Youth Climate Strike will start at South Columbus Drive and East Roosevelt Road in the south end of Grant Park near the Field Museum at 11am and march to Federal Plaza, South Dearborn and Adams, for a rally featuring performers and speakers.

I have been promoting the Climate Strike on this blog and in social media for some time and was eagerly planning to take the train down to Chicago to participate.  Alas the other day while looking at the march route I came to an unfortunate but irrefutable conclusion.  I am simply no longer physically able to make such a march, to be on my feet for so many hours, and to be largely unable to have access to toilets.  Since my major illness last year, even relatively moderate exercise leaves me short of breath and weak.  It is a bitter pill for a guy who used to walk miles regularly and who is an old fire horse ready to respond to any call for action.  In fact, the realization leaves me feeling heart broken and useless. 

It must have been weighing heavily on my mind because I woke with a start last night.  I suddenly realized that if Greta Thunberg could start this whole ball rolling with her personal lonely vigil, there is no reason why I can’t conduct my own climate strike right here where I live.

My crappy homemade sign for my one geezer climate strike today.
I took a marker to some poster board, and made a sloppy sign.  While the March is on in Chicago, I will stand at the end of my driveway on busy Illinois Rt. 176 in Crystal Lake and bear my own witness.  Maybe I will call the Northwest Herald and tip them off to the action of a crazy old man in a cowboy hat.  Maybe they will cover it. Maybe they won’t.  I’ll be there either way.  Honk if you drive by.

I invite others like me to do the same.  If your house is not on as busy a street as mine, amble over to some nearby intersection and pass a couple of pleasant hours.  Someone is bound to see you. 

Meanwhile I am so glad young people are taking up where we geezers are leaving off.  After all, the future belongs to you!

The Excruciating Death of James A. Garfield—A Case of Medical Malpractice

✇ WWUUD?
19 September 2019 at 11:53
By: Patrick Murfin
President James A. Garfield being treated by doctors at the White House after being shot.  The wound was serious, but should not have been fatal.  Attempts to probe for the bullet--often with unwashed hands and fingers, widened the wound, caused more bleeding, pierced his liver, and ultimately led to a deadly and painful infection.
On September 19, 1881 President James A. Garfield died in agony on the Jersey Shore 78 days after being shot in the back by a disappointed office seeker in a Washington train station.  He had only been in office a total of 199 days, almost half that time incapacitatedby his injury.  
One of the bullets that fired the morning of July 2 by Charles J. Gateau grazed the President’s arm.  The other lodged in his back near the spine.  It could not be found.  But the search for the bullet, rather than missile itself ultimately cost Garfield his life.  
Taken back to the White House several doctors over the next few days probed for the bullet with instruments, and with their own unwashed hands—a bad practice even in those days.  One doctor even managed to pierce his liver.  The resulting infection, probably caused by Streptococcus, resulted in “blood poisoning,” untreatable in the days before antibiotics. 

Alexander Graham Bell, left, attempted to locate the bullet with a magnetic device of his invention but was foiled by metal bed springs.
Still desperate to find the bullet, inventor Alexander Graham Bell was called in.  He had developed a magnetic device to locate the projectile.  It would have worked, too.  But neither he nor the other doctors realized that the bed on which Garfield was lying had a metal frame and springs—relatively uncommon at the time—rendering the magnetic devise useless.  Even if the bullet had been discovered, however, the infection had already taken hold and it was probably too late to save the President by surgery.
On September 9, Garfield was taken by train to a beach home in Elberon(now Long Branch) New Jersey in hopes that the sea air would revive him.  It didn’t.
Garfield was born in Moreland Hills, Ohio on November 19, 1831.  His father died when he was small and he was raised by his mother.  A gifted student, he attended collegein nearby Hiram at a school maintained by his family’s Church of Christ (The Christian Church) denomination before going east to complete his education at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts from which he graduated with distinction in 1856.
Returning to Ohio he took up preaching at the Franklin Circle Christian Church.  He decided against making a career in the ministry, but was ordained as an elder, making him the only clergy person ever elected President.  He remained a devoted church member the rest of his life.  
Garfield married in 1858 and began supporting his growing family as a teacher.  Meanwhile he privately studied law and entered politics.  He was elected to the Ohio State Senate as a Republican in 1859 and passed the bar the following year.
Garfield’s rise to prominence began as a youthful officer in the Civil War.  He helped raise the 42nd Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment and was named its Colonel.  Major General Don Carlos Buell gave him a command of a mixed brigade of Ohio and KentuckyVolunteer infantry and Virginia loyalist cavalry.  He helped clear Confederate forces out of western Kentucky and was promoted to Brigadier.  He was a brigade commander at Shiloh and at the Siege of Corinth, Mississippi.

Garfield as a young Brigadier General in the Civil War.
Pleading health concerns Garfield asked for leave from the Army and was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.  He returned to active duty until the new Congress was sworn in and served as Chief of Staff for William S. Rosecrans, Commander of the Army of the Cumberland.  After the Battle of Chickamaugahe was promoted Major General.  In December, 1863 he resigned his commission to take his seat in Congress.
Garfield quickly rose to prominence in the Houseas a hawk on the war and for a harsh Reconstruction policy.  He was handily re-elected every two years, despite having been brushed by the Crédit Mobilier scandal in which members of Congress were alleged to have taken bribes to support the Union Pacific Railroad.
In 1876 he was one of the appointed Republican Special Commissioners that handed the Presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayesdespite lagging Democrat Samuel Tilden in the popular vote.  The same year he became Republican Floor Leader of the House.
In January 1880 Garfield was elected to the Senate by the Ohio Legislature, which had just returned to Republican hands.  He went to the Republican National Convention later that year pledged to support the candidacy of fellow Ohioan John Sherman.  At the convention the leading candidates, former President Ulysses S Grant and Maine’s James G. Blaine, were hopelessly deadlocked after multiple ballots.  Grant’s partisans, the so-called Stalwarts represented a return to business-as-usual and an aggressive use of political patronage.  Blaine and Sherman represented, to one degree or another advocates of Civil Service Reform and were nick-named the Half Breeds.  On the 36th ballot, Blaine and Sherman threw their combined support behind a surprised Garfield who won the nomination.
The election campaign, against another Civil War General, Democrat Winfield Scott Hancock, was close fought.  In addition the perennial issues of the pace of Reconstruction and Civil Service, Chinese immigration was a hot button issue in California, a crucial swing state.  Both candidates publicly opposed further Asian immigration.  A handwritten letter purporting to be from Garfield to an H.L. Morey of Massachusetts indicated he supported unrestricted immigration.  The firestormthreatened to effectively derail his campaign until Garfield proved that the letter was a forgery and that no H. L. Morey existed.  Public sympathy swung to the wronged Candidate.  The popular vote was tight—Garfield won by only 2,000 votes out of 8.89 million cast—but he handily won the Electoral College.     

Garfield in an official portrait during his brief presidency.
Garfield spent the first months of his term trying to put together a Cabinet in the face of opposition from Stalwart leader Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York.  Conkling had succeeded in getting his protégée, former Collector of the Port of New York Chester Allan Arthur on the ticket as Vice President, but he could not get the Cabinet posts he desired for his faction, particularly the patronage rich position of Post Master General.  Garfield nominated Blaine as Secretary of State and Robert Todd Lincoln, son of the martyred President as Secretary of War.   He gave the Post Master General job to a New York state rival of Conkling.  Conkling and the other New York Senator resigned in protest to the affront to Senatorial privilege, but were surprised when the New York Legislature did not promptly re-elect them.  After months of struggle, Garfield had consolidated his power and defeated the Stalwarts.  He finally was ready to turn to his agenda—the passage of Civil Service Reform and the defense of suffrage for Freedmen in the South.  He never got to either task.

Garfield with Robert Todd Lincoln at his side was shot in the back at a Washington railroad station by a man described as a "disappointed office seeker." 
On the morning of July 2 Garfield entered the Sixth Street Station of theBaltimore and Potomac Railroad for a trip to his alma mater Williams College where he was slated to make a speech.  He was accompanied by Blaine and Lincoln and two of his young sons.  He was shot in the back by Gateau, who had fruitlessly been pursuing an appointment as a U.S. Consul in Paris, a job for which he was manifestly unqualified.  After he was subdued by onlookers, Gateau told police that, “I am the Stalwart of Stalwarts!  Now Arthur is President!”
That led to brief speculation that the horrified Arthur or other Stalwarts were somehow involved in an assassination plot.  Gateau, however, was quickly proven to have acted alone.  After the President died, his lawyers tried to defend him on the charge of murder by saying that the bullets he fired did not kill the Garfield, his doctors did.  Fair enough, but the doctors could have never botched their treatment if Gateau had not fired.  A juryquickly found him guilty and he was hanged on June 30, 1882.

This famous front page Puck cartoon depicts assassin Guiteau, the disappointed office seeker.  The public perception of Garfield as a martyr to Civil Service reform, forced the hand of incoming President Chester Alan Arthur, a veteran New York spoilsman himself and loyal Stalwart, to back reform.
The new president surprised everyone, including himself, by successfully pushing Civil Service reform through Congress.  Arthur signed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act into law on January 16, 1883, a fitting memorialto Garfield.
Robert Todd Lincoln, who had endured the assassination of his father and was at Garfield’s side when he was shot, was also in Buffalo, New York at the Pan-American Exposition at the invitation of the President when William McKinley was shot in 1901.  He understandably felt he was something of a jinx and declined all invitations to appear with other Presidents until the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922.  And that day, he was looking over his shoulder.


Déjà vu—ICE Reactance Echoes Fugitive Slave Law Divisions

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18 September 2019 at 12:37
By: Patrick Murfin
U.S. Marshall and a slave catcher attempt to capture a Black woman and child under the Fugitive Slave Act.
The infamous Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress on September 18, 1850.  It was one part of a larger Compromise of 1850 meant to ease tensionsbetween slave and free states.  It did not work.  In fact attempts at enforcement of the law enraged many northerners who would otherwise have been content to let slavery be out of sight and mind in the South.
A Fugitive Slave Law had been in the Federal statutes since 1793.  It was an enforcement provision for Article 4, Section 2 of the Constitution, which required the return of runaway slaves and was passed at a time when slavery was still legal in most states on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line.  But one by one northern states hadabandoned slavery.  Within the next decade the last slaves in some gradual emancipation plans would be freed.  Many northern states had fairly sizable populations of Free Blacks.  Southern states, however, with the introduction of a wide spread cotton economy were more dependent on slavery than ever and the end of the international slave trade had cut off a supply offresh bodies from Africa and the Caribbean. 
Slavery was not only disappearing in the North, public opinion was swinging against it, particularly in New England and those states carved from the old Northwest Territories that were heavily settled by the New England diaspora.  Many states had taken actions to blunt the enforcement of the 1793 law.  Several had enacted Personal Liberty Laws by which a captured Negro could demand a jury trial where the claimant would have to prove that he or she was legal owner.  This was to prevent free Blacks in the North from being kidnapped and taken south to be sold into slavery—a common practice among slave chasers.  Other laws forbad state and local officials from rendering assistance to slave chasers or the use of local jails to hold them.  This practice was upheld by an 1842 Supreme Court decision, Prigg v. Pennsylvania, which essentially gutted enforcement of the 1793 law in much of the North.
Beyond legal barriers, there was growing popular resistance to slavery which manifested itself in the network of the Underground Railroad which actively assisted fleeing slaves to reach either Canada or settle in relatively safe portions of the North under assumed identities.  In several cities citizens actively interfered with slave catchers.  All of this, of course, infuriated the South.

The Underground Railroad abetting and harboring escaped slaves on their flight to freedom was a manifestation of growing opposition to slavery and slave catchers in the north.
Other issues were also inflaming North/South tensions, principally whether slavery would be extended in the vast territories obtained in the Mexican War.  The South wanted all of the land opened to slavery—or failing that something like an extension of the Missouri Compromise line that would allow territories to the south of the same or similar line eventually be admitted to the Union as slave states.  They even hoped to possibly divide Texas into two or more states and break off southern California somewhere north of Los Angeles.  That would give the South and slave holding border statescontrol of the Senate, and by extension the Federal government itself.  
Northerners, on the other hand, wanted to exclude slavery from all newly organized territories and keep Texas and California unified, with the understanding that California would enter the Union as a free state, balancing slave holding Texas.

Kentucky Whig Henry Clay tried to engineer another great compromise but this time failed.
President Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War and himself a Louisiana planter and slave holder, stood with the North in opposing the extension of slavery.  His Whig Party was unraveling over the issue.  Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, a borderer state Whig who had long dreamed of the Presidency, set out to craft a compromise early in the year.  But with the president of his own party in opposition, the compromise fell apart in the Senate.
When the new session of Congress convened in March Democrat Stephen Douglas of Illinois and Massachusetts Whig Daniel Webster—Clay’s long-time rival for party leadership—advanced a modified version of Clay’s compromise proposals.  It varied from Clay’s failed version mostly in the disposal of the thorny issue of Texas.  The new version was mostly crafted by Douglas and incorporated the Democratic platform principle of Popular Sovereignty—that residents of Territories should be able to decide by voting whether or not slavery would be allowed—for the two proposed Territories carved from Texas claims—Utah and New Mexico.  Mormon controlled Utah would definitely opt to be a free territory, and everyone knew that it was unlikely that sparsely populated New Mexico, which was totally unsuitable to a plantation economy, would elect to allow slavery.  California would be admitted to the Union undivided as a free state.

New Englanders turned on their long-time political hero Daniel Webster for agreeing to include a tough Fugitive Slave Law in a new compromise to "save the Union."
Debate was fierce.  Most northern Whigs led by William Steward of New York were bitterly opposed because the package did not include Wilmot Proviso, a long sought provision that would have permanently banned slavery from territory acquired as a result of the Mexican War.  Even though no new slave Territories or States were created, the application of the principle of Popular Sovereignty left the possibility open in the future.  They were also outraged by the inclusion of the Fugitive Slave Act.
On the other hand Southern firebrands led by John C. Calhoun were just as voraciously opposed because they did not get the division of California or any new slave holding Territories.  They also had to give up the continuation of the slave trade in the District of Columbia, although slavery itself would be preserved there.

South Carolina's John C. Calhoun led the firebrands in opposition to the compromise because it didn't guarantee the extension of slavery.
Numerous alternative plans were advanced and beaten back.  Douglas and Webster, with the support of Clay, had to stitch together a Senate majority from northern Democrats, moderate southern Democrats, and southern Whigs.  The opposition was split between to extremes, northern Whigs on one hand, and southern firebrands on the other.
The compromise got a boost when Taylor died suddenly and his Vice President Millard Fillmoreascended to the White House.  Fillmore was one of Webster’s few Northern Whig allies and supported the compromise.  Douglas split the original omnibus bill into five separate bills from an, and carefully crafted narrow majorities for each, with each bill getting support from a slightly different combination of forces.  It was precarious, but it worked.

Rising Democratic star and leading proponent of Popular Sovereignty Stephen A. Douglas devised the plan to split the compromise into separate parts and build different majorities in support of each.
The bills, passed independently between September 9 and 20 and quickly signed into law by President Fillmore included:
  • The admission of California as a free state.
  • The abolition of the slave trade in the District of Columbia.
  • The organization Territory of New Mexico (including present-day Arizona) and the Territory of Utah under the rule of popular sovereignty.
  • The enactment of Fugitive Slave Act requiring all U.S. citizens to assist in the return of runaway slaves.
  • Texas ceding of much of its western land claims in exchange for of $10 million to pay off its national debt.
Douglas and Webster thought they had crafted a compromise which saved the union.  Instead, they reaped the whirlwind, especially because of the onerous provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act.
The Act made any Federal Marshal or other official who did not arrest an alleged runaway slave liable to a fine of $1,000. Local law enforcement was required to arrest anyone suspectedof being a runaway slave on no more evidence than a claimant’s sworn testimony of ownership. The suspected slave could not ask for a jury trialor testify on his or her own behalf. Anyone aiding a runaway slave by providing food or shelter was subject to asix month imprisonment and a $1,000 fine. Officers who captured a fugitive slave were entitled to a bonus or promotion for their work. Slave owners only needed to supply an affidavitto a Federal Marshal to capture an escaped slave and since a suspected slave was not eligible for a trial to prove his status, many free blacks could beconscripted into slavery. 
Outrage in the North, particularly in New England was fierce.  Daniel Webster, the political hero of the region for more than 40 years, was excoriated as a traitor.  The hand of Abolitionists, a previously despised minority, was greatly strengthened.  Some Abolitionists even contemplated northern secession from the union in response to the Act and the still open possibility of the extension of slavery into new territories.  Even Ralph Waldo Emerson flirted with the idea. 

Abolitionists sometimes published warnings interfering with slave chasers, a source of outrage in the South.
Citizens of Boston and other towns organized to oppose slave catchers and interfere with their work in every way possible.  Handbillswere circulated warning free Blacks that the local police were cooperating with slave catchers under the law.
Politically, the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law spelled the end of the Whigs as a national party.  Northern Whigs swung to the new Free Soil Party and four years later into the new Republican Party alongside anti-slavery northern Democrats.  Southern Whigs were re-absorbed into the Democratic Party from which most of them had originated.  Democrats were riven by sectional conflicts themselves.
Whatever “peace” might have been bought fell apart four years later as the future of Kansas turned on the principle of Popular Sovereignty leading to a local civil war as slave holders and Free Soilers rushed to the territory to attempt to control the Territorial Government.

Anti-ICE protestors echo the outrage against the Fugitive Slave Law.
From a modern perspective, it is useful to compare the provisions of the Fugitive Slave Act to and the current bitter divisions over local and state cooperation with ICE raids, enforcement, and detention.  There are many parallels including the refusal of many cities and states to allow their law enforcement agencies to cooperate with ICE raids and sweeps.   Meanwhile those who have assisted immigrants and asylum seekers crossing the dangerous Southwest deserts have been arrested and prosecuted for felonies.  Churches offer sanctuary to endangered immigrants, an echo of the defiant Underground Railroad.  Some armed “volunteers” have taken up patrolling the borders.
Donald Trump has made the deportation of millions of undocumented immigrants and the erection of an impenetrable boarder wallthe center piece of his Presidency.  Meanwhile many Americans have been revolted and repelled by the ugly rhetoric.  Regional and philosophic divisions are sharper than ever.  His de facto allies among White Nationalist and supremacists and neo-Nazis are now publicly encouraging violence against opponents and hare even threatened assassination and rebellion should they lose.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Accept No Substitutes! Only Diez y Seis de Septiembre is Mexican Independence Day

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17 September 2019 at 10:33
By: Patrick Murfin
Revolution and religion mix in this homage to Padre Miguel Hidalgo with the banner of the Virgen de Guadalupe and an angel bending to kiss his brow.
Note:  A day late but still apt.  Versions of this have run previously in this blog, I’m posting it again as a public service.  Mexico has a real history and tradition that is deeper than a taco and tequila festival favored by Gringos. 

Quick, what’s Mexican Independence Day?  If you answered Cinco de Mayo, you’d be wrong.  That is a minor provincial holiday in Mexico that has become a celebration of Mexican pride in the United States.  It celebrates the victory of the Mexican Army over the French Empire at the Battle of Puebla in 1862, during the French invasion of Mexico.  The correct answer is Diez y Seis de Septiembre—September 16—which commemorates El Grito de Delores, the rallying cry which set off a Mexican revolution against Spanish colonial rule and the caste of native born Spaniards who ran roughshod over the people in 1810. 

Early in the morning of that fateful day Padre Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a respected priest and champion of the Mestizos—mixed Spanish and Indian blood—and the Indios.  Both classes were held in virtual serfdom by a system in which native born Spaniards—Gachupines—held ruthless sway.  Hidalgo had for sometime been part of a plot by Criollos to stage a coup d’état by Mexican born Spaniards who were the middling level officers and administers of the system.  
The Criollo plot was to take advantage of resentment of the impositionof Joseph Bonaparte on the Spanish throneby Napoleon to declare Mexican independence within a Spanish Empire under Ferdinand VII, considered by the Spanish people as the legitimate heir to the throne. But Ferdinand was held in France by the Emperor, so if it had succeeded the plot would have created a de-facto republic.  The Gachupines, who had accepted Bonaparte, would be driven out of Mexico.  
Plotters decided on a date in December to stage their coup.  In the meantime they were quietly trying to line up the support of Criollo officers and by extension the Army.  But the plot was betrayed and orders were sent out to arrest the leaders, including Hidalgo.
The wife of Miguel Domínguez, Corregidor of Queretaro (chief administrative official of the city of Queretaro) and a leader of the plot, learned of the pending arrests and sent a warning to Hidalgo in the village of Delores near the city of Guanajuato, about 230 miles northwest of the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, Mexico City. The late in the evening of September 15, Hidalgo asked Ignacio Allende, the Criollo officer who had brought the warning, to arrest all of the Gachupines in the city.
It was apparent to Hidalgo and Allende that the Criollos had not had time to solidify their support in the army, and indeed that many Criollo officers refused to join.  The revolution would inevitably be crushed.  Sometime in the early morning hours of September 16, Hidalgo made a fateful decision—he would call on the mestizo and Indio masses to rise up.  

At about 6 A.M.  Hidalgo assembled the people of the pueblo by tolling the church bell.  When they were together he made this appeal, which he had hastily drafted:

My children: a new dispensation comes to us today. Will you receive it? Will you free yourselves? Will you recover the lands stolen by three hundred years ago from your forefathers by the hated Spaniards? We must act at once… Will you defend your religion and your rights as true patriots? Long live our Lady of Guadalupe! Death to bad government! Death to the Gachupines! 
This is the famous Grito de Delores which sparked the revolt.  Runners went out to nearby towns carrying the message.  The long oppressed people flocked to the cause armed with knives, machetes, homemade spears, farm implements, and what few fire arms that they could take from the Gachupines.  

Indios, Meztizos, and Criollos on the march in this mural by Juan O'Gorman.

With Hidalgo and Allende at their head, the peasants began the march to Mexico City.  Along the way they acquired an icon of the Virgin of Guadalupe—Mary depicted as a dark skinned Indian—which became the banner of the revolt.

Along the way a regular Army regiment under the command of Criollos joined the march, but the swelling ranks of peasants—soon to number up to 50,000, was out of control by any authority. 

The first major battle of the war began at Guanajuato, a substantial provincial town, on September 28.  Local officials rounded up the Gachupines and loyal Criollos and their families and made a stand in the town’s fortified granary.  Hundreds of peasants were killed in wild frontal assaults on the position until rocks thrown from above caused the collapse of the granary roof, injuring many.  When a civil official ran up a white flag of surrender, the garrison commander countermanded the order and opened fire on the native forces coming forward to accept it.  Scores were killed.  After that there was no quarter.  With the exception of a few women and children, the 400 occupants of the granary were massacred.  Then the town was pillaged and looted, with Criollo homes faring no better than the native Spaniards.

The siege of the fortified granary during the Battle of Guanajuato.   

Of course Hidalgo had unleashed an unmanageableand ferocious anger among the people.  Along the march any Gachupines unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of the rebels were brutally killed, as were any Criollos who sided with them—or were simply assumed to be European born.  The revolt was not just a national one—it was a virtualslave revolt with all of the attendant horror that implied.

Word of the fate of Guanajuato mobilized forces in Mexico City and caused most wealthy Criollos to side with the government or try to remain neutral. 

Hidalgo and his closest supporters later abandoned the army and returned to Delores.  He was frightenedand disillusioned by what he had brought about.  A year later he was captured by Gachupine forces and hanged.

Hidalgo, Allende, and almost the entire revolutionary officer corps were trapped and arrested in March 1811.

It took 11 years of war to finally oust the Spaniards. A triumphant revolutionary army finally entered Mexico City on September 28, 1821, issued an official Declaration of the Independence of Mexican Empire, and established a government of imperial regency under Agustín de Iturbide.

But Mexicans mark the beginning of the struggle—the Grito de Delores—as the true anniversary of independence.

Huge crowds throng Mexico City each year for the pageantry and celebration of Independence Day including spectacular fireworks.

Eventually the church bell from Delores was brought to the capital.  Each year on the night of September 15, the President of Mexico rings the bell at the National Palace and repeats a Grito Mexicano based upon the Grito de Dolores from the balcony of the palace to the hundreds of thousands assembled in the Plaza de la Constitución.  At dawn on September 16 a military parade starts in the Plaza passes the Hidalgo Memorial and proceeds down the Paseo de la Reforma, the city’s main boulevard.  Similar celebrations are held in cities and towns across Mexico.

Monarchs and Migration and The Lovely Corpse—September Murfin Verse

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16 September 2019 at 10:31
By: Patrick Murfin
Monarchs rest in the doomed National Butterfly Center refuge in Texas.
They say that this September Monarch butterflies are making a comebackof sorts.  My nature loving Facebook friends, who notice such things, commented from several locations and posted photos.  But before the celebration for the gets out of hand, ecologists, who should know, express concerns about long-range climate change and habitat destruction and the particularly egregious bulldozing of the National Butterfly Center in Mission, Texas, a critical preserve, to make way for Donald Trump’s beloved border wall.
A poem from my 2004 collection We Build Temples in the Heart took note of the epic fall migration when it was still routine.

In better times, Monarch in migration.
Migrations

Later they will come,
            the legions of Canada
            on the edge of cutting cold,
            backs scraping stratus slate,
            arrayed in military majesty,
            dressed in ranks and counting cadence,
            squadron after squadron, an air armada,
            single minded in their migratory mission.

But now,
            when September sun lingers and
            lengthened shadows hint ferocity to come,
            the first glints of gold and black flit
            with seaming aimlessness,
            pushed here and there by the faintest zephyr,
            the pioneers of a nation,
            descended from Alberta prairies
            and Minnesota Lakes.

One will linger
            briefly on my shoulder 
            if I am blessed, then be off again.

Then, if she is lucky
            she will pause to rest with
            the millions along the bend of the Rio Grande
            before finding a winter’s respite of death
            amid deep Mexican forests.

And it will turn again next spring—
egg to larva,
            larva to silken slumber
                        pupa to Monarch
                                    Monarch to migration.

            Oh ye proud Canada,
                        mute your boastful blare—
the mighty bow before true courage.

—Patrick Murfin
The approach of the International Climate Strike this Friday, September 20 reminded me of this other fragile canary-in-the-coal-mine.
In 2015 Lisa Haderlein, a McHenry County maven of the environment and preserver and restorer of the wild places posted a photo on Facebook.  It was taken outside the Starline Gallery in Harvard.  It got me to thinking….
Lisa Haderlein's telling photo.

The Lovely Corpse

Monarchs, they say, are a dying breed.
Not the superfluous Royals of Windsor
            or oil rich Arabs.
They will disappear, too, 
in their own good time
but are not our business here today.

I am talking about those golden orange and black
            zephyr riding marvels that by the millions
            used brighten Septembers 
            with hints golden autumn yet to come
            on their epic migrations 
            from Canadian prairies
            to Mexican piney woods.

They are scarcer with every passing year.

Now each sighting is an adventure
            like spotting some rare songbird
            flitting unexpectedly from bough to bough.

They say the warming world is to blame 
            which is tough on common milkweed,
            the migrant’s only diet.

Perhaps.

But if I say it out loud, 
some Fox News talking head
will scream that I’m a liar and a fraud
and someone will decide that after all
they are illegal immigrants
and likely terrorists to boot
and propose to build a wall net
to ensnare them lest they
infect our purity.

A friend of mine espied one the other day
            and thought to snap a photo,
            but the monarch was not on wing
            or resting on some rare milkweed pod,
            but splatted against the gleaming grill
            of a Jaguar.

Think of all that horse power 
            from the carbon spewing engine
            that cooks the atmosphere 
            that kills the milkweed
            yet made this assassination
            personal.

—Patrick Murfin


Birmingham Sunday Again

✇ WWUUD?
15 September 2019 at 09:21
By: Patrick Murfin
Four Little Girls:  Ada Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair, and Cynthia Wesley.
Of all of the many battlegrounds for Civil Rights in the South, Birmingham, Alabama stood out for the level of sheer ferocity and brutality of opposition to change.  Then, on September 15, 1963 the already blood-soaked city was rocked by a Sunday morning bomb blast at the 16th Avenue Baptist Church.  When the dust and smoke cleared, four young girls were dead and 22 other people were injured.  It was a crime of such sickening brutality that it shocked the nation.  If it happened today, it would be called what it surely was then—an act of terrorism.

Birmingham was not a rural backwater.  It was one of the South’s major industrial centers, the self-proclaimed Miracle City that had grown on economy based on steel production.  After a war time boom, the city settled into a period of prosperity in the 1950’s—a prosperity that the approximately one third of its population, Blacks, did not fully share in.  The large white working class population of the city, mostly no more than a generation or so from rural poverty themselves, were particularly fearful of competition from Blacks for jobs and resources.  That fueled a culture that was as resistant to change as any in the South.

Local Blacks, led by the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth of the Bethel Baptist Church, began to organize protests in the mid 1950’s.  After the State of Alabama outlawed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), of which Shuttlesworth was state Membership Chair, in 1956, the minister organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights to continue the work.  On Christmas Day that year a bomb made of 16 sticks of dynamite nearly destroyed Shuttlesworth’s parsonage home.  He survivedand defied threats by police to leave town.  The next day he launched an attempt to desegregate the city bus system.  He and 21 others were arrested and launched a law suit as a result.

Tenacious and pugnatious the Rev. Fred Shuttelsworth drove Birmingham Civil Rights campaigns with a righteous fury and was the target of bombs, mob attacks, attempted assasination, and repeated jailings.


It was just the beginning.  In January, 1957 Shuttlesworth joined Martin Luther King, Jr., Joseph Lowery, Ralph Abernathy, Bayard Ruskin, and other to establish what would become the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC).  The pugnacious Shuttlesworth sometimes bedeviled King and other leaders while pressing for more aggressive action.  He said that “flowery speeches” were empty unless acted upon.

Shuttlesworth continued to act.  When trying to register his children at an all white school later that year the minister and his wife were attacked by a mob of known Ku Klux Klansmen with police notable for their absence.  Shuttlesworth was beaten unconscious with chains and his wife stabbed.  The next year he survived another bombing attempt.  He organized and participated in lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 and was part of the Freedom Rides in 1961.

Through it all, his most visible opponent was Police Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor an ardent and outspoken segregationistwho frequently arrested Shuttlesworth and other civil rights leaders while his department refused to investigate the many attacks that by 1960 had earned the city the nickname Bombingham.  Connor was supported by most of thelocal establishment under the banner of a local White Citizen’s Council.  Businessmen and professionals who showed any tendency to toward compromise were threatened and harassed themselves.  And behind everything was a large, if sometimes fractured, Ku Klux Klan, which included many sworn police officers, ready to do almost anything.

Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ran virtual parallell city governement, commanded Police and Fire Departments riddled with Klansmen, and vowed never to give an inch to Civil Rights protestors.  As the Birmingham campaign leaders expected, he became a nationaly visible symbol Jim Crow violence.

In 1961, the Bethel Church, which itself had been bombed twice, grew tired of Shuttlesworth’s obsession with the Civil Rights movement at the expense of regular pastoral duties.  The minister left town to take up another pulpit in Cincinnati, but returned regularly and continued to lead the Birmingham movement.

In 1962 local Black leaders, with the encouragement of Shuttlesworth, began a boycott of major downtown business to demand equal access and employment opportunity.  Enforced bycommunity patrols, the boycott successfully reduced sales downtownby as much a 40%.  Business leaders, led by the Chamber of Commerce, sought a compromise.  They fielded a candidate for mayoragainst Bull Connor, who was running for the same office, in the November 1962. 

When their candidate won the election, however, Connor asserted that his term as the almost completely independent Police Commission did not expire until 1965 and he retained the support of other lame duck Commissioners.  The city essentially operated with two city governments—but Connor’s side had the guns and muscle.

After the Easter shopping season was ruined, many took the Whites only and Colored onlysigns out of their windows only to be threatened by Connor with the revocation of their business licenses. 

At this point Shuttlesworth and other boycott leaders decided to call in Dr. King and the SCLC.  The new initiative was dubbed Plan C.  Devised by SCLC leader Wyatt Tee Walker, the plan was to defy Connor and fill the jails with daily protests that would inevitably result in brutal suppression by Connor leading topublic condemnation around the country.  They also felt that they had to keep local business leaders’ feet to the fire to give them courage to defy Connor. 

There were daily demonstrations including lunch counter sit-ins, kneel-ins at white-only churches, demonstrations at libraries and other segregated city facilities, and, perhaps most frightening of all, a march to register voters at the Jefferson County Court House.  The aggressiveness of the campaign frightened and alienated even many in the Black community, but leaders were undeterred. 

Connor played his role as predicted.  On April 10 he got a blanket injunction against all demonstrations from a state judge.  He began to arrest anyone even attempting to demonstrate and held them on bonds of $1,200 each.  The King and SCLC leaders who had obeyed an injunction during an earlier failed campaign in Albany, Georgia, struggled with what to do.  Shuttlesworth and others accused King of being indecisiveand his closest aides reported that he was “more troubled than they had ever seen him” about the prospects of leading a march directly into Connor’s brutal hands.  After prayer, however, he decided to go ahead.

On April 12, Good Friday, King, Abernathy, and 50 Birmingham residents were arrested.  At first King was held without being able to see a lawyer and was not allowed to communicate with his family, including wife Coretta Scott King who had just given birth to her fourth child.  Mrs. King received a call from President John F. Kennedy the following Monday.  

Dr. Martin Luther King behind bars wrote his Letter from Birmingham Jail for an audience of squeamish white moderates and sit-on-their-hands liberals.
On Tuesday King released his famous Letter from a Birmingham Jail, which berated White moderates for failing to act.  Publicity surrounding King’s jailing and the letter alarmed the owners of several major national chain storeswith businesses downtown who urged Kennedy to intervene to resolve the problem.  On April 20 King was released.

Demonstrations and arrests had continued, but finding more volunteers for abuse and incarceration was getting harder.  The campaign was in danger of collapse until James Bevel, the SCLC's Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education, devised a plan for a Children’s Crusade.  After getting King’s reluctant approval, Bevel began to recruit and train high school students, local Black college students, and even elementary age children.  He thought them the basics of non-violence and shared films of earlier Civil Rights confrontations.  He counted on the social cohesion of students to stay together.

On May 2 more than 1000 students skipped school and gathered at the 16th Street Church.  Marching in disciplined small groups and coordinated with walkie-talkies, the students set out at intervals on different routes, each group assigned a target.  The first group was to attempt to meet with the new Mayor.  Others were to go to various stores and public facilities.  Astonished by the discipline of the students, Connor arrested more than 600 on the first day swelling the total number of demonstrators incarcerated in the city jail to more than 1,200, far exceeding the maximum capacity of 900.

The use of fire hoses and dogs against Rev. James Bevel's Children's Crusade marchers shocked the nation.

On the May 3, Connor first used high pressure fire hoses against the marching students and then attacked demonstrators and bystanders alike with police dogs.  The whole scene was captured on film for national television and dramatic still photographs splashed across the papers nationwide the next day. 
As leaders knew it would, the ghastly images moved national opinion. New York Senator Jacob Javits, with bi-partisan support of Republicans and Democrats announced support for a new Civil Rights Act to cover public accommodations.  Kennedy ordered the Justice Department to open an investigation and sent Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall to try to mediate a solution.  Under pressure from Connor, downtown business leaders refused to budge and civil rights leaders refused to call off daily protests.
Although the youthful demonstrators were disciplined, onlookers, including parents, often became enraged and there were incidents of bottles and rocks being thrown at police despite the pleas of Bevel and organizers that, “if any police are hurt, we lose.” 
On May 6, Connor converted the Fair Grounds to an open air jail to hold those arrested.  More were arrested that day as they attempted to worship at some White churches, although Catholic, Episcopal, and Presbyterian houses of worship did admit the demonstrators.  Connor attempted to prevent marches by blocking the doors of Black churches with demonstrators still inside and even blasting the interiors with fire hoses.

The next day, Monday May 7, the situation reached crisis levels.  Connor was out with hoses and dogs again, but hundreds of new recruits marched on city center.  Rev. Shuttlesworth was hit and injured by a fire hose.  Connor told reporters that he regretted that he had not seen it and the minister had not been killed.  More than 1000 were arrested, yet protests continued.  More than 3000 protestors made it to the downtown district and occupied stores.  No business of any kind could be conducted downtown that day. 

On May 8, business leaders capitulated to virtually all of the demonstrator’s demands, but claimed that they could not control the actions of the city.  The campaign continued until King and Shuttlesworth announced an agreement with the city to officially desegregate public facilities within 90 days.  Those held in jail would be released on their own recognizance. Connor and his ally the outgoing Mayor opposed the settlement.

Just as it seemed that the crisis might be passed, the Gastonia Motel, where King and SCLC leaders had stayed was destroyed by a powerful bomb on May 11 and the home of King’s brother, A. D. King, was damaged in another blast.  Fire and police responding to the explosions were pelted with rocks by local residents. Over the objections of Alabama Governor George Wallace, President Kennedy dispatched Federal Troops to restore order and Dr. King returned to Birmingham to plead for peace. 

The Alabama State Supreme Court ruled that “moderate” Albert Boutwell could take office on May 21 replacing Connor ally Art Hanes.  Connor was also stripped of his position and tearfully told reporters “This is the worst day of my life” as he picked up hislast paycheck. In June the Jim Crowsigns regulating segregated public places were taken down.  Although many businesses dragged their feet in complying with the new reality, and King and others were criticized for not continuing the demonstrations until all promises were fulfilled, the crisis seemed over.

King’s prestige as a leader was reaching his high point.  President Kennedy drafted Civil Rights legislation that was soon tied up in a Senate filibuster.  The March on Washington August would gain even more wide spread public support.

John F. Kennedy addressed the nation about Civil Rights on June 11, 1963 largely in response to the events in Birmingham.
But bitter Whites, led by the active Ku Klux Klan, began a virtual guerilla campaignagainst local civil rights leaders and white “race traitors” who accommodated them.  A tear gas canister was thrown into Loveman’s Department Store when it complied with the desegregation agreement and twenty people required hospital treatment.  The home of NAACP attorney Arthur Shores was bombed injuring his wife.

Tensions rose again when city schools were desegregated in September.  Governor Wallace’s vow to resist with Alabama National Guard troops was foiled when Kennedy nationalized the Guard and ordered them to stand down.  Still, most white students shunned the newly integrated schools.

On Sunday morning September 15 a white man driving a white and turquoise Chevrolet was seen placing a box under the stepsof the 16th Street Church.  A bomb exploded as students were filing into abasement room for Sunday school.  The bomb killed 11 year old Denise McNair and Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley, all 14 years old.

Surveying the bomb damage to the 16th Street Baptist Church.
Rev. King spoke at the funeral for three of the girls. More than 8,000mourners, including 800 clergymen of all races, attended the service. No city officials attended.  

Outrage over the bombing and other atrocities paved the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson the following summer. 

Ku Klux Klan member Robert Chambliss was later identifiedas the man who left the package.  He was soon arrested and 122 sticks of dynamite were found in his home matching the forensic pattern of the explosives used in the bomb.  Despite overwhelming evidence, including an eyewitness, a local jury acquitted Chambliss of murderand convicted him of a minor charge of possessing explosives.  He was fined $100 and sentenced tosix months in local jail, where he was safely separated from Black inmates and treated as a hero by jailers.  


Defiant Klansman Robert Chambliss who planted the bomb was confident and defiant outside of the court house during his state trial for murder.  Despite overwhelming evidence an all white jury acquitted of that charge and convicted him of a minor possession of explosives charge.  He would ultimately be brought to justice decades later and died in prison.
The verdict shocked and outraged the nation.   But it was not until 1977 when young Alabama Attorney General Bill Baxley reopened the casethat anything like justice began to be done.  Baxley secured a conviction of Chambliss despite not having accessto FBI files which were denied him because the agency feared that the extent of its infiltration of the Klan—and possible advance knowledge of the bombing plot—might be exposed.  Chambliss was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in an Alabama prison on October 29, 1985.

In May of 2002 the FBI finally made public its files on the case and said that Klansmen Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry had conspired with Chambliss on the bombing.  Cash was dead.  Blanton and Cherry were charged with murder and eventually convicted in separate trials.  Cherry was identified as the ring leader and the man whose military training made him familiar with explosives.  Cherry died in prison in 2004.  Blanton remains in prison.
Richard Fariña wrote Birmingham Sunday, a haunting ballad recorded by his sister in law Joan Baez on her 1964 album Joan Baez/5, and was used as the theme song of the 1997 Spike Lee documentary about the bombing, 4 Little Girls.


 

From Broadside Ballad to Anthem

✇ WWUUD?
14 September 2019 at 11:16
By: Patrick Murfin
The Bombardment of Fort McHenry--the bombs bursting in air.

On September 14, 1814 a young Baltimore attorney, Francis Scott Key, dashed off a long poem, The Defense of Fort McHenry after his release from a British warship on which he was detainedduring the bombardment of the fort in the War of 1812.  It was publishedto considerable acclaim in the Patriot on September 20.  Street broadsideswere soon circulating with the instruction to sing the words to the tune of a popular drinking song, To Anacreon in Heaven.  In later decades all but the first verse would become largely forgottenand the song would become known as The Star Spangled Banner.

Key had accompanied American Prisoner Exchange Agent Colonel John Stuart Skinnerto the HMS Tonnant, flag ship of the British fleet, to appeal to commanders Vice Admiral Alexander Cochrane, Rear Admiral Sir George Cockburn, and Major General Robert Ross for the release of civilian prisonerstaken by shore parties.  Most particularly they sought the release of Dr. William Beanes of Upper Marlboro, Maryland who had foolishly tried to place straggling and drunken English soldiers under citizen’s arrest for being disorderly in the streets.  The officers entertained Key and Skinner hospitably, including a fine dinner with good wine.  And they agreedto the requested release.  But because the men had seen the strength and dispositionof the fleet, they were held on board pending what the British assumed, after the easy landings and attack on the Washington, would be the rapid reduction of Baltimore’s harbor fortification and the seizure of the city.

On board the British flag ship Francis Scott Key spotted a banner in the dawn.
Key and the other Americans had the freedom of the deck as the fleet opened up a 25 hour bombardment of the star shaped fortress.  About 1,800 cannon balls were fired at the recently completed modern fortification, and hundreds of rounds of explosive mortar shellswere launched from five mortar barges.  The HMS Erebus launched Congreve Rockets, which were ineffective but explodedso impressively in the air that they were a highly useful psychologicalweapon.

Despite the heavy bombardment, American troops at the fort under Major George Armistead were able to concentrate fire on a Britishlanding party west of the fort, squelching an attempted flanking maneuver in support of the main British army approaching the city from the east.  At dawn on September 14, Scott, peering through the smoke of cannon fire and morning haze, made out a giant flag flying defiantly over the fort.

Without being able to take the fort with its impressive fire power and without the support of the secondary land attack, Colonel Arthur Brooke, in command of the main 5000 man attacking force after General Ross was killed by an American sniper, ordered his men to withdraw.  After re-boarding their transports, the Army and fleet abandoned the attack on Baltimore and set sail for a rendezvous with destiny in New Orleans.   

The original Star Spangled Banner--the battered giant flag is preserved and on display at the Smithsonian.
The flag that Key observed was not the standard sized banner that had flown over the fort during the bulk of the bombardment.  That flag was heavily damaged.  In order to signal the survival of the fort and send encouragement to Baltimore’s ground defenders, Armistead ordered a giant, previously unused, ceremonial flag sewn by local flag maker Mary Pickersgill and her young daughter hoisted in its place.

Coming on the heels of the humiliation of the burning of the Capital the defense of Baltimore became a moment of immense national pride.  The first known public performance of the poem set to the tune of To Anacreon in Heaven occurred soon after the publication of the broadside edition when actor Ferdinand Durangclimbed on a chair and sang it to a cheering crowd at Captain McCauley’s tavern.  Newspapers around the country picked up Key’s poem and it slowly grew in popularity as a song.

But it was not the National Anthem.  The United States did not yet have one.  The most commonly played patriotic songwas Hail Columbia which had been performed at George Washington’s inaugural and had become known as the President’s March.  That might have become an official anthem except for the inconvenient fact that the nation was not named Columbia and that another nation had rudely stolen the name in 1810.

In 1831 Samuel Francis Smith penned new lyrics to God Save the King to make the British dittyinto an American patriotic song.  The simplicity of the tune, much easier to sing than the Star Spangled Banner, or even the popular My Country ‘Tis of Thee made America the dominant mid-19th Century flag waver.  It was adopted as an official anthem by the U.S. Navy in 1889 and was linked with the Pledge of Allegiance to become a morning ritual for school children across the country in the wave of patriotism in the wake of the Spanish American War.  Despite its use as an unofficial anthem, sharing the music with the official anthem of the country from which the U.S. had declared its independence and with which it had fought two wars, made it unsuitable for international use.

By the time that President Woodrow Wilson issued an executive order that the Star Spangled Banner be used as an anthem by military and naval bands in 1916, other songs were emerging as contenders for the title of an official anthem. Katherine Lee Bates’ poem America the Beautiful was set to a tuneby Samuel A Ward.  George M. Cohan’s rouser You’re A Grand Old Flag from the 1906 musical George Washington, Jr. also was another candidate.

Despite the competition, Congress finally designated the Star Spangled Banner as the National Anthem in 1931 and the resolution was signed into law by President Herbert Hoover.

Key’s song, however, always had its detractors.  With its wide range, it is very hard for all but accomplished singers and its martial spiritoffends those who would prefer their patriotism without belligerence.   

Kate Smith's rousing 1938 version of Irving Berlin's God Bless America made the song a leading contender as a replacement National Anthem.
Most commonly mentioned as an alternative is a song that Irving Berlin wrote for his Doughboy camp musical Yip, Yip Yank in 1917 but which had been cut from the show.  Years later, Berlin tinkered with the lyrics and Kate Smith sang it on her popular radio show in 1938.  God Bless America became an instant favorite and is often sung at public events either with or as an alternative to the Star Spangled Banner.

There has even been a movement to make Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land the anthem.  Guthrie wrote the song as a direct answer to Smith’s version of God Bless America in 1940 but did not record it until 1944.  It was not published until Woody put out a mimeographed pamphlet of 10 of his songs to sell at concerts in 1950.  It took off with the folk revival and political upheaval of the 1960’s and was recorded by Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, and, Peter Paul and Mary and many others.  As great as the song is, it is difficult to imagine a song with that political pedigree ever becoming the official Anthem.

Sentiment was growing to ditch the Star Spangled Banner until Whitney Houston's spectacular performance at the Super Bowl in 1998 during a spasm of patriotism during the Gulf War.
These days the song is under attack because of Key’s later legal career and political entanglements as an ardent defender of slavery, mouthpiece for strictly enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act, and being an ally of John C. Calhoun and the nullifiers.  Critics insist that the Star Spangled Banner is the tainted fruit of a tainted tree.

Despite this and the difficulty in singing the song, it can inspire goose bumps even among the most blasé.

Key's anthem got a boost during the Civil War.  There was no mistaking the Star Spangled Banner for the Stars and Bars or the Confederate Battle Flag.


The Star Spangled Banner

Complete lyrics



O say can you see, by the dawn's early light,

What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming,

Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,

O’er the ramparts we watched, were so gallantly streaming?

And the rockets' red glare, the bombs bursting in air,

Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there;

O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?



On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep,

Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,

What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,

As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?

Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,

In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:

‘Tis the star-spangled banner, O long may it wave

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.



And where is that band who so vauntingly swore

That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,

A home and a country, should leave us no more?

Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps’ pollution.

No refuge could save the hireling and slave

From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:

And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave,

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.



O thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand

Between their loved homes and the war’s desolation.

Blest with vict’ry and peace, may the Heav’n rescued land

Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation!

Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,

And this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave

O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!



—Francis Scott Key


Trump’s Hadrian Envy

✇ WWUUD?
13 September 2019 at 09:55
By: Patrick Murfin
Hadrian's Wall is now a picturesque British tourist attraction.
Donald Trump probably slept through world history classes at expensive New York Military Academy and the two years he spent at Fordham before transferring to Wharton to study the art of the real estate swindle.  He probably promised to pay some dweeb to do his homeworkand then stiffed him.  But even The Donald may have heard of Hadrianand his wall and been envious and inspired.  After all, he wants to be Caesar and has a taste for bloated projects.  
According to sources I consult when choosing topics for the blog, on this date in 122 A.D. or C.E. in current academic parlance work began on the construction of Hadrian’s Wall, defensive fortifications that stretched across the northern boundary of the Romanprovince of Britannia.  How that can be determined with such precision is unclear to me, but never let a fuzzy date interfere with a good story.

A statue of the Emperor Hadrian photo shopped to re-create its original vivid paint job makes for a stunningly life-like image. 
The wall was built at the direction of the Emperor Hadrian, the third of the so-called Five Good Emperors, who ruled the Empire from 117 to 138.  He came from a noble Roman family of Iberian origins and was also a noted Stoic philosopher.  Hadrian ruled over a period of stability and initiated a policy of peace through strength by fortifyingand garrisoning the borders of the Empire most threatened—in Germania and Britannia.  The German fortifications were elaborate wooden palisades, but the largely treeless moors of northern Britannia caused those fortifications to be built of abundant local stone.
Hadrian’s Legions had crushed a major rebellion in Britannia a year earlier and sent the remnants of the defeated armies scurrying north into the Cornish and Scottish highlands where both Celts and Picts had long resisted Roman rule. The Emperor personally ordered the construction to “separate the Romans from the Barbarians,” while on a personal inspection tour of the remote province.  
The Wall eventually extended west from Segedunum at Wallsend on the River Tyneto the shore of the Solway Firth.  For most of its distance the wall was continuous but interspersed at intervals with gates to allow trade and collect tariffsand garrison forts.  In the rugged terrain near its western terminus, the curtain wall was replaced by a system of Milecastles and Turrets, each within sight of one another.

Construction of a section of the wall with a diagram of fortifications.
Construction on the wall took six years to complete.  Sections were assigned to each of the three Legions posted to Britannia, and construction detailsdiffered depending on which Legion did the work.  Originally Milecastles and gates were to be manned by small garrisons of a few dozen each.  Within a few years, it was determined to strengthen the line with the construction of 14 to 17 major forts at intervals, each capable of holding 100 to 1000 troops.  Infantry was posted along most of the distance and two large cavalry posts for 1000 riders anchored each end.
Eventually the entire defensive line included small forts set north of the wall as an early warning system; a glacis, an artificial slope of earth and ditch; a berm with rows of pits concealing entanglements; the curtain wall and gate fortresses; and an interior military road.  It was a formidable barrier.

Remains of a small gate garrison fortification.  The gate below was cut by modern farmers to access grazing for their sheep.
After the Legions completed construction, the Wall was garrisoned by Auxiliary troops—non-Roman citizen mercenaries hired by the Empire.  They probably included troops raised in Germania, Gaul, and Iberia, but eventually were mostly locally recruited Britons.  The garrisons were permanent and the soldiersfarmed nearby lands on both sides of the wall for sustenance, married, and raised families.  By the end of its useful existence, which actually outlived the Roman presence in Britain, the troops were so well integrated that they were essentially a local militia.  In its early years as many as 10,000 soldiers maintained the garrisons.
After Hadrian’s death his successor Antoninus Pius sought to aggressively push the frontier north.  He ordered the Antoine Wall built to the north at the narrowest width of lower Scotia.  Hadrian’s Wall was stripped of most of its garrisons and made a secondary defensive line.  But the barbarians of the north were too much and after Marcus Aurelius came to power he ordered the Antoine Wall abandoned in 164 and the return to and reconditioning of Hadrian’s original line.  

"Barbarians" attacking the Wall.
In the years around 190 the wall came underconcerted attack from the barbarians.  Fierce fighting damaged some sections, but on the whole the Wall prevented Britannia from being overwhelmed.  Major renovations and repairs were made.
By 410 the Legions and most Roman administrators had left the island.  While still technically part of the Empire, local troops and Romanized Britonswere left to their own devises.  Parts of the wall remained occupied and garrisoned well into the 5th Century before the last remnants of Romanized Briton collapsed under pressure—the myth shrouded era that gave original birth to the Arthurian Legend.
For generations local farmers stripped portions of the wall of stone for their own construction and local authorities used them for road building.  By the early 19th Century it was in danger of disappearing as a landmark.  

Early Victorian John Clayton began buying up land crossed by the wall, sponsored archeological excavations, and  began reconstruction efforts.
In 1830 Newcastle upon Tyne Town Clerk John Clayton, an avid antiquarian, undertook to save the Wall from continued demolition and to restore as much of it as possible.  In 1834 he personally began to buy land on which the wall sat and to do excavations and eventual restoration.  Over time he had control of land from Brunton to Cawfields.  By the introduction of modern agricultural techniques and selective livestock breading, the lands became profitable enough to sustain Clayton’s continued work on the wall.  He also publicized and popularized his work throughout England.
Although Clayton’s heirs squandered his fortune at the gambling tables, much of the work was done.  
In 1987 Hadrian’s Wall was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Its maintenance and preservation is the responsibility of English Heritage, a government organizationin charge of historic sites in England.  Hiking trails parallel much of the Wall and in most places visitors can walk right up to it, and even climb itto have their pictures taken.  It is the most popular tourist attraction in northern England.

Although often photographed, this stretch of Trump's Wall is part of less than 47 miles he has actually built.
Despite looting Federal agencies including FEMA and the Department of Defense of billions for construction of his southern border wall and running roughshod over public lands including nature reserves as well as over local land owners and municipalities, Donny Boy’s project is not going well.  46.7 miles actual wall have been built two-and-a-half years into Trump's presidency.  Existing fencing and barriers, some of it merely barbed and razor wire already cover 648 of the more than 1000 miles of his proposed wall from the Pacific Oceanto the Gulf of Mexico.  Despite ordering his minions to defy Federal Law and court orders with a promise to pardon them if they are indicted, he is unlikely ever to come close to completing the monument to his own ego.  As Caesars go he is much more likely to be remembered as a Nero fiddling while Rome—American democracy—burns, than as the “Good Emperor” Hadrian.

The Frenchman in the Boater Hat

✇ WWUUD?
12 September 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin

Maurice Chevalier, despite the aristocratic connotations of his last name, made in inauspicious bow in Paris on September 12, 1888, the son of a house painter, considered a low trade, and a Franco-Belgian beauty.  He grew up little more than a street urchin with little formal schooling.
By 1901, as the age of 13 he was singing for tips in a café which eventually led to small parts in theatrical productions.  But through his teens he supported himself mostly with a parade of jobs—carpenter’s apprentice, electrician, printer, and doll painter.
In the first a series of relationships with important women, the handsome young man attracted the attention of Fréhel, a leading star of the Paris stage in 1909.  Like him she had come from the Paris streets to fame as a music hall performer.  Their relationship was tempestuous, due in no small part to her serious alcoholism, but during their brief affair she used her influence to get Chevalier a star shot as a singer and mimic at l’Alcazar in Marseille.
Sensational notices in the south brought him back to Paris where he was soon staring in the Folies Bergère.   In 1911 he abruptly cut off his relationship with Fréhel, causing her to attempt suicide.  He took up with his dance partner and a major star of the Folies, 36-year-old Mistinguett.  They had a very public love affair and she advanced his career—and as we shall see, may have saved his life.

Chevalier as a World War I French Poilu --wounded, held as a prisoner of war, and decorated.
After success on the stage and as a recording artist—and less success in a few silent films, Chevalier was called into national service shortly before World War I broke out in 1914.  Stationed at the front from the beginning of serious hostilities, he was severely woundedin the back by shrapnel and was captured by the Germans and held as a prisoner of war.  While there he undertook the study of English from British P.O.W.s and became quite fluent.
In 1916 Mistinguett prevailed upon her admirer—and probable lover—King Alfonso XIII of Spain, to intercede with his cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II to release Chevalier.  And in good time, too, because conditions in the camps deteriorated badly as the war dragged on and many died there.
Back in Paris Mistinguett secured him a spot in her current show at the prestigious Casino de Paris in 1917.  By this time he had perfected his wry but suave stage persona with a straw boater hat tilted rakishly over one eye.  His star turn at the casino attracted big audiences not only among Parisians, but among the huge numbers of British and American troops flooding the city.  Although he sang in French, he was able to banter charmingly in English, which opened up new possibilities.
He was booked in London where he had huge success at the Palace Theatre.  While in England, he was exposed for the first time to American jazz, just introduced there by the Original Dixieland Jass Band, which deeply influenced his own singing style, something that deepened as Black musicians began performing in Paris soon after.
Back in Paris, Chevalier impressed visiting American screen idle Douglas Fairbanks in 1920 who tried to sign him for Four Stars Pictures to work opposite his wife, Mary Pickford.  But Chevalier, who’s French films had not been successful, did not believe he was suitable for silent film.
In 1920 he appeared—and nearly stole the show—as the second lead in the operetta Dédé.  When the show was picked up for Broadway, Chevalier was able to make his American debutin 1922, which he followed up with successful appearances in revues.  He was creating many of his memorable song and dance performances, including such signature hits as Valentine.
The advent of talking pictures in 1928 proved to be Chevalier’s breakthrough in film.  Paramount Pictures, eager to catch up with first-out-of-the-gateWarner Bros., looked for established musical stars.  The handsome Frenchman fit the bill perfectly.  Arriving in Hollywood with a new wife, dancer Yvonne Vallée, he went to work.

Sheet music for Chevalier's signature song Louise from his first American sound film Innocents of Paris.
Paramount released its first musical, Innocents of Paris staring Chevalier in 1929.  Like most early musicals, encumbered by a camera that had to be kept in a sealed room because of its own noise, the film was somewhat flat and static.  But Chevalier was sensational in his performance of the instant classic Louise.
In 1929 he appeared in for the first time with Jeanette McDonald in The Love Parade despite the fact that the insecure star was convinced he could not portray of a member of a royal court.  In fact the hit saved the studio which was on the brink of collapse after the Stock Market Crash, and earned Chevalier an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor.

Chevalier in Love Parade.  He was insecure playing an officer and aristocrat instead of his usual happy-go-lucky working class Parisian. 
 By the following year he was the biggest star on the Paramount lot and some say the highest paid actor in films.  The Big Pond that year teamed him with Claudette Colbert in a light romantic comedy which featured hit songs, Livin’ in the Sunlight, Lovin’ in the Moonlight and A New Kind of Love, often called the Nightingale Song.  Chevalier received another Oscar nomination for the part.  He was also part of an all-star revue film, Paramount on Parade.
These films, and ones to follow, were simultaneously shot in French for release in Europe
An illustration of just how iconic Chevalier had become in a short time, was a scene in the Marx Brothers classic Monkey Business in 1931.  Harpo, Chico, and Groucho, stowaways on an ocean liner, each try to sneak past immigration with Chevaliers’ stolen passport, each trying to prove he is the star by performing a famous snatch of A New Kind of Love—“If the nightingales could sing like you….”
Despite his success, his humble and impoverished origins caused some quirky behavior.  He was notoriously cheap, refusing to pay a dime a day parking feeon the Paramount lot.  When offered the customary cigarette, a polite custom of the time, he would take two or three and stuff them in his pocket.  He was also a poor tipper on his rounds of nightclubs with young dancers and actresses.  Despite his marriage, he was notoriously on the prowl.  Chevalier was very insecure about his humble origins and lack of a good education.  He relied on fellow French stars Charles Boyer and Adolph Menjou, both well-bred men of sophisticated taste, for tips on art, literature, and culture. 
Musicals had briefly gone out of fashion in 1931 when the studio re-united Chevalier with Colbert and with Miriam Hopkins in The Smiling Lieutenant.  It was his third hit film for director Ernst Lubitsch and Paramount’s biggest grossing picture of the year.

Before Nelson Eddy, Chevalier was Jeanette MacDonald's first leading man despite his casual, almost talkative style singing contrasting with her operettic voice.
He was then reteamed with rising star McDonald in three more huge hit musicals, One Hour With You, Love Me Tonight, and Franz Lehároperetta The Merry Widow.  In the second of those films, songwriters Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart for the first time integrated the music to advance the plot.
Despite these successes, Chevalier got into a salary dispute with Paramount bosses and bolted the studio for rival MGM in 1935.  But MGM did not seem interested him for American releases.  Instead he was sent back to France to make films in French for the European market.  In 1936 working again with McDonald he made La veuve joyeuse with Lubitsch directing.  
They loaned him to Columbia Pictures for Folies Bergère de Paris with Merle Oberon and Ann Sothern, produced in English and French Versions—the French version including the famous topless dancers of the revue.
Chevalier’s star power in Hollywood was fading, but still strong in Europe.  In ’37 he starred in a British release, The Beloved Vagabond.  He continued to make films in France for the rest of the decade, some of which were in limited release in the US in English versions, but none were successful.  The same year he married in Paris for a second time to another dancer, Nita Raya.
None the less Chevalier remained a major star and returned with great success to the Paris stage.

Chevalier with a French officer held in a German POW camp in 1940--the same camp where he was a prisoner.  His social connections with German officers in Paris facilited the visit and fueled rumors that he was a collaborator.  He left the camp with 15 men paroled personally to him.
His career, however, ominously collided with the outbreak of World War II, resulting in an almost fatal blow to his American reputation.  Chevalier stayed in Paris during the German occupation starring again at the Casino de Paris in the revue Bonjour Paris.  Just as American and British troops were a big part of his audience in 1917, Germans crowded his performances in 1940 and ’41.  He was invited—virtually ordered—to appear in Berlin, but he constantly declined.  He did get permission to entertain at the very same prisoner of war camp where he had once been held and, turning on his noted charm, managed to leave with 10 POWs released to his custody.
Despite this, Chevalier never used his popularity with German officers in Paris, who he saw socially, to mine for intelligence information like Collette and other famous figures or to become active in the Resistance like Josephine Baker.  He tried to remain neutral.  But that became more and more difficult and in 1942 he left Paris and performing for a period as a near recluse near Cannes.
After liberation, he joined in street celebrations in Paris, and also participated in some Communist street rallies.  He was charged with collaboration in 1944, which was widely publicized in the US.  Not widely publicized was that he was cleared of all charges.
With his ability to tour in the US and Britain damaged not only by the lingering suspicions of collaboration, but by McCarthy Era anti-communist hysteria, Chevalier spent several years working on his autobiography in hopes to clear his name.
Splitting from Ray in 1946, he also cultivated an interest in painting and the arts, always trying to climb out of his origins in the Paris gutter.
Just when the first ever official Friars Club Roast was held in his honor making it seem like he might regain ground in America, his appearance at the Stockholm Appeal concert, a Communist organized protest to nuclear arms in 1949 resulted in his visa to visit the US being revoked.
Despite continuing to tour elsewhere, Chevalier was considering retirement and bought a comfortable estate in Paris.  He began a long-time relationship with Janie Michels, a young divorcee with three children.  
With McCarthyism fading, his visa was restored in 1954 and the next year Chevalier launched a successful US tour, mostly working in the most elegant nightclubs.  Revived interest in his career convinced screenwriter/director Billy Wilder to cast him as Audrey Hepburn’s father, a small but meaty dramatic role, in Love in the Afternoon.  The 1957 film was his first American production in 20 years.

The highlight of Chevalier's revived film career was in GiGi where he played an older Boulevardier.  He opened the film with this number, Thank Heaven for Little Girls. 
It was followed by a hugely successful second film career as an elderly man, notably in Gigi, 1958 with Leslie Caron.  The Motion Picture Academy presented him with an Honorary Oscar in recognition of his whole film career as a result.
Chevalier also appeared in Can-Can with Frank Sinatra, the romantic drama Fanny with Caron and his old Hollywood friend Charles Boyer, Panic Button with Jayne Mansfieldand three other U.S films.  In between he toured tireless in the US, Latin America, and Europe.
But he was slowing down.  After a farewell American tour in 1969, he retired.  Disney songwriters Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman lured him into the studio one more time to record the theme for The Aristocats, his final contribution to the film industry.
Chevalier died in Paris on January 1, 1972 at the age of 83.

That Dreaded Anniversary Again—Murfin Rants and Poetry

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11 September 2019 at 09:58
By: Patrick Murfin

There is no escaping it.  A scab is pulled off a barely healed wound.  Opportunistsand con men scramble to once again jump to wrong conclusions, scapegoat strawmen, and bend the occasion to serve their ambitions and blood lust.
I dread it every year.  But it will not leave me or, I suspect, any of us alone.
But as horrible as those images etched indelibly in my mind are, is it wrong to say that I miss the days just after?  Remember?  For a little while Americans loved each other, found comfort in each other’s arms.  Divisions melted.  We were united by grief, and yes, even some righteous anger.  Even the world mourned for us.  Some of us even dared hope that the sense of oneness, community, and solidaritycould change us.  Maybe even last.
Of course it didn’t.  Weeks went by and we went charging off in different directions—drumming up wars on people who hadnothing to do with the attack, cooking up wild conspiracy theories that confirmed our own personal demons and loathing’s, scapegoating the convenient and the weak, attacking the patriotismof anyone who did not wear a flag pin 24 hours a day.
And now, multiple wars later, a Depression, the election of a Black President then his replacement with a malignant narcissist and common charlatan, the ascent of a kind of political madness, the rise of entitled oligarchy, immigration panic and the rise of fascist White nationalism Americans hate each other.  Really hate.  Can’t stand to talk with each other, be in the same room, breath the same air.  Rage is the order of the day.  White men strut through malls and fast food emporiums with military style weapons slung over their shoulder daring anyone to look cross eyed at them and in their heart of hearts hoping that someone will challenge them.  Looking for any spark to set off a Civil War.

18 years later America is shattered and American despise each other.
Black kids who look like they could be trouble are pumped full of holes with monotonous regularity.  Half-starvedimmigrant children are torn from their parents, caged, and brutalized. In some churches, mosques, and temples hate thy neighbor is the daily message.  We are sliced and diced apart every which way—by race, language, religion, politics, age, gender, and who we choose to love.
The once revered first responder heroes of 9/11 have been transformed into greedy union thugs by politicians.  Police departments have been transformed from serve and protect into little armies to quashthe slightest suggestion of unrest or dissent.
Women and their health have become more than ever political plaything, and the objects of Great Lie campaigns worthy of anything by Goebbels.   Transgender humans have become prey righteous hunters.
And guns still don’t kill people—the increasing mounds of bodies are felled by some kind of mysterious magic. 
So much for my rant.
Looking back, I have grappled with 9/11 in my poetrymore than any other single subject.  And how that poetry evolved speaks to what has happened to us.  
The first one was written for a one year anniversary program and included in my collection We Build Temples in the Heart in 2004.

Photos of the dead and missing in New York posted on a makeshift memorial wall.
The Dead of 9/11 Leave a Message on George W’s Voice Mail

The Dead cry out—

It is not lonely here!
            They come by the scores
                        and by the thousands
                        every day,
                        as they have always come,
                        each arrival here
                        a wrenching loss below.

            They come as they have always come,
                        each death the completion of a journey,
                        the closing of a hoop of life.

            And we welcome each of them.

But we are not lonely here.

            We do not wander silent corridors
                        our footsteps echoing,
                        yearning for a voice.

            We are not lonely
                        for we are the Dead
                        and we are everywhere
                        united in that last breath
                        and in eternity.

But You—

You make haste to fill the unfillable,
            to send us more,
            many more,
            out of their own time
            as we were out of ours,
            yanked here in violence and hatred.

Let them be.

They will come in their own time.

We who know death
            do not cry out for revenge.

We are not lonely here.

—Patrick Murfin



"If I wore stars on a pointed hat."

In 2007 came one of those serendipitous coming together of calendar occasions

September 12, 2007 
The Day After 9/11—Ramadan and Rosh Hashanah

Wheels turning within wheels—
     an astrolabe,
          Tycho’s observatory,
               gears in some fantastic machine,
                    electrons—atoms—molecules,
                        moons—planets—stars—galaxies—universes.

Today, just today—
     Point A on Wheel X, spinning urgently,
     comes to kiss Point B on Wheel Y,
     rotating on its own good time,
     for just a nano-second
     having just brushed by
     Point C on cog Z.

These precise events will come again,
    I suppose—
     you do the math if you wish.

But if I wore stars on a pointed hat,
    I might conclude that there was something
    beyond mere physics at work here.

Call it an omen, if you wish,
     or the flat hand of something Greater
     slapping us up side our 
     merely mortal heads
     and scolding us—

               “Spin as you will,
                you spin not alone.”

—Patrick Murfin


The cloud of ash envelops Manhattan.
On the tenth anniversary I was moved by reading that the dust from the Twin Towers was still orbiting the stratosphere and slowly, year by year, falling to earth.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust
September 9, 2011, Crystal Lake, Illinois

The ash and dust, they say, 
rose as high as the skirts
of the ionosphere.
Prevailing winds pushed it 
            across oceans and around the world.

Most has sifted by now to the earth.
Some orbits still, 
motes descending
            now and again.

My study is a cluttered mess.
Dust lays on any unattended
horizontal surface, 
makes webs in corners,
balls in computer wire rats nests,
devils under bookshelves.

That speck, that one there,
            the one by the stapler,
            just might be what’s left
            of the Dominican cleaner
            who left her children
            with their Abuela
            and went to work 
            in the sky
            only to be vaporized.

Hola, señora.
It is an honor to meet you.

—Patrick Murfin


La Moneda, the Presidential Palace in Santiago, under attack during the U.S. sponsored Chilean coup on 9/11 1973.  In the wake of the coup thousands were killed or disappeared.

Six years ago I recalled that 9/11 was etched in the memories of Chileans as the date of their own national catastrophe—the 1973 coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and ushered in a brutal dictatorship.  The United States government was more than just complicit in that.

Two Anniversaries
September 11, 2013

I’ll ante my 3,000 vaporized on a crystal morning.
You’ll see me your 3,000 homeless ghosts.
I’ll give you my crumbling Towers and billowing ash.
You will call with the bombed rubble of La Moneda .

I’ll throw in a stack of terrorists with beards and turbans.
You’ll count out freckled faces, crew cuts, and black fedoras.

Let’s show our cards and see who loses.

—Patrick Murfin


Before the Bambino—The First Ever Major League Baseball Grand Slam

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10 September 2019 at 11:15
By: Patrick Murfin
Roger Connor of the Troy Trojans hits the first big league grand slam in 1880.

In the early years of big league baseballhome runs were hard to come by.  Ball parks were small, but the ballwas dead—much softer with a less elastic core then modern balls.   Bats were heavy slowing down bat speed.  Pitchershad yet to perfect a 90 mile per hour fast ball.  It took a dead eye, prodigious strength, a bit of luck, and usually a tail wind to get a ball over the fences.  Instead of waiting for big innings where sluggers clear the bases, as in the modern game, it was small ball—singles, doubles, stolen bases, daring slideswith sharpened spikes high, plus a lot of walks and hit batsmen.

Before there was a Babe Ruth, there was Roger Connor, a towering first baseman—said to be 6’3’’ in an age when men were generally much shorter—who started his career with the Troy, New York Trojans in 1880 at the age of 22. 

Then, as now, there were cash poor teams in small markets who could not afford to pay the kind of stars playing on teams like Chicago White Stockings and clubs in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia.  The Trojans were one of them.  They packed their teams with promising amateurs like Conner, a kid who had played club ballin his hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut.

