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So called Open Up America protestors have taken to the streets when others won't to claim their time in the lime light. |
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| C.S.E. Cooney |
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Gun toting neo-fascists were a prominent part of the first open up rally at the Michigan capitol in Lancing. Trump tweeted "Liberate Michigan!" "Liberate Minnesota!" "Liberate Virginia!" |
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The sleeve for the 1972 British release of Alone Again (Naturally). |
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O'Sullivan's odd appearance and image as the cloth capped Bisto Kid with the bad bowl haircut and funny assumed name were all his own creation to mask a deep shyness. |
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Beloved Irish poet Eavan Boland Ireland is deeply mourning loss of Eavan Boland one of the greatest of her contemporary poets who died yesterday at the age of 75 at her Dublin home. Her prolific body of work wrestled with often thorny issues of Irish identity and insisted on the recognition of the roleof women including their domestic situations. It became so central to the conversation about evolving modern Ireland that her poems are studied by are studied by Irishstudents who take the Leaving Certificate, the final exam of secondary students required for admission to a college or university. Mary Robinson selected her to read a poem at her 1990 inauguration as the first woman President of Éire and Barack Obama quoted her at a White House St. Patrick’s Day reception. Eavan Frances Boland was born on September 24, 1944 in Dublin to career diplomat Frederick Boland and his wife noted painter Frances Kelly. When she was six in 1950 her father was appointed Ambassador to the United Kingdom to the most important Irish diplomatic post at a time when relations between the country were tense over Ireland’s neutrality during World War II and continuing claims on Northern Ireland. As a child in London she first experienced anti-Irish sentiment which strengthened her identification with her Irish heritagewhich she later described in her poem An Irish Childhood in England: 1951.  At 14, she returned to Dublin to attend Holy Child School in Killiney and them Trinity College where she was a classmate of Mary Robinson and where she published a first pamphlet 23 Poems in 1962. She earned her BA with First Class Honors in English Literature and Languagefrom Trinity in 1966. Since then she held numerous teaching positions and published poetry, prose criticism, and essays. Boland married the novelist Kevin Casey in 1969 and had two daughters. Her experiences as a wife and mother influenced her to write about the centrality of the ordinary, as well as providing a frame for more political and historical themes.  She taught at Trinity College, University College, Dublin, and Bowdoin College in Main, and was a member of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. She was also writer in residence at Trinity and at the National Maternity Hospital. In the late 1970s and 1980s, Boland taught at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. From 1996 she was a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University and divided her time between Palo Alto, and her home in Dublin. Boland’s first book of poetry was New Territory published in 1965 followed by The War Horse in 1975, In Her Own Image (1980) and Night Feed (1982), which established her reputation as a writer on the ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world.  Boland reading in a pub. She published dozens of collections most recently Eavan Boland: A Poet’s Dublin edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph and A Woman Without A Country both in 2014. Boland’s many honors and awards on both sides of the Atlanticare too numerous to mention. Her work best speaks for itself. My friend and radical poet Jerry Pendergast selected this apt poem about the Irish famine and the typhoid epidemic that accompanied it to remember Boland. Quarantine In the worst hour of the worst season of the worst year of a whole people a man set out from the workhouse with his wife. He was walking—they were both walking—north. She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up. He lifted her and put her on his back. He walked like that west and west and north. Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived. In the morning they were both found dead. Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history. But her feet were held against his breastbone. The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her. Let no love poem ever come to this threshold. There is no place here for the inexact praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body. There is only time for this merciless inventory: Their death together in the winter of 1847. Also what they suffered. How they lived. And what there is between a man and woman. And in which darkness it can best be proved. —Eavan Boland  This one cuts to the quick of shame and guilt. Domestic Violence 1. It was winter, lunar, wet. At dusk Pewter seedlings became moonlight orphans. Pleased to meet you meat to please you said the butcher's sign in the window in the village. Everything changed the year that we got married. And after that we moved out to the suburbs. How young we were, how ignorant, how ready to think the only history was our own. And there was a couple who quarreled into the night, Their voices high, sharp: nothing is ever entirely right in the lives of those who love each other. 2. In that season suddenly our island Broke out its old sores for all to see. We saw them too. We stood there wondering how the salt horizons and the Dublin hills, the rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes we thought we knew had been made to shiver into our ancient twelve by fifteen television which gave them back as gray and grayer tears and killings, killings, killings, then moonlight-colored funerals: nothing we said not then, not later, fathomed what it is is wrong in the lives of those who hate each other. 3. And if the provenance of memory is only that—remember, not atone— and if I can be safe in the weak spring light in that kitchen, then why is there another kitchen, spring light always darkening in it and a woman whispering to a man over and over what else could we have done? 4. We failed our moment or our moment failed us. The times were grand in size and we were small. Why do I write that when I don't believe it? We lived our lives, were happy, stayed as one. Children were born and raised here and are gone, including ours. As for that couple did we ever find out who they were and did we want to? I think we know. I think we always knew. —Eavan Boland  Finally one on the complex interactions of history, the natural world, love, and art. How We Made New Art on Old Ground A famous battle happened in this valley. You never understood the nature poem. Till now. Till this moment—if these statements seem separate, unrelated, follow this silence to its edge and you will hear the history of air: the crispness of a fern or the upward cut and turn around of a fieldfare or thrush written on it. The other history is silent: The estuary is over there. The issue was decided here: Two kings prepared to give no quarter. Then one king and one dead tradition. Now the humid dusk, the old wounds wait for language, for a different truth: When you see the silk of the willow and the wider edge of the river turn and grow dark and then darker, then you will know that the nature poem is not the action nor its end: it is this rust on the gate beside the trees, on the cattle grid underneath our feet, on the steering wheel shaft: it is an aftermath, an overlay and even in its own modest way, an art of peace: I try the word distance and it fills with sycamores, a summer's worth of pollen And as I write valley straw, metal blood, oaths, armour are unwritten. Silence spreads slowly from these words to those ilex trees half in, half out of shadows falling on the shallow ford of the south bank beside Yellow Island as twilight shows how this sweet corrosion begins to be complete: what we see is what the poem says: evening coming—cattle, cattle-shadows— and when bushes and a change of weather about to change them all: what we see is how the place and the torment of the place are for this moment free of one another. —Eavan Boland |
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Young Starhawk in the California woods.. |
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The 20th Anniversary editions of Starhawk' influential manifesto for eco-feminist and activist paganism. |
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Starhawk was active in founding CUUPS which helped lead to the adoption of the Unitarian Universalsit 7th Principle--"respect for the independent web of existance of which we are a part. |
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Today Starhawk is probably the most influential elder or crone of feminist neo-paganism. |
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Starhawk chose this illustration for her poem--A stylized Unitarian Universalist chalice superimposed of Brigid's fiery forge. |
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A Maenad Prophecy dance. |
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| Harold Grey's Sandy and Annie with those weird blank round eyes. |
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Andrea McArdle and Reid Shelton as Daddy Warbucks in the original Broadway Production of Annie. |
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Irish Volunteers on the march in Dublin in the outset of the 1916 Easter Rebellion. Last Friday, April 24 was 104th anniversary of the day when the Irish Volunteers, Irish Citizen’s Army, the 200 women members of Cumann na mBan, and a small force of Hibernian Rifles seized key buildings in Dublin, including the General Post Office and read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. It was, by no coincidence, Easter Monday. In thefive bloody days that followed the Royal Navy shelled the city and thousands of troops poured ineventually crushing the rebellionwith heavy casualties. All seven signatories of the Proclamation including Padraig Pearce and the wounded socialist and radical labor unionist James Connolly and seven others, including men who were not even directly involved, were executed by firing squads.  Over 1,500 rebelswere placed in virtual concentration camps where they met in secretand plotted revolution. The Rebellion was crushed but despite epic British repression, the flame of Irish independence and liberty was never extinguished. Survivors of the insurrection and those inspired by the sacrifices the Irish martyrs met and organized in secret over the next years under the political leadership of the Sinn Féinparty and the creation of the Irish Republican Army. The Declaration of Independence was a document adopted by Dáil Éireann, the revolutionary parliament of theIrish Republic, at its first meeting in the Mansion House in Dublin on January 21, 1919. A bloody and remorseless year a half guerilla war revolution followed. By mid-1920 revolutionary forces we in de facto control of most of the country except for the capital in Dublin and majority ProtestantUlster where a particularly savage civil war was contested. The British were exhausted by the monumental losses of the Great War of 1914-1918 public opinion was rising against continuing a war in Ireland. In May 1921, Ireland was partitioned under British law by the Government of Ireland Act, which created Northern Ireland. Both sides agreed to a truce on July 11. The post-ceasefire talks led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on December 6.1921. This ended British rule in most of Ireland and, after a ten-month transitionalperiod overseen by a provisional government, the Irish Free Statewas created as a self-governing Dominionof the British Empire on December 6, 1922 while Northern Ireland remained within the United Kingdom.  