On September 10, 1881 the Trojans were playing another down-at-the-heels small city team, the Worcester Ruby Legs.  Down three runs in the 9th inning, their cause looked hopeless.  But the plucky team managed to load the bases.  With two outs Connor strode to the plate—and blasted the first grand slam home runin major league history. 

The thrilling storybook ending attracted the attention of the mighty New York Gothams.  By the 1882 season Connor was playing in the Big Apple for one of the National League’s elite teams.  Soon he was the star of the team not only hitting for average and power, but despite his size a lithe and speedy base runner.  Sports writers began to refer to the team as the Giants in his honor.  The nickname stuck.
Connor played first base barehanded in the era before fielding gloves.
In 1886 Connor gained fame for being the first person to hit a homerun entirely out of the Polo Grounds, a ball park in which it was notoriously hard to hit homers.

In 1890 Connor was part of the revoltagainst National League owners that resulted in the short lived Players League.  As a member of a team made up of rebellious Giants, he led the new league in home runs with 14, the only time he ever held a single season home run title.  But he was consistent over an 18 year career.  He came in second four times in the National League and amassed a total of career total of 138 homers—a record that stood until Ruth broke it 23 years after Connor’s retirement in 1897.

The towering 6'3" Connor inspired the new nickname for the New York City National League club--the Giants.  He was the beau ideal of a Gilded Age baseball star.
Ruth actually thought he broke the record when he smashed homer number 132.  Due to incomplete record keeping Connor was then only credited with 131.  Subsequent research shows that the real total was 138.

By the time Connor retired after spending his last seasons with the Philadelphia Phillies and St. Louis Browns, he had racked up an impressive record:  233 triples (still No. 4 on the all-time list after all of these years), 244 stolen bases, National League batting crown in 1885 with a .371 average, in the top ten for batting average 10 times, led the league in doubles ten times and triples 7, batted in 1,321 runs, and had a career average of .317.

Connor's Hall of Fame plaque.
After his retirement from the majors, Connor returned to his Waterbury where he managed minor league teams and basked in the admiration of his home town.  He lived to see Ruth break his career home run record.  He died in Waterbury in 1931 at the age of 73.

In 1976 the great left handed hitter was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans’ Committee—a fitting tribute for the onetime Home Run King.

Tree of Life UU Congregation Announces New Musical Team

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9 September 2019 at 15:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Tree of Life Music Director Cassandra Vohs-Demman.
The Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Roadin McHenry, Illinois will have new leadership this year for its choir and music program.  Cassandra Vohs-Demann has been named Music Director and will be joined by Billy Seger as Accompanist.
The pair takes up their duties after Forrest Ransburg, Music Director for the past three years, resigned to further his professional music education in Maryland.
Vohs-Demann is well known in McHenry County as a performer, singer/songwriter, vocal coach,  and owner of A Place to Shine Music.  She is the founder and Artistic Directorof the Woodstock Community Choir, curates and hosts monthly Second Saturday Concerts and  hosts the Original Open Mic at the Stage Left Café.  She also leads the Ukulele Super Heroes.   She is no stranger to Tree of Life having sung with the Choir and performed at Coffee House programs.  Last spring she teamed with Forrest Ransburg for a special joint concert at the church. 

Billy Seger, Tree of Life Accompanist.
Billy Seger first started participating in musical theatre productions, choir, and piano lessons at the age of 8.  He is remembered for his enthusiastic performances in productions of Dille’s Follies presented by the church when it was known as the Congregational Unitarian Congregation in Woodstock. He graduated from Millikin University’s prestigious School of Theater and Dance in 2009.  He went on to perform professionally across the country, including two national tours, two international contracts aboard Oceania Cruise Lines, and two Christmas seasons as a backup singer/dancer for country superstar Pam Tillis. Segar currently lives in Woodstock and works as a professional director/choreographer for various theater companies including Woodstock High School and Raue Center for the Arts in Crystal Lake.

Look for the Tree of Life UU Congregation sign on Bull Valley Road in McHenry.
The Tree of Life Choir under Vohs-Demann’s direction will perform during the annual in-gathering service and water communion Sunday, September15.  A picnic on the grounds will follow the service.  
For more information contact the church at 815 322-2464, e-mail office@treeoflifeuu.org , or visit https://treeoflifeuu.org/.


The Hanapepe Massacre and the Bitter Taste of Sugar in Paradise

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9 September 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Filipino sugar cane cutters in Hawaii in 1924.  Note the bolo knives used in their backbreaking work.
Regular readers of this blog and those interested in labor history should not be surprised by yet another tale oframpaging police and massacred strikers.  From the Great Railway Strike of 1877 on for the next five or six decades such scenes repeated themselves with variations outside besieged steel mills, in mining towns stretching from West Virginia to Colorado, and on gritty urban streets.  It was open class warfare and the victims of the depredations by the hirelings of the bosses, gun thugs, vigilantes, Pinkertons, cops, and troopsbecame martyrs, their stories preserved in song and legend.
We don’t think of such things happening in paradise, but it did. On September 9, 1924 16 workers and four Sherriff’s officers were killed in what became known as the Hanapepe Massacre.  And the victims and their story have been largely forgotten even by their own people.
Of course what is now paradise of mainland touristswas something different for the thousands of Filipino laborers who had been recruited for the sugar industry in the Hawaiian Islands.  They cut cane and worked in sugar processing, notoriously dangerous and exhausting work, on the massive plantations that were a mainstay of the Territory of Hawaii’s economy.  Moreover, they were at the bottom of an ethnic pecking order in the industry.
The Filipinos were the latest of three groups imported by growers to work the fields after native Hawaiians proved unsuitable and unwilling to do the back breaking labor.  First were the Chinese, but the Oriental Exclusion Act which came into force on the islands when they were annexed to the United States in 1898 cut off the source of coolies.  Growers turned to the Japanese who arrived mostly in family groups and had well developed cultural ties and institutions.  By 1909 they were conducting their first strikes for better wages and conditions and in 1920 organized the Federation of Japanese Labor, which carried out another big strike on Oahuthat year.
With the Japanese increasingly restless, employers turned to the U.S. colony of The Philippines to recruit more plaint labor.  Workers were recruited from three distinct ethnic groups from the islands, Visayans, Ilocanos, and, in much smaller numbers, Tagalogs, each group speaking a different language.  Unlike the Japanese, most of the recruits were young single men and illiterate.  Both the bosses and the Japanese regarded them as rustic primitives.
The first waves arrived during or just after the 1909 strike and their numbers swelled each year.  By 1924 there were an estimated 37,000 Filipinos out of a total population of 323,600 in the Territory, scattered over the sugar producing islands of Oahu, the Big Island of Hawaii, Maui, and Kauai. On arrival they were given the hardest, lowest status jobs, housed in the worst conditions, and given hardly enough basic rations to survive on.  Anything additional and services like laundry had to be paid for at company stores at inflated prices.
Despite their outcast status and the fact that the Japanese ethnic based union refused to enlist them, many Filipino workers walked off their jobs during the 1920 strike as well.

Well meaning but inexperienced Pablo Manlapit, Filipino labor leader. 
Pablo Manlapit young Honolulu attorney, one of the few Filipinos who had worked his way out of the cane fields of the Big Island to professional status, organized the Filipino Labor Union, which was essentially confined to Oahu, unlike the territory-wide Japanese union.  Manlapit, a minority Tagalog, had helped organize the Filipino walk out in 1920.  By 1924 he felt his union was ready for a push for High Wage Movement in support of demands he had made of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters’ Association (HSPA), beginning two years earlier.  The ambitious agenda included doubling the minimum wage from $1 a day to $2, an eight-hour workday—down from 10 to 12 hours—and overtime pay, equal pay between men and women, and collective bargaining rights.
For their part, growers, who controlled the Territorial Government, had responded to increased militancy by both Japanese and Filipino by following the mainland in enacting draconian anti-labor laws during the post-World War I Red Scare period.  The Territorial Legislature passed the Criminal Syndicalism Law of 1919, Anarchistic Publications Law of 1921, and the Anti-Picketing Law of 1923.  Despite penalties of up to ten years in prison, the severity of the reaction only fueled worker discontent.
In April of 1924 Manlapit called an all-island strike against the growers. 
The Japanese Union also struck, but did notcoordinate its activity with the Filipinos.  By this time the Filipinos were the majority of the work force and the Japanese were concentrated in the more skilled jobs. On their part, the Japanese with their well-established system of union branches on all of the Islands and at most of the major plantations and sense of communal solidarity were able to effectively bring most of their work force out.
Manlapit’s Filipino Union did not fare so well.  Barely organized outside of Oahu, the union chief contented himself with making speeches and holding rallies on the other islands calling on the workers to join the walk out.  Although the rallies were well attended and he received an enthusiastic welcome, he did not provide local workers with organizers, structural support, or even much of a plan.  The result was predictably disastrous.  On Kauai only 575 Filipino laborers out of more than 5,500 employed at the Koloa, Makaweli, Kekaha, Lihue and McBryde Sugar Co. plantations actually walked out. 
Strikers on the island set up headquarters in the only two towns not on plantation property or controlled by the growers.  At Hanapepe about 124 active strikers set up a strike headquarters in a Japanese school building which they rented.
The strike dragged on through the springand summer with most of the action on Oahu.  Without leadership or a clear plan militant workers on Kauai grew increasingly frustrated—and hungry.  They had to rely on fishing and modest charityby local merchants to survive.  Meanwhile most of their fellow Filipinos stayed on the job and production at the plantations was hardly effected.
For their part plantation owners responded predictably with armed thugs, the National Guard, and strike breakers paid a higher wage than the strikers demanded. Strikers were turned out of their homes.  Propaganda was distributed to whip up racist reaction among white and native Hawaiian populations and to further divide Filipino from Japanese workers.

Sensational headlines blamed the strikers.

Tensions boiled over on September 7 when two non-striking workers, both 18 year-old ethnic Ilocanos bicycled into Hanapepe looking to buy shoes.  They were captured by strikers from the school building almost all ethnic Visayans, held against their will and beaten. 
Deputy Sheriff William Crowell went to the headquarters when he heard reports of the incident and demanded the release of the two young men.  The strikers produced them, but under compulsion the men said that they were there voluntarily. Crowell left unconvinced and went to the county attorney.  Arrest warrants were sworn not for the strikers, but for the captives, as a way to free them.
Crowell returned the following morning with other officers and a posse of about 40 men, many of them company guards or employees armed with hunting rifles paid for by the HSPA.  Crowell and three or for regular deputies approached the school and served the warrant.  The rest of the posse was positioned behind a line of automobiles on the road and high on a hill overlooking the school.
Strikers surrendered the two young men.  But as Crowell and his men began to leave with them, strikers poured from the school cursing and following the men.  Many had their cane cutting bolo knives, a kind of Filipino machete.  At this point accounts of what happenedvary widely.  According to authorities, Crowell and his men came under attack and sharpshooterson the hill and behind the automobiles let loose and intense fusillade of rifle fire that lasted several minutes.
Surviving unionists insisted that although they were pressing on the Sherriff’s men, no one was assaulted until firing began.  This view as been somewhat corroborated by non-striking local residents who witnessed the shooting, but their account has been challenged because they were thought to be sympathetic to the strikers.  At least one of the members of the posse later testified that he and others opened fire when they thought that Crowell would come under attack.
No one will ever know for sure.
But after about 15 minutes of confused fighting, 16 strikers lay dead, dozens were wounded, and four deputies were stabbed to death.  Crowell and others were wounded but survived.  The posse and National Guard troops arrested all of the strikers they could find.
In Honolulu, where strike leader Manlapit was already in custody for unrelated strike charges, the victims of the shooting got no sympathy.  The rest of the Hawaiian labor movement, mostly concentrated on the docks, did not respond with sympathy or solidarity.  And after a day or two of screaming headlines on the Mainland, the incident was quickly forgotten there, too.
The Filipino dead were packed in cardboard caskets and buried together in an unmarked slit trench, the location of which has been lost.  The Sheriff’s men were buried with the pomp reserved for military heroes.

Under National Guard custody over 130 strikers awaiting trial for riot charges outside the Lihue district court.
Of course the strike was broken and the Filipino union was smashed.  101 strikers from Hanapepe were brought to trial.  According to Tiffany Hill in an articleon the massacre in Honolulu Magazine, “57 strikers received 13 months in jail, and returned to work afterward. Seventy-six were indicted on riot charges—16 were acquitted—and two were charged with assault and battery for beating the two Ilocanos; nobody was charged with murder. Most received four-year prison sentences, and some were deported back to the Philippines.”
Manlapit was also deported to the Philippines after a prison sentence, but returned in 1932.  He tried to organize a new multi-ethnic sugar worker’s union with little success.  Small scale local strikes in 1933 failed to attract many non-Filipino workers and the new attempt petered out before any wide spread strike was again attempted.
Sugar workers on the islands were not organized until the post-World War II when the International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union (ILWU) finally was recognized as the collective bargaining agent and won many of the demands of the High Wage Movement and the Filipino Union.

It wasn't until 2006 that the Hanapepe Massacre was commemorated by ethnic Filipino groups and the Hawaiian labor movement.
Today the sugar industry has all but vanishedfrom the islands and the Hanapepe Massacre is largely forgotten.  Even among Filipinos, it was not until the 1970s that ethnic writers and historians began to investigate this buried part of their heritage.

The Last Cruise of the Lady Elgin

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8 September 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
The Lady Elgin at dock.
When folks think of ship wrecks and maritime disasters, their thoughts turn to the Titanic and other famous sinkings on the briny deep. 
But in fact the disasters with the most loss of life have occurred on our inland water ways.  By far the heaviest loss of life was on the riverboatSultanaoverloaded with former Yankee prisonersrecently liberated from Rebelprisons.  The ship’s boilers exploded in April 1865 near Helena, Arkansas killing over 1,800.
Even ships at dock have not been safe.  In 1915 the Eastland, a passenger steamer out of Chicago, rolled over at her moorage when passengers, Western Electric employees on a day excursion, rushed to the dock side to wave goodbye to family and friends.  844 were killed, the largest loss of life in any single Great Lakes shipwreck.

The recovery of bodies from the S.S. Eastland which rolled over a dock in Chicago causing the largest loss of life in Great Lakes waters in 1915.
The Eastland’s record does not stand for any want of competition.  In fact the Great Lakes, particularly the biggest ones—Superior, Michigan, and Huron—are among the most treacherous waters in the world.  According to David Swayze, the acknowledged expert in the field, there have been 4,900 documented ship wrecks on the Lakes in about nearly 500 years of non-native navigation.  Extreme weather conditions and very choppy water caused by the shallow bowl effect on the lake continue to make sailing on them hazardous for even the largest and most modern vessels—witness the famed wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald.
Few Lake Michigan disasters are more storied than the sinking of the Lady Elgin, which went down off the Illinois North Shore near Highland Park on September 8, 1860.  The wooden hulled side-wheel steamer was the pride of the lakes, one of the largest and most elegant passenger packetsto ply its waters.
Built in Buffalo, New York shipyard in 1851, she was named for the wife of the Governor General of Canada, James Bruce, Earl of Elgin.
Despite her swanky appointments and favor with well-healed passengers the Lady Elgin in retrospect seems a jinxed ship.  In her 19 years of service she was involved in numerous accidentsand mishaps.  In 1854 she sank after striking a rock near Manitowoc, Wisconsin.  After being refloated and repaired an accident with her machinery left her dead in the water the next year and she had to be towed to port in Chicago.  She was damaged in an 1857 fire, struck a reef at Cooper Harbor, Michigan in 1858 and later that same year ran aground on another reef on Lake Superior.  In 1859 she had to be towed to ports in Michigan twice.
But none of these mishaps had caused the loss of life and she was still regarded as a seaworthy, first class ship.
On September 6, 1860 the Lady Elgin was engaged to make a round trip, two day excursion run from Milwaukee to Chicago.  On board were members of the city’s Union Guardmilitia unit and their families bound for a day of politicsincluding a scheduled speech by Democratic Presidential candidate Stephen Douglas.  After a pleasant day of oration and picnicking the passenger re-embarked as storm clouds gathered looking forward to an evening of gay dancing to the music of a German band on board.

The Augusta rams the Lady Elgin amidships.
The ship made its way south in heavy rain and against a strong head wind.  Despite this, her powerful engines were making decent time.  About 2 a.m. the sailing schooner Augusta of Oswego spotted the Lady Elgin by her bright running lights and the lights from the forward cabin where diehards were still dancing.  The captain of the Augusta lost sight of the other ship in the storm and misgauged the distance between them.  At 2:20 the Augusta rammed her amid ship.  Unlike the steamship, the schooner was not required to have running lights and was invisible to the crew of the Lady Elgin who could take no evasive action.
The ship initially stayed afloat but was taking water.  The Captain of the Augusta assumed the other vessel was alright.  Concerned with damage to his bow, he headed to port in Chicago without standing by to render assistance.
Captain Jack Wilson of the Lady Elgin ordered that 50 head of cattle in the hold, cargo, and baggage be jettisoned in an attempt to get the hole in her side above water level.  The chief steward and other crew tried unsuccessfully to plug the breachwith mattresses.  A large life boat was lowered on the starboard side to assess the damage.  It never regained the ship, which broke in half after about half an hour, the aft portion sinking.  Life preservers, actually just large planks for survivors to cling to were never issued.  Only two small boats and one large raft got away from the ship.  Many clung to pieces of wreckage.
Prevailing winds drove the survivors, including Captain Wilson on the crowded raft jammed with as many as 300 people, toward the shore.  Two boats with 18 people in them, a smaller raft with 14, and individuals on wreckage did reach shore.  But at day break between 300 and 400, including Wilson and the large raft, were floundering just off shore.

Survivors of the sinking cling to wreckage in the storm-tossed lake.
Students from nearby Northwestern University and the Garrett Biblical Institute worked frantically to pull survivors ashore.  Captain Wilson died heroically trying to save two women as storm-lashed winds beat against the rocks. 
Although the exact number will never be known because the ship manifest was lost, at least 300 people died in the tragedy.  It was the greatest loss of life ever in an open-water wreckon the Great Lakes.

Four years later rules were adopted that required running lights on sail, as well as steam powered ships.

Wreckage of the Lady Elgin in 60 feet of water off the North Shore.
In 1989 the wreckage of the Lady Elgin was found off of Highwood by Harry Zych, who after an extended court fight was granted ownership by right of salvage.  Divers, who must get Zych’s permission, have retrieved many artifacts from the wreck which lies in four debris fields in about 60 feet of water.

A Wisconsin state historical marker commemorating the disaster.
The wreckage was officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.

Everett McKinley Dirksen—When Republicans Were Not All Crooks and Madmen

✇ WWUUD?
7 September 2019 at 12:13
By: Patrick Murfin

The maxim says “a dead fish rots from the head down.”  Case in point, Donald Trump, his cabinet and other appointees, the GOP in Congress—most noticeably Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell—and a slew of Red State governors.  Corruption, venality, bigotry leavened with incompetence and willful ignorance.  As many have noted it’s not your father’s Republican Party.  But…
Those of us of a certain age remember when Republicans were stodgyand conservative but generally not crooks, or madmen.  I never thought I would say that I miss those guys. 
A good way to see just how far the modern Republican Party has gone off the rails is to review the career of Illinois Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen, a self-proclaimed party conservative who died fifty years ago today September 7, 1969 having served nearly 19 years in the Senate including 10 years as Minority Leader.  
Dirksen and his fraternal twin brother were born on his parent’s farm near downstate Pekin, Illinois on January 4, 1896.  His parents were both German immigrants and his father, like most Midwestern Germans, was a staunch Republican.  He named his son in honor the legendary orator Edward Everett and President William McKinley.  
The boy was educated in local schools and attended the University of Minnesota Law School before dropping out to enlist in the Army during World War I.  He served in France as a second lieutenant of artillery.
A handbill for Dirksen's successful 1932 campaign for Congress.
After the war he returned to Pekin and took up private business.  His political career began with election to the city council in 1927.  He had his eye on bigger things.  He failed to win the GOP nomination for the House of Representatives in 1930, but won both nomination and election in 1932.
Dirksen entered Congress as a minority Republican in the Democratic landslide that brought Franklin D. Roosevelt to the White House.  Despite the ingrained conservatism of a small town businessman, Dirksen recognized the severity of the national emergency of the Great Depression and supported much, but not all, of F.D.R.’s New Deal legislation despite pressure from party leaders.  It marked a willingness to work across party lines that was the hallmark of his long career.
Roosevelt, however, could not rely on the Illinois Congressman for support as he steered the country to support of the Allies in World War II.  Dirksen was an ardent isolationist in the mold of one of his most influential political supporters, Col. Robert R. McCormack, publisher of the Chicago Tribune.  He showed his considerable skill as a legislative tactician during the debate over Roosevelt’s Lend Lease Act.  He recognized that there were not enough Republican votes to stop passage in the House, but took advantage of sixty-five Democrats leaving the floor for lunch to successfully attach an amendment that gave the Senate and House to power to revoke the President’s authority by a concurring resolution that could be passed by a simple majority in both houses.
Dirksen made an abortive bid for the 1944 Republican Presidential nomination, which observers believed was mostly an attempt to derail the re-nomination of liberal Wendell Willkie or a ploy to get the Vice Presidential nomination.  In any event on the eve of the convention he signaled that he would not be a contender and although he allowed himself to be nominated as a favorite son of Illinois, did not get a single vote.
In 1948, citing an eye ailment that would plague him the rest of his life, Dirksen announced that he would not seek re-election.  He was evidently feeling better in 1950 when he beat incumbent Senator Scott Lucas, the sitting Majority Leader and a key ally of President Harry Truman.  Dirksen campaigned with the help of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy who accused Lucas of being soft on Communism.
Dirksen remained loyal to McCarthy, but tried to convince him to admit to “misstatements” and apologize to avoid censureby the Senate.  When the vote came down, he supported McCarthy while privately acknowledging that his friend had, “lost his senses.”
Even as a freshman Dirksen quickly became a power in the Senate where he was known for his 19th Century style florid oratory, deceptively folksy demeanor, and considerable skill at building legislative coalitions.  By 1952 he was well enough thought of to be the voice of Mid-Western conservatives at the Republican National Convention in support of Senator Robert Taft of Ohio and against Dwight Eisenhower.  In a blistering speech to the convention he went directly after Eisenhower’s biggest supporter, former two time nominee Thomas E. Dewey.  Pointing at Dewey on the floor he thundered, “Don’t take us down the path to defeat again!” to a mixed chorus of boos and cheers.

From political opponent to key ally--Dirksen and Eisenhower in the Oval Office.
Dirksen, however, dutifully supported Eisenhower that fall and soon became his most reliable ally in the Senate, a tribute to the practicality of both men.
When the Senate reorganized in 1959, Dirksen was elected Minority Leader over more liberal John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, but he moved quickly to heal rifts between wings of the party and molded a solid caucus.  As John F. Kennedy came to the Presidency, he became the face of the Republican Party, along with House Minority Leader Charles Halleck of Indiana.   Their weekly joint news conference, dubbed the Ev and Charley Show, became goldmine of television sound bites, usually featuring Dirksen’s folksy wit.  His weathered face, mop of unruly curls, and distinctive voice made him a regular on Meet the Press and Face the Nation.

The weekly joint press conference of House Minority Leader Charles Halleck and Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen was so entertaining it regularly made the evening newscasts and was dubbed the Ev and Charlie Show.
Dirksen became famous for his quips such as, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you’re talking real money,” when talking about the budget and his story of two Quaker ladies discussing taxes, “Don’t tax me, don’t tax thee, tax the fellow behind the tree.”
Although a moderate conservative on economic policyand an anti-Communist hawk in foreign affairs, Dirksen, in the tradition of Illinois Republicans, was passionate about civil rights.  Working across the aisle with Democratic Majority Leader Mike Mansfield of Montana, he was critical in rounding up Republican votes to break filibusters against both the Civil Rights Act of 1963 and the Open Housing Act of 1968.

Dirksen collaborated with Democratic Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to the key Civil Rights legislation passed in the Senate.
Reversing his traditional isolationism, Dirksen became an early supporter of the War in Vietnam.  His advice to his old Senate friend Lyndon B. Johnson was said to be critical to Johnson’s decisionnot only to continue Kennedy’s commitment of troops there, but to dramatically escalate the war against his own nagging doubts.

Dirksen was a regular on the Sunday morning news panel programs.  With Edwin Newman on Meet the Press.
Dirksen recorded several spoken word albums.  A single from one of them, The Gallant Men, became an unexpected radio hit and earned him a Grammy.
The Senator was also famous for his passion for the common marigold and his frequent attempts to have the hardy plant name the national flower.  He waxed eloquent about the topic at a drop of a hat.

Dirksen's statue on the ground of the Illinois Capitol in Springfield.
Dirksen died of complications following surgery for lung cancer at Walter Reed Army Hospitalat the age of 77.  He was so well thought of by his Senate colleagues that they re-named the main Senate office building in his honor.  The new 1972 Federal Court Building in Chicagowas also named for him.  His portrait hangs in honor in the Illinois State Capitol and a bronze statuestands on the lawn.

The Chicago Bears and NFL at 100 Maybe

✇ WWUUD?
6 September 2019 at 13:58
By: Patrick Murfin
The NFL's "100th Season" logo was everywhere this week.  But is it really? Last night amid all of the impressive hoopla that the National Football League (NFL) can muster the “One Hundredth Season” was launched with a Bears/Packer’s game at Soldier Field in Chicago.   It did not go well for the home team whose sky-high expectations fizzled with the touted offense.   Not that Green Bay did much better.   It was a defensive slug fest but Bears Quarterback Mitch Trubisky threw and end zone interception in the second Quarter.   The visitors maintained their humiliating dominance at the Lakefront stadium. The new statues of George Halas and Walter Payton were unveiled outside Soldier Field. The game was almost anticlimactic after a...

Seventy Years Ago in Peekskill—When White Folks Rioted

✇ WWUUD?
4 September 2019 at 11:56
By: Patrick Murfin
White rioters attack a car of people who attended a heavily guarded Paul Robeson concert in Peekskill, New York in 1949.
Note:  The riot in Peekskill, New York to protest the appearance of Paul Robeson was organized by the Ku Klux Klan in cahoots with the American Legion and local police.  Think it can’t happen again?  Maybe you haven’t been paying attention.
It should have been a pleasant Sunday in the country.  But on September 4, 1949 the residents of up-scale, White suburban Westchester County New York got together for a well-planned riot.  It was the second one in a week.  It was inflamed by headlines in a respectable local newspaper. It was largely organized by the local Posts of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars.  Members of the Ku Klux Klan from far and wide came to give the locals a hand and some technical advice—and signed up more than 700 new members.  It was overseen, protected, and participated in by local police, sheriff’s deputies, and State Police.  
When it was over most of the national media heartily approved.  Members of Congress cheered the rioters and blamed the victims using on the floor of the House the vilest racial epithets available.  The Governor of the state of New York, a famous former crusading District Attorney and twice the nominee of the Republican Party for President of the United States, not only refused to investigate but—you guessed it—blamed the victims.  All because a Black man wanted to sing and a bunch of people—many of them Jews from New York City—wanted to come and hear him.
The object of all of this well-orchestrated fury was Paul Robeson, one of the most celebrated—and reviled—Black men in the United States.  Then 51 years old, he had already led a remarkable and accomplished life.
Robeson was born on April 9, 1898 in Princeton, New Jersey to a former slave and Presbyterian minister, the Rev. William Drew Robeson and his mixed race Quaker wife, Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson.  That made him by birth one of a tiny eliteof American Negros.  When he was just 3 his father was forced out of his long-time pulpit by the Presbyterydespite the strong support of his Black congregation and the family was quickly plunged into poverty.  Shortly after, his nearly blind mother was killed in a kitchen fire.   The senior Robeson finally found a place at an African American Episcopal congregation some years later and the family’s lot improved.
Paul attended Somerville High School in Somerville, New Jersey where despite prejudice, everything he touched seemed to turn to gold.  Already towering over his classmates the powerfully built young man lettered in football, baseball, basketball, and track.  He added his powerful bass voice to the choir and discovered a love a performing while acting in student productions of Julius Caesar and Othello.  Academically he was at the head of his class.  And none of these accomplishments shielded him from racial taunting, which he dealt with by following his father’s advice—keep your head up, ignore insults, be unfailingly polite, and never lay your hands on a white man.
Paul Robeson as Rutgers All-American end.
In his senior year Robeson won a state-wide competition for a full, four year scholarship to Rutgers which he entered in 1915 as only the third Black ever to attend the university and the only one during his entire tenure.  As a freshman he was a walk-on for the football team, accepted by the coach over the objections of his other players.  By the end of a stellar college career he was twice a first team All-American at end and considered by Walter Camp to be the greatest player ever at that position.  Yet he was benched when Southern teams refused to play with a Black on the field.
Robeson also repeated triumphs on stage and academically.  He added champion debater to his resume, took home the annual oratorical prize in each of his four years, earned his Phi Beta Cap key, was elected to the elite Cap and Scull Society, and ultimately was elected class valedictorian.  He did all of this while working for meal money, singing off campus for cash, and in his last two years regularly commuting home to care for his dying father.
His college career caught the eye of W.E.B. Du Bois who profiled the student in The Crisis.  
After graduation, Robeson enrolled in New York University Law School supporting himself as a high school football coach and as a singer.  He felt the sting of racism at NYU, moved to Harlem and transferred to Colombia Law School.  Despite consistently high grades, it took Robeson four years to complete law school.  He interrupted his studies to play professional football at Akron and then with the Milwaukee Badgers in the inaugural 1922 season of the National Football League.  He also took time to appear on Broadway in the hit all-black revue Shuffle Along and in Taboo, an ante-bellum plantation drama produced at Harlem’s Sam Harris Theater in the spring of 1922.  Later he would travel to London for a production of the play supervised by the famous actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell who added more musical numbers for Robeson.
Despite these interruptions, distractions, and a rising reputation as a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Robeson graduated law school with honors in 1923.  By now married to Eslanda Cardozo Goode—Elsie—an anthropologist and activist, Robeson did not practice law for long.  He found his race was a barrier to the kind of career he had imagined.  Instead, with Elsie’s encouragement, he turned to a full time career as an actor and singer with his wife as his manager.
By the mid ’20 he had triumphed in a revival of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, which he also took to London, and more controversially had appeared in O’Neill’s stark and damning racial drama All God’s Chillun Got Wings in which he played a Black man who metaphorically consummated his marriage with his white wife by symbolically emasculating himself.  Needless to say that controversial topic created uproar across the country.  He also teamed with pianist Lawrence Brown to tourthe United States and Europe with a hugely successful program of Black spirituals and folk music.  RCA Victor signed him to a record contract.  
In Europe, particularly France, Robeson experienced a freedom from prejudice that he had never experienced at home.  He found himself welcome in intellectual and expatriate communities by the likes of Gertrude Stein and Claude McKay.

Liftin' that bale as Joe in Showboat in London.
In 1928 Robeson starred as Joe in the London production of Jerome Kern’s Showboat where his famous rendition of Ol’ Man River became the standardupon which all subsequent productions would be judged.  The show was much more successful in London than it had been in its first New York run and lasted for more than a year at the prestigious Covent Garden Theater.  He followed up with the experimental film Borderland opposite his wife.  
Back in London he appeared in an acclaimed Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft as Desdemona which led to an affair with Ashcroft that nearly cost him his marriage. 

As Othello with Peggy Ashcrcroft, future Dame.  An affair with the actress strained Robeson's marriage nearly to the breaking point.
After the affair ended and he reconciled with his wife, Robeson returned to Broadway for the great revival of Showboat in 1932.  In 1933 he became the first Black ever to star in a major Hollywood film, The Emperor Jones.  Over the next few years he made several films.  Other than Showboat, most of them were British productions. Sanders of the River, a tale of colonial Kenya in which he played a local chief who aids a sympathetic colonial officer made him a major star in Britain.  But Robeson was stung by criticism that the part was degrading to Africans.  That sparked a new interest in Africa and his cultural roots, including the study of several African languages and involvement in an emerging anti-colonial movement.
It was associates in the anti-colonial movement that first brought Robeson to Moscow.  He contrastedwhat he found there to the rising racism he observed in Nazi Berlin and to continued Jim Crow rule in the United States.  He said “Here I am not a Negro but a human being for the first time in my life ... I walk in full human dignity.”  Two years later he sent his son Paul, Jr.  to study in Moscow to spare him the sting of racism at home.
Inevitably Robeson and his wife became drawn to the Communist Party, which in the US was one of the few movements that seemed totally opento Black participation on an absolutely equal basis.  By the late ‘30’s he was spending more time as an activist and lending his talents to Party causes—particularly to support of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War—even journeying to Spain in the dark hours to perform before and support the International Brigades.  He also raised money for the cause at several benefits and supported organizing drives by several unions.  When his manager complained that his political work was harming his career, Robeson said, “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”

The 78 rpm album of Ballad for Americans with music by frequent collaborator Earl Robinson who would also compose I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night, one of Robeson's most famous songs.
With the outbreak of World War II, Robeson returned to the United States.  The war years were marked by personal and professional triumphs and by increasing controversy over his politics.  In 1939 he starred in the hugely popular Ballad for Americans a patriotic cantata with lyrics by John La Touche and music by Earl Robinson which was aired on CBS Radio.  A recording became a bestselling album.  
In 1940 Robeson starred in the Ealing Film The Proud Valley in which he played a Black American who finds himself in Wales where he lends his singing voice to the famous local men’s choirs and joins coal miners in the pits where he ultimately sacrifices himself.  The film was a fusion of Robeson’s political and artistic life and was well received in Britain and initially in the United States.  But it would later be views as pro-labor propaganda as would the 1942 documentary Native Land about union busting corporations.  That film was based on the actual reports of the 1938 La Follett Committee/s investigation of the repression of labor organizing.  Robeson was off-screen narrator and provided music for the film.
In 1943 Robeson became the first Black actor to portray Othello on Broadway, opposite Uta Hagen.  Throughout the war years he appeared at rallies and benefits for various anti-fascist causes.
With the end of the war anti-fascism suddenly became subversive, as did Robeson’s continued anti-colonialist activities and his new crusade against lynching.  As anti-Communist hysteria mounted, he publicly came to the defense of accused Communists although he denied he was a member of the Party.  None-the-less two organizations in which he was very active were placed on the new Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations.  Called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and questioned about his membership in the Party, Robeson now vowed, “Some of the most brilliant and distinguished Americans are about to go to jail for the failure to answer that question, and I am going to join them, if necessary.”

Campaigning for Henry Wallace, second from left, with Lena Horne in 1948.
In ’48 Robeson took a leading role in the campaign of former Vice President Henry Wallace for President on the Progressive ticket.  At great personal risk he campaigned for Black votes in the Deep South.  As tensions with the Soviet Union continued to rise, he echoed Wallace’s Peace Platformfor accommodation with the USSR.
But it was an appearance at a Communist sponsored World Peace Conference in Paris in 1949 that started the chain of events that led to the Peekskill rioting.  According to a transcription of the proceedings, Robeson told delegates:
We in America do not forget that it was the backs of white workers from Europe and on the backs of millions of Blacks that the wealth of America was built. And we are resolved to share it equally. We reject any hysterical raving that urges us to make war on anyone. Our will to fight for peace is strong...We shall support peace and friendship among all nations, with Soviet Russia and the People’s Republics.
Somehow—and the heavy suspicion was on the intervention of American intelligence operatives—the Associated Press (AP) substituted the following “quote:”
We colonial peoples have contributed to the building of the United States and are determined to share its wealth. We denounce the policy of the United States government which is similar to Hitler and Goebbels.... It is unthinkable that American Negros would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against the Soviet Union which in one generation has lifted our people to full human dignity.
The alleged quote was widely reported and unleashed a torrent of criticism and invective.  
When the Civil Rights Congress, one of the “front” organizations on the Attorney General’s List, announced that Robeson would headline a befit concert at Lakeland Acres, just north of Peekskill on August 27, the Peekskill Evening Star condemned the concert and encouraged people to “make their position on communism felt.”  Although no overt threat of violence was made, the town was soon abuzz with plans to not just demonstrate, but to block the concert and prevent it from occurring.  The Joint Veteran’s Council, spearheaded by the American Legion openly boasted that they would physically prevent any gathering.
Concert organizers, who had twice before staged events there featuring Robeson, were expecting demonstrators and heckling.  They did not expect what happened.  As the police stood off and refused calls for protection from rock throwing, bat wielding mobs which attacked concert goers as they attempted to reach the site by car.  Several people were injured.  A large flaming cross was observed on a nearby hillside and Robeson was lynched in effigy.  
Robeson arrived at the local commuter line station where his long-time friend and Peekskill resident Helen Rosen picked him up in her car.  Attacks against visitors had been going on for some time and she attempted to find a safe route to the concert site.  As they neared they were taunted by chants and jeers of “Niggers!”  “Kikes!”  “Dirty Commies.”  Robeson had to be forcibly restrained from leaving the car to confront the rioters.  Eventually Rosen turned around.  Neither Robeson nor the audience reached the concert site.
The Legion Post commander, while denying that there was any violence during their “peaceful march” did boast to the press, “Our objective was to prevent the Paul Robeson concert and I think our objective was reached.”
The incident sparked national headlines.  Much of the commentary supported the rioters.  Even many of Robeson’s former friends were now reluctant to come to the defense of a Communist.  Things were different in New York radical and left labor circles.  A Westchester Committee for Law and Order was hastily assembled representing local liberals and unionists.  They decided to invite Robeson back to Peekskill and to demand protection from the local authorities.  Separately a committee of workers from Communist led unions in the City including the Fur and Leather Workers, Longshoremen, and the United Electrical Workers vowed to supply security to insure that a concert could be held safely.  After a new date. September 4, was announced, Robson appeared before 4,000 people at a support rally in Harlem.  The stage was set for a renewed confrontation.

Robeson was surrounded by veterans and New York labor union body guards as he performed under siege on September 4.
The September 4 concert was relocated to the Hollow Brook Golf Course in Cortlandt Manor, near the site of the original concert.  20,000 people showed up and safely got to the grounds protected by hundreds ofunion marshals who lined the approach route and circled the concert grounds.  Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the Almanac Singers performed before Robeson took the stage to thunderous applause.  Meanwhile a police helicopter swooped low over the crowd sometimes making it difficult for the performers to be heard.  Police did find one snipers nest apparently set up to take shots at the stage.
Trouble erupted as concert goers attempted to get home.  A convoy of busses from the city was attacked near the intersection of Locust and Hillside Avenues.  Police then diverted the long line of vehicles including hundreds of cars, on a miles long detour lined with howling protesters who pelted the cars with rocks, broke windows and beat on the hoods and roofs with baseball bats and 2x4s.  Several cars were turned over.  Some were set on fire.  Many drivers and passengers were dragged from their cars and beaten.  
Among the cars attacked was one containing Pete Seeger, his wife Yoshie, their small children, Almanac member Lee Hays, and Woody Guthrie.  When the windows of the car were shattered Guthrie tried to use a shirt to cover one window and keep out the stones.  Unfortunately, Seeger later remembered, Woody used an old red shirt which just inflamed the mob.  The occupants escaped serious injury.  Pete kept several of the stones that landed inside the car and used them in building the fireplace chimney of his cabin in Fishkill.

World War I vet Eugene Bullard attacked by the mob led by two local policemen and a State Police officer.


One of those injured was Eugene Bullard, a World War I veteran and America’s first Black military pilot.  Both film footage and still photographs caught him being savagely beaten by the mob which was actively joined by two local policemen and State Police officer.  Despite being clearly identifiable none of the officers were charged, or even questioned about the assault.  Neither were many readily identifiable Legion members.
Finally union members and others including novelist Howard Fastsucceeded in forming an arms linked cordon around the cars placing themselves non-violently between the concert goers and rioters.  They sang We Shall Not Be Moved as rioters hurled curses and slurs.  Several were injured but stood their ground and the rest of the concert goers finally got out relatively safely.
At least 140 people were treated for injuries, and some of the injuries were serious.  Many others suffered lesser wounds.
In the aftermath of the riot Governor Thomas Dewey turned aside a delegation of 300 who came to Albany to demand and investigation into the riot.  Dewey refused to meet with them and blamed the riot on Robeson for insisting on singing where he wasn’t wanted.  
In the House of Representatives Congressman John E. Rankin of Mississippi castigated Robeson and attacked liberal Republican Reprehensive Jacob Javitz of New York for daring to defend the right of free speech, “It was not surprising to hear the gentlemen from New York defend the Communist enclave… [the American people are not in sympathy] with that Nigger Communist and that bunch of Reds who went up there.”  Congressman Vito Marcantonio of the American Labor Party protested the use of the word Nigger.  He was ruled out of order by Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas after Rankin reiterated, “I said Nigger, and I meant it!’
Despite protests by some civil libertarians, liberal and religious groups, the general public went along with the dominant press narrative that the violence, though “deplorable” was the responsibility of Robeson and his allies for insisting on performing.  No one was ever prosecuted for the numerous assaults and damage to property.  A civil suit filed on behalf of several of the injured languished in court for three years before being dismissed.
As for Robeson, his career was essentially over in the United States.  Over 40 planned concert dates were canceledbecause of fear of violence.  He was effectively blackballed from film work, radio, and infant television.  His recordings and films were withdrawn from circulation.  Even his college football records were erased.
In 1950 Robeson’s passport was revoked and all American portsand international airports were put on alert to prevent him from leaving the country.  He was not allowed to travel again internationally until 1958, effectively silencing him both at home and abroad and leaving him virtually without any source of income.
When his passport was finally returned, Robeson resumed touring internationally based out of London, although he could seldom find a booking in the United States.  Refused numerous entreaties to denounce Communism in exchange for a return to favor, or even a chance to work publicly with the growing American Civil Rights Movement which felt compelled to keep him at arm’s length.  He followed the Party line during de-Stalinization. He visited the Soviet Union again, even spending time with Nikita Khrushchev at his vacation dacha.  
Robeson was in Moscow in 1961 when he suffered a complete breakdown, slashing his wrists while in a locked bathroom.  He reported that he was being watched constantly which was not paranoia since he undoubtedly was under surveillance by both US agents and the Soviets.  But also reported suffered sudden delusionsand hallucinations.  The onset of the breakdown was so sudden and the symptoms so dramatic that some biographers believe that he may have been slipped hallucinogens by American intelligence services in an attempt to discredit and silence him.  

Eslanda Robeson stood by her husband through the long years of his ordeal under black list and unable to tour internationally because his passport was revoked.  Despite everything, he refused to abandon his support of Communism, Stalin, and the Soviet Union.
After years of treatments in the Soviet Union, London, and East Germany, Robeson returned to the United States a broken man.  Aside from a couple of appearances, he retreated into isolation living as a virtual hermit until dying of a stroke in his Philadelphia home in 1977.  His death revived interest in his career and slowly his old records and films became available again.  
He was always a hero to the Black community, but in death he rose to be a cult figure on the white left far beyond his shrinking Communist community.  A lot of those people in trying to rehabilitate his image down played his loyalty to the Party or portrayed him as a naïve dupe.
Robeson would have had none of it.  He remained to his dying day a defiant Communist, long after many of his former comrades like Pete Seeger had left the party out of disgust with Stalinism and the authoritarian repression of popular uprisingslike that in Hungary.  For him the Communists were always the ones who had accepted him without question or reservation and who as far as he could see were on the right side of the struggles he cared about—anti-colonialism, civil rights, labor, and peace.  He would not turn his back on them despite the enormous personal cost.


Oldest Nation and Republic--San Marino a Haven for the Persecuted

✇ WWUUD?
3 September 2019 at 12:46
By: Patrick Murfin
Perched on the top Monte Titano stand the three fortification towers of Guaita linked by walls and communication trenches, which offer spectacular panoramic views of San Marino.

The story goes like this.  Stone mason and sometimes preacher Marinus of Arba and his life-long pal Leo were forced by some political upheaval to leave their home of Rab, a Roman colony on the island of Arba in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of what is now Croatia.  The two young men settled in the northern Italian city of Rimini to find work reconstructing the city’s ruined walls.  But there they ran afoul of the infamous persecution of Christians ordered by the Emperor Diocletian and had to flee the city. 
At the same time some of Marinus’s sermons as an ordained Deacon were found somehow at odds with the not-yet codified tenets of the Church so he could find no refuge.  The pair fled to the rugged, remote, and unpopulated Apennine Mountains determined to live as monastic hermits equally free of the Emperor and the Pope.  By traditionon September 3, 301 CE Marius began laying the stones of a chapel and the establishment of a monastic community.

A much later German etching depicting Saint Marinus the Stone Cutter building his monastery.
 Marinus died many years later in 366 with the words Relinquo vos liberos ab utroque homine—I leave you free from both men—meaning the Emperor and the Pope.  By then his community had grown and prospered and the monastery high on the top of Monte Titano had become a haven for refugees persecuted by both.  It would remain so through the centuries. 
Eventually Marinus would be canonized as San Marino and the community that sprang up around his Hermitage would become known as the Most Serene Republic of San Marino.  The tiny nation, occupying less than 24square miles, has maintained its independence ever since and celebrates September 3 not only as Marinus’s Feast Day, but as foundation date of the Republic.
That makes San Marino easily the oldest surviving continuously sovereign state in the world, and because it never came under the rule of even a local nobleman or feudal governance by the Abby, also the oldest Republic.  This was made possible by its isolation, the terrain so rugged that it was said there was hardly a square inch of level ground, location away from traditional trade routes and invasion corridors, sometimes surprising friends in High Places, and just plain dumb luck.
In its earliest years San Marino was informally ruled by the hermit monks of Church of St. Agatha on the top of Monte Titan.  This hardly was governance of any meaningful kind.  In the early 400’s with Rome near collapse eight neighboring towns joined with San Marino seeking protection from invading Goths.  These communes became the along with the original settlement became San Marino’s nine municipalities. With the expanded territory and population the heads of families established themselves as ruling council known as the Arengo which governed from the 5th Century to 1243.  By then it had grown to representatives of more than 50 extended families and had become a cumbersome body and was riven by feuds and rival cabals. 
The Sammarinese,as citizens are known, fed up by oligarchic rule established their own Grand and General Council which PopeInnocent IV, the titular head of state,  in one of the first acts of his Papacy recognized as the country’s ruling body.  Every six months the Grand and General Council elected two Captains Regent to co-hold executive power.  They were not eligible for re-election, but could be returned to the position on later occasions.  Traditionally the pair of Regents were drawn from opposing factions on the Council and since the adoption of a two party system, from each of the political parties.  This form of governance was molded after the Senate and Consuls of the old Roman Republic.  This arrangement was codified the Leges Statutae Republicae Sancti Marini—Constitution of San Marino—recorded in a series of six books written in Latin in the late 1600.  In 1631the Papacy waived its light claims on San Marino and recognized its independence from the Papal States.

The Constitution of San Marino was codified and published in 1600.
 If maintaining essential independence for nearly 1400 years from the declining years of the Roman Empire, through the Dark Ages, and the Renaissance when intrigue and war spread across the Italian Peninsula as the Papacy, ambitious city states, and various leagues and alliances struggled for supremacy was hard, the challenges of the Napoleonic era, clash of Empires, and the rise of the European nation state was even more daunting.
In 1797 San Marino’s independence was threatened when Napoleon Bonaparte’s French Army was rampaging through Italy.  Somehow Antonio Onofri,  one of the two serving Captains Regent, managed to befriend the General and impress him with his tale of San Marino’s long independence as a republic.  Napoleon at this stage of his career was still an ideologically committed Republican himself.  Not only did he offer to guarantee and protect San Marino’s independence, but he offered to award the country territory from adjacent states.  The grateful Grand and General Council politely refused that off rightly fearing that accepting a land grab would alienate more powerful neighbors and lead to attacks when the French would inevitably eventually leave Italy.
An even greater challenge was the long struggle of Italian unification that began after the final fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and continued up to the final surrender of the Papal States and the location of a capital at Rome for the Kingdom of Italy.  San Marino began the period completely surrounded by the Papal States.  But in 1859 the rapidly expanding Kingdom of Sardinia extended its borders over Central Italy and San Marino lay astride the border between that Kingdom and the Papal States.  In accordance to its traditions, San Marino became of place of refuge for many fleeing the fighting, but especially for refugees from pro-unification areas.   In December 1860 the Papal province of Marche adjacent to San Marino was incorporated in the Kingdom of Sardinia.

San Marino was often blessed with freinds in high places like the great Italian unifier Giuseppe Garibaldi.
 That made San Marino an island in an area aflame for unification.  In gratitudeand in recognition of the tiny nation’s long resistance to Papal rule, unification leader Giuseppe Garibaldi prevailed upon the soon-to-be King of Italy, Victor Emanuel II who had led the Sarndinian-Piedmontese forces which had captured Marche, to respect the traditional independence of San Marino.
San Marino was not immune from its own domestic crisis.  By the turn of the 20th Century the citizenry had become restive under the Grand and General Council which had become increasingly oligarchic.  In a bold and unusual move in 1906 the Sammarinese Socialist Partyagitated for and achieved a call to meeting of the ancient Arengo, where the heads of families, under some public duress, voted to authorize universal manhood suffrage for the first time in elections to the General Council.  The Socialists took advantage of the change to assume leadership of a majority coalition in the Council.  The oligarchs formed a counter-party and bided their time for a chance to resume power.
The eruption of World War I interrupted the internal political struggles and put independence once again at risk.  Italy initially entered the war on the side of Austria-Hungary, honoring old treaty obligations.  Then in May of 1915, Italy changed sides, declaring war on its former ally in hopes gaining territory along the frontier between the countries. San Marino, however, declared its neutrality, which was taken as hostile by Italy which feared that the small state could become a nest of Austrian spies and agents and that the country’s powerful new radio transmitter atop Monte Titano could be used by the enemy.
Italy tried to force the occupation of San Marino by units of the Carabinieri paramilitary police which the Republic refused and resisted.  In retaliation Italy cut San Marino’s telephone lines and established a partial blockade.  The Italians did not, however, invade the country.
Still within San Marino there was some popular support for the Italians.  Small numbers of Sammarinese formed a volunteer unit to fight with the Italians.  Another volunteer group set up a Red Cross field hospital.  This was regarded as hostile by the Austrians who broke diplomatic relations and threatened the country should the front move its way.
The Italians fared poorly in a brutal campaign that turned into retreat and then stalemate.  The Sammarinese once again offered shelter to refugees.
In the aftermath of World War I the old oligarchic faction reorganized under Giuliano Gozi, one of the volunteers with the Italian army and then serving as both Foreign Minister—effectively the leader of the Cabinet—and Interior Minister which put him in control of the Army and police forces.  Gozi founded the Sammarinese Fascist Party, modeled on the Italian Party, in 1922 and used street thugs to intimidate the Socialists and syndicalists—unionists.  In 1923 Gozi was elected the first Fascist Captain Regent.  After 1926 all other parties were banned and until the end of World War II both Captains Regents were Fascist in contradiction to the ancient Constitution. Although San Marino had become a single party state, Fascist power was not absolute, however, and independents continued to hold a majority in the Grand and General Council until 1932.  After that a split in Fascist ranks weakened the Party.
Despite cordial relations with Mussolini and the Italian Fascists, San Marino once again declared its traditional neutrality with the outbreak of a general European War in 1939.  It had already not followed the Italian Party’s lead in adopting Anti-Jewish legislation in 1938.  It had a small, but long standing Jewish population, and after persecution began in Italy some Jews found refuge in San Marino.  During the war anti-fascist Italian Partisans also occasionally found secret refuge there, although the local Fascists expelled those who were discovered.
In 1940 the New York Times erroneously reported that San Marino had declared war on Britain.  The Sammarinese government scrambled to wire London denying entering the war.  With the fall of Mussolini in Italy in July of 1943 and the subsequent official separate peace with the Allies, the Sammarinese Fascist Party lost power, although they were briefly restored in 1944.  The Fascists reiterated neutrality in April of 1944 but the British bombed the country on June 26 believing it was a repository for military supplies for the Germans.  The government denied allowing munitions of any nation to be stored on its territory.
  
Indian troops passing the grave of a German soldier.  After they cleared out the Nazis in the Battle o San Marino in 1944 the British withdrew their troops from the tiny nation.
 In early September the Germans forcibly occupied the country, the first and only time the country was overrun by a hostile power.  The Germans were already in general retreat in Italy.  On September 17 the 4th Indian Infantry Divisionattacked the Nazis and ousted them in the brief Battle of San Marino.  After driving the Germans out the Indians quickly withdrew and left the country in the control of its own armed forces.
The German occupation effectively finished the Fascists as a political force in San Marino.  Multi-party parliamentary government was restored and in 1945 a coalition led by the Communistsachieved a majority and ruled until 1957.  It was the first time anywhere in the world that Communists formed an elected government. 
The Grand and General Council was for years split between multiple parties, some of them quite small, a mirror of the situation in Italy.  In 2008 a new election law put restrictions on small parties forcing most of them out of existence or to join coalitions.  There were two main opposing coalitions, the Pact for San Marino, led by the Christian Democratic Party, andthe United Left, led by the Party of Socialists and Democrats, a merger of the Socialist Party and the former communist Party of Democrats.  Today the center-right party coalition is the Republica Futura which was formed by fusion of the Popular Alliance(AP) and the Union for the Republic(UPR).  The other side has reformed as the Democratic Socialist Left. The frequent turn-over of Captains Regents has resulted in San Marino having more recognized female heads of state than any other nation in the world—15,  including three who served twice.

In April 2017 two women, Mimma Zavoli and Vanessa D'Ambrosio were elected Captains Regent of San Marino.  At age 29 D'Ambrosio was the youngest head of state in the world.  



Today San Marino is the smallest member of the Council of Europe but it is not a member of the European Economic Union or the European Parliament.  None the less, it is by agreement allowed to use the Euro as currency and as is customary has its own national images printed on the obverse side of notes, most of which are snapped up by collectors. 
With an economy relying heavily on finance, technical services, and tourism, the approximately 35,000 residents enjoy the highest per capita income in Europe and are the only country on the continent with more automobiles than people.  Its citizens are also among the most highly educatedin Europe.  Unlike many small nations with substantial finance industries, San Marino does not rely on being a tax shelter.  There is a corporate profits tax rate of 19 percent. Capital gains are subject to a five percent tax, and interest is subject to a 13 percent withholding tax.  Foreigners use San Marino banks for their renowned stability and the high level of technical and personal services.

The Guard of the Rock on parade, one of the major units of the San Marino regular Army.
 By agreement Italy is responsible for the general defense of San Marino, but the country maintains a fairly sizable military establishment for its size.  This includes colorful units with largely ceremonial duties including the Crossbow Corps, Guard of the Rock (also a combat unit and border patrol), and Guard of the Council Great and General (which protects the government).  In addition every family with more than adult two males is required to provide a member of the Company of Uniformed Militia.  Participation is so popular that it is over subscribed.
 

September 1, 1939—Lessons of a Grim Anniversary Fading

✇ WWUUD?
2 September 2019 at 13:41
By: Patrick Murfin
Hitler reviewing his Nazi troops on the way to Poland.
Note:  Ordinarily on Labor Day I would make an appropriate post.  But this year the holiday falls the day after the 80th anniversary of the official beginning of World War II and given certain woeful contemporary events it seems urgent to revisit that.  If you are looking for a Labor Day message from me you can drop by the annual celebration on Woodstock Square today from 11 am to 1 pm.
A funny thing happened Donald Trump’s way to Poland to officially commemorate the beginning of the Second World War.  He got cold feet or second thoughts and suddenly rushed home from Europe leaving Vice President Mike Pence to take his place.  He said he had to return because perhaps the strongest hurricane in historywas on its way to Florida.  But when he got home he spent the day on one of his own golf courses.  Of course he did.  And yesterday he kept busy making clueless—he wasn’t sure if he ever heard of a category 5 storm—or entirely erroneous Tweets—no, Alabama is not even close to the path of the storm.  His pudgy thumbs were also busy trying to minimize the death toll in the latest Texas mass murder spree and picking a fight with Deborah Messing—Grace of Will and Grace.  Because that is what Presidents do.
But what was behind the Cheeto-in-Charge’s sudden change of plans?  He is a big fan of Poland’s current right-wing authoritarian government with its more or less open anti-Semitism.  But perhaps he thought better of offending an important part of his base attending an event where the Nazis are inescapably bad guys.  Maybe all of those “My dad was an antifa group in the 1940s but back then they called the U.S. Army” memes on Facebook made him nervous.  Or maybe his pal in the Kremlin who is perfectly delighted to use right wing Poland to destabilize Europe and NATO but doesn’t want the world to remember that the old Soviet Union also invaded the country.

Polish President Andrzej Duda, German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and Vice President Mike Pence attend a ceremony marking the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II in Warsaw on Sunday on September  1.  Donald Trump MIA.
Whatever the case with neo-Nazism and White Supremacy emboldened and on the rise in this country, we need to remember what happened in 1939 which was a lot scarier than the flying monkeys in the Wizard of Oz which came to the big screen that same year.
The exact beginning of the greatest cataclysm in the history—so far—is harder to pin point than you might imagine.  In the early 1930’s Japan and Italy were honing their war skills and adding to their empires with attacks on, respectively, Manchuria and Abyssinia (Ethiopia.)  The Germans and Italians on one side and to a lesser extent the Russians on the other used the Spanish Civil War as a kind of laboratory for modern war.  In 1937 Japan opened up war with China, Throughout the late 1930’s Adolph Hitler continued to blatantly re-arm in pretty much open violation of the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I and used that gathering might to cower Britain and France into acquiescing to aggressive land grabs in the Sudetenland and Czechoslovakia.  All of this was part of the slide into the eventual universal conflagration known as World War II.
Americansare apt to believe the whole thing started on December 7, 1941 when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor.  But of course war had raged in Europe and Asia for years.
Open up any text book and you will find an exact datefor the beginning of the war—September 1, 1939.  It came just one week after the signing of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, the German and Russian non-aggression pact that also secretly called for the division of Poland.
The Poles mobilized as tensions mounted on the border.  The cavalry, the pride of the Polish army, would charge German tanks with their lances when the war started with terrible but predictable results.
On the night of August 31 a small group of German operatives, dressed in Polish uniforms seized the Gleiwitz radio station in Silesia and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish.
To “prove” that attack was the work of the Poles, Franciszek Honiok, a German Silesian known for sympathizing with the Poles and who had been arrested the previous day by the Gestapo was dressed in a Polish uniform and then killed by lethal injection.  His bodywas riddled with gunshot wounds, and left at the scene. The corpse was subsequently presented as proof of the attack to the public and press.
The reason for this elaborate but transparent ruse was to provide justification for a German declaration of war against Poland as an act of self-defense and not a violation of international law.  The hope was that the French and British, pledged to the defense of Poland, might be cowed once again and refrain from action.  As early as August 22 with preparation for the invasion of Poland in full swing Hitler told his generals, “I shall give a propaganda reason for starting the war; whether it is plausible or not. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth.”
On September 1 in a speech to the Reichstag, Hitler cited the Gleiwitz incident and twenty other equally spurious episodes of Polish “aggression” against Germany and ethnic Germans in its territory.  By then the tanks were already rolling.  The long planned invasion had started across the border shortly after 4 am.

It seemed like a lark—laughing German soldiers take down a Polish border road barricade to begin their invasion....
The Poles, who were partially mobilized as tensions grew, put up as good a defense as possible.  They hoped to hold out long enough for promised British and French intervention.  Despite inferior equipment and numbers, they slowed the highly mechanized German advance in many places.  But they were relatively helpless against German air superiority.  Their whole defense plan collapsed on September 17 when the Russians attacked from the rear.  

...and it quickly turns into this.  Ten year old Kazimiera Mika mourns over the body of her sister, sometimes identified as the first casualty of World War II.  She was caught on her way to school by a strafing Luftwaffe airplane.  In reality there were both Poles and Germans killed in border skirmishing even before September 1, 1939.
The Poles managed to get sizable numbers of their troops over the borderto neutral Romania, including many officers of the Polish Air Force, before the country was completely overrun on October 6.  Some of these troops and airmen eventually made it to Britain from which they participated as Free Polish forces in the D-Day invasion and French campaign.
On September 3 at 11:15 am British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced on BBC Radio that the deadline of the final British ultimatum for the withdrawal of German troops from Poland expired at 11:00am and that “consequently this nation is at war with Germany”. Australia, India, and New Zealand also declared war on Germany within hours.  The French followed a few hours later.
The British and French began mobilization, but were not ready to materially aid Poland.  And they never extended their declaration of war to the second aggressive party, the Soviet Union.  There followed months of the so called Phony War as the Allies built up forces and ditheredin France.  That ended when Hitler shifted his forces from the East and launched his invasion of France on May 10, 1940.  Chamberlain’s government felland Winston Churchill became British Prime minister.  
There would be no more Phony War.

W.H. Auden around 1939.
British poet W. H. Auden inebriated in a smoky bar in New York City that day wrote:

September 1, 1939



I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.




—W. H. Auden


Wislawa Szymborska with her 1996 Nobel Prize.
When the whole bloody mess was finally over Wisława Szymborska, a Nobel Prize winner for Literature mused:
The End and the Beginning

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.
 
Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.
 
Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.
 
Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall,
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.
 
Photogenic it's not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.
 
We'll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.
 
Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.
 
From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.
 
Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
 
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

—Wisława Szymborska

Fannie Sellins—The Union Maid as Labor Martyr

✇ WWUUD?
1 September 2019 at 13:17
By: Patrick Murfin
A baseball style trading card commemorating Fannie Sellins
There once was a union maid, she never was afraid
Of goons and ginks and company finks and the deputy sheriffs who made the raid.
She went to the union hall when a meeting it was called,
And when the Legion boys come ‘round
She always stood her ground.

Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,
I’m sticking to the union, I’m sticking to the union.
Oh, you can’t scare me, I’m sticking to the union,
I’m sticking to the union ‘til the day I die

—Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie penned the catchy and classic labor song Union Maid for the Almanac Singers twenty-one years after Fannie Sellins was murdered on a Pennsylvania picket line on August 26, 1919 but it may as well have been written with her in mind.
Sellins is far less well known than some of her female labor contemporaries—the Rebel Girl of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and the United Mine Workers of America’s Mother Jones spring easily to mine.  In fact Sellins was hired by the UMWA to work in the Pennsylvania coal fields as a kind of stand-in or replacement for Mother Jones who was then well into her eighties semi-retired.  But neither of those staunch union women paid the ultimate blood sacrifice.  In that way she deserves a place among the great labor dead—the Haymarket Martyrs, Joe Hill, and Frank Little for instance.
She was born in 1872 as Frances Mooney in Ohio in 1867 or in 1872 in New Orleans—accounts vary.  In likelihood her family moved from Ohio to Louisiana when she was a young child.  Next to nothing is known about her life before she showed up in St. Louis, Missouri as a young woman where she married Charles Sellins, a garment worker.  The couple had four children before her husband died plunging the family into poverty.
Opportunities for a widow were slender—taking in laundry, domestic service, drudge work or prostitution.   Fannie followed her husband into the needle trades where she found herself on piece work in sweat shops for a fraction of the money Charles had made.  She helped organize the shops and rose to public prominence when she became the chief negotiator for 400 mostly women workers locked out by their employers.

United Garment Workers women on strike.
By 1910 she moved to Chicago probably because she found herself black listed in St. Louis.   She was a key organizer of Local 67 of the United Garment Workers of America during the strike sparked by a spontaneous walk out at Hart, Shaftner & Marx that eventually spread to 40,000 workers across the city.  The strike was long and bitter.  Sellins’ work came to the attention of organizer Sydney Hillman.  She shared his disgust and disappointment that the UGWA, a traditional American Federation of Labor, catered to the mostly male skilled workers with little regard and no interest in unskilled women who made up most of the workforce.
Her work attracted the attention of the Van Bittner, President of District 5of the UMWA who hired her explicitly to take up the king of agitating and organizing pioneered by Mother Jones.  In 1913 she began her work in West Virginia.   Her work, she wrote, was to distribute “clothing and food to starving women and babies, to assist poverty stricken mothers and bring children into the world, and to minister to the sick and close the eyes of the dying.”  That was crucial to keeping desperate wives from urging that their striking husbands return for work.  More than just ministering to the women, like Mother Jones, she organized them into strong and militant strike supporters.
The coal bosses and local authorities took note of her effectiveness and targeted her.  Sellins earned national notice for defying a court injunction against speaking in support of striking miners in Colliers, West Virginia where Sellins, addressed 6,000 miners in February 1914, saying that “a jail sentence holds no terror for me.”
Federal judge Alston G, Dayton wanted "no more Mother Joneses."
Federal District Court Judge Alston G. Daytontested that bold defiance by sentencing Sellins to jail for inciting to riot.  The UMWA organized a national campaign to petition President Woodrow Wilson to pardon her or commute her sentence.  The White House was flooded with postcard depicting Sellins in her jail cell.  Ultimately Wilson freed her after she served six months in prison.

Fannie Sellins in her jail cell.  UMWA postcards with this image flooded Woodrow Wilson's office demanding her release.
Judge Dayton’s outrageous and biased conduct of Sellins’ trial caused the House Judicial Committee to consider bringing impeachment proceedings against him.  In testimony to an investigative sub-committee Sellins recalled some of the judge’s comments in open court: 
I know that one remark he said was there would be no more Mother Joneses springing up in West Virginia, no more women of her character; and he said no self-respecting American woman would be affiliated with such an association.
Ultimately a split Judicial Committee chastised Dayton but failed to recommend impeachment:
The evidence shows many matters of individual bad taste on the part of Judge Dayton—some not of that high standard of judicial ethics which should crown the federal judiciary—but a careful consideration of all the evidence and the attending circumstances convinces us that there is little possibility of maintaining to a conclusion of guilt the charges made, and impels us, therefore, to recommend that there be no further proceedings herein.
The case made Sellins a labor heroine and national celebrity.  It also made her a marked woman.
Philip Murray hired Sellins to join the union staff in Pittsburgh in 1917.  That year she gained notoriety.  She was with a group of strikers who stopped a train carrying Black miners and their families who had been hired from the South as scabs.  Most of the Black workers were unaware that they were being used to break a strike.  Sellins boarded the train explained the struggle of union workers to improve their work and living conditions and offered friendship and train fare home for those who would quit. Most accepted. This effective action once again put Sellins in the crosshairs of angry coal barons.

In 1919, she was assigned to the Allegheny River Valley district to direct picketing by striking miners at Allegheny Coal and Coke Company.  The Western Pennsylvania coal field operatorshad a history of fiercely and violently opposing all union organizing attempts.  The matter was complicated because Welsh, Irish, Cornish, and American born skilled miners had refused in the past to be associated with the largely Slavic workers in the pits.  The UMWA was organized as an industrial rather than a craft union to overcome just such divisions.  But it wasn’t easy.  Sellins proved to be an effective bridge to both communities and was skilled at building solidarity.

The bitter strike against Allegheny Coal and Coke, a major supplier to the blast furnacesof Pittsburgh, was both a prelude and a preview of the great 1919 Steel Strike which broke out in September.  It was a drive of the old Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Workers (AA) to organize the steel industry nationally which had the strong support of the UMWA.  The AA, an AFL craft union of skilled workers, had been on the decline since the Homestead Strike in 1892.  Despite the opposition of many in the AFL, Philip Murray was eager to encourage the union to adopt the industrial union approach of the Mine Workers to overcome that fatal weakness.  Former IWW organizer William Z. Foster, who led the Steel Strike, shared that view.  

William Z, Foster led the 1919 Steel Strike and wrote extensively about Fannie Sellins.
Murray would go on to lead the United Steel Workers of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) which finally organized the steel industry in the Depression and World War II era.  Foster would go on to a long labor career and leadership of the Communist Party.  In his influential book The Great Steel Strike and Its Lessons published in 1920 Foster would place Allegheny Coal and Coke strike in the context of the steel organizing drive and write at length about Sellins who’s martyr’s death became a rallying cry in the effort.  He described Sellins as:

an able speaker…possessed of boundless courage, energy, enthusiasm and idealism…She was the very heart of the local labor movement…[and] earned the undying hatred of the…employers in the benighted Black Valley district.
The exact details of Sellins’ death are muddy.  Contemporary press and union accounts are at odds over details and eye witness recollections collected and published decades later are fuzzy.  What is known for sure is that there was a violent picket line confrontationbetween strikers and company guardswho had been sworn in as sheriff’s deputies on August 26 that left a striker and Sellins dead.  The autopsy performed on Sellins and a grizzly photograph of her crushed skull was undeniable testimonies to the savagery of the attack she suffered.

Foster wrote that.

A dozen drunken deputy sheriffs on strike duty, led by a mine official, suddenly rushed the pickets, shooting as they came. Joseph Starzeleskifell, mortally wounded. Mrs. Sellins, standing close by, rushed to get some children out of danger. Then she came back to plead with the deputies, who were still clubbing the prostrate Starzeleski, not to kill him.
Some accounts place Sellins on the picket line herself—the company claimed she was actively inciting a riot.  But most sources place her in the fenced yard of a steel worker family home near the mine gate with a number of children and their mothers when the charge came.  After Starzeleski fell wounded, he was beaten as he lay.  Sellins tried to intervene when she was clubbed in the head by a mine official.  

An account in the September 20, 1919, New Majority described the scene:

The mine official snatched a club and felled the woman to the ground. This was not on company ground, but just outside the fence of a friend of Mrs. Sellins. She rose and tried to drag herself toward the gate [The official] shouted: “Kill that—!Three shots were fired, each taking effect. She fell to the ground, and [the official] cried: “Give her  another!”
Multiple accounts agree that Sellins was motionless and lying face down.  She was rolled over and a deputy shot her in the face.  Another smashed her skull with a shovel.  

The photo of Sellins' crushed skull was widely circulated during the 1919 Steel Strike.
The bodies of Starzeleski and Sellins were thrown into a touring car and whisked away.
The autopsy told a slightly different story.  Sellins was probably knocked unconscious by the first blow and when she was turned over suffered two gunshot wounds to the face.  Any other shots fired apparently missed her.  The crushed skull was undeniable.
Despite the physical evidence a Coroner’s Inquest found that the deputies were justified because:
 Mrs. Sellins, accompanied by women and children, went outside the home of a family she was visiting to stop a fight between steelworkers and some of the deputies.
In the wake of the murder both the UMWA and the Steel Workers Strike Committee widely circulated the gruesome picture of Sellins' smashed head.  The case became a cause célèbre and many newspaperswere shocked and sympathetic.
Under public pressure 10 deputies were originally charged.  Historians doubt that the men included the manager who initially clubbed Sellins, the deputy who shot her, or the one who smashed her skull.  Only two men were brought to trial.  No one was ever convicted.  No surprise there.
In the end both the Allegheny Coal and Coke and the 1919 Steel Strike were crushed.
But Sellins remained a rallying figure in Pennsylvania even if her fame waned elsewhere.

The United Mine Worker's memorial to Sellins at the Union Cemetery at Arnold, Pennsylvania. 
In 1920, UMWA District 5 members erected a memorial at Sellins grave in Union Cemetery at Arnold, Pennsylvania.  The inscriptionreads:
In Memory of Fannie Sellins and Joe Starzeleski, killed by the enemies of organized labor, near the Allegheny Steel and Coal Company, at West Natrona, Pa.
In 1989, 70 years after her death, Sellins’ grave was designated a Pennsylvania State Historic Landmark and a marker was erected.
Like the Haymarket Memorial at Forest Home Cemetery near Chicago and Mother Jones’s grave at the Union Miner’s Cemetery at Mount Olive, Illinois, the monument has become a labor pilgrimage site.  Commemoration ceremonies are held there annually on Labor Day.

Fannie Sellins Never Flinched by Mary Cronk Farrell.
Sellins’ story has been told most completely by Mary Cronk Farrell in her book Fannie Never Flinched: One Woman’s Courage in the Struggle for American Labor Union Rights published in 2016 by Abrams Books.

Labor rebel and balladeer Anne Feeney grew up in Pennsylvania inspired by the story of Fannie Sellins.
Contemporary labor bard Anne Feeney recorded her tribute to Sellins on her 2003 album Union Maid.
Fannie Sellins
In labor’s glorious history was many a union maid
Who stood up to the bosses, so staunch and unafraid.
Molly Jackson, Mother Jones fought for a brighter way.
But let’s sing of Fannie Sellins, and remember her today.

All over Pennsylvania Fannie spread the Union word.
In the coalfields and the company towns her voice of hope was heard:
“United we will bargain, but divided we will beg”
Fannie Sellins spread the dreams of the UMWA.

A widow with four children, toiling eighty hours a week
Found time to fight injustice and bring power to the meek.
She lived with tireless energy, no duty would she shirk.
Though murderers cut short her life, we carry on her work.

In the company slums of Ducktown in the summer of nineteen,
An unarmed striking miner was gunned down by deputies.
When Fannie cried out, “Spare his life!” They shot her down as well.
And hundreds watched in horror as this fearless woman fell.

Now the ones who gave the orders faced no charge of any sort.
And the men who pulled the triggers were acquitted by the court.
But when companies own the courthouse, justice fails for you and me.
So let’s work like Fannie Sellins now for true equality.

A widow with four children, toiling eighty hours a week
Found time to fight injustice and bring power to the meek.
She lived with tireless energy, no duty would she shirk.
And though murderers cut short her life, we carry on her work.

Though murderers cut short her life, we carry on her work.
—Anne Feeney

Labor Day Celebration Returns to Woodstock Square on Monday

✇ WWUUD?
30 August 2019 at 12:29
By: Patrick Murfin

The fifth annual Labor Day Celebrationon historic Woodstock Square will be held Monday, September 2 from 11 am to 1 pm.  The program is sponsored by the McHenry County Progressives.
Missy Funk, event organizer, invites the public to “grab a lawn chair and bring friends and family to hear speakers on workers’ rights and participate in an open mic discussion.”
Speakers will include Patty Boyd who works in the McHenry County Clerk’s officewhere the Metropolitan Alliance of Police is in negotiations for a contract.  Michael Williamson is President of Local Education Association of D300 (LEAD 300) and an Illinois Education Association (IEA) Regional Chair.  Patrick Murfin is a long-time McHenry County social justice activist, labor historian, and a former General Secretary-Treasurerof the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW.)
For more information see the Facebook Event.

The 2019 Labor Day Celebration on Woodstock Square.


Bigger than Dr. King—The March for Jobs and Freedom Moved a Nation

✇ WWUUD?
28 August 2019 at 12:13
By: Patrick Murfin
Dr. Martin Luther King's ringing I Have a Dream speech was the highlight and climax of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington and helped change America, but the March itself was bigger than any one man.

Like a lot of people back in ’63 I was glued to the television for the beginning-to-end coverage provided by CBS News of the March for Jobs and Justice on August 28.  I was a 14 year old in Cheyenne, Wyoming at the time.  I was both thrilled and awestruck.  Listening to Dr. King’s I Have a Dream Speechliterally changed my life.

The March was the brain child of labor and Civil Rights leader A. Phillip Randolph.
The march originally was the brainchildof an elder of both the labor and Civil Rights movements.  A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and of the Negro American Labor Council as well as a Vice President of the AFL-CIO modeled his call for a march on Washington on a similar event he had planned back in 1941 to force President Franklin D. Roosevelt to open up employment in the burgeoning defense industry to Blacks.  Just the threat of thousands of Negros descending on the Capital had been enough to cause the President to establish the Committee on Fair Employment Practice and bardiscriminatory hiring in the defense industry.  Randolph wanted to bring similar pressure on President John F. Kennedy and Congress to move on stalled Civil Rights legislation, but also to bring up new issues of jobs that had been overshadowedby the tumultuous battle for civil rights in the South. 

Randolph brought together the leaders of all of the largest national Civil Rights organizations including James Farmer, President of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); John Lewis, President of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Roy Wilkins, President of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Whitney Young, President of the National Urban League; and Dr. King, President of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to form a coalition to sponsor the march.  It was no small feat because of turf wars, ideological differences, and egos.

Civil Rights Leaders and major speakers at the March for Jobs and Justice, standing left to right are Director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice Matthew Ahmann, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader John Lewis, Protestant minister Eugene Carson Blake, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) leader Floyd McKissick, and UAW President Walter Reuther; sitting are National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young, chairman of the Demonstration Committee Cleveland Robinson, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters President A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader Roy Wilkins.
In addition Randolph sought support from the Labor movement, most significantly from Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers (UAW).  The White dominated craft unions of the AFL, however, were notable for their absence. 

Bayard Rustinof the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the organizer of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, an early forerunner of the Freedom Rides that was meant to test a Supreme Court ruling that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel, was tapped to coordinate volunteers and logistics, recruit marchers from across the country, and attend to all of the other details of the march while Randolph pulled together political, labor and religious support for the march.  
Veteran pacifist and Civil Rights leader Beyard Rustin of the Fellowship of Reconciliation was the Deputy Director of the March and in charge of most of the planning and logistics.  As an openly Gay man his public profile was kept low.  Retail workers labor leader Cleveland Robinson was named Chairman of the Administrative Committee.
Other than being a star speaker that day King was not heavily involved in the planning or management of the event. He even left the details of mobilizing SCLC supporters to his aides.

As word spread, it became apparent that the march was going to turn into the largest event of its kind in history.  The media began to pay attention.  On the day of the march, buses poured into the city from sleepy Mississippi towns and from gritty industrial hubs like Detroit and Chicago.  Trains from Boston, New York, and Philadelphia were jammed.  Thousands of local Washington residents swelled the throng. 

Organizers put the crowd at more than 300,000.  The National Park Service, in charge because the speakers’ platform was erected at the Lincoln Memorial, said 200,000.  Whatever was the case, crowds filled the Mall far passed the Washington Monument.  About 80% of the marchers were Black. Marchers included many celebritiesincluding actors like Sidney Poitier, Harry Bellefonte, and Charlton Heston—yes that Charlton Heston.  

Charlton Heston, Harry Bellefonte, novelist James Baldwin, and Marlon Brando added star power to the March.
It was a Wednesday afternoon but the three major broadcast networks broke away from their usual programming of afternoon soap operas to cover the swelling crowd and speeches live. 

Marian Anderson, who had sung on the same steps at the invitation of Eleanor Roosevelt after she was denied use of the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall in 1939, opened the program with the National Anthem.  Several other performers took to the stage over the course of the program, perhaps most notably Peter, Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and Mahalia Jackson.  

Peter Paul & Mary were among the notable entertainers who performed.  They led the crowd in Pete Seger's anthem If I Had a Hammer.
The Catholic Archbishop of Washington, Patrick O’Boyle led the invocation.  Other religious leaders on the program included Dr. Eugene Blake on behalf of the Protestant National Council of Churches and two leading Rabbis. 

After Randolph’s opening remarks each of the major civil rights leaders took the stage in turn. Floyd McKissick had to read the remarks of CORE’s James Farmer, who was in a Louisiana jail. The youngest leader, John Lewis of the militant SNCC, excoriatedthe Kennedy Administration for not acting to protect Civil Rights workers who were under regular and violent attackacross the South.  Randolph and others who were trying to flatter and coax the President into action forced Lewis to strike the most inflammatory portions of his speech, but what was left was still plenty critical.  

Despite their notable contributions to the Civil Rights Movement key figures like Rosa Parks, and Dianne Nash were excluded from the speaker's list.  In the end the only woman to address the crowd was singer and dancer Josephine Baker who had spent most of the previous 30 years as an expatriate in Paris.  She wore her World War II uniform as a decorated member of the French Resistance.
Slain NAACP organizer Medgar Evers’swife Myrlie was on the announced program to lead a Tribute to Negro Women, but did not appear.  In fact several prominent female figures in the Movement were either not invited or had their requests to be added to the program rejected by Randolph.  In the end the only woman to speak was jazz singer and dancer Josephine Baker who wore her World War II Free French uniform emblazoned with her medal of the Légion d’honneur. 

It all led up the last major address—the highly anticipated speech of Dr. King.  If civil rights veterans knew what to expect from the notoriously eloquent leader, millions of Americans viewing at home were in for an eye opening experience.  The speech, built to the thundering crescendo:

Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring—when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

The hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks who showed up for the March for Jobs and Justice were just as important as any of the movement heavies and celebrities.
The nation, or much of, it was awestruck and impressed.  That speech, along with the continued televised violence against Blacks struggling for equal access to public accommodations and the vote, helped set the stage for the major Civil Rights legislation enacted in the next three years. 

The Fire Next Time is Now—Murfin Verse

✇ WWUUD?
27 August 2019 at 22:53
By: Patrick Murfin

The Fire Next Time is Now
August 27, 2019

For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water. But the heavens and the earth which are now preserved by the same word, are reserved for fire until the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men.

           —2 Peter 3: 5-7  The Bible New King James Version

Okay, so Biblical Prophecy is not my thing.
Mumbo-jumbo, mystic-tristick bullshit.
It gives me a rash and a headache.

But this creeps me out, you know?
            Cripes look at the headlines!
                        Record Heat Wave Feeds Massive Australian Bush Fires
                        Wildfires Permanently Alter Alaska’s Forest Composition
                        Huge Wildfires in the Arctic and Far North Send a Planetary Warning
                        Siberia is Burning!
                        Lungs of the World Ablaze in the Amazon
                        More Fires Now Burning in Angola, Congo Than Amazon.

Maybe Peter, or whoever wrote in his name,
            was onto something after all.
            I don’t know exactly who is un-godly
—me probably, you maybe,
those guys over there,
but maybe the day of judgement and perdition
is on us all after all.

We failed somehow despite the warnings
            of a thousand prophets, Jeremiahs, and Cassandras
            who warned us over and over
            to do something before it’s too late.

Is it too late really?  We beg for answers from the Holy seers.
            Hear our plea
                        Al Gore
                        Neil deGrasse Tyson
                        Gagged scientists of NOAA and NASA
Greta Thunberg  and your children’s crusade.
                        Elders of the Alaskan Nunakauyarmiut Tribe

Can we wake up, you know, like Scrooge on Christmas morning
            fresh and new, our eyes wide open
            and throw open the shutters to buy the world
            a turkey and a second chance?

Probably not that easy.

But you know what’s worse?
            That Bible guy said no flood this time,
            but he was wrong—
            the oceans rise, the world sinks
            Fire and Flood
                        Fire and Flood
                                    Fire and Flood.

—Patrick Murfin

                       

Hustling Himself Out of Baseball—Pete Rose

✇ WWUUD?
23 August 2019 at 11:52
By: Patrick Murfin
Charley Hustle making the wrong kind of headlines.
Thirty years ago on August 24, 1989 Pete Rose aka Charlie Hustle was banned from baseball for life for gambling on Cincinnati Reds games when he was manager by an outraged Commissioner of Baseball Bart Giamatti.
Considered a shoe-in for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot, Rose probably doomed his chances for ever being included by for years steadfastly denying gambling on baseball despite mounting evidence, before sheepishly admitting guilt in his autobiographyMy Prison Without Bars.    
Rose's rookie card still a hot commodity for collectors in mint condition.
Rose was a home town product of Cincinnati, born to working class parents in 1941.  The switch hitting right hander’s dream came true when he was called to the Big Show in 1963. In his stellar 23 year career as a player, most of the time with the Reds, Rose hit for a .303 batting average, tallied 4,256 hitsincluding 160 home runs and drove in a total of 1,394 runs.  He was famously aggressive on the base pathsdespite not being a fast runner and perfected a dangerous head-first slide.  
Among his many honors were Rookie of the Year in the National League in 1963, two Gold Gloves for his sparkling defensive play, three batting titles, 17 All Star Game appearances, and three World Championships with Cincinnati’s legendary Big Red Machine.  After playing for the Philadelphia Phillies and Montreal Expos from 1979 to ’84, controversial Reds owner Marge Schott brought Rose back as a player-managerto finish the ’84 season.  

Rose's signature head-first dive into base made him one of the most exciting players in baseball.
He played two more years in the combined role before retiring to concentrate on his bench duties.  He was undoubtedly the most popular player in Reds history and one of the most admired in baseball.  
But he was an inveterate gambler.  He claimed his regular bets with a major bookie did not include baseball, then after proof surfaced, that he did not bet on games he was part of.  When that claim, too, was disproven, he could only say that he bet for his team, not against it. 

Rose as Reds manager.
But gambling is the big no-no in Major League Base which was nearly killed by gambling scandals in the 19th Century and again by the Black Sox scandal of 1919.  Baseball ignored a lot of misbehavior, including the nearly murderous attacks of Ty Cobb on fans, regular alcohol abuseby stars like Babe Ruth, and numerous instances of sexual peccadilloes.  It would not, however, forgive gambling.  
After his banishment Rose cut a pathetic figure.  Banned from even setting foot into a ball park, he made his living signing autographs and selling memorabilia.  Even that got him into trouble.  On April 20, 1990, Rose pleaded guilty to two charges of filing false income tax returns for not reporting income from selling autographs and memorabilia, and from horse racing winnings. He was sentenced to five months in the medium security Prison Camp at the United States Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois and fined $50,000. Released on January 7, 1991 after having paid $366,041 in back taxes and interest he was required to perform 1000 hours of community service. 

Rose would sign anything for a buck, including humiliating admissions.

Rose’s 2004 autobiography was an attempt to both bring in much needed income and rehabilitate his reputation, possibly leading to a lifting of the lifelong ban and eligibility for the Hall of Fame.  Despite the vocal support of many players and some sportswriters, the book failed on the later count. 
The steroid scandals of the early 21st Century were used by supporters to argue that Rose, who never used performance enhancing drugs and who played hard his entire career, deserved consideration to be included in the Hall while disgraced players like Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, and Roger Clemens remain eligible.  

Rose flogging his autobiography, My Prison Without Bars.  The book flopped as a plea for sympathy and as a bid to regain eligibility for the Hall of Fame.
Baseball is officially un-moved by these arguments. After rumors that he was considering lifting the ban surfaced in 2010, Commissioner Bud Selig quickly denied the reports.  Selig’s successor has been no more sympathetic and many of the sportswriters who admired and championed him have retired.  Baseball has moved on.  It is doubtful Pete Rose will ever enter the Hall of Fame. 


Jerry Leiber—Half of Late Tin Pan Alley’s R&B, Rock, and Soul Duo

✇ WWUUD?
22 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Mike Stoller and Jerry Leiber plugging a song.

One half of a songwriting duo that changed American music died on this date in 2011 at the age of 78.  If you think that this is an exaggeration, try erasing the songs of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller from rhythm and blues, formative rock and roll, and blues tinged pop.  You can’t do it.  The hole would be too big.  Whole genresmight collapse.

Raised in Baltimore in a Jewish family, Jerry Leiber was fascinated with Black music from an early age.  He later said:

I felt black. I was as far as I was concerned. And I wanted to be black for lots of reasons. They were better musicians, they were better athletes, they were not uptight about sex, and they knew how to enjoy life better than most people.

He found himself finishing high school in alien Los Angeles in 1950 when he met Mike Stoller, a freshman at Los Angeles City College who played piano and shared Leiber’s passion for Black music.  The two teamed up and were soon spending hours collaborating on songs.  Stoller mainly wrote the musicand Leiber, with his ear for Black street talk, handled the lyrics, but their collaboration was so tight that both dabbled in the other’s area and often could not recall or tell who contributed what to a song.

Their first work was hardcore blues.  Within months of beginning their collaboration blues shouter Johnny Witherspoon became the first to record one of their songs, Real Ugly Woman.  Their first hit was Hard Times which made the R&B Charts in 1952 for Charlie Brown.  The same year they wrote K.C. Lovin’ for Little Willie Littlefield, a song that would later become a rock and roll hit for Wilbert Harrison under a new name—Kansas City.

In 1953 they pennedHound Dog for Big Mama Thornton, one of the last of the barrel house blues belters.  Three years latter a relatively unknown Memphis singer named Elvis Presley would cover the song.  It would explode into his first break-out hit and become a cultural phenomenon.  Leiber was resentful that Pressley had tinkered with the lyrics and believed the song meant to be a bitter scold to a lazy gigolo had become a noveltysong that people seemed to think was actually about a dog.  None the less, as he observed, “…the fact that it sold more than seven million copies took the sting out of what seemed to be a capricious change of lyrics.”

Despite dismay that Elvis Pressley changed the lyrics to Hound Dog, the duo went on to a successful association with the King of Rock and Roll with big hits from his movies.

The team would go on to work with Presley, who also was rooted in a love of Black Music, on several songs, most notably the ballad Loving You, King Creole, and Jail House Rock, the themes of Presley’s films.
In three short years the team was established enough to form their own label, Sparks Records.  They began to specialize in music for doo wop inspired Black vocal groups like The Robins who recorded Riot in Cell Block #9 andSmokey Joe’s Cafe. They were branching out from song writing to producing.  In doing so they did even more to shape the emerging sound.

At work in the Brill Building, ground zero for late Tin Pan Alley R&B and rock composers.
Atlantic Records bought their label and gave them an unprecedented deal that also gave them the right to produce artists on other labels making them among the first independent producers.  For The Coasters Leiber crafted novelty lyrics that struck home with a growing white audience including Yakety Yak, Charlie Brown,Along Came Jones, and Poison Ivy.  The last song was not as innocent as it sounded—it was a song about getting the clap.  The song writing duo penned a total of 24 songs on the R&B or rock and roll charts for the group.


With The Coasters.

The Drifters, another top group with a rotating cast of singers also befitted from Leiber and Stoller’s work.  It was also the beginning of a fruitful relationship with Ben E. Nelson, later on known as Ben E. King.  Hits included On the Boardwalk, Spanish Harlem, and Stand By Me on which they collaborated with King.  As producers for The Drifters, they made a breakthrough when they added stringsand lush orchestration to There Goes my Baby by King, Lover Patterson and George Treadwell.  The song was an enormous hit and influenced the emerging genre of soul music, a smooth and sophisticated update of R&B.  A young musician named Phil Spector worked with Leiber and Stoller in the recording sessions and was influenced by it in his development of his wall of sound.  Save the Last Dance for Me by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman developed the sound even more. 


During these years with Atlantic records the songwriting team also worked with Peggy Lee, Benny Goodman’s former vocalist who had carved a niche as a jazzy, blues infused chanteuse. Is That All There Is? with its minor key and shifting, slow rhythm displayed a sophistication that surprised many.  Lee also introduced I am a Woman which was destined to become a feminist anthem.

Leiber and Stoller left Atlantic in the early sixties for a period at United Artists where they wrote and produced Love Potion #9 for The Clovers.  Then they started yet another label, Red Bird Records, where they concentrated on writing for and producing the girl groups who were topping the charts.  Their first effort was Chapel of Love for The Dixie Cups written by Spector, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich.  The Shangri-Las’ Leader of the Pack also streaked to #1 and introduced a whole new spate of dead teenager songs.  Eleven of the 30 songs they produced on Red Bird reached the charts.

Leiber and Stoller produced Chapeil of Love for the Dixie Chicks.



After a falling out with business partners at Red Bird, they sold their interest to concentrate on independent writing and producing.  But the British Invasion was changing music and Leiber and Stoller’s R&B based sound was harder to sell.  They continued to produce hits with Jay and the Americans, often using R&B songs intended for Ben E. King or other artists.  The pairs last big hit was in 1975 with Smack in the Middle With You by Stealers Wheel, with a sound meant to mirror Bob Dylan’s electric period.
Despite falling off the charts the duo never stopped writing and continued to produce, including an albums for Elkie Brooks that sold well in Europe and album cuts for solo albums by Donald Fagen and Michael McDonald.
A new generation was introduced to the music of Leiber and Stoller in 1995 when Smokey Joe's Café opened on Broadway.  The show featured 39 of the duo’s songs.  It set a record as the longest running revue in Broadway history, closing after 2,036 performances.  Touring countries sold out theaters across the country and the show opened in London 1n 1996. The show was nominated for several Tony Awards and the original cast album not only sold briskly but won a Grammy. 

A new generation was introduced to Leiber and Stoller with Smokey Joe's Café, one of the first Broadway juke box musicals.
As their contributions to American music were recognized, Leiber and Stoller were showered with honors in their later years including induction into both the Songwriter’s Hall of Fame and Rock And Roll Hall of Fame and dozens of awards and citations.

In 2009 were credited with writer David Ritz on Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography published by Simon and Schuster.
When Leiber died of heart failure, Peter Stoller, Mike’s son, wrote on the Leiber & Stoller web page, “…[Jerry] would have said, “Let’s break out the booze, and have a ball…”

The Pueblo Revolution—Kicking Spanish Butt

✇ WWUUD?
21 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
A depiction of the Pueblo uprising from a Spanish perspective.

On August 21, 1680 the embattled Spanish at Santa Fe, New Mexicobroke a week long siege by members of several Pueblos and fled south to El Paso del Norte abandoning the northern province of New Spain to the native residents.  Despite repeated efforts the Spanish were not able to retake control of the district for twelve years.  It was the first successful expulsion of Europeansby a native people in North America and only one of a handful of instances it was ever accomplished even briefly.

Spanish settlement of New Mexico dated to 1598 when several hundred Europeans established the settlement of San Gabriel across the Rio Grande from San Juan Pueblo. About 1608, they moved their capital 25 miles north to Santa Fe.  Although there were frictions between the peace loving Pueblos and their new neighbors, relations were generally amiableuntil the Spanish began to treat the people as peons—virtual propertyof the Church, state, and those holding royal land grants.

By the mid-17th Century the dual systems of encomienda—a tax on foodand other resources to support the Church, military, and civil institutions that was so high it frequently caused great want in the Pueblos—and repartimiento—the compulsion of set numbers of days per year of forced labor in the service of the Church, the state, and as field laborers and domestics on the haciendascaused rising resentment. Still, the Pueblos remained peaceful, grateful at least to the Spanish for protection from raids by their traditional enemiesthe Apache and the Navaho.  They also adopted some Spanish agricultural practices.


This Pueblo Kachina dance in the early 20th Century was little changed from the practice that drew the wrath of Catholic priests.
When Padre Alonzo de Posada arrived about 1760 to become the chief Priest in New Mexico, he made open war on traditional Pueblo culture, particularly the kachina dances that were at the center of communal life.  He ordered his priests to seize and destroy all of the elaborate kachina masks they could find and forbid the practice.

In 1675, Governor Juan de Trevino arrested 47 Pueblo men and charged them with sorcery. Four were condemned to death, three were hanged and the fourth committed suicide. The rest were publicly whipped in the plaza in Santa Fe and sentenced to slave labor.  When much of Trevino’s garrison left to pursue Apache raiders, members of near-by Pueblos descended on the capital and feed the prisoners including Popé, a shamanof the San Juan Pueblo.

Popé began a slow, methodical organization of the Pueblos to rise against the Spanish.  It took five years of secret meetings at dozens of Pueblos and persuading those with closer ties to the Spanish or who had more deeply adopted Catholicism to join him.  A prolonged droughtduring this period aided him because the Spanish refused to let up on the demands of encomienda even as crops failed. 

The drought also affected the more nomadic Apache and Navaho whose game became scarce bringing increasing raids against the Pueblos and Spanish alike.  The small Spanish garrison, far from the capital at Mexico City, received scant reinforcements from the Viceroyand were spread thin over thousands of square miles.  The inability of the Spanish to protect the Pueblos removed one of the few continuing reasons to remain under their yoke and the tattered veneer of military power made even the un-warlike Pueblo believe that they could rise up.

The knotted ropes that were sent to the Pueblos to coordinate the time of the insurrection.

After a final meeting at Tesuque on August 8, 1680 Popé, dispatched two messengers carrying knotted ropes showing the number of days before the revolt would begin to the Pueblos.  The chief of each Pueblo was to untie a knot each day and when the last knots were untied rise up against the local priests and haciendas making a coordinated attack across the province.  It was a brilliant plan, but the Spanish got wind of it and Governor Antonio de Otermin had the messengers arrested. 

When the people of Tesuque found out, they rose up and attacked the local church, expelling the priest and killing one Spaniard.  Padre Cristobal de Herrera returned the next day with one soldier to find the pueblo deserted.  He tracked the people into the hills where they found and murdered him.  The soldier fled to Santa Fe with news of an uprising. 

The rebels prepare to burn the body of a priest hung from a rafter of his destroyed church.

Within days the Rio Arriba area north of White Rock Canyon was devastated and depopulated.  Churches and haciendas were burned, any Spaniards who could be found—Priests (23 of who were put to death as their churches burned), men, women, and children were—were killed.  Survivors fled to El Paso del Norte or to the fortified governor’s palace at Santa Fe. 

The Santa Fe Pueblo and others near-by invaded the capital on August 13.  The Spanish—heavily armed with harquebuses (an early heavy matchlock musket), soldiers sheathed in armor plate and armed with steel swords—were able to hold off the lightly armed Pueblo who had only bows and arrows, clubs, knives, and stones.  The Pueblo, who were mainly used to defensive fighting around their towns against Apache raiders, were not used to being on the offensive, fighting in large groups or laying a siege. 


The Taos Pueblo, one of the largest in the uprising, as it appeared in a 1930's era post card and much the same as during the Revolt.
They persisted, but after a few days members of some Pueblos began to melt away.  But they were reinforced by others from Cochiti and Santo Domingo, led by Alonzo Catiti of Santo Domingo.  The Spanish reported later to being besieged by as many as 2,500 warriors, surely a wild exaggeration. 

The attackers damned the stream that brought water into Casa Reales, the governor’s palace.  Within a few days the Spanish began losing their horses and pack animals.  Gov. Otermin decided that they would have to make a run for it while the still could.  After executing 47 warriors who had been captured in fighting that morning, he led the break-out on the night of August 21.  

Over the next 12 years, Governor Otermin and his successor, Domingo Jironza Petriz de Cruzate, struck periodically at Pueblo country and once Santa Fe was briefly re-occupied.  But they could not regain control. 

Over time internal dissention wracked Pueblo unity.  Exactly what happened is unclear.  There are conflicting oral traditions and no Europeans were left alive to record the events.  We know that pressure from the Apache and Navaho, as well as from the Spanish continued.  

Some accounts claim that Popé became a brutal dictator, inflamed to uproot any vestige of Spanish religion or culture.  These stories say that not only did he order all crosses, Bibles, and other Christian artifactsburned, but he ordered that men who had been married by the Padres to abandon their wives and take new ones by Pueblo custom.  He also supposedly banned cultivation of European crops, adding to starvation.  These stories were, of course, circulated by the Spanish and by the few Pueblo who remained loyal to the Church. 

Other accounts have Popé retiring to his San Juan Pueblo to live in obscurity.  A third story has him disappearing into the mists of time but ready to return when his people need him, a variation of many hero legends. 

The Spanish--and some modern New Mexicans--honored Governor Diego de Vargas as a hero for his re-conquest of Santa Fe.
By 1692 the Pueblo were as dispirited as they were disunited.  A new governor, Diego de Vargas with only six Spanish soldiers, one cannon and a number of native allies from the Pirotribes of the lower Rio Grande and some loyal Catholic Pueblo were able to bloodlessly retake Santa Fe.  

There were more battles, some furious and bloody, followed by a general persecution.  New Mexico was firmly back under Spanish rule within a year. 

But the Pueblo did, in the long run, win a lot.  The Spanish never again tried to impose encomienda or repartimiento.  Priests allowed traditional cultural practices and tried to find ways to adapt them to Catholic worship instead of crushing them.  The Spanish recognized the land claims of the Pueblo and their local self-government.  

A statue of Pope in the New Mexico state museum.
As a result to this day of all of the tribes in what is now the United States, only the Pueblo have been able to retain most of their own land while maintainingtheir rich culture and much of their religious identity. 

There were two other long lasting side effects of the uprising and its aftermath.  The agricultural Pueblo traded the many Spanish horses that came into their possession to the north enabling the flourishing of the Plains Indian culture that developed in the 18th Century.  Secondly, many Pueblo forced to flee the Spanish and the raiding Apache eventually went to join another ancient enemy the Navaho, whose culture was greatly affected by the infusion.

Proud Boys, White Nationalists and Antifa—One of These Things is Not Like the Other—With Murfin Verse

✇ WWUUD?
20 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Proud Boys and Neo-Nazi allies marching in Portland.
The Proud Boys, allegedly White Nationalist lite “western chauvinists” descended on Portland, Oregon over the weekend for what was billed as a “End Domestic Terrorism” march and the largest such demonstration yet of the neo-fascist right.  The frat boys of the so-called alt-rightwere joined by the harder edged Three Percenters, a patriot movement militia, the American Guard, and assorted officially unaffiliated loners and losers scraped up in neo-Nazi chat rooms on the dark web.  The Domestic Terrorism that they were protesting was not that which has left scores dead in multiple recent mass murder shootings, but the Antifa who have done such despicable things as throwing a milk shake at rabid right Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz, punching alt-right spokesman Richard Spencer, and demonstrating at speaking events.
Portland, a city that The Guardian described as having “a liberal laid-back hippy vibe” was the target of the march for two reasons.  First, it is the home of the largest groupings of the amorphous Antifa which sprang up from a robust local anarchist scene and the Black Block street fighters that first came to prominence in the 1999 World Trade Organization (WTO) protests up the coast in Seattle.  Secondly, it is convenient the compounds, bunkers, and training camps of the Patriot Militias, White supremacists, and anti-government radicals that dot eastern Oregon and Washington, Idaho, and Montana
The two sides have faced off in Portland before.  As the city prepared for what was expected to be the largest confrontation ever, Donald Trump stirred the pot.  Of course he did.  The Resident Tweeted, “Major consideration is being given to naming ANTIFA an ‘ORGANIZATION OF TERROR.  Portland is being watched very closely. Hopefully the Mayor will be able to properly do his job!”
Not only did the Cheeto-in-Charge not mention or condemn the White Nationalist with a proven history of violence—the Proud Boys were prominent in in the Charlottesville clashes two years ago that left anti-Nazi protestor Heather Heyer dead—but he explicitly endorsed their stated cause much to the delight of organizers Joe Biggs and Enrique Tarrio of the planned non-permitted march.

Proud Boy spokes bigot Enrique Tarrio was the most visible leader to actually make the march.
Predictably much of the American mass media, trained like Pavlov’s dog to spout on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand equivalency in the name of journalistic neutrality, treated the Proud Boys and the Antifa equally “dangerous extremists of the far right and far left.”
In the end Portland Police kept the two sides mostly separated preventing violent clashes.  But the march leaders mostly failed to show up to their own event fearing arrest and left their followers with no plans or support.  They were forced to march back and forth across the long Morrison Bridge over the Willamette and then were steered to a riverfront industrial area where cement barricades police in full riot gear kept them separated from the Antifa who were also largely neutralized except for shouting back and forth.

In one of many street theater performances counter protestors proclaimed "White Flour," "Wife Power," and dressed as hot dogs to mock the white nationalist marchers.
But that doesn’t mean that the marchers were unopposed.  Large numbers of creative and non-violent Portlandians got ahead of both the police and marchers preemptively occupying most of the squares and public places in the downtown area where the marchers could gather with dancing unicorns, clowns, jugglers, puppets and derisive signs.  The counter protests also featured Buddhistand Jewish prayers, speeches, a poop emoji costume parade organized by the PopMob group, and music.  Their mood was joyful and triumphant. Meanwhile the leaderless marchers were steeredthrough hostile minority neighborhoodswhere they were frequently given wrong directions and where local businesses refused to sell them water or food or allow them to use restrooms.  When they finally found a place to gather the planned three hour rally was cut to half an hour as speakers were drowned out by counter protestors’ jeers, chants, and songs.
The exhausted marchers had to retrace their steps under humiliating police protection and were left where they had to walk additional miles to return to the busses and cars that brought them.  Over the entire day a handful on each side had been arrested, mostly in isolated incidents after the main march broke up.

A lone Black Antifa marched alongside the massive police presence that separated the two sides.
The local press depicted the day as a humiliating defeat for the White Nationalists.  But Proud Boy leaders declared victory anyway and vowed to return to the city with new marches every month with the stated aim of bankrupting the city until the Mayor and Council “cracked down and eliminated the Antifa.”  Blackmail by attrition if you will.
With calls for suppression not of White Nationalists or Neo-Nazis on the rise including legislation in Congress to declare the Antifa as terrorists, comes the difficult question of defining just who Antifa are and who are other opponents of the Right.  Are the Black Block and the Antifa on the streets of Charlottesville, Portland, New York, Boston, the Bay Area, and other places really identical?  Clearly there is some overlap and the cosmeticsare similar—the use of black clothing, banners, and sometimes masks.  But the Antifa are clearly much broader and focused more directly on community self-defense and direct confrontationwith racist thugs than on mindless rampage.  The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), my old radical labor union and its General Defense Committee (GDC) which have been among the most cohesiveand visible elements of the Antifa movement has clearly made that distinction.  Many of those now joining the Antifa movement have no ties at all to the Black Block. 

A typical red and black Antifa flag carried in many actions.
Two years ago in Charlottesville the Antifa were a very visible presence in the protests organized to protest the planned removal of a monument to Robert E. Lee.  They were pointedly not included in Trumps famous declaration that there were “good people on both sides.”  But the Antifa famously came to the defense of religious leaders including Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) President Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray and several other UUs who linked arms around the perimeter of the block where the Lee statue stood to prevent the Neo-Nazis from rallying there.  The ministers came under attack and feared for their lives.  They were rescued and protected with masked Antifa including IWW members.  One participant, famed Black scholar Cornel West said frankly.  “The antifascists, and then, crucially, the anarchists…saved our lives, actually. We would have been completely crushed, and I’ll never forget that.”

Antifa including members of the IWW--note fag to the right--to the rescue shielding besieged ministers and religious leaders in Charlottesville two years ago.
A few days later we held a vigil on the grounds of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, Illinois.  A couple of hundred folks showed up on short notice.  As the crowd formed a solemn circle before moving to line Bull Valley Road with lighted candles I spoke.
After remembering the blood sacrifice of 32 year old anti-fascist heroHeather Heyer and the needless deathsof Virginia State Police Lt. H. Jay Cullon and Trooper Pilot Berk M.M. Bates in a helicopter crashresponding to the violent chaos unleashed by the organized forces of bigotry, I said that it fell to me to be the voice of anger and outrage.  I was not there to lead a chorus of Kumbaya.  I noted West’s appreciation of the Antifa--the same anti-fascists that Trump and far too much of the media held to be equally guilty for the violence.  And I was moved to recall others who had confronted Nazism.  The poem I wrote and read at the time may have made some gathered that evening uncomfortable.  But it had to be said.

Communists and Brown Shirts brawling in a Munich beer hall in 1932.  No one else physically stood up against growing Nazi power.
Munich and Charlottesville
August 13, 2017

So is this how it felt on the streets of Munich
            when the strutting Brown Shirts 
            in their polished jackboots,
            Sam Browne belts, and scarlet arm bands
            faced the scruffy Commies 
            in their cloth caps
            and shirtsleeves rolled up 
            and battled in the beerhalls,
            parks and streets.

All of the good people, the nice people
            cowered behind closed doors
            and wished it would go away—
                        all of the liberals, the Catholics,
                        the new-bred pacifists of the Great War,
                        the professors and doctors,
                        editors and intellectuals,
                        the Social Democrats,
                        even—my God!—Jews 
                        who had not gone Red—
            a pox on both your houses they solemnly intoned.

Hey, buddy, in retrospect those damn Bolshies
            look pretty good,
            like heroes even.

Things look a little different in Charlottesville,
            in brilliant color not grainy black and white
            and the Fascists can’t agree on a
            Boy Scout uniform and array themselves
            golf shirts and khakis, rainbow Klan hoods,
            biker black and studs and strutting camo.

But the smell, you know, that stench,
            is just the same.

The question is—do you dare be a Red today
            or will you close your doors
            and go back to your game consoles
            and cat videos.

Which will it be, buddy?

—Patrick Murfin

Philo T. Farnsworth—Number One Suspect in DNA Test for Father of Television

✇ WWUUD?
19 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Philo T  Farnsworth displays his television receptor for the press,
Inventor Philo T. Farnsworth was born in a log cabin on his grandfather’s remote ranch in southwest Utah on August 19, 1906.  His family was of pioneer Mormon stock.  Despite the classic 19th Centurypioneer circumstances of his birth, Farnsworth would help reshape the modern world with his inventions.

By 1918 the family was ranching on its own in southern Idaho.  The new homestead had its own small generatorand was primitively wired for lightingand some farm equipment.  Young Philo, a tinkerer in the great tradition and a devotee of Popular Mechanics was soon busy adapting other gadgets and appliances to being run by electricity.

He proved to be a whiz in high school in Rigby, Idaho at advanced math, chemistry, and physics. But he stunned Justin Tolman,his high school science teacher, with sketches for electron tubes.  He demonstrated how pictures might be transmittedand received wirelessly over a distance by filling several chalkboardswith equations for his awestruck teacher.  That teacher’s memory of these early events later became key testimony in Farnsworth’s epic patent battles with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA).

Farnsworth's high school science teacher Justin Tomlin saved his sketch of an electron tube which eventually proved the inventor's priority over competitors.

After graduating from high school early, Farnsworth worked for the railroadto raise money for tuition to Brigham Young University.  In 1923 he joined his family, which had moved to Provo, Utah.  But when his father died less than a year later, 16 year old Philo was forced to quit school to support his family.

But his dreams never died.  He seized another opportunity to get a quality education when he tested number 2 in the nation and was recruited to the U.S. Naval Academy.  But when he discovered that the Navy would own any patents he developed during his continuing research, he resigned and returned to Utah.

An unsuccessful business venture brought him to Salt Lake City, where he took classes at the University of Utah.  He also caught the eye of George Everson, a professional fund raiser and philanthropist to work with local Community Chest.  Philo’s project so excited him that he agreed to pay for him to move to Los Angeles where he would be provided housing and a small laboratory space.  

Pem Farnsworth, the inventor's wife, has been called the first TV star because he broadcast her photo in his public press presentation.

Farnsworth leapt at the opportunity.  He married his sweetheart, Elma “Pem” Gardner, the sister of an associate of Everson.

After a period in L.A., the Farnsworth’s moved to San Francisco to be closer to Everson.  Despite Everson’s support, it was difficult to keep up the research and support the family.  Farnsworth worked mostly alone and the strange looking apparatusthat were brought into his apartment/laboratory aroused suspicion and the place was raided by local police suspecting he was running a distillery.

After only a few months in California, however, Farnsworth was far enough along in his work to file patents.  Others were developing television systems, based on mechanical scanning devices.  Farnsworth proposed an entirely electronic system to produce images that could be received on another devise.  These early patent applications gave him a lead over others who were experimenting with electronic systems.

In September, 1927 Farnsworth transmitted his first image in his San Francisco lab, a simple line inscribed on a black plate back illuminated by a powerful arc lamp to a receiving device which reproduced the image by an electronic scan.  He demonstrated his device to the press a year later.

In 1930 Farnsworth’s patents were approved.  He was also visited by Vladimir Zworykin, who had been developing his own television system in Pittsburg for Westinghouse for some years.  Although his system was promising, it never functioned well enough.  Impressed, he made copies of Farnsworth’s Image Dissector for his own use.  He would eventually abandon that technique because of the extremely bright lighting required and turn his attention to developing the Iconoscope.


Farnsworth's nemesis David Sarnoff of RCA.  The two fought bitterly over patent rights in a series of law suits that lasted years and nearly ruined Farnsworth despite winning them.
Meanwhile Farnsworth turned down an offer by David Sarnoff of RCA to buy his patents and work for them.  Again the inventor balked at having his patents held by others.  Instead he moved to Philadelphia where he found what he hoped would be a congenial home at Philco.

RCA acquired Zworykin’s patents, which Zworykin had already used to challenge Farnsworth’s.   The company renewed the objections, but in 1934, based on evidence from that high school teacher and others, the Patent Office ruled that Farnsworth established priority for electronic television with his Image Dissector.  In the meantime Farnsworth applied for additional patents, including one for color transmission and reproduction.

Despite the Patent Office decision, litigation between Farnsworth and RCA dragged on for year, greatly distressing the inventor.  Finally in 1939 RCA agreed to settle the dispute by licensing Farnsworth’s patents for a million dollars.  That led directly to the famous public demonstration of the RCA television system, based on several different patents, including Farnsworth’s at the New York World’s Fair on April 20, 1939.

But before that Farnsworth had struggled.  He parted ways with Philco in 1933 and then went to England in hopes of raising money for his expensive litigation with RCA.  There he met John Logie Baird, a Scottish inventor who had given the world first public demonstration of a working television system in London in 1926 using a mechanical rotating disc device.  The two joined forces and Baird’s company began to market a system to the BBC in competition with EMI, which used Zworkink’s patents.  Eventually the BBC opted for the EMI system.  

Farnsworth also demonstrated his system in Germany, where it was used for experimental broadcasts of the 1936 Olympics.
Farnsworth showing off components for his television system including the critical cathode ray tube.
Back in America, Farnsworth continued his experimentation and filed several patents both for the improvement of television and in new areas, including  a ray for airplanes and ships to penetrate fog.  During World War II in combination with other patents on an improved cathode ray tube to be used as an image receptor, it led to radar.

He founded his own company, Farnsworth Television and Radio Corporationbased in Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1936.  The company took on numerous defense contractsduring the World War II, including the development of radar and improvements to sonar.  But the small, undercapitalized company struggled to make deliveries on time.

In 1951 International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) bought his company and kept Farnsworth on a chief researcher working from a small basement laboratory known as The Cave.  His improvements to the radar circular sweep screen made possible modern air traffic control systems.

ITT agreed to modestly fund Farnsworth’s basic research into a new area, nuclear fusion.  He developed a specialized set of fusion reaction tubes called fusors.  Although he was able to produce micro scale fusion reactions in the lab, he could not figure out how to create large enough reactions to become a potential power source.  ITT soured on the expense of the project and cancelled its support, causing Farnsworth to leave the company in 1966.

Farnsworth was never a household name like other inventors.  He stumpped the panel on I've Got a Secret on the medium he pioneered.
Disillusionedand drinking heavily, Farnsworth transferred his research back to Utah where he worked in a laboratory provided by Brigham Young University.  He started a new, small firm, Philo T. Farnsworth and Associates and lured some former colleagues from ITT to join him in Utah.  He secured a contract with NASA, but his bank called in its loans, which Farnsworth had secured with his home and pension.  The company collapsed and the Internal Revenue Service padlocked his lab for failure to pay back taxes. 

Despite the failure of his fusion system to be commercially viable, it has become an invaluable tool in basic research and fusors are used to produce particles for use in cyclotrons and for other basic particle physics research.

With his family reduced to poverty despite fathering one of the great industries of the century, Farnsworth fell into deep depression and drank heavily, destroying his always fragile health.  He died of pneumonia on March 11, 1971, largely in obscurity.  His widow Pem campaigned relentlessly after his death to promote his place in the birth of television.

Fame is fleeting.  A statue of Philo T. Farnsworth has represented Utah in Statuary Hall in the U.S. Capital since 2010.  He joined Mormon patriarch Brigham Young in what has been called a national hall of fame.  But this year the Utah legislator voted to remove the statue in 2020 and replace it with one of Martha Hughes Cannon,  a suffrage pioneer and first woman elected to a state legislature.  Copies of the Farnsworth statue will still be on display in his home town and in an upper gallery of the Utah capitol building.
Farnsworth was not THE inventor of television.  Many inventors contributed to what would ultimately be the operating system that became practical and which after World War II exploded changing society and culture in ways Farnsworth could never have imagined when he began sketching ideas for tubes as a 14 year old in an Idaho science class.

“ No bomb can kill the dreams I hold For freedom never dies!”

✇ WWUUD?
18 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Teachers and activists Harriette and Harry T. Moore were killed in a Ku Klux Klan terror bombing.
File under outrageous injustice—a day late and a dollar short.  Fifteen years ago on August 6, 2006 Florida Attorney General Charlie Christ, a Republican who later served a term as Governor and who ultimately became a Democrat after endorsing President Barack Obama for re-election, announced that four white men had been identified as likely responsiblefor the house bombing that killed Civil Rights champions Harry and Harriette Moore on Christmas 1951.  All four men were conveniently already dead.
Their identities were hardly an impenetrable mystery for all of those years.  One man, Joseph Cox, committed suicide in 1952 the day after FBI agents interviewed him in the case.  Another, Edward L. Spivey, made a death bed confession in 1978.  The supposed orchestrator of the bombing plot was Earl J. Brooklyn, was considered a violent rogue by even some Ku Klux Klan members and had been expelled from a Georgia Klavern for “engaging in unsanctioned acts of violence.”  Tillman H. “Curley” Belvin was a close friend of Brooklyn.  The latter two came up in the three investigations prior to the one conducted by the Florida Attorney General’s Office of Civil Rights.
Many believe that the four men may have been acting on behalf of a long-time Sheriff Willis McCall of Lake County who shot two defendants in the infamous Groveland Case while transporting them for a new trial.  Harry Moore had been deeply involved in protesting the case and advocating for an investigation of McCall.  More on this below.
The wreckage of the Moore home in Mims, Florida.
n his remarks to reporters at the time Christ said “Over the years, a number of motives have been suggested for the Moore murders. All of them share a common theme—retribution against Harry Moore for his civil rights activities.”  No shit, Charlie!
Chances are unless you are from Florida or a scholar of Black History you have never heard of the victims of the racist conspiracy.  So who were Harry and Harriette Moore?  Among other things they were the first important leaders of the post-World War II Civil Rights Movement to be assassinated.  They would not be the last.
Harry Tyson Moore was born on November 18, 1905, in Houston, Florida, a tiny farm community in Suwanee County. His father tended the water tanks for the Seaboard Air Line Railroad and ran a small store who died when Harry was 9 years old 1914. His mother Rosa, tried to manage alone, working in the cotton fields and running the small store on weekends.
In 1916 Harry was sent to Jacksonville to live with his aunts.  Jacksonville had a large and vibrant African-American community, with a proud tradition of independence and intellectual achievement.  Moore’s aunts were educated, well-informed women—two were educators and one was a nurse.  Under their nurturing guidance, Moore's natural inquisitiveness and love of learning were reinforced.  
He was a much more confident and sophisticated boy when returned home to Suwanee County in 1919 and enrolled in the high school program of Florida Memorial College.  He excelled in his studies and he was nicknamed Doc by his classmates.  In May 1925, at age 19, he graduated from Florida Memorial Collegewith a normal degree for teaching in the elementary grades and accepted a teaching job in Cocoa, Florida—in the watery wilderness of Brevard County.
In his first year in Cocoa he met Harriette Vyda Simms, herself a former teacher two years older than 20 year old Harry who was then selling insurance for Atlanta Life Insurance Company, a major black-owned business. 
Harriette, born in West Palm Beach on June 19, 1902, had wider experience in the world than her new young beau.  Her family relocated to Mims but a teen spent summers working up north in Massillon, Ohio with her father. She attended the segregated Daytona Normal Industrial Institute in Daytona Beach before launching her teaching career.
The Moore's home was in tiny unincorporated Mims near Titusville.
In 1926 Harry was principal of the Titusville Colored School and she had returned to teaching on Merrit Island nearby when they married on Christmas Day.  The couple went on to have two daughters—Annie Rosalea, known as Peaches in 1928 and Evangeline in 1932.
The young couple continued to teach in Brevard County with time out to earn their education degrees at historically Black Bethune Cookman College Daytona.  They then returned to Harriette’s home town of Mims where they took up residence with her mother.  The small town would be their primary home and center of their extensive activities for the rest of their lives.
Mims was a small citrus town outside the county seat of Titusville where Harry continued to work as a principle overseeing 6 teachers in the fourth through ninth grade school and personally teaching the ninth grade.  They soon built their own small home adjacent to Harriette’s mother.

The young Moore family in happier times, about when they became involved with the NAACP.
In 1934 the Moores founded the Brevard County chapter of the National Association of Colored People (NAACP) and then Henry also helped organize the statewide NAACP organization. 
A word now on Brevard County in the 1930’s and after.  Although now known as the main part of the Space Coast centering on the Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral, and Cocoa Beach with an 80% white majority, many of them highly educated, Brevard County was then relatively sparsely populated, isolated, and poor with a much higher percentage of African-American residents.  It was an unreconstructed part of Confederate Florida.  At the end of reconstruction—which was barely felt in the area—night riders and the Ku Klux Klan brutally enforced Jim Crowe laws.  Lynching was common.  After World War I the return of “uppity” black veterans to the region sparked wide-spread enrolment in the resurrected Klan.  Many local officials were either members or under the influence of the Klan.  Brevard County was more like places in rural Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia than the areas around Miami which were already experiencing an influx of Northerners.  It was not a safe place to be Black—or to be public in opposition to white domination.
But Harry was unafraid.  In the mid 30’s he concentrated concentrate in recruiting greatly increased the number of NAACP members.  The new members were attracted by the strong public stands he took on issues of housing and education. He investigated lynchings, filed lawsuits against voter registration barriers and white primaries, and with Harriette worked for equal pay for Black teachers in the segregated public schools.
They promoted teacher unionism, making them labor as well as a Civil Rights leaders.  In 1946 the long campaign for teacher pay parity came to a head and both the Moores were fired from their teaching jobs because of their activism
The firing freed Harry to accept a paid positionas Executive Director of the Florida NAACP which not only kept his family financially afloat, but allowed more time to fight for Black rights state wide in order to survive economically.
He had already achieved notability for his work on several fronts.  He also led the Progressive Voters League. Following a Supreme Court rulingagainst white-only primaries as unconstitutional between 1944 and 1950, Moore succeeded in increasing the registration of Black voters in Florida to 31 % of those eligible to vote, significantly higherthan in any other Southern state.  Needless to say, entrenched White Democrats were enraged.
If all of this was not enough to make the Moores targets, Henry’s involvement it the infamous Groveland Casecertainly was.

Three of the surviving Groveland Four in custody before their re-trial on rape and murder charges.
n July 1949, four Black men were accused of rapinga white woman in Groveland, Florida. Ernest Thomas fled the county and was killed by a posse, his body riddled with 400 bullets.  The other three suspects were arrested and beaten while in custody, coercingtwo of them to confess. A mob of more than 400 demanded that Lake County Sheriff Willis V. McCall, who had hidden the prisoners in the basement of his Eustis home, hand the prisoners over for lynching. The mob left the jail and went on a rampage, burning buildings in the black district of town. McCall transferred the prisoners to Raiford State Prison for their safety asked the Governor to send in the National Guard.  It took six days to restore order.
The three young men, including 16-year-old Charles Greenlee were found guilty by an all-white jury. Greenlee was sentenced to life in prison while Sam Shepherd and Walter Irvin got the death penalty.  
Harry Moore organized a campaign against what he saw as the wrongful convictions of the three men.  Appeals were pursued and in April 1951, a legal team headed by NAACMP Counsel Thurgood Marshall won the overturning of Shepherd and Irvin’s convictions before the U.S. Supreme Court. A new trial was scheduled.
Sheriff McCall was responsible for transporting Shepherd and Irvin to the new trial venue in November 1951. He claimed that the two men, both handcuffed, attacked him in an escape attempt. He had pulled on to an isolated country road, claiming tire trouble. He swore in a deposition that Shepherd and Irvin attacked him in an escape attempt, and that he shot themboth in self-defense.  Shepherd diedat the scene.  Irvin survived with three wounds and was shot a fourth time by a deputy who had pulled up to the scene.  Irvin later told NAACP investigators and the FBI officials that the sheriff shot both them in cold blood. Both men were found on the ground outside of the sheriff’s car still handcuffed together.

Sherriff Willis McCall stands over the body of Sam Shepherd and gravely injured Walter Irvin who were still handcuffed together.  The Sherriff claimed self-defense in an attempted escape.
Moore demanded an indictment of Sheriff McCall for murder and called on Florida Governor Fuller Warren to suspend McCall from office.
Ultimately a coroner’s inquest found, no surprise ruled Shepherds murder justified.  A judge refused to empanel a grand jury to investigate the case.  After Irvin recovered from the shooting, his re-trial was moved to Marion County just north of Lake County, in February 1952. Irwin was offered a plea bargain but refused to plead guilty, and maintained his innocence. The jury found Irvin guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death again. The case was appealed, but the conviction was upheld by the Florida State Supreme Court. In early 1954, U.S. the Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case.
Harry Moore worked with NAACP counsel Thurgood Marshall, seen here with Walter Irvin and Charles Greenlee, on the Groveland case and was killed weeks after demanding that Sheriff McCall be relieved of office and indicted for murder. 
Supporters of Irvin appealed to the governor for clemency. After reviewing the material personally, newly elected Governor LeRoy Collins in 1955 commuted Irvin’s sentence to life in prison, saying that he did not believe the State established guiltbeyond a reasonable doubt. Greenlee, who did not appeal his case, was paroledin 1962, and Irvin in 1968. Irvin died in 1969 while visiting Lake County. Greenlee moved with his wife and daughter to Tennessee, and lived until 2012.
But those outcomes were in the future.  Neither Henry nor Henriette Moore lived to see the case play out.  Just six weeks after Moore called for Sheriff McCall’s removal from office the couple’s home was bombed.         
On Christmas night in 1951, Harry and his immediate family had dinner at his brother-in-law’s to celebrate their wedding anniversary before returning home about 9 pm. At 10:20 pm, a bomb placed below Harry and Harriette’s bedroom went off. The children and their grandmother in other rooms were alright. They found the couple in their bedroom covered with debris. The family rushed them to a medical facility in Sanford, Harry’s head bleeding into his mother’s lap.
Harry was declared dead on arrival. Harriette recovered enough to visit her husband’s body at the funeral home, and then succumbed herself.  Before she died she told an Orlando Sentinel reporter, “There isn’t much left to fight back for” and “My home is wrecked. My children are grown up. They don’t need me. Others can carry on.”
Investigations would later show that Earl Brooklyn was the ring leader of the plot and induced his pal Tillman H. Belvin to hunt up two patsies to actually plant the bomb—Cox and Spivey.  Brooklyn somehow obtained floor plans of the Moore home.  Belvin scouted the residence so that the exact placement of the bomb was sure to kill its target. Brooklyn apparently obtained explosives and made the bomb.  Blevins delivered it to Cox and Spivey.  Cox committed suicide after being interviewed by the FBI and was fingered by Spivey as the only one who planted the bomb in his deathbed confession.  Likely both men were directly involved.
Almost immediately there was speculation that Sherriff McCall, who moved in the same Klan circles as Brooklyn, personally encouraged the bombing or at least gave wink-and-nod encouragement.  
But if so, McCall never paid for it.  He became something of a folk hero in Florida and across the Deep South.  He even wrote an autobiography, The Wisdom of Willis McCall in which he defended segregation in all forms and his actions as Sheriff.  He boasted that he had been investigated 49 times and that five different governors tried to remove him. “I've been accused of everything but taking a bath and called everything but a child of God.”  He enjoyed his reputation as the toughest white supremacist sheriff in the South—a title for which there was heavy completion.  He was re-elected six more times.  
But in 1972 McCall was indicted for second-degree murder by a state grand jury for the death of Tommy J. Vickers, a mentally disabled Black prisoner, while in his custody. Vickers died in the hospital in April 1972 of acute peritonitisdue to a blow to the lower abdomen. McCall was accused of kicking and beating Vickers to death for throwing his food on the floor.
Governor Reubin Askew suspended McCall the day of the indictment. McCall was acquitted by an all-white jury in Ocala in neighboring Marion County after a lengthy trial. McCall was returned to office.  But the demographics of Lake County had changed with an influx of Northerners.  Days after his trial for manslaughter of he narrowly lost his re-election bid in November 1972 to Republican Guy Bliss.  He retired to his home in Umatilla where he lived until his death at age 84 in 1994.
The immediate aftermath of the Moores death did not register much national attention.  Not only was it lost during the holiday season but amid news—most of it bad—from the War in Korea and episodes in the on-going great post-war Red Scare. 
But it could hardly go unnoticed in Florida.  The day after the bombing Black residents from across Brevard County, many of whom had personally known the Moores and been touched by them as teachers, mentors, and champions, descended on Mims and on the County Seat demanding justice.
Nationally the NAACP organized protests in support of the organization’s first martyrs including a Madison Square Garden rally during which Harry was posthumously awardedthe organization’s Spingarn Medalfor outstanding achievement by an African American.  At the rally Langston Hughes read his new poem The Ballad of Harry Moore.  
The uproar eventually caused President Harry Truman to order an FBI investigation of the case when it became apparent that no justice would be found in Florida courts.    Director J. Edgar Hoover complied and agents assembled significant documentation on the case including the identities of the prime suspects.  The agency suspended its investigation in 1953 and the Justice Department failed to bring any charges.  
The bombing was the first, or one of the first, of a wave of terror bombings.  The homes of 40 Black Southern families were bombed during 1951 and 1952. Some, like Harry Moore, were activists whose work exposed them to danger, but most were either people who had refused to bow to racist convention or were simply “innocent bystanders, unsuspecting victims of random white terrorism.”  Bombing was becoming the new lynching.
During the Civil Rights Movement the homes of Birmingham, Alabama NAACP leader the Reverend Fred Shuttleworth and of Martin Luther King, Jr among other were targets of Klan bombs and four Black girls were killed in the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963.

Daughter Evangeline hold portraits of her parents in 2012.She survived the bombing.
Still, the story of Henry and Henriette Moore remained obscure.  Gov. Christ’s announcement helped revive interest and there have been books, magazine articles, and documentaries made about the case.   In 1999, the state of Florida designated of the Moores’ home site as a Florida Heritage Landmark and Brevard County started restoring the site.  By 2004, the County had created the Harry T. and Harriette Moore Memorial Park and Interpretive Center in Mims.  Later the County named its Justice Center after the Moores and included material there about their lives and work.

The Florida state historical marker at the Moore homesite.
In 2012, the Florida Legislature designated State Road 46 in Brevard County as the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Memorial Highway.  A year later in 2013, the Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Post Office in Cocoa, Florida was named in their honor and both were inducted into the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame.
Their story has now been told many times, but perhaps never so movingly as in that poem by Langston Hughes which much later was set to music by Sweet Honey and the Rock.

Langston Hughes about the time he wrote and read the Ballad of Harry Moore
Ballad of Harry Moore
(Killed at Mims, Florida, on Christmas night, 1951)

Florida means land of flowers.
It was on Christmas night
In the state named for the flowers
Men came bearing dynamite.

Men came stealing through the orange groves
Bearing hate instead of love,
While the Star of Bethlehem
Was in the sky above.

Oh, memories of a Christmas evening
When Wise Men traveled from afar
Seeking out a lowly manger
Guided by a Holy Star!

Oh, memories of a Christmas evening
When to Bethlehem there came
“Peace on earth, good will to men”— 
Jesus was His name.

But they must’ve forgotten Jesus
Down in Florida that night
Stealing through the orange groves
Bearing hate and dynamite.

It was a little cottage,
A family, name of Moore.
In the windows wreaths of holly,
And a pine wreath on the door.

Christmas, 1951,
The family prayers were said
When father, mother, daughter,
And grandmother went to bed.

The father's name was Harry Moore.
The N.A.A.C.P.
Told him to carry out its work
That Negroes might be free.

So it was that Harry Moore
(So deeply did he care)
Sought the right for men to live
With their heads up everywhere.

Because of that, white killers,
Who like Negroes “in their place,”
Came stealing through the orange groves
On that night of dark disgrace.

It could not be in Jesus’ name,
Beneath the bedroom floor,
On Christmas night the killers
Hid the bomb for Harry Moore.

It could not be in Jesus’ name
The killers took his life,
Blew his home to pieces
And killed his faithful wife.

It could not be for the sake of love
They did this awful thing—
For when the bomb exploded
No hearts were heard to sing.

And certainly no angels cried,
“Peace on earth, good will to men”— 
But around the world an echo hurled
A question: When?...When?....When?

When will men for sake of peace
And for democracy
Learn no bombs a man can make
Keep men from being free?

It seems that I hear Harry Moore.
From the earth his voice cries,
No bomb can kill the dreams I hold—
For freedom never dies!

I will not stop! I will not stop--
For freedom never dies!
I will not stop! I will not stop!
Freedom never dies!

So should you see our Harry Moore
Walking on a Christmas night,
Don't run and hide, you killers,
He has no dynamite.

In his heart is only love
For all the human race,
And all he wants is for every man
To have his rightful place.

And this he says, our Harry Moore,
As from the grave he cries:
No bomb can kill the dreams I hold
For freedom never dies!

Freedom never dies, I say!
Freedom never dies!

—Langston Hughes

Shopping With Mom—A Cheyenne Memoir

✇ WWUUD?
16 August 2019 at 10:32
By: Patrick Murfin
The clipping that jarred a memory.
It didn’t take much to jar the memory.  Stored long ago and jammed tightly in the closet of a dusty recess of my mind, it fell to the floor and rolled to my feet when shaken by a mild tremor.  I picked it, popped the twine, and peeled back the layers of yellowed newsprint that had wrapped it.  There it was.  Almost 60 years old and only somewhat dinged and nicked, a small part snapped off here and there,  but whole and hefty in my hands.
What shook it loose was of photo posted on a Facebook page for nostalgic old denizens of Cheyenne, Wyoming, the place where I grew up.  It was a .jpeg of a newspaper clipping with the grainy image of a building and a story under the headline, DDA Aims to Purchase Z’s Furniture Building.  The caption noted that the building once was home to Fowler’s, Cheyenne’s leading department storeback when they were putting fins on Chevys.  The article explained that the building had been vacant and a home to pigeons for some years and that the Downtown Development Association hoped to buy it and somehow turn it into “a mixed residential and commercial use anchor” for what has become a moribund business district.  Little cared I for that, but Fowlers….
Fowler’s sat at the corner of 17th and Careyin the heart of what was at the cusp of the ’50’s and ‘60’s a bustling downtown shopping district.  Like most of the downtown, the building had been erected in the boom years of the 1880’s when the Union Pacific Railway yards and the cattle business made the Wyoming Territorial Capital a bustling and progressive place—the city Tom Edison picked to install his first street lighting, forward thinking and modern shaking the mud and shame from its boots from its wild days as Hell on Wheels.
In that spirit the Fowlers, the familythat owned the department store had itself gone mid-century modern.  They clad the upper three stories of the building in gleaming white, windowless smooth masonry and wrapped the first floor in sweeping display windows worthy of anything in New York or Chicago.  The name Fowler’s was emblazoned against those white walls in a bold but flowing script at a jaunty rising angle.  It stood out proudly, different than anything that surrounded it.
Fowler’s, you see, was our Macy’s, our Marshal Fields, our May Co.  It was where  the better class of matrons—and those like my mother who desperately wanted to join their ranks—of Cheyenne, half the state, and much of western Nebraskacame to find the latest fashionsstraight from New York and where their husbands bought their double breasted suits and had them marked with chalk and fitted by real tailors.
16th Street in downtown Cheyenne circa 1960.  One block over on 17th Street Fowler's Department Store sat a the corner of Carey Avenue.
There were, of course, other department stores down town.  There was Montgomery Ward, J. C. Penney, and a couple of smaller, less prestigious, local owned places.  There were ladies dress shops, men’s wear places, shoe stores, and of course Western Ranchman Outfitterswhere everyone went to get their cowboy on.  Mom shopped at them all, dragging me and my twin brother Tim along with her on her weekly Saturday expeditions.  Most weeks we looked, or she ended up just picking up notions at Woolworth’s.  But a few times a year it was serious shopping—back to school time in August, the Christmas rush, and the time to get us all polished up for Easter.
For our back to school jeans and plaid shirts, Ward’s and Penney’s would do.  She would have to shop for my jeans in the husky boys department, a mild humiliation especially when she would chat loudly with the sales women, most of whom she seemed to know from the PTA, Cub Scouts, church, or various charity projects, about my failure to firm up into a suitably athletic young man.  We would buy a pile of three or four jeans to last the year.  Mom would count her bills out to the clerk who would put them with a ticket into a brass and glass capsule to send shooting off through mysterious pneumatic tubes  to some distant office and after a few moments her change and receipt would come zooming back.
To get ready for Frontier Days or to shop for my father who’s job at the Wyoming Travel Commission required him to be turned out in cowboy style, it was off to Western Ranchman where Tim and I could get our annual pearl snap shirts, silk kerchiefs, cowboy boots, and dress straw hats, none of which were to be worn except for rodeo events and state occasions decreed by Mom.

Dad, W.M. Murfin (center) cowboying it up at Western Ranchman Outfitters
But for her own wardrobe and for our Sunday-go-to-meeting dress clothes, nothing would do but Fowler’s.  This particular Saturday, it must have been in October or November because there was a sense of urgency, the mission was to get me a winter coat.  And not just any winter coat, a very particular one.  
Tim, the all-American boy and apple of my mother’s eye, had already laid early claim of teenage style.  He was carefully smoothing his dark hairwith generous glops of Brylcreemevery morning which left it shining and immovable and he insisted on being shod, at least until the snow flew, not in boots or polished lace-up shoes, but in black and white high lace-up PF Flyers.  He had overwhelmed mom’s early objections and picked out a letterman style jacketwith leather sleeves and wool front that he would wear in all but blizzard conditions.
I, on the hand, was pursuing my single minded desire to dress like a 40 year old so that I would be treated with respect.  The fact that the gray Rough Rider style hat with the pinned up side brim that I was habitually wearing in those days belied that ambition evidently escaped me.  The hat embarrassed Mom no end, but she could not get it off me until it was cold enough for my black leather cap with the fold down earflaps and chin strap.
Other than my hat, my mother approved my middle age style aspirations, although she approved of very little else about her bookish son.  In her mind that was classy, the most vaunted ambitionof a woman who had grown up dirt poorand who yearned for middle class respectability.  So the coat for which we were searching was a good wool car coat, the kind that could fit over a sport coat but was not quite a full overcoat.  Most importantly it must have a fur collar, and a least a suitable faux fur one.  This had turned out to be a difficult quest because, surprise, surprise, most stores were not showing coats like that for pre-teen boys.  But if anyone in town would have it, it had to be Fowler’s.
Just before we descended into the boy’s department in the basement Mom took my brother and I to the side and shookus strongly by our shoulders that, along with a certain terrifying steely tone to her voice, told us that she meant business, and bent down low to whisper in our ears “I don’t want you to say a word about Mr. Brown.  Do you understand?”  Brown was not the real name which is lost to my memory or an alias created to spare embarrassmentto any surviving family, but a mere generic substitute.
One morning over breakfast before school a week or so earlier, mom had gasped loudly and laid down her coffee cup.  “Murf!” she said to my father, her head enveloped in the usual cloud of cigarette smoke, “Did you see this?  The paper says that Ed Brown was arrested in the men’s room of the Wyo Theater the other day on a morals charge!  And I always thought he was such a nice man.”  
The Wyo was one of three downtown movie houses.  The Lincoln was the top, the one that got most of the biggest films and hosted the road shows for Biblical epics like The Robe or Ben Hur, the Paramount showed double bills with A picture tops.  But the Wyo showed B movie triple bills, horror and sci-fi, the cheaper oaters.  That’s where you went to see a flick in 3D—if you mother would let you, which ours did not.  But once in a while we would sneak over there, ditching the Saturday marathon kiddie matinee at the Lincoln where we had been deposited, to see something thrilling like Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman.  The washrooms there were dirty and had sticky floors, but I had no idea of what sort of crime could be committed in them.
I was unclear on what a morals charge was or why anyone would get arrested in a toilet.  My more sophisticated brother informed me that it meant that Brown was a queer, although he was hazy on what exactly that meant except that it was dirty.
Later that day after school Mom ever so casually asked us if Mr. Brown had ever touched us, “down there” when we were at the store.  The question confused me.  She tried to explain and got red faced.  Finally I semi-understood.  “No,” I said, “not even when he measured me for pants.”

17th Street looking West from Capital Avenue in the mid-50's.  We did most of our back to school shopping a Montgomery Ward's, the red brick building on the left, across the street from the Wyoming Tribune building.  Fowler's was up the street to the right in the multi-story building seen here before it was clad in the new white façade.  
Back at Fowler’s, Mom released us having given her most impressive fair warning.  We descended the stairs to the brightly lit Boy’s Department.  Almost as soon as my mother’s foot touched the floor, Mr. Brown rushed over to greet us with a broad smile as if he were encountering long lost kin.  I guessed him to be about my Fathers age, but that meant he could have been anywhere from 30 to 50.  He had close cropped rather curly hair with just a hint of gray.  He wore those glasses with a tortoise shell top frame and gold rimssecuring the lenses.  Was there a moustache? My memory is hazy, but let’s give him a close clipped thin one.  He wore a subdued hunter’s plaid sport coat, crisp white shirt with a bow tie, sharply pleated slacks and gleaming oxfords.  
“Mrs. Murfin!” he exclaimed, “How is Murf?”  They fell to chatting excitedly sharing family details.  Mr. Brown was married and had children evidently around our age who went to a different school.  His wife was going to model for Fowler’s at an up-coming charity fashion luncheon at the Palomino Club out on the highway to Denver.  It went on like that for a while my brother and I fidgeted. 
Eventually Mom broached the purpose of the expedition.  Mr. Brown turned and considered me.  I was wearing that damn Rough Rider hat and last year’s zippered fall jacket, too tight now with frayed knit cuffs riding high above my wrists and a rip in one of the slash pockets from my shoving a balled up glove into it with too much force.  Clearly I was a boy in need of counselingand clothing. 
“Hmm,” he said after consideration, “I have just the thing.”  He rifled through some racks and pulled out a light brown car coat of wool so soft, he said, “it might as well be camel’s hair.”  It had three large leather buttons, commodious pockets and, yes, a fine faux fur brown collar.  I put it on and stood in bay of three mirrors to examine myself as Mom and Mr. Brown hovered behind.  “It’s a little big,” I said noting that the sleeves half covered my fingerswhen I hung my arms to my sides.  Mom nodded silently.
“But look how tall Pat is getting!”  I tried to stretch myself taller, proud of my one advantageover my brother.  “He’ll grow into this by Christmas, just you see.”  
Mom nodded again. “We’ll take it.”
I took off the coat and handed it to Mr. Brown.  We all strolled together back to the register.  On the way Brown casually snapped up a brown fedoraon the way past, whipped the Rough Rider hat of my head, and sat it on me at a jaunty angle.  “What a handsome young man!” No one ever had called me handsome in my entire life and I may not have ever been complimented me on my looks.  That was Tim’s personal department.
Mom turned to carefully survey me.  She picked up the hat, weighed the possibility that I could be convinced to wear it instead of my battered old hat.  I more than half wanted her to buy it, but dared not say so.  She looked at the price tag and then, somewhat sadly, returned it to the mannequin head from which Brown had snatched it.
By the register Brown carefully folded my new coat and laid it in a large white box lined with tissue paper which he carefully folded over it and smoothed down with a practiced hand.  He carefully fitted the top on and then from a large cone of twine on a spindle tied the package with practiced ease.  Mom handed over a ten dollar bill and got back little change.  I may not have ever had such an expensive garmentbefore. 
All the while Mom and Mr. Brown chatted, smiles beaming from both.  After extended pleasantries Mr. Brown shook my mother’s hand and turned and shook mine with a dry, firm grip as if I was important and grown up.  I carried the large package for my Mom.