But Republicans were bitterly divided over the exclusion of Ulster from the rest of the country. After the ceasefire, violence in Belfast and fighting in border areas of Northern Ireland continued, and the factions of the IRA launched a failed Northern offensivein May 1922. In June disagreement among republicans over the Anglo-Irish Treaty broke out into the eleven-month Irish Civil War. Eamon DeVallera rallied forces against the Provisional Government headed by Michael Collins, IRA commander during the revolution. Collins was assassinated August and many anti-treaty Republican leaders were also killed. Casualties probably greatly exceeded those lost during the Revolution. The Free State government finally prevailed. But DeVallera and his hyper-Catholic nationalists made steady political gains over the next decade and a half while the anti-treaty or irregular IRA continued to operate on a low level in the North. Following a national plebiscite in July 1937 a new Constitution of Ireland replaced the Constitution of the Irish Free State and adopted Éire as the new name of the country. While Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution defined the national territory to be the whole island, they also confined the state’s jurisdiction to the area that had been the Irish Free State. DeVallera’s Fianna Fáil party became the dominant force in the country and he became Taoiseach—prime minister serving three times.  The dream of uniting Ireland never went away and there were periodic campaigns by IRA elements in Ulster for years. The late 1960’s saw the beginning of The Troubles that continued for decades until 1998 when a shaky cease fire and a drawn-out peace process began. Finally the St Andrews Agreement between the British and Irish governments and Northern Ireland's political parties in relation to the devolution of power in the region led to a final withdrawal of British troops in Northern Ireland and Sinn Féin finally agreeing to participate in Northern Ireland’s parliament.  The ride has not been all smooth since then, but general peace has prevailed. Brexit has threatened to erect a tariff wall between the Republic and the North since Éire remained staunchly attached to the European Unionwhich could destroy the common economy of the island. On the other hand the government in the South has finally shaken domination by the Catholic Church and adopted liberal reforms allowing for divorce and even abortion which makes the South less threatening to Protestants in the North. Even those Protestants, now on the verge of becoming a minority in Ulster, also rejected Brexit although they were dragged into it. It is not inconceivable the Northern Ireland like Scotland and perhaps Wales could seek to leave the United Kingdom to rejoin Europe which could finally lead to the reunification of Ireland.  That’s a lot of history and drama. Which makes William Butler Yeats’ powerful poem Easter 1916 seem more prophetic. Yeats, generally listed along with Anglo-American T.S. Eliotas one of the greatest English Language poets of the 20th Century, witnessed the Rising but did not participate. In fact at first he was ambivalentat first as were many surprised Dubliners. But he was moved by the executions of the leaders. Easter, 1916 became a Republican rallying cry. It is always read at annual commemorations of the Rising in Dublin.  Easter, 1916 I have met them at close of day Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey Eighteenth-century houses. I have passed with a nod of the head Or polite meaningless words, Or have lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words, And thought before I had done Of a mocking tale or a gibe To please a companion Around the fire at the club, Being certain that they and I But lived where motley is worn: All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. That woman's days were spent In ignorant good-will, Her nights in argument Until her voice grew shrill. What voice more sweet than hers When, young and beautiful, She rode to harriers? This man had kept a school And rode our wingèd horse; This other his helper and friend Was coming into his force; He might have won fame in the end, So sensitive his nature seemed, So daring and sweet his thought. This other man I had dreamed A drunken, vainglorious lout. He had done most bitter wrong To some who are near my heart, Yet I number him in the song; He, too, has resigned his part In the casual comedy; He, too, has been changed in his turn, Transformed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. Hearts with one purpose alone Through summer and winter seem Enchanted to a stone To trouble the living stream. The horse that comes from the road, The rider, the birds that range From cloud to tumbling cloud, Minute by minute they change; A shadow of cloud on the stream Changes minute by minute; A horse-hoof slides on the brim, And a horse plashes within it; The long-legged moor-hens dive, And hens to moor-cocks call; Minute by minute they live: The stone's in the midst of all. Too long a sacrifice Can make a stone of the heart. O when may it suffice? That is Heaven's part, our part To murmur name upon name, As a mother names her child When sleep at last has come On limbs that had run wild. What is it but nightfall? No, no, not night but death; Was it needless death after all? For England may keep faith For all that is done and said. We know their dream; enough To know they dreamed and are dead; And what if excess of love Bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse— MacDonagh and MacBride And Connolly and Pearse Now and in time to be, Wherever green is worn, Are changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born. —William Butler Yeats |
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A stunned and exhausted nurse may become the iconic image of the Coronavirus pandemic. |
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A World War I eastern European post card of a Red Cross nurse as an angel. |
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Romance novel nurse. |
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American Henry Wadsworth Longfellow first referred to Florence Nightingale as "The Lady with the Lamp" |
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A woodcut of Walt Whitman as a Civil War nurse. |
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Ray Buchanan, the 89 year old Coronavirus victim who nurse Doug Rae comforted as he died. |
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Mayor Lightfoot is watching but even she will let you take a walk if you social distance. |
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Ted Lewis with his clarinet and trademark bashed in top hat with his band circa 1930. |
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The Sentimentalists a/k/a the Clark Sisters were the vocalists on Tommy Dorsey's hit recording. |
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English Romantic poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon was often compared to Lord Byron but his promiscuity was winked at or even admired while mere rumors of hers destroyed her. |
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Landon from the front piece of one of her books of poetry. |
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Writer John Forster was Landon's fiancé who demanded proof of her guiltlessness then jilted her anyway. |
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Portrait of a cad--George Maclean, Governor of the Gold Coast. |
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Lucasta Millers recent biography examines the double standard that destroyed Landon personally and as a literary figure. |
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Walt Whitman. |
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Nikki Geovanni. |
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Alberto Rios. |
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Mark Strand. |
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The Janitor as Poet from a 2004 newspaper clipping. |
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| Late night hosts Stephen Colbert and the two Jimmies, Fallon and Kimmel. |
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Lady Gaga singing Charlie Chaplain's Smile. |
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Margaret Blanchard. |
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Tess Gallagher in the 1970's. |
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Patricia Monaghan |
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May Nothing Evil Cross This Door is the first hymn in the UUA's Singing the Living Tradition first published in 1003. |
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Louis Untermeyer. poet, critic, editor, and anthologist. |
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Untermeyer and Arlene Francis as celebrity panelists on What's My Line in 1950. |
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A glass mezuzah shows the prayer scroll inside. |
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Lurid but exciting covers like this attracted generation of young science fiction fans. Poetry helped elevate speculative literature of all types reach wider and more adult audiences. |
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. |
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Ursula K. Le Guin. |
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Margaret Atwood among her Handmaidens. |
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Eric Carmen, left, with Raspberries--polyester and helmet hair. |
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All By Myself 45 rpm single sleeve. |
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A swingin', studly persona was essential for FM radio success. |
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Abe Lincoln at his desk engraved by John Sartain from a photograph by Ferdinand Thomas Lee Boyle. Without explanation or commentary. The Old Man commits poetry. Republicans Remember Headline: Trump’s ‘LIBERATE MICHIGAN!’ Tweets Incite Insurrection April 17, 2020 Ah yes, they remember it well— That time ol’ Abe sitting idly in the White House, his feet up on the desk petting a cat as Willy and Tad cavorted on the carpet with their goat scrawled a message and handed it to young John Hay to hustle over to the telegraph office at the War Department. General Beauregard Charleston, South Carolina April 11, 1861 Sir— I share your outrage that the tyrannical Federal Government appears determined to squash your liberties stop Arms and reinforcements from New York for Ft. Sumter aboard the Star of the West were a knife at your noble throats stop Eighty-five jack booted thugs refuse to hand over the fortress stop LIBERATE SOUTH CAROLINA! Defend your Second Amendment Rights! Death to the Tyrants! To Arms! To Arms! stop A. A. Lincoln The President’s House Washington District of Columbia Yep, that’s just what happened. Ask any patriot. —Patrick Murfin  |