Rodel's Drug Store was west of Fowlers and was a frequent stop on our Saturday shopping sprees for treats at the soda bar.  We spent too much money on my coat to stop on this trip.
On the walk back to the car she told us that we had spent so much money that we would have to skip the usual stop for sodasat Rodel’s Drugs.  She had a worried look.  I knew with some guilt that she had wildly over spent and was concerned about what to tell Dad.
We climbed into Mom’s ’51 Chevy, Tim as usual riding shotgun in the place of honor in the front seat.  I sat behind Mom with the package stretched out beside me on the seat.  Mom lit up an unfiltered Kool and he the car was soon filled with a haze.  On our drive back to the house on Cheshire Drive, I worked up the courage to ask what Mr. Brown could possibly have done to get arrested.

More than a year later, at Christmas 1961, I was still wearing the car coat,  Note it was getting a little tight. With twin brother Tim in his cool letterman style jacket and our dog, Fritz on our front step on Cheshire Drive.
After a pause Mom said, “Some people just don’t know to keep out other people’s private business.  You’d think the Police Department would have better things to do than hiding out in a men’s room stall.”  And that is all she would say on the subject.  We drove home the rest of the way in silence.
We continued to see Mr. Brown at Fowler’s until I entered high school and started getting my clothes in the Men’s Wear Department.
Later I realized that a small article like the one about Mr. Fowler was enough to drive some men from town in disgrace.  I learned of other men who were fired from their jobs, whose wives left them, and at least one who was beaten to a pulp outside a bar.  But the Fowlers, a very nice couple, treated all of their employees “like family.”  Mr. Brown had been with them for years and was very good at his job.  In those days a man could make a not extravagantbut comfortable middle class livingas a commission floor salesman at a Department store.   No matter what private conversation they may have had with him, they were loyal to Mr. Brown and even left him in the Boy’s Department instead of exiling him to some position where he would never come in contact with Boys.  That had to cost them customers.
And then there was Mom.  I may have learned more from her about kindness and compassion that day than in all of the Sunday school classes that she ever sent me to.

Music, Mud, Memory, and Myth—The Woodstock Festival at 50

✇ WWUUD?
15 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
John Sebastian, who did more than anyone to make tie-dye a hippy fashion statement on stage at Woodstock n 1969.
A certain song said, “By the time we got to Woodstock/We were half a million strong.”  By last count 24,794,612 aging Baby Boomers have claimed at one time or another to be in attendance at the Woodstock Music & Art Fair which opened fifty years ago today on August 15, 1969 on Max Yasgur’s farm in Bethel, New York.  But then it was written by Joni Mitchell who missed it herself because her agent didn’t want her to miss an appearance on the Dick Cavett Show.
Like Joni, I didn’t get to Woodstock either.  I was working a third shift printing daily employment listings for Illinois Unemployment offices and was helping organize on the People’s Park Project at Halstead and Armitageas a new member of the Chicago Branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  Of course, when I found out what I had missed, I, too, wished I had been there.  
Two rich young guys, John Roberts and Joel Rosenman took out ads in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal which read, “Young men with unlimited capital looking for interesting, legitimate investment opportunities and business propositions.”  It attracted the attention of and Artie Kornfield who came up with an idea to build a world class recording studio in rustic Woodstock, New Yorkwere artists like Bob Dylan and The Band were already living.  As discussions evolved, the idea of a festival to promote the studio and maybe featuring some of those local luminaries began to emerge.  

As envisioned it was a much more modest event than it became.  But, in a series of legendary steps and misstepsit evolved into something unique.  After experiencing difficulty recruiting top acts, Creedence Clearwater Revival agreed to play for $10,000—a steep fee but one which signaled to other top acts that the festival would be worth doing.  Leading rock and roll acts, including the cream of the San Francisco psychedelic scene and one huge British Invasion group, The Who, were joined by folk music legends like Joan Baez and Arlo Guthrie.  
Planned as a for-profit program, tickets went on sale in New York City area record stores and by mail for $18 a day or $24 for all three—fairly steep prices at a time when top concert tickets sold for less than $5 at most venues.  But sales were brisk.  186,000 were sold in advance and the promoters began to believe that as many as 200,000 would attend.  They could foresee a nice profit.  
This, however, far exceeded the 50,000 that promoters had told officials in Wallkill, where they had leased land in an industrial park.  Alarmed local residents protested voraciously. The town board voted in mid July to require that gatherings of more than 5,000 have a permit and then officially deniedthe organizers’ application on the ground that port-a-potties would not meet local code.  
Scrambling to find an alternative, promoters found Bethel motel owner Elliot Tiber who had a permit already for another event and who offered the use of 15 acres behind his business.  A local real estate agent recommended Max Yasgur, whose farm abutted Tiber’s property with a gently sloping hillside that would make a natural amphitheater for a stage set up at the bottom in front of a pond.  
The Bethel Town Clerk and Supervisor approved permits for the event, but the board refused to issue them and ordered the clerk to post stop work notices on the site.  But it was too late, despite local alarm, early arrivals began coming into the area more than a week in advance.  
The underground press and progressive rock radio stations were spreading the word far and wide.  Everyone realized that far more people than expected would show up.  The organizers had to decide to try reinforcing fencingat the site to maintain a ticket for admission policy or put their resourcesinto finishing the large and elaborate stage and sound systems which were behind schedule.  They decided that fencing and security could lead to violence, as could the cancellation of the festival because the stage was not ready.  They opted for the stage.  

Traffic jams to the festival were so bad that many abandoned their cars on the road and walked for miles.
By August 14 roads to Bethel were becoming clogged and crowds thick.  The fence was cut.  Like it or not for most Woodstock would be a free festival.  

The Woodstock Festival of our imagination.
The enormous crowds and the traffic snarls became a media event by themselves as network TV ran footage from helicoptersof the hordes of hippies descending on the rural village.  Rather than discourage people, reports set even more on the road to join in what was being recognized as something astonishing.  
Torrential rains before and during the concert transformed the fields to seas of mud.   Conventional camping became impossible.  Shortages of food and water became critical.  The Hog Farm commune set up a free feed operation featuring brown riceand some vegetables.  Local residents took pity on the bedraggled hippies and made thousands of peanut butter sandwiches to be handed out.  
The Woodstock experience for most--mud and garbage far from the stage
There was no shortage of drugs.  Marijuanasmoke hung like a haze over the crowd and LSD, including the famous bad brown acid that Hog Farmers warned about from the stage, was plentiful.  So, evidently was heroin, which resulted in at least one fatal overdose.  
Despite the hardship, the crowd remained peaceful and legendarily mellow.  From the first act, Richie Havens, to the last, an almost unknown guitarist named Jimi Hendrix, the music was spectacular.  Most of those in attendance even remember it, at least after their memories were refreshed by Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music,the landmark 1970 film  directed by Michael Wadleigh and edited byThelma Schoonmaker and Martin Scorsese, or by the multi-disc record albums that were released.  

Jimi Hendrix who closed the show and Crosby, Stills, and Nash who debuted there were the festival's break-out stars.  Janis Joplin and The Who turned in legendary performances.  An irritated Pete Townsend broke a guitar over Abbie Hoffman's head for making a political speech.
Joni Mitchell penned the memorial ditty which became an anthem hit for Crosby, Stills and Nash, the super groupwhich debuted at Woodstock.  
The festival also boosted the careers of several other participants, none more so than Hendrix, who vaulted overnight to super star status.  
As for the organizers, they lost their shirts, at least at first.  They were deluged by unpaid bills and over 80 law suits.  Eventually revenue from the movie paid off all debts, but none of the original partners, now feuding among themselves, made any money.  
They, like their event, however, became legendary—even heroes—in later books and in the interesting 2008 film Taking Woodstock by Taiwanese director Ang Lee.

Michael Lang's much hyped Woodstock 50 reboot crashed and burned.
Earlier this year Michael Lang, one of the original promoters who lost his shirt on the festival, tried to cash in on nostalgia by staging Woodstock 50  with big name current rock, rap, and pop acts and a couple of surviving artists from the original festival, Country Joe McDonald and John Sebastian.

Things began to unravel almost from the start.  Lang lost his principle financial backer, Dentsu Aegis who tried unsuccessfully to cancel the event.  Then production partner Superfly dropped out a few days later.  Permits could not be obtained for the originally announced venue—the Watkins Glenn Raceway in upstate New York and the Town of Vernon near Utica.  By July most of the originally announced main acts including Jay-Z, Miley Cyrus, Santana, the Lumineers, and Dead and Company.  Finally a last minute scramble to recast the festival as a voter registration event and a fundraiser for environmental groups, at a much smaller venue, the 15,000 seat Merriweather Pavilion in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. also collapsed.  Lang threw in the towel in a press release issued on July 31.
The golden anniversary will not go commemorated, however, near its original home in Bethel.  The town is hosting a string of events centered on the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts on the site of Max Yasgur’s farm.  Events include including a sold-out Arlo Guthrieperformance and Woodstock documentary screening on August 15; concerts by Ringo Starr on the 16th, John Fogertyon the 18th, and Santana on the17th, as well as art exhibitions, craft shows, and panel discussions.
The festival has also been celebrated with a new PBS documentary, Woodstock: Three Days that Defined a Generation.

The crowd and stage at Woodstock.  Feel free to circle yourself if you were there..
Meanwhile aging hippies whether they actually made it to Woodstock or not fifty years ago or not, are putting on tie-dye, and digging out their old albums or copies of the movie.  And yeah, a lot of them will toke up, too.


Social Security Under Siege on its Birthday

✇ WWUUD?
14 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act.  Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, behind the President was the administration point person for the Act.
On August 14, 1935 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law.  It was the crowning achievement of the New Deal.   It has rightly been acclaimed “the most successful American anti-poverty program in history.”  Once considered so popular that proposals to alteror abolish it were widely considered the third rail of American politics—too dangerous to seriously advance.  But that was before years of a carefully managed drum beat of hysteria that the system was somehow running out of money which has convinced many folks, despite all of the evidence to the contrary, that they will never live to collect what they have been paying in for their entire working lives.
That kind of talk was the camel’s nose under the tent that allowed retirement ages to creep upward and for talk of limiting or reducing future benefits become fashionable in some quarters.  Proposals to privatize all or part of the system in whole or in part seemed to be gain steam for a while.  These would allow younger workers to take all or part of their Social Security contributions and invest them in private IRA-like accounts.
  
The fears of some Republicans in this 2005 cartoon were justified--George W. Bush's support of Social Security privatization helped cost him re-election and punished Congressional Republicans.
The wind was kicked out of that fantasy in the stock market collapse of 2008, which understandably raised doubts for the safety of investment in the volatile Stock Market.
But some bad ideas just won’t stay dead.  Republican Vice Presidential Candidate in 2012 Paul Ryan refloated various alleged reforms, including the privatization scheme.  That was good politics in the short run as Tea Party activists were threatening to sit out the election because Mitt Romney was allegedly too moderate or perhaps even a hated RINO (Republican in Name Only.)  But it surely it contributed to the GOP’s rather decisive drubbing at the hands of Barack Obama and Social Security loving Democrats.
In the 2016 clown car posse of Republican presidential wannabes mostly kept their yaps shut about Social Security even if their plans did not change.  Libertarian darling Rand Paul, however, was actually for abolition of the system, but you have to dig deep into his position papers and old speeches to safely conservative audiences to discover it.  Hapless Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, dragging bottom in the polls tried to attract attention and support from deep pocket oligarchs by making noises about hitting the program.  Jeb Bush, the White Hope of party regulars and insiders as a supposed moderate  who could win a general election, showed himself to be a clone of his brother who pushed so-called reform and privatization by suggesting that lazy Americans need to work until they are 70 or beyond.  Donald Trump avoided the topic except to claim that he would “save” Social Security.
Of course the demographics of a lot of Baby Boomers retiring together over the next few years in a kind of slow motion avalanche and the reduction of collection of FICA taxes after the economic collapse due to heavy unemployment and actually falling wages for those still employed did put a strain on the system, which could theoretically go bankrupt in a few years unless “something is done.”
But that something does not have to be further raises in the retirement age, reduction of benefits, privatization, or changing the system from social insurance to a means tested welfare program—the later program sometimes surprisingly advancedon the right knowing that it would erode support for the system among higher income voters.  

Even before his first run for the Presidency, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was sponsoring legislation to save Social Security without reducing benefits or raising retirement age.
Bernie Sanders, the Independent Vermont Senator and proudly self-proclaimed socialist who surged from being a snubbed dark horse challenger to a serious rival to Hillary Clinton as a populist powerhouse, long supported and proposed simple Social Security reforms that would keep the program safe and solvent well into the next century.  He pointed out that simply raising the cap on wage income subject to FICA taxes and/or levying FICA taxes on non-wage income above a certain level would do the trick.
Now, three years into the Trump era and the all-fronts attack on all popular Democratic programs from Obama’s Affordable Care Act (ACA),  to Environmental Protection Agency regulations, to voting rights and election security, Social Security cuts are once again on the table.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blamed the burgeoning deficit on social insurance programsand so-called entitlement programs when he publicly pledged to pursue massive cuts in October of last year.  Despite the fact that the ballooning deficit was clearly the direct result of Republican tax cuts for the wealthy which slashed Federal tax revenues and that the Social Security Trust Fund is entirely separate from the operational budget, McConnell has recently re-affirmed his intention to make cuts a priority in the next Congress.

Meanwhile even more draconian plans to actually abolish the Social Security System have been proposed by some Republican in the House of Representatives.  Although these bills have zero chance in the Democratic controlled House, they make propaganda points with the libertarian far right and the deep-pocket billionairesthat finance them. 

Republican/Libertarian and Ayn Rand fan boy has long set his sights on destroying Social Security.  With his brother Koch family PACS and Dark Money fronts fuel new attacks on the system with the help of other billionaire oligarchs.
Before Social Security was enacted those who lived beyond their income producing yearswere the poorest sector of society, particularly those who could not rely on the support and/or charity of family.  And the necessity of supporting an elderly relative drove many young families into poverty because of the extra expenses and the foregone income of those who had to become caretakers. 
Today, those over 65 are the least likely of all age cohorts to live in poverty. 
The battle for Federal retirement insurancewas a long one.  The first such scheme was advocated as early as the 1820’s by trade unionists and socialists in Europe.  German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck implemented the first old age insurance plan in 1889 in the hope of achieving social stability in the new German Empire and uniting the loyalties of citizens of the various principalitieshe had brought together.  The German system provided contributory retirement benefits and disability benefitsas well.  Participation was mandatory and contributions were taken from the employee, the employer,and the government.  It would become essentially the model for F.D.R.’s initiative. 
Social security plans had spread over Europe but were resisted as unwanted government interference in business in this country.  Social security, along with unemployment insurance, a government medical plan, the eight hour day, and limits to child labor were key planks of Eugene V. Debs’ Socialist Party platform of 1912.  It was widely supported by most of the labor movement, although some craft unions which had wrung private pension plans from employers were opposed. 
Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins spearheaded the drive for Social Security for the administration.  Republicans in Congress bitterly opposed the program, decrying it as socialist, un-American, unconstitutional, and a business destroying tax burden.  Sound familiar?   

A poster promoting the 1939 Amended Social Security Act
But the program was still wildly popular with voters, who elected large majorities of Democrats committed to the program in both houses of Congress.  Some compromises, however, had to be made and the original system was far from perfect.  Nearly 50% of all workers were excluded from coverage including workers in agriculture, domestic service, government employees, and most teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers. The act also did not cover those who worked intermittently including most seasonal workers. 
These provisions fell especially heavy on women and minorities who were disproportionately engaged in these occupations.  90% of all domestic workers were women and 2/3 of all employed Black women worked in domestic service.  And Southern Black men were predominately engaged as agricultural workers.  For these reasons the NAACP actually opposed the legislation that reached Roosevelt’s desk calling it, “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” Most women qualified for old age insurance only through their husbands.  Women’s payments under the system were based on the presumption that mothers would not be in the work force.

Black workers heavily employed in agriculture, domestic service, seasonal and casual labor were largely excluded from Social Security coverage.  Women of all ages were disadvantaged by having their benefits tied to their husband's earnings.
The Social Security Act also established the Aid to Dependent Children, a welfare program designed to support childrenin unemployed families who had exhausted unemployment insurance.  Management of these programs was left to the States, at the insistence of Southern Democrats who did not want to disturb the racial status quo.  As a result Southern states routinely adopted rules making it difficult or nearly impossible for Black families to qualify. 
This became one of the major reasons, along with increased employment opportunities as the country geared up for war later in the decade, for the Great Migration of rural Southern Blacks to Northern cities. 
In 1937 the Social Security withholding taxwent into effect and the system began building reserves to make the first payments to retirees, originally scheduled for 1942.  Some economists charged that the income taken out of circulation by the tax was responsible for the 1937 Roosevelt Recession.  Others have pointed to drastic reductions in Federal spending because of budget concerns and because key elements of the New Deal had been declared unconstitutional as being the real culprit in the downturn.  Some felt that building a huge reserve before beginning to make pay-outs was a drag on the economy. 
So in 1939 Social Security was amendedto begin making payout two years earlier than planned.  This caused the plan to become de facto a pay as you go system with current workers supporting the immediate benefits to retirees instead of relying of a large accumulated fund.  The amendments did establish a trust fund for any surplus funds managed by the Secretary of the Treasury. The money could be invested in both non-marketable and marketable securities. 
But because this trust fund became a Treasury Department asset, Congress later began to borrow against it to fund current general spending.
Amendments to the act also tied women’s benefits more closely than ever to their husband’s income. The amendment added wives, elderly widows, and dependent survivors of covered male workers to those who could receive old age pensions. These individuals had previously been granted lump sum payments upon only death or coverage through the Aid to Dependent Children program.  

Ida Mae Fuller receives first Social Security check.in 1940.
While this rescued many widows from poverty, the amendments also devalued the value of benefits a woman could receive from her own labor.  If a married wage-earning woman’s own benefit was worth less than 50% of her husband’s benefit, she was treated as a wife, not a worker and the dependents of women who were covered by Social Security benefits were ineligible for her benefits.  Changes were also made to the Aid to Dependent Children program, including raising the age of eligible children to 18. 
Despite being far from perfect, the first monthly payment was issued on January 31, 1940 to Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont.

Buddhist Arsonists in Medieval Japan and the Burning Temples

✇ WWUUD?
13 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Soldier Monks from Mt. Heie burned rival temples in 1536 by the Western calendar.
My trusty Wikipedia historical calendar, the secret weapon of a blog that most frequently offers almanac style history posts, informs me that, Buddhist monks from Kyoto, Japan’s Enryaku-ji Temple in what is known as the Tenbun Hokke Disturbance burned the temples of rivals. The event is traditionally ascribed to this date in 1536.   Now I know next to nothing about either Buddhist history or medieval Japan, but that grabbed my attention.  After all, isn’t Buddhism supposed to be about peace and harmony?  At least that’s what my friends who spend their time squatting cross-legged on mats chanting and/or meditating tell me.  So the idea of rampaging monks wreaking havoc on rivals is a source of cognitive dissonance.
The details I could quickly discover in English without being sent scurrying to thick and dense tome of Japanese history are sketchy but go like this.
The Enryaku-ji Temple, which grew to be the largest, most influential, and powerful temple complex in Japan, was founded about 788 at the height of the Heian Period, the last epoch of classical Japanese history in the Imperial capitol of Heian-kyō, modern day Kyoto.  It was an era of great Chinese influence on the court and broader culture, particularly the flourishing of Taoism and Buddhism in a country long dominated by ancestor worshipping Shintoism.
The monk Saichō, given the posthumous honorific Dengyō Daishi, studied in China and introduced the Tendai  tradition of Mahayana Buddhism to his native country with the support of the Emperor Kammu.  Tendai differed sharply with already well established schools of Buddhism in the Hinayana.  He was granted permission to establish a teaching monastery on Mount Hiei.  The monetary at first was instructed to train devotees in two distinct and rival traditions—a ploy by the Emperor to bring peace between contentious sects.  But Saichō wanted to train and ordain his monks in the Tendai traditions instead of at the Tōdai-ji Temple under the ancient Vinaya Code.  This request was finally granted only after the master’s death in 822.
Tendai Buddhism was based in the teachings of the Bodhisattva Precepts.  I am informed also that it emphasized Esoteric Buddhism which aimed at achieving enlightenment through disciplined meditation and study in one lifetime rather than over eons of deathand rebirth, the Exoteric Tradition.  All of this is fuzzy to me, but I am sure is clear to my many Buddhist readers.
Under Saichō, his disciples, and successors training at the Enryaku-ji Temple was extremely rigorous and based on the principles of his personal vows composed when he was only 20:
So long as I have not attained the stage where my six faculties are pure, I will not venture out into the world.
So long as I have not realized the absolute, I will not acquire any special skills or arts [medicine, divination, calligraphy, etc.]
So long as I have not kept all the precepts purely, I will not participate in any lay donors Buddhist meetings.
So long as I have not attained wisdom, I will not participate in worldly affairs unless it be to benefit others.
May any merit from my practice in the past, present and future be given not to me, but to all sentient beings so that they may attain supreme enlightenment.

Saichō, Founder of the Temple.
Monks lived in seclusion from the world for 12 years on remote Mt. Hiei where they undertook a rigorous program of study and meditation.  More than half of the students left in their first year.  After completing their studies, only the best and most promisingstudents were accepted for ordination and sent to the 3000 sub-temples that were eventually established throughout Japan.  The remaining students were also highly valued and most entered the Imperial Service as civil servants and soldiers.
Things continued in this way for almost 300 years when a split occurred and competing schools of Tendai monks were established by the followers of Ennin and Enchin.  Both had been first generations disciples of Saichō and the teaching of their respective lines did not differ in many essentials.  Enchin was said to have promoted the worship of native Japanese Gods—essentially Shinto—as consistant with Confucian wisdom in addition to Buddhist spiritual practice.  Over the centuries the followers of the two schools with Ennins followers still based at the Enryaku-ji Temple known as the Mountain Order and Enchins at Mii-dera which was at the foot of Mt. Hiei, down slope from the mountain top temple.  Enchis’s followers became known as the Jimon sect or Temple School.
The conflict was more than anything about influence at court, prestige, and territorial conflicts.  Periodic clashes between monks escalated and each group assembled armies of soldier monks that often clashed and which also became entangled in court intrigue and dynastic disputes.  Sometimes the monk armies were supplemented with paid mercenaries including samurai and ronin warriors. 
But these disputes were only a prelude to a more deadly rivalry that began with the rise of Nichiren Buddhism in the 13 Century.  Founded by the monk Nichiren in 1253 who had studied at Tōdai-ji and other teaching centers, the new sect revolved heavily around the Lotus Sutra, which was also honored by Tendai monks.  But the Nichiren were highly sectarian to the point of being what we would now call fundamentalist.  They denied the legitimacy of all other Buddhist Schools and accused them of heresy to the original teaching of the Buddha.  They engaged in polemical wars with rivals, but also physical confrontations.  Their targets not only included both the Mountain Order and Temple School, but newer developing sects including emerging Zen, Nembutsu, Shingon, and Ritsu.    
In other words the Nichiren were sanctimonious, self-righteous, and a pain in the neck to just about everyone who did not agree with them.  That included the monks of Enryaku-ji Temple.  It is probably wise not to piss off a powerful and established sect with its own army.  Things came to a head in 1536 with Tenbun Hokke Disturbance, the burning of all of those temples, and attendant violence. 
The conflict came amid the chaotic period of Japanese history known as Warring States when feudal lords clashed for supremacy and Japan lay disunited.  A powerful, would-be uniter arose in the person of the War Lord Oda Nobunaga.  Warring temples and armies of monks represented the social chaos he strove to squelch as well a potential rival centers of power.  Oda attacked several contentious Temple centers, but Enryaku-ji was the most powerful.  In 1571 he attacked the Temple complex slaughtering all of the monks he could find and leveled the ancient buildings. Only one small shrine, the Ruri-dō or Lapis Lazuli Hall, isolated up a narrow and obscure path from the rest of the complex survive.

One of the many buildings the  UNESCO World Heritage site, Enryaku-ji Temple complex which were rebuilt after the arson fires.
After Japan was ultimately unified and the Tokugawa Shogunate was established in 1601, the monks returned to Mt.  Hiei and rebuilt the Enryaku-ji Temple complexes.  Those are the buildings that have been declared a United Nations International Cultural Site.
All of this sounds more like the familiar religious wars of Europe than what we expect of peace loving Buddhists.  The Japanese Buddhist wars were mostly confined to clashes between monks and armies, sparing the wide spread civilian slaughter as punishment for inappropriate worship that characterized the West.   Still, it was brutal enough.
And it was not entirely isolated in history.  Just a few years ago rival Korean Buddhists made world-wide headlinesfor pitched battles with clubs, knives, and swords over the possession of holy temples.  The brutal military masters of Miramar—Burma—were always said to be passionately observant Buddhists with great reverence for the tens of thousands of Temple monks, yet they not only turned their guns on their restive populations, they raided the temples, beat, murdered and imprisoned hundred of monks.  
I personally know Sri Lankan Buddhist monks who have converted our old Unitarian church in Woodstock, Illinois to the Blue Lotus Temple and I have never met such gentle spirits.  But the orders of monks from which they sprang back in Sri Lanka are militant in their opposition to and hatred of the dark-skinned Hindu Tamil minority and have resisted all attempts to find peace and reconciliation between the communities.  They can’t let go of the decades of tit-for-tat violence, terrorism, and military atrocities that still grip the country.

Ethnic Rakine buddhist monks in Myanmar demonstrate against minority Rohingra Muslims and have led ethnic cleansing and massacres according to the United Nations.
Sri Lankan Buddhists have also attacked minority Muslims and in Myanmar—former Burma—Rakine monks are engaged in what the United Nations has charged is brutal ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims including several documented massacres of minority villages.
The point is not to bash Buddhism.  Rather it is to point out that no philosophy, religion, or faith traditions, whatever the teachings of their founders and the continuing good will of their most spiritual leaders, are immune from falling into mere sectarianism and resorting to violence against those who can be seen somehow as others. 
Despite the spasms or Buddhist violence, these episodes are aberrations, not the norm.  The teachings of Buddhism are rooted in peace and tranquility and modern Buddhists like the Dalai Lama and Titch Nhat Hahn have been world leaders for inter-faith peace and respect.  

I don’t believe that religion itself is only that murderous spirit of some or that it is defined by its worst members and moments.  As a teenager who discovered the horrors of the Inquisition, European religious wars, and the fresh evidence of the HolocaustI fell into that easy, juvenile trap.  I screamed “a pox on all your houses”, avowed my atheism, and literally went out of my way to piss on churches for the next decade.  Foolish me.
There was nothing in the teachings of Jesusor the Buddha that was war-like.  Quite the contrary, both taught and sought peace and reconciliation.  The problemseems to come later, when prayers and incantations become empty words of ritual, when personal identification with the form of religion takes center stage, when holy institutions vie for power and wealth, and when those who do not share your prayer book are dehumanized into the monstrous other, that the problems arise.
Militant atheism as opposed to rationalism, free thought, true skepticism, humanism, or agnosticism easily becomes its own certain faith too eager to tell others that they should not/can not/will nothave their heretical faith.  These type of  atheists scream with protest when horrors of Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot et. al. are laid at their doorsteps, even as they are eager to hold every pew sitting Christian task for every murderous fanatic who ever carried a cross.
We are not much different than either those who have made peace or waged war.  We could go either way, given the circumstances.  If we want to choose peace, we must be on guard against our own certaintiesand our own eagerness to cast those with whom we differ as innately evil and undeservingof either compassion or consideration. 
It’s a lot harder than it looks. 

Cavalry Clash in Industrial Scale War—Battle of the Silver Helmets

✇ WWUUD?
12 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
The glorious charge of the German cavalry at Haelen, Belgium as portrayed in propaganda for the folks back home.
It should have been a perfectly splendid affray at the onset of what all sides seemed to think would be a glorious war providing for noble spectacle and opportunities for gallantry and honors sadly missing from Europe for generations.  The Great War was all shiny and new and all of the powers leaping madly into the melee were sure of rapid victory and Christmas at home.  And what could be a more fitting opening chapter than a clash between the dashing cavalry of two opposing armies, each still fitted out in splendor as if for a victory parade down a broad avenue.  It happened near a river ford town named Haelen in Belgium on August 12, 1914 just 105 years ago.
Thing had moved briskly in Europe since the assassination of an Austrian Archduke in his comic opera uniform and his wife in Sarajevo on June.  July was wasted on a complicated series of threats, ultimatums, and rejectionsthat spread complex patterns to countries far removed from the original clauses.  On July 28 Austria-Hungary finally declared war on Serbia and three days later Germany declared war on Russia for mobilizing to intervene on behalf of its ally and client state Serbia.  The three great Central and Eastern European empires were now committed, but the contagion could not be confined. 
On August 2 Germany invadedLuxembourg, obviously intending to move on Russian ally France.  The next Belgian government refused a German ultimatum to open its borders to the passage of German troops and Britain government guaranteed military support to Belgium should Germany invade. Contemptuously ignoring the warning Germany immediately entered Belgium and formally declared war on France, the British government ordered general mobilization and Italy declared neutrality.  The British mobilized and sent another ultimatum to Germany then quickly declared war on Germany at midnight on August 4 Central European time. The Belgium declaration of war was a final formality as the German army moved on Liège. 
The problem was that the huge armies of the major powers, each calling millions of men to arms, dwarfed anything before it in both complexity and the relatively short periods of time available to mobilize. The notoriously efficient Germans with their highly trained, professional army and largely Prussian General Staff and senior officer corps were able to get their large army on the move more quickly than France, which was still scrambling, and Britain which had to move an expeditionary force from the home islands.  
But even the Germans, like everyone else, were rusty. They had not been in major combatsince the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.  Only a handful of the most decrepit senior generals had even been lieutenants in that conflict.  The French, who were mad to revenge their humiliating defeat in 1870, had fought rebellions in their North African possessions but had mostly used their mercenary Foreign Legion troops who by law could not serve on French soil.  The British had been very busy with a seemingly endless succession of colonial wars in India, the Sudan, Afghanistan, and of course the Boer Wars in South Africa.  They had many combat seasoned officers and highly professional regiments in addition to reasonably trained reserves—and, of course, unchallenged world naval superiority.  But naval superiority would not immediately mean much in a land war in Europe and the British had not engaged a modern European army since the Crimean War which had ended way back in 1856.  And that had gone very badly for the British whose troops were poorly equipped, clothed, and supported and who were pounded in a relentless and brutal trench warfare campaign which should have been taken as lesson, but was, instead treated as an aberration. 
These armies had modern weapons—bolt action rifles that gave individual soldier and units many times the firepowerof their Napoleonic Eracounterparts, machine guns whose death dealing capabilities had not yet been fully understood as rendering old fashion mass maneuver and the gallant charge obsolete, light-weight and mobile mortars that could move and advance with infantry, and breach-loading and rifled cannon that could heave explosive shells far beyond the range of smooth bore cannon with greater accuracy.  
But they still moved by horse power.  No European army yet had more than a relative handful of trucks.  Civilian automobileswere in use as staff cars and a few were being tried out for scout vehicles, but since they could not operate reliably off roads were of limited use.  Motorcycles competed with bicycles and horses as messengers where telephone lines were down or unavailable. The Germans were using some limited radio communications as well, but the equipment was too bulky to accompany units in the field.  While in the mobilization phase, internal railway systems could deliver men and materiel to marshalling points, but after that—and certainly after entering enemy territory—artillery, ammunition, and baggage  was all horse-drawn greatly limiting the speed with which any army could advance even under ideal conditions with little or no armed opposition.
So, despite light opposition by the Belgians who were scrambling to get their small army in place and hopping for the early arrival of the French and English in large numbers, the Germans were not exactly slicing through the small country at lightning speed.  You are thinking of the highly mechanized Panzer Divisions that enabled the Blitzkrieg of the next war.  The Germans were plodding to Liège slowly and behind the detailed plans of the General Staff.

German Cavalry on the move early in the war.  These are Hussars--note the distinctive jackets worn draped over the left shoulder, the hallmark of this kind of cavalry.
Which is where the cavalry came in.  All of the European armies still carried large forces of cavalry, many still carrying lances for use against tightly packed infantry formations.  All of these forces were now also armed with rifles, carbines, and horse pistols.  They were to be used as cavalry had been deployed for centuries—for scouting and reconnaissance, for screening the flanks infantry to prevent ambushesor surprise attacks, for rapid movements ahead of the main army to seize strategic points like cross-roads and river fords, to harassthe enemy rear and disrupt baggage trains, over-run artillery positions, and finally in pitched battle as shock troops to shatter enemy infantry formations.  In the course of such operations it was to be expected that cavalry of opposing sides would discover each other resulting in that most glorious of all actions, a mounted cavalry battle with the blare of bugles, charges and counter charges, sabers slashing.
Like many units of most armies, the Cavalry was still outfitted in the splendor befitting old Napoleonic glory, or an only moderately subdued version of it.  Even infantry was not immune—the French Poilus marched to war in bright blue coats, red trousers, and kepis.  The Germans already preferred their gray uniforms, but many troops still wore patent leather spike helmets.  Only the British who had learned from bitter experience in all of their colonial wars that their traditions scarlet coats only made their troops easy targets, had adapted to dun brown woolens and a variety of soft caps and hats to provide regiments with distinctiveness.  But the cavalry, the glorious cavalry, were still in their gleaming silver helmets, or some other elaborate headdress, knee-high polished boots with spurs, cut-away jackets with split tails or waist-length tunics, gauntlets, and scabbered sabers still cut dashing figures.  Uniforms, including the colors of coats and breeches, might vary between types of horsemen—Hussars (light cavalry), Dragoons (multi-purpose assault and reconnaissance, frequently used as mounted infantry to fight on foot), Lancers (assault against infantry and artillery), and Cuirassiers (heavy cavalry with rifles or carbines and assault troops)—and between regiments.
Representative uniforms of Belgian cavalry units in World War I.  Some of those at Haelen also wore silver helmets, but few got to fight from the saddle.

The German generals decided to deploy their gaily bedecked cavalry—they had two whole divisions organized as the II Cavalry Corps under General Georg von der Marwitz.  Cavalry scouts sent ahead to reconnoiter along the routes to Antwerp, Brussels and Charleroi reported on August 7 a gap in the Allied line between Deist and Hay. 
Belgian lancers on scout duty.
On August 11 Belgian cavalry scouts reported a large movement of troops, including infantry, cavalry, and artillery were rumbling on the move.  Anticipating an attempt to breach the gap before more French reinforcements could arrive, the Belgian cavalry division under Lieutenant-General Léon de Witte was dispatched to secure the bridge over the River Gete at Haelen and either block the German advance or delay it long enough for the gap in the line to be filled.  De Witte was also pointedly ordered to use his cavalrymen as infantry and not to challenge the Germans on horseback. 
Those are disappointing orders for any cavalry commander, but de Witte complied speedily.  His mounted forces could move quickly to Haelen and had time to take up defensive positions with excellent cover.  His force consisted of five mounted regiments with 2,400 men, a bicycle company with 450 riflemen, and one company of pioneers (armed engineers).  He concentrated his forces at the rear of the village and spread some along concealed positions on his flanks should he be overwhelmed.
Also on the 11, the German 2nd Cavalry Division under Major-General von Krane was ordered ahead towards Spalbeek and the 4th Cavalry Division under Lieutenant-General von Garnier was to advance via Alken to Stevoort.  But neither force moved until August 12 because their horses and men were exhausted from a forced march in intense summer heat and sufficient oats for the horses had not caught up to them. 
Before they could move, however, the Belgians intercepted an encoded radio message that revealed the German force and its destinations—one of the first such instances in modern war and a red-flag warning to secure messages floating in the airways for anyone to pick up.  Belgian headquarters quickly dispatched the 4th Infantry Brigade to reinforce de Witte at Haelen
Germans from the 4th Division attempted to cross the Gete behind a screen provided by members of two Jäger battalions (literally hunters but elite specialized ranger units used as advanced skirmishers often in conjunction with the cavalry.)  The movement was detected and 200 advanced Belgian skirmishers set up defensive positions in the building of the town inflicting a whiting fire on the attackers.  Belgian pioneers blew the bridge but it failed to completely collapse.  German artillery rousted the defenders from the village sending them back across the river. 
Von Krane managed to get about 1000 of his mounted troopers across the bridge and into the town.  He must have been confident that he could scatter an inferior enemy.  He was wrong.  There was soon hell to pay.
The main Belgian line stretched west from the town and was hidden behind copses, hedges, and farm building.  Attacks there were repulsed because the attackers could not, in most cases even see the defenders or make out how they had deployed their line making traps likely. 
Haelen and to the south the Jägers and the 17th and 3rd Brigades of the 4th Division tried to advance through some corn fields.  Here they met disaster despite support from artillery and from a machine gun company.  The dismounted Belgians poured vicious fire into repeated charges by the cavalry, cutting the advance units to pieces as men and horses got tangled in barbed wire farm fences and floundered in a sunken road where they were picked off by sharpshooters and raked with machine gun fire.

The grim aftermath of the battle.
At the end of a long afternoon of sharp fighting the German retreated, the battered 4th Division toward Alken and the 2nd Division toward Hasselt.  It was a stunning victory for the plucky and outnumbered Belgians and a devastating loss of pride and prestige for the German cavalry.  Both sides sustained heavy casualties—the Belgians lost 160 dead and 320 wounded and the Germans lost 150 dead, 600 wounded, 200–300 prisoners.  The 4th Division alone lost a combined 501 men dead and wounded and 848 horses—casualty rates of 16% for men and 28% for horses.  That far exceeds the classical definition of decimation.  Far from expected glory, the German cavalry was given a grim preview of the relentless war ahead.
Despite the valiant stand, which is still celebrated by the Belgians if forgotten by everyone else, the action at Haelen barely slowed up the German advance across the country.  Germans besieged and captured fortified Namur, Liège,  and Antwerp and were not stopped until the Allies could mass enough troops along the Yser in late October of 1914 leaving the Germans in control of most of Belgium.  Then the war began to settle down into the grinding years of trench warfare so etched in the popular memory.

All that's left of glory--a gleaming helmet of a member of the German 2nd Cuirassiers found on the field of battle.
At home German propagandists turned the defeat of the Cavalry at Haelen as a gallant but futile loss, much as the English had romanticized the doomed Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea and the Americans had lionized Custer and the 7th Cavalry after the Little Big Horn.  Allied propagandists made hay of the Rape of Belgium by the inhuman Huns, and their German counterparts vowed vengeance for the slaughter of their Knights in the Silver Helmets.
Such is the way of war.

That Time Red-Faced America Paid Reparations to Detainees

✇ WWUUD?
11 August 2019 at 10:34
By: Patrick Murfin
From George Takei's graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy.
Given the disgraceful circumstances of our concentration camps for immigrants, asylum seekers, and whatever brown skinned legal residents and citizens get swept up with the not to mention the mass raids last week at Mississippi poultry plants, perhaps it is good to remember this tidbit of American History.  What will our heirs and progeny be mortified by us and how will they have to atone for our crimes?
On August 10, 1988, more than 45 years after the start of internment, the United States government authorized reparations payments to Japanese-Americansdetained during World War II.

President Ronald Reagan signing the bill apologizing for World War II internment of Japanese-Americans and authorizing alargely symbolic reparations.
Ten weeks after the December 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering 120,000 people of Japanese descent—including 75,000 American citizens—into internment camps. The announced purpose was to protect the West Coast from sabotage and collusion with the enemy, but the perceived threat was based more in racial prejudice than military strategy, as the great majority German-American and Italian-Americanresidents were allowed to remain in their homes undisturbed.  And despite the large pre-war German-American Bundwith its openly pro-Nazi rallies and proven networks of spies and saboteurs.  
For the length of  the war, Americans of Japanese descent and Japanese nationals—many of denied American citizenship based on racially discriminatory quotas—were imprisoned in makeshift internment camps throughout the West Coast and as far east as Arkansas. Interned people were forced to abandontheir homes, farms, and businesses, or sell them at rock bottom prices, losing economic stability and generational wealth. The 1944 U.S. Supreme Court decision Korematsu v. U.S., upheld Roosevelt’s executive order.
Despite the trauma the great majority of the detainees remained loyal to America and thousands of their young men volunteered for service in the Armed forces.  That included members of the 442nd Infantry Regiment made up of Nisei—second generation American citizens—that became the most decorated unit of it size during the war for its hard-fighting service in Italy and France.

A member of the Nesei 442nd Regiment on guard in France in 1945.
After the war, Japanese-Americans returned home to distrust and resentment. Wartime internment traumatized an entire generation of people and continues to impact their descendants. 

After the war the detainies were often unwanted back in their home communities.

Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, survivors of internment organized to demand that the United States government address this history.
In 1980, Congress established a commission to investigate the internment camps and their legacy. The report decried Japanese internment as a “grave injustice” and acknowledged that the internment was fueled by “racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.” 
The decade-long efforts of Japanese American civil rights advocates were realized when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which provided an apology and compensation of $20,000 to living survivors of Japanese internment. An estimated 50,000 people interned during the war diedbefore the reparation act’s passage.
Although Japanese Americans were gratified by the acknowledgement of the grave injustice done to them and for the formal apology, the cash settlements were a drop in the bucket compared to actual losses.  
A one day evacuation sale at a Japanese-American owned business.  Many did not even have the timer or opportunity to even attempting to get some value for their abandoned property.
Hard working and industrious Japanese had some of the finest farms on the West Coast, prosperous businesses in towns and cities as well as high-rates of home ownership.  All of that caused resentment and envy by their neighbors, many of whom swooped in to claim their property legallyor by winked-at outright theft.  A mere $20,000 came nowhere near making up those losses, especially considering inflation.  And by denying recompense to the tens of thousands who had already died, their heirs were effectively cheated as well.
In the decades after the apology and reparations, a public consensus grew that the internment was one of the blackest episodes in American history.  But now with new camps—and proposals to actually use former Japanese internment camps—springing up like mushrooms, a spate of Trump apologists, right-wing ideologues, and outright White nationalists—not only defend the camps but exult in them.  And they assail the birthright citizenship of the Nisei generations.  The Japanese like the millions of Latino American citizensare derided as alien stains on White America.

A Trump rally in Iowa where more than half of his supports agree that World War II internment was justified and wanted the same treatment for Muslim-Americans.  They support the border concentration camps today by even larger margins
There is every evidence that Donald Trump shares that view—he has threatened to try to end birthright citizenship by fiat—executive order—and many of his Make America Great Again devotees cheer it on.  An unthinkable cancer is spreading.
All because we are already forgetting the lessons of Manzanar.

The Purple Heart—The Medal My Father Didn’t Want

✇ WWUUD?
10 August 2019 at 10:36
By: Patrick Murfin

My father never wanted a Purple Heart and dodged attempts to pin one on him.  W.M. Murfin served as an Army Medical Corps officer in the Pacific during World War II.  That service included three amphibious landings under fire and front-line service with forward battalion aid stations.  While never seriously wounded he was injured three times including being cut up crawling over barbed wire and scrapes and abrasions rescuing seriously wounded soldiers under fire.  On one day of such rescues when his unit was cut off by the Japanese on Leyte in the Philippines he dragged several men to safety under machine gun fire.  That earned him the Bronze Star.  He was glad to receive that medal and after the War kept it in its presentation case along with another award he treasured—his Eagle Scout medal.
First Lieutenant W.M. Murfin, U.S. Army Medical Corps on Leyte in the Philippines in 1943.
But he dodged the Purple Heart despite repeated attempts to give him one.  He knew what they represented and what they were worth—as a Medical Corps officer he had handed out scores of them to the maimed men his unit treated.  He felt that his own minor bleeding did not match the suffering of those in his care.  He also felt, sometimes at least, that the medal was a trinket that was inadequate recompense for the pain and suffering.
The Purple Heart is said to be the oldest U.S, combat decoration which it is, sort of, but then again isn’t.  Let me explain.
During the Revolutionary War the Continental Army did not have formal awards for bravery.  This was due partly to concern for republican virtue—a rejection of the titles and decorations of European royalty and their military, and partly because no one knew exactly who could or should authorizesuch awards, Congress, the Commanding General, or even the states.  Besides, everyone was concerned by more pressing matters.
But in 1782 with the war slowly winding down after the defeat of Cornwallis’ army at Yorktownand as peace negotiations dragged on in Paris George Washington was faced with a restless—and mostly unpaid—army in his camp at Newberg, New York
The only formal recognition of bravery or distinguished service was a mention in official reports on engagements.  Most frequently officers were cited, non-commissioned officers and private soldiers only rarely.  Some time the citations were read aloud to units in assembly but even that was often overlooked.  
Just once, in 1780, Congress authorized the striking of a special medal designated at the Fidelity Medallion to honor three soldiers who were conspicuous in the capture of Major John André, the man who received Benedict Arnold’s traitorous offer to deliver West Point to the British.  But the three men, Privates John Paulding, David Williams, and Isaac Van Wart were New York militiamen not troops of the Continental Line.  The Fidelity Medallion was never awarded again and is thus considered a commemorative award rather than a regular military decoration.
George Washington's Revolutionary War cloth Badge of Military Merritt.
General Washington designed a cloth purple heart shaped patch that could be sewn on a uniform.  On August 7, 1782 he signed an order authorizing the award of a Badge of Military Merritt to specifically award the “common soldier” and was meant to recognize those who gave “loyal military service.” Washington personally cited three men—sergeants William Brown, Elijah Churchill, and Daniel Bissel who served as a spy.  All three were from Connecticut. Other commanders were authorized to make the award as well, but it is unclear if any did, or how many may have been granted before the Continental Army officially disbanded. Any records of such awards would have been kept in an Orderly Book which has never been found.
After the war the Badge of Military Merritt was never again awarded, although the honor was not officially abolished.  It simply was forgotten.  None-the-less, the boosters of the modern Purple Heart medal claim that it directly traces its origins to Washington’s 1782 order.  The claim is tenuous at best, but those who lobbied for the creation of the current medal identified it with the Badge and its design was based on the purple heart shape with a cameo of Washington added to bolster the connection.
Through the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and several Indian campaigns, the Army had no decoration for bravery.  With the coming of the Civil War there was a clamor for an award for heroism.  No one seemed to have thought to revive the Badge of Merritt.  At the outset of the war Commanding General Winfield Scottopposed the creation of a medal as an un-republican symbol of aristocracy and privilege.  After Scott retired late in 1861 Navy Secretary Gideon Wells requested authorization of a medal from Congress.  By 1862 separate legislation authorized a Medal of Honor for each service.
With no other awards available the Medal of Honor was soon handed out nearly wholesale.  In the Civil War alone 1,523 were awarded and before World War I another 767 were handed out for conflicts big, small, and obscure including the Indian Wars, Spanish-American Wars, Philippine Rebellion, Boxer Rebellion, and the occupation of Veracruz.  
By 1916 the Army became convinced that the Medal of Honor had become devalued by capricious awards.  After a report of a special Medal of Honor Review Board the Army rescinded 911 of the awards in 1917.  During World War I far fewer were awarded, but new medals were authorized for bravery below the level of “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.”  A number of new decorations were created for heroism in combat below the Medal of Honor including the Distinguished Service and Navy Crosses, Silver Star, and Bronze Star.  But the Badge of Merritt was not among them.
However nearly ten years after the war ended Army brass had second thoughts about being relatively stingy with medals during the Great War.  Army Chief of Staff General Charles Pelot Summerall proposed reviving the long defunct Badge of Merritt in 1928 but it died in Congress.  His successor General Douglas MacArthur with the support of private lobbying groups confidentially reopened work on a new design, involving the Washington Commission of Fine Arts and Elizabeth Will an Army heraldic specialistin the Office of the Quartermaster General.  By Executive Order of PresidentHerbert Hoover in one of his final acts the award was revived on the 200th Anniversary of George Washington’s birth, amid considerable hoopla by War Department General Order No. 3, dated February 22, 1932.
The criteriafor the new Purple Heart medal was broad—and retroactive.  Servicemen from April 5, 1917, the day before the U.S. entered the war were eligible upon their request if they had the Meritorious Service Citation Certificate, Army Wound Ribbon, or were authorizedto wear Wound Chevrons on their uniforms.  The Service Citation was a given for “meritorious performance of duty” which could include combat but also other exceptional service.  Civilians serving with the military—Red Crossand YMCA volunteers for example were also eligible.
The first non-retroactivePurple Heart was awarded to General MacArthur not for wounds, but for his meritorious service during the defense of the Philippines.
In World War II many G.I.s were given their Purple Hearts by the staff of military hospitals.  This soldier seems happy to get his--perhaps because he received a "ticket home" wound.
Until early in World War II the same criteria were used for new awards.  By executive order in December 1942 the practice of awarding the Purple Heart for meritorious service was discontinued and the award limited to wounds suffered in combat.  Eligibility was extended to all armed services.  
During World War II, 1,506,000 Purple Heart medals were manufactured, many in anticipation of the estimated casualties resulting from the planned Allied invasion of Japan. By the end of the war, even accounting for medals lost, stolen or wasted, nearly 500,000 remained. More than 70 years later that cacheof medals is still being used.  In 2000 more than 120,000 were in stock—plenty for new conflicts from Desert Storm to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  As in previous wars there were plenty on hand with combat units for immediate award to the wounded.  
Since World War II there have been several adjustments to eligibility including allowing for posthumous awards; excluding previously eligible civilians; including those wounded in terroristattacks, or while serving as part of a peacekeeping force, and to former prisoners of war wounded after April 25, 1962.
U.S. Army Major General Carla G. Hawley-Bowland pins a Purple Heart medal on U.S. Army Medical Corps Sergeant Juan Roldan-Jaramillo during a ceremony at Walter Reed Medical Center in 2008. The Sergeant lost both of his legs from an improvised explosive device (IED) attack in Iraq.
An accurate total of Purple Hearts awarded is impossible since a great many were presented without ceremony or documentation in war zones when the wounded were treated for their injuries.  In 2009 National Geographic estimated the following totals of Purple Hearts awarded by conflict. 

    World War I—320,518
    World War II—1,076,245
    Korean War—118,650
    Vietnam War—351,794
    Persian Gulf War—607 
    Afghanistan War—7,027 (as of June 5, 2010)
    Iraq War—35,321 (as of June 5, 2010)
Additional decorations have been awarded in numerous other operations among them the bombing of a Marine barracks in Lebanonin 1983; the invasions of Granada and Panama; peace keeping activities in Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993; the NATO campaign against Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War in 1999, and the Benghazi attack in Libya in 2012.
The Military Order of the Purple Heart has helped place scores of monuments like this one on the Square in Woodstock, Illinois


The Military Order of the Purple Heart (MOPH) was chartered by Congress in 1932 and is restricted to veterans who have received the medal.  It currently has approximately 45,300 members.  The Order annually promotes Purple Heart Day on August 7, helps place Purple Heart monuments in many locations including Woodstock, Illinois, and assists returning lost medals to the recipients or their families. 
All honor to those who have received the Purple Heart.  But as Dad knew, it’s the medal no one wants to earn.



Here We Go Again—A Vow to Remain Un-numbed with Murfin Verse

✇ WWUUD?
6 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
A gun man in El Paso--White rage, a weapon of war, and a manifesto.
Note—ordinarily a blog entry for this date would remember and ponder the dropping of the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima in 1949—the fires of hell unleashed on Earth changing everything. We have lived under what I have called “The Inevitable Umbra of the Mushroom Cloud” for74 years now.  But this year another dreadful fire burns in our country and threatens to consume it—the poisonous stew of White supremacy and nationalism crossed by toxic masculinity, freely armed by gun worship cult, and abated by a fascist criminal in the White House.
Over the years I have written poetry often, far too often, after explosions of gun violence, mass murder, and domestic terrorism in this country.  It feels like there is hardly anything else to say—no new insights, outrage, or grief.  The parade of atrocities seems never ending, as does our by now ritualized and inadequate responses.  But however familiar they become, we cannot allow ourselves to be numbed by them.  We cannot lay aside our outrage and our anger not only against the individual perpetrators, but those who encourage, abet, and arm them. We must resist the culture that fosters violence and hate and take positive action—far more than ever before—to stop it.
In lieu of new pieces inspired by killing sprees in El Paso, Dayton and elsewhere, here are three poems that remain still relevant.
The victims at Umpqua Community College--now barely a footnote.
Remember the Umpqua Community College shooting?  Probably not.  Ancient history as these things go—way back in 2015.  Wikipedia reminds us that:
The Umpqua Community College shooting occurred on October 1, 2015, at the UCC campus near Roseburg, Oregon, United States. Chris Harper-Mercer, a 26-year-old student who was enrolled at the school, fatally shot an assistant professor and eight students in a classroom. Eight others were injured. Roseburg police detectives responding to the incident engaged Harper-Mercer in a brief shootout. After being wounded, he killed himself by shooting himself in the head. The mass shooting was the deadliest in Oregon's modern history.
What stunned me that time was how before the bodies were even cold the gun worshipers and NRA trolls were all over social media wailing that they were the real victims.  The same this week with some new twists.  Less than an hour of the first bulletins, someone posted that the El Paso shooting was “another false flag attack”  and the whole thing was just more “fake news” to empower gun grabbers.  In the past the NRA line was feigned sympathy along with finger pointing at Democrats, liberals, bleeding hearts, mental illness, movies, rap music, video games, and the ever reliable—taking prayer from schools.  The answer, they say is more guns and they blame the victims for failing to be armed to the teeth. 
There was plenty of that again this time from the Lt. Governor of Texas, an official White House spokesmen, and a parade of Republican Congress rats.   But there was also something even more sinister.  Emboldened and enabled by Presidential Tweets and rally rants,  White Supremacists and Nationalists are openly cheering for the gunmen and violence on the so-called Dark Web—the online forum 8chan, the neo-Nazi web page Stormfront and other sites.  Shooters are hailed as heroes and saints and open calls are made for more killings in the hope that a wave of them will destabilize the nation leading to a collapse upon which Arians can construct their utopia free from the “mud races,” Jews, and race traitors.

Ritual Bloodletting, Breast Beating, and Blaming
October 1, 2015
In the Wake of Umpqua Community College Killings

Grief stricken families, victims, and survivors
            are the bullies
            the launchers of vast, dark conspiracies
            and the gun worshipers and fantasy world heroes
            the mewling, pitiful victims.

Step right over the victims.
            Don’t slip on the blood.
            Remember what is Holy and Sacred.

…Or we will kill you.

—Patrick Murfin

            
Not John Brown.
Less than two months later a self-proclaimed John Brown of the Right to Life movement dealt death at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood Clinic. A police officer and two women at the clinic as patients or accompanying patients were killed; five police officers and four civilians were injured.

He Who Shall Not Be Named Here
November 27, 2015
After Colorado Springs

No!  He is not Old John Brown 
            come round again
            no matter the wild eyes
            and wilder beard.

The unborn will not rise up
            and arm themselves,
            to wreck vengeance on
            the women who carry them
            and anyone who ever
            had a kind word or thought 
            for them.

God is not on his side
            just as He/She/It 
            is not on the side
            righteous trigger happy cops
            tempted by the backs
            of Black young people.

Just as Allah is not on the side
            of fanatics in Syria, Iraq, and Paris.

He will never savor martyrdom,
            ride to his own hanging
            on his casket,
            only the long, lonely oblivion
            of maximum prison hole.

Despite his yearnings
            a nation will not march to war
            with his name ringing in song
            on hundred thousand lips.

With luck, rivers of blood
            and mountains of corpses,
            families turned against families,
            the land laid waste,
            will not be his legacy.

With luck.

—Patrick Murfin

             
Bodies amid the refuse of the stampede to get out of the line of fire in Las Vegas.

The efficient mass murder in Las Vegas in 2017 was unusual only that it was carried on from a distance—a hotel snipers’ nest overlooking an outdoor concert.  By happenstance it occurred exactly two years after the Umpqua rampage.  The shooter killed 58 people and wounded 422, and the ensuing panicbrought the injury total to 851.

What Doesn’t Stay In Vegas
October 3, 2017

What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay there.

It oozes under the front door 
of that little house in Tennessee
leaving a nasty stain in the carpet
that will last generations.

It drips from the empty desk
            in the high school office
            where the phone rings unattended
            next to a famed family photo
            and a jar of M & Ms.

It is tangled in the nets
            of that Alaska trawler
            spilling on the deck
            and splattering those rubber boots.

It has to be wiped from the table
            of that Disneyland café
            by some other harried waitress
            before it spoils some child’s
            special day
            or gets on Snow White’s costume.

It pools by the council’s table
            in a San Diego courtroom
            the empty chair 
            unable to represent 
            the mother of three.

It cannot be washed from
            the filthy hands
            of every politico 
            who took gun pushers’ cash
            and kissed the ass of every
            fetishist wanking himself off
            to violence porn and hero fantasies.

—Patrick Murfin

A target for Valentine's Day.

After the February 14, 2018 slaughter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, I began to see a pattern.

Three Holes in the Valentine Heart

Chicago 1929

Toddlin’ Town rat-a-tat-tat,
            just Jazz Age juice and justice,
            Tommy guns talkin’
            fedoras flying,
            mugs massacred,
            wanna-be eye doc,
            grease monkey
            garage gore gone.

“Only Capone kills like that.”

Cool beans!
            Gangsters!

            —Patrick Murfin


Northern Illinois University 2008

Gunman on campus!
            Good-guy grad student
            gone goofy
            lecture hall lesson
            in shot gun blasts
            and Glock gotchas.

Campus cops closing in, 
            one last round 
            under the chin,
            oblivion.

Twenty-three down, 
            sixteen shot,
            five dead and,
            oh yeah, the perp.

Is that all?
            Piker!  Ain’t no Virginia Tech!
            hardly worth the weeping and wailing
            all those vigils and candlelight!

And the NRA says all those pussy students
            who didn’t pack their own heat
            should have OK corralled it.

Nothing to see here,
            move along.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School 2018

Crazy Cruz kid had issues,
            gas mask, smoke grenades,
            and a handy AK-47
            extra magazines just in case.

Shoot, pull fire alarm.
            spray death, kick in doors,
            spray death, repeat.
            Efficient.

Thoughts and prayers 
            out the wazoo today.
            Blame tomorrow.
            Not me, not us.
            Unpreventable.

Look….a squirrel
            or Stormy Danniels’ cleavage,
            any damn thing…

—Patrick Murfin


Martín Espada—Two Poems for a Lights for Liberty Rally

✇ WWUUD?
5 August 2019 at 10:56
By: Patrick Murfin
Poet Martín Espada.
My friend Everett Hoagland, proud and skilled Black poet who has lived and worked much of his life in mostly white environments was kind enough to share the work of another writer of importance and discernment.  Hoagland has been the poet laureate of New Bedford, Massachusetts and is a long-time member of the First Unitarian Church there.  When Everett recommends a poet I sit up and take notice
Martín Espada is a 61 year old poet, academic, and activist who was born in Brooklyn, New York to Puerto Rican parents.  His father was a leader in the Puerto Rican community and the civil rights movement.  Espada received a B.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a doctorate of law from Northeastern University in Boston.  For many years, he worked as a tenant lawyer and a supervisor of a legal services program. 
In 1982, Espada published his first book of political poems, The Immigrant Iceboy's Bolero, featuring photography by his father.  Since then he has written thirteen more highly praised volumes in English and in Spanish, most recently Vivas to Those Who Have Failed which was published in 2016 by W.W. Norton.

His work has gleaned honors including the National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1986; the PEN/Revson Foundation Fellowship in Poetry, 1989; Paterson Poetry Prize, 1991; National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, 1992; National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist, 1997; Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, 1997; Pushcart Prize, 1999,  Independent Publisher Book Award, 1999; Poet Laureate of Northampton, Massachusetts, 2001; American Library Association Notable Book, 2004; John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2006; Pulitzer Prize Finalist, 2007; Library Journal Best Poetry Books, 2007; National Hispanic Cultural Center Literary Award, 2008; Massachusetts Book Award, 2012; International Latino Book Award, 2012; Busboys and Poets Award, 2014; Academy of American Poets Fellowship, 2018; and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, 2018 among others.
He is currently a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he teaches poetry.
Espada spoke at a July 12 Lights for Liberty vigil to end detention camps at the Unitarian Universalist First Church in Salem, Massachusetts. The two poems he shared there and some explanatory notesare featured in the current issue of the venerable Progressive.
Espada's Lights for Liberty poems are in the current July/August issue of The Progressive.
Espada explained his first verse:
Trump announced his candidacy in June 2015, with the pronouncement that Mexicans crossing the border brought with them a range of criminal tendencies from drug smuggling to rape. That August, two brothers, Scott and Steve Leader, took him at his word, attacking a homeless Mexican immigrant as he slept outside the JFK subway stop on the Red Line.
This poem is about that hate crime. It’s also about Donald Trump’s idea of hell: empathy. There were many more healing hands than hurting hands placed on the victim’s body that night. Now, since this is a poem about a hate crime, there is some language and imagery you might find ugly. The poem is called:
Not for Him the Fiery Lake of the False Prophet
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. —Donald Trump, June 16, 2015
They woke him up by pissing in his face. He opened his mouth 
to scream in Spanish, so his mouth became a urinal at the ballpark.

Scott and Steve: the Leader brothers, celebrating a night at Fenway, 
where the Sox beat the Indians and a rookie named Rodríguez spun 
the seams on his changeup to hypnotize the Tribe. Later that night, 
Steve urinated on the door of his cell, and Scott told the cops why 
they did it:  Donald Trump was right. All these illegals need to be deported.

He was a Mexican in a sleeping bag outside JFK station on a night 
in August, so they called him a wetback and emptied their bladders
in his hair. In court, the lawyers spoke his name: Guillermo Rodríguez
immigrant with papers, crop-picker in the fields, trader of bottles 
and cans collected in his cart. Two strangers squashed the cartilage
in his nose like a can drained of beer. In dreams, he would remember
the shoes digging into his ribcage, the pole raked repeatedly across
his cheekbones and upraised knuckles, the high-five over his body.

Donald Trump was right, said Scott. And Trump said: The people 
that are following me are very passionate. His hands fluttered 
as he spoke, a demagogue’s hands, no blood under the fingernails, 
no whiff of urine to scrub away.  He would orchestrate the chant 
of Build That Wallat rally after rally, bellowing till the blood rushed 
to his face, red as a demagogue in the grip of masturbatory dreams:
a tribute to the new conquistador, the Wall raised up by Mexican hands,  
Mexican hair and fingernails bristling in the brick, Mexican blood 
swirling in the cement like raspberry syrup on a vanilla sundae. 
On the Cinco de Mayo, he leered over a taco bowl at Trump Tower.

Not for him the fiery lake of the false prophet, reddening
his ruddy face. Not for him the devils of Puritan imagination,
shrieking in a foreign tongue and climbing in the window
like the immigrant demons he conjures for the crowd.

Not even for him ten thousand years of the Leader brothers.
streaming a fountain of piss in his face as he sputters forever.

For him, Hell is a country where the man in a hard hat
paving the road to JFK station sees Guillermo and dials 911;
Hell is a country where EMTs kneel to wrap a blanket around
the shivering shoulders of Guillermo and wipe his face clean;
Hell is a country where the nurse at the emergency room
hangs a morphine drip for Guillermo, so he can go back to sleep.
Two thousand miles away, someone leaves a trail of water bottles
in the desert for the border crossing of the next Guillermo.

We smuggle ourselves across the border of a demagogue’s dreams:
Confederate generals on horseback tumble one by one into 
the fiery lake of false prophets; into the fiery lake crumbles
the demolished Wall. Thousands stand, sledgehammers in hand, 
to await the bullhorns and handcuffs, await the trembling revolvers. 
In the full moon of the flashlight, every face interrogates the interrogator. 
In the full moon of the flashlight, every face is the face of Guillermo.

—Martín Espada

Espada wrote the second poem especially for the Lights for Liberty rally.
The mass incarceration of migrant children—by the thousands—is also a hate crime. Let’s call it what it is. And that brings me to a place called Tornillo. The Trump Administration opened the Tornillo internment center in Texas in June 2018 and closed it in January 2019. My good friend Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, as Director of Research and Advocacy at Hope Border Institute in El Paso, was a major organizer in the campaign to shut down Tornillo—and shut it down they did.
Camilo told me: “the one place the kids detained there told us they felt free was on the soccer field . . . It was the only place they could be connected in some kind of physical flow with the world beyond the barbed wire, by kicking as many soccer balls as high and as far as they could, beyond the fencing around them. Large numbers of these balls piled up quickly outside and at the edges of the facility.”
Latino youth play soccer.
Ode to the Soccer Ball Sailing Over a Barbed Wire Fence
          Tornillo…has become the symbol of what may be the largest U.S. mass detention of children not charged with crimes since the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans. —Robert Moore, Texas Monthly

Praise Tornillo: word for screw in Spanish, word for jailer in English,  
word for three thousand adolescent migrants incarcerated in camp.

Praise the three thousand soccer balls gift-wrapped at Christmas,
as if raindrops in the desert inflated and bounced through the door.

Praise the soccer games rotating with a whistle every twenty minutes 
so three thousand adolescent migrants could take turns kicking a ball.

Praise the boys and girls who walked a thousand miles, blood caked  
in their toes, yelling in Spanish and a dozen Mayan tongues on the field.

Praise the first teenager, brain ablaze like chili pepper Christmas lights,
to kick a soccer ball high over the chain link and barbed wire fence.

Praise the first teenager to scrawl a name and number on the face
of the ball, then boot it all the way to the dirt road on the other side.

Praise the smirk of teenagers at the jailers scooping up fugitive 
soccer balls, jabbering about the ingratitude of teenagers at Christmas.

Praise the soccer ball sailing over the barbed wire fence, white
and black like the moon, yellow like the sun, blue like the world.

Praise the soccer ball flying to the moon, flying to the sun, flying to other 
worlds, flying to Antigua Guatemala, where Starbucks buys coffee beans.

Praise the soccer ball bounding off the lawn at the White House,
thudding off the president’s head as he waves to absolutely no one.

Praise the piñata of the president’s head, jellybeans pouring from his ears, 
enough to feed three thousand adolescents incarcerated at Tornillo.

Praise Tornillo: word in Spanish for adolescent migrant internment camp, 
abandoned by jailers in the desert, liberated by a blizzard of soccer balls.

—Martín Espada
On a personal note, Espada second poem evoked one of the few specific stories that my father, W.M. Murfin, ever told me about his World War II experiences.
Italian POWs in Libya--glad to be out of the war.
He was the top sergeant of a U.S. Army Field Hospital attached to the British and ANZAC troops under Field Marshal Montgomery who chased Rommel and his Afrika Korpsout of Egypt and across North Africa.   In the deserts of Libya the hospital pitched its tents next to a prisoner of war camp for captured Italian troops.  Most of the Italians had gladly surrendered and were happy to be out of the war.  The Tommies in their khaki shorts and tin hats for the most part treated the prisoners well.  They reserved their rage and vengeance for the Germans and Nazis.
Aside from some hastily erected gun towers, the camp had no wallsor even barbed wire fence.  There was no need—there was nowhere to escape to in the vast and terrible desert.  Lines literally scratched in the ground were the only marks of the camp’s perimeter. 
The Brits gave their prisoners some of their footballs to kick around to pass the time.  The Italians quickly organized teams and were playing il calico—soccer—on the sands.  One idle afternoon under the baking sun patients and staff from the hospital joined inmates and guards to watch a match.
During the back and forth action the ball got kicked out of bounds and across the camp’s line in the sand.  Without thinking a player sprinted after it.  When he crossed the line without even a shouted warning, a guard shot him dead.
Of all of the horrormy Dad saw in the war in North Africa and then in three Pacific island landings this one senseless execution haunted him the most.