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Louis Prima wrote the music and lyrics for Sing Sing Sing. |
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Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall in 1938. |
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Goodman recorded Sing Sing Sing again for the bio-flick The Benny Goodman Story. |
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Jackie Robinson, 1954 Topps baseball card. |
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The 2013 bio-pic 42 Starring Chadwick Boseman, Harrison Ford, Christopher Meloni, and Nichole Beharie set me off in search of Jackie Robinson poems. |
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Laura Brienza. |
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Brienza's acclaimed ply Old Love New Love premiered at Luna Stage in West Orange, New Jersey. |
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Jackie Robinson sliding home. |
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Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan were friendly rivals but rivals none the less. Seen here with Greenwich Village folk scene staple Dave Van Ronk at the 1944 Concert for Chile at the Felt Forum in New York City. |
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Ochs's 1966 album ended with When I'm Gone. |
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A lobby card from the MGM musical Chasing Rainbow which featured Happy Days Are Here Again against the background of the World War I Armistice. |
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Barbara Streisand and Judy Garland sang a memorable duet of Get Happy and Happy Days Are Here Again on the Judy Garland Show in 1963. |
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Radio diva Annette Hanshaw. |
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Poets tackle the Coronavirus pandemic. |
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Rev. Theresa Novack. |
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Ken Balmes. |
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Jerry Pendergast. |
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Jessica Miller. |
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The Old Man reading. |
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Roy Orbison--the trademark look of a jet black pompadour and the heavy framed dark glasses that he wore due to an eye sight problem. |
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The London Records single release of Only the Lonely. |
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Poet Laureate Joy Harjo with maybe the most famous tattoo in American literature since Ishmael. |
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Harjo in 1975. |
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Harjo's 2012 memoirs. |
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Harjo and her saxophone. Music infuses her work across art forms and genres. |
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Harjo's art and poetry are interwoven--Perhaps the World Ends Here. |
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Harjo speaking. |
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The Resurection by Noel Coypel, 1700. |
 The First Plymouth Congregational Church, Lincoln Nebraska. |
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Carl Sandburg's contemporary, the Socialist cartoonist Art Young, shared his understanding of Jesus. |
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Carl Sandburg in Chicago. He knew whereof he wrote. |
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Billy Sunday doing his schtick. |
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Prolific tunesmith Irving Berlin |
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| Bing Crosby crooned Easter Parade to Marjorie Reynold in 1942 Holiday Inn, |
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A lobby card for Irving Berlin's Easter Parade. |
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Sam Walter Foss--a regionalis poet of the common man. |
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Wiffs from the Wild Meadows, 1892, the second of seven volumes of Foss's collected poetry. |
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An old post card of the House by the Side of the Road, Foss's boyhood New Hampshire farm home which became a tourist attraction after the poem named for it became famous. |
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A Ukrainian Klezmer band from around the turn ot the 20th Century. |
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Klezmer musician and dancers at an Orthodox Jewish wedding. |
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A contemporary American Klezmer band in includes an electric guitar, a full drum kit, and a woman fiddler. She would have been barred from a traditional Orthodox group that practiced strict gender segregation. |
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Grant and Lee at Appomattox by Louis Guillaume. Grant was carelessly, but customarily, dressed in the blouse of a private soldier with his rank straps sewn to his shoulders, his boots scuffed and muddy. Lee was resplendent in his best dress uniform with golden sash and gleaming boots. They recalled they had met as comrades in another war. |
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Herman Melville in 1861. |
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| As imagined by John Greenleaf Whittier--Barbara Frietche and her flag. |
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A Union picket on night guard by N.C. Wyeth. |
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Civil War dead photographed by Alexander Gardner. |
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The Army of Northern Virginia stacks arms and furls its flags. |
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Gwerful Mechain, celebrant of Medieval sex/ |
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Katie Gramich's The Works of Gwerful Mechain |
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A manuscript illumination of the sexual position we call today reverse cowgirl. |
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Shortly before the release American release of the Sounds of Silence album Simon included April, Come She Will on his British solo album The Paul Simon Songbook. It was not available in the US until 1981 when it was included in a box set, Paul Simon: Collected Works. |
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Ernesto Cardenal in his signature black beret and beard, |
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Pope John Paull II scolding Father Ernesto Cardenal on the tarmac at the Managua airport when the priest knelt to kiss the Pontiff's ring. |
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Ernesto Cardenal as a young man, |
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Marianne Faithful were the hottest celebrity couple in swinging London in the late 1960's |
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Faithfull in 1970 just before her downfall. |
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Faithful receiving the Women's World Award in Vienna in 2009 |
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Faithful on a recent red carpet. |
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Rachel "Raych" Jackson performing. |
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American Baptist minister Robert Wadsworth Lowry wrote the music to How Can I Keep From Singing? and included it in an 1868 song book. |
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Pete Seeger popularized Doris Penn's pacifist revision of How Can I Keep From Singing? |
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Irish New Age singer Enya brought How Can I Keep From Singing? to new audiences. |
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Hoosier poet Shari Wagner with two of her books. |
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Downtown Markle, Indiana in the 1950's. In the '60's Wagner's doctor father had an office on the street. |
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The woods near Wagner's childhood home inspired some of her earliest poetry and is now a nature preserve, |
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Bill Withers posed with his lunch box at is factory job for his first album which featured the break out hit Ain't No Sunshine. |
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Bill Withers in live performance. |
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Withers with John Legend at his 2005 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. |
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Seattle Poet Jed Myers |
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Jed Myers, on drums, often performs with Band of Poets including John Burgess, Anna Jenkins, Ted McMahon, and Rosanne Olson sometimes joined by other musicians and poets. |
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The image of the bodies of asylum seekers Alberto Ramirez and his toddler daughter Valeria in the Rio Grande briefly caught the attention of Americans and shocked the shockable. |
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Young John Prine was chill and a master of the casual slouch off stage. |
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John Prine with his Irish wife Fiona Whelan. |
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John Prine just starting out at the 5th Peg Pub in front of a banner that misspelled his name. |
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Best buddies Steve Goodman & Prine at the Earl of Old Town |
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Prine and Kristofferson in Las Vegas, 2015. |
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Prine with Poet Laureate Ted Kooser (left) at the Library of Congress. |
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Prine's most recent studio album The Tree of Forgiveness is the biggest commercial success of his career. |
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Marie Howe. |
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Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon cutting a vocal track during the recording of A Bridge Over Troubled Water. |
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Paul Simon with fellow Kennedy Center Honorees James Earl Jones, Chita Rivera, James Levine, and Elizabeth Taylor in 2002. |
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These days the Unitarian Universalist Association cheerfully provides Lenten worship materials for congregations and for individual spiritual practice. It was not always so. |
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Nothing could be more UU than a mug for coffee hour, often called Unitarian communion. This one expressed the feelings of many Humanists in the late 20th Century. |
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Elements of Lenten practice--not just for orthodox Christians any more. |
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Home, Sweet Home was so popular that this West Virginia savings and loan gave away copies of the sheet music to drum up business in the early 20th Century |
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| Home, Sweet Home samplers hung in many American parlors. |
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| Deanna Durbin sang Home, Sweet Home in her 1939 film First Love and had hit record of the song the same year. |
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An RAF Halifax unloads its bombs over a German urban target in a saturation raid like that planned for Nuremberg. Unfortunately the night of the long planned raid the city was mostly shrouded in cloud cover. |
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The heart of Nuremberg was quaint and medieval, but the "Spiritual heart of Nazism" was marked for destruction at the highest levels in Britain. |
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Versatile little RAF de Havilland Mosquitos, a pesky wood-framed multi-use light bomber, played several roles in the Nuremberg raid including providing weather observations over the Continent, flying decoy missions, and dropping incendiary markers for the main bomber formations. |
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The wreckage of an RAF bomber and its dead crew after the Nuremberg Raid. |
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| Take My Hand--original art by Lester Kern. |
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Rev. Thomas A. Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson. |
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One of several original or compellation Aretha Franklyn gospel albums. |
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Most modern Americans have a vague but positive image of the Salvation Army. Their members, dressed in tidy blue uniforms are spotted annually ringing hand bells by familiar Red Kettles. Sometimes, in big cities at high profile locations there may even be a small brass ensemble and/or singers. All the better to lure your coins and bills for a charity that promises to feed and house the hungry and destitute and help treat those who have hit rock bottom due to drinking or drug use. Perhaps we envision the slightly prissy but sexy Sergeant Sarah Brown in Guys and Dolls. Most of us are unaware that the Salvation Army is not just a charity, but a highly zealous evangelical denomination whose main mission is not comforting the afflicted, but saving their souls by bringing them to Jesus. The down and outers that they serve quickly learn that there is a price for every donut, dinner, and cot—being a captive audiencefor emotional hell-fire and brimstone sermons and accepting counseling that is as much fervent prayer and the study of religious tracts, as psychological support. But so what, many will shrug. It can’t do much harm and may do some good. The Salvation Army dates to mid-19th Century Victorian England where its brand of militarized proselytizingof the wretched urban poor was from the start highly controversial. The Church of England, Catholics, and more traditional dissenters were rarely united in their opposition to the style and substance of the Army’s brand of Evangelical Christianity. Brewers, distillers, publicans, and working class drinkers were threatened and enraged by the Salvation Army’s militant teetotalism and demands for the legal prohibition of alcohol sales. Its roots were in fervent Methodism. Again modern Americans will be surprised. Our Methodists are right smack dab in the staid middle of mainstream Protestantism. But it had originated the emotional Evangelical revival crusades that under powerful preachers like George Whitefield on both sides of the Atlantic in the 18th Century. In America Whitefield ignited the First Great Awakening. Methodism directed much of its energy to proselytizing among the poor and working classes. It gave real hope to folk in want and misery and spread rapidly. In America it was the largest Protestant denomination by1860 thanks to its saddle bag circuit riding preachers following the frontier as it expanded. A glimpse at that old time fervor is found in an offhand comment offered by Norman Maclean’s Presbyterian fain the novella and movie A River Runs Through It—“Methodists are just Baptists who can read.” In Britain, after officially separating from the Church of England, it was soon outpacing more traditional and largely Calvinist dissenting sects. By the mid-19th Century some of the original excitement was dying down amid general Victorian respectability, and emphasis on saving souls was somewhat replaced by a zeal for social reform embraced by many of its middle class adherents. And no reform seemed as urgent as temperance—the mother of all reforms. William Booth was a preacher who kept up the old-school fervor for salvation coupled with a zeal for reform and sacrificial service to the poor. Born to a comfortable middle class family in Nottingham in 1829, he was forced to leave school and be bound out as a pawnbroker’s apprentice at the age of 13 when his family’s fortune collapsed. Exposed to people in such crisis that they gave up their most prized possessions, young Booth found solace in the revivals and street meeting sweeping the region. He converted to Methodism at age 15 and was soon engaged in lay preaching. Shortly after he teamed with his best friend to conduct their own revival meetings in the area, which lasted until the friend’s death in 1849. He left Nottingham for London that year where he found work at another pawn shop and resumed lay preaching then began revival preaching in the Kensington District. In 1851 he joined the splinter Methodist Reform Church and sought to enter the regular ministry. Preaching at their headquarters Binfield Chapel in Clapham young Booth became engaged to the equally fervent Catherine Mumford. Booth’s heart was in revival evangelism at which he excelled. But his church superiors insisted that he serve as a parish minister. He would have to give short shrift to his congregations to answer frequent calls to speak at various revival meetings. With the loyal support of Catherine, Booth resigned the ministry and left the denomination after his third parish assignment in 1861 and began a career as an independent revivalist. Although he continued to preach Methodist doctrine, he now found himself barred from meetings at chapels of his old denomination. In 1865 Booth was preaching to street crowds outside a notorious pubin London’s deeply impoverished East End. Missionaries conducting their own tent meeting near-by were impressed and invited them to join them. The success of his meetings there beginning in July convinced him he had found his real calling. Soon after he and Catherine opened their Christian Revival Society, later known as the East London Christian Mission. Two years later they acquired a former Beer Hall and made it the center of a movement. Known as the People's Mission Hall housed sometimes rowdy all night prayer vigil, provided cheap or free meals, and ministered to other immediate needs of the poorest of the poor, criminals, drunkards, and prostitutes without discrimination. It was one of almost 500 missions established by well-meaning Christians of all denominations out to save the souls of the wicked poor. But, it was one of the most successful in part because Booth mixed his gospel with real assistance. He began to attract disciples who tried to duplicate his work elsewhere. But it was hard. Brewers and publicans railed against his temperance marches. Drinkers and hooligans often stoned him, his marchers, and broke windows in the mission building. For every step forward there seemed a setback. In 1878 Booth was dictating a letter to his secretary and used a phrase “The Christian Mission is a Volunteer Army.” His teenage son Bramwell heard it and exclaimed, “I’m not a volunteer, I’m a regular or nothing!” Booth to substitute the words Salvation Army for the Volunteer Army and soon made it the new name of the Christian Mission. He also adopted a military form of organization with ranks of officers—ministers, lay workers as NCOs, the rank and file of the saved were soldiers, and the latest but uncommitted converts were captives. The Corps, as they were called were outfitted in uniform’s mimicking those of the British Army—Men in scarlet tunics and military caps, the women in matching tunics, long blue skirts, large bonnets fastened at one side of the neck by a wide ribbon bow,and sometime a blue cloak with a scarlet lining.  A typical English Salvation Army brass band of the late 19th Century. In the Methodist tradition Booth had already employed music—including music hall tunes with new hymn lyrics in the grand Sunday worship he led at large, rented theaters. Now he added marching bands for his street parades and rallies and had other members carry and play tambourines as they sang enthusiastically. And the parades, which drew more and more attention, marched behind the Army’s own distinctive banner. All of this was disconcerting to the religious establishment and to communities being targeted, most of whose residents had little interest in either being saved or being reformed. Civil authorities were also concerned that a religious army might actually take up arms and become and insurrectionary one. This was not such a ridiculous worry considering that just such a religious army had once risen up in English history, plunged the country into a prolonged and bloody Civil War, over thrown the monarchy, committed regicide, and then had its leader, Oliver Cromwell, rule as an oppressive dictator. Despite opposition from all sides, the Salvation Army grew rapidly and was soon dispatching officers—both men and women who served with equal authority—to all corners of the British Isles. Soon new branches were springing up in America and other countries as well. To get an idea of the exuberant energy of the Salvation Army, consider the famous verses by American Poet Vachel Lindsey years later in General William Booth Enters Heaven: [GRAND CHORUS OF ALL INSTRUMENTS. TAMBOURINES TO THE FOREGROUND] The hosts were sandalled, and their wings were fire! (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) But their noise played havoc with the angel-choir. (Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?) O shout Salvation! It was good to see Kings and Princes by the Lamb set free. The banjos rattled and the tambourines Jing-jing-jingled in the hands of Queens. [REVERENTLY SUNG. NO INSTRUMENTS] And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer He saw his Master thro’ the flag-filled air. Christ came gently with a robe and crown For Booth the soldier, while the throng knelt down. He saw King Jesus. They were face to face, And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place. Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb? Which brings us, at long last, to the town of Basingstoke advertized in the headline. It was once an old and sleepy market town in Hampshire in south central England. After being connected to London and port communities by railroad in the 1850’s it had become an industrial center and its population swelled with those looking for work in its plantsand mills. In addition to producing farming machinery, heavy equipment, and textiles, the town was home to several breweries which supplied beer and ale to a wide region. It also boasted of more than 50 public houses serving a municipal population of only 6,681. The town had developed a regional reputation for public drunkenness and rowdy behavior. The respectable people of the town were not amused. Since the time of Cromwell Basingstoke had been center for Dissenters. Its professional classes, shopkeepers, and master tradesmen, what might be called the Burger classes were still largely members of Dissenting sects, most particularly the influential London Street Congregational Church. Most of the members of the town council and other officers were members of that church. A minority in town were Anglicans, principally members of the old gentry, and those who were loyal to or aspired to reap benefitsfrom Tory governments. Catholics were scarce and despised. The majority of the laboring class, many of them relatively recent arrivals, were largely un-churched or susceptible to fits of religious enthusiasm when this or that revival would roll through town. Allegiances to evangelical dissenting sects like the Methodists waxed and waned. The Congregationalists supported a Temperance movement as did other dissenting congregations, local Temperance Societies, and the local newspaper, the Hants and Berks Gazettefounded two years earlier. But they were getting nowhere in restraining the liquor trade or suppressing public vice. A good dose of religion was the prescribed medicine, but the Congregationalists certainly did not want to admit even saved grubby workers to their holy precincts. By 1880 they may have signaled General Booth that they would welcome the Salvation Army in their community and support a vigorous temperance campaign.  British Salvagion Army lasses of the 1880 like intrepid Captain Jordan and her second in command who braved rioters in Basingstoke and were thrown into the river. At any rate they welcomed the “two feeble women,” a Captain Jordan, a female Lieutenant, and a small number of sergeants and soldiers, including musicians, were dispatched to Basingstoke, arriving in September of 1880. They immediately announce plans for to “open fire on Sin and Satan.” Within a week they had begun their street parades which attracted crowds to their meetings. Local Brewers and publicans were alarmed at the threat to their livelihood. They quickly began to support—and stoke with their products—resentment of working class mobs who began to gather to harass the Sallies, as they were called, within weeks of their arrival. They modeled themselves on the Skeleton Armies that harassed the Salvation Army in London and other major cities.  The Bassingstoke Massagainians modeled themselves on the Skeleton Army that harassed Salvation Army temperance parades in London. They took to calling themselves the Massagainians because, as legend would have it an early leaflet call working men to “Mass again” against the teetotalers. They attempted to disrupt the marches with jeers, their own loud music, plus thrown stones and punches. Stale beer and froth drenched the singing Salvationists from windows of May’s Brewer. Tensions escalated through December along with split lips, cracked heads, and bloody noses. Eggs were thrown at the old silk mill in Brook Street and the Gazette office had its windows broken. The perpetrator of the Gazette attack was publicly awarded a gallon of ale. Sally members were ambushed and dunked in the canal and Captain Jordan narrowly escaped drowning in the River Loddon. Winter somewhat reduced confrontations, but things heated up again in March 1881. On Sunday March 20, 1881 the Sally planned a major march and was attacked by a mob of Massagainians numbering in the hundreds outside of the Mechanics Institute on New Street. A particularly burly Sally soldier named Charles Elms wrested a Union Jack from the hands of a hooligan then got his arm broken in the struggle to retrieve it. As word of the melee spread reinforcements arrived on both sides bringing the number of attackers to as many as 1000. Many “good citizens” of the town, including members of the Congregationalist church rushed to the scene to protect the marcher. Meanwhile the five member Town Constable force and Mayor W. B. Blatch, a brewer, stood aside and did nothing. Rioting continued into the afternoon up and down Church Street where a several shop windows were smashed. The unfortunate Elms, who had returned to the side of his Salvation Army cohorts, had his jaw broken and head cracked. Another man was badly cut when pushed through the plate-glass window of the Little Dustpan furniture shop. Still another was trampled. More minor injuries on both sides were too numerous to count. The Adams Brothers, proprietors of the Victoria Brewery, were identified as leaders of the Massagainians. Following the riot General Booth wrote the Home Secretary demanding that his troops and supporters be protected from mob violence. Salvation Army leaders defiantly announced another march the following Sunday, March 27. The Massagainians vowed to stop it. As both sides prepared a bitterly divided local government struggled with how to respond. The Council, dominated by the Congregationalists, demanded protection. The Brewer mayor and Chief Constable maintained that their small force was insufficient to safely guarantee the peace. The council forced the mayor to mobilize 30-50 Special Constables to be drawn from—virtually drafted—from the ranks of the towns “leading Tradesmen.” It was a reluctant force at best, many in sympathy with the Massagainians. Realizing this Council called in 30 County Police from Winchester who were thought to have no conflicting loyalties. In addition the captain of a troop of Royal Horse Artillery in town was asked to have his men at the ready. Just how the troops “happened” to be in town is something of a mystery as they were not normally billeted there and would have had no regular duties that would have brought them to the town on Sunday. On Sunday the Salvation Army march got off under escort of the town and special constables with the County Police in reserve. They were trailed by a hooting contingent of Massagainians numbering several hundred. The special constables were notably unhappy and uncomfortable with their duty. When the morning march concluded safely, about 3/4s of the special constables returned to town hall and announced that they would not continue to protect, “damned hypocrites.” When the Sally reassembled outside their old mill headquarters for a second afternoon march many of the special constables had joined the Massagainians. The march set off with the protection of County officers but was stopped by the Mayor who said he was afraid of the more than 3,000 who had gathered at Church and Brook Streets who were led by their own band. The Army pressed forward anyway reaching as far as May’s Brewery when they saw the Massagainians descending on them. The attempted to turn around to return to the mill, but the mob marched past them pinning them against the side of the street and preventing them from going forward or back. Fighting broke out and from the steps of the Town Hall Mayor Blatch officially read the riot act and ordered the Royal Horse Artillery to clear the streets of everyone, Sally and Massagainian alike. They made short, brutal work of the job, but no one was killed. The day ended in an essential draw. But news of the invocation of the Riot act and action by the Army made headlines across the country and resulted in Parliamentary debate and investigation. That Sunday was the apex of the trouble in Basingstoke, but hardly the end of them. The Home Office put pressure on local the magistrates who issued a proclamation forbidding all processions and open air gatherings in hopes of easing tensions. Three new magistrates were appointed in June 1881 and against the wishes of the Mayor and one other magistrate, persuaded the rest to allow the Salvation Army parades to resume. So did minor rioting and street brawls. In August the Vicar of the Anglican parish, who would later write an article detailing the history of the conflict which is a source for historians of the event, presented the Magistrates with a petition signed by calling for the Salvation Army processions to be banned for disturbing the peace of the town. In his history the Vicar decried the violence of opponents, but painted the Sallies as needlessly provocative and exciting excessive passions in its followers—a classic Anglican response to revivalist evangelism in general. The minister of the Congregational Church countered with a petition signed by 613 calling for the processions to be protected to the fullest extent of the law. That August Captain Jordon also swore out charges against a group of Massagainian leaders and those who had been identified with specific acts of violence. On August 30th, 20 people appeared before the magistrates, charged with assault and obstructionas a crowd of Massagainians besiegedthe court, shouting, beating drums, waving rattles. Ten of were sentenced to Winchester jail for 14 days. When the men were released they were greeted as martyrs and heroes. They were fetched from the jail in fine liveried carriages and escorted to Basingstoke by outriders in scarlet coats and a professional band playing Hail the Conquering Heroes. They were brought to the public Corn Exchange building, rented for the occasion from the town for an elegant banquet amid spectacular decoration. Brewers donated six barrels of a specially brewed extra strong beer dubbed Massagainian Stingo.  Broken windows on Church Street after the Election Day 1881 riot. In the sharply divided town the municipal elections held on November 1 were hotly contested with Tories, Anglicans, and Massagainians in an odd coalition backing slates against the Liberals, Congregationalists, and Temperance groups. The Massagainian slate with the overwhelming support of the town’s working class population carried the day. An enthusiastic mob celebrated with yet another riot in which the newspaper office, Congregational Parsonage, the Sally’s Silk Mill where a prayer meeting was being held, and Soper’s Castle, the elegant home of a leading Temperance man all suffered smashed windows. Incidents continued into 1882, including one in which the Mayor once again Read the Riot Act after a mob tried to break into the Town Hall to rescue a fellow who had been arrested to assaulting a constable and another in which six Salvation Army lasses were thrown into the Town Brook. But as another spring arrived everyone had grown tired of more than a year and a half of strife. The brewers, publicans, and their customers realized that the Sally proved no existential threat to their livelihoods and entertainments. In fact, business was booming. For their part the Salvation Army, once it established its right and ability to parade unmolested, discretely reduced the number and aggressiveness of its public demonstrations. General Booth personally visited the town to claim victory but was not molested. With donations from all over the country, he saw that a fine new Salvation Army barracks and headquarters was built in town with plenty of room not only for meetings but for soup kitchen like public feeding and dormitory rooms for formerly fallen young women. 