The Temple in Flames—The Enduring Effects of the Fall of Jerusalem

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4 August 2019 at 09:59
By: Patrick Murfin
As the Temple and City of Jerusalem burn Titus's Legions make off with the loot including the Menorah from the Holy of Holies. 
By tradition it was on this date in 70 CE that Roman Legions under the command of Titus Flavius Vespasianus, the future Emperor Titus, set fire to the Second Temple in Jerusalem destroying it and much of the city.  The date is commemorated by Tisha B’Av, the saddest day of the Hebrew Calendar.
In 66 the Zealots had risen up and expelled the Romans from the Judean capital.  They had held sway there for four years.  But they were divided by factionalism and were actively opposed by the Pharisees and the Sadducees who were bitter about the Zealot’s lack of obedience to traditional Jewish law and to the authority of the priests of the Temple.  They also felt that the Zealots uncompromising anti-Roman militancyput the whole the Jewish people at risk.
Of course the Romans were not used to losing territory that they considered their own.  Titus arrived with his Legions earlier in the year and began to lay siege to the city.  They choked off most commerce to the city and encouraged starvation by allowing pilgrims from the countryside to enter the city then not allowing them to returnswelling the population.  Starvation and suffering in the city was reportedly made worse by the Zealots burning years of accumulated food and firewood reserves supposedly in order to make the people desperate to break the siege according by hostile Rabbinic scholars writing a century later.
Titus leads The Conquest of Jerusalem by Nicola Poussin.
Much of what we know about the siege and the destruction of the Temple, in fact, comes from hostile sources because the Zealots in the city were largely massacred and survivors died later in the Siege of Masada.  
In addition to the rabbinic accounts we have the writings of Josephus, a former leader of the uprising in the north who was captured by the Romans in 67 CE.  Eventually he was freed by the Emperor Vespasian and became a Roman citizen.  He accompanied the Emperor’s son Titus as a translator on the expedition and took the Roman name Titus Flavius Josephus.  He is the same historian who made the only near-contemporary notice of the life of Jesus.  Thus the most detailed account that we have, the one most relied on by contemporary historians was written by a turn coat and courtier trying to keep and win favors from his Roman masters.
Historian Josephus--The Jewish turn coat as Roman citizen Titus Flavius Josephus left the most detailed account of the burning of the Temple and the destruction of Jerusalem.
Josephus was dispatched by Titus to enter the city and attempt to negotiate a settlement.  Not only was the overture repulsed, but Josephus was wounded by an arrow.  Titus then stepped up the siege, breaching the third and second city walls by battering ram in May.  
Turning their attention to the Fortress of Antonia just north of the Temple Mount, the Legions engaged in vicious street fighting, slowly pushing the Zealots back to a last stand in the Temple itself while taking heavy casualties.  The casualties, along with others sustained in various break-outs to secure food and hector the Roman rear, enraged the Legionnaires who were clamping at the bit against Titus’s supposed policy of moderation and eventual conciliation with the Jews.  At least as Josephus told it later.
The last stand of the Zealots on the walls of the Temple.
The Fortress of Antonia finally fell giving the Romans a commanding presence over the Temple.  While the Temple walls were too thick to be breached by battering ram, Legionnaires could pepper the Temple compound with arrows, stones and other missiles.  Despite Titus’s orders that the Temple not be destroyed, it was set ablaze by burning fagots which ignited the roofs of adjacent buildings.  It was engulfed in flames, as was much of the city.  The walls were breached and defenders threw the stones from them onto adjacent streets to impede the Romans where some of them can still be seen.  When the fire went out, only the Western Wall was left standing of the Second Temple, which had been built by Herod the Great only 90 earlier on the site of the Temple of Solomon which itself was destroyed 700 years earlier.
Carrying the spoils of the Temple, including the sacred Menorah from the Holy of Holies in a Roman Triumph as depicted on the Arch of Titus.
Some of the Zealots escaped the city.  Most of the survivors retreated to the north of the city for a last stand.  The Romans constructed siege towers and breached the final wall to the north, eradicating resistance by early September.
Titus ordered the complete destruction of the city, its suburbs, what was left of the Temple, and the slaughter of the inhabitants.  According to Josephus over a millionwere killed, an impossible number, but surely tens of the thousands.  Here is a bit of his account:
  Now as soon as the army had no more people to slay or to plunder, because there remained none to be the objects of their fury (for they would not have spared any, had there remained any other work to be done), [Titus] Caesar gave orders that they should now demolish the entire city and Temple, but should leave as many of the towers standing as they were of the greatest eminence; that is, Phasaelus, and Hippicus, and Mariamne; and so much of the wall enclosed the city on the west side. This wall was spared, in order to afford a camp for such as were to lie in garrison [in the Upper City], as were the towers [the three forts] also spared, in order to demonstrate to posterity what kind of city it was, and how well fortified, which the Roman valor had subdued; but for all the rest of the wall [surrounding Jerusalem], it was so thoroughly laid even with the ground by those that dug it up to the foundation, that there was left nothing to make those that came thither believe it [Jerusalem] had ever been inhabited. This was the end which Jerusalem came to by the madness of those that were for innovations; a city otherwise of great magnificence, and of mighty fame among all mankind…
And truly, the very view itself was a melancholy thing; for those places which were adorned with trees and pleasant gardens, were now become desolate country every way, and its trees were all cut down. Nor could any foreigner that had formerly seen Judaea and the most beautiful suburbs of the city, and now saw it as a desert, but lament and mourn sadly at so great a change. For the war had laid all signs of beauty quite waste. Nor had anyone who had known the place before, had come on a sudden to it now, would he have known it again. But though he [a foreigner] were at the city itself, yet would he have inquired for it…
The slaughter within was even more dreadful than the spectacle from without. Men and women, old and young, insurgents and priests, those who fought and those who entreated mercy, were hewn down in indiscriminate carnage. The number of the slain exceeded that of the slayers. The legionaries had to clamber over heaps of dead to carry on the work of extermination.
For his part, Titus was lionized as a heroin Rome, although he modestly—or perhaps politically shrewdly—declined the Laurel wreath claiming that he was only acting on the will of the gods.  Still he allowed a triumphant arch to be erected, which still stands to this day.  On it can be seen the looting of the Temple including carrying away as treasure the holy Menorah from the Holy of Holies.
The Arch of Titus stood amid the ruins of a Roman wall when painted during the Renaissance.  It stands alone today in modern Rome. 
The Siege of Masada in 73 or 74 CE effectively ended Jewish resistance to Roman rule.  Although some remained, even in the destroyed city of Jerusalem itself, many survivors fled to the east, the north and around the Mediterranean, where there were already well established Jewish communities, many, ironically within the Empire.  Within centuries the Diaspora had spread as far east as China and India, into Abyssinia and points south in Africa, through the lands occupied by the spread of Islam,and deep into Europe.
Judea was repopulated mostly by waves of neighboring Semitic peoples of various origins, including after the Muslim conquest, Arabs.  Together these disparate people would eventually forge an identity as Palestinians.
So much even modern history is thus tied up with the foggy events of antiquity.


The Voyage of the USS Nautilus —Under the Ice and Across the Pole

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3 August 2019 at 11:17
By: Patrick Murfin
The USS Nautilus under the Polar ice cap.
On August 3, 1958 the USS Nautilus, the U.S. Navy’sfirst nuclear powered submarine, crossed the North Pole under the Polar icecap.  Under the command of Captain William R. Anderson, 111 officers and crew plus four civilian scientists were on board when the ship submerged off of Point Barrow, Alaska and sailed without surfacingover 1,000 miles before passing under the Pole.  She then continued submerged until she finally surfaced between Greenland and Spitzbergen on August 5.  
Within days the achievement was touted to the press as a scientific breakthrough as part of the widely hyped International Geophysical Year.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower awarded Anderson the Legion of Merit.  
1968 action thriller Ice Station Zebra starring Rock Hudson and Earnest Borgnine, a U.S. nuclear submarine is sent on a mission to save the crew of a weather station on the ice near the North Pole but are confronted by Soviet paratroopers in a stand-off that could lead to nuclear war.  The film was based on the dangerous game played by both nations at the top of the world.
But there was more—much more—than science afoot in the Arctic.  The real reason for the mission was the strategic game of cat and mouse being played between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over control of Arctic waters.  Submarines of both nations prowled the water there for decades during the Cold War often resulting in dangerous, but highly classified, confrontations.  The films Bedford Incident and Ice Station Zebra were based on this perilous game.  
The USS Nautilus was built in Groton, Connecticut by General Dynamics Electric Boat Division under the personal supervision of AdmiralHyman G. Rickover, the Father of the Nuclear Navy. Her power plant was the S2W naval reactor, a pressurized water reactor by Westinghouse Electric Corporation and is the basis for the design of nuclear propulsion still used by navies around the world.  
Mamie Eisenhower did the honors at the launch of the Nautilus in 1954.
 She was christened by Mamie Eisenhower on January 21, 1954, ran under nuclear power on the morning of January 17, 1955, and was commissionedon September 30, 1954, under the command of Commander Eugene P. Wilkinson.  She almost immediately began to smash recordsfor endurance—total time submerged, and distance traveled.  In the mid-‘50’s she was the most publicized ship in the Navy, her very existence a cautionary shot over the bow of Soviet naval ambitions.  
Jules Verne's mad captain on the deck of his submarine The Nautilus in and illustration from an early English edition of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
She was named for the famous submarine build and sailed by mad Captain Nemo in Jules Verne’s pioneering science fiction novel Twenty Leagues Years Under the Sea first published in France in 1870.  As you may recall Nemo wanted to build a super weapon that would enforce world peace by making war too terrible to contemplate—just the supposed mission of American nuclear arms.
The ship remained in service until decommissioned in 1980.  Since 1986 the USS Nautilus has been on display at the Submarine Force Museumin Groton.


The Lioness of Brittany— Revenge of the Pirate Queen

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2 August 2019 at 17:14
By: Patrick Murfin
The Lioness of Britany Jeanne de Belleville was heroically depicted in this illustration from an illuminated manuscript.
There is something about a female pirate that stirs the imagination—and evidently the loins.  Googling women pirates turns up a torrent of pictures—heaving breasts straining against thin shirts, hair flowing in the wind, cutlass or pistol held menacingly sometimes with a cringing victim at her feet.  There are drawings old and new, woodcut prints, fantasy paintings, and plenty of posed photos, some with even less clothing.  
In fact there were, indeed famous lady buccaneers most famously Grace O’Malley, the Queen of Umaill and Chieftain of the Irish Ó Máille clan of Elizabethan times and several who plied and plundered the Spanish Main including Anne Dieu-le-Veut, Jacquotte Delahaye, and Anne Bonny—all portrayed as fiery red heads a la Maureen O’Hara.
A typical fantasy depiction of a female pirate complete with amble cleavage and fiery red hair.
But none could hold a candle to Jeanne de Clisson, a noble woman of Brittany whose vengeance spawned career on the seas that was un-matched for duration, ferocity, and merciless brutality.
It all began on August 2, 1343 when Olivier de Clisson was found guilty of treason and beheaded at Les Hallesin Paris. His seriously aggrieved widow, Jeanne de Clisson, decided to take matters into her own hands the rest is history, grisly history.
Jeanne was born in 1300 to Maurice IV of Belleville-Montaigu, a leading noble of Britany At the age of 12 she was married to another noble lad, 19 year old Geoffrey de Châteaubriant.  The marriage produce two children if little passion and ended when Geoffrey up and died leaving a lovely 26 year old widow.
A woman of such high birth, wealth, and beauty was not destined to be a widow long.  In 1330 Jeanne married Olivier III de Clisson another nobleman who held a castle at Clisson, a house in Nantesand lands at Blain.  Between the two the new husband and wife were instantly among the wealthiest and most influential couples in Brittany.  But the marriage also seemed to be particularly loving and close.  The two were about the same age and they had five children together—Maurice, Guillaume, Olivier, Isabeau, and Jeanne.  The younger Olivier would grow up to be a significant figure in French history on his own and once as Constable of France.
Olivier was a descendent of English knights who were awarded estates in Brittany to help preserve the claim of the English Crown on the province.  But by this period he was a vassal of the King of France, Philip IV.  When the Duke of Brittany died leaving no clear heirs each of the two main claimants were backed by opposing sides in the great chess game for control of most of France known as the Hundred Years War.  Philip backed Jeanne de Penthievre and Edward III of England put his money on Jean de Montfort. 
A depiction of the execution of  Oliver de Clisson on the orders of King Phillip IV of France.  His widow took vengeance.
 Despite his ancestral ties to England, Olivier apparently loyally joined other important nobles including Charles de Blois to defend Brittany from the English and de Montfort in 1342.  Unfortunately in the campaign to follow Olivier failed to hold Vannes, an important port through which the English could land still more troops.  De Blois suspected treason in the surrender of the port.  When Olivier, blithely unaware, decided to attend a tournament in French territory, he was arrested and hauled to Paris for trial.  He was tried before 15 noble peers including his accuser de Blois and the King himself.  He was quickly found guilty and had his head separated from his body by an axman.  Olivier’s personal holdings were confiscated—much of it ending up in the hands of de Blois.  And to add to the ignominy, his severed head was returned to Nantes to be displayed on a pole.
Twice widowed Jeanne did not take this lightly.  She sold all of her considerable personal holdings—and according to some accounts by less-than-friendly French chroniclers her 43 year old body—to raise the cash needed to purchase the three largest and newest warships she could find.  She hired the best captains and crews—a mix of Bretons, English, and rogue French and armed them well.
To make her ships distinctive and to terrify her enemies, she had them pained blackand their sails dyed a deep crimson—itself an expensive proposition.  Taking personal command of her fleet Jean began her career as a pirate warring exclusively on French commerce  from the refuge of the many often fog enshrouded coves and inlets of the Britany coast. Hunting in a pack or sometimes singly the Black Fleet had no trouble overhauling and capturing the ships of King Philip, his nobles, and wealthy merchants.  After boarding the helpless vessels Jeanne was merciless, executing the crew.  Her preferred but messy method was to stab them to death with daggers while they were bound and kneeling.  Jeanne was said to personally join in the slaughter of the captains and officers. Bodies were unceremoniously dumped overboard.  But she was careful always to leave two or three survivors who were put ashore with the instruction to report to the king that Jeanne had struck.
A woodcut depiction of a ship of the Black Fleet executing the crew of a captured ship.
Dozens of ships were captured in this manner and Jeanne’s wealth began to grow.  And so did her popularity in Brittany, among the common people and the allies of Jean de Montfort who began to hail her as the Lioness of Brittany.
Since she was careful to leave English shipping undisturbed, Jeanne was effectively the ally of Edward III and her depredations were bound to have an effect on his on-going war with Philip.   Not only did she effectively sweep the Channel of French warships, but the supplies she plundered helped sustain the English armies campaigning in France and some historians credit her with thus contributing to the great and legendary English victory at the Battle of Crécy in 1631.
Some thought that Jeanne would end her rampage when Philip died in 1350, his kingdom almost in ruins from defeats by the English and the Black Plague.  They were wrong.  She turned with new gusto to seeking out the ships of loyal French nobles.  When she found one on board she reportedly personally beheaded him with an ax.  This was something that even strong men found difficult so it is likely her victims had to endure being hacked several times before their heads rolled away.
A fanciful contemporary depiction of Jeanne de Clisson in battle.
After thirteen years as the terror of the Channel, Jeanne retired and wed for a third time to Sir Walter Bentley, a lieutenant to Edward III and retired to England with her children including the younger Olivier.  Later she returned to France where she lived in luxury in Hennebont until she died in 1359.
Her son, Olivier IV de Clisson, made quite a name for himself with important commands on both sides of the War of Breton Succession, that long-running side show to the Hundred Years War.  He was famous for ordering no quarter to his battle captives.  The apple, it seems, did not fall far from the tree.


Harriet Quimby—First Pioneer Aviatrix

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1 August 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Harriet Quimby in a Blériot one-seat monoplane.
Harriet Quimby was one of a kind—actress, journalist, screenwriter, pioneer aviatrix, barnstormer before there was a word for it, and a colorful, defiant independent woman with a dash of style.  She was Nellie Bly crossed with Amelia Earhart, and a dash of the self-promotingfeminist pioneer Victoria Claffin Woodhull thrown in for good measure.
Quimby was born to a farm family in Arcadia, Michigan on May 11, 1875. Twelve years later she relocated to the San Francisco Bay area in California.  Little is known of her early life as she purposefully tried to obscure it.  She would later claim that she had been born to a wealthy family in Arroyo Grande, Californiaon May 1, 1884—not the last time she would re-invent herself.
Quimby was a remarkably attractive woman and knew how to use her charms to her advantage.
1900 found 25 year old Quimby listed in the Census for San Francisco as an actress living alone.  No creditsfor any theater roles have ever been found, but in those days the term was often used for the dancers in waterfront dives many of whom doubled as prostitutes—not that there is any proof that she did that, either.  She was a remarkably attractive woman with almost black hair, expressive eyes, and evidently quite charming.  Her most apparent source of income was as a writer, contributing short pieces and reviews to Bay Area publications. 
In 1903 with clippings of those pieces in hand, and boasting of her experience as an “actress” Quimby crossed the continent to New York City, waltzed into the offices of Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, a popular women’s magazine and charmed her way into a job.  She was put on as theater critic but was soon reviewing entertainments of all sorts, including the infant films being shown in Nickelodeons.  
Quimby worked as a script writer and actress at D.W. Griffith's Biograph studio in the Bronx.

As the films became more sophisticated, so did her interest. Through an old friend from San Francisco, actress Linda Advinson, Quimby got to know her husband, pioneer director D.W. Griffith.   He was impressed enough by her to hire her as a screen writer for Biograph Pictures.  She wrote seven film shorts for him, featuring early Biograph stars Florence La Badie, Wilfred Lucas, and Blanche Sweet which were filmed at the company’s Bronx studio.   She appeared in one the films that were made between 1910 and 1912 and perhaps was uncredited in others.  Most of these are lost films.
In addition to her reviews, Quimby sought out new assignments from the magazine.  She wrote articles on how women could be independent—auto repairs, career tips, and tips on running a household without being a slave.  She taught herself photography, an important skill for the highly illustrated magazine and wrangled assignments in to Europe, Mexico, Cuba, and Egypt.
All the while she remained an independent woman.  She never married or became dependent on a man.  At a time when it was still scandalous, she drove her own car, smoked, and traveled the world unescorted.  This is not to say that as an attractive woman she did not attract attention and welcome it as long as no strings were attached.  She was making a decent living and enjoying the modicum of celebrity that came with being a prolific writer.
Quimby, left, with Matilde Moisant, her friend and aviation rival.  Although Moisant began flying earlier under the instruction of her brother, Quimby passed her by to become the first American woman liscenced by the International Aeuronautic Federation.
A magazine assignment in October of 1910 changed Quimby’s life.  She set out to photograph the Belmont Park International Aviation Tournament on Long Island, and met John Moisant, a well-known aviator and operator of a flight school, and his sister Matilde.  She was immediately smitten with aviation and convinced Moisant to take her on as a student, joining Matilde who had already done some flying.  Since the Moisants were French, she was taught in a Blériotmonoplane instead of the rickety Wright or Curtis bi-planes flown by most American pilots. The lessons continued under Moisant’s brother Alfred when John was killed in a crash. Quimby was a quick study—and perhaps a little competitive.  
Somehow word of her training “leaked” to the press—three guesses on the suspected leaker—creating a flurry of publicity.  Quimby began to write about her experiences.  On August 1, 1911she somehow leaped over Matilde and was granted License #37 from Aero Club of America, the U.S. affiliate of the International Aeuronautic Federation which granted international pilot’s licenses. That made her the first American woman licensed as a pilot and the second woman in the world behind the Baroness de la Roche in France.  Matilde Moisant, who may have been a little miffed at having been run around, soon became the second female American pilot.
Quimby aloft in a Bleriot monoplane at an air show.

With the considerable publicity surrounding her training and obtaining a license, Quimby decided to launch a tour “exhibiting myself” and her flying across the U.S. and into Mexico.  Crowds clamored to see the beautiful and glamourous aviatrix.  And she knew how to charm them.  Quimby designed her own unique flying outfit, plum-colored wool-backed satin, with a cowl hood that was tailored enough to show off her curves.  Not for her either aping the gear of male flyers or going up, as some early women pilots had, in impractical voluminous skirts.  At each stop she made herself available to the press and could always be counted on for a clever quote.
Quimby in her signature plum colored flying suit in a promotional poster.
Despite her success Quimby knew that to achieve real respect as a pilot and be more than simply a novelty, she had to establish some sort of flying record.  She set her sights on being the first woman to fly across the English Channel.  When Miss Trehawke-Davis flew across as a passenger, she knew it was only a matter of time before some European female flyer would attempt to pilot the crossing.
With unaccustomed secrecy, lest word of her coming spur others to make the trip first, Quimby sailed to England.  Once there she talked Louis Blériot, who was the first person to fly across the Channel in 1909, to loan her one of famous monoplanes.
On April 16, 1912 Quimby took off from Dover, flying roughly the same route as Blériot but in reverse she set out for Calais.  There was a heavy overcast over the Channel that day and she had to navigate solely by compass.  It took her 59 minutes to make the crossing in her 50 horsepower plane.  She came safely to earth 25 miles south of Calais on a beach at Hardelot-Plage with hardly a drop of fuel left.  She had won her treasured record.
If the sinking of the Titanic initially kept her achievement off the front pages, the Salt Lake Tribune took notice a month and a half later.  Two guesses who provided the pictures for this and other American publicity.

She did not attract quite all of the hoopla that ordinarily surrounded such early aviation feats because of a sad accident of the calendar.  Her flight took place the day after the Titanic sank when papers on both sides of the Atlantic were dedicated almost exclusively to the tragedy and would remain so for days.  All Quimby’s accomplishment could muster were articles buried deep in most newspaper pages.
Still, by spring of 1912 Quimby was one of the most famous women in America.  When pilot Calbraith Perry Rodgers was killed in an April crash of his plane, the Vin Fiz J. Ogden Armourof the meatpacking family hired Quimby and her fortuitously purple suit to endorse his brand of grape soda.  She was featured in color posters in drug storesoda fountains and in a magazine advertising campaign.
Quimby as featured in a store promotion for Vin Fiz.
Upon arrival back in the states and with the sponsorship of Vin Fiz Quimby launched herself in a new and lucrative tour of the now popular air meets, rallies, and exhibitions popping up all around the country.
On July 1, 1912 Quimby flew in the Third Annual Boston Aviation Meet at Squantum, Massachusetts, an event unsanctionedby the Aero Club of America which could technically have cost her license.  But the appearance fee was handsome and Quimby was glad to lend a hand in promoting the event.  Early in the day she took off with show manager William Willard as a passenger in her new two-seatBleriot monoplane for the benefit of the press.  Rising to an altitude of about 3,000 feet she flew out to Boston Light in Boston Harbor then returned and circled the airfield where a good size crowd was now in attendance.
Then suddenly as the plane descended to about 1,500 feet it suddenly shuddered and pitched forward tumbling Willard out of his seat and to his death.  Seconds later Quimby fell after him.  The plane itself recovered from whatever had happened and continued to fly, gliding down to what would have been a survivable landing.  Her career as a pilot ended with her death only 9 months after it had begun.
Quimby's body was recovered in shallow water after falling from her plane.
The cause of the sudden lurch remains one of aviation’s great mysteries.  Some conjecture that a cablesupporting the wing may have snapped and fouled the engine.  Others think that Willard, a rather large man, may have suddenly shifted his weight in his seat unbalancing the aircraft.  Almost all agree that if the pilot and passenger had been strapped into their seats, they would not have fallen out and most likely have walked away from a hard landing.
She was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, and then was moved to Kenisco Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
But fame is fleeting and hers faded from memory.  She was most celebrated back in her home state of Michigan—the place she felt she had escaped from and actually denied.  A historic marker stands in front of the abandoned family home in Arcadia and another in the southern Michigan town of Coldwater.  Her grave in Valhalla is graced with a bronze plaque with a reproduction of her monoplane and a description of her life and achievement.  Perhaps her greatest memorial was the inspiration to other female pilots—especially Amelia Earhart who idolized her as a girl.
Quimby as memorialized by the Postal Service in 1991
Interest Quimby has lately revived.  In 1991 she was pictured in what is surely the only glamor shot on an airmail stamp honoring pioneer aviators by the by the United State Postal Service.  In 2012 she was inducted into the Long Island Air and Space Hall of Fame.  She was the subject of a biography by Giacinta Bradley Koontzwhich also included numerous photographs, press clippings, and memorabilia recently discovered. A descendent company of Biograph Pictures, the company she worked for with D. W. Griffith, was said to be in development of a bio pic with Donnamarie Recco in the title role in 2014,
Claims were made the wreckage plane the Quimby died piloting was found, discovered in a New Hampshire barn during the 1960’s.  The aircraft has been meticulously restored to flying condition and is on display at Old Rhinebeck Aerodrome, an aviation museum in Red Hook, New York.  The plane is the second oldest in existence still airworthy.  But the plane is one-seater Blériot XI, which bears the Blériot factory’s serial number 56, showing that it was manufactured in 1909. Since Quimby’s plane, in 1912, was a brand new two-seater, it could not have been Quimby’s.

What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men—The Shadow Knows

✇ WWUUD?
31 July 2019 at 10:39
By: Patrick Murfin
The Shadow was one of the first radio dramas to hook listeners with secret coded messages,
When Street and Smith, a Depression era publisher of pulp fiction, decided to boost the sagging sales of its flagship Detective Story Magazinethey took a flyer on radio, which was just coming into its own as a platform for dramas.  David Chrisman of the Ruthrauff & Ryan advertising agency was hired to create a package that would frame stories from the magazine adapted by editor/publisher William Sweets.  It was decided to have the stories introduced by a mysterious, nameless narrator.  Several possibilities were tossed around until writer Harry Engman Charlotsuggested the eerie and sinister sounding The Shadow.
Detective Story Hour premiered on Thursday July 31, 1930 on the CBS Radio network.  It was the first interaction of an American cultural phenomenon which would go on to become one of the longest running an most popular radio dramas of all time, a long running series of twice-a-month pulp novel and spawn movie serialsand features, comic books, and a TV series.  The character of The Shadow would help inspire the superhero genre on in comic books, especially The BatMan and the Green Hornet on radio.  The Hornet was depicted as the modern nephew of the Lone Ranger by as Detroit radio station desperate for a mystery program to match The Shadow.
But all of that was as yet in the future.  The character and the radio show both had some growing and adapting to do.
In those early broadcasts, the eerie introduction that became famous was not yet in its full form.  The Shadow did not yet have a secret identity and was not an active participant in the stories, just a kind of omnipresent observer to the unfolding yarn.  But the narrator voiced by James LaCurto and later Frank Readick uttered the now familiar introduction “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows…” 
The Shadow Magazine eventually came out twice a month with a complete short novel in each issue plus short stories and features.  The Shadow in the magazine had a more complex back story than depicted on radio.


Audiences were hooked from the beginning.  Smith and Street were gratified by the success of the show, but somewhat stunned by the audience reaction to The Shadow.  But being smart purveyors of popular culture, the company wasted no time in cashing in.  On April 1, 1931 the company launched a new magazine, The Shadow, a quarterlywhich featured a complete novel in each issue plus additional detective short stories.  The editors commissioned Walter B. Gibson, a prolific pulp writer and stage magician as the principal author of the novels which were published under the name Maxwell Grant.


Gibson fleshed out the character and invented the mythos surrounding him.  The new book was such a sensation that within months it went from a four times a year schedule to twice a month—requiring the hyperactive writer to churn out 75,000 word stories every two weeks in addition to later contributing to the radio program, comic books, and a daily syndicated comic strip.  Although eventually other writers were brought in to take up some of the slack, Gibson would go on to pen 282 of the 325 Shadow novels.  And after the pulp magazine folded he went on to write three additional longer form novels under his own name in a new series issued by Belmont Books.
In the Gibson stories The Shadow’s secret identity was Kent Allard, a World War I air ace who flew for France and was known as the Black Eagle.  After the war, Allard turned to the challenge in waging war on criminals. He faked his death in the South American jungles, then returned to the States.  Back in New York City, he adopted numerous identities to conceal his existence, Lamont Cranston, a “wealthy young man about town,” being just one of them.  Alard blackmailed the real playboy into allowing him to assume his identity while he traveled the world.
Assuming the identity of Cranston and others the Shadow pursued villains relentlessly by night employing the skills of a cat burglar, hypnotist, magician, and master of disguise to seemingly be anywhere.  He would often torment the men—and occasional woman—he stalked them with ominous taunts from the darkness, often driving them to near insanity.  In the end either The Shadow would cut the bad guy down in a blaze of gun fire or lead him into a police trap, or even have him killed by his own accomplices or victims.  For most of the duration of the pulp series there was no hint that The Shadow possessed any supernatural powers.
Lurid covers with endangered beauties and oriental villains sold magazines.

The lurid pulp covers gripped readers with an unforgettable image of the anti-hero. He wore a large, wide brimmed black hatpulled low over his face revealing only intense staring eyes.  Over an ordinary black business suit he wore a crimson lined black cape pulled up revealing only a hawk-like nose.
With the magazine launched, the company was still a little unsure how to use the character on the radio show.  They even tried to employ him as the narrator for another short lived series based on a Smith and Street rag, Love Story Hour, which took over the original Thursday night slot.  Detective Story Hour shifted to Sunday evenings.  In September, 1931 the program acquired a commercial sponsor and was re-named the Blue Coal Radio Revue but it remained an hour long program with Frank Readick starring as The Shadow. 
The following year the show and its sponsor jumped to NBC on Tuesday and Wednesday nights.  Readick remained the star, although LaCurto sometimes filled in.  And the program was now officially what audiences had called it all along The Shadow.
As the radio dramas began to integratethe narrator into the story lines, some of them borrowed from and adapted from the novels for the sake of simplicitysome elements of character as portrayed by Gibson were dropped or altered.  First to go was any mention of Kent Allard or other assumed identities.  The Shadow was Lamont Cranston.  To avoid bringing the action to a screeching halt to explain in each episode how the Shadow seems to be everywhere, a key part of the novels, it was said simply that he “had the power to cloud men’s minds.”  This was inferred to be a form of hypnotism mastered by The Shadow in the Orient.  Later in the series it he seemed to have acquired a super power of invisibility.
Agness Morehead was The Shadow's accomplice on the radio show.
One of the most important differences between the books and the show was the introduction of a female accomplice, Margo Lane, who learns Cranston’s secret, becomes his companion, possible lover, and abets him in his crusade.  The part was added to give a feminine voice to the series, and Lane sometimes stepped in as narrator explaining her part in the unfolding drama.  Gibson was resentful of this change and refused for quite a while to include Lane in his novels, finally giving in to public pressure after 1940.  In 1937 the program moved to the Mutual Network and Sunday nights where it became an institution.  And with a new Shadow, youthful wiz kid Orson Welles and Agnes Morehead as Margo Lane the program took on the form that is most remembered, and which is still heard on old time radio programs and available in CD collections.  Although the famous introduction and the closing sinister laugh were still provided by recording of Readick,  Welles’s deep rich voice and nuanced performance built tension as never before.
Orson Welles became the most famous voice of The Shadow.
Welles only stayed with the show for two seasons, moving on to his own ambitious Mercury Theater of the Air and Hollywood, taking Morehead with him on both adventures, but his stamp remained on the program through the several other actors called upon to portray the mysterious crime fighter including Bill Johnstone(1938-1943), John Archer(1944-1945), and Bret Morrison (1943-1944, 1945-1954).  Lane was portrayed by Morehead through 1940 then by Majorie Anderson (1940-1944), Grace Matthews(1946-1949), and Gertrude Warner(1949-1954).
Bret Morison and Marjorie Anderson were a '40's pairing as The Shadow and Margo Lane.
The show remained popular and Blue Coal remained the usual sponsor on the East Coast until replaced by the U.S. Army and Air Force, and later by Wildroot Cream Oil.  After 1953 no regular single sponsor could be found and the program was sustained by the network with spot advertising.  That was writing on the wall, listeners and advertisers were abandoning long formdrama radio for the glamor of television.  The Shadow aired its last original episode on December 26, 1954.
The Shadow also lived across multiple other media.  There were several film versions, mostly by minor studios, beginning with a series of two reel shorts produced by Universal Pictures during the first flush of success on the radio in 1930-31.  The first entry in the series, A Burglar to the Rescue, was filmed in New York City with the voice of The Shadow on radio, Frank Readick.  Subsequent instalments were filmed cheaply in Hollywood with different actors.  In 1937 and ’38 Rod La Rocque starred in two Grand National Pictures releases. 
Victor Jory played The Shadow in a Columbia Pictures serial.  Poverty Row B-movie studios churned out cheep bottom-of-the-Double feature films. 
The Shadow was a 15 episode cliff hanging serialstarring Victor Jory in probably the most memorablecinematic portrayal for Columbia in 1940.  Poverty row Monogram Pictures, best known for their westerns, made three super-low budget entries in the post war years.
In the 1958 two pilot episodes of a failed TV series were slapped togetherand released to theaters as Invisible Avenger.
The character did not get a first classfilm presentation until 1994 when Alec Baldwin and Penelope Ann Miller appeared in The Shadow in what Universal Pictures hoped would be a blockbuster.  The film feature John Lone as an Asian supervillain working to develop an atomic bomb, and a supporting cast of Peter Boyle, Jonathon Winters, Ian McKellan, and Tim Curry.  Although the film made money, it was not warmly greeted by critics and failed to become a mega-hit.
The Shadow finally got a big budget production in 1994 when Alec Baldwin played the lead and Penelope Ann Miller played Margo Lane.  It was supposed to set up a movie franchise for Universal Pictures, but failed to become a blockbuster.
The Shadow fared better in illustrated print.  Walter Gibson participated in a daily strip drawn by Vernon Greene which ran for two years, 1940-42 and covered six adventures adapted from his novels until it was cancelled along with many other strips to preserve paper during the war years.  The strips were assembled and released as two comic books.
Publishers Street and Smith published their own comic book series, Shadow Comics for 101 issues between 1940 and 1949 based on the magazine version of the hero.  Archie Comics tried to cash in on the super hero craze in 1964 with a new series based on the radio show.  In the second issue of an eight book arc, a blond Lamont Cranston and The Shadow was transformed into a muscular superhero in green and blue tights.  Loyal Shadow fans were not amused and neither was the intended teen age audience.
Street and Smith issued the first comic book which ran for 101 issues through the 1940.s.
D.C. Comics produced four Shadow series—a 12-issue series (Nov. 1973 - Sept. 1975) drawing heavily on the atmosphere of the novels and the graphic content of their covers; a 1986 mini-series, Shadow: Blood and Judgment that brought the old hero to modern New York; and in 1987 a new a monthly series by writer Andy Helfer and drawn primarily by artists Bill Sienkiewicz and Kyle Baker continuing the modern universe of the mini-series.  During this period The Shadow also made cross appearances in other DC Comics, particularly Detective Comics where Batman acknowledges the now elderly Shadow as his inspiration and we learn that the character had once saved the livesof Bruce Wayne’s parents.
At DC Comics The Shadow had his own book and showed up with the company's superheroes, notably Batman in other books.
From 1989 to 1992, DC published a new Shadow series, The Shadow Strikes, written by Gerard Jones and Eduardo Barreto set in the ‘30s and returning The Shadow to his pulp origins.
Marvel Comics also had a crack at The Shadow with a graphic novel, The Shadow 1941: Hitler’s Astrologer by writer Dennis O’Neil and artist Michael Kaluta who had worked together on D.C.’s first series.
Dark Horse Comics acquired the rights to The Shadow and published the mini-series In The Coils of Leviathan in 1993, Hell’s Heat Wave, and The Shadow and Doc Savage both in 1995 as well as two single issue specials.
In 2012 Dynamite Entertainment began yet another new series written by Garth Ennis and illustrated by Aaron Campbell and a mini-series Masks, teaming the 1930 era Shadow with the Spider, The Green Hornet and Kato, and a 1930s version of Zorro. 
It seems that after all of these years pop culture fans still can’t get enough of The Shadow.

Visiting Big Boy—A Blast from a Cheyenne Past

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30 July 2019 at 13:48
By: Patrick Murfin
The Union Pacific's Big Boy 4014 engine in West Chicago.
Last Sunday afternoon my wife Kathy Brady-Murfin indulged the sentimental Old Man and drove down to West Chicago to visit an old friend.  Union Pacific 4014, a massive Big Boy steam locomotive was on display at the Larry S. Provo Union Pacific Training Center there.  The great beast roared into the town on Friday as part of 150th Anniversary of the Transcontinental Railroad Tour. 
Ol’ 4014 was built in 1941 at the American Locomotive Company shops in Schenectady, New York.  Of the 25 Big Boy engines built all but eight have long ago been sent to scrap.  Seven are in railroad museums or otherwise on static display.  Only 4014 is operable and once again rolling. 
The Big Boy engines were specifically designed to haul exceptionally long trains—up to three miles long—over the Wasatch mountains between Ogden, Utah, and Green River, Wyoming.  In 1947 they were reassigned to run from Nebraska over the hump of Sherman Hill between Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming—the highest elevation on the UP route and were based in Cheyenne.
A Big Boy engine hauling freight through Echo Canyon, Utah.
In the special nomenclature of steam engines they were articulated 4-8-8-4 steam locomotives—a four-wheel leading truck for stability entering curves, two sets of eight driving wheels and a four-wheel trailing truck to support the large firebox.  The engines were 85 feet long and with the firebox were a total of just under 133 feet.  The engine weighed 762,000 lbs. and with the addition of the firebox a total of 1,250,000 lbs.  In every aspect they were the biggest, heaviest, and most powerful steam engines ever built.
They were originally designed to haul 3,600-ton trains over steep grades.  In operation they proved capable of much more and load limits were raised several time finally running at 4,200 tons.  They were capable of speeds in excess of 80 miles an hour over level ground and routinely operated at 60 mph.  The engines were efficient money makers for the UP eliminating the need add extra engines—double head—to get over steep grades which required making up and breaking up trains on each side of the grade.  Engine crews admired them for being sure-footed and easy to handle despite the rugged terrain it covered.
The Big Boys were well maintained and had years of service ahead when the UP decided to remove them from service only because the railroad wanted close their Wyoming mines which provided the bituminous soft coal they used for fuel.  They were last run in regular revenue service on July 21, 1959 and officially retired them all by 1962.
They were replaced by diesel and gas turbine-electric locomotives.  Several locomotive units had to be attached at each end of a long train in a push-pulloperation to duplicate a single Big Boy.
Enough of the train geek stuff.  My connection to the mighty behemoths was much more personal.  Stop me if you have heard the tale before.
When we first moved to Cheyenne we stayed at the Lincoln Court Motel.  Across Highway 30 I could see the Union Pacific yards.
We moved to Cheyenne in 1953 from Canyon City, Colorado when my father, W. M. Murfin got a new job as Secretary of the Cheyenne Chamber of Commerce.  We move temporarily into the Lincoln Court Motel by the Hitching Post Inn on U.S. 30 while my folks searched for a house.  It was only supposed to be a few days, but my twin brother Tim and I came down with a virulent case of the measles—so serious that there was evidently fear for our four-year old lives.  We were quarantined in the tight motel room for several days.  
After the fever broke I spent long hours in my bed looking out the window across the highway to the busy UP humping yards.  I was fascinated by the trains and what seemed like constant bustle.  My favorites were the little steam switch engines busily moved cars in the yards making and unmaking trains.  I called them baby trains.  But more impressive was the mighty rumble of the Big Boy engines and the blasts from their horns as the came in from Sherman hill or gathered steam for the push to the summit going the other way.
By the late ‘50’s we were settled into a house on Cheshire Drive by the long runway of the airport.  In the summertime in those long-gone days a boy was free to roam anywhere his legs or bicycle could take him as long as he was home when Mom rang the dinner bell.  Sometimes I would go all the way across town and sneakin the rail yards.  Well, maybe not sneak.  Most of the switchmen and other yard workers ignored a curious boy and I was only once in a while yelled at or shooed by a conductor or yard bull.  Engineers high up in their cabs in striped overalls, puffy topped caps, and impressive gauntlets would wave and sometime toot whistles.
Watching a Big Boy take water was an awesome sight.
If a Big Boy was making up, I made for the water tower and watched the crews swing the boomand let loose Niagaras of water down the top hatch to the insatiable boilers.  It seemed that the huge tank could not hold enough water to satisfy the thirsty beast.
On some cool summer nights Tim and I would sleep out in the back yard in our father’s World War II Army mummy bags under the spectacular array of the Milky Way.  On still nights we could hear the freight trains crest the high plateau at Pine Bluffs and hear it until it went over Sherman Hill.  It was a lovely, lonesome sound sometimes punctuated by the distant howl of a coyote. 
Cheyenne was still as much a railroad town as anything our next door neighbor on Cheshire was a U.P. fireman and the father of my brother’s best friend Aubrey Mumpower was an engineer on the Big Boys.
In 1962 the UP gifted Big Boy 4004 to the city of Cheyenne for display in Holliday Park.  We gathered one day to what the huge engine being moved from the yards down Lincolnway—U.S. 30—to its new home.  The busy highway was closed.  Workmen carefully laid rails in front of the engine which crept forward under its own power.  They picked up the rails left behind and moved them to the front in a slow leapfrog operation.  It took hours.  Finally at the Park it rolled down an embankment to its new home.
The Big Boy in the park then set on its rails completely in the open.  Tim and I would visit it and climb all over the engine.  I would sit in the engineer’s seat with my head and elbow out the window with my other hand on the throttle.  Somewhere there are little Kodak Brownie snapshots of the heroic pose.
Big Boy 4004 on static display at Cheyenne's Holiday Park was already surrounded by a chain-link fence when it was flooded in 1984,
Eventually, long after I left town, the old Big Boy was caged behind a chain-link fence.  It had suffered at the hands of scrambling children like me, vandals, and souvenir hunters.  Exposed to the elements it rusted and deteriorated.  Over the last two years dedicated local volunteers completed a cosmetic restoration of 4004 to its former glory and are currently working on restoring a UP caboose to put on display with it.
Seven other Big Boys were donated to various railroad museums or cities.  All but two have been displayed outdoors and are in various states of repair.  Two are undercover at the Forney Transportation Museumin Denver and the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin.  4014 was long on display at the Fairplex RailGiants Train Museum in Pomona, California.
In 2013, the Union Pacific re-acquired4014 and brought it home to Cheyenne for a complete restoration project at their Steam Shop.  Its huge driving wheels were sent to be repaired by the Strasburg Rail Road in Strasburg, Pennsylvania and the boiler had to be adapted to fire No.5 Diesel fuel instead of coal.  After more than two years work the boiler was successfully test fired on April 9, 2019 and on May 1, it moved under its own power for the first time in more than 59 years. The next evening, the locomotive made its first test run—a round trip from Cheyenne to Nunn, Colorado. 
Restored Big Boy 4014 by historic Union Station ready to leave Cheyenne.
4014 was official designated for excursion service and made its first run to and from Ogden Utah for that city’s Heritage Day Festival.  Then in July it began a Midwest tour hauling a rolling museum in a restored mail car with stops in Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.
If you live in these parts and you are nimble you might catch that Big Boy on the move.  It is scheduled to leave West Chicago this morning at 8:30 with stops at Rochelle, Clinton and Wheatland, Iowa before stopping overnight at Cedar Rapids.  There will be several other stops in Iowa and Nebraska before 4014 comes back home to Cheyenne.  For a complete schedule check here.
Interestingly in addition to excursion service, the UP indicates that 4014 is designated to haul revenue freight during ferry moves.  So the old warrior might occasionally be put back to real work. 
The Old Man and Big Boy, united at last.
On our quick visit to West Chicago, throngswere overwhelming the Provo Training Center.  Neither local police nor the UP seemed quite prepared for the crowds.  Clear signage pointing to the somewhat out-of-the-way and to parking was sorely lacking.  So were directions on the ground leaving many folks wandering about trying to find out how exactly to access the display at ground level.  We huffed and puffed back and forth a long viaduct and around the grounds before we finally could get up close.
The Old Man lay his hands on the old engine.  He was, as they say, verklempt.

Three Poets and a Chicago Riot—Sandburg, Brooks, and Ewing

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29 July 2019 at 19:07
By: Patrick Murfin
A white mob attack a black home during the 1919 Race Riots.

The Chicago 1919 Race Riots seared the souls of the cotton field diasporawho had found rough shelter in the city’s unwelcoming arms—the Great Migration, Exodus indeed.  The proper city of the gleaming towers and rah-rah civic boosters strove mightily to forget, to infuse or enforce a willful amnesia.  But the poets noticed.
Carl Sandburg was 41 that year and bursting forth as a poet to be noticed.  Chicago Poems had shaken up conventions in its sensational appearance in 1914 and later in the fatal year Cornhuskers would win the Pulitzer Prize.  But the prairie Socialist was still proud to pound a typewriter at the Chicago Daily News as a working reporter.
Things were already tense on the South Side.  Race riots had already popped up cities including East St. Louis, Illinois that summer.  In Chicago a series of bombings had occurred on the fringes of the Black Belt aimed at discouraging Blacks from moving into adjacent white blocks.  White gangs would occasionally cruise through the neighborhood shooting indiscriminately out car windows.  In self-defenseBlack veterans organized “sniping”—firing on the raiders from windows and doorways—as they sped through.  It was a practice that would be honed during the full-blown riots with the addition of using refuse and trash cans to barricade the streets and trap the cars longer under the return fire.
Carl Sandburg--poet and reporter.
All of the major newspapers were wringing their handsand nearly unanimously laid all the blame on “invading Negros” who were depicted variously as filthy, ignorant, lazy, violent, and criminal.  The Daily News, however, decided to put Sandburg, a reporter known to be keen on social issues and familiar with the working class streets, on the story.  He covered it as no one else would, by spending ten days in June talking to ordinary Black residents including women whose voices were seldom heard, their White neighbors, business people and real estate brokers, police, preachers, and precinct level politicians.  He asked pointed questions about everything—the Black Migration and why people had come, housing conditions, work opportunities and competition for jobs including charges of strikebreaking, wildly exaggerated and sensationalized press accounts of Black crime, primal fears of race mixing and miscegenation.
Sandburg wrote to father in-law, “I have spent 10 days in the Black Belt and am starting a series in the Chicago Daily News on why Abyssinians, Bushmen and Zulus are here.”  Some later commentators would take that sentence as proof that even a sympathetic Sandbur was tainted with racism.  No doubt like almost every White person of the time—or now—that might be true.  But it fails to take into account the bitter irony that often infused his poetry.  He was never afraid to use the blunt language he heard on the street to expose its outrageousness.
A black crowd gathers on a Black Belt corner ready to defend the neighborhood from white gangs.
Among his most telling observations, which would be born out in the riots, was the significant role played by Black veterans who had served in France.  While the served in segregated units and many were assigned menial labor like loading and unloading munitions and suppliesor carting the dead from the battlefield, others served in infantry regiments who fought alongside the French and earned their admiration.  All of the veterans returned with a sense that they had earned the respect of all of society.  The city’s Black Belt neighborhood sent more than 18,000 draftees to France in addition to volunteers. Sandburg reported:
In barber shop windows and in cigar stores and haberdasheries are helmets, rifles, cartridges, canteens and haversacks and photographs of negro regiments that were sent to France… So it is clear that in one neighborhood there are ... strong young men who have been talking to each other on topics more or less intimately related to the questions, “What are we ready to die for? Why do we live? What is democracy? What is the meaning of freedom; of self-determination?
He quoted Charles Duke, one of the relatively few Black officers who served:
All attempts at segregation bring only discord and resentful opposition. The bombing of the homes of colored citizens is futile. This will neither intimidate any considerable number of them nor stop their moving into a given district.
His series of articles began running daily on July 14—perhaps not entirely accidently Bastille Day—and ran until just before the riots broke out on July 27.  If anyone wondered why or how the ultimate explosionoccurred, Sandburg had already supplied the answers.
The book assembled from Sandburg's Chicago Daily News articles.
NAACP Joel Spingarn  board member was in Chicago during and after the eight days of rioting.  He discovered Sandburg’s series and was so impressed that he sent it to Alfred Harcourt of the Harcourt, Brace and Howe publishers without consulting the reporter.  Harcourt was impressed and contacted Sandburg with an offer to do a book based on the series.  Sandburg, who had other projects at hand in addition to his work as a reporter, agreed with the stipulation that he did not have time for much new material including a detailed account of the actual riots.
The original articles became the core of the book with a little introductory and final commentator.  Walter Lippmann, then known as a liberal commentator was tapped to write the forward, which gave the slender volume some literary heft.  It was quickly issued under the slightly deceptive title of The Chicago Race Riots, July 1919despite the fact that it was mostly essential background to the actual disturbances. 
In his own brief introduction Sandburg summarized his findings:
In any American city where the racial situation is critical at this moment, the radical and active factors probably are (1) housing, (2) politics and war psychology, and (3) organization of labor.
The book sold well and became an essential text for anyone studying the Red Summer in Chicago.  But the title continued to fool people.  A 50th anniversary edition was published in 1969 on the heels of a new wave of race riots.  Distinguished Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill did the new forward but despite the clear evidence of the text he was praising wrote as if Sandburg reported and wrote after the riots.  He couldn’t believe that Sandburg’s presciencewas not hind sight.
Gwendolyn Brooks as a young poet about the time A Street in Bronzevill was published.
Decades later for Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks the riots of the Red Summer were the background and subtext to her Bronzeville poems and the haunted roots of her turn-the-table verse of the 1968 West Side riots. 
Riot

A riot is the language of the unheard.

—martin luther king



John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,

all whitebluerose below his golden hair,

wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,

almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;

almost forgot Grandtully (which is The

Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost

forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray

and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s,

the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.



Because the Negroes were coming down the street.



Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty

(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)

and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.

In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.

And not detainable. And not discreet.



Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot

itched instantly beneath the nourished white

that told his story of glory to the World.

“Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered

to any handy angel in the sky.

But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove

and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath

the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili,

malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old

averted doubt jerked forward decently,

cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man,

and the desperate die expensively today.”



John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire

and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord!

Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”



—Gwendolyn Brooks

The cover of Eve L. Ewing's 1919 Poems from Haymarket Books.


Evie L. Ewing is the heir of both Sandburg in Brooks.  Her amazing slender new book 1919 Poems from Haymarket Books explicitly evokes both.  Ewing, a University of Chicago sociologist as well as an accomplished poet, turned to another essential book on the riots for her inspiration.  
The Negro in Chicago: A Study in Race Relations and a Race Riot was the dry, academic title of the report published in 1922 of an evenly split Black and White 12 person commission  established by Illinois Governor Frank Lowden and selected by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations.  Not the kind of inspiration you would expect for a poet.
Ewing's touchstone and inspiration.
Ewing first encountered the report in her research for a previous book, Ghosts in the School Yard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. She was struck that:
…a view into Black life in my city a century earlier, and so many things struck me as being either radically different or completely unchanged.  And even though this was a government issued report, many of its passages immediately think about poetry.  They were so narrative, so evocative, so imagistic.  The report was like an old pastry with loose threads sticking out, and I wanted to tug on them and see what I could unravel, see what new thing I could weave.
Thus the conception of her new book was born.  Ewing uses direct quotes from the report as epigrams for each poem and then riffs on it in a wide variety of styles and in many voices as they seem appropriate.  It is all fresh.  More than that, it is liberating.
Ewing was born in Chicago in 1986 and grew up in Logan Square the daughter of a radio reporter and producer mother and an artist father.  She attended public schools and graduated from Northside College Preparatory High School before entering the University of Chicago.  She earned an masters degree in Elementary Education from Dominican Universityand taught middle school science in Chicago public schools before moving to Bostonwhere she earned an M.Ed in Education Policy and Management in 2013 and a doctorate from Harvard University's Graduate School of Education.  Ewing is currently an assistant professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.
Eve L. Ewing--scholar and poet.
Beyond her impressive academic credentials, Ewing has been a prolific writer and poet whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, and the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, curated by Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States. With Nate Marshall, she co-wrote the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, produced by Manual Cinema and commissioned by the Poetry Foundation. 
On top of all of that Ewing displays her versatility as the writer/creator of the Ironheart series for Marvel Comics and a contributor to other of their projects. She co-directs Crescendo Literary, a partnershipthat develops community-engaged arts events and educational resourcesas a form of cultural organizing. 
And since last October she has hosted of the podcast Bughouse Square with Eve Ewingwhich begins each episode with an excerpt from the vast archive of Studs Terkle’s radio broadcasts then interviews a guest in a conversation with parallel themes.  She uses Terkle’s source material in ways the echo her use of The Negro in Chicago in her new collection.
Eve L. Fanning self portrait.

Her debut literary collection, Electric Arches published in 2017 by Haymarket Books was an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhoodthrough poetry, visual art, and narrative prose.  The book gathered high praise and awards including the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Alex Award for Young by the American Library Association Winner, National Public Radio’s list of Best Books of 2017,Top Ten Books of 2017 by the Chicago Tribune, Best Poetry Book of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books, and Top Ten Books of 2017 by the Chicago Public Library.
Ewing divides 1919 Poems into three sections: Before, What Happened, and After.  Before examines Black roots in slavery and the South and the Great Migration to Chicago.  Biblical Exodus is a recurring theme as is the Great Fire that had scorched the city.  She takes care to present individual voices as well as a mystical collective consciousness.
True Stories About the Great Fire
…the sentiment was expressed that the Negro invasion of the district was the worst calamity that had struck the city since the Great Fire.  A prominent white real estate man said: “Property owners should be notified to stand together block by block and prevent such invasion.” (118-19)

Everything they tell you is wrong.

The Great Fire came here in a pair of worn loafers

dating its last sandwich wrapped in paper

and the Great Fire had a smell like grease and flowers.


The Great Fire did not come to eat up the homes,

The homes lay down at the foot of the Great Fire,

for it was godly, and it glowed.

The Great Fire blessed the rooftops.

The Great Fire danced with the lakeshore.


The Great Fire has an auntie who makes dresses

and the Great Fire wears a red pinafore

and dances in a cake walk.


The Great Fire can only move at right angles.

The Great Fire goes from block to block at night

and kisses stray cats in the moonlight

and the cats catch the Holy Ghost.


The Great Fire sits in the balcony and yells at the picture.

The Great Fire sings in a too-loud voice.

The Great Fire has plans for you.

The Great Fire is going to take your daughter someplace.

The Great Fire has a hoard of gold like a dragon.


The Great Fire already lives next door

and hides in the daytime.

The Great Fire knows that they don’t want it here.

The Great Fire is going to burn the city they built

and we will watch from the stone tower

and we will wait for it to finish

and we can wait a long time

and the Fire can too.


—Eve L. Ewing
In What Happened she captures snap shots of the events.
City in a Garden
After Carl Sandburg

The Negro crowd  from  Twenty-ninth Street got into action, and white men who came I contact with it were beaten…Further to the west, as darkness came on, white gangsters became active.  Negroes in white districts suffered severely at their hands.  From 9:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. twenty-seven Negroes were beaten, seven were stabbed, and four were shot.  (5)

o my ugly homestead,

blood-sodden prairie.

            Who is horto, meaning:

                        if it grows it once came from dirt.


o my love, why do you till the ground with iron?

o my miracle, why do you fire in the dark?

you, thief of dusk, you, captain of my sorrows. you avarice.

your ground is greedy for our children, and you take them as you please.

the babies come from you, the train car orators, and the beloved hustlers.

they die, and you send forth more, you who makes a place

in a middle land, you ruthless.  you seed ground.

you bear the best of us and the worst in equal measure.


o my garden, which am I.

—Eve L. Ewing

A youth confronts Illinois National Guardsmen during the 1968 West Side riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King.


And in After:

April 5, 1968

After Gwendolyn Brooks

Our country is over, you see.  Here lies

my prettiest baby and her glass fingertips are

are all over the tar.  In the before I told

her, ‘play beloved’ and

from the storefront piano came legends

of the mountaintop and it made

me weep.  I was an ugly phoenix

but our dirt was our own.  As the sun rises

now I know what we do is right.  Unafraid

I stand before the skinny boy with the

bayonet & say ‘before I’ll be an ashen ghost, black

gone gray at your hand like our dead philosopher,

I’ll burn my own, you see, just the way I want, & you will

know it’s mine.’ Goodbye Madison.  I will remember

my country, my sun-up town.  Because there

on the mountaintop I saw the fire in the valley.  They

were coming to take you away.  They came

with cursed wat, the hurting river the used to

strike down the children of Birmingham, each life

a bad joke in their bull eyes. And

I said ‘not here.  Not never. Not Madison.  And exulted

in the shadow of the first fire, then the next, the

the heat sending sweat into my eyes, that simple salt hurt

keeping me from thinking too long of your piano gone mute.

I suspect the boy wanted to run then

but he stood shaking, gun raised, and I said, “if this is it,

if this is my last day that ever was,

man, at least I know I got over,

that the likes of you will never have us, that the

street I call my only home burned to dust

at my hand.  Let them sing of how bright the sun was as

a coward struck me down. They will tell it always, they will say

that one glorious morning, I showed hem your heart, lest they think it was settled.


—Eve L. Ewing

A Week from Hell—The Chicago Race Riots of 1919

✇ WWUUD?
27 July 2019 at 18:48
By: Patrick Murfin
A Chicago Tribune cartoon published while the 1919 riots were still raging depicts the flashpoint at the 29th Street Beach.
It began 100 years ago with what might, under other circumstances, have been passed off a teenage rough housewhen a boy from another neighborhoodwandered into waters of a Lake Michigan beach and the local rascals pelted him with stones. By all accounts 24year-old George Stauber threw the rock that ultimately caused 17-year-old Eugene Williams to drown.  When the Chicago police arrived at the chaotic scene they arrested a youth who pointed out the assailant. A melee erupted.  Someone fired a shot, supposedly at the cops.  They blindly returned fire.
Not much to see here, move on.  Except that the incident set off eight days or deadly rioting across the South Side that ultimately left at least 38 dead and more than 535 treated by local doctors and hospitals or held injured by the police.  Probably additional dead were uncounted and hundreds of the injured did not seek medical help for fear of arrest.  Did I mention that the original victim, Williams, was Black and his attackers were all White. 
Violence spilled from the 29th Street Beach over this pedestrian overpass and rapidly spread through the South Side.
In the midst of one of the city’s suffocating heat waves on July 27 the Chicago Race Riot of 1919 was off and running.  That term can be confusing because to modern ears it evokes the bloody uprisings of despair of the 1960’s and ‘70’s when enraged Blacks in Chicago and other major cities fought police and often burned down their own neighborhoods.  But in 1919 the rioters were mostly White mobs roaming the streets and indiscriminately attacking  Black men, women, and children they encountered; burning black residences, schools, and churches; and looting not only Black businesses, but white-owned shops and stores that sold to them.  
The Chicago Defender, the city's Black newspaper of record reported more accurately on the events than the downtown dailies while trying to calm the situation.
Here and there Blacks individually and in small groups fought back—notably ex-Doughboysback from France—some times with gunfire.  But the statistics of the known victims tell the tale.  Thirty-eight people were killed—23 Black and 15 white with some White likely the victims of their own indiscriminate fire. 537 were officially reported wounded, with 2/3 injured being Black.  The 1000 to 2000 who lost their homes to arson and frenzied demolition were virtually all Black.  Hundreds were arrested by the Police or held by the Illinois National Guard after it was finally mobilized.  The records are incomplete but the majority of those were also Black.  In fact Police often turned a blind eye to racial attacks and sometimes joined them.
Stoning a Black victim to death.  The man with the raised arm is in what looks like a Chicago Fire Department uniform.
1919 was another one of those pivotal yearsin American history, a paradigm shift.  World War I was over and “a million men in khaki suits” were returning home to a devastating post war recession and high unemployment.  Around the world revolution was in the air while at home a massive strike wave that included a national steel strike, coal mining wars, and the defiant radicalism of the energized Industrial Workers of the World actions out West in the lumber, metal mining, agricultural industries.  War-time anti-labor actions pivoted into a full blown Red Scare with nationwide raids, mass arrests, show trials, and incarcerations. Temporary war-time prohibition was becoming permanent under the 18th Amendment to the Constitution and the enabling Volstead Act. 
On the other hand 19th Amendment for women’s suffrage passed both houses of Congress and was in the process of being ratified in the States and empowered women were ditching cumbersome, heavy garments for clothes they could move comfortably in.   And Black culture was beginning to go mainstreamas jass or jazz escaped New Orleans to Chicago and the New York stage. 
But things were particularly bleak for African-Americans.  Hope had been high that the service of Blacks in the War to End All Wars and on the home front would earn respect and gratitude which would improve their daily lives and prospects.  Hundreds of thousands had escaped the Jim Crow Southto the major northern industrial citiesto work in defense and other heavy industry in a movement known as the Great Migration.  Now, with unemployment raging white workers saw Blacks as job thieves who undercut wages.  Blacks had also been used as strikebreakers.  Tensions were on the rise.
Meanwhile in the South Black veterans were seen as threat to the Jim Crow system of White supremacy.  The new Ku Klux Klan that arose in the afterglow of the 1914 release of D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and other secret night riders were spreading widely.  Lynching’s surged including executions of Black veterans still in uniform.  
In what became known as the Red Summer, race riots erupted in more than 25 cities including Indianapolis, Indiana and Washington, DC.  While the Chicago riot lasted the longest and did by far the most property damage, Blacks in the South suffered even greater losses, often with scant attention by the press. 
An Omaha lynch mob gleefully posed with the burning body of their victim in one of the many Red Summer riots.
A mob led by White sailors in Charleston, South Carolina killed five blacks including a respected doctor who tried to defend himself with a hand gun and another died later.  A white race riot in Longview, Texas led to the deaths of at least four men and destroyed the Black neighborhood in town. Local police in Bisbee, Arizona attacked Buffalo Soldier troops of 10th U.S. Cavalry in the Battle of Brewery Gulch. In Norfolk, Virginia a mob attacked a homecoming party for Black veterans.  In Knoxville, Tennessee a lynch mob stormed the court house then They attacked the African-American business district, where they fought business owners, leaving at least seven dead and wounding more than 20 people.  In Omaha, Nebraska another lynch mob attacked a jail, seized Will Brown hanged him and burned his body before attacking Black neighborhoods and stores on the north side.
Worst of all a meeting of Black sharecropper trying to form a union near tiny Elain, Arkansas was attacked by armed mob of hundreds of whites who hunted and killed over 100 Black men and women over two days.  Then 79 surviving Blacks were tried and convicted by all-white juries, and 12 were sentenced to death for murder.  Only the Supreme Court’s ultimate overturn of the convictions for denial of due process saved their lives.  No White attacker was ever charged with anything.
Red Summer indeed.
A Tribune map marked flashpoint of the riots.
In Chicago the White rampage was largely led by Irish gangs from Bridgeport including the politically clout-heavy Hamburg Athletic Club which included 19-year-old Richard J. Daley who was the group’s president.  Another gang, Ragen’s Colts donned in blackface and set fire to Lithuanian and Polish homes in the Back of the Yards neighborhood in a deliberate attempt to incite the immigrant community to join the riots.
Black-owned Providence Hospital, which was caring for many victims, was threatened by the mob but was turned aside by Chicago Police.  In other instances the police stood aside as mobs prevented the Fire Department from responding to arson fires and some officers actually joined attacks on isolated individuals.  Street cars were targeted and Black riders pulled off and beaten even in the Loop, miles north of the main unrest.
Chicago Mayor William Hale (Big Bill) Thompson let the rioting go on for days before he was forced to accept National Guard troops.
Republican Mayor William Hale Thompson engaged in a game of brinksmanship with Illinois Governor Frank Lowden.  Thompson refused to ask Lowden to send in the Illinois National Guard for four days and gave the impression that he generally supported White rioters as “defenders of their homes. Lowden had already called up the 11th Illinois Infantry Regiment and its machine gun company, as well as the 1st, 2nd and 3rd reserve militia totaling 3,500 men and they were waiting in armories.  Lowden had to appeal to President Woodrow Wilson to put pressure on Thompson before he could finally put the troops on the streets.
The Cook County Sheriff also hastily deputized 3,000 recently discharged volunteer white veterans who were haphazardly deployed and undisciplined.  Guardsmen were deployed to protect Black property and lives and to keeps the two sides separate.  It took four days to fully restore order. 
A Black veteran outranked the young National Guardsman he contorted.
In the wake of the Lowden launched a special blue-ribbon investigation and other inquiries were led by the Coroner’s office.  The State’s Attorney Maclay Hoyne only brought accused Black rioters to a Grand Jury which rebelled and refused to issue indictments until at least some White rioters were brought before it.  A Cook County judge told scolded the Police Department for only bringing charges against Blacks, “I want to explain to you officers that these colored people could not have been rioting among themselves. Bring me some white prisoners.”
The ugly legacy of the riots was a hardening racial division in the city.  Both Blacks and Whites sought protection in segregated neighborhoods.  Over the years the South Side Black Belt expanded block-by-block resulting in White flight with real estate speculators roiling the pot to make fast killings.  Mayor Daley would use massive housing developments and expressways to isolate and contain the Black communities, including those which had spread to the West Side.  Poverty festered in those communities leading directly to the riots of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s.
For decades there was a semi-official policyof forgetting the 1919 riots.  Outside of the Black community, few whites ever encountered much more than a veiled mention of the events.  No monuments to the dead were erected, no municipal commemorations held.  The DuSable Museum of African American History and the Chicago History Museum (formerly the Chicago Historical Society Museum) have had exhibits, but people had to seek them out.
With a new Black Mayor, Lori Lightfoot official recognition of the 100th anniversary is now underway.  On July 27 Chicago Race Riot of 1919 Commemoration Project (CRR19) is being launched in Bronzeville, the historic Black neighborhood that was the target of much of the violence.  Events will include a special exhibition at the Newberry Library including photos captured by Japanese American photographer Jun Fujita during the riots along with a timeline of the violence, and an interactive map of the 38 deaths.  Dozens of special programs are planned over the next year.
Tomorrow:  Two poets on the Chicago 1919 Race Riots.

The Last Yippie!—Paul Krassner

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25 July 2019 at 16:37
By: Patrick Murfin
Paul Krassner was unrepentant and defiant to the end of his long life. Note —This post took three days to pull together and does not even scratch the surface. The icons and influencers of my youth are dropping like flies.   Paul Krassner was the latest.   He died on Sunday in Desert Hot Springs, Californiaafter a long period of declining health.   He was 87 years old.   Always an iconoclast and avowed humanist he would have laughed at suggestions in some Facebook posts I saw that he had gone to a better placeor would somehow be reunited with former pals and co-conspirators.   Dead is dead period he would have insisted—kick the useless corpseaside and move on.   But he might have had an eye-rolling chuckle at the hippiesque anno...

Cheyenne’s Daddy of ‘em All—Frontier Days

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22 July 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Bronc riding at the first Frontier Day cowboy competition in 1897.  Spectators watched from carriages and horse back or perched on the rail fences.  A few hundred attended, but word spread fast and an annual event became a popular tourist spectacle.
Back in my old home town of Cheyenne, Wyoming the annual rodeo completion cum bacchanal known as Cheyenne Frontier Days which has been held annually for 122 years is in full swing.  This year over the ten days around the last full week in July it will attract more than 200,000 visitors virtually swamping the Wyoming capital city’s 64,000 residents.
Known as the Daddy of ‘em All, it is both the longest continuously held cowboy competition in the world and by far the largest outdoor competitionof its kind.  Although there has been a National Finals Rodeo since 1956 to crown individual champions in each main professional rodeo event, that indoor competition, currently held in Las Vegas, lacks the pageantryand history that makes Frontier Days unique.  
The first Cheyenne Frontier Day was a one day contest for local cowboys working the big ranchesin the area on September 27, 1897.  The event included a raucous informal cowboy parade through downtownwith the boys whooping it up and riding wildly much as they had done when they brought their herds to the rail head after round-up every year.  
The distinguished gentlemen of the firs Frontier Committee donned their formal top hats best suits in their finest carriages.  Local cattle barons, bankers, railroad executives, and politicians.  Having their fine wheels drawn by oxen and a jack ass was a nice touch.
Cheyenne was then a bustling and modern small city, not only the Wyoming state capital, but home to major Union Pacific Railroad facilities.  Its streets had been the first in the nation to be illuminated by electric arc lamps back in 1883.   Fueled by the wealth of cattle barons on Millionaire’s Row, the city considered itself up-to-date and cosmopolitan.  Even in 1896, however, just six years after statehood and four years since the bloody events of the Johnson County War, residents were becoming nostalgic for their wild west heritage.  
The first event was so successful that Frontier Day became an annual event.  The competition was soon promoted nationally by the Union Pacific to boost tourist traffic on its trains, and the local business community loved the sound of cash registers ringing in local hotels, restaurants, bars, and brothels.  
In the early years cowgirls competed separately in most of the same events as the men.  Despite the popularity of their competitions, by the 1930s they were confined to "powderpuff" events like barrel racing.
By the turn of the 20th Century elements of the wild west shows popularized by Buffalo Bill Cody and others, including mock hold-ups of the Cheyenne to Deadwood stage coach, Indian battles, and in particularly bad taste given recent the state’s recent history, a re-enacted lynching of rustlerswere incorporated into pageantry surrounding the rodeo.  Other events like street dances, amateur theatrics, menageries, and carnivals were added to the ever growing event over the years as more days of competition were added to the rodeo. Cowgirl competitions were an early favorite. The cowgirls rode the same stock and took the same risks as the men but were judged separately. 
From his special box erected on the arena floor former President Theodore Roosevelt shook hands with a cowgirl at the 1910 Frontier Days.
In 1910 former President Theodore Roosevelt was delighted to be on hand to congratulate the winning riders.  In 1903 as sitting president he had visited and a special one day rodeo was staged in his honor and he participated in a ride over Sherman Hill from Cheyenne to Laramie with Senator Francis E. Warren and big-wigs of the Wyoming Stock Growers Association.   
By the 1930’s stars of Hollywood’s popular westerns, including the state’s own favorite son Col. Tim McCoy, were regularly making personal appearances and sometimes incorporating the rodeo itself into their films.  Concerts by popular Hillbilly and Cowboy singers—and later the masters of Western Swing—were added to the mix.  
Miss Frontier of 1936, Mary Helen Warren, granddaughter of Wyoming's first Governor and former Senator Francis E. Warren designed the fringed white buckskin culottes still worn by the rodeo queens. 
Since 1931 reigning over the event has been Miss Frontier and her Lady in Waiting.  The first was Jean Nimmo Dubois, a descendent of Esther Hobart Morris who was America’s first female Justice of the Peace in South Pass in 1869 and a heroine of the Wyoming suffrage movement. For the first three years the winner was selected on the basis of who could sell the most tickets to a dance.  Starting in 1934 the Frontier Committee has privately picked Miss Frontier and her Lady in Waiting, traditionally drawing on the daughters and granddaughters of local cattle barons or Cheyenne business leaders.  One requirement was that she had to be an expert horsewoman.  
Miss Frontier of 1936 was Mary Helen Warren Wolborn, granddaughter of the state’s founding patriarch Francis E. Warren.  She designed the distinctive white buckskin culottes worn to this day.  Her inspiration was a costume worn by celebrated fan dancer Sally Rand who had titillated audiences the year before.  

For a boy in Cheyenne in the 1950's rodeo champions like Casey Tibbs were bigger stars than baseball heroes like Mickey Mantel, Stan Musial, or Willie Mays.
The 1950’s were the Golden Age of Rodeo.  The most storied figures of the sport were active—Casey Tibbs, Big Jim Shoulders, the Bell Brothers, and the legendary rodeo clown and bulldogger Wilbur Plaugher—and shined in Cheyenne.  Monte Blue, known for playing the sheriff in countless B westerns, was the arena announcerfamous for his signature call at the beginning of each rodeo, “Let’s go, let’s show, let’s rodeo!”  
Chief Charley Red Cloud and Princess Blue Water of the Oglala Sioux brought their band to Frontier Days for many years shown here with Miss Frontier and her Lady in Waiting in 1956.
Chief Charley Red Cloud and Princes Blue Water, who had appeared with Buffalo Bill, brought their band of Oglala Sioux each year to perform traditional dancing and live in a teepee village on the grounds of Frontier Park.  Top movie and TV starsfrom Roy Rogers to Hugh O’Brian made personal appearances and country music stars like Ernest Tubbs, Red Foley, and the Sons of the Pioneers performed nightly at the Frontier Pavilion. 
During that era the famous saloons and bars downtown were a nightly explosions of cowboy contestants, tourists, and pretty young local girls—many of the really, really young—carousing and drinking with intermittent brawls all of which spilled into the streets until the wee-small hours.  I am told that in the interest of family entertainment local authorities have heavily clamped down on that and the evenings are pale and tame now.  Some old timers say downright boring.
My father W. M. Murfin in his first year as Secretary of the Frontier Committee in 1954.