Today Basingstoke is mildly embarrassed that riots of 1880-82 are the best known incidents in the town’s long history. Many of the old industries have closed but the town has been made over to exurban satellite of greater London with much of the town’s historic center razed to make room for modern shopping malls. The population has swollen to 84,275 including many middle class commuters. The Salvation Army is still there, now in its third building. And although there are no longer 90 pubs or local breweries, there are plenty of places to drink and drinkers to fill them. |
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You Ain't Goin' Nowhere was included on the 1975 album The Basement Tapes five years after it was recorded with The Band. |
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The Byrds in 1968. McGuinn and Hillman were joined by Hillman's cousin Kevin Kelly on drums and Gram Parsons on guitar and vocals for their Nashville country recording sessions |
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Police and bystanders watch helplessly as more victims jump to their deaths to escape the flames of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory on the upper floors of the Asch Building. |
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The Fire Department responded quickly but did not have ladders tall enough to reach the top three floors which were on fire and fire fighters could not get up stairways choked with the bodies of those trying to escape. They could only use their most powerful pumpers to spay water from the outside. |
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The sewing floor of a typical shirtwaist factory and the young women who worked there. |
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Ida B. Wells, undaunted. |
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Cartoonist Kate Beaton depicted Ida B. Wells's defining moment on a train in her Hark! A Vagrant. |
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Well's classic lynching expose made her famous. |
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Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett with her children in 1909. |
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Mid-rise buildings in the Chicago Housing Authority's Ida B. Wells homes shortly after they opened just before World War II. From a promising beginning they deteriorated into a crime and drug infested ghetto by the turn of the 21st Century and were razed. |
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Steve Goodman in overalls with pal John Prine at the Earl of Old Town, 1972. |
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The City of New Orleans in its blue and orange Illinois Central livery. |
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Goodman singing Go Cubs Go! at Wrigley Field not long before his death. |
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An early photo of open car horse drawn service on the Swansea and Mumbles Railway. Probably a vary pleasant hour or so on a lovely spring day, but undoubtedly miserable in Wales's snowy winters. |
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The re-introduction of passenger service in 1866 brought these more comfortable cars. |
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A tank steam locomotive drawing double-deck cars arrives in Oystermouth Station in the early 20th Century. |
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These handsome and striking red double-deck overhead tram cars serviced the line for decades. This one is approaching the Mumbles Pier in the last days of the line. |
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The last intact car sat for years awaiting restoration but deteriorating on a Leeds siding. Seen in 1966, it was destroyed by fire soon after. |
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Ottis Redding was a dynamic live performer. |
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The posthumous The Dock of the Bay album matched the wild success of the single peaking at #4 on the Album Charts. It has never gone out of circulation. |
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Dr. Robert Koch at work in his laboratory. |
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In the 1938 weeper Three Comrades Margaret Sullivan dies beautifully, with self-sacrificing heroism of consumption in a mountain sanitarium leaving behind her grieving husband Robert Taylor, and his surviving World War I comrade Franchot Tone who also worshiped her. Tragic death by consumption was a frequent theme of novels, plays, and film for generations. |
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Deady Tuberculosis bacteria first isolated and identified by Dr, Kosh using the techniques and protocols that he invented and which are still the standard for microbiological research. |
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Examining a sheep for anthrax. |
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Dr. Robert Koch about the time he gained fame for his breakthrough identification of the anthrax pathogen, |
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Dr. Koch created a scandal when he divorced his wife of 25 years to marry his much younger mistress, actress Emma Hedwig Freiberg |
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In the 1930 film classic The Blue Angel, nightclub singer Lola Lola--Marlena Dietrich--was the cause of the downfall and ruin of a distinguished professor--Emile Jannings--said to be modeled on Dr, Koch. |
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Journeyman tunesmith Harry Woods wrote When the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin' Along. |
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Singer Lillian Roth, a very hot number in her day, made the Red, Red Robin her signature song. |
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Al Jolson sang the song in the 1926 Vitaphone short A Plantation Act. |
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The passenger car installed by Elijah Otis on Broadway in 1857 was not as elaborate as this post-Civil War model, but it did the job. |
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Elijah Otis, the classic example of an American tinkerer. |
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The dazzling Crystal Palace, home of the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations in New York City in 1853. |
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That's supposed to be P.T. Barnum himself on the upper platform with the sword he just used to cut the rope on Otis's lift platform. |
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The familiar Otis name plate is on the floor door sill of almost every elevator you will step on. |
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The graduation scene from the original Broadway production of Rodger and Hammerstein's Carousel. |
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The movie poster for the 1956 film adaptation. |
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Renée Fleming as Nettie comforts Julie in the 2018 Broadway revival of Carousel |
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The destination is wrong, but the gear was about the same except I wore cowboy boots and jeans on my Western trip. |
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A few months after my Western trip at an IWW picnic in Chicago's Oz park. |
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Noted Scottish physician Dr. Neil Arnott invented what is likely the first water bed to prevent bed sores in invalids. |
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Science Fiction pioneer Robert A. Heinlein invented but did not build a surprisingly modern water bed in the 1930's when he was enduring a long bed rest convalescence |
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How could anyone resist a deal like this? An ad like this undoubtedly ran in the Chicago Seed. |
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On March 21, 1617 Rebecca Rolfe, the 22 year old wife of John died, probably of smallpox or pneumonia, in Englandleaving behind an infant son, Thomas. This incident, while tragic was so commonthat it would hardly be remembered today except for Rebecca’s maiden name—Pocahontas. She was born about 1598 in what is now Virginia, the daughter of Wahunsunacah, principal chief of a network of Algonquian speaking tribesand known by the ceremonial title of Powhatan. Her birth name was Matoaka.  A Powhatan girl like "Little Wanton" from a contemporary drawing by a Virginia settler. Pocahontas, the name by which she was introduced to the English settlers at Jamestown, was said to mean “little wanton.” As a child of about ten, she captured the colonist’s attention by regular visits to them while cavorting naked and apparently unashamed. Years later Captain John Smith, the leading soldierof the colony, told a story of how the young Indian “princess” had saved him from being executed by her father. In embellished accounts she literally threw herself over Smith’s body to prevent his decapitation. Some historians doubt the veracity of the story. Smith did not report it in his first writings about the colony but only years later in a letter to Queen Anne asking that the girl be received in Court. 
But it is undoubtedly true that Smith had a relationship with the girl, and may have made promises of future marriage to either her or her father. At any event she did bring Smith gifts of provisions which helped the nearly starving colonists survive. Relations between the Powhatan Confederacy and the English deterioratedas more settlers arrived. In 1609 Smith was injured in a powder explosion and returned to England to recover. For some reason Pocahontas was told by the colonists that he had died, although her father warned her that it might not be so because “the English lie.” Around 1612 she may have married a tribesman, but little is known about that marriage. At any rate, in 1613 she was living with another tribe, the Patawomeck, trading partners of the Powhatan, near present day Fredericksburg. She was seen and recognized by visiting Englishmen and kidnapped to be held for ransom in exchange for prisoners held by her father. She was kept for over a year, reportedly in “extraordinary courteous usage” as negotiations dragged on. Powhatan did release prisoners, but refused other demands. Meanwhile the young woman was being instructed in Christianity and learned to speak fluent English. She allowed herself to be baptized and took the name Rebecca. John Rolfe, a recent widower who had cultivated a new strain of tobacco suitable for wide spread cultivation and export, may have contributed to her conversion. He certainly wooed her and made it clear that he could not marry a “heathen.” She met with a large band of Powhatan after an armed conflict with her captors in March 1614 and she told them that she rebuked her father for not valuing her above “old sword pieces, or axes,” and proclaimedthat she would rather live with the English. 