From 1954 through 1956 my father, W. M. Murfin as Secretary of the Frontier Committee, played a leading role in coordinating the rodeo and all of the other activities.  My brother Tim and I reveled in riding in the parades and meeting the cowboys and celebrities that often came through our house.  
Today the whole Frontier Days extravaganza stretches over ten days and includes 9 rodeos sanctioned by the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association (PRCA).  Day Money is awarded to the winners in each event for each rodeo.  At the end of the schedule Cheyenne Frontier Days champions are named in each event and an All Around Cowboy, who has to compete in two or more events, are determined by the total amount of Day Money earned. There are also nights of separate Championship Bull Riding (CBR) competitions. 
Frontier Days features three grand parades down town with colorful floats, miniature trains, marching bands, equestrian units, and one of the world largest collections of functional carriages, coaches, buggies, hearses, and wagons.
More than 2,500 local volunteers work on events that include the rodeo, 3 Grand Parades, pancake breakfasts, concerts, chili and chuck wagon cook-offs, the carnival, exhibits, Indian Village, military open houses.  A traditional performance by the United States Air Force Thunderbirdsis back with their aerial acrobatics. 
This year top country music acts like Lady Antebellum, Rascal Flats, Josh Turner, Miranda Lambert, Keith Urban, and Tim McGraw will headline Frontier Nights in the main arena.  Side venues will feature other acts, making Frontier Days a major music festival. 
I know many readers of this blog are animal lovers and abhor rodeo and the people who love it.  No question about it, rodeo can be brutal to both animals and human competitors—bull riding is hands down the most dangerous competitive sport in the world.  It remains so even though significant reforms have been made in how rodeo stock is handled.   Particularly dangerous events for animals like the Chuck Wagon Races—think horse drawn NASCAR with often horrific pile-ups—and Steer busting—roping a steer around the horns then pulling past the animal catching its feet and throwing it to the ground, a maneuver that often resulted in broken necksor legs—have been eliminated.  Nothing short of abolition by law of all rodeo competition will satisfy many animal rights folks.  I understand that.  But I also love a good rodeo.  I guess you will have to lump me with the heartless brutes. 


The Last of the Firsts—Pumpsie Green and the Boston Red Sox

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21 July 2019 at 09:32
By: Patrick Murfin
Pumpsie Green batting, running, and fielding for the Boston Rec Sox.

Sixty years ago today the Boston Red Sox did it at far from home at Comiskey Park in Chicago on July 21, 1959 in a losing game against the red hot White Sox, the eventual American League Champions that year.  The BoSox, languishing below .500 and way back in the pack, sent Pumpsie Green into the game as a pinch runner.  He had no effect on the 2-1 loss to the Pale Hose.  But that brief appearance made Boston the last of the pre-expansion Major League Baseball teams to field a Black ballplayer.  That was more than 12 years after Jackie Robinson took his famous bow with the Brooklyn Dodgers.
You would have to be a very hard core baseball nerd indeed to have ever heard of Pumpsie Green.  Although by all accounts a very nice and rather shy man who returned to his California home town to become a high school coach and beloved figure, Green was barely a journeyman ball player with a short 5 year Big League career with generous time back down in the Minors who never became a regular in the lineup and was used mainly a utility infielder and pinch runner.  
Pumpsie Green 1960 baseball card.
Contrast that record with those who broke the color barrier at other teams.  Owners generally followed the Dodger’s Branch Rickey in introducing top flight players from the Negro Leagues in hopes that real star talent that could boost their teams in the pennant races would eventually win over all but the most hard core racists among their fans.  In addition to the legendary Robinson other team firsts included standouts and some future Hall of Famers like Cleveland’s Larry Dolby (1947), Hank Thompson for the St. Louis Browns (1947) and the New York Giants (1949), Monte Irvins also with the Giants on the same day as Thompson, Minnie Miñoso for the White Sox (1951), Ernie Bankswith the Chicago Cubs (1953), and Elston Howard in New York Yankee pinstripes (1955).
Long time Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey.
This was not an accident.  The Red Sox organization never wanted to integrate and resisted all pressure to do so for as long as possible.  Whether this was due to the personal racism of owner Tom Yawkey and the team’s long time manager and Yawkey’s drinking buddy, Texas born and raised Mike “Pinky” Higgins is the subject of much debate.  Higgins often gets more of the blame and after his death some of his former players recalled racist comments.  Baseball writer Al Hirshberg reported in his 1973 history of the team that in the ‘50’s Higgins had bluntly told him “There’ll be no niggers on this ball club as long as I have anything to say about it.”
But even before Higgins’s ascent, Yawkey had proven reluctant to hire Blacks.  Not that he did not have the chance.  In fact the Red Sox had first crack at Robinson and other future greats.  Robinson’s first Major League try out was at Fenway Park on April 16, 1945.  As he was finishing up someone yelled from the stands “Get that Nigger off the field!”  It was a humiliating moment for Robinson who remembered it with bitterness.  Some have attributed the shout to Yawkey himself.  Others have scoffed at the idea that the elegant Yale educated owner would have said anything that crude even if he agreed with it.  But he clearly oversaw an organization where it was possible and perhaps encouraged.  The team also passed up first rights to Willie Mays and Hank Aaron.
Under Yawkey and Higgins the Red Sox did develop a number of Black prospects in their minor leagues system, but consistently traded them away for less promising white player or released them outright before they could hit the majors.  The team pointedly kept its spring training home in Tempe, Arizona which had no hotels that would accommodate Blacks who would have to stay in Phoenix 15 miles away while they were being evaluated for the big team.
Was Manager Mike Higgins really behind Boston's long hold out against Black players?
Management apologists—and they are legion in Boston—claim that it was not the animus of Yawkey and Higgins, but the Red Sox fan base that was to blame.  
Boston always had a reputation as a liberal city in regard to race.  Famously it was a hot bed of resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law and a cradle of Abolitionism.  Rev. Theodore Parker and a cabal of wealthy abolitionists had secretly bankrolled John Brown.  Senator Charles Sumner was a lion of abolitionism and a Radical Republican bane to Abraham Lincoln and his hopes of re-integrating the South back into the Union.   In the post-war Reconstruction Era most of the Massachusetts Congressional delegation firmly supported Black citizenship and voting rights in the south and the generous 40 acres and a mule policy of the Freedman’s Bureau.  Years in the future, in 1967 the state would elect Edward Brooke the first Black in the Senate since Reconstruction.
But often forgotten were the anti-abolitionist riots that the righteous minority in the city had to face.  Also forgotten is the strength and appeal of the anti-immigrant and anti-Black Know Nothings in the 1850’s.  The liberal, Republican and largely Unitarian elite began to leave the city for the leafy suburbs in the late 19thand early 20th Centuries leaving the city itself a Democratic power house and populated largely by Irish, Italian, and other immigrants and their dependents.  It had, compared to other Northern cities, a small Black population which was bitterly resentenced in the teaming white working class neighborhoods.  Just how deep the animus ran would be shown years later when Southie and other white working class neighborhoods erupted into years of sometimes violent opposition tobussing to desegregate the school system.
Liberal whites in the suburbs might have watched the Red Sox on TV, but the seats at old Fenway were filled by those working class whites who, we are told, would stage a revolt if they saw Black players on the field.  Perhaps.  But other cities had similar resistance and managed to integrate after overcoming initial resistance.
The boost that talented Black players provided to teams was one big reason.  Boston suffered from its long holdout.  Under Higgins’s managership after early marginal successes the team went from a perennial powerhouse and pennant contender to a consistent bottom dweller in the standings.  Sports writers were beginning to blame that on Higgins’s stodgy management styleand on his refusal to bring on talented Black players.
Perhaps that is why with the team languishing again in the cellar, and days after the usually fawning Boston newspapers began singing the song about missing great Black players that Yawkey finally canned Higgins as manager and replaced him with Billy Jurges.  But he kept his good drinking buddy close to him in senior management as a special advisor.  The move allowed Higgins to never be personally responsible for introducing a Black player on the team.  
Later that summer pitcher Earl Wilson was also called up.  Neither player set the league afire—perhaps an “I told you so” moment for Higgins.  The Red Sox finished the season a dismal 100 games under .500 and staring up at the White Sox and the hated Yankee dynasty that would go on to dominate Baseball through much of the ‘60’s.
Fenway Park circa 1960 on a post card.  The ball wasn't the only thing white....
Early the next season Higgins talked himself back into the dugout where he managed his Black players without ever personally insulting them but lavishing them with scant affection.  After retiring as a manager in 1962 with a career record only two games over .500, Higgins was promoted to officially become General Manager.  As Yawkey’s confidant he had effectively been acting in that capacity without portfoliofor years.
The Red Sox went on to field Black Players, including some stars.  But they always tended to have fewer on the field than most teams.  And they generally preferred dark skinned Latinos to African Americans.  Sometimes it seemed that they were back sliding.  As late as 2009 they began the season with not a single Black player in the season starting lineup.  
Meanwhile demographics in Boston have changed.  Over the last 30 years Yuppies and their descendents Hipsters have returned to the city and recolonized neighborhood after neighborhood squeezing the old ethnic enclaves and Black neighborhoods alike.  Many Blacks have been pushed into surrounding towns and suburbs.  The Yuppies and hipsters became noisy and loyal members of the Red Sox Nation.  Indeed when I was last in Boston in 2007 it seemed like by law no male in his 20’s or early 30’s could be seen on the street without a Red Sox capbeat up just enough to indicate that it sat on the head of a non-tourist.  They buy out the increasingly expensive seats in Fenway Park displacing the working class fans that kept the team afloat in its leaner years.
The Yuppies and Hipsters tend to be more tolerant, or polite, about race than the denizens of Southie.  Yet attendance at Fenway remains overwhelmingly white, rivaling the bleached look of fans in Atlanta and Houston where Astros management once hired Black vendors to sit in vacant seats in the boxes behind home plate to give the illusion inclusiveness on national TV during a playoff series.
As for Pumpsie himself, he was uncomfortable even talking about his experiences.
Elijah Green was born on October 27, 1931 in Boley, Oklahoma.  He got his unusual nickname from his mother.  His family relocated to Richmond, California largely to give their athletic sons the best possible opportunity. Two brothers were drafted into the National Football League and Cornell Green was a long-time safety on the Green Bay Packers.  Pumpsie also showed promise as a three letter man at El Cerrito High School.
Green considered basketball to be his best sport, but baseball seemed like the best ticket to a professional career. He attended the two year Conta Costa College to which his high school coach had moved.  In his second year there he tried out for and was signed into the system of the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League. 
In 1954, Green batted .297 in his second season with Oaks affiliate the Wenatchee Chiefs, and was promoted the next year to Stockton Ports. Green’s contract was purchased by the Red Sox organization during the 1955 season but he was allowed to finish out the season in Stockton.  He worked his way up the Reds organization as a short stop and second baseman over the next three years.  All the while he saw more talented Black prospects traded away from the organization.  
After spending the 1958 campaign with the Minneapolis Millers, Green was called up to Red Sox spring training the next year.  As one of the few remaining Black prospects in the system, he drew a lot of attention and some largely unmerited press hype.  But he was sent back to Minnesota where for the first half of the season he played some of the best ball of his career, hitting .320 in 98 games.

Green was especially grateful for the support and friendship of slugger Ted Williams, the team's acknowledged leader.  That helped the whole team embrace him even in the face of manager Mike Higgins' hostility and fan dissatisfaction.
He never got enough playing time with the Red Sox to get into much of a groove with his bat or glove, although he was valued for his speed on the base paths.  He only played 50 games for the rest of the season and hit an anemic .233.  All of his starts were at second base, not his natural position as a short stop.
In 1960 he settled into a role as a utility man giving regular starters a rest or, because he was a switch hitter for use against left-handed pitchers.  He appeared in 133 games, some of them as a pinch runner and divided his time between second and short.  
Green was off to a relatively hot start in 1961 and looked for a while like he might break into the status of a regular starter.  But in May he was hospitalized with appendicitis and put on the disabled list for a month.  He was still in physically weakened condition when he came back to the club.  Still he put up his best numbers in the Majors--six home runs, 27 RBIs, 12 doubles, and four stolen bases. 
Despite the promise the 1962 season was a humiliation.  Famously after a weekend sweep  by  the hated Yankees in New York City Green and his buddy pitcher Gene Conley jumped off a team bus that was stuck in Bronx traffic and disappeared. The pair was found two days later at Idlewild International Airport trying to board a plane for Israel, with no passports or luggage.  The famously bizarre episode became the butt of comedian’s jokes but was never explained.
The next year Green was traded to the New York Mets for the 1962 season.  The Mets kept him on their Buffalo Bison affiliate roster most of the year.  He made only 17 spot appearances with the big league club and swung a bat for the last time as a major leaguer on September 26, 1962.
Before returning permanently to the Minors for the final two years of his career, Green racked up a .246 batting average with 13 home runs and 74 Runs Batted In (RBI) in 344 games. 
After retiring from organized Baseball Green became the baseball coach and a summer school math teacher, and councilor at Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California.  He settled back in El Cerrito with his longtime wife, Marie.  He was a respected, even beloved, citizen of his adopted hometown which honored him in 2012 with a proclamation for his “Distinguished status in the history of Baseball.”
Throwing out the first pitch at Fenway 50 years later.
The Red Sox organization was getting some flak for never recognizing his contribution in integrating the team.  Back in 1959 the often loquacious Yawkey had not one word to say in the press about the event and management had done damn little to highlight it ever since.  Finally on April 17, 2009 at the beginning of the season 50 years after of his debut, Green was invited to throw out a first ball. He was invited back to do the same before Jackie Robinson Day in 2012 and was among the old timers in attendance for Fenway’s 100th anniversarycelebrations later that month.
But there has never been a Pumpsie Green Day.  And don’t hold your breath for the Bobble Head promotion.
Just five days ago on July 17 Green died at the age of 85 in California earning brief obituaries in the New York Times and Washington Post and a longer notice in the Boston Globe.


Man oh Man on the Moon

✇ WWUUD?
20 July 2019 at 12:34
By: Patrick Murfin
The world was transfixed by the grainy video from a camera attached to the Lunar Module as Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon.
As Americans and countless others around the world stayed glued to theirtelevisions, Astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the face of the Moon on July 20, 1969, 50 years ago today Armstrong, the commander of the Apollo 11mission climbed down a ladder from the Lunar Module Eagle to the surface in the Sea of Tranquility at 10:56 P.M. Eastern Day Light Time.  
As he climbed down he repeated a carefully constructed statement on what he knew would be a historic occasion.  Viewers at home heard him say, “That’s one small step for man, one giant step for mankind.”  Armstrong would later insist he said “one small step for a man” and that the article had simply not been picked up by the microphone.  It is indicative of Armstrong’s notoriously detailed mindand insistence on precision that this misquote bothered him for years.  
The mission famously made good on President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 pledge,made at the height of the Space Race with the Soviet Union that the country would go to the Moon within a decade. 
The crew of Apollo 11--Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin in their NASA publicity photo.
 Like Armstrong, the other two members of the Apollo 11 crew were already veteran astronauts.  Pilot Michael Collins stayed in the main Command Module, Columbia still in orbit while Armstrong and Lunar Module pilot Edwin “Buzz” Aldrindescended to the surface, a tense trip marked by an alarming shortage of fuel for the rockets that adjusted the attitude of the craft and brought it to a landing.  Less than 11 seconds of fuel were left on touchdown.  
The business-like Armstrong had been calling off markers on the way down to Mission Control in Houston.  Finally he radioed, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”  It took two hours to prepare to depart the lunar module.  Armstrong was soon joined on the surface by Aldrin. The men were on the surface for a little over two and a half hours.  
They shot still photographs, made a panoramic videoof the surroundings then set up the camera on a tripod to observe their activities.  They tested various means of moving about on the surface and settled on kind of a lope. The two planted an American Flag stiffened with wire to stay unfurled in the Moon’s windless zero gravity.  They collected rock and soil samples, but everything was taking longer than expected and Aldrin tried to speed up the pace of his assignments before being warned that his pulse rate was climbing.  The pair was given a 15 minute extension of planed EVA (Extra Vehicular Activity) to complete their tasks.  
On the Moon with the Eagle Lunar Module and the American flag of conquest.
Aldrin re-boarded Eagle first and had some difficulty getting a bulky box of mineral samples up the ladder.  After a night’s sleep, the Eagle lifted off to return to Columbia.  Aldrin and Armstrong had been on the Moon for just over 21 hours.  They left behind the flag, the landing craft stairs with a special plaque commemorating the event, and discarded items from their EVA including their backpacks, lunar overshoes, and a Hasselblad camera.  There was also a small bag ofmementos carried by Aldrin in a suit pocket.  
After Columbia splashed down in the Pacific near Wake Island the capsule and astronauts were carried by helicopter to the deck of the USS Hornet, a famous aircraft carrier from World War II, where they were personally greeted by President Richard Nixon.  
President Richard Nixon with the Apollo 11 crew in isolation on the USS Hornet.
With the war in Vietnam still raging, dissent rife at home, and urban riots exploding in Black communities, Nixon—and the nation—craved some good news.  
The occasion of the landing has become beyond iconic.  Many historiansnow regard it as the pinnacle of the American Century.  Unsuspected by most people at the time, the county was on the verge of a long, slow slide.  
Today in on-going economic insecurity marked by the rapid shrinkage of the middle class, with old wars refusing to fade away and new ones looming, the public polarized to the edge of civil war, and the United States no longer able to send astronauts into space via American rockets or the retired Space Shuttle fleet, the image of Armstrong on the Moon is a melancholy reminder that once we were a nation that could do things, big things.
President Trump aiming to cast himself in the image of JFK has ordered NASA to return men to the Moon within five years but has given the gutted agency scant resources to complete the mission.  In celebration of capitalism and scorn for government accomplishments, hope is pinned on two competing privately owned corporations to build re-usable rocket systems to first transport astronauts and equipment to the International Space Station from which a new mission to the Moon might be launched.
Although old rival Russia, a partner in the Space Station, is not publicly planning their own Moon mission, many believe Vladimir Putin might have one up his sleeve to assert a new dominance in the world.  The Chinese have openly been pursuing their own plans.
Not only does an American mission lack focus and the kind of unified national resources that made it possible to fulfill JFK’s challenge.  But Trump’s wholesale rejection of science that does not confirm his various hunches and prejudiceshas sapped the intellectual capacity to do Big Things.  American industry and technology no longer dominates the world and Trump’s trade wars with China and Europe threatens access to vital modern know-how, components, and equipment.
Ryan Goslling, center, as Neil Armstrong in First Man.
Despite, or perhaps because of all this, Americans are commemorating the golden anniversary of the nation’s crowning achievementwith enthusiasm tempered by nostalgia.  Last year the film First Man focused on Neil Armstrong played by Ryan Gosling.  Currently the documentary Apollo 11 is enjoying a well-reviewed theatrical release.  PBS is airing multiple documentaries and less prestigious cable outlets like The History Channel and The Sci-Fi Channel have offerings of their own.  Network TV networks are all airing special programing.  Apollo Mission Control at the Johnson Space Center in Houston has been meticulously restored and opened to the public.
Buzz Aldrin's, (second from the right) skeptical, shocked mugging during Donald Trump's unintelligible blathering about space became a social media sensation.
Neil Armstrong died in 2012 but octogenarians Michael Collins and Buzz Aldrin are still with us.  Aldrin enjoys his celebrity status and makes frequent public appearances including a memorable stint on Dancing With the Stars.  He is a strong proponent of the space program and an advocate for manned space exploration and a return to the Moon.  In 2017 he accepted an invitation from Donald Trump to attend a White House speech on the space program.  He became a viral social media sensation for the contorted faces he made as the Cheeto-in-Charge spouted literal gibberish.  Way to go, Buzz!


1995 Chicago Heat Wave—Late Casualties of the ’68 Democratic Convention Riots?

✇ WWUUD?
19 July 2019 at 11:33
By: Patrick Murfin
1995 headlines tell the shocking story of the heat wave disaster that hit Chicago in July.
My Columbia College writing teacher John Schulz penned one of the earliest and best accounts of the demonstrations and street confrontations around the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.  He called it No One Was Killed.  Perhaps he was premature in that judgement by37 years.
We are in the grips of long, dangerous hot spell and the Chicago media have taken to recalling July of 1995 when more than 700 people died as the city baked in temperatures that hovered around 100° complete with grainy but graphic archival footage of Chicagoans sweltering and the inconvenient bodiespiled up in refrigerator trailers at the overwhelmed Cook County Medical Examiner’s offices and buried unceremoniously in slit trenches.
There had been other notable heatwaves in the city, especially in the mid-1930’s when the city was struck with the same blasting heat that created the Dust Bowl.  But none produced anything like the same mortality rates.  While several factors including humidity levels, a heat inversion that trapped polluted air over the city, and frequent spot power outages and brownouts contributed to the toll, some of the deaths were a direct result of Mayor Richard J. Dailey’s decision to close the parks, especially the lakefront parks to overnight sleeping to prevent them from being used by Yippies and other demonstrator from using them during the Convention protests.
Chicagoans had been seeking relief from the heat at night on the shores of Lake Michigan as far back as the 19th Century.  On October 8, 1877 a rare hot, dry blanket covered the city and much of the Midwest on both sides of the Lake. Despite the fact that railroad tracks, lumber yards, tanneries and other industrial buildings, warehouses, and busy wharves and piers blocked easy access to the lakefront in many areas, hundreds, maybe thousands, were sleeping where they could including the cemeterythat is now Lincoln Park when the Great Chicago Fire broke out.  They would soon be joined by tens of thousands more fleeing the rapidly spreading conflagration. 
Chicagoans sleeping in the park on a hot night in the 1950's
After Daniel Burnham’s great plan led to the creation of a string of lakefront parks and public beaches and Chicago’s extensive street car systems made them easily accessible to residents far from the shores, the custom of whole families camping out on blankets under the stars was well established.  In the major heatwaves from the ‘30’s through the ‘60’s the press reported the custom.
That ended after Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin announced plans for a Yippie! Festival of Life during the 1968 Democratic National Convention to protest the War in Vietnam.  The call to the Festival invited the youth of America come to the city and camp in the lakefront parks.  Hysterical press coverage imagined thousands of drug and sex crazed radicals descending of the city and creating “anarchy in the streets.”  For their part the Yippies relished the free publicity.
Alarmed, Mayor Richard J. Daley ordered the Chicago Park District to enact an ordinance closing all parks at 11 pm and prohibiting any sleeping or camping.   First to feel the effects of the ordinance were surprised troops of Boy Scouts and veteran’s organizations who had regularly used the parks for camping.  During a relatively mild heat snap in July families seeking to sleep out were first turned away.
Chicago Police mass in Lincoln Park before violently pushing Yippies and other protestors out of the park after the new curfew.
The battles to clear Lincoln Park of Yippies and other demonstrators during the Conventions were bloody affairs with Chicago Police Department baton chargesand heavy use of tear gas that spilled into nearby Old Town Streets.
Almost everyone expected that things would go back to normal after it was all over, that either the ordinance would simply be unenforced in future years against ordinary Chicagoans or that it would be explicitly repealed. But Dailey was terrified the parks could once again be used by radicals and by rumors that the city restive and angry West and Southside Black residents would swarm the parks and threaten Loop businesses and swanky Gold Coast.  His lawyers also advised him that if the camping bans were lifted, the Courts might rule that they had been imposed strictly to limit the rights of assembly and free speech and not, as had been claimed, for general public safety and protection of park land and facilities from damage.
Year after year, the sleeping ban stayed and was vigorously enforced, mostly against the homeless who still sought secluded spots to comfortably rest.  By the 1990’s the old custom of seeking relief at night Lake was a more than half forgotten quaint memory.
By 1995 many Chicagoans enjoyed air conditioning.  But not so much in the city’s poorest wards and neighborhoods.  Massive high-rise public housing developments like Robert Taylor Homes on the South Side and Cabrini Green on the Near North Side as well as Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) mid-risesenior buildings were un-air-conditioned. And unlike the city’s traditional housing stock of two and three flats, court yard apartments, brick bungalows and other single-family homes, those buildings did not have good cross ventilation to cool them at nights.  Instead they were virtual brick ovens that retained the day’s suffocating heat.
Paramedics load a heat stroke victim from a CHA senior housing building.

Even when public housing residents or other poor folks installed window air-conditioning units, many could not afford to run them due to the high cost of electricity.  Some were even reluctant to use fans.  Moreover and aggressive campaign to disconnect power to those with outstanding electric bills who they were barred by law from stopping service to during freezing winter months, left many poor folks in the stifling dark.  In addition, during the heart of the five day heat wave that year record electrical usage sparked wide-spread spot power outages and brown-outs.
Many residents in high crime areas were afraid to leave their windows open at night.
As the oppressive heat and high humidity settled over the city, trapped smog became a further health hazard for the elderly and those with respiratory ailments. 

The city government was slow to respond to the growing emergency even as bodies began piling up at the morgue. . The city did not declare a heat emergency and open cooling centers until the fourth day of the crisis.   There was as yet no system for the emergency distribution of fans or to provide bottled water to the most adversely affected residents.
Eric Klinenberg, author of the 2002 book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, has noted that the map of heat-related deaths in Chicago mirrored the map of poverty.  Most adversely affected were the elderly and isolated—those without family or community support.  Old menwith chronic illnesses fared far worse than elderly women, who tended to have more social connections to look after them.
The exact number of deaths in Cook County may never be known for sure.  Mortality tables show that 739 additional people died in that week above the usual average.  Blacks suffered significantly higher death rates than whites or Hispanics.
A priest reads prayers over the caskets of 41 unclaimed victims of the 1995 heat wave before they were covered by a bulldozer.
Seven refrigerator trailers had to be used to handle the bodies.  Many of the elderly victims lived and died alone.  When it was all over, 41 of the victims were either not identified or had no family to claims the bodies.  They were buried in plywood caskets in a slit trench in a suburban Homewood cemetery.
How many of these victims might have survived if they still had access to the air conditioner by the Lake?  No one can say for sure, but probably dozens or scores.
They were the late casualties of the Democratic Convention.


Barbara Stanwyck—From Broadway to Baby Face to Big Valley Matriarch

✇ WWUUD?
18 July 2019 at 00:39
By: Patrick Murfin
Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number. A handful of others had longer careers—Lillian Gish and Bette Davis come to mind—but few other American actors or actress remained a top ranked star from nearly the beginning to the end of a 60 year career.   Barbara Stanwyck—once known as Baby and don’t call her Babs if you know what’s good for you—ranged from pre-code sexpot temptress, bio-pics, screw ball comedy, women’s weeper melodrama, dancer, film noir vixen, middle aged helpless victim, to western matriarch, perfecting each with perfect conviction and believability.    She did it all while being compellingly attractive but never a classic movie beauty.   And she did it on her own terms without studio drama and temper tant...

The Bayonet Charge at Stony Point —Mad Anthony Wayne’s Little Masterpiece

✇ WWUUD?
16 July 2019 at 11:04
By: Patrick Murfin
Continental General Anthony Wayne earned the name Mad Anthony from his troops for his conduct at the Battle of Stony Point.
As Revolutionary War battles go it was neither large nor in the long-run that significant.  But in a surprise attack at midnight on July 16, 1779 elite light infantry of the Continental Line stormed Stony Point, a British strong point on the Hudson River and swept aside a garrisonof more than 600 seasoned troops with formidable artillery in a bayonet charge.  The garrison and its commander were vanquished and captured in less than an hour with a loss of 20-50 men dead, while the attacking Americans lost only 15 men killed and 85 wounded.
The attack had been personally planned in detail by Commanding General George Washington based on his personal reconnaissance and the carefully constructed intelligence operationwhich he ran as his own spy master.  In field command was Washington’s best infantry commander, Brigadier General Anthony Wayne of the Pennsylvania Line.  For his daring-do at Stony Point and other actions Wayne earned the nicknameMad Anthony from his troops.  
The troops under Wayne’s command were assembled in a special unit, the Corps of Light Infantry on June 12, 1779, expressly for the attack on Stony Point and other British outposts on the Hudson.  The men were hand-picked veteransfrom the best infantry regiments of the line organized into a brigade of four 300-340 man regiments.  They were the cream of the Continental Army and they knew it.
Together they executed as near perfect an operation as was ever conducted by the American military.
By 1779 the wily Washington had largely checkmated a much larger and better equipped British Army in based in New York.  The defeat of General John “Gentleman” Burgoyne at Saratoga two years earlier had smashed British North American Commander in Chief, Lieutenant General Sir Henry Clinton’s hopes for severing the Colonies in two along the Hudson River, then turning on Washington’s army and decisively defeating it in the field.  
Lt. General Sir Henry Clinton commanded in New York and was frustrated by George Washington's refusal to commit his main army to a decisive battle.
Washington somehow managed to keep his sometimes starving army in the field, holding them in a ring of strong points in a wide arc around New York with the bulk of the force in Hudson Highlands north of the city.  Despite Clinton’s repeated attempts to force Washington to come out and engage in a battle of main forces, the American commander refused to take any bait offered.  The war bogged down to raids, diversions, and small scale actions while the frustrated Clinton begged for ever more troops and materiel from home.
Clinton’s main plan for the 1779 campaign season was a series of strong raids along the Connecticut shore which he hoped would force the Continental garrison at Middlebrook to come out and fight.  With that portion of the army dealt with Clinton then hoped to turn north to finally draw out Washington’s main force.  There would be other, diversionary attacks as well, effectively dividing his own force.  But once again Washington wasn’t biting and Clinton dithered while awaiting more troops.
Still, he opened the campaign in late May by personally leading a force of 6,000 up the Hudson with the aim of capturing key river fords by which Washington could maneuver his forces between both sides.  The first, and most important, target was a Continental block-house and garrison at Stony Point, on the bluffs above King’s Ferry 30 miles north of the city.  Clinton sailed up the river on ships and barges escorted by the Royal Navy and landed his mixed force of Redcoat regulars, Hessian mercenaries, and Loyalist (Tory) troops.  The American garrison of only 40 Patriots quickly abandoned the post burning the nearly completed block house as they left.
Clinton hauled fifteen field pieces that included five iron and two brass cannon, four mortars and four small howitzers up the steep slopes of the Point to shell another near-by Yankee strong point, Fort Lafayette.  Clinton and his main force returned to New York, leaving behind a 500 man force under Lt. Col. Henry Johnson consisting of elements of the 17th Regiment of Foot, a Grenadier company of the 71st Regiment, a detachment of the Loyal American Regiment, and gun crews of the Royal Artillery.  In addition a Royal Navy gunboat and the sloop of war Vulture were anchored or patrolling nearby to defend a river approach.
The British did not have time to erect a classic European masonry fortress on the summit, or even to rebuild the burned block house and erect palisade walls, the standard of frontier fortifications.  Instead they dug their guns in behind earthen breast works with projecting redans and erected outer defenses of abates—logs sharpened to a point and placed in trenches in front of the earthworks. The defenses were placed a rocky elevation approachable only from the west, protected in the front by a watery defile and on both flanks by extensive swampy areas.
Rugged Stony Point with the narrow beach along the bluff along which Waynes troops advanced to surprise the British seen in 1915 with a lighthouse on top near the site of the Red Coat fortifications.
The British thought it impregnable to assault without the extensive use of artillery.  In fact Clinton hoped Washington would haul out his guns for just such an attack, a maneuver that could be easily detected.  Then as Washington laid siege to Stony Point, Clinton would rush up from the city for the kill.
Washington knew that the occupation of Stony Point was an annoyance, but hardly fatal, as would his attempt to take the post by siege would be.  As construction of the defenses continued through June the commanding general personally came to observe the situation through his telescope from the top of near-by Buckberg Mountain.  He also gained detailed information on the south side of the post which he could not directly see from careful questioning of local merchants who supplied the post, area farmers, scouts, and quite possibly soldiers in mufti acting as spies.  Washington gathered a detailed profile of the enemy’s dispositions, routines, and even the types and styles of passwords used by sentries.
In mid-June he mobilized his Light Infantry Corps consisting of the 1st Regiment, commanded by Col. Christian Febiger of the 2nd Virginia Regiment consisting of six companies of Virginia and two of Pennsylvania troops;  the 2nd Regiment, under Col. Richard Butler of the 9th Pennsylvania with four companies each of Pennsylvanians and of Marylanders;  the 3rd Regiment under Col. Return Jonathan Meigs of the 6th Connecticut with  eight companies of Nutmeg State troops; and the 4th Regiment, a volatile mix of six companies of Massachusetts troops and two of North Carolina, temporarily commanded by Major William Hull of the 8th Massachusetts. 
Then Washington carefully laid out his plan of attack exploiting a fatal flaw in the fortifications—abatis along the southern shore of the point were not extended into the deep water of the Hudson and could be outflanked by attackers along a narrow beach at low tide. This would be the route of the main attack with secondary and diversionary attacks along the north shore of the point and across the causeway to the center—the point where the British expected any attack to be made.  
Meanwhile in early July Clinton dispatched 2,000 troops, including some that had earlier been posted to Stony Point, on his Connecticut raids, which Washington left to the local militia to handle while he concentrated on Stony Point.
To work, the attack had to be a surprise.  Wayne would bring his troops from up river to Fort Montgomery, an American strong post on the west side of the Hudson where a giant heavy chain was stretched across the river channel to prevent the Royal Navy from sailing further north.  From there, they would set off on July 15 on a wide meandering path taking him west of the river through rugged territory and over roads and cow paths.  Along the way any civilians the column encountered would be taken captive to prevent word of the advance getting to the British.  The force carried no baggage and had no artillery so as to be able to move fast and quietly.  As planned they circled the redoubt and approached the post from the south undetected.  
Washington had one last order—a highly unusual one that if it failed would lead to disaster.  The main attacking force was to advance with un-loaded muskets and fixed bayonets only.  This was to prevent an accidental discharge of a musket as the men scrambled up the steep sides of the point and alerting the garrison.
A map of the Hudson Valley campaign of 1779 show Wayne's difficult march on Stony Point.



Despite this meticulous planning, Washington had great confidence in Wayne and gave his field commander the rare latitude to change the orders as conditions demanded.  It turned out Wayne would have to make few ad lib tactical adjustments. 
The force arrived at Springsteel’s Farm approximately two miles from Stony Point in the early evening of the 16th. At officer’s call Wayne outlined his final order of battle.  Butler’s 2nd Regiment of approximately 300 men would make a largely diversionary an assault along the northern shore of the point, while Wayne himself would lead the main column of 700 consisting of the 1st and 3rd Regiments, and Hull’s detachment of Massachusetts light infantry from the south.  In advance of each of these  columns were about 50 pioneers armed with axes to chop through the abates including 20 men each designate the forlorn hope charged with piercing the defenses and leading the others through.  Two companies of North Carolina light infantry under Major Hardy Murfree, which Wayne ordered to cross the causeway, and stage a demonstration attack at the center of the British defenses, where the British expected an attack to come.  These were the only men engaged on the American side with loaded muskets.  They were instructed to “lay down a galling fire” which was to be the signal for the two flanking attacks to make the final push.  It was also hoped that the British would draw men from the flank defenses to meet the apparent attack on the center.

Each man was given a scrap of white paper to pin to their hat for identification in the dark.  As the flanking columns began their move about 10:30 the weather cooperated with heavy clouds obscuring the moonlight and wind masking the sound of their movements.  But Wayne’s main column soon encountered the only major unforeseen snag of the operation.  The beach on which they were supposed advance at low tide was floodedunder two to four feet of water blowing ashore in the stiff wind.  That slowed Wayne’s advance as his men struggled ahead in the water and the noise alerted sentries who opened fire. 

Wounded and head bandaged Wayne was carried by his troops in the final assault.

Although total surprise was lost, Col. Johnson did not have enough time to lower his artillery to fire on the forces almost directly below them.  And when Murfree launched his demonstration, just as hoped Johnson diverted forces to the center assuming that Wayne’s attack was the diversion.  Both flanks began their final assault almost exactly midnight, just as planned.  Wayne’s column scrambling up the steep rock terrain first breached the outer defense line at which point the commander was rendered briefly unconscious when he was struck in the head by a nearly spent musket ball.  Col. Febiger briefly assumed command and pressed the attack until Wayne recovered, had his head bandaged, and was carried forward on the shoulders of his men.
Meanwhile Butler’s pioneers had hacked through the abatis on the north with the loss of only one man.  The two forces almost simultaneously pushed for the earthworks at the summit.  Lt. Col. Francois de Fleury, a French aristocrat and engineer commanding a battalion of the 1st Regiment became the first man to breech the defenses and enter the fortifications followed by PrivatePeter Francisco, Lt. Henry Knox, Sgt. William Baker, and Private George Dunlop.  These men earned a special cash purse promised by Wayne.  As the troops poured over the defenses bayonets to the fore they called out the watch word “The fort is ours!” which encouraged those behind them to press forward.  Col. de Fleury cut the British colors from the flag staff.

The midnight assault on Stoney Point showing the pioneers chopping the abatis defences and Lt. Col. de Fleury breeched the earthworks.
The Red Coats were overwhelmed and disorganized and could put up no real fight inside the walls.  The battle was over less than 35 minutes after sentries had fired the first shots.  Col. Johnson had no choice but to surrender his garrison to a force that according to all of the military textbooks was too small to successfully storm such a well-defended fortress.  In the early morning hours Wayne was able to send a terse message to Washington, “The fort and garrison, with Col. Johnson, are ours. The  men behaved like men determined to be free.”
The British reported losses of 20 killed, 74 wounded and the entire force except for 63 men reported missing was captured.  American losses in the assault were 15 killed and 83 injured.  Although historians have tended to take the British reports at face value, some think that the toll of dead could be has high as 50 including most of the missing men who may have drowned in the Hudson trying to escape.
It was a triumph of arms.  Washington and his staff rode down to survey the battle scene the next day and lavished praise on Wayne, his officers and men.  He ordered the British guns trained on occupied Verplanck’s Point across the river, but the distance was too great and the barrages did little damage.  But the cannon fire frightened the English gun boat which cut anchor and drifted down stream and kept the sloop Vulture at a distance.
Washington sent General Robert Howe to lead the two brigades to besiege Verplanck on the 17th, but the force was not provisioned with adequate artillery or siege equipment, and could do little more than blockade the fort. On the 18th some British troops were landed from ships sent upriver, and more were rumored to be coming overland, so Howe decided to withdraw.
Washington now assessed the situation.  He had dealt the British a stinging and humiliating defeat and provided a huge moral boost for the war wear Continentals.  He had as prisoners of war a large force of veteran British soldiers.  But he also now had a sizable force in the field and perhaps subject to destruction if Clinton moved up fast and in force from New York. So on the 19th Washington ordered the fort evacuated taking the artillery and a large store of much needed shot, powder, and supplies with the retreating troops.  The fortifications were meticulously destroyed.  
Clinton did order a force to re-take the vacated fort.  But he was now shy of Washington’s unexpected maneuvers.  The following October he abandoned the fort permanently along with Verplanck and other Hudson strong posts hoping once again to build up strength in New York for a fresh campaign come spring.  But Clinton was to be disappointed.  Stony Point was almost the last major actionin the North while British hopes concentrated on the South where Lord Cornwallis was rampaging out of the Carolinas and into Virginia where Lafayette was pulling together a force to oppose him.
Clinton’s withdrawal left King’s Ford open and unmolested just when Washington would need it to march his whole army from New Port, Rhode Island south to the Head of Elk, Maryland at the head of Chesapeake Bay where they would board French ships to transport them and a sizable French army to Virginia to join Lafayette and trap Cornwallis at Yorktown.  You know the rest.
As for General Wayne, he was an instant American hero and icon.  Congress voted him a special medal, one of only a handful of such awards made through the entire war.  He served with notable distinction at Bulls Ferry opposite New York City in 1780.  His Pennsylvania Line troopers failed to capture a block house and cannons.  He then had to help Washington quell a mutiny in the Pennsylvania Line as troops demanded back pay from Congress and menaced Philadelphia and rebuild his troops.
He was assigned to reinforce Lafayette in Virginia a head of Washington’s main army and again earned honors for the Battle of Green Spring during the Yorktown Campaign when he broke out of a trap by superior British forces with another daring bayonet Charge.  After Cornwallis’s surrender, Washington sent him to the deep South with the rank of Major General to mop up British and Tory operations there.  He was also to split the British from their main Native allies in the South—the Creeks and Cherokee.  He succeeded at both tasks and made treaties with both tribes.  A grateful Georgia presented him with a plantation and slaves in gratitude.
After the war Wayne retired to Pennsylvania where he followed a political career, and then settled on his Georgia plantation.   

General Wayne and the Legion of the United State reconnoiter before the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794
In 1793 now President Washington ignored Wayne active political opposition as a member of the half-formed Jeffersonian anti-Federalists to command the new nation’s first army in the field since the Revolution—The Legion of the United States.  Wayne carefully drilled and trained his recruits molding them into smart Regular troops and unleashing a campaign against the hostile Shawnee and allied tribes of the of the Western Indian Confederacy.  At the 1794 Battle of Fallen Timbers he smashed the native forces under Blue Jacket.  He then systematically raided and burned villages throughout the territory.  The decisive campaign opened Ohio for settlement and statehood by 1803.  Wayne was a national hero all over again.
Wayne died of complications from gout on December 15 1796, during a return trip to Pennsylvania from Fort Detroit, and was buried at Fort Presque Isle now Erie, Pennsylvania.  His bones were later moved and reinterred at family plot in St. David’s Episcopal Church cemeteryin Radnor, Pennsylvania.
His Legion of the United States was allowed to go out of existence but was soon replaced by a small Regular Army that was scattered over wide ranging frontier and costal fortifications.


Bastille Day—France’s Fête Nationale

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14 July 2019 at 10:56
By: Patrick Murfin
Like almost all illustrations of the Storming of the Bastille, this painting was highly romanticized.
It’s Bastille Day, of course, commemorating the day in 230 years ago in1789 when the Paris Mobset off the French Revolution by storming the Bastille, a fortress prison traditionally used by the monarchy to detain its political enemies without benefit of civil appeal.  The French make a big deal of it. 
In the United States it is generally marked by an exceptionally busy evening in French restaurants.  In recent years the long-time loathing of all things French by the right wing stretching back to the panic of Federalists over the Revolution has been revived and we are told that patriotic Americans must despise the Frogs and their damned holiday. 
There was a brief thaw after the Charlie Hebdo massacre if only because it gave American xenophobes an opportunity to paint Muslims as a universal threat to Western Civilization.  Then two years ago Donald Trump was in Paris.  French President Emmanuel Macronpublicly made nice with the Cheeto in Charge and gave him the full glitz and pomp of a state visit.  They also watched the annual military parade which so deeply impressed Donnie Boy that he had to have one of his very own back home which finally came to a sort of feeble fruition with his Fourth of July debacle with tanks on the National Mall this year.
Witnessing the grand military parade gave Donald Trump such a hard on that he decided that he wanted one of his very own minus the Liberty, Equality, Fraternity nonsense.
But the flirtation with France was short lived when Macron chimed in with other European and allied leaders, pointing out what a bonehead, bully, and bullshit artist Trump was.  Pretty soon Fox News talking heads, Congressional chest beaters, and Alt-Right hate peddlers were back on the familiar ground of dissing the French.
In France the holiday is known as La Fête Nationale—the National Celebration and it does not officially commemorate the revolutionary event at all, but rather the 1790 Fête de la Fédération, held on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and supposedly symbolizing the unity of the nation under the constitutional monarchy that preceded the First Republic.  The national holiday was established in 1880 after observances had been popularly revived in 1878 and ’79.
Celebration of the storming of the Bastille had been neglectedduring the turbulent and bloody periodsof the Revolution and suppressedduring the Napoleonic Empire, the later Bourbon Restoration, and the Second Empireunder Louis Napoleon.
More than 30,000 Parisians were executed by the National Guard after the Paris Commune was crushed in 1871.  The reactionary new Republican government was in no mood to celebrate any kind of  revolutionary or insurrectionist activity.
After the Paris Commune was crushed by the National Guard in 1871 in the aftermath of France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the fall Louis Napoleon which resulted in more than 30,000 Parisians being executed, celebrations of revolutionary action by the Paris mob were naturally discouraged. 
But by the end of the decade the conservative Second Republic was searching for ways to restore national unity and reassertnational pride.  On June 30, 1878 the City of Paris declared afeast in honor of the Republic which became a gay affair with boulevards lined with the Tri-color flag.  The following year the feast was moved to June 14 and a reception was held at the Chamber of Deputies, a military parade was put on, and celebrations spread to other cities giving the day semi-official recognition as anational event.
The flag bedraped spectacle of Paris's 1878 feast in honor of the Republic was captured by Claude Monet.
But debate over the next year about establishing Bastille Day as a national holiday in the Chamber was often bitter and divisive.  Monarchists, some of the senior military who had been involved in crushing the Commune, and other conservatives were bitterly opposed.  Instead they proposed August 4, the anniversary of the end ofserfdom under the constitutional monarchy in 1789.  But the people’s enthusiasm for Bastille Day could not be denied.
In the end a compromise was reached to commemorate not the revolutionary action, but the Fête de la Fédération.  Authorities also made sure that the central event of the new national celebration when it was held for the first time in 1880 would be a grand military parade.  The holiday was intended to be less a celebration of the still dangerous ideas of Liberté, égalité, fraternité (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity) than one of martial nationalism.


The Fete Nationale in 1890--La Belle Époque.
To this day the grand military parade, the oldest such tradition in the world, presided over by the President of the Republic and spectacular fireworks in the evening are the center pieces of the celebration.  
But stop a Parisian on the street and ask what he or she is celebrating and there is no talk of the Fête de la Fédération.  Paris celebrates Bastille Day.


Lights For Liberty Shined in Woodstock

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13 July 2019 at 18:17
By: Patrick Murfin
The crowd listens to speakers at the Woodstock Lights for Liberty rally.  The McHenry County government center looms behind the fenced off parking lot with the Jail on the left.  Immigrant detainees are held on the fourth floor. Missy Funk photo.

In more than 50 years as an activist it was the first time I remember a crowd gathering to the sounds of a sousaphone ensemble.  Sousaphones Against Hate lent a joyous Wisconsin brat and beer vibe to the steady stream of folks carrying signsand folding chairs who were filling the grassy strip along Route 47 to participate in Lights for Liberty Woodstock, the rally and vigil at the McHenry County Jail/Immigrant Detention facility.  It was one of more than 500 such events across the country in addition to a number of other anti-ICE marches and protests in cities great and small—an eruption of Resistance to the terrorizing and oppression of immigrants and asylum seekers.
Organizers and volunteers had been working overtime for weeks to make the event a reality.  We coordinated our efforts through conference calls facilitated by Leni Manaa-Hoppenworth and Scott Cross of Indivisible Illinois—an indispensable asset and major co-sponsor of the event.  Volunteers, many of whom had never met or worked together before, came from all over the Chicago area joining local lead organizers Patrick Murfin, hear after known as the Old Man of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation Social Justice Team, and Elisabeth Hubbard of Lake County.
Together we shared tasks and responsibilities, lined up 11 other co-sponsoring organizations, recruited speakers, attended to innumerable logistic and support details, and finally assembled, with some last minute juggling a coherent and effective program that would discuss the many aspects of the current crisis.  Elisabeth Hubble acted as our registration person for speakers, stage manager, and general major domo who kept the program running smoothly.  The Old Man was joined on stage by immigration attorney Lillian Gonzalez as co-hosts.
                                    The Old Man as a co-host of the rally. Dawn Anderson photo.
Earlier in the afternoon after some semi-comic glitches we managed to drag a rented 4 X 8 foot stage section and a battery powered p.a. podium half a block and set them up near the chain link fence that blocked off half of the jail parking lot which was under re-construction.  We met with friendly but firm Sheriff Department officers, who told us that unlike previous similar rallies in the same location, we could not set foot on any of the parking lots surrounding the Jail, Court House, and County government complex. 
Our experienced and efficient event marshals under the leadership of Dee Darling—veterans of several marches and events on Woodstock Square—helped folks safely cross Rt. 47 from parking at the school across the street.  As we made last minute arrangements around the stage—the p.a. system on the podium emitted screeching feedback and we were rescued by Scott Cross’s small portable unit with a hand-held microphone—and as the sousaphones played the swelling crowd spread out along Rt. 47 holding up hand-made signs to the busy street traffic passing by.  Many cars honked their support.
Promptly at 7pm we began the rally program.  The crowd turned to face the stage and was continually reinforce through the evening by a steady stream.  At its peak the press and several experienced crowd estimators that 400-500 were in attendance.
Rabbi Maralee Gordon.  Kathy Brady-Murfin photo.
After a welcome and some brief house-keeping announcements the program began with Maralee Gordon, the retired Rabbi Emeritus of the McHenry County Jewish Congregation, a leading member of the interfaith group Faithbridge, and a jail visitor for the Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants (ICDI).  She grounded her remarks in the requirements to welcome and harbor immigrants and strangers found in the Torah and Talmudic teachings as well as in the Christian New Testament, and Islamic scripture.
Latino youth.  Democratic Party of McHenry County photo.
She was followed on the stage by Melanie Schikore, Executive Director of ICDI that put a personal face on people detained in the McHenry County Jail and other detention center and ended with the admonition that we all must work to free those who are held, often in terrible conditions in the border camps, and demand that the government’s punitive immigration policies be reversed, and demand that ICE, the stormtroopers for enforcing that policy, be abolished.  She was the first of many speakers to reference the nation-wide family raids that have been touted the administration and which striking terror in many communities.
Melanie Schikore of the Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants (ICDI).  Missy Funk photo.
Dave Trost representing McHenry County Progressives read a moving message from a detainee at a one of the Illinois detention centers.  Sara Crosental, a young woman from Rising DREAMERS Uniterecounted her personal story of being awakened by armed, unidentified men in black crashing into her family home to drag her father away.
Carol Huntsinger, a Lake County church musician led the crown in the first song of the evening, the Civil Rights anthem We Shall Overcome.  Later veteran singer/guitarist Norm Siegel, who the Old Man has known since the days of the Earl of Old Town and the great Chicago folk music scare fifty years ago led a rousing rendition of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Landand began the candle light vigil with the familiar spiritual This Little Light of Mine.
Dr. Marjorie Fujara, child abuse pediatric specialist.  Missy Funk photo.
Dr. Marjoie Fujara, a child abuse pediatrics specialist for the Cook County Department of Health,explained the impact of child maltreatment and toxic stress on unaccompanied minors seeking refugee status.
Lea Grover of the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) discussed the sexual abuse and violence that many women and children endure not only in detention custody, but by employers, husbands and mates and others who know that the victims will be unlikely to reportcrimes for fear of being exposed to arrest and deportation.
Lea Glover--Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN).  Photo by Missy Funk
At this point the Old Man needs to explain his near constant presence on stage.  Contrary to rumor, I was not just trying to hog the camera.  I had real trouble getting on and off of the 16 inch stage platform, especially as the night wore on.
Co-host Lillian Gonzalez spoke as a former undocumented alien who became a lawyer representing clients enmeshed in the system.
Vigil signs and candles.  Photo by Scott Cross
Lisa Arvanites of McHenry County NOW spoke on the special dangers that members of the LGBTQ face especially trans women of color who endure a triple whammy of discrimination and marginalization face.
Kristina Zahorik, the Chair of the Democratic Party of McHenry County and of the Illinois Democratic County Chairs Committee, told of her personal political re-awakening after the disastrous 2006 election that brought Donald Trump to power along with enlarged majorities in the House and Senate and control of the majority of state governments.  She was given hope by the groundswell of activism that returned the House to a Democratic majority including new Representatives Lauren Underwoodand Sean Casten, brought J. B. Pritzker to the Governorship, and elected 5 Democrats to the county Board.

Kristina Zahorik, Chair of the McHenry County Democratic Party with the elusive Elizabeth Hubbard a principle organizer and stage manager.  Kathy Brady-Murfin photo.
Scott Cross, Executive Director of Indivisible Illinois spoke to actions folks can take moving forward including keeping regular contact with state and Federal legislators and office holders to demand action on immigration and other critical issues; being ready to take to the streets in more actions, rally, and marches including civil disobedience; actively working on upcoming campaigns, and most importantly joining or starting grassroots organizations working to effect change.
As the final speaker of the evening finished up volunteers distributed vigil candles to those who didn’t bring their own which were lit as the gloaming settled in over the Jail.  After a period of song and silent witness a car caravan from Aurora organized by Stand and March and Uni2 arrived.  They processed though the hushed crowd carrying seven white wooden crossesrepresenting the five children known to have died this year in custody, and Oscar Alberto Martinez  his 23-month-old daughter Angie Valeria who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande to seek asylum.   They placed the crosses in a row by the stage and knelt behind the crosses.  No vestige of whispering or rustle of a distracted crowd lingered.  After several minutes of silence Casotio “Casey” Cuevas spoke emotionally on behalf of the members of the caravan.
Car caravan from Aurora entrance with crosses.  Judy Stettner photo.
When the vigil wound down, volunteers quickly took down the stage and carted it, table, chairs, bottled water and other items to vehicles.  One of the last volunteers on the grounds was the tireless Missy Funk of McHenry County Progressives and Woodstock Pride looked up and saw lights flashing in the slit windows of the Jail’s fourth floor where immigrant detainees are held.  They were aware of the vigil and that folks on the outside had not forgotten them.  They were flashing, probably at risk of punishment, a thank-you.
The candle light vigil.  Scott Cross photo.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge all of the organization who co-sponsored the rally and vigil—the Democratic Party of McHenry County, Illinois Muslim Civic Coalition, Indivisible Illinois, Indivisible Brookfield, ICDI, League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), McHenry County Democratic Women’s Club, McHenry County National Organization for Women (NOW), McHenry County Progressives, Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), Sousaphones Against Hate, Woodstock Pride, Women’s March and None of the Above, and the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation Social Justice Team.


Emma Lazarus and Those Quaint Words of Immigrant Welcome

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11 July 2019 at 08:15
By: Patrick Murfin
Emma Lazarus as a young woman.
Note—As we gather on Friday evening at hundreds of Lights for Liberty rallies and vigils for immigrants being held in detention/concentration camps and terrorized by Trump and his ICE raiders, it is good to remember the young woman who’s words became enshrined on the Statue of Liberty and represented a real welcome to the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”  The Cheeto-in-Charge and his minions want to declare that welcome null and void.  If you are in McHenry County join at 7:30 at the McHenry County Jail/Immigrant Detainment facility in Woodstock.  Emma would thank you.
Emma Lazarus was just 34 years old when she penned the lines ofpoetry that might be the most familiar verse to millions ofAmericans.  Odds were stacked against her ever achieving that kind of recognition.  She a woman at a time when most distaff poetry was confined to the pages of women’s magazines and the columns of newspapers desperate to fill inches at next to no expense.  Only a handful of women, almost unanimouslyWASP gentlewomen like Julia Ward Howe were taken seriously by the cultural guardians of the literary elite.
If that was not enough to overcome, she was also proud  to be openly Jewish, which is to say a virtual automatic pariah.
Yet she was no product of the shtetel, one of the impoverishedEastern European refugees from pogroms who were just beginning to flood American cities in 1883.  Indeed, she had deeper roots in the New World than most Colonial Dames.  On her mother’s side she was a Nathan, a Sephardic family with roots in Portugal via the Netherlands and Brazil who had settled in Manhattan when it was still Dutch Nieuw Amsterdam in the mid-1600s.  That side of he family was well established, prosperous, and produced a distinguished line that included an 18th Century poetess, Grace Seixas Nathan and her distant cousin, Benjamin N. Cardozo, later a Justice of the Supreme Court.
The family of Emma father, Moses Lazarus, was among the German Jews who immigrated in the early 19th Century.  Like many of the others they did not come over in steerage.  They were middle class, well educated, highly cultured, and well assimilated in Germany.  They spoke German, not Yiddish.  In New York these Jews quickly established themselves as merchants, shopkeepers, and professionals.  These Ashkenazi assumed leadership of the still small Jewish community over the sometimes resentful long time Sephardic residents.
That Emma, the fourth of seven children, was the product of both of the great lines of European Jewry was somewhat unusual.
The Lazarus comfortable summer home in Newport, Rhode Island.
She was born on July 22, 1849 in New York City, the year after a wave of European revolutions that would send another surge of Jewish immigrants to the city.  The family was  upper-middle class, not terribly religious, and deeply interested in high culture.  They were comfortable enough to have a summer home at Newport, Rhode Island, home of the famous Sephardic Jewish Synagogue, the oldest in America which later inspiredone of Emma’s best known poems.
At home they spoke English, which had been her mother’s family language for generations but she also became fluent in her father’s German.  He was eager to share with her all of the classics of German literature and of the Romantic movement.  Tutored privately, she also learned French and Italian and intently studied British and American literature.
Lazarus was writing poetry in her teens and published translations of German poets including the Romantics Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Heinrich Heine in the early 1860’s.  Her proud father arranged to have her first collection of original poems privately published in 1866 and the next year Poems and Translations had successful commercial publication.  That volume drew the approving attention of no less than Ralph Waldo Emerson for whom the German Romantics were an important early influence.
Over the next decade, Lazarus published a second volume of poetry, Admetus and Other Poems in 1871; the novel Alide: An Episode in Goethe’s Lifein 1874, and a play in verse, The Spagnoletto in 1876.  If not a literary celebrity she earned the attention and approval in cultivated circles.  But most of her readers were not aware that the youthful female poet was Jewish.  In fact the name Lazarus, familiar from the Jesus miracle story in the New Testament, probably gave many the impression she was Christian.
Henry George's work and her dedication to the movement they inspired changed the direction of Emma's life.
Like many of the Ashkenazi elite in New York, her father was a political liberal, ardent abolitionist and Union supporter during the Civil War, and open to new and radical ideas.  His daughter was an apple that fell close to the tree.  When Henry George published his hugely influential Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry into the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth: The Remedy in 1879 Lazarus became an early disciple and soon a close personal friend of the visionary author.  She plunged into spreading the word about George’s vision of a communal society supported by a single tax on land which rivaled Marxist socialism as a model for a new society among American radicals of that era.  
In addition to a laudatory poem published in the New York Times she wrote, “Progress and Poverty is not so much a book as an event. The life and thought of no one capable of understanding it can be quite the same after reading it,” and even that reading it would prevent such a person, who also “prized justice or common honesty” from being able to ever again “dine or sleep or work in peace.”
Yet in all of this literary and political activity, Lazarus did not seem much interested in her Jewish identity or advancing Jewish causes.  She was occasionally stung by anti-Semitism but like many others believed that assimilation would eventually overcome prejudice.  That changed when she got her hands on George Eliot’s 1876 novel Daniel Deronda which was not well known in America.  This social satire contained a moving description of the plight of European Jews and painted an idealistic picture of a young man out to right historic oppressionand save his people.  Although it was the final work of an important Victorian novelist and therefore a somewhat unlikely source, the book inspired a generation on both sides of the Atlantic to become what is now recognized as proto-Zionists, that term having not yet been invented for a formal movement launched by Theodor Herzl in 1897.
This interest was further stirred by the news of Russian pogroms that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881.  That set off the first wave of massive Eastern European immigration of largely destitute refugees to the city.  While many of the established Ashkenazi elite were horrified by the crude peasants and laborers who they feared would evoke a harsh backlash from latent American nativism, Lazarus plunged into organizing aid and loudly advocating for the truly wretched refuse that were filling the tenements and slums.  It became the work of the rest of her life.
She wrote The Dance to Death, a dramatization of a German short story about the burning of Jews in Nordhausen during the Black Death.  In addition to articles published where ever she could place them Lazarus published Songs of a Semite in 1882.
On a practical level Lazarus helped to found the Hebrew Technical Institute in New York to provide vocational training to assist destitute Jewish immigrants to become self-supportingand raised funds for other charitiesand relief programs.
The manuscript for the poem The New Colossus was offered in this auction catalog to raise money for the Statue of Liberty pedestal.
In that spirit she somewhat casually donateda new poem inspired by the French giftto an auction, conducted by the Art Loan Fund Exhibition in Aid of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund for the Statue of Liberty in order to raise funds to build the pedestal in New York Harbor.  It was not until 1903 that the first verse of that poem, The New Colossus was installed on a bronze plaque on the pedestal it modestly helped finance.  The words subsequently reprinted in school text books and recited at patriotic gatherings became some of the most familiar and beloved lines of American poetry. 
The memorial plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty was affixed there in 1903.
She traveled to Europe twice in in 1883 and again from 1885 to 1887 to learn more of conditions there and to contact Jewish intellectuals and leaders as well as leading radicals like William Morris.
She returned from the second trip deathly ill.  Two months after she sailed passed Lady Liberty which had finally been dedicated while she was abroad, Emma Lazarus died of what is now believed to have been Hodgkin’s lymphomaon November 19, 1887.  She was only 38 years old.
At the time of her death she was still not well known to most of the American public.  She was eulogizedmost often in the Jewish and radical press, although due note was made in the New York Times which had published several of her essays over the years.  Indeed many of her earlier admirers distanced themselves from her as she identified more urgently as a Jew.
Mostly on the strength of The New Colossus she is widely honored today.  She was honored by the Office of the Manhattan Borough President in March, 2008, and her homeon West 10th Street was included in a map of Women's Rights Historic Sites. In 2009, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame and The Museum of Jewish Heritage featured an exhibition on her in 2012.  
Emma never got her own stamp, but her portrait adorned the First Day Cover for a Statue of Liberty stamp.
The Postal Service has never seen fit to issue an Emma Lazarus stamp, but it did feature her portrait on the first day cover card of a 1978 16¢ First Class Statue of Liberty stamp that quoted a line from her poem.
Here is that famous poem and two more samples of her work that deserve to be remembered as well.
Refugees and exiles, the very "wretched of the earth" in the old socialist hymn.
The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

—Emma Lazarus


The Touro Synagogue in Newport--the nation's oldest dating to pre-Revolutionary times.
In The Jewish Synagogue at Newport

Here, where the noises of the busy town,

   The ocean’s plunge and roar can enter not,

We stand and gaze around with tearful awe,

   And muse upon the consecrated spot.


No signs of life are here: the very prayers

   Inscribed around are in a language dead;

The light of the “perpetual lamp” is spent

   That an undying radiance was to shed.


What prayers were in this temple offered up,

   Wrung from sad hearts that knew no joy on earth,

By these lone exiles of a thousand years,

   From the fair sunrise land that gave them birth!


How as we gaze, in this new world of light,

   Upon this relic of the days of old,

The present vanishes, and tropic bloom

   And Eastern towns and temples we behold.


Again we see the patriarch with his flocks,

   The purple seas, the hot blue sky o’erhead,

The slaves of Egypt,—omens, mysteries,—

   Dark fleeing hosts by flaming angels led.


A wondrous light upon a sky-kissed mount,

   A man who reads Jehovah’s written law,

‘Midst blinding glory and effulgence rare,

   Unto a people prone with reverent awe.


The pride of luxury’s barbaric pomp,

   In the rich court of royal Solomon—

Alas! we wake: one scene alone remains,—

   The exiles by the streams of Babylon.


Our softened voices send us back again

   But mournful echoes through the empty hall:

Our footsteps have a strange unnatural sound,

   And with unwonted gentleness they fall.


The weary ones, the sad, the suffering,

   All found their comfort in the holy place,

And children’s gladness and men's gratitude

   ‘Took voice and mingled in the chant of praise.


The funeral and the marriage, now, alas!

   We know not which is sadder to recall;

For youth and happiness have followed age,

   And green grass lieth gently over all.


Nathless the sacred shrine is holy yet,

   With its lone floors where reverent feet once trod.

Take off your shoes as by the burning bush,

   Before the mystery of death and God.

—Emma Lazarus


The expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 on the very same day that Christopher Columbus sailed his famed voyage.
1492

Thou two-faced year, Mother of Change and Fate,

Didst weep when Spain cast forth with flaming sword,

The children of the prophets of the Lord,

Prince, priest, and people, spurned by zealot hate.

Hounded from sea to sea, from state to state,

The West refused them, and the East abhorred.

No anchorage the known world could afford,

Close-locked was every port, barred every gate.

Then smiling, thou unveil’dst, O two-faced year,

A virgin world where doors of sunset part,

Saying, “Ho, all who weary, enter here!

There falls each ancient barrier that the art

Of race or creed or rank devised, to rear

Grim bulwarked hatred between heart and heart!”

—Emma Lazarus

Martin Luther King’s Soldier Field Rally Kicked Off Chicago Open Housing Campaign

✇ WWUUD?
10 July 2019 at 10:33
By: Patrick Murfin
Dr. Martin Luther King kicked off his Chicago housing campaign in 1968 at Soldier Field. More than 60,000 bodies crammed into Chicago’s Soldier Field, then the seating capacity of the stadium on the Lake on Sunday, July 10, 1966.   The Sun-Times reported the next day that thousands more were turned away.   Although mega-watt stars were on hand to perform including Mahalia Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Peter Paul and Mary not a single ticket was sold to see them.   The real star, you see, was the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and he had something important to say that day—a challenge to the City of Chicago for specific and systematic change to make African-American citizens truly equal in a great Northern city. The waves of change cau...

Dr. Daniel Hale Williams and the First Open Heart Surgery

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9 July 2019 at 10:58
By: Patrick Murfin
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams performing the first successful open heart surgery at Provident Hospital in Chicago.
Things were tense in the operating room of two year old Provident Hospitalin Chicago on July 10, 1893.  James Cornish had been carried to the hospital with what was surely a fatal wound—a knife was sticking out of his chest and lodged in the heart.  The only way to save him—open the chest, remove the knife and suturethe pericardium—the tough double layered membrane which covers the heart—would probably kill him.  No one had previously survived the handful of attempts at the procedure.
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams, a 37 year old surgeon and founder of the only hospital in Chicago with an integrated staff, was used to breaking new ground and confident in his skills.  He was also a pioneer of the sterile operating room, being one of the first American surgeons to heed the ground breaking research of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister at a time when older doctors were still performing multiple operations on the same bloody table without washing their hands in between.  That reform alone had greatly boosted survival rates among his patients.
Dr. Daniel Hale Williams.
Without the benefit of modern antibiotics and with unreliable anesthetics he went to work.  And he had to work fast because he also had no access to blood transfusions.  He quickly and skillfully cracked the chest, removed the knife, sutured the pericardium, closed and sutured the chest.  Within ten days Cornish had fully recovered and went on to live a normal life for many years.
Dr. Williams had just performed the first successful open heart surgery.
James Cornish recovering from his heart surgery
Did I mention that he was Black?
Williams was born on January 18, 1856 in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania.  His parents were free Blacks and his fathermade a good living as a barber.  The elder Williams was also a community leader and active in the Equal Rights League, an early civil rightsorganization active during the Reconstruction Era.
At the age of ten the boy’s security was shattered with the sudden death of his father.  He was sent to live with relatives in Baltimore where he got a little more basic education before being unhappily apprenticedto a shoemaker.
Dissatisfied, he left Maryland to join his mother and other members of his family who had relocated to Chicago.  He took up his father’s trade and was soon made enough money to better himself by apprenticing to Dr. Henry Palmer, a highly accomplished surgeon. He then completed formal training at Chicago Medical College, one of the few schools in the country to accept Black students.
Unable to gain a position or admitting status at any Chicago hospital because of his race, Williams set up a private practice on the South Side.  Then he was hired as a doctor for the Chicago Street Railway, treating mostly white workers and injured passengers.  Despite the general racism of the times, he was well thought of by the men and affectionately called Dr. Dan.
Private practice or the Railway offices, however did not offer the kind of recovery facilities necessary to perform the most difficult and challenging operations.  For that he needed a full service hospital.  He also wanted to encourage more blacks to enter medicine, not only as doctors, but as nurses and other support personnel.  
The original Providence Hospital building.
So in 1891 Dr. Williams founded Provident Hospital and Training School for Nurses, the nation’s first hospital with a nursing and intern program that had a racially integrated staff.
Dr. Williams work soon attracted the attention of the aging abolitionist Fredrick Douglas who championed him among friends in Washington.  As a result in 1894 Williams was appointed the chief surgeon of the Freedmen’s Hospital, serving former slaves.  It was a daunting task.  Poorly equipped and funded from its beginning in the Reconstruction Era, it had been allowed to deteriorate and offered substandard care with an astonishing mortality rate.
Freedmen's Hospital in Washington, D.C.
Williams worked feverishly on the turn-around, instituting modern hygienic standards, re-training the staff, improving surgical procedures including public viewing of surgeries which he believed would be an incentive to the staff to operate on the highest level.  He also added specialists in more fields, launched an ambulance service, and on the model of Provident, adding a multiracial staff, continuing to provide opportunities for black physicians and nursing students.
The following year, in 1895 William co-founded the National Medical Association, an alternative to the American Medical Association, which didn’t allow African-American membership.
The school for nursing was an important part of Provident hospital and bringing Black women into medical careers one of the most treasured parts of Dr. Williams' legacy.
In his years in Washington, Williams met Alice Johnson who he married in 1898.  The couple returned to Chicago where he resumed his position at Provident.  Later he would practice at Cook County Hospital and St. Luke’s, major modern hospitals who could no longer deny privileges to one of the most distinguished surgeons in the nation.
From 1901 he spent part of every year in Nashville where he was a voluntary visiting clinical professorat Meharry Medical College for more than two decades. He became a charter member of the American College of Surgeons in 1913.
Dr. Williams was active until he suffered a stroke in 1926.  On August 4, 1931 he died in Idlewild, Michigan.
Williams was widely honored in his lifetime and his story has become a staple of Black History Month commemorations.  But he is largely unknown to white Americans.
Williams’s beloved Providence Hospital, one of the few full service hospitals on the under-served South Side, was forced to close in 1987 due to financial problems.  In 1993 it reopened in as Provident Hospital of Cook County, part of the Cook County Bureau of Health Services.  Finances continue to threaten the public hospital and its future is far from certain.

Lights For Liberty Vigil Set for Friday at McHenry County Jail

✇ WWUUD?
8 July 2019 at 17:04
By: Patrick Murfin


The Lights for Liberty Vigil to End Human Detention Camps at 7:30 pm this Friday July 12  to at the McHenry County Jail will attract hundreds of participants from across the Chicago metropolitan area and Northern Illinois.  Although there are dozens of other local Lights for Liberty actions across the region, including one in near-by Crystal Lake, the Woodstock rally is the only one at a facility housing immigration detainees.
The McHenry County Sherriff’s Departmentcontroversially rents the fourth floor of the Jail to the U.S. Marshall’s service to hold adult immigrants awaiting status hearings, appeals, or deportation orders who have been rounded up across Northern Illinois.  Criticized as a “cash cow” for McHenry County coffers, the facility holds detainees not only from Mexico and Central America, but from across the globe including Africans, Asians, and Europeans.
The nation-wide Lights for Liberty events have been organized by “a coalition of people, many of whom are mothers, dedicated to human rights, and the fundamental principle behind democracy that all human beings have a right to life, liberty and dignity. We are partnering with international, national, regional and local communities and organizations who believe that these fundamental rights are not negotiable and are willing to protect them.”
According to Patrick Murfin, an organizer of the Woodstock event and co-chair of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation Social Justice Team, there was a groundswell of interest in the event especially “after disclosures of shocking conditions and abuse in holding facilities for children at the border and President Trump’s threat of massive round-up raids to round up entire families across the country which has terrified whole communities.
“We will callout immigrant detentions camps for the shame of what they really are—American concentration camps.”
The event will begin with a rally on the grassy area across from the jail along Seminary Avenue—Route 47—in Woodstock between Ware Road and Russel Court. Speakers from organizations fighting for immigration justice and members of the impacted communities will highlight all aspects of the abusive system including the infamous border detention camps, the plight of children and separated families, sexual abuse and violence in detention facilities, the  abandonment of traditional processes for applying for asylum,  and the special dangers faced by LGBTQ persons.
A candlelight vigil at McHenry County Jail/Immigrant Detention center one year ago
At 9 pm the candle light vigil will begin, coordinating with other actions across the country.  Participants are urged to bring friends, signs, candles.
The event is co-sponsored by Indivisible Illinois, Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants (ICDI), League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC-IL), McHenry County Democratic Party, McHenry County Democratic Women’s Club, McHenry County National Organization for Women (NOW), McHenry County Progressives, Rape Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), Woodstock Pride, and the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation Social Justice Team.