Rolfe wrote the Governor for permission to marry her, pointing out that he was also saving her soul by bringing her to Christianity. The couple wed in April and settled on Rolfe’s plantation. The marriage did produce peace between Powhatan and the English. It also produced son Thomas in January, 1615 almost exactly nine months after the wedding. The following year the family set sail for England in hopes of recruiting more settlers and getting financial backing for the struggling colonies. Rebecca was valuable as a symbolthat the colonies could both live in peace with the natives and convert them to Christianity. She was received in Plymouth and latter in Londonwith great interest and won friends with her charm. When Smith heard she was in the country, he wrote the letter to Queen Anne that first told the story of his rescue. In 1617 the Rolfes were introduced to King Jameshimself at Whitehall Palace. The same year she met John Smith at a social gathering and had what Smith recordedas an uncomfortable private meetingwith him. She reminded him of broken promises he had made, shamed himby calling him “father,” and finally forgave him. The Rolfe family was on ship board to return to Virginia when Rebecca was taken ill. She was brought ashoreand died at Gravesend, Kent. Her grief stricken husband and son returned to Virginia. Through Thomas many of the great Tidewater aristocratic families can trace decent from the “Indian princes.” These include the Randolphs of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, the Byrds—Admiral Richard and Senator Robert—and First Ladies Edith Wilson and Nancy Reagan. Claiming descent from Pocahontas was a two edged sword. On one hand it provided a colorful and romantic background and was proof of a lineage tracing back to the revered First Families of Virginia. On the other hand as racial attitudes and prejudices hardened progressively through the 18th and 19th Centuries acknowledging Pocahontas meant admitting to having tainted blood. Families and individual vacillated between bragging about the connection and trying to obscure it. It turns out Pocahontas can still carry a sting by association. Donald Trump has slurred Senator Elizabeth Warren repeatedly as Pocahontas for claiming some Native American blood. It was an effective sting against one of his most voracious Democratic critics and potential challengers. Some think that attack so undermined Warren that it contributed to her failure in Democratic Presidential primaries this year. 
The story of Pocahontas has been told and retold and highly romanticized. That reached its zenith with the 1995 Disney animated film which resurrected a romance that may never have happened and transformed the girl into an ecological guru. A few years ago I was moved to commit poetry. Death of a Princess March 21, 1617 They saw you gambol naked in their midst. Little wanton they called you as they lusted in their Christian hearts. They stroked you and cooed soft words. You had your father bring them presents and won for him some iron trinkets that made him the richest man in the forests. You may, or may not, have saved the life of a golden hair in shining armor. He may, or may not, have lain with you on the soft leaves and, chest heaving, have made promises he could not keep. You were traded away, made captive and ransomed. Abandoned by your people, you made the best deal for yourself to an earnest widower with a fine farm. You lost your name, whatever it was. He took you across the great water. They gaped at you in wonder and swathed you in acres of the finest cloth. What happened to your naked soul in that wide, stiff ruff, rigid bodice and skirts too voluminous to take a petty brook in a joyful leap? And they wondered what killed you. —Patrick Murfin |
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The USS Langley (CV-1), the U.S. Navy's first aircraft carrier with her compliment of Vought VE-7 Bluebird fighters. |
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The Langley was built on the hull of the USS Jupiter, collier which had seen service in World War I. |
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The First tail hook landing on board. |
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Seaplane Tender USS Langley under attack off of Java |
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The new USS Langley (CVL-27) in action near Singapore. |
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Note: Much sadder than closing saloons to St. Patrick’s Day puke parties, is the necessary cancelation of St. Joseph’s Day Table feasts, the wonderful tradition of sharing food with all who are hungry. Perhaps this year those who are young, healthy, and mobile can carry the tradition to the doors of those in need.  St. Joseph’s Day is celebrated annually on March 19. Joseph, the husband of Mary—does that make him Jesus’s stepfather?—is the Patron Saint of Poland, of carpenters, workers of all kinds, and of assorted other things. In many Latincountries it is also the occasion to celebrate fathers. Joseph is particularly revered in Sicily where he is credited with bringing an end to a drought and famine in the Middle Ages. Devotion to him spread through southern Italy and was brought to the United Statesby emigrants. Sicilians, who arrived in New Orleans in the late 19th Century promoted wide spread celebrations in that city. On the East Coast, particularly in Providence, Rhode Island, there are sometimes major parades featuring the wearing o’ the red—St. Joseph’s color—as more than a subtle tweak of the Irish, who attracted a lot of attention with their little festival two days earlier. These parades actually were shows ofpolitical clout as the Italians muscled the Irish out of control of city governments.  Politics aside, the main feature of the celebration is St. Joseph’s Table, a feast set out in thanks for the miracle of saving Sicily. Usually laid out buffet style and decorated with the good Saint’s statue, lily blossoms, and votive candles. Food includes elaborate meatless offerings—it is Lent after all—including stuffed artichokes, pasta and fish, as well as breads, cookies, pastries, cakes and other delicacies. Fava beans, the food St. Joseph provided to relieve the famine, are prominentlyfeatured.  St. Joseph's Day is not just for Italians and Poles. Here is an ethnic Czeck parade in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. What makes the St. Joseph Table different from other feasts is that it is supposed to belaid out for the poor, homeless, andoppressed. No one is turned away. You don’t have to go to mass or even be Catholic. You can smell like Richard’s Wild Irish Rose and stale piss, be covered in tattoos with nails piercing your face. Who knows? You can even be Gay or have had an abortion. Come. Eat. Share with us. What a great holiday! |
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Farm laborers from Dorset may have met under a tree to swear a secret oath to create a combination to raise wages and protect tenants. The fate of six farm laborers in Dorset and the huge protest and movement that their brutal transportation to Australia stirred are touchstones to the British labor movement. The Tolpuddle Martyrs are widely celebrated in England as well as in the former penal colony where they were sent and in far off Canada. Most Americanshave never heard of them. We aim to rectify that. In 1833 George Loveless, a Methodist lay preacher, and a respected leader among the farm laborers around the village of Tolpuddle in southern England, called a few of his matestogether. Legend has it that six of them met under a sycamore tree. Others say that they squeezed into the tiny hovelof Thomas Standfield. They had serious business to attend to. Landlords in the area were putting the arm on their laborers and tenants. Unlike areas closer to London or the grimy cities of the rapidly industrializing north, farmers in Dorset did not have to keep up wages to compete with the lure of the cities and factory jobs. In addition modest changes to age old farming practices were reducing the number of laborer needed on the farms and estates. Conditions were ripe for wage cutting. Local wages had been steady at 10 schillings a week—hardly a fortune, but enough to barely fed and cloth a family. Landowners had already cut that to 7 and had announced a second cut to 6 was imminent. No reductions in the rentdemanded for their cottages were proposed. Earlier, in 1830, farm workers had responded to such cuts and the new farm equipment that made them possible with the Swing Rebellion—a Luddite like uprising in which laborers rioted, attacking and burning equipment like threshing machines and menacing landlords. Frightened farmers suspended their cuts, or sometimes even gave wage boosts, but waited for authorities to act. And act they did. Militia and Army units swept the county rounding up hundreds of suspects. At trial several were sentenced to hang, although in the end only a handful were swung in public as an object lesson, the rest were torn from their families and transported to Australia. Conditions returned to what they were before the protests—or worse. Loveless and his friends knew that violence and disorganized riot was not the answer. They had to find new ways of organizing a protest. They had some reasons for hope. The Combination Acts, passed in 1799 at the height of panic about the possible spread of revolution from France to the English working and agrarian classes and which had outlawed combinations to obtain better wages and working conditions, had been repealed in 1824 and’25. A modest trade union movement was developing, not without severe opposition, in among skilled tradesmen in cities and in the mines. More over the Reform Act, passed earlier in 1832, had finally extended the franchise to some without yet granting universal male suffrage. It was not enough by half, but the Dorset men felt that it might foretell a more liberal age. Despite these reasons for optimism, the fate of the Swing Rebellion left them no illusions about the dangers of their undertaking. So that when they agreed to form the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourersthey did so swearing an oath of secrecy. Local landlords began to hear certain rumors. As planting season neared men were refusing to work for less than the old 10 schillings standard. One landlord, James Frampton, petitioned to Lord Melbourne, the Whig Home Minister for relief. It was fast in coming. On February 24, 1834 Loveless and the other men were arrested as they left their homes. Their families would not see them for a long time.  Five of the six accused conspirators. In no time at all they were hauled before an unsympathetic Judge Baron John Williams. Loveless, Stanfield, James Brine, James Hammett, and James Loveless, George’s brother were charged under an obscure law also dating to the late 18th Century which made the swearing of secret oaths to each other illegal. On March 18, subsequently celebrated as Tolpuddle Martyrs Day, they were found guilty and sentenced to 7 years transportation to Australia—a sentence few men ever returned from. Despite rising protests from working people across England, all of the men were quickly bundled off to the ships that carried them away. From his cell before being shipped out George Loveless had scribbled a noteon a scrap of paper that was soon printed all over England: God is our guide! from field, from wave, From plough, from anvil, and from loom; We come, our country’s rights to save, And speak a tyrant faction’s doom: We raise the watch-word liberty; We will, we will, we will be free!  Tens of thousands rallied on Copenhagen Fields near King's Cross, London organized by the Central Committee of the Metropolitan Trade Unions and marched through London to Kennington Common with a wagon carrying a petition with over 200,000 signatures for the remission of the Tolpuddle Martyrs's sentences. Inspired by those words an unprecedented protest arose across the country. More than 80,000 signed petitions to Lord Melbourne himself in April. And in London more than 25 thousand assembled for the largest public demonstration of its kind ever held in protest to a government action. In addition to the labor movement, the reform press took up the protest as did the liberal wing of Melbourne’s own Whig party. In 1836 by then Prime Minister Melbourne’s new Home Secretary Lord John Russell commuted the sentences of all but Hammett who had a previous minor conviction. Four of the men arrived back in England at Plymouth. A plaque next to the Mayflower Steps commemorates their return. Hammett was released a year later and returned to Tolpuddle, where he lived a long life in poverty and want. He died in the Dorchester workhouse in 1891.  Tolpuddle Martyrs Monument and cottages in London, Ontario. The other men realized they could not support their families back home where no landlord would hire them. They moved together for a time to Essex and then with the help of funds subscribed for their relief, immigrated together to London, Ontario, Canada. They were greeted in their new home as heroes and are still commemorated there today with a monument and an affordable housing co-op / trade union complex named after them. Back home the Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum preserves their story and their deep connection to the trade union movement. A monument was erected to them in 1934 on the centennial of their sentence and a new statue installed before the museum in 2001. There are also modest monuments in Australia. The Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival is held annually in Tolpuddle, usually in the third week of July, organized by the National Union of Agricultural Workers (recently amalgamated with the Transport and General Workers Union) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC)featuring a parade of banners from many trade unions, a memorial service, speeches and music. Recent festivals have featured speakers such as Tony Bennand musicians such as Billy Bragg. Forgetting for a moment that as a Methodist, Loveless was likely a teetotaler, I propose all good working men and women raise a toast today to the lads from Tolpuddle. |
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Despite the cancelations of dying the Chicago River green and of the St. Patrick's Parade thousands of young revelers hit the bars early Saturday morning for a pub crawl in defiance of orders to limit large gatherings. It so enraged Governor Pritzker that he order all bars and restaurants closed. |
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Tons of corned beef and cabbage fixings could rot unless restaurants can arrange pickup and delivery services. The dish was unknown in Ireland until American tourists started to demand it. It originated as New England boiled dinner when the immigrant Irish met the Jews in the slums of 19th Century Boston. |
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Up until the mid '60 St. Patrick's Day remained a religious festival in Ireland and the annual parade in Dublin, seen here in 1905, was mostly a religious procession, often led by the St. John's Total Abstinence and Benefit Society. Now the parade is an American style extravaganza awash in Kelly Green, dancing leprechauns, shamrocks, and scantily clad girls. General rowdiness is the rule of the day, largely due to the large annual pilgrimages to the Auld Sod by Irish Americans, now generations removed from the island. This year Dublin canceled the parade. |
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By the second half of the 19th Century New York's St. Patrick's Day parades had become elaborate celebrations of Irish nationalism and a display of raw political power in the city. |
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Traditional Irish music and step dancing were nearly eradicated by Britain's policy of cultural genocide but were preserved and nurtured by American clubs and societies like this mid-20th Century step dancing group. Dancing academies are now staples of St. Patrick's day parades and Knights of Columbus corned beef and cabbage dinners. |
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Hizzonor da Mayor, Richard J. Daley steps off with his blackthorn stick and green fedora at the head of the 1963 Chicago St. Patrick's Day joined by officials of the sponsoring Plumbers union, the Irish Consul General, Cardinal Alber Meyer (second from left} and actor Pat O'Brien to the Mayor's left and a bevy of politicians in the second row jockeying for position. Then Republican Cook County States Attorney James P. Thompson can be spotted just over Daley's shoulder |
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St, Patrick himself--a Romanized Welshman captured and enslaved by Irish pirates who somehow escaped, became a priest, and returned to Christianize the land of his pagan captors. Was it a noble mission, or perhaps revenge? |
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The Scarlet Letter by Hugues Merlem 1861. Hester Prynne and daughter Pearl are in the foreground and Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth can be seen dimly in the background at left. |
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Despite a receding hair line, Nathaniel Hawthorne was still matinee idol handsome in this 1848 Daguerreotype taken two years before the publication of his masterpiece. |
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The lovely but sickly Sophia Peabody married Hawthorne and her health improved. She ended up out living him by seven years. Her charcoal self-portrait. |
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The Wayside, formerly the Concord home of Bronson Alcott and his family including young Louisa May, was twice Hathorne's home. |
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Perhaps the most memorable of all of the film versions of Hawthorne's masterpiece was the MGM silent starring the ever-suffering Lillian Gish. Here she is condemned in a mob scene before a castle-like building unlike anything found in old Salem. |
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The Coronaviris a/k/a Covid 19--the runaway favorite for Time magazine's Infection of the Year. |
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The Rev. Lynn Unger. |
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Br. Richard Hendrick |
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The Rev. Theresa Novak. |
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The Old Man. |
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It was called “the perfect musical.” From that first night on the Broadway stage, March 15, 1956, at the Mark Hellinger Theatre audiences leapt to their feet cheering, critics wore out the Thesaurus in search of superlatives, trophies could not be cast fast enough. My Fair Lady had to be moved twice to larger theaters and set a record of 2,717 performances in its first production. The world, it seemed was singing its songs. But the path to theatrical glorywas long. Very long. It began with a lost legend on Cyprus about a Phoenician king named Pumayyaton who the Greeks called Pygmalion. Centuries later the Roman poet Ovid cast Pygmalion as a sculptor who creates a perfect statue of a woman out of ivory who he named Galatea. After sacrificing to Aphrodite, Goddess of Beauty on her feast day, he returns home where he kisses the perfect idol he has created only to learn that her lips were sweet and breasts yielding. The goddess had granted his wish to turn the statue into a woman.  Jean-Leon Gerome's Pygmalion and Galatea painted in 1890 is just one of many popular art renderings of Ovid's version of the myth. The story of the artist and his art sprung to life resonated, especially during and after the Renaissance was told and re-told many times and was depicted in painting and sculpture. It was the subject of many poems in Victorian England. William S. Gilbert’s blank verse Pygmalion and Galatea, an Original Mythological Comedy was produced in London in 1871 and was so popular that it was revived three times in five years and other companies rushed their own versions of the tale to the stage. A youngIrishman struggling to make his markas a critic took notice. Forty years later at the height of his powers George Bernard Shaw recast the themes of a woman metamophisized by her creator into one of his didactic lessons on social class. He also wanted to propound his own pet theory that standardized pronunciation of English could help liberate the poor, who were stigmatized by their crudeaccents. Written in 1912, in his Pygmalion the creator is Henry Higgins, a tyrannical, misanthropic professor linguistics and phoneticsand the object of transformation is a Cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle.  George Bernard Shaw, the witty and didactic Irish born playwrite and Fabian Socialist about the time of his 1912 triumph, Pygmalion. Shaw needed another character to who Higgins could expound his theories and to whom Eliza could turn for comfort. He found the perfect model in Dr. Watson, Sherlock Holmes’s side kick whose main function was to listen to the flights of brilliance of the detective. In