Some of Lights for Liberty Woodstock sponsors
Parking will be available in the Northwood Junior High school lot across Rt. 47, in the County Health Clinic parking lot at the corner of Ware Road and Rt. 47, and along Russel Court.  No parking will be permitted in the Jail lot.  Marshalls in reflective vests will be available to assist.
For more information visit the Facebook Event, e-mail pmurfin@sbcglobal.net , or call 815 814-5645.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini—Patron of Immigrants

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7 July 2019 at 07:32
By: Patrick Murfin
Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini--Patron of Immigrants from a devotional card.
Note—Perhaps as we register out outrage at the criminal abuse of immigrants and asylum seekers in Trump’s America this week at Lights for Liberty vigils this Friday and other actions around the country, it would do well to recall an earlier immigrant….
She arrived in New York Cityin 1889 just short of 40 years old, a frailand tiny woman accompanied by six of her sisters barely able to speak a word of English and with virtually no resources.  Frances Xavier Cabrini, Prioress of the Institute of Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart, found a chilly welcome from Archbishop Michael Corrigan, who, like many of the mainly Irish American Catholic Bishops, was disdainful and distrustful of the waves of Italian immigrants who were piling up on American shores.  Rather than seeing them as potential reinforcements for the faith in a still largely Protestant and hostile nation, Corrigan thought of them as ignorant and dangerousand a threat to Catholicism’s gradual and grudging acceptance.  He found her space in the partially empty conventof the Sisters of Charity, and left her to her own devices with little support—and frequent opposition—from the Archdiocese for her missionary work.
When she died less than thirty years later the woman who came to be known simply as Mother Cabrini and her order had established 67 institutions—orphanages, hospitals, schools, and convents in New York, Chicago, Seattle, New Orleans, Denver, Los Angeles,  Philadelphia, and other locations.  In addition there were more than 100 others in Italy, and countries throughout Europe and Latin America.  Archbishop Corrigan and the rest of the American Hierarchy eventually became her admirers and supporters.  Not bad for a woman who originally had only wanted to become a missionary to the heathen Chinese.
Maria Francesca Cabrini was born on July 15, 1850, at Sant’Angelo Lodigianoin the Province of Lodi, Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia, of the Austrian Empire.   Her father, Agostino Cabrini was a prosperous cherry grower.  Her very religious mother, the former Stella Oldini raised her 11 children, only four of whom lived to adulthood, steeped in the Faith.  Francesca, as she was known, was the youngest of the family and always frail.  After nursing siblingswho died in a small pox outbreakand contracting the disease herself, she was almost invalid. 
Francesca spent a lot of time with a favorite uncle, a priest, who encouraged her growing sense of vacation.  As a child she constructed paper boats filled them with violets, launching them on a canal by her uncle’s church telling him the flowers were missionaries on their way to China.  At 12 she took a personal vow of perpetual virginity.
The next year at the age of 13, Francesca enrolled in a school run by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart. She graduated cum laude in 1868 with a teaching certificate.  But when she tried to join the order, the sisters had to turn down their accomplished student on the grounds that she was too frail for their life.  
Sister Francis Xavier Cabrini as a young nun in Italy.
Instead she took a teaching position and then became Headmistress of the House of Providence Orphanage in Codogno.  In addition to teaching, Maria gathered a religious community around her, drawing mostly on older girls from the Orphanage.  In 1877 she and seven of them took religious vows together.  She adopted the name Francesca Saverio Cabrini—Francis Xavier Cabrini—at that time in honor of the Jesuit saint, Francis Xavier, Patron of missionary service.
Three years later in 1880 Cabrini and her sisters formally founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with her as the Superior General of the order.  Under her visionary leadership and administration skills, sisters grew rapidly and within a few years had established seven orphan homes, a free school, and a nursery.  They supported their work through the sale of needle work and fine embroidery produced by the nuns and by students.  They also benefited from Mother Cabrini’s persuasive skills in soliciting donations from the wealthy.
This work achieved the admiring attention of Giovanni Scalabrini, Bishop of Piacenza who arranged for an interview with Pope Leo XIII.  She expressed her childhood dream of being allowed to become a missionary to China.  The Pope discouraged that idea.  Instead he suggested she consider moving her mission field to the United States where large numbers of Italians were settling and where they had few priests to serve them and keep them loyal to the Church and where they were mired in poverty and exploitation at near the bottom rung—barely above Negros—of American society.  “"Not to the East, but to the West,” he admonished her.
It took a few years for Cabrini to put the affairs of the Sisters in order in Italy to keep up the work there and to raise the funds for the mission trip with a nucleus of her sisters.  They were finally able to make the crossing in 1889.

Cabrini's West Park, New York orphanage and school for immigrant girls.



The sisters began their work by teaching catechism and general literacy—in Italian—classes for the immigrants in New York City’s crowded slums.  In an age where many poor women died in childbirth, diseases like tuberculosis cut short lives, industrial accidents took a heavy toll on men and women alike, and when many men abandoned their families, the sisters found many orphaned or abandoned children living in the streets.  Mother Cabrini founded her first American orphanage for girls, now known as the Saint Cabrini Home in West Park, Ulster County New York.  The grounds also included an academy, the American Mother House and Novitiate, and served as Cabrini’s principle home and headquarters for the rest of her life.

The property was sold to a rock bottom prices by the Jesuits who could find no water on it.  But legend has it that Cabrini prayed to find a spring on the grounds and, seemingly miraculously after years of futile searching by the Jesuits an ample, pure spring was found on a hillside where she first dug.

Concerned with the appalling health care immigrants received, Mother Cabrini and the sisters expanded their operations to hospitals first opening Columbus Hospital in New York City in 1892, a year of national hoopla over the supposed discovery of the New World by Italian hero Christopher Columbus 400 years earlier.  The hospital merged with the Italian Hospital (founded 1937) in 1973 to become the Cabrini Medical Center.

Chicago became another important center for Mother Cabrini.  She founded the large Italian immigrant community there especially fertile ground and enjoyed more support from the Archdiocese there than in New York.  In addition to establishing a large convent there and founded Assumption School on East Erie Street in Streeterville and Chicago Columbus Hospital in the North Side Lincoln Park neighborhood in 1905.  Later she added Columbus Extension Hospital for the Poor on the West Side.  In her later years Chicago became a virtual second home.

Mother Cabrini, by this time famous and celebrated, became a naturalized American Citizen in 1907.  Her example was said to have encouraged a minor wave of naturalizations among the immigrants she served and who adored her.

Mother Cabrini in maturity.
Cabrini was a busy administrator and tireless fund raiser.  She also made the arduous round trip trance-Atlantic crossing almost every year for 30 years.  On one such trip in 1915 Italy joined the Allied side in World War I with the aim of reclaiming more Italian speaking regions from Austria—Cabrini’s home in Lombardy had been annexed by the Kingdom of Italy back in 1859.  Cabrini threw herself into organizing her hospitals and convents there in support of Italian troops and providing medical care for the wounded as well as relief for refugees.  She was hailed as national heroine. 
Mother Cabrini made one more hazardous war-time crossing back to Italy.  But back in Chicago on December 27, 1917 her fragile body succumbed to malaria in a room of her own Chicago Columbus Hospital.  At her request she was buried on the grounds of the Mother House in New York beside other sisters of her order.  Back in Chicago, the room in which she died became an unofficial shrine. It was preserved just as it was on the day of her death and was visited annually by thousands.  Rumors of prayers answered and cures began to be associated with it.
Responding to the rumors of miracles and to the worshipful attention Mother Cabrini continued to inspire in Chicago, Cardinal George Mundelein initiated the Church investigation leading to her official veneration, the first step toward canonization.  As part of that process her body was exhumed for inspectionin 1931.  In the spirit of the ancient tradition of dismembering the body to be used as relics at church and shrines dedicated to or associated with the dead, Mother Cabrini’s headwas removed and preservedin the chapel of the Congregation’s international motherhouse in Rome.  One arm was severed and sent to Chicago to a chapel adjacent to her death room at Columbus Hospital.  The rest of her body was brought to a new Shine constructed on the ground of the girls’ school she founded in New York City at 701 Fort Washington Avenue.
Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini in stained glass.
In 1938 after a miracle involving the restoration of sight to a child blinded by the excess application of silver nitrate to the eyes, Pope Pius XI raised her to official veneration in a decree, anointing her heroic virtues.  After a second miracle involving the healing of a terminally ill nun was confirmed, Pope Pius XII officially canonized her on July 7, 1947.   The whole process took an unusually short period of time, which reflected the concern at the Vatican that the United States, which had become one of the largest Catholic countriesin the world by population as well as the wealthiest, was vastly underrepresented on the Calendar of Saints.
St. Cabrini made Patron of immigrants, orphans, hospital administrators, unlikely causes, and against malaria.  Her feast dayis on November 13, the date of her beatification, rather than the more customary anniversary of her ascent into Heaven (death.)  This was probably due to the crowded nature of the liturgical calendarduring the Christmas Season.
IN 1955 Cardinal Samuel Stritch consecrated the National Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini including her death room inside the Chicago Columbus Hospital.
Many of the institutions Mother Cabrini founded are no longer functioning.  State authorities and other institutions took over many of the orphanages and closed them with the movement to placements in foster care or adoptions.  Many of her schools fell victim to declining enrollments, including Mother Cabrini Catholic High School in New York where a separate shrine was built on the grounds in 1957 and which shut its doors at the end of the school year in 2014 after 111 years.
Her hospitals could not survive the relentless pressure from ever-growing private, for profit hospital conglomerates on one hand, and shrinking Medicare and Medicaid payments for their largely indigent patients.  No amount of fundraising could save most of the hospitals first from rounds of merger and consolidation and then from closure.  In late 2001, Chicago Columbus Hospital closed its doors. A year later, the shrine and chapel inside were also shuttered. The hospital building was demolished, but the Cabrini National Shrine was a separate property belonging to the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and was preserved.  After years of controversy and heavy handed pressure to relocate the Shrine so that the valuable Lincoln Park land could be profitably redeveloped an agreement was made and a new luxury condominium building was erected over and around the Shrine.  After restoration the Shrine was blessed and dedicated by Cardinal Francis George on September 30, 2012. 
The National Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini as it now stands alone in Chicago's affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood.
Meanwhile in New York City, Cabrini Medical Center was forced to close in 2008.   After an attempt by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to turn the vacant buildings into a for-profit out-patient surgery center fell through, the complex was sold to private developers who planned to convert the buildings to condominiums.
For many people, Mother Cabrini is best remembered for something she never personally had anything to do with—Chicago’s notorious Cabrini-Green public housing project.  The projects were built out over a period of twenty years beginning in 1944 with the Frances Cabrini Roughhouses on land cleared from some of the worst and most dangerous slums in the City, a largely Italian neighborhoodso rife with crime that more than 50 murders were committed in one year alone at Death Corner, Locust and Sedgwick.  Four additional sections of high rise buildings were finally finished by 1964.  
At first the development was integrated and most of its residents were employed former slum residents who took pride in being Development People.  But Mayor Richard J. Daly shifted the focus of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) to warehousing the very poor and reinforcing the city’s rigid racial segregation.  By the mid-‘70’s Cabrini-Green was over-run by drugs, gangs, and violence and the building were allowed to deteriorate with poor maintenance and vandalism.  Many believe that it was allowed to happen because the land juts into the intersection of two of Chicago’s wealthiest neighborhoods, Lincoln Park and the Gold Coast and was coveted by developers.
In Chicago Mother Cabrini's name is most closely associated with the Chicago Housing Authorities Cabrini Green project which became  notorious crime ridden vertical slums for warehousing the city's Black poor.  When the real estate on the near north side became valuable and attractive to developers, the massive building were torn down and the residents dispersed to uncertain fate.  More attractive row houses were upgraded for yuppie colonizers.
A new round of Public Housing “reform” has seen the high rise buildings razed and their residents disbursed.  The area is being re-developed, supposedly for mixed income uses.  The Cabrini row houses were preserved, although their residents were all evicted.  They are now an up-scale anchor for the planned development.  No one expects that any of the former Black residents will find space in the few units reserved for low income residents.
Meanwhile the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus continue their work in the United States and around the world.  They remain dedicated serving the needs of the poor and immigrants with health care, senior care, immigrant services and the like.  They have taken a special interest in implementing Catholic teachings on Social Justice and ending world-wide human trafficking.

Jefferson—The Flawed Founder with Murfin Verse

✇ WWUUD?
6 July 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Jefferson stands as a demi god in the Greek temple erected as his Memorial in Washington, his famous words etched in the walls around him.

Independence Day has come and gone, but perhaps it is not too late to consider the brilliant author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.  Growing up and as a young man Jefferson was always my favorite founder.  Like the much older Benjamin Franklin, he was a man of wide interests, a probing mind, and a philosophical bent.  His Deism spoke to my unorthodox soul.  And his soaring rhetoric inspired my life long quest for human liberty and social justice.  But I learned that there was a mote the size of a log in the great man’s eye.

Next to George Washington and Franklin, Jefferson is the most revered of the Founding Fathers.  He was author of the Declaration of Independence, a tireless advocate of religious freedom and the inventor of the idea of “a wall of separation between church and state.”  He was the founder of the Democratic Republican Party that challenged the “monarchaltendencies” and anglophelia of the Federalist Party, leading to the Revolution of 1800 and the triumph of democracy.  Cultured and urbane, he would have been an ideal and stimulating dining companion.
Thomas Jefferson
Jefferson was a hero of mine since childhood.  But he was no saint and his legacy is sullied—in the eyes of some irredeemably so. 

First there is the stain of slavery.  He recognized that it made a mockery of all of the high ideas of the Declaration.  The theoretical admirer of the yeoman farmer as the ideal, he could never give up the life of luxury and ease that his slaves afforded him.  Although he dreamed of the day when slavery would be ended, he feared that Blacks and Whites could never live and work side by side as equals.  Instead, he promoted schemes to resettle Freemen in Africa.

Perhaps worse yet, Jefferson exploited his power over the slave quarters to take as his longtime mistress the personal slave and teenage half-sister of his dead wife Martha.   Some believe that the long term relationship became one of love and mutual devotion; others maintain it was nothing more than serial rape.  
No life portrait exists of Sally Hemmings.  This is a contemporary artist's conception.
He could have left Sally Hemmings in France where she would have been a free woman, but he returned to Virginia with her where she was his chattel.  Later, he would allow some her children, who were fair skinned and red haired and were said to bear an uncanny resemblance to him, to “escape.”  The others were freed in his will.  But all of the rest of the slaves remained in bondage and many would be sold off and families torn asunder to pay his enormous debts.

Then there is the Jefferson who as President sowed the destruction of his agrarian republic by becoming the god father of Manifest Destiny and empire with the purchase of Louisiana from the French.  And who presented visiting delegations of Native Americanswith peace medallions emblazonedwith his profile while waging relentless war against them.

So much to admire.  So much to disdain.   Our brains which demand either/or cannot quite compute.  In recent years the tendency among liberals has been to kick Jefferson out of the Pantheon and to the gutter.  Once esteemed by Unitarian Universalists for his self-proclaimed small “u” unitarianism, his devotion to religious liberty, and his meticulously constructed Bible with its very human Jesus, he has come to be viewed as an embarrassment.  After years of trying his name was stripped from the former Thomas Jefferson District of the UUAamid cheers and self-congratulations.

As for me, because Jefferson was every bit as human as his Jesus, I don’t expect perfection, or to worshiphim.  I don’t subscribe to the idea that because he did evil in his life, everything he accomplished must be cast aside as the “tainted fruit of a poisoned tree.”

Come let us embrace Jefferson.  Let us embrace Sally Hemmings.  Let us embrace ambiguity.
Sam Neil as Jefferson and Carmen Ejogo as Sally in the 2000 TV movie Sally Hemmings: An American Scandal.
Jefferson Awoke



He woke early, as was his  custom.

The first yellow light of dawn

pierced the wavy window panes, warmed his ruddy cheek

until those gold flecked brown eyes opened,

hisred hair, unpoweredand loosened from its velvetribbon

splayed across the pillow

twining with her shining black tresses,

lay upon her perfectcaramel shoulder.



As he stirred, so did she,

rising from her old Mistress’s bed,

abandoning the damp, warm spot on satin

towrap herself silently in coarse linen

andslip unnoticed from the Master’s chamber

before Polly and the household

would be forced to acknowledge what their hearts knew—

That Sally Hemming s,

ledger page chattel of Thom as Jefferson,

half-sister to his dead wife,

childhood playmate of Polly and now her body servant,

was his—what?

                          Lover?

                                    Consolation?

                                                     Careless sponge for urgency?



And he, crossing to that secretary of his own devise,

without a momentary glance back at the retreating figure,

sitting on that ingeniously swiveling chair,

spread the heavy sheets before e him,

dipped quill into indigo

and paused for just a moment

before inventing America.



—Patrick Murfin


The Bikini Debut—A Cultural and Fashion A-Bomb

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5 July 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Michilee Beradini during the shoot for Louis Reard's first Bikini.
On July 5, 1946 war weary France was given something explosive to shake out of the drab and depressing years of Nazi occupation.  Designer Louis Reard  introduced a skimpy new two piece bathing suit whose very abbreviated bottom was cut high on the thighand well below the belly button.  Since he expected his suit to really shake things up, he named it the Bikinibecause the Americans had set off a highly publicized Atomic bomb test at Bikini Atoll in the Pacificfour days earlier.
When it came to the photo shoot, Reard had a hard time finding a model willing to expose herself in the skimpy outfit.  The usual run way and magazine photo models were scared that the scandal would ruin their careers.  Finally he found 18 year old Michilee Beradini, an amateur just trying to break into the business.  She probably did not realize the risk she was taking.  Her fresh faced appeal may have helped Reard’s cause
He was not the first designer with the idea.  A few days before Jacques Heim had unveiled a very similar suit that he called the atome. Maybe Reard had a better press agent, or maybe the Bikini was just a better name, but the press went wild for his creation.
Ava Gardner in 1949 in one of two-piece suits that were careful to cover the navel and not expose clevage that were worn in the late  '30's through the war years.

When pictures reached the U.S. our still puritanical society was predictably appalled and outraged.  A surprising amount of serious ink was spent in editorial columns of major newspapers and “smart” magazines decrying the bathing suit and tsk-tsking about plummeting morals.  
Two piece suits themselves were nothing new. They had been worn stateside with little public comment since the mid ‘30’s.  The bottoms of these suits, however, were essentially tight fitting shorts, legs cut straight across and modestly covering the navel.  The tops were armored breast-plate like bras covered with fabric and often trimmed in pleated flounces to make sure that no swelling flesh was inadvertently exposed. 
           Aussie swimming champion Annette Kellerman in the suit that got her busted on a Boston Beach in 1907.
After all this is was a nation that was so shocked by a simple one piece tank suit in that authorities arrested Australian swimming A champion Annette Kellerman in 1907 for wearing one on a Boston beach.  Although her case helped overturn some of the more draconian swimming dress codes, heavy wool suits with skirts, and stockings as immortalized by the Keystone Bathing Beauties of the silent pictures did not disappear until the late ‘20’s.
Esther Williams’s Aquacade film extravaganzas  of the ‘40’s set off an American interest in swimwear that was figure flattering—if a girl had William’s substantial curves—while appropriately chaste. 
Movie star Esther Williams made one piece sheath bathing suits that flattered her statuesque figure the American fashion standard for the post-war years.  She even had her own line of swim suits.

Even in France the daring bikini took a while to take off with the public.  But after a young starlet named Brigitte Bardot wore one on the beach during the 1953 Cannes Film Festival that they became common on the beaches of the Riviera.  It took until about 1960 for bikinis to become more than exotic curiosities in the United States.  Although restrictions against them remained in force at most public beaches and pools, the rapid spread of private pools gave women places where they could actually wear the little suites without being arrested.  

                 Brigitte Bardot on the beach at Cannes in 1953 boosted the popularity of the bikini in Europe. 



Pools were becoming an expected attraction at the roadside motels catering to a nation on wheels and the back yard poolhad gone from being a symbol of ostentatious wealth to a common amenity of many middle class homes.  Society as a whole was becoming more relaxed—blame the pernicious influence of Hollywood and Rock and Roll. 
In 1960 Brian Hyland chronicled the fate of a modest young woman and her new swim suit in his hit Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.  The popular teen beach and surfing movies of the decade helped spread the craze, though beach queen Annette Funicello herself never wore one.  
Brian Hyland's 1960 novelty song hit resurrected interest in the bikini in the U.S.

In 1964 Sport Illustrated inaugurated their annual Swimsuit Issuewith a model in a bikini on the cover.  By ’67 even that staunch defender of middle class propriety, Time reported, “65% of the young set had already gone over,” to the bikini. 
After Donald Trump bought the Miss USA and Miss Universe pageants in 1996 he decreed bikinis for the bathing suit competition to, in his own words “sex things up.”  Naturally.  Later the more staid and convention Miss America organization switched to two piece suits, albeit much more modest than string bikinis, before eliminating their bathing suit competition entirely in 2018. 
 
Miss Universe contestants in Sydney, Australia in 2009.  Contestants recalled that pageant owner Donald Trump would enter their dressing room while they were changing "on inspection."  Of course he did.
America still is behind Europe.  The topless suits seen now on the Riviera or even the Brazilian thong bikini, standard around the world, are still relatively rare on these shores.


Should Independence Day be Celebrated on the 4th of July?

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4 July 2019 at 10:13
By: Patrick Murfin

A scene that never happened--the signing of the Declaration of Independence.  There was no great signing ceremony on July 4th or any other day.  On August 2, 1776 the Delegates to the Continental Congress who were still in Philadelphia stopped by the Pennsylvania State House to add their signatures before they left town.  Those who were already gone added their signatures when they could--weeks, months, and in one case years later.

As we all know today is Independence Day when Americans celebrate the adoption of a resolution by the Continental Congress formally severing ties between the England and her former colonies in 1776. Although we celebrate on July 4th, the date is just one of several that could have been chosen. 

On May 15 Congress adopted a preamble for a resolution offered by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia calling for colonies without a “government sufficient to the exigencies of their affairs” to adopt new governments..  The preamble, written by John Adams, said that “it is necessary that the exercise of every kind of authority under the said crown should be totally suppressed.”  Although the four Middle Coloniesvoted against it, Adams wrote home that he considered this a virtual declaration of independence.  The same day the Virginia Convention adopted a resolution calling for a dissolving all allegiance to the Crown.  
Virtually forgotten in popular accounts, Virginia delegate Richard Henry Lee offered the underlying resolution for Independence.  The familiar document was an explanation and justification of the act drafted by a special committee.  It was not the legal document accomplishing separation.  Lee's resolution and the votes for and against it were recorded in the official proceedings of Congress.
In keeping with his instructions on June 11 Lee offered a resolution that Congress declare independence, seek foreign alliances, and begin laying the groundwork for a new confederation:

Resolved, that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

As Lee’s resolution was being debated Congress authorized a Committee of Five to draw up a document explaining the action, should it be passed.  The committee consisted of Adams; Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania, the delegate with the most international renown and prestige; Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, one of the youngest delegates; Robert R. Livingstonof New York, and Roger Sherman of Connecticut.  
The famous committee charged with drafting a justification for Independence. Left to right:  Thomas Jefferson, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and John Adams.  Jefferson wrote the first draft.  Franklin and Adams were actively involved in editing and fine tuning the document.  Sherman and Livingston are not known to have contributed tot he wordage but were important politically to secure support from their states--especially Livingston whose New York delegation was deadlocked on Independence.
The committee delegated to Jefferson the job of writing a first draft.  He did so over several days.  The committee conferred and recommended some changes, which mortified Jefferson, and then he produced a draft incorporating the edits.  It remained, however, mostly Jefferson’s work. 

The language was sent to Congress on June 28.  The document was tabled until action on Lee’s resolution was completed. On July 1, sitting as a Committee of the Whole with each Colony having one vote, the resolution was approved with 9 yeas, two nays (Pennsylvania and South Carolina), and no vote by New York, whose delegation lacked instructions, and Delaware whose two delegates were split.  
Ceasar Rodney rode hell-for-leather from Delaware to cast his deciding vote in that colony's delegation on June 2 passing Lee's resolution.
On July 2 South Carolina reconsidered and switched its vote to yes and the two most ardent opponents of independence in the Pennsylvania delegation, John Dickinson and Robert Morris, bowing to the inevitable abstained in a caucus of the state’s delegates allowing the delegation to follow Franklin for independence.  Then, dramatically, Caesar Rodney arrived after an epic ride from Delaware to cast a vote breaking the tie in that delegation.  Only New York, then, had not voted for independence.  Adams regarded the July 2 vote as definitively the day of independence.  He wrote home to his wife Abigail:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

Congress then took up the wording declaration from of the Committee of Five. On July 3 after spirited debate Congress adopted most of Jefferson’s text except for a lengthy passage critical of the slave trade and some other relatively minor matters of language.  He was bitterly disappointed but the deed was done.  Congress ordered official copies be made for each state and printed copies to be read publicly. These copies were dated July 4 A calligrapher worked on a very fine original document which most delegates signed on August 2and to which absent delegates appended their signatures weeks, maybe even months later.  There was no grand signing ceremony as enshrined in myth.  
The iconic document on display at the Library of Congress and reproduced in class rooms across the country is one of about three copies made by a calligrapher.  Like the printed copies it was dated July 4 although there was no action by Congress that day.  The Fourth was meant to be the date that the Declaration was to be read publicly for the first time  but the broadsides were not ready from the printer.  The Philadelphia Evening Post ran it on July 6  and it was not until July 8 that Col. John Nixon of the Philadelphia Committee of Safety read it on the steps of the State House.   General George Washington personally read the document to his troops and local citizens in New York City on July 9.
Here are some dates in the associated with marking Independence Day and the Fourth of July:

1776—Philadelphia celebrated with toasts, 13-gun salutes, speeches, fireworks, and paradesafter the official reading on July 8.

1777—13 guns were fired once in the morning and once in the evening in Bristol, Rhode Island

1778—George Washingtonmarked the occasion with double rum ration for the troops. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams held a dinner for fellow Americans in Paris.

1779—The Fourth fell on a Sunday. To keep the Sabbath, observances in many places were held July 5.

1781—Massachusettsbecame the first state whose  legislatureto recognize the day as an official occasion.

1791—The first recorded use of the name Independence Day occurred.

1826—former Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died within an hour of each other on the 50th anniversary of the dated copies of the Declaration

1831—Former President James Monroe died on the Fourth.

1870—Congress made the 4th of July an unpaid holiday for Federal employees.

1884—The Statue of Liberty was presented to the American People in Paris.

1941—Congress made Independence Day a paid Federal holiday.


Québec—Champlain’s Habitation on the Bluffs

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3 July 2019 at 16:40
By: Patrick Murfin
This fanciful depiction of the arrival of Samuel de Champlain at the site of the future Quebec City was painted in 1808 by George Agnew Reid.  The local Algonquian tribes did not adorn themselves in plains Indian war bonnets and were not known to have dispatched such a welcoming committee. On June 3, 1608 French explorer Samuel de Champlain founded Ville de Québec—Quebec City— at the site of Stadacona, a long abandoned St. Lawrence Iroquoian settlement.   It was the first permanent settlement in North America built outside of Spanish possessions.   The town was built in an easily fortified position on the top of bluffs on the north side of the St. Lawrence River where it narrows considerably.   It is surrounded by a low plain—...

One Year Ago—A Witness Against ICE and Immigrant Detention in Woodstock

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1 July 2019 at 10:37
By: Patrick Murfin


As the vigil began the McHenry County Jail with its Immigration  detention unit on the top floor to the left gleamed in setting sunlight.  Photo  by Delby Guzman.
Note:  Almost exactly one year ago more than 200 gathered outside of the McHenry County Jail complex and Federal immigrant detention center in Woodstock, Illinois to protest brutal immigration policies and to demand the abolition of ICE—the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency which has ruthlessly applied that policy.  This year on Friday, July 12 even larger crowds will gather at 7:30 at the same location for a Lights for Liberty protest rally and vigil.  We encourage all who can to join us.  Perhaps you will be inspired by this photo essay of last year’s event.

A line of timely thunderstorms raced quickly across McHenry County finally breaking the oppressive heat and humidity that had gripped the area for three days.  The skies cleared, a hint of a breeze cooled the mid-summer evening air.  The sinking sun gleamed on the imposing walls of the McHenry County Adult Corrections Center and County Building that loomed over the wide parking lot separating two hundred or so who had gathered.  

The crowd gathered along the edge of the parking lot of the McHenry County Jail which houses an ICE Detention Center at 8 pm Sunday night for a dramatic protest vigil.  Photo courtesy Ken West.
The top floor of the left side of the building—the half with narrow rows of slit windows has been leased to ICE by the McHenry County governmentfor use as an immigrant detention center.  In fact a number of years ago a fourth floor was added to theCounty Jail expressly for the purpose of renting to the Feds as a cash cow.  That it is still in operation eight years later is the shame of the County Board.
Sheriff Bill Prim, a right-wing Republican who is an enthusiastic booster of Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, says he doesn’t know what all of the fuss is about, or why people would disturb the tranquility of a summer evening to make noise on the edge of his bailiwick.  He is quick to point out that none of the children ripped from their parents under the administration’s Zero Tolerance policy are held in the facility nor are any families.  All detainees are adults who may have been picked up anywhere.  Nothing to see here, according to Prim.
In fact the detainees come from around the world.  Many, if not most, are not even Latino and speak dozens of different native languages.  The Sheriff doesn’t mention that many have been torn from their families—wives, husbands, children including American citizens, mothers and fathers—representing family separation as surely as the ugly scenes at the border.
According to the Northwest Herald:
An agreement with the U.S. Marshals Service allows McHenry County to charge $95 a day for housing immigration detainees. The county also is compensated $46 an hour for transporting federal inmates. Between January 2016 and September 2017, the jail earned $14,570,699 from the agreement, invoices show.
The county’s contract with ICE has resulted in several lawsuits against Sheriff Bill Prim. The suits, which since have been dismissed, accused Prim of illegally detaining people in violation of the Trust Act, which bars police from searching, arresting or detaining a person simply because of their immigration status.

Outrage over those border separations and heartbreakingly cruel child detentions has sparked a massive protest movement that included the hundreds of thousands in more than 700 separate Families Belong Together actions across the country on Saturday.  But awareness is growing that the whole system is broken and thoroughly corrupt.  The vigil in Woodstock was meant to express that and demand fundamental change including the dismantlement of ICE itself.

Sameena Mustafa..  Photo by Elizabeth Linquist.

I arrived at the rally just after it started at 8 pm.  The crowd was still gathering in a semi-circle around a youngish woman in a modified orange sarispeaking through an electric bullhorn—speaking well and passionately.  That was Sameena Mustafa one of the principle organizers of the vigil and the host for the evening.  Mustafa is a former Planned Parenthood manager and a deeply involved community volunteer who ran as a progressive against incumbent Democrat Mike Quigley in this March’s 5th District Congressional primary.  Her deep and wide connections helped secure the quality speakers at the vigil and helped bring activists from around the Metropolitan area to join locals at the event. 

Yesenia Mata. Photo by Delby Guzman

Yesenia Mata is Political Director of Dream Action Coalition(DRM) and studies at the John Marshall Law School.  She is one of the most prominent young leaders of the Chicago-area immigration justice movement and a nationally respected spokesperson for the Dreamers—the young people brought to this country as children who have made lives for themselves as contributing members of the only country they have ever really known.
Mata introduced Olivia Segura, whose tragic story brought tears to the eyes of many.  Her daughter, Ashley Sietsema, was killed in a vehicle accident while on active duty with the Army as a nurse’s aide in a medical battalion in Kuwait in 2007.  Although Mexican-born Segura is a U.S. Citizen, her second husband Alberto, who helped raise Ashley since she was four years old and who is the biological father of Segura’s 21-year-old son, Kyle, is not a citizen. He has been attempting to gaincitizenship for years, but has been deniedbecause of two non-violent felony drug convictions dating back more than a decade.  

Olivia Segura with Jill Manrique, one of the principle organizers of the vigil, holding the bullhorn. Photo by Elizabeth Lindquist.

While grieving over Ashley’s death Olivia turned to the numbing comfort of prescription pills and her husband drank.  That drinking ultimately earned him DUI convictions and landed him in immigration court facing deportation.  She desperately sought help for her husband but was continually told that nothing could be done.  Then came the good news that the Executive Office for Immigration Review ordered that Alberto’s deportation case be “administratively closed,” because of “humanitarian consideration.”  But the deportation process was not officially ended and Alberto was caught in limbo, unable to gain citizenship status or a work visa.

Trump, of course canceled humanitarian suspensions of deportation proceedings.  Albert was arrested and now sits in the ICE Detention Center in Woodstock awaiting a final expulsion and permanent separation from his citizen family.  Olivia accuses the government of violatingConstitutional prohibition of double jeopardy by essentially punishing her husband again for old, non-violent crimes for which he has already paid the price.  In her long fight to keep her family united, Olivia Segura has become a public face of opposition to mindless ICE cruelty.

United Methodist Pastor Emma Lozano. Photo by Delby Guzma
The Rev Emma Lozano is co-pastor with her husband, the Rev. Walter Coleman, who I used to know as Slim Coleman years ago in his days with Chicago’s radical greaser newspaper Rising Up Angry, of the Lincoln United Methodist Church in Pilsen.  In 2006 as pastor of the Adalberto United Methodist Church she gave refuge to Elvira Arellano, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico whose story made national headlines. Arellano became a face of the immigration debate and Lozano’s church became a symbol of the sanctuary church movement, which grew rapidly because of the publicity. Arellano was deported to Mexico in 2007. 

Lozano is the founder and face of Centro/Pueblo Sin Fronteras, a grassroots organization that gives aid and support to many families facing deportation.  Among the many who have been assisted was Olivia Segura.

Cesar Vargas. Photo by Delby Guzman. 
Cesar Vargas is a nationally known immigration reform advocate who made history when a New York court paved the way for him to become the first undocumented immigrant to practice law in the state.  His organization, the Dream Action Coalition is a leading force in the movement of Dreamers to secure the right to stay in the country in which they have been raised since childhood.  Vargas shared a moving account of his last night in Mexico when he was four years old with his Mother and brother as they prayed in Church and their perilous flight across the border.  His struggle to get an education, complete law school, and pass the bar was made possible by the sacrifices of his mother.  But Vargas also acknowledged that it is easy to stir-up sympathy for high-achieving Dreamers like himself, who will obviously be assets to the country.  Meanwhile other immigrants, including desperate refugees are painted as criminals, potential terrorists, drug pushers, job thieves, and welfare idlers by Trump propaganda which is too often believed in whole or in part by many.

Pam Shearman with Sameena  Mustafa .  Photo by  Delby Guzman

Pam Shearman is the coordinator for jail visits at four ICI Detention Centers including the one in McHenry County for the Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants.  She oversees a cadre of volunteers who make pastoral care visits to detainees often providing them their only contact to the outside world.  This is the same great program that was represented by volunteer Sue Rekenthaler at the recent Families Belong Together Woodstock rally.

Christopher Sims is a Unitarian Universalist spoken word poetand unofficial lay minister from Rockford who also performs as UniverSouLove and has recently been very involved with the Poor Peoples Campaign.  Sim wrote a poem, Detained Humanity especially for the McHenry County vigil.  It is printed in its entirety at the end of this post.

Candles lit.  Photo by Pam Sourelis.
As the sun was setting and the speeches wound down, the Old Man had to leave to get ready for his overnight shift at a Crystal Lake gas station/convenience store.  But the vigil went on without me.  Folks lit their candlesas beacons of hope to the detainees inside the jail.  They prayed, sang, and bore silent witness.  

Raising Lights of hope.
Then there was a short processional march to lay flowers of remembrance at the monument sign for the Correctional Center.  After the formal program concluded many participants drifted back to the parking lot, this time immediately in front of the building where they had been explicitly warned not to trespass.  They held their candles aloft in hopes that they could be seen from inside the facility.  Neither the handful of Sheriff’s deputies watching close by made any attempt to disperse them.

U.U. poet Christopher D. Sims,  Photo by Delby Guzman.

Detained Humanity

Mi amigos, mi Amiga’s, ninos
Gringos are detaining your
humanity. The insanity taking
place in the United States is
not to be honored, respected,
embraced.

You are faced with the worst of odds.

It’s odd a homeland that exists with
all kinds and flavors of woman and
man cannot stand the site of you
as you choose where you want to live.

Existence is not to be politicized,
scrutinized, or penalized. My people—
indigenous African people—were forced
upon this soil. We had to fight and die
for civil rights. Your plight is much the
same. North America wants you worried
or worn out just so they can play the same
game with your precious lives.

At the border a war is going on. You’re
not down if you’re brown, even if in

this country you were born. Even if in
this country you were born. We’ve sworn
to the flag an allegiance unyielding,
passionate, and hopeful. Borders should
never contain walls, we are a people global.

The United Nations should have stations

all across the land to help defend woman

and man who has a plan to set themselves
free or engage in economic opportunities
instead of creating jail cells that exploit and house
communities of color.

We are all one in this sister, brother, lover,
fighter, warrior, soldier, survivor, provider, person
with a dream, human being.

To detain who you are denies you the sacred
stars hovering inside your galaxies as you fight
with tenacity to gain the rights you deserve.

How can your life be captured on cards or legal papers,
when collectively, we are universal neighbors

on a planet that should see all of us as one?

At the border, the sun makes you sweat.

Politicians forget their ancestors were immigrants
too. That's not fiction, it's not falsehood, and it's
not North American made voodoo.

Your spirit will not be detained behind jail cells
as they create catastrophe, denial. Why should
anyone's humanity ever be put on trial?

I pray for the children, I meditate for the fathers, I sing
a song for the disconnected mothers. In this land of
imbalanced legislation we've forgotten how to be
the keepers of our brothers.

A soul detained, soon freedom they will gain

to ease the pain of the people. The warfare is lethal.

The treatment of babies, children is unbelievable.

I wish you peace in the rising of a revolution

Where love, acceptance, and civility is shown.

You are, we are unequal citizens in a land some of us
have always called home.

I wish you peace in the rising of a revolution
where love, acceptance, and civility is shown.

© Christopher D. Sims

June 28, 2018

The Gadsden Land Grab Made a New Border With Mexico

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30 June 2019 at 04:06
By: Patrick Murfin
In 1853 a lot of Mexicans woke up to discover that they were living in another country in which at best they were third class citizens and at worst considered verminto be erased at the earliest opportunity.   A shady international real estate scheme pushed the Mexican/US boarder south, deep into the deserts of the future states of New Mexico and Arizona.   Without that land grab desperate Central American refugees would have had a hell of a lot longer walk to seek asylum and Trump’s Wall even more useless. The boundaries of the continental United States were expanded for a final time when President Franklin Pierce signed the agreement for the Gadsden Purchase on June 29, 1853.   The purchase added 29,670 square miles south of the Gi...

Reprising Emma and Helen Birthday Sisters—Murfin Verse

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28 June 2019 at 09:24
By: Patrick Murfin
A young Emma Goldman  in her mug shot after her arrest for conspiring with her lover Alexander Berkman  in an assassination attempt on steel baron Henry Clay Frick.

Note—I have posted this before, as recently as last year but the two women are particular favorites of mine and I immodestly think that the poem is one of my better efforts.
Emma Goldman, whose grave I have visited on pilgrimages to the Haymarket Memorial in Forest Home Cemetery, and Helen Keller, who has fascinated me since seeing The Miracle Worker and reading a paperback biography I ordered from a Scholastic Book Club flyer shared a common birthday on June 27.
Helen Keller as a student at Radcliffe was already world famous for her astounding achievements overcoming blindness and deafness.
You know, if you have visited here before, that such calendar coincidences trigger an inexplicable urge to commit poetry.
Most people recognize Goldman’s name as America’s most famous anarchist.  They may be surprised to learn that she was also a famous lecturer whose talks on theater, religion, women’s rights, and free love drew as much attention in their day as her calls to smash the state and end capitalism.
Goldman was such a compelling writer and public figure that even the capitalist press was eager to publish her fiery essays.
Keller’s profound advocacy of Socialism and the IWW has largely been white washed from her public image.  But that is changing as folks on the left slowly become aware that she was a comrade and fellow worker.
Helen Keller as a Joan of Arc type hero leading the working people of the world to triumph in an allegorical scene from her 1919 silent film Deliverance
In these dark times it is good to remember our sheroes.  

Birthday Sisters Emma and Helen

Emma Goldman June 27,1869, Konvo, Imperial Russian Lithuania
Helen Keller, June 27, 1880, Tuscumbia, Alabama, USA

If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution—Emma Goldman

…there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.—Helen Keller.

You might not suspect that they were sisters.

Emma with her square jaw and carelessly attend hair,

            gray eyes peering through

            those old fashion pinze nez spectacles

            perched upon her nose,

            the urban smells of coal fire,

delivery horse dung and workman’s sweat

clinging to her frumpy clothes,

speech meticulously enunciated

barely betraying here and there

a Yiddish trace.

Helen, who would have been a delicate beauty

            in her youth

            were it not for those disconcerting,

            unfocused eyes,

            Confederate grace and slave cotton wealth

            a mantle on her delicate shoulders,

            the sweet lilt of a gentlewoman

            lost to grunts and moans.

But wait….    

            These two knew what it was like

            to be a stranger, an exile,

            an alien other

            and ultimately what it was like

            to be a celebrated curiosity.

They learned as a Jew

            and as a side show freak,

            as women, after all,

            what oppression was

            but also that they

            were not alone—

They swam in a sea of oppression

            and learned early

            of the solidarity of the school

            against the sharks

            that would consume them.

Maybe the world expected little else

            from the Jewess

            who threw her lot early

            with the filthy anarchists

            who made bombs

            and plotted  attentats

            like that job she pulled

            passing the pistol

            to her lover, for god sake,

            to plug Henry Clay Frick.

But the world was aghast

            when the delicate Radcliffe flower

            who had charmed Mark Twain,

            Alexander Graham Bell,

            and Teddy Roosevelt,

            raised the Red Flag

            and fell side by side

            with the laborers,

            the unemployed,        

            the despised—even the Negros!

The atheist anarchist

            and the Socialist Wobbly

            who dabbled in Swedenborgism

            and a mystic Red Jesus

            did not agree on details,

            they might have enjoyed

            a friendly debate

            each being a master

            of the platform.

But each in her own way

            was steadfast to the end

            of her long life

            for a revolution of liberation

            and the ultimate triumph

            of beauty.

I imagine sometimes

            that as they each

            traversed the country

            on lecture tour or

            vaudeville circuit

            if they ever crossed paths

            in say, a railway station

            in Omaha or a

            hotel lobby in Akron

            and fell into each other’s arms

            sobbing—

“Sister, sister, I have found you!”

—Patrick Murfin


The Night the Queers Fought Back—Stonewall and the Birth of a Movement

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27 June 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
The Stonewall was a dive bar operated by the Mob in New York's Greenwich Village.  It's patrons were outcasts and the most flamboyant of a rough streets scene--young hustlers, drag queens, butch lesbians.  It was also an inter-racial scene that attracted police attention.  Wealthier and more respectable Gays gathered and partied more discretely in posh clubs that authorities usually ignored.

Fifty years ago on the night of June 27, 1969 somethingsnapped when New York City Police made one of their regular raids on a Gay bar.  Instead of meekly submitting to arrest, the denizens  of the Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village bar operated by the Mafia and patronized by the most marginalized of folks—homeless street kid hustlers, drag queens, butch dikes, and others resistedwhen police started to arrest them. 

The raid was conducted by a small team of detectives, uniformed officers including women led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine of the Public Morals Squad. 

For some reason patrons refused to follow the familiar procedure of such raids—allowing restroom inspections of individuals in women’s clothing to determine if they were men and providing identification upon request.  Dumfounded by resistance, police called for backup and patrol wagons.  There was some scufflinginside.  
The Stonewall Inn in 1969 looked just as seedy as it was.

Meanwhile some patrons who had been released were joined bypassersby outside the bar.  The crowd quickly swelled.  Taunts and jeers were exchanged between the police and crowd.  The crowd began to interfere as drag queens were led to the wagons.  When a lesbian made several unsuccessful attempts to escape, she was beaten and cried out to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?” 

That ignited the crowd which began pelting police with beer cans, coins, and rubble from a nearby construction site.  They attacked the wagons, freeing some of those arrested.  Police retreatedinto the bar and barricaded themselves.  They grabbed some members of the crowd as they went, including folk singer Dave Van Ronk who had been playing at a nearby club and came out to investigate the ruckus, and Howard Smith, a writer for the Village Voice. 
When a lesbian named Betty repeatedly tried to break away from custody and was roughly handled by several cops she famously pled, "Why don't you guys do something?"  It became the Remember he Alamo battle cry of a movement.

Observers reported that the most aggressive members of the crowd were the young street kids.  They used an uprooted parking meter as a ram to try and break down the doors of the bar and crashed through the plywood covered windows.  When they got in police drew their pistols and threatened to shoot while rioters used lighter fluid to start a fire. 

The Fire Department responded as the crowd outside grew to hundreds.  The Tactical Police Force (TPF) arrived in riot gear to rescue the besieged officers in the saloon.  They formed a phalanx and moved up the street being blocked and taunted by an impromptu kick line of drag queens and “sissies.”  
Drag queens played a leading role in the resistance after the police raid in the the nights that followed.
Rioters and police played a brand of violent tag around the narrow streets of the Village until after 4 AM.  
Later that morning the riots were front page news. 

And they were not over.  The next night even larger crowds gathered in front of the building and fighting continued.  Despite heavy rain there were sporadic eruptions the next two nights. 

Meanwhile the Gay community, which had been largelyunorganized except for the small Mattachine Society which advocated a campaign to educate the public that Homosexuals were “normal,” began to meet and debate tactics.  Thousands of flierswere printed for a Wednesday march. 

The original rebellion, which had been entirely spontaneous, was already laying the groundwork for a new, open and defiant Gay movement.  Taking cues from the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement, which were also confronting authorities with a new militancy, and taking advantage of the traditionalanti-establishment radicalism of the Village, the beginning of a new movement was taking place. 

On Wednesday the Village Voice—the most liberal paper in New York, carried a harshly critical piece on the riots describing participants as “forces of faggotry.”  Angry demonstrators descended on the Voice offices that night and threatened to burn them down.  Other violent confrontations erupted in the neighborhood as police tried to stop marchers, this time for the first time carrying signs and “making demands.” 

That was the last night of disturbances, but things changed quickly over the next year.  Two new militant Gay organizations emerged in New York, the Gay Liberation Front, which allied itself with the broader radical movement, and the Gay Activists Alliance which advocated a focused campaign demanding an end to police harassment and for broader rights for Gays. 

Similar or allied groups sprang up in major cities and college towns across the country.  New Yorkers founded three new newspapers, Gay, Come Out!, and Gay Power which soon had press runs to 2000 to 2500.  Again, similar publications were founded across the country.  
The Christopher Street March on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion is considered the founding event of the Gay Pride marches now held internationally.
On June 28, 1970 the anniversary of what was now being called the Stonewall Rebellion was marked by Christopher Street Liberation Day and a 51 block marchfrom the Village to Central Park with thousands of marchers filling the streets.  Marches were also held in Chicago and Los Angeles. 

These became the Gay Pride Marches and annual events across the country.  There was a huge march is scheduled this Sunday in Chicago.  An indication of how accepted and mainstreamGay rights have become, at least in big cities, is that there are official floats sponsored by the city’s sports teams. Politicians galore and all of the major media turn out to court the potent Gay vote and consumer demographic.  But there were still loads drag queens and all of the high camp fun that the carnival-like parades have become known for.
This year New York City will have competing Pride Parades on June 30.  The Heritage of Pride (HOP) Parade  has faced criticism in past years for over commercialization, dominant corporate  presence in  floats and units. campaigning politicians, the presence of uniformed police officers, and restrictive rules. The Reclaim Pride Coalition (RPC) will sponsor an alternative back to basic march “Eschewing the corporate-saturated, highly policed nature of recent parades, the March is a truly grassroots action that mobilizes the community to address the many social and political battles that continue to be fought locally, nationally, and globally.”  Local TV will lavishly cover the older, more respectable event.
But this year Gay Pride Parades  also reflect a community increasingly under siege by a well-oiled and funded backlash led by religious zealots and abetted by the radicalized Republican Party eager to pander to a big part of itsbase.  With Republicans in complete control of many governorships and State houses rafts of anti-Gay legislation have been enacted or proposed. 

And now the Cheeto-in-Charge, who in an earlier incarnation had proclaimed himself a “friend of the Gays,” has lent his full blather and bluster to stoking the fires of repression.  He let Gay Pride Month pass without even the most tepid acknowledgement and order U.S embassies abroad not to fly the Pride Flag—an order that was floutedat many of them.  Trump has worked to strip protections against discrimination in agency after agency. The Supreme Court recently smiled on so-called religious liberty grounds for refusing service to Gays, lesbians, and transgender folk.

So it was not a surprisethat in the midst of the usual party, floats and marching units speak out.  Or that in several cities outright protests have broken  out around or in the parades.  50 years after the fact Pride Month has returned to its roots—Resistance!

McHenry County Jail Will be Target of a Lights For Liberty Vigil

✇ WWUUD?
26 June 2019 at 19:51
By: Patrick Murfin

The McHenry County Jail which rents space to Federal detention, will be the focus in the Chicago area and Northern Illinois for a Lights for Liberty Vigil to End Human Detention Camps on Friday July 12from 7:30 to 9 pm.  It will be one scores protest vigils at detention camps on the border and other detention centers nationwide.
Light for Liberty describes itself as:
 A coalition of people, many of whom are mothers, dedicated to human rights, and the fundamental principle behind democracy that all human beings have a right to life, liberty and dignity. We are partnering with international, national, regional and local communities and organizations who believe that these fundamental rights are not negotiable and are willing to protect them. https://www.lightsforliberty.org/

According to Patrick Murfin, a lead organizer of the Woodstock event and co-chair of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation Social Justice Team, there was a groundswell of interest in the event especially “after disclosures of shocking conditions and abuse in holding facilities for children at the border and President Trump’s threat of massive round-up raids on  families across the country which has terrified whole communities.
“We will callout immigrant detentions camps for the shame of  what they really are—American concentration camps.”
The event will be held on the grassy areaacross from the jail along Route 47in Woodstock between Ware Road and Russel Court.  Parking will be available in the Northwood Junior High School lot across Rt. 47.  A rally will begin at 7:30 featuring speakers from the Latino community, immigrant justice advocates, religious leaders, legal support groups, and personal witnesses.  A list of speakers will soon be forthcoming.
The Lights for Liberty rally and vigil at the McHenry County jail promises to be much larger than this Abolish ICE event last July.
At 9 pm the candle light vigil will begin, coordinating with other actions across the country.  Participants are urged to bring friends, signs, candles.
The event has been planned by concerned local residents and is officially co-sponsoredby Indivisible Illinois and the Tree of Life UU Congregation Social Justice Team.  Several other co-sponsors are expected.
As a regional action the rally and vigil is expected to be the biggest yet held at the Jail or in support of immigration justice.
For more information visit the FacebookEvent, e-mail pmurfin@sbcglobal.net, or call 815 814-5645.


Breaking the Pastoral Glass Ceiling—Olympia Brown

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25 June 2019 at 19:35
By: Patrick Murfin
Olympia Brown as a young woman.
On June 25, 1863 Olympia Brown was ordained as a minister by the St. Lawrence Association of Universalists in New York State.  She was the first woman in America ordained as a minister with full denominational authority.  A handful of other women had been ordained by individual congregations, been licensed to preach, or founded their own churches.  
The twenty-eight year old Brown came fully and formally educated in a denomination—Universalism—that had often relied on self-educated preachers to spread the liberal gospel of Universal Salvation.  
Brown was born to Vermont Yankee stock on a pioneer farm near Prairie Ronde, Michigan in 1835.  The family of devout Universalists placed a high value on education.  Her fatherbuilt a school house on his farm and raised money from neighbors to hire a teacher.  Later Olympia, the eldest of four children, attended school in the nearby aptly named town of  Schoolcraft.  
But she craved more than semi-frontier schools could offer.  Her father agreed to enroll her in prestigious Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts but the school’s strict Calvinismdeeply offended her sensibilities.  
She was much happier at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, which was presided over by noted Unitarian social reformer and educator Horace Mann.  She sent such glowing reports of the school home that her parents relocated the whole family to Yellow Springs so the other children could benefit from the same fine education.  
Rev. Antoinette Brown, Olympia's inspiration.
While at Oberlin, Brown invited Rev. Antoinette Brown (Blackwell) to speak and preach.  As a young woman the then Antoinette Brown (no relation to Olympia, by the way) had struggled to become licensed to preach by the Congregationalists, was hired to serve a small New York church, and was irregularly ordained by a Methodist minister.  She was a staunch abolitionist and suffragistwho became a noted lecturer after her brief pastorate.  Blackwell electrified the young Brown, “It was the first time I had heard a woman preach and the sense of victory lifted me up. I felt as though the Kingdom of Heaven were at hand.”  
She determined to enroll in a theological school and pursue the ministry herself.  That was easier said than done.  No theological school in the country then regularly admitted women to degree programs, though a handful allowed them to take classes.  Even such bastions of liberal theology as the Unitarian School of Meadville in Pennsylvania and Oberlin turned her down, although Oberlin said she could attend classes but “not participate in public exercises” or expect a degree.  
She took a somewhat ambiguously discouraging letter from the president of the Universalist Divinity School of St. Lawrence University as an acceptance and surprised him by appearing for the 1861 term.  Sheepishly, he had to admit her.  It was characteristic of Brown’s bold determination.  She afterward wrote, “I was told I had not been expected and that Mr. Fisherhad said I would not come as he had written so discouragingly to me. I had supposed his discouragement was my encouragement.”  Brown efficiently completed her course of study in 1863 with distinction.  
Encountering resistance at every turn she doggedly convinced skeptical authorities to first ordain her, and then allow her to be called as a denominational minister.  Shortly after graduation the St. Lawrence Association ordained her.  After a period of pulpit supply preaching Brown was called as a minister to a Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts church.  While serving there she became deeply involved in the organized women’s movement. 
Antoinette Brown's sister in law, leading suffragist Lucy Stone recruited Olympia to rouse Kansas for a statewide referendum on giving women the vote.
In the summer of 1867 Lucy Stone, the sister-in-law of her old inspiration Antoinette Brown, urged her to travel to Kansas to lead a campaign in support of a state constitutional amendment to extend thefranchise to women.  She arrived in the state to find no organization on the ground or any support.  She had to schedule her own appearances, book halls, make traveling and lodging arrangements and then speak to often hostile audiences.  Traveling relentlessly to all corners of the state she made over 300 speeches and attracted national attention.  Although the state’s male voters overwhelmingly rejected the amendment, Susan B. Anthony commended her work as “a glorious triumph.”  
Brown found herself in demand as a speaker, but yearned to return to parish ministry.  In 1870 she was called to the large, prosperous congregation in Bridgeport, Connecticut, the home church of activeUniversalist layman Phineas T. Barman.  She found the church far less progressive than her first pastorate and, although she enjoyed support of the majority of members, a persistent minority campaigned against her in favor of calling a man.  
During her service she married John Henry Willis in 1873.  While on maternity leave with their first child, agitation by the minority to permanently replace her increased.  By the end of 1874 she had enough and resigned her ministry.  The family remained in Bridgeport and added a second child, but Brown—who kept her maiden name—searched for another pulpit.  
She found one in Racine, Wisconsin on the shores of Lake Michigan just north of Illinois.  The church was in “unfortunate condition” after a series of failed pastorates, was demoralized, and was struggling to maintain membership and keep afloat.  Brown recognized that only churches in this condition were desperate enough to call a woman.  She eagerly accepted the challenge.  Her supportive husband closed his Bridgeport business to move with his wife.  Eventually he became part owner of the local newspaper in Racine which not only helped support the family financially but gave support to Olympia’s ministry. 


The Universalist Society of Racine, Wisconsin as it looked when Olympia served there.

Under her leadership the church flourished, grew in membership, stabilized its finances and became a cultural center for Racine.  She sponsored regular speaking engagements by leading feminists and social reformers including Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Julia Ward Howe.  After nine successful years at age 53 Brown decided to dedicate more of her time to the cause of women’s suffrage.  The Racine congregation was on firm ground and continued thrive.  In the 20th Century the congregation took the name Olympia Brown Unitarian Universalist Church in her honor.  
Brown continued to serve small Wisconsin Universalist congregations on a part time basis or as a pulpit supply preacher, but spent most of her time as President of the Wisconsin Suffrage Association and as Vice-president of the National Woman Suffrage Association.  She belonged to the Elizabeth Cady Stanton wingof the women’s movement which believed that reform on many issues in addition to obtaining the right to vote was essential for women’s equality.  She was particularly concerned about educational opportunities for women and campaigned for previously all male schools to admit women—and to encourage women to dare to seek higher education.  
By the 1890’s Brown was concerned that conservative leadership by Carrie Chapman Catt was sapping the strength of the movement.  In 1913 she was happy to embrace Alice Paul’s new militant and confrontational Women’s Party.  As a charter member she said, “I belonged to this party before I was born.”  At the age of 80 she was delighted to take to the streets.  She once burned Woodrow Wilson’s speeches in front of the White House because of his refusal to support suffrage.  She risked arrest time and again.  
After the 19th Amendment to the Constitution finally passed in 1919, Brown became one of the few veteran movement leaders to survive to cast her vote.  
Olympia Brown at a suffrage convention in her old age.  She was one of the few early leaders of the movement to survive to cast a vote in a Federal election.
Not content with that victory, she turned her energy to the peace movementbecoming one of the founding membersof the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.  
In old age she summered in Racine and spent the cold months with a daughter in Baltimore, where she let her opinions be known on a number of issues.  When she died there in 1926 at the age of 91 the Baltimore Sun wrote, “Perhaps no phase of her life better exemplified her vitality and intellectual independence than the mental discomfort she succeeded in arousing, between her eightieth and ninetieth birthdays, among the conservatively minded Baltimorans.”  
Brown’s body was returned to Racine where, after an overflow service at her old church, she was laid to rest next to her husband.


King Philip’s War—That Time the Indians Almost Won

✇ WWUUD?
24 June 2019 at 10:04
By: Patrick Murfin
Attacking a homestead during King Philip's War.
On June 24, 1675 King Philip’s Warerupted in New England with the sudden attack on isolated farmsteads in the town of Swansea in Plymouth Colony by a band of Pokanoket.  The raiders lay siege to the town for five days before capturing and burning it with several settlers killed, including some from other towns who had attempted to raise the siege. 
Alarm spread across the colonies.  Forces of Plymouth and Boston responded by raiding and burning a Wampanoag town at Mt. Hope(modern Bristol, Rhode Island).  The war quickly spread across the region with the Wampanoag, Pokanoket, Nipmunk,  Podunk, Narragansett, and Nashaway peoples rising up against the colonists and their native allies the Mohegan and Pequoit.
It was the bloodiest conflict between settlers and natives in the early colonial period and per-capita on both sides the bloodiest war ever fought in North America.  Out of a total English population of about 56,000 more than 800 were killed, about 1.5% of the total.  Nearly half of all New England towns were attacked and more remote areas were swept of settlers. 
Losses were even worse for native tribes.  Out of about 20,000 people in the various tribes, 3,000 or so were killed outright—about 15% of the population—and many more were injured.  Smaller tribes were nearly destroyed and many fled their homes to an uncertain fate in the territory of hostile tribes further inland. 
What stunned the settlers was that the war erupted after 50 years of general peace and was led by the Wampanoag, long-time allies and trading partners.  The original peace had been made by Massasoit, Sachem of the tribe and Plymouth leaders shortly after their 1620 landing.  It had been Massasoit and his band that had helped the struggling colony survive the first brutal winter, taught them how to grow corn, and were the guests at the legendary First Thanksgiving.  The Wampanoag had prospered trading pelts, meat, and crafts with the colonists for knives, pots, and other desired iron goods.  And the alliance had protected them from their enemies including the Iroquoian Mohegans. 
But tensions had gradually been rising as Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay colony centered at Boston had spread inland, north and south along the coast, and up the Connecticut River stabbing deep into tribal hunting grounds.  The rapid population growth of Colonists put pressure on game populations.  And an economic crisis of sorts arose as the friendly tribes began running out of trade goods and turned to bartering for land—often land that they shared with other tribes. 
Attempts to Christianize the tribes was also resented by most, although a few hundred did convert and moved to Praying Towns where they studied the Gospel and learned English crafts and trades.  These Praying Indians were resented by traditionalists, and, when push came to shove, distrusted by their White protectors. 
After the elderly Massasoit, who had crafted the alliance died in 1661, relations rapidly deteriorated.  His eldest son Wamsutta became Grand Sachem of the Wampanoag Confederacy.  Wamsutta himself died suddenly, and somewhat mysteriously, while visiting Plymouth Governor Josiah Winslow’s home for negotiations.  He was succeeded as Sachem by his younger brother Metacom, who would become known among the colonists as King Philip. 
Paul Revere imagined this is what Metacom looked like in  this engraving for the book The Entertaining History of King Philip's War.
In council Metacom had long advocated resistance to the English.  Now he circulated among the tribes, both members of the Wampanoag Confederacy and ancient tribal enemies urging them to unite and rise up.  An advisor to Metacom, Praying Indian John Sassamon and the first native educated at Harvard, became alarmed and warned Plymouth officials of a possible uprising.  His mutilated body was soon found frozen in a pond, likely assassinated by Metacom’s supporters. 
Plymouth authorities, acting on tips from other Praying Indians, arrested three warriors, tried them before a jurythat included some natives, and hanged them on June 8.  Two weeks later war broke out. 
Early in the war the natives were triumphant. During the summer the towns of Middleborough, Dartmouth, Mendon, Brookfield, and Lancaster were attacked and survivors fled. In early September they attacked Deerfield, Hadley, and Northfield. 
100 Militia and unarmed farmers sent to reap harvests abandoned by panicked settlers were ambushed and nearly massacred at Battle of Bloody Bank.
The New England Confederation consisting of the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay, Connecticut, and New Haven, declared war on September 9 and began organizing a common defense.  Their first action was a disaster.  A column of about 100 militia and farmers was dispatched to the burned over areas to try to reap abandoned harvests and retrieve other supplies for the coming winter.  They were ambushed near Hadley and nearly massacred at the Battle of Bloody Bank.  More raids against the frontier towns of Springfield and Hatfield continued in the early fall. 
Plymouth Governor Josiah Winslow was the main New England leader in King Philip's War.  The death of Wampanoag Grand Sachem Wamsutta at his home while visiting for negotiations may have been an assassination or an accident, but it set of the war.  He would order the attack on the neutral Narragansett Praying Indians was not only an atrocity, it spread the war.
Led by Plymouth Governor Winslow the Colonists elected not to strike west into the Wamponoag heartland, but south against the Narragansett, who had tried to remain neutral in the war.  Winslow suspected them of harboring Wamponoag women and children and feared that they might join the  Ggeneral uprising.  With friendly Indians for guides the force moved into Rhode Island, not a member of the New England Confederacy and generally friendly to the tribe.  In December they found and destroyed several villages then located the Narragansett stronghold palisade fort near modern South Kingston.  Winslow attacked with about a thousand men across a frozen bog.  The Great Swamp Fight ended with the fort and most of the tribe’s winter provisions burned.  The Narragansett lost at least 300 and the remnants of the tribe were forced away from their homes where many died of exposure or starvation and the surviving warriors joined the general uprising. 
The colonists also lost heavily in the fight with 70 killed, including many of their most experienced officers, and 150 wounded. 
The Great Swamp Fight.
Over the winter the tribal offensive intensified.  Twenty-three towns and villages were attacked.  And in reprisal for the Narragansett raid the Jireh Bull Garrison House near the site of the Great Swamp Fight was attacked, burned to the ground, and its 15 man garrison massacred.  It was a rare instance of a well-fortified colonial post being taken by assault. 
Things got even worse that spring.  Plymouth Plantation itself, deep in the most settled and well defended area, was attacked on March 12.  Although the attack was repulsed it demoralized the colonists.  Three more towns were attacked within two weeks.  A sizable company of Massachusetts Militiaunder a Captain Pierce was ambushed between Pawtucket and Blackstone’s settlement.  Most were killed outright and those taken captive were tortured and killed. 
The Rhode Island capital of Providence had to be abandoned and was later burned.  Across the region colonists were forced back on their most populous towns which were fortified to withstand repeated attacks.  Rhode Islanders were forced into a small defensive perimeter around Newport. 
But despite battlefield victories, the Indian offensive began to grind to a halt for lack of provisions.  The war had left their own crops neglected and a hunting season was lost to battle.  Hoped for aid from the English enemy the French in Canada did not materialize except for some arms and ammunition used in the northernmost battleground—Massachusetts’s colonies in what is now Maine. 
The Wampanoag’s traditional enemies the Pequot and Mohegans joined the colonists in greater numbers and began raiding Wamponoag villages and burning crops.  They played a big role in defending Connecticut from the kind of destruction faced elsewhere. 
Desperately Metacom traveled to the lands of his traditional enemies the Mohawks to secure an alliance but instead they launched attacks on his exposed villages and fields.  Hungry bands began leaving the area for safety in Maine, New Hampshire, New York,  and even Canada. 
In April 1676 the remnants of the Narragansett under Canonchet were defeated and the chief killed.  The next month Massachusetts Militia under Captain William Turner fell upon a large group of natives in a fishing campat Peskeopscut on the Falls of the Connecticut River killing nearly 200 and forcing many survivors to jump into the river where they likely drown.  It was an expensive victory.  Turner and 40 of his men were also killed. 
Battles near Hadley and Marlborough scattered native survivors.  Colonial authorities offered an amnesty to those who would come in to surrender and who could show that they had not been combatants.  Hungry bands began to straggle in.  By early July over 400 had surrendered. 
Metacom went into hiding in the Assowamset Swampnear Providence and near where the war had started.  He was hunted my mixed teams of settlers and native allies.  He was found and killed by Praying Indian John Alderman.  He was beheaded, drawn and quartered. 
Victorious militia troops march into Plymouth with Metacom's head on a pike.
The severed head of “King Philip” was on display at Plymouth for the next twenty years.  Fighting in northern Maine dragged on another year, but the New England heartland was secure. 
Many of the tribes were essentially eliminated as organized bands or pushed beyond the frontier.  Hundreds of native captives were tried and executed or sold as slaves in Bermuda, where many residents today trace their lineage to exiled Indians. 
Although Plymouth and other colonies had gone deeply in debt and much capital was destroyed, the amazing population growth of the colonies recouped losses within a few years.  Western settlement was delayed by lingering fears of Indian attacks and by the growing threat of the French but that allowed the core settlements to grow into real citiesand encouraged a move away from subsistence farming to trade and manufacture.  By the end of the century the per capita income and standard of living in New England exceeded that of Mother England.

Burning River Blues

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23 June 2019 at 15:02
By: Patrick Murfin
The Cuyahoga River in Cleveland burns in 1969 Note— The river on fire in Cleveland was a wake-up call from the depths of a long era of unfettered industrial pollution of America’s waters and air.   It even got Richard Nixon’s attention and was one of the events that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and Clean Water regulations.   Those are the regulations that the Trump administration is systematically either dismantling or declining to enforce.   For the first time in decades air and water pollution are both getting worse.   If the trend continues unabated maybe we can return to the Great America Trump treasures and toast our marshmallows on the river. Fifty years ago on June 22, 1969 sparks from a pas...

A New Poet Laureate—Joy Harjo the First Native American

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22 June 2019 at 18:25
By: Patrick Murfin
New Poet Laureate Joy Harjo with maybe the most famous tattoo in American literature since Ishmael. 
Note—Long time readers of this little blog are probably familiar with and thoroughly sick of my regular feigned despair at being passed over for being named U.S. Poet Laureate  In fact there are probably a thousand or more American versifiers more accomplished, deserving, and distinguished not to mention prolific, widely published, and honored.  And in recent years the sages who make the selection have made a point of seeking a wide range of voices often representing ignored or marginalized communities.  I can’t pretend to have any argument over this year’s selection.

On Wednesday Carla Hayden, the Librarian of the Congress announced the selection of a new Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to succeed Tracy K. Smith. Native American scribe.  Hayden noted: 
Joy Harjo has championed the art of poetry – ‘soul talk’ as she calls it – for over four decades,” Hayden said. “To her, poems are ‘carriers of dreams, knowledge and wisdom,’ and through them she tells an American story of tradition and loss, reckoning and myth-making. Her work powerfully connects us to the earth and the spiritual world with direct, inventive lyricism that helps us reimagine who we are.
Multi-talented Harjo has also studied art; mastered the saxophone at age 40 becoming a recording artist; penned juvenile fiction, memoirs, and plays; and has had a distinguished academic career.  But her path to our nation’s greatest achievement for a poet has been anything but smooth and straight.
Harjo was born on May 9, 1951 as Joy Foster. Her father Allen W. Foster was Muscogee—Creek—and her mother Wynema Baker Foster, had mixed ancestry—Cherokee, French, and Irish.  She was the oldest of four children. Her parents divorced due to her father’s drinking and emotional and physical abusive behavior when drunk. Her mother's second marriage was to a man who disliked Indians was equally abusive.  The trauma rendered her nearly mute and she struggled in school.
In her teen years she found comfort, solace, and expression in art but her stepfather kicked her out of the family home when she was only 16.  Drifting in an out of the marginal lifestyle of an impoverished Native woman Joy found her way to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and enrolled in the Institute of American Indian Arts.
At age 19 she officially enrolled as a member of the Muscogee Nation and took her paternal grandmother’s last name Harjo, a common name among Muscogee and related peoples.
In Santa Fe Harjo met and married a fellow IAIA student, Phil Wilmon.  They had a son, Phil Dayn before the youthful marriage ended in divorce.
Harjo moved on to the University of New Mexico, enrolling as a pre-med student but changing her major to art and then creative writing, as she was inspired by Native American writers.  There she met Simon Ortiz of the Acoma Pueblo at poetry readings.  The established poet became her mentor and eventually her lover and together they had a daughter, Rainy Dawn.
Harjo in 1975.
She graduated in 1976 already noted as a promising and then earned her Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the prestigious University of Iowa.
Harjo returned to the IAIA to teach in 1978 and ‘79 and again in ‘83 and ‘84. She has also taught at Arizona State Universityfrom, the University of Coloradofrom 1985 to 1988, the University of Arizona from 1988 to 1990, the University of New Mexico from 1991 to 1995, American Indian Studies Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaignin 2013, and was appointed to the Chair of Excellence in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in 2016.
During her final years of study and through her academic career, Harjo published poetry and stories to growing acclaim beginning with The Last Song in 1975 and including She Had Some Horses in 1983, Secrets from the Center of the World in 1989, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky in 1994, A Map to the Next World in 2000, 1, How We Became Human New and Selected Poems: 1975–2001in 2004, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings: Poemsin 2015, and An American Sunrise: Poems this year.
Along the way Harjo reaped a slew of awards, recognition, and fellowships including a listing in the Outstanding Young Women in America and a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in 1978; the Arizona Commission on the Arts Poetry Fellowship in 1989; the American Indian Distinguished Achievement in the Arts Award in 1990; the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation for In Mad Love and War in 1991; the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at Green Mountain College in Poultney, Vermont in 1993; the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of The Americas in 1995; the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1997; the Oklahoma Book Award for Poetry for How We Became Human in 2003; the Eagle Spirit Achievement Award in 2009; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 2014; the Wallace Stevens Award in Poetry by the Academy of American Poets Board of Chancellors in 2015; and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation in 2017.  This list is neither complete nor exhaustive.
Harjo's 2012 memoirs.
If all of this seems like a smooth, steady climb to success and recognition, it was not. Harjo’s personal life was often chaotic.  She was wracked with self-doubt and restless both creatively and spiritually in addition to her poetry she continued to draw and create works of visual art that she often incorporated in readings and performances. 

At the age of 40 after hearing recordings of John Coltrane Harjo picked up the saxophone.  She brought that free form jazz spirit to music based on Native American traditions, lore, and rhythms.  She also sang.  Her five albums each received honors and in 2009 she won the Native American Music Award for best female artist. She frequently tourswith her music group, the Arrow Dynamicsand incorporates music into her readings in which she speaks with a musical tone, creating a song in every poem.
Harjo and her saxophone.  Music infuses her work across art forms and genres.
Harjo has also used her poetry and creative spirit in social justice activism not only around Native American issues but women’s rights and equal justice in today’s hostile environment.  Her web site includes insightful commentary on the issues in her blog.  Her activism for Native American rights and feminism stems from her belief in unity and the lack of separation among human, animal, plant, sky, and earth. Harjo believes that we become most human when we understand the connection among all living things—what Unitarian Universalists like to call the interdependent web of all existence. She believes that colonialism led to Native American women being oppressedwithin their own communities, and she works to encourage more political equality between the sexes.
These beliefs spring especially from an ever deepening understanding of her Muscogee/Creek tradition but are not limited to it.  Due to her long time residency in the Southwest, many of her stories and poems are set there and reflect to stories of the Hopi and other tribes/nations of that region as well as the broader condition of native peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere.
Now to some samples of that work.
The cover of Harjo's upcoming collection to be published by W. W, Norton
An America Sunrise is the title poem of her next collection which will be published later this year by her long-time publisher W.W. Nortonreflects on and salutes a famous poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, who was herself an early Poet Laureate, We Real Cool.
An American Sunrise

We were running out of breath, as we ran out to meet ourselves. We

were surfacing the edge of our ancestors’ fights, and ready to strike.

It was difficult to lose days in the Indian bar if you were straight.

Easy if you played pool and drank to remember to forget. We

made plans to be professional — and did. And some of us could sing

so we drummed a fire-lit pathway up to those starry stars. Sin

was invented by the Christians, as was the Devil, we sang. We

were the heathens, but needed to be saved from them — thin

chance. We knew we were all related in this story, a little gin

will clarify the dark and make us all feel like dancing. We

had something to do with the origins of blues and jazz

I argued with a Pueblo as I filled the jukebox with dimes in June,

forty years later and we still want justice. We are still America. We

know the rumors of our demise. We spit them out. They die

soon.

—Joy Harjo




Eagle Poem


To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear;

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we

Were born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.

—Joy Harjo





How to Write a Poem in Time of War

You can’t begin just anywhere. It’s a wreck.

                                                                                       Shrapnel and the eye

            Of a house, a row of houses. There’s a rat scrambling

           From light with fleshy trash in its mouth. A baby strapped to its mother’s back

           Cut loose.                                                                     Soldiers crawl the city,



The river, the town, the village,

                                      The bedroom, our kitchen. They eat everything.

Or burn it.

They kill what they cannot take. They rape. What they cannot kill they take.

Rumors fall like rain.

                                     Like bombs.

                 Like mother and father tears swallowed for restless peace.



                                     Like sunset slanting toward a moonless midnight.

Like a train blown free of its destination.         Like a seed fallen where

There is no chance of trees                 or anyplace       for birds to live.



No, start here.                           Deer peer from the edge of the woods.



                                                                        We used to see woodpeckers

The size of the sun, redbirds, and were greeted

                                          By chickadees with their good morning songs.

We’d started to cook outside slippery with dew and laughter, ah those smoky sweet sunrises.

We tried to pretend war wasn’t going to happen.

Though they began building their houses all around us and demanding 
more.

They started teaching our children their god’s story,

                                                               A story in which we’d always be slaves.



No. Not here.

You can’t begin here.

This is memory shredded because it is impossible to hold by words, even poetry.


These memories were left here with the trees:

The torn pocket of your daughter’s hand-sewn dress,

The sash, the lace.

The baby’s delicately beaded moccasin still connected to the foot,

A young man’s note of promise to his beloved —


                                                                              No! This is not the best place to begin.


Everyone was asleep, despite the distant bombs. Terror had become the familiar stranger.

Our beloved twin girls curled up in their nightgowns, next to their father and me.


If we begin here, none of us will make it to the end
                                                                                                               Of the poem.


Someone has to make it out alive, sang a grandfather to his grandson,

His granddaughter, as he blew his most powerful song into the hearts of the children.

There it would be hidden from the soldiers,

Who would take them miles, rivers, mountains from the navel cord place

Of the origin story.

He knew one day, far day, the grandchildren would return, 
generations later

Over slick highways                             constructed over old trails

Through walls of laws meant to hamper or destroy, over the 
libraries of

The ancestors in the winds, born in stones.

His song brings us to his home place in these smoky hills.


Begin here.

—Joy Harjo

Juneteenth—A Jubilee of Freedom

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19 June 2019 at 10:20
By: Patrick Murfin


Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862.  Word spread through the slave grapevine pretty quickly in much of the Confederacy and, as Lincoln had hoped, many slaves abandoned their plantations and sought the safety of Union forces where ever they could.  Not only did this cripple the Rebeleconomy, but the refugees formed a pool of laborers, teamsters, and—eventually—troops in support of the war effort.  
But things were different in Texas at the far western edge of the Confederacy.  Word was slow getting there.  After the fall of Vicksburg in 1863 Confederate territory west of the Mississippi was pretty well cut off from the eastern states.  Although word might have leaked through in some places, around Galveston, the main port for cotton export from East Texas, slave owners evidently were pretty successful in keeping their property from learning that they were free.  
Junteenth is now the largest and most widespread of all of the local Jubilee celebrations of Emancipation.
Far from the main theater of the war, the last battles were fought in Texas along the Rio Grande on May 13 and Major General Kirby Smith, commander of the Trans-Mississippi Districtbecame the last major Rebel commanderto formally surrender on June 2.  
On June 18 Major General Gordon Granger landed on Galveston Island to take possession of Texas for the Union.  The next day, June 19, the General was said to have stepped onto the balcony of the Ashton Villa and addressed a large crowd of Blacks.  He read them his General Order #3:
The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

On June 19, 1867 Major General Gordon Granger read the order announcing  Emancipation in Galveston, Texas.
The announcement set off joyous celebrations and the word spread across Texas.  The next year, former slaves marked the occasions with more celebrations, which soon became a yearly celebration.  The events were similar to those that occurred across the South on local anniversaries of the Jubilee Days of Emancipation.  
The Texas observances quickly became major annual events in Black communities.  By 1870 the day became known as Juneteenth and various traditions started to be associated with it.  Outdoor gatherings of extended families, churches, or communities grew to be all day festivals.  The day typically began with a reading of Gordon’s and the text of the Emancipation Proclamation followed by recitations of family stories, singing songs like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, dancing, the recitation of poetry, and prayer.  The central event of the day was usually a community-wide barbeque and pot luck.  
The first Junteenth celebration one year after the news arrived in Texas.  Note the many celebrants in Union Army forage caps and fragments of uniforms.  In addition to those who had served in the ranks during the war, many other collected the garments while serving as teamsters or laborers for the Army.  Others acquired the gear as surplus after the war.
Because slave codes often forbade those in bondagefrom wearing finery of any kind, by the late 19th Century people turned out in their finest clothes.  There were games and contests, particularly baseball, races of all sorts, and—particularly in West Texas—rodeos.  
In many towns local blacks pooled their fundsto buy land for the annual gatherings.  These Juneteenth Grounds have become city parks in places like Houston and Austin.   
Late 19th Century ladies in full finery drive a carriage decorated for a Juneteenth parade.
Needless to say, large, exuberant gatherings of Black people frightened and alarmedmany whites.  There were attempts to discouraged participation, but the celebrations continued.  The Depression took a toll on observances as families were dispersed, and many rural Blacks sought work in cities where employers did not take kindly to taking days off of work.  Younger folks also began to look on the gatherings a simply old fashioned.  
The Civil Rights movement reignited interest in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s.  After Martin Luther King’s assassination the Reverend Ralph Abernathy promoted celebrations of Juneteenth during the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington.  Observances began to spread beyond Texas.  
In 1997, the founder of the National Juneteenth Celebration Foundation (NJCF), Ben Haith, created the Juneteenth flag. Raising of the flag ceremonies are now held in Galveston as well other cities across the country. It is raised after the U.S. flag and the national anthem and before the anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing.  Here Buffalo Soldier reenactors hoist the colors.
By 2000 a movement arose to make Juneteenth a holiday of some sort in all states and recognition by the Federal Government.  It is an official state Holiday in Texas and 36 states have granted some sort of recognition.  The celebration has even gathered momentum in Africa and other places around the world. 

Race in America—Looking Back at the Lessons of Rachel Dolezal and Dylann Roof

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18 June 2019 at 17:34
By: Patrick Murfin
Parishioners and family members prayed out side Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina.
Note—It was only four years ago, but seems longer.  Headlines and social media buzz from June 2015 provided a snapshot of America’s tortured relationship with race.  The shocking murders in a Black Charleston, South Carolina were a grim preview of more to come.  The hubbub around a local NAACP leader who turned out to be White passing for Black may be nearly forgotten but it still illuminates deep racial identity angst.  And, of course the rise of Donald Trump from the early 2016 Republican nomination scrum fueled by his racist attacks on immigrants is now recognized to be no mere fluke.  Today I harken back to that moment with this reprised blog post.  It seems as relevant as ever.
From the moment I first saw a posting on Facebook a few days ago that a woman with wild, springy hair who had been elected to a local NAACP leadership post was really a white woman passing for BlackI refrained from joining the rising cacophony of comments.   I could see the train wreck coming.  This one apparently damaged woman would become the focus of a news and social media firestorm as Americans of all stripes transformed her from a human being to a symbol for their individual racial anxieties, identity insecurities, ideologies, and wells of moral indignation.  I knew the terms of engagement would be quickly set and hardened and that the whole affair would quickly degenerate into a shouting melee in which no one listened to what did not confirm their own conclusionsand in which no minds would be changed.  And indeed, that is exactly what happened to Rachel Dolezal and by extension all of us.

Then just as the whole thing was burning with satisfactory white heat, just as CNN was dedicating its whole evening news blockto her, a harmless looking goofy white kid with a ‘60’s bowl hair cut sat in a Charleston, South Carolina Wednesday night prayer meeting at the most historically significant Black Church in the state, and then calmly began shooting people.  As he reloadedthe kid later identified as Dylann Roofexplained himself, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”  CNN, instead of going into their famous wall-to-wall coverage of a breaking terrorism story, doggedly stuck with its coverage of Dolezal with only periodic moments-long bulletins from Charleston.
The morning before Dylan Root opened fire, Donald Trump announced his run for the Presidency and used some of the same phrases against immigrants that Root would use against Blacks that evening.
Over at Fox News, more notorious than CNN only because it is more shameless, they had their own agenda for the evening—fawning over the latest declared Republican candidate for President to emerge from the seemingly infinitely commodious clown car, Donald Trump.  They could hardly be bothered to take any notice at all.  Interestingly earlier that day in his rambling announcement speech, Trump had pointedly charged another despised minority—Mexican immigrants—raped our women and committed crimes.  This statement, apt to inflame the racial paranoia of any number of devoted and armed Fox viewers, was not questioned by the interviewer.

And there, of course, is one of several cruxesof widening racially motivated violence in this country—abetted and even encouraged by allegedly respectable media for the political advantage of their benefactors and clients.

The brouhaha about Rachel Dolezal was never much more than a distractiondestined to be fodder for a few days of news cycles.  It came hot on the heels of another, but more enduring story because celebrities were involved, the Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner transformation.  It struck a similar note of anxiety over well defined identities and roles.  The ability of people to apparently transcend agreed upon identities really freaks a lot of folks out, especially those, like many Americans, who have been conditioned to think in binary, polar terms—this or that never both, either, or neither.  Journalist and analyst Doug Mulder explained, “Everything you thought was a category is actually a continuum” in his post at his blog The Weekly Sift.
Rachel Dolezal, the local Spokane, Washington NAACP leader who set tongues wagging and outrage boiling over when it was revealed that she was White passing for Black.
What really freaked people out about Dolezal, an obscure figure on the national stage at best, was not that she lied about her race or that she tried to pass, it was that she was white and tried to pass for Black.  Had the opposite occurred—and it sometimes has—it would have caused no more than a ripple.  Mixed race, light skin blacks have been passing for white since colonial times.  Think the natural children of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings.  It is enshrined in our culture and has been a common theme in novels, plays, and films—think Julie in Showboat and major characters in Imitation of Life, Band of Angles, Pinky, I Passed for White, and The Human Stain.  We may not approve of it.  Whites may be made insecure about their own pasts and Blacks may feel betrayed, but everyone understands it.  After all who, given the chance, would not choose to be White and claim all of the security and privilege that status offers?
But a white choose to pass as Black?  Well that must be just plain crazy.  Who the hell would want to do that?  The paranoid mind can come to only one conclusion.  An educated white woman choosing to be Black must be more evidence that Blacks are “winning”, that their master plot to subjugate the White race is working.  Rachel Dolezal was just an early deserter.  More will surely follow the evil liberals who have always been race traitors anyway.
A lot of folks who are not avowed racists pick up on that anxiety vibe and resonate with it never fully consciously realizing the implications.
I am not writing an apology for Dolezal here.  But neither am I going to participate in the ritual denunciationsof her with which many white anti-racist allies feel compelled to preface any remarks which might indicate some personal sympathy with her.  I am interested in how this blip on the racial radar against the background of the towering thunderheads which threaten to envelop it and all of us.
Dylann Roof, racist, terrorist, and assassin.  Not a misunderstood victim of mental illness,  He proudly posed in his jacket emblazoned with the flags of Apartheid era South Africa and rogue White supremist sate Rhodesia for his social media accounts.
The murderous terrorist Dylann Roof is emblematic of that storm that has been gathering strength for month, in direct response to the many protests of police brutality and the summary execution of Black men, women, and children.   The heretical claim that Black Lives Matterand deserve to be treated with respect and dignity is seen as a slap in the face by many whites, a daring challenge to privilege, and an attack the empowered guardians of that privilege, the police. 
That certainly is what Roof thought.  In the short hours since his identification and peaceful arrest in North Carolina, we have discovered a lot about him.  He was an avowed racist and considered himself a neo-Confederatepatriot.  He proudly had a Confederate Flag license plate frame on his vehicle.  He posted a widely circulated picture of himself in a jacket emblazoned with the Apartheid Era South African Flag and the flag of the rogue white supremacist country of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).  And we have learned that his weasel of a roommate was used to his racist rants and knew for months that Roof was planning “something big” in hopes of igniting a race war and did nothing to report the danger to anyone.
And then there is the matter of Roof’s selection of a target.  It was hardly a random or accidental choice.  There are plenty of places to kill Black people in Charleston which is more than 25% Black.    The state of South Carolina as a whole more is than one third Black.  He could have picked busy streets, stores, schools, night spots, or movie theaters.  Instead he picked the most significant black shrine in the city, Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church—Mother Emanuel as it was known far and wide.   
The congregation was formed in 1816 by The Rev. Morris Brown, Denmark Vesey, and others after braking from the white led Methodist Church when Black were denied use of the burial grounds.  It quickly became the first South Carolina affiliate of the African Methodist Episcopal denomination founded in Philadelphia by Richard Allen.  Within a few years the congregation built a wood frame church building.  That building was burned to the ground by a mobfollowing an infamous slave insurrection led by Vesey.  Worship services continued after the church was rebuilt until 1834 when new Black Laws forbad public worship by Blacks.  
 The congregation survived by worshiping in secret until the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.  In 1865 the congregation emerged from hiding, reorganized, and began using the name Emanuel.  A wooden two-story church that was built on the present site in 1872 was destroyed by a devastating earthquake on August 31, 1886. The present handsome brick building with a soaring spire was completed in 1891.  
During the Civil Rights Era the church, its pastors, and lay leaders were central to numerous local struggles, including the drive to desegregate the city’s bus service.  It has remained a mainstay of social justice activism in the city.
The. Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney in his historic church.
Then there was the issue of Mother Emanuel’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney who was not only a dynamic and beloved religious leader to his congregation, but an important local activist who became the youngest ever Black member of the South Carolina House of Representatives at age 23 and was currently a State Senator.  He had recently co-sponsored bitterly contested legislation to require police to wear body cameras and joined other local pastors for a prayer vigil and protest after Walter Scott, an unarmed Black man, was shot eight times in the back by a police officer in North Charleston.  The attack then was more than a mass shooting—it was a political assassination.
It is impossible to deny that Roof conducted an act of racial terrorism.  Not that the American right wing which has long courted overt racists and their covertallies as a key element of their political base is not desperate to try.  On Thursday anchors on the Fox & Friends morning show were flogging the idea that the shooting was an attack on Christianity.  By evening presidential wannabe and perpetual dick Rick Santorum was making the same claim, thus by implication shifting the blame to secularists, humanists, and atheists he identifies with the Left.  There is no evidence of this and it flies in the face of Roof’s own words, but that never stops blatant lying before and won’t now.  Millions of American will soon believe it as, you should pardon the expression, gospel.
There were also leading conservatives who expressed sorrow and regret at the shooting but professed the complete inability to understand it.  Leading that charge was Governor Nikki Haley who because she comes from an Asian Indian family, is used to by the state’s racists to prove that South Carolina has now moved “beyond race” and is essentially color blind.  In her first response in a Facebook post she wrote, “While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another…”   This is a woman who has made political hay out of defending the continued display of the Confederate Battle Flag on the state Capitol grounds.  That’s the same flag that Roof flaunted on his car.  
Then there is the secondary issue of guns.  Gun worshipers are all over their web pages and social media sites wringing their hands and screaming that the attack will be used as an excuse to take away their manhood, er, toys.  Some have held Rev. Pinckney responsible for his own death by no packing heat himself and shooting it out wild west style.  But the fact remains that the murders were carried out by Roof with an automatic pistol given to him on his 21st birthday by his parents despite their knowledge that he was “troubled” and feared he was dangerous.  That makes them abettors and accomplices in my book.
That leads us to the knee jerk trope that Roof was the victim of mental illnesswhich was floated by the media as soon as the shooter was identified as white and well before anyone had any ideajust who the hell he was.
Yesterday I read one too many Facebook comment about not understanding the actions of a madman, many from well-meaning but naïve people who should know better.  This is what I posted yesterday in weary response to one-too-many such claims.
I am uncomfortable with the repeated use of the word madman to describe him. This, along with lone wolf, always seems to be used as modifiers for White men with guns who commit multiple murders.  Black killers, alleged or confirmed, are never described that way in the media.  They are called thugs, criminals, and terrorists. Pleas for better mental health services often far outnumber calls for restricting easy access to guns are part of the same syndrome.  So is the refusal to acknowledge the culpability of the media and society that is spreading and fostering racial hatred and a burgeoning networkof hate groups and hangers on.  Many an alleged lone wolf has spent hours on such web sites even if he never actually joined a group. Worse, his example will empower copy cats. The clear racism, xenophobia, and gun worshiping culture have to be strongly confronted and stripped of its cover and excuses. Ask yourself if by spreading these code words if you are not abetting the crime.....
That’s my take on the sorry situation of our country.  Black Lives Matter!  What the hell are we going to do about that?

Jail Brakers Offers Story Time at Woodstock Public Library

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17 June 2019 at 14:58
By: Patrick Murfin
On Saturday, June 22 Jail Brakers will present Our Story , a special story time for the children and families of incarcerated individualsat the Woodstock Public Library, 414 West Judd Street from 10 to 11 am. Cheryl Niemo , the Executive Director of Jail Brakers said, “When a family member is involved in the justice system it can be hard to connect to other who understand.   Our program connects families with shared experiences by listening to each other’s stories to build community.” Jail Brakers is an organization of people who have been or are in prison as well family members of incarcerated individuals which offers support, increases awareness of special needs to develop more meaningful resources and policies for this under-se...

Urgent Rally to Save McHenry Township Bus Service

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17 June 2019 at 12:45
By: Patrick Murfin
Senior citizens and the disabled rely on McHenry Township bus service which is unduplicated by PACE. Alarmed McHenry Township residents are planning a rally to protest plans to cut bus service at a special meeting of the Township Trustees on Tuesday, June 18 from 4:30 to 5:45 pm.   Citizens will gather at the northwest corner of Route 31 and Johnsburg Road near the Township Hall at 3703 North Richmond Road in Johnsburg.   They will then attend a special meeting to consider eliminating the service scheduled for 7 pm after a continued budget and appropriations meeting. Protest organizer Terry Kappel “Many of McHenry Township’s seniors, disabled, and poor to get to and from doctor's appointments, shopping centers, jobs and to perform ...

By the Way, It’s Father’s Day

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16 June 2019 at 11:58
By: Patrick Murfin
Although today most Dad's eschew neck ties, they remain an iconic symbol of the day.
I may have mentioned that Father’s Day is the redheaded step child of holidays.  It gets less respect than Rodney Dangerfield and is widely perceived for what it is—a tiny participation trophy to the gold plated loving cup that is Mothers’ Day.  And that’s alright with most Dads who would rather just sleep in, thank you, and pass of the fuss.
Once neckties were the gift of choice, but since few Dads regularly use them anymore, sales have concentrated on novelty coffee mugs, t-shirts, and caps, all cheaper than a dozen roses or two pounds of gourmet chocolates for mom.  If the family insists on dragging the Old Man out to dinner, a chain bar and grill with plenty of meat, cheap margaritas, and waitresses in tight t-shirts will do just fine.
It’s a good Hallmark holiday.  But if you peruse the selection in the supermarket you would swear that all Dads want to do is go golfing or fishing, tool around in a vintage car, or drink beer.  There are also plenty of pipes despite the fact that fewer men use them than ever.  Never mind, Pop won’t care as long as it’s signed, no mushy sentiment required.
Just how Father’s Day is clearly the afterthought to Mothers’ Day is revealed by the history of the celebration.  By the way, note the apostrophe is placed as a singularinstead of the plural in Mothers’ Day.  That wasn’t entirely accidental either though it shows a certain grammar sloppiness that Mom would never tolerate.
Sonora Smart Dodd, founder of Father's Day and her father and inspiration William Jackson Smart.
Father's Day was first observed in Spokane, Washington at the YMCA on June 19, 1910.  It was the brainchild of Sonora Smart Dodd, who was born in Arkansas in 1882 the daughter of Confederate Civil War veteran William Jackson Smart.  He was a widower and a single parent who raised his six children there.
Sonora was married to a funeral home owner and a young mother living in Spokane in 1909 when she heard Mothers’ Day founder Anna Jarvis speak at the city’s Central Methodist Episcopal Church She told her pastor that fathers should have a similar holiday honoring them. She initially suggested June 5, her father's birthday for the occasion the following year, the minister felt that more time between the two parental celebrations was better and selected third Sunday of June instead.
Although she could not have cared less Mothers' Day Founder Anna Jarvis indirectly inspired Father's Day.
Dodd’s celebration drew national attention, although many newspapers mocked it as a Johnny come lately imitation of Mothers’ Day.  A bill for national recognition of the celebration was introduced in Congress in 1913 but died on the vine. In 1916, President Woodrow Wilsonwent to Spokane to speak in a Father’s Day celebration and wanted to make it official, but Congress resisted, fearing that it would become commercialized.  Calvin Coolidge recommended in 1924 that the day be observed by the nation, but stopped short of issuing a national proclamation.
Dodd did not give the unwavering attention to promoting her brain child like Jarvis.  In the post-World War I years with her marriage deteriorating Dodd left Spokane to study at the Art Institute of Chicago and dabbling in painting and writing poetry.  She even worked for a while as costume designer in Hollywood.  Over the rest of the 1920s attention to the celebration waned nationally and even in its hometown Spokane.
In the 1930s Dodd returned to Spokane and started promoting the celebration again, raising awareness at a national level.  Unlike Jarvis who waged an unrelenting war on the commercialization of Mothers’ Day, Dodd turned to trade groups that would benefit most from the holiday—the manufacturers of and retailors of ties and men’s wear, tobacco pipes, and any traditional present to fathers.  Beginning in 1938 she had the full support and aid of the Father's Day Council, founded by the New York Associated Men’s Wear Retailers to consolidate and systematize the commercial promotion.
Tobacco products and especially pipes were so heavily promoted as gifts that they became emblematic of the commercial holiday.  1950's ads showing children and wives showering Dad with cans of tobacco and cartons of cigarettes now look like assassination attempts.
There was backlash against the hype and crass hucksterism and frankly ambivalence over whether fathers deserved the attention.
The tide turned after World War II when millions of ex-GIs came home to establish families.  The 1950’s booming economy, the enshrinement of the nuclear rather than the extended family as the norm and ideal, and the promotion of rigid gender roles made the decade the Golden Age of Father’s Day.
This greeting card ad captures the wholesome nuclear family vibe of the 1950's.
Still, there was no national recognition of the holiday.  In 1957 Maine Senator Margaret Chase Smith wrote a proposal accusing Congress of ignoring fathers for 40 years while honoring mothers, “singling] out just one of our two parents.”  Nothing came of it. In 1966, President Lyndon B. Johnson issued the first presidential proclamationhonoring fathers, designating the third Sunday in June as Father's Day.  Six years later, the day was made a permanent national holiday when Richard Nixon signed it into law in 1972.
It turns out that Dodd’s was not the first Father’s Day celebration—or the first one inspired by Jarvis.  In 1908 Mrs. Grace Golden Clayton asked the minister of the Memorial Methodist Episcopal Church South in Fairmont, West Virginia, not far from Grafton where Jarvis held her first Mothers’ Day service at another Methodist Church.  Unlike Jarvis, Clayton was not just moved by the loss of her own parent, but by a disaster of enormous proportions.
On December 6, 1907, 367 men were working in Fairmont Coal Company mines when, unexpectedly, an explosion occurred which killed an estimated 362 of the miners, with only four escaping and one being rescued by those who came to help. The four who escaped later died of their injuries. The Monongah Mining Disaster is widely considered the worst mining disaster in American History.   Over 1000 children lost their fathers.

Families wait for word of the fate of their loved ones during futile rescue efforts at the Monangah Mining Disaster.
Despite, or maybe because, of the tragic background Clayton’s celebration never caught on.  Unlike Spokane, Fairmont never issued an official proclamation to honor the celebration.  Neither Clayton nor the community did much to promote it after the initial observation in part because the Fairmont Coal Company did not want to keep the story of the disaster alive.  It is only in later years that Clayton’s moving commemoration was even given a footnote in the history of Father’s Day.
As is often the case, there are other claimants to Father’s Day. 
In 1911, Jane Addams proposed that a citywide Father's Day celebration in Chicago, but was turned down.
In 1912, a Father’s Day celebration was held in Vancouver, Washington, suggested by Methodist pastor J.J. Berringer of the Irvington Methodist Church after a 1911 suggestion in the Portland Oregonian.  They were evidently unaware of the Spokane celebration on the other end of the state. 
Harry C. Meek, a member of Lions Clubs International, claimed that he had first come up with the idea for Father’s Day in 1915. The Lions Club has named him the Originator of Father's Day and continue to promote his claim.  Meek made many efforts to promote Father's Day and make it an official holiday even after becoming aware of Dodd’s celebration.
So much for History.
Today you can keep or neglect Father’s Day as you will.

Franklin’s Stormy Kite Fly Helped Arm the Revolution

✇ WWUUD?
15 June 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Most illustrations of the famous kite fly get it wrong--Ben out doors, the lightning actually striking the kite, his soon William either absent or depicted as a small boy.  This one gets most of it right as Ben and his 19 year old son seek shelter from the rain in a shed.  The only err in this one is Franklin is holding the wet string above the key, not by the dry ribbon below it.  William holds the Lyden Jar which is charged by electrical discharges from the clouds, not by a direct lightning strike of the kite.

Like a youthful George Washington chopping down the cherry tree, Benjamin Franklin flying the kite in the lightening storm is an image known to every school child.  Unlike the cherry tree myth, Franklin really did fly a kite into an approaching storm on or about June 15, 1752—no one knows the exact date for sure. 

It was the most spectacular of the Philadelphia sage’s experiments with electricity which earned him world-wide acclaim as a scientist.  The adventure would also ultimately have world-wide political implications. 

Born in Boston in 1707, Franklin’s amazing career is too rich and varied to recount here.  Suffice it to say after Franklin arrived in Philadelphia as a 17 year old run-away apprentice in 1723 he was a printer, journalist, editor, and  publisher; businessman; post master; localand  colony official; militia officer; inventor and scientist; philanthropist; founder of the first insurance company, fire brigade, and hospital in the colonies; founder of the University of Pennsylvania and the American Philosophic Society; colonial agent in Britain; Delegate to the Continental Congress and member of the committee which drafted the Declaration of Independence; diplomat and Minister to France; President of Pennsylvania, and member of the Constitutional Convention.  Whew! And that leaves out a lot.  
Benjamin Franklin in 1759, seven years after flying his kite.
By 1752 Franklin was semi-retired from his successful printing businesses and focusing his attention on his electrical experiments.  Franklin, experimenting with a Lyden Jar, a container for storing an electrical charge, had already proven the existence of positive and negative electrical charges and shown them to both be forms of the same “electrical fluid.”  He had also described conservation of a charge.  These were critical advances in scientific learning. 

In 1750 he published a paper describing a proposed kite experiment to show conclusively that lighting was a form of electrical discharge. Adapting his experiment to an iron rod instead of a kite Frenchman Thomas-François Dalibard successfully proved Franklin’s hypothesisin May 1752. 

Of course Franklin would have no way of knowing that when he took his son and faithful assistant William out to an open area near the edge of the city that day to finally execute the experiment himself.  Under threatening skies he attached his kite to a silk string, tying an iron key at the other end.  A thin wire was wound around the key and run into a Leyden jar.  A silk ribbon was tied to the key for Franklin to hold. 
The Leyden jar was one of the most important experimental devices used in early investigation of electricity.  It could store and discharge electrical charges.
He launched the kite as the storm approached and once it was aloft, moved under the cover of a barn so that he would not get wet. As the leading edge of thunder storm cloudpassed over Franklin’s kite, negative charges in the cloud passed onto his kite, down the wet silk string, to the key, and into the jar. Franklin, standing on dry ground inside the barn and holding the dry ribbon was insulated from the negative charges on the key.  When he moved his free hand near the iron key, a spark jumped from the key to his exposed knuckle because the negative charges in the key were so strongly attracted to the positive charges in his body.

He had successfully demonstrated that lightning was static electricity.  Franklin was lucky to have survived the experiment.  Others who tried to duplicate it later were electrocuted, including noted Russian scientist Georg Wilhelm Richmann.  Franklin would have died too, had lightning actually struck the kite.  He was aware of that danger.  Which is why he flew his kite early in the storm close to the clouds where it picked up electrical discharges without actually being struck by lightning.  
Franklin's lighting rod may have been his most important and successful invention.   Its rapid adoption in the Colonies was credited with preventing thousands of fire a year and huge monetary losses.  As a bonus since he had a pioneering fire insurance side business, he saved money on claims.
A supremely practical man, he quickly turned his discovery to use with the invention of the lighting rod which protected buildings from deadly lightning strikes that every year were responsible for many fires and deaths. 

He reported his findings informally in letters to English scientists.  His findings made him one of the most famous men in the world.  The prestigious Royal Society awarded him its Copley Medal in 1753 and elected him a Fellow of the Society, an honor granted to few Colonials, in 1756.  Franklin also did pioneering work on the wave theory of light, meteorology, cooling by evaporation, heat conductivity, and oceanographyover his long life.  
The adoration of aristocratic French society for Franklin as a scientist, philosopher, and exemplar of republican virtue paved the way for the vital alliance without which the American Revolution could not have been won.
Franklin’s fame as a scientist and as the author of pithy sayings in his famous Poor Richard’s Almanac, opened many important doors for him when he became agent for Pennsylvania and other colonies in London from 1757 to 1775.  When he arrived in France as American Minister in 1776, he found himself the object of public adorationand private respect due in no small measure to his enormous scientific reputation.  With an in to the great Salonsof Paris he carefully exploited his fame and cultivated relationships that would pay off for the struggling new nation first with significant loans, then with official recognition of Independence, and finally with French troops on the ground and a fleet off shore that bottled up unfortunate Lord Cornwallis and the main British Army at Yorktown.  
In America Franklin was just behind George Washington himself as an icon for founding the new nation. This painting by Benjamin West in 1816 showed the older Franklin that the painter knew in an apotheosis celebrating his famous kite experiment.
A good case can be made that it was those French doors opened by that dangerous experiment in 1752 and Franklin’s celebrity as a scientist to which George Washington owed his most famousbattle field victory and ultimately the confirmation of American Independence.

Can Flag Day Unite a Bitterly Divided Nation?

✇ WWUUD?
14 June 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin



Note:  We’ve been here before but slightly updated to account for current catastrophes.



In case you hadn’t noticed today is officially Flag Day, a demi-holiday easily overlooked.  It is celebratedby displaying the American Flag.  Veterans’ groups often organize solemn flag disposal ceremonies. 

No other country on earth makes quite the fetish of its flag as does the United States.  The word idolatry comes to mind.  At its worst it elevatesthe symbol—the Flag—over the substance—the democratic values espoused in the Declaration of Independence and protected by the Constitution.  It is an absolute truism that those who wrap themselves most in the Flag—and these day that is not just a figurative term—are the most disingenuous and dangerous.  Witness any Donald Trump performance.
Donald Trumps performance at this year's  Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) was not the first time he literally hugged the flag proving the truism about patriotism being the last refuge of scoundrels.
On the other hand—especially those who served in the Armed Forces or who were raised in a veteran’s household—have been taught to respectthe Flag and “the nation for which it stands.”  I still hang the Flag on my house on patriotic holidays and always place my hat over my heart when it passes by in a parade.  It’s just the way I was raised.

Part of the national devotion to the Flag comes from an odd combination of cultural coincidence and calculated political strategy.  Our National Anthem, not officially adopteduntil 1931 but widely used on patriotic occasions for more than a century prior, may be the only national song about a flag.  
This 19th Century greeting card depicted the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack and was typical of the flag drape imagery promoted by the Grand Army of the Republic after the Civil War.
Not widely displayed except at military posts, on Navy ships, and on some Federal buildingsprior to the Civil War, the Grand Army of the Republic heavily promoted its use after the war in a spirit of triumphalism of the Union over the vanquished South.  For that reason display of the national flag was highly unpopular in the South until World War I.

The Pledge of Allegiance was penned by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and socialist, for use during celebration the 400th anniversary of the supposed discoveryof the New World by Christopher Columbus.  Quickly adopted by schools as part of the daily ritual to begin classes, the Pledge does not swear allegiance to the government—an inclusive
Immigrant children were taught to salute the flag in public schools like this one in New York City where they would be punished for speaking their native languages.  Photo by Jacob Riis.
By the turn of the 20th Century the Flag was being used as a symbol of assimilation for the waves of emigrants swamping our shores—and as a test of their loyalty.  The most popular composers of the era—the March King John Philip Sousa and Broadway’s George M. Cohan made literal flag waving as popular as moon-June-spoon ballads. 
During World War I, the Woodrow Wilson administration used flag imagery as part of their very sophisticated domestic propaganda operation designed to rouse support of the war effort and raise Liberty Loans.  After the war, the Flag was used to rally support for suppression of the labor movement, radicalism, Socialism, and Communism said to represent sinister alien ideologies.
The Flag was the central image in the Wilson administration's sophisticated campaign in support of World War I used for recruiting, War Bond sales, home front moral boosts, and to warn of possible subversion.  After the War the same techniques were turned against the labor movement, Socialists, Communists, and other alleged subversives during the great Red Scare.
Wilson proclaimedthe first official Flag Day in 1916.  In 1949, with the country in the grips of yet another Red Scare, Congress made it an official Federal Holiday, although withholding the paid days off for Federal employeesstandard for other holidays.

June 14 is Flag Day because on this date in 1777 the Continental Congress passed the Flag Act which officially described a new national banner:

Resolved: That the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.

The new official flag—not, by the way, likely first sewn by Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross—was basedon the unofficial Grand Union flag used by General George Washington during the Siege of Boston.  That flag had the same thirteen alternating red and white stripesbut had the British Union flag in its canton.  Of course, that was before Independence was declared in July of 1776.  It wouldn’t do to keep the reference to the British flag.  
One of the most enduring myths about the Flag is that the first one was made by Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross for George Washington.  There is no evidence that she did.  There is also great doubt that the thirteen stars in a circle arrangement often shown was ever used during the Revolution.
The Act was vague—it did not describe the arrangement of the stars in the field, how the stars should be shaped, or even how large the field should be.  Local flag makers working from the sketchy description produced many variations with five, six, and even twelve pointed stars; with stars of different sizes; and many arrangements.  Also the shade of blue used for the field depended largely on what blue cloth the maker might have at hand. 

The familiar thirteen stars in a circle was not only not standard, some historians doubt if it was used at all during the Revolutionary War.  Others believe that it might have beenthe flag used at the British surrender at Yorktown.
A display of Flag used since the Revolutionary War both unofficial and official.
After Vermont and Kentucky were added to the Union two additional stars and two stripes were added.  It was this flag that was the Star Spangled Banner observed still flying over Ft. McHenry in Baltimore harborafter an all-night British naval bombardment in 1815.  It became apparent that with more new states, adding stripes would quickly become clumsy. In 1818, after five more states were added, Congress fixed the number of stripes at thirteen with an added star for each new state.  

But it still did not specifically designate an arrangement for the stars.  During the Civil War flags with all manner of arrangements were used.  It was not until the creation of the 48 star flag in 1912 that a specific arrangement was established.  The current 50 star flag has been in use since July 4, 1960 after the admission of Hawaii to the Union.  This year will mark the 59th anniversaryof that  flag, which has been in service longer than any previous national banner.  



Today the flag is waved by forces on both sidesof the great social and political divide even as the nation for which it stands seems to teeter perilously on the verge of a second civil war.  Both sides claim to love their country but have seemingly irreconcilable notions about what America is, what it means, and what it should become.
I’ve got my flag out today and I stand for the belief that it stands for “Liberty and Justice for All.”  What does your flag mean?













The Song Remains the Same—Leaks, Secrets, and Vindictive Presidents

✇ WWUUD?
13 June 2019 at 07:00
By: Patrick Murfin
Daniel Ellsberg speaks to the press outside his trial in Boston.  Co-defendant Anthony Russo and his wife Katherine, left, and Ellsberg's wife Patricia look on.
Some of today’s most talked about news items—leaks, secrets, national security, a war on the media, and an embattled, deeply paranoid President—are the same ingredients in a variant recipe as for the events that unfolded 48 years ago in the during  the reignof  Richard M. Nixon. On June 13, 1971 The New York Times began publishing The Pentagon Papers, a top secret history of the military and political involvement of the highest echelons of the U. S. Government in the Vietnam War. 
The study had been commissioned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamaraand was completed in 1968.  The document was obtained by Daniel Ellsberg, a former military analyst for the RAND Corporation think tank who had been involved in the original study.  He hoped to expose how the leaders of the government in successive administrations had systematically lied to the American peopleabout both their intentions in Vietnam and about the actual conduct of the war. 
Among the many disclosures that shocked the nation was that Lyndon Johnson had made the decision to widen U.S. involvement with the introduction of combat units on the ground well before a heralded “consultation” with his senior advisors.  Johnson was also shown to be committed to bombing North Vietnam even as he was running for election in 1964 on a promise of seeking “no wider war.”  The documents also revealed the long secret war in Cambodia. 
The Nixon Administration reacted with a combination of horror and fury.  Attorney General John Mitchell immediately sought arestraining order against the Timesto prevent them from continuing publicationciting the 1917 Espionage Actwhich made it a crime to be in possession of classified documents illegally obtained “…which information the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation, willfully communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated.”  
This New York Times headline grabbed the immediate attention of the President and administration officials who launched an all-out offensive against Ellsberg, the Times and anyone and everyone remotely involved.
The Times was forced to suspend publication while the case was expedited through the Federal Courts.  A few days later another restraining order was issued against the Washington Post, which had also been provided the text by Ellsberg and had begun running its own series. 
As the case was being reviewed, Senator Mike Gravel, Democrat of Alaska entered 1400 pages of the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record, which could not be restrained by the courts and put the material in a public form which could be quoted without fear of prosecution. 
The next day, on June 30 a deeply divided court ruled 6–3 that the injunctions were unconstitutional prior restraint and the government failed to meet the heavyburden of proof required.  Each of the nine justices wrote decisions agreeing or dissenting opinions on various parts of the ruling. 
It was less than the clear-cut victory for freedom of the press than the Times and Post hoped for, but it did affirm a broad interpretation of the First Amendment and allowed them to resume publication of the papers. 
Meanwhile the Justice Department had warned/threatened publishing houses against issuing the papers as a book.  Fearful, not one major commercial publisher would touch it.   
UUA President Robert West and Alaska Senator Mike Gravel at a press conference announcing the Beacon Press edition of the Pentagon Papers.  Gravel, as a U.S. Senator, was legally untouchable but paid a heavy political price.  West and the UUA endured years of investigations, constant harassment, and threat of criminal charges and the revocation of the UAA's tax exempt status and the status of all member congregations. Even individual donors to the UU were fearful of being targeted when the Fed sought financial records. 

Gravel, a Unitarian Universalist, suggested that Beacon Press, publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) take it up.  UUA President Robert West agreed setting off two and a half years of harassment, intimidation, and court action against the publisher and the UUA by the government.  Despite threats and even a personal phone call from Nixon, the company rushed to put out the full Mike Gravel Edition of the Pentagon Papersin October. 
After publication the Justice department subpoenaed all of the UUA bank records for four and a half months, including checks from individual members.  That action was stopped on appeal, then started again, and finally ended, but the government tied the UUA up in court for two and a half years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. 
Both West and Beacon Press Director Gobin Stair were publicly named as likely to be indicted on espionage or even treason chargesand both were called to testify in the criminal trial of Ellsberg and his co-defendant Anthony Russo, an associate who had helped with the copying.
At various times government agents hinted that the UUA and each member congregation might losenon-profit tax exempt status and that UUA might even be placed on the notorious Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations. 
Ellsberg and Russo had been charged under the Espionage Act and with a raft of other charges including theft and conspiracy, carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years.  The trial finally got underway in January of 1973 in the Boston courtroom of U.S. District Judge William Matthew Byrne, Jr. 
During the trial a number of “gross improprieties” by the government were revealed.  Not the least of which was the August 1971 break-in of the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a psychiatrist who had treated Ellsberg.  This operation was conducted by G. G. Gordon Liddy, H. Howard Hunt and three Cubans at the direction of Nixon aide John Ehrlichman—the first operation of the infamous Plumber’s Unit that would soon be swept up in Watergate.  
Top Nixon aide and henchman John Ehrlichman created the Plumbers Unit whose first caper under spook G.Gordon Libby was a break in at Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist office.  That was the rap that sent Ehrlichman up the river.
It was also revealed that Judge Byrne personally met twice with Ehrlichman, who offered him directorship of the FBI. Although Byrne said he refused to consider the offer while the Ellsberg case was pending, even agreeing to meet with Ehrlichman during the case raisedred flags. 
The government was accused of illegally obtaining evidence and of monitoring the defense team.  When the government tried to claim that it lost wiretap recordson Ellsberg the exasperated Judge Byrne declared a mistrial and said “The totality of the circumstances of this case which I have only briefly sketched offend a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case.”
Nixon’s paranoia, which ultimately resulted in hisresignation in disgrace over the Watergate scandal, can be traced to this case.  Aides Ehrlichman, H. R. Halderman, Richard Kleindienst, and John Dean were forced to resign when the Fielding burglary was disclosed in the course of the trial.  Egil Krogh and Charles Colson were convicted and sent to prison for their roles in supervising the break in. 
So what about today?  Well unfortunately intimidation of the press has become routine—and successful often successful.  Aides to President Donald Trump have repeatedly been caught improperly trying to interfere with the Mueller probe and Congressional investigations in a range of cases including improper communications withRussian officials and possible tampering with the 2016 Presidential Election.  The Cheeto in Charge himself was been caught more or less red handed trying to influence FBI Chief James Comey before firing him.  He has also threatened the press and individual journalists in his morning toilet seat Tweets, and been shown to be a bald faced liar on more occasions than can be counted. 
The two more contemporary whistle blowers have already been imprisoned, the fate Ellsberg and his press collaborators avoided all those years ago.
Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning addresses reporters outside the Albert Bryan U.S federal courthouse with attorney Moira Meltzer-Cohen May 16, 2019 in Alexandria, Virginia. 
Chelsea Manning, formally known as Bradly Manning, was an active duty soldier with a security clearance who passed thousands of pages of classified documents to Julian Assange of WikiLeaks.  She pled guilty to ten charges and was later convicted of 17 others.  Sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, President Barack Obama commuted her sentence to basically time served since her arrest. 
Widely viewed as a classic whistle blower, Manning’s reputation has suffered as Assange sat for year in the London Ecuadorian Embassy and was revealed to be either a willing or unwitting tool of the Russians in meddling in the 2016 election.  This year she was returned to prison for refusing to respect a subpoena to testify before a Virginia Federal Grand Jury investigating Assange and WikiLeaks.  She was held for two months until the expiration of the Grand Jury term.  Almost immediately after her release a new Grand Jury was impaneled in the same case.  Attorney General William Barr, who is ironically himself defying a subpoena, ordered her re-arrested.  She was returned to jail for the 18 month term of the grand jury. In addition a fine was imposed of $500 for each day she spends in jail over 30 days and $1,000 for each day she spends in jail over 60 days.  Even upon the expiration of this Grand Jury, another could be impaneled.

Reality Winner pled guilty in to leaking classified information about Russian interference in the 2016 election and was sentenced to 63 months in prison.
Reality Winner a young womancontractor with a name out of a Dickens novel was charged and unlike Ellsberg was convicted, and imprisoned for leaking documents to the press about Russian hacking of the election.  Despite a spate or articles at the time, she has already been virtually forgotten.
Meanwhile readers of this blog, which has undoubtedlytriggered whatever algorithmsare used by NSA supper sophisticated snooping programs to flag possible dangerous threats, and those who click on links here from Facebook have to look over their shoulders and assumethat Big Brother really is watching.

Murder in Jackson—The Assassination of Medgar Evers

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12 June 2019 at 09:34
By: Patrick Murfin
Medgar Evers was a tireless champion for Civil Rights as a Mississippi  NAACP leader.
Late in the evening of June 12, 1963 fertilizer salesman/Ku Klux Klansman Byron De La Beckwith lay in wait outside a modest Jackson, Mississippi home. When Medgar Evers returned from a round of NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) meetings and got out of his car carrying an armload of Jim Crow Must Go t-shirts, Beckwith shot him once in the back once with a 1917 Enfield .306 rifle.  The bullet tore through his body and ricocheted into his home. 

Evers’ wife and their three children rushed out to find Evers face down on the porch bleeding heavily.  He died within an hour at a local hospital.  His death, just hours after President John F. Kennedy had delivered a nationally televised speech on Civil Rights, became a flashpoint of the bloody struggle in the South.  

As a U.S. soldier Evers was engaged in the invasion of Normandy and was discharged in 1947 after nearly five years of service as a sergeant.
Evers was born in 1925 the son of a farmer and saw mill worker in Decatur, Mississippi.  Drafted into the Army in 1943, he served in France and emerged from the war with the rank of sergeant. 

Like so many of his generation he used the G.I. Bill to get an education.  As a business major at Alcorn College, a state supported school for Blackstudents, Evers was an athlete and student leader.  Before graduation he married fellow student Myrlie Beasley.  He got his B.A. in 1952.  

The wedding of Medgar and Myrlie  Evers.

The Evers moved to Mound Bayou, Mississippi where Edgar got a jobselling insurance.  He also became involved in a local campaign to boycott service stations that would not allow Blacks to use their restrooms.  Soon he was the   President of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL). 

In 1953 he applied to the still segregated University of Mississippi Law School.  When inevitably rejected, he filed suit with the support of the NAACP.  The organization was so impressed with him that they appointed Evers the first NAACP Field Director for Mississippi. 

As his family grew to three children Evers spent the next decade as one of the highest profile Civil Rights figures in the state.  He launched an investigation into the lynching of Chicago teenager Emmet Hill, and was a vigorous supporter of Clyde Kennard, a young activist who tried to de-segregate Mississippi Southern College, was framed on bogus charges, and sentenced to seven years in prison.  After the trial Evers was charged with contempt of court and sentenced to six months in jail for calling the verdict “a mockery of judicial justice.” 

Police Arrest Medgar Evers and NAACP Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins for protesting outside a Woolworth’s  store In Jackson, Mississippi on June 1, 1963 just days before his murder.

But Evers truly drew the wrath of the White Citizen Council—of which De La Beckwith was a founding member—for his work getting James Meredith enrolled in the University of Mississippi in 1962.  Threats against Evers and his family escalated.  In May1963 a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the family’s attached carport.  Myrlie put out the fire with a garden hose.  Evers refused to give in to threats, although he spoke of being a marked man.  

Assassin Byron De La Beckwith was a Klansman and leader of the White Citizen Council who was cockily sure that he was safe from justice.
After the murder it did not take long to trace it De La Beckwith—he left the rifle behind with his thumbprint, was seen in the neighborhood by several witnesses, and boasted about the murder to his fellow Klansmen.  But despite overwhelming evidence, two all-white juries failed to convict him in 1964 and 1965 trials.  

Myrlie moved the family to the safety of Los Angeles where she became a businesswoman and twice a candidate for Congress.  After re-marrying as Myrlie Evers-Williams she served as a commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, and NAACP Chairwoman from 1995-98.  
Medgar Evers' widow Myrlie became a Civil Rights leader and public servant in her own right.

All the while she fought to have the murder case against De La Beckwith reopened.  In 1994 at her urging prosecutor Bobby DeLaughter re-opened the case and with new evidence.  After thirty years the killer was finally convicted.  He died in prison in 2001. 

The story of Medgar Evers quickly entered the culture.  Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and Nina Simone all wrote and recorded songs about the murder.  Writers as varied as Eudora Welty and Rex Stout wrote fictional pieces based on the case.  PBS aired a made-for-TV movie about the case, For Us the Living: The Medgar Evers Story starring Howard Rollins, Jr. and Irene Cara as Medgar and Myrlie Evers 1983.  

Director Rob Reiner's 1993 film Ghosts of Mississippi had star power with Whoopi Goldberg, Alec Baldwin, and James Wood.  It was one of many Hollywood films about the Civil Rights movement to focus on a white hero.

A better known theatrical film Ghosts of Mississippi by Rob Reiner, recounted the story of the final prosecution with Alec Baldwin as DeLaughter, James Woods as De La Beckwith, and Whoopi Goldberg as Myrlie.  As in so many Hollywood takes on the Civil Rights movement, the hero was not the black victim, but a noble White man. 

Jackson, Mississippi, a now Black majority city, has several times memorialized Evers—with a 1992 statue, the re-naming of a stretch of U.S. Highway 49, and changing the name of the city's air field to Jackson-Evers International Airport in 2001.

Boston’s Riot on Broad Street—Fire Brigades Attack Catholics

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11 June 2019 at 17:07
By: Patrick Murfin
Generic early 19th Century depiction of rioting/street brawl represents the kind of melee that erupted on Boston's Broad Street in  1837

It began, as so many unpleasant things do, with a traffic jam of sorts.  It was June 11, 1837 and the place was Boston a/k/a the Hub of the Universe.  After fighting a fire in neighboring Roxburythe volunteer firefighters of Fire Engine Company 20 had stopped at a saloon to wash the smoke out of their throats.  After refreshing themselves they departed to make their way back to the station.  They found their way blocked by a passing Irish funeral parade.  An outraged fireman, named George Feybegan cursing at the mourners then took a shove at one of them.  Instantly a melee erupted and quickly escalated as paving stones were hurled and all manner of makeshift weapons, including the brigade’s fire axes, were deployed.

Fire Captain W. W. Miller ordered his men to make a run for the firehouse.  When they got there Miller sounded an alarmthat called out all of the city’s fire brigades.  Those heroes rushed to the scene and along with Company 20 to the scene of the initial fight.  By that time the funeral procession had passed but the commotion had attracted a crowd which the firefighters immediately attacked.

It was called the Broad Street Riot, and became the greatest street disturbance in the city’s history.  About 1000 people on both sides engaged in a furious street battle.  Fire fighters chased their foes inside some homes which were then systematically smashed up.  Although no one was known to be killed outright, fighting went on for hours.
Mayor Samuel Atkins Eliot, a prominent Unitarian, called out the Militia to quell the riot.

It was broken up when Mayor Samuel Atkins Eliot—Unitarians will recognize the name as a member of that faith’s most distinguished family—who had been on the scene of the original fire, arrived with 10 companies of militia he had hastily called out.  The violence was quelled, but not the simmering rage boiling between the immigrant Catholic Irish and Boston’s working class Protestants.  The fine lads of the fire brigades, you see, were all recruited among the city’s Protestant laborers, apprentices, and shop clerks.  No Irish need apply.

Boston, founded by Puritans, had a tradition of rabid anti-Catholicismstretching back well before the American Revolution.  It was then the custom for gangs of apprentices and laborers to gather every year on Guy Fawkes Day—called locally Pope Day—for parades bearing effigies of the Pope to be burned.  Gangs from the North and South sideswould customarily run into each other and engage in a semi-ritualistic gang brawl between them.  All of this in a city virtually bereft of any actual Catholics, except whatever seamen might be lounging around the port. It took a shrewd organizer, Samuel Adams, to transform these street hooligansinto the muscle of the Sons of Liberty.

After the Revolution when Boston’s municipal volunteer fire companies were organized, they were drawn from the same pool.
Volunteer fire brigades like this one required a lot of manpower to pull the engine through the streets, handle hoses and bucket brigades, and tear down burning walls.  The men in Boston were recruited among Protestant apprentices, laborers, and street toughs and were idolized in their community.
Boston had recovered as a major port and trading center.  By the turn of the 19th Century it was beginning to attract immigrants, especially from Ireland, seeking work.  Most of them were Catholics.  There was plenty of work and whatever resentment the locals might have was kept in check by prosperity.  But President Thomas Jefferson’s embargo on trade with warring European powers and the War of 1812all but destroyed Boston’s commerce and led to a regional depression.  Tensions mounted between Yankees and Micks.  Street brawls became common.

The first ever public Catholic Mass in Boston was not held until 1788.  In 1803 the Catholics were numerous and prosperous enough to open Holy Cross Church, designed by the same architect—Charles Bulfinch—who was building the city’s impressive churches for the Standing Order.   By 1808 there were enough Catholics—the vast majority of the Irish—to establish the Diocese of Boston. The first Bishop was Jean Cheverus, a refugee from the French Revolution. 

After the War of 1812, commerce resumed, and so did prosperity.  New waves of immigrants arrived.  Catholics began building not only churches but other institutions—a convent and schools.  This rapid rise of Catholics in their midst inflamed the Protestant Clergy as much as job competition inflamed the working class.  Denouncing insidious Popery in thundering terms became common on Sunday mornings and the city’s several religious periodicals could be relied on for more.

No matter how theologically liberal the Boston clergy were—and most of them were very liberal religiously and would soon formally break from the Calvinist Standing Order and become openly Unitarian—few of its members could resist the siren call of anti-Popery.  Rhetoric heated up which seemed to give a sanctionto anti-Catholic street violence.
As fire brigades stood by a Protestant mob burnedthe Ursuline Convent and Girl's Academy.
Things really blew up in 1834 in Charleston—now the Somerville neighborhoodof Boston—home to a large population of working class Protestants.  It was also the site of a Convent of Ursuline Nuns, and the academy for girls that they operated.  Since no other equivalently high quality education was available to girls in Boston, many of the city’s Unitarian elite had enrolled their daughters there, regardless of warnings from their ministers.  In 1834 the school had 47 students, only six of whom were Catholic.  The neighborhood Protestants resented both Catholics and the haughty Bostonian elite.

Rumors circulated of Protestant girls being “sold” to the convent.  Then in August word began to circulate about a nun who possibly wanted to leave the convent, but was prevented from doing so.  Inflamed by a circular calling on the citizenry to intervene to free the mysterious woman, a mob gathered on the evening of August 11.  Early the next morning they rushed the convent with torchesand burning tar barrels.  The nuns and students barely had time to escape and hide in the garden while the building was vandalized then set on fire.  Responding fire brigades not only refused to extinguish the flames, but they joined the rioters.  The building burned to the ground in two hours.

The following morning Mayor Theodore Lyman convened a meeting at Faneuil Hall totry to calm the situation and instigate an investigation into the arson.  Bishop Benedict Fenwick called another meeting about the same time at Holy Cross, now officially a cathedral at which he tried to keep the outraged Irish from pouring into the streets to seek revenge.  He was largely successful.

But a new Protestant mob assembled and marched first to Faneuil Hall with the intent of breaking up the Mayor’s meting and then on to the Cathedral.  They were foiled at both points by a Militia guard.  After failing to procure arms from the guarded arsenal they proceeded on to the Convent.  In a frenzy as the Convent itself still smoldered the mob destroyed the gardens and orchards, set bonfires, and pulled down fencesbefore exhausting their fury.

The city’s clergy were divided by the convent riot.  Orthodoxministers including Lyman Beecher, soon to rise to fame as a leading abolitionist either openly cheered the rioters or found excuses for their actions in supposed Catholic immorality and exploitation of pure womanhood.  The city’s Unitarian divines generally decried the violence but refrained from any action or speech which could be considered coming to the defense of Catholics.  The only sympathy came from Bishop Fenwick’s personal friend, the Universalist Hosea Ballou, himself an outcast from the local religious establishment.

The self-confessed ring leader of the riot, John R. Buzzell and a dozen others were charged and brought to trial, but Buzzell boasted:

The testimony against me was point blank and sufficient to have convicted twenty men, but somehow I proved an alibi, and the jury brought in a victory of not guilty, after having been out for twenty-one hours.

In the end only one defendant, a 16 year old boy seen burning a book after the main arson, was convicted.  The boy had no attorney and not a friend in the world.  He became a safe designated scape goat and was sentenced to life in prison.  That sentence was so manifestly unjustand out of line that Bishop Fenwick and Mother Superior Sister Mary St. George joined 5,000 local citizens petitioning for a commutation of sentence for the boy.  He was eventually released.

Catholic demands for restitution for the failure of authorities to protect their property kept the memory of the Convent Riot alive in both communities as the Boston City Council, Charleston Town Meeting, the County of Middlesex, and the Massachusetts legislature all considered and rejected claims year after year.
Anti-Catholic cartoons like this kept Protestant workers inflamed.
Tensions between Catholics and Protestants remained high.  Then in January of 1836 Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or, The Hidden Secrets of a Nun’s Life in a Convent Exposed was published and became an instant best seller.  In fact it was said to be the mostly widely read American book between Parson’s Weems’s spurious biography of George Washington and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  The book was a pot boiler novel supposedly written by Maria Monk, a young woman who had escaped from a convent.  It told a hair-raising story of sexual exploitation.  The book, since proven to be almost total fabrication, fueled new waves of anti-Catholicism and led directly to the emergence of the Know Nothings, a rabidly anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant secret societyand political party.

Given this kind of history, the Broad Street Riot comes clearly into focus.  Fourteen Irish and four Protestants were brought to trial.  Like the earlier Convent Riot, no Protestants were convicted.  The four Irish were all sentenced to terms in the work house.

The riot did cause Mayor Eliot to institute two reforms.  First, he established a paid Fire Department under the authority of the Mayor and Council.  The volunteer brigades were abolished, although almost all of the members of the new professional Department were drawn from their ranks.  Second, he established a Day Police to supplement the existing Night Watch. The two were soon merged into the Boston Police Department.  Recruitment into the new department came mostly from the Irish community.  The Fire and Police Departments remained largely segregated for decades.

Two versions of the riot were told and kept alive in their communities.  The popular version among working class Protestants was that the fire brigade was rushing to a fire when blocked by arrogant Irish mourners who would not let them pass.  In some versions children or whole families perished in the flames.  It was manifestly not true. 

That did not stop it from being believed and the story is retold to this day. The Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a popular Ska and proto-punk band in the 1990’s sang:

The Boston fire-fighting volunteers

 On their way to fight a fire somewhere

Met with a funeral procession

Proceeding way too slow

A brownstone burns out of control

We need to lay to rest this soul

Loggerheads on Broad Street Eye to eye and toe to toe

Broad Street’s just not broad enough

And you just don’t love God enough…

A new wave of immigrants arrived in the 1840’s spurred by the Irish Potato Famine, and the flood gates of Europe opened up after the Civil War.  Catholics gained a majority in the city population and led by Irish politicians seized the City government, a move as bitterly resented by the class of Unitarian Brahminswho were used to running things as by the still large Protestant working class.

Meanwhile the enthusiasm for reform among the intellectual elite of Boston tended to grow in direct proportion to the growing Irish Catholic population.  Early support for moderation in alcohol use was transformed into a temperance movementaimed squarely at the taverns of the scary, rowdy Irish.  Free public education was supported as a counter to the Catholic’s system of parochial schools.  Compulsory public schooling was at first meant to close the Catholic schools and place children into public schools where they would be inoculated with Protestant values.  Crusades for decency and morality in entertainment were aimed at popular amusements.  What Do-gooders saw as reform, the working class Irish recognized as a cultural attackupon them.

Late 19th Century resentments resulted the persistence of the No Irish Need Apply signs still frequently seen in shops and factories.  The politics of Boston and those signs would be bitterly remembered by Joseph P. Kennedy when he became a fabulously rich man married to a daughter of the former Boston Mayor John Francis “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.  He would inoculate his sons, and by extension their children with a resentment of the WASP elite, and a determination to prove themselves better than any of them.
Members of the almost all Irish Boston Police Department leave a 1919 strike meeting.  WASP governor Calvin Coolidge crushed the strike with National Guard troops and banned the strikers for life from any public employment souring still strong resentments in Boston's Irish Southie community that have lingered to this day.
While Protestant/Catholic relations improved across much of the nation, and as Irish Americans established themselves in politics and the professions, the old strains eased in most places.  But not in Boston.  The Irish found themselves “put in their place” when Governor Calvin Coolidge, a quintessential WASP, crushed the strike by the virtually all Irish Boston Police in 1919, banning every manfor life from public service.  Many of those men, unable to find work, would make their close-knit South Boston neighborhood—Southie—a bastion of bank robbers, cartage thieves, and gangsters to this day.

If the Irish in Boston hold resentments to this day, the Protestants have not been shining examples of brotherhood.  The Unitarian’s Beacon Press continued to publish virulent anti-Catholic screeds well into the 1950’s.  Unitarian Universalist ministers generally supported Boston school desegregation in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s including forced bussing which was voraciously—and occasionally violently—opposed by the Irish of Southie and were often harsh in characterizing the opposition as racist.
A Boston Police sergeant--by the look of him, Irish--guards Black teens boarding school busses in compliance with a court ordered desegregation plan.  They would be greeted by angry crowds and rioting in the same Southie neighborhood where the cop probably lived.  Resentment over "forced busing" and liberal recriminations of racism kept Catholic/Protestant relation inflamed in Boston.

More recently conflicts over abortion rights, LBGT rights, and marriage equality, along with the continued clergy sex abuse scandals in the Church, has stoked new criticism of the Church.

Today in most parts of the country with heavily Catholic populations, large proportions—often majorities—of local Unitarian Universalist congregations—are made up of former Catholics.  But not so much in Boston, and especially not among the Boston Irish.  Disgruntled liberal former Catholics would generally go anywhere to worship before they would set foot in a congregation of those they see as their ancient tribal enemies.

It seems some street brawls never really end.

A Very Good Day at Woodstock Pride Fest

✇ WWUUD?
10 June 2019 at 14:28
By: Patrick Murfin
Balloon arches decked the four entrances to Woodstock Square.  Sue Sieber photo.  Note— I was busy and pretty much anchored to the Tree of Life UU Congregation booth yesterday at the first ever Woodstock Pride Fest, so this photo post includes many shots by friends ganked from Facebook.   I hope no one minds.   Photos are credited. Thousands of happy people descended yesterday on the Squareto celebrate Woodstock Pride Fest.   It was a glorious afternoon that scared away the storms that TV weather folkpredicted for the afternoon.   Thousands came and went over the five hour event.   They crowded the streets to participate in or cheer on the predictable colorful parade.   They thronged the Square cross walks where vendors, non-pr...

Jelly Roll Morton and the Birth of Jazz

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10 June 2019 at 11:45
By: Patrick Murfin
Jelly Roll Morton claimed to have invented Jazz.  Probably not, but he was in the delivery room at birth. On June 9, 1924 Jelly Roll Morton stepped into a Chicago studio and recorded a solo piano version of Jelly Roll Blues , one of the most important early jazz pieces.   In fact to hear Morton tell it, it was THE first jazz song and he invented jazz.   While both claims are hard to prove, Morton was certainly on hand from the beginning and was one of the most influential composer/arranger/pianist/band leaders in the early days.   Ferdinand Joseph LaMothe was born in New Orleans to a common law Creole couple.   No original birth certificate has ever been found, but at various times he later listed dates of birth ranging from 1884 to...

Helen Keller Ended Up on J. Edgar Hoover’s Commie List

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8 June 2019 at 11:22
By: Patrick Murfin
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover testifying before Congress about the "Communist Fifth Column."
Note—Attacks on “enemies of the people” and suggestions that folks should be thrown in jail for protests or simply overt opposition to the Cheeto-in-Charge as well as suggestions that reporters, activist actors, and even members of Congress be physically attacked by “patriots” bring to mind an earlier dark era for American liberties.  May we learn from the past.
On June 9, 1949 J. Edgar Hoover did his part to fuel the growing anti-Communist hysteriasweeping post-World War II America when he released a “confidential” Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) report that named scores of influential Americans, most of them in the movie and entertainment businessas members of the Communist Party. 
Hoover had developed his list after Attorney General Tom Clark in 1946 asked for the names of potentially “disloyal Americans” who might be detained in event of a “national emergency.”  The names on the list were included a year later in 1950 after the Korean War broke  out in a report to President Harry Truman with the names of more than 12,000 who should be rounded up and detained after the formal suspension of the right of habeas corpus.  Truman had the good sense to thank his powerful FBI boss and promptly put the report and recommendation in the bottom drawer never to be acted upon.
But there were plenty, many of the in Congress and including some of the country’s most powerful media barons like the Chicago Tribune’s Col. Robert R. McCormack and Time’sHenry Luce were already clamoring for just such draconian measures.
Hollywood where the major studios were run by Jews and where many actors, writers, and creative people were politically active liberals and leftistsand where there was a powerful labor union movement with sometimes radical leadership, had already been singled out as a virtual Commie fifth column. 
In 1946 and ’47 the powerful House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAAC) launched high profile hearings on Communist infiltration of the film industry and subpoenaed hundreds to testify and name names.  Nineteen of those refused to do so and were named as unfriendly witnesses.  Eleven of those were called before the committee and 10 refused to answer questions.  Only German émigré Berthold Brecht relented and testified.  The others including screen writers Dalton Trumbo, Howard Koch, and Ring Larder, Jr. were indicted for contempt of Congress and eventually sent to prison and blacklisted from the industry.
Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart lead a delegation at the Capitol of the Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights to protest the persecution of the Hollywood 10.  Easily identifiable are Danny Kaye behind Bogart, June Haver behind Bacall, William Holden and Richard Conti. Studio executive forced the committee to back down and some participants were themselves black listed.
Some of Hollywood royalty including John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, John Garfield, Danny Kaye, and Billy Wilder attempted to rally support for the Hollywood Ten by organizing a Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights and traveling to Washington to protest.  They came under intense attack by the Committee, the press, and by the terrified studio owners.  Bogart, spearhead and principle spokesman for the group, was forced to back track and issue a statement that the trip had been ill advised.  The group broke up acrimoniously between those who thought they should have toughed it out and those like Wilder who advised it was time “to fold our tents.”
Two years later Garfield and Kaye were among those named in the new FBI report, which was based on unnamed confidential informants and the Bureau’s own “analysis” which concluded that the Communists claimed “to have been successful in using well-known Hollywood personalities to further Communist Party aims.”  Analysis was often based on no more than the recollection of an informant seeing an individual at a meeting years earlier, attendance at public functions, donations to certain charities, or signatures on some petitions.  It included pre-war support for anti-Fascist causes and war time support of the Soviet Union—including activities undertaken at the request of the government.
Some people on the list were, or had been Party Members.  Others were sympathetic.  Some were non-Communist leftists—members of the Socialist Party or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  Many were unionists or sympathizers with the early Civil Rights Movement.  And very many were simply liberals.  It made no difference.  To Hoover all were not just the “willing dupes” of the HUAC hearings, but active, card carrying Communists.

Among those listed were acknowledged Socialist and IWW member Helen Keller, even then widely regarded as a sort of secular saint.  The report centered on the activities of Fredric March, a well-known liberal and an active Democrat who had recently won his second Academy Award for the brilliant film about the return of World War II GIs, The Best Years of Our Lives.  March was no Communist, but he had organized a group concerned about atomic weapons and critical of America’s growing arsenal.  Any one even tangentially connected to that effort, or to people connected to the effort were caught up in rippling waves of innuendo.
John Garfield, once the brightest new star at Warner Bros. came under especially severe scrutiny and his career immediately suffered.  Already plagued with heart problems, the stress of the accusations was widely believed to be a direct contributing factor to his death of a heart attack in May of 1952. 
Other prominent people named in the report, along with hundreds of non-celebrities included writer and wit Dorothy Parker, Paul Muni, and Edward G. Robinson.  Like Garfield and Kaye they were all Jewish.  In fact the reek of Anti-Semitism hung over the whole report.

Fredric March, Paulette Goddard, Edward G. Robinson, and Audie Murphy, America's most decorated World War II soldier, stood up to Hoover.
The effect on careers varied.  Many of the more obscure found themselves on blacklists.  Parker lost the radio panel show jobs that had provided most of her income.  Muni’s film career was essentially finished.  March and Kaye were able to keep working and had some of their best work ahead of them.  Robinson’s career was hurt, but not over.  And he was the most outspokenly defiant befitting his tough guyimage.
These rantings, ravings, accusations, smearing, and character assassinations can only emanate from sick, diseased minds of people who rush to the press with indictments of good American citizens. I have played many parts in my life, but no part have I played better or been more proud of than that of being an American citizen.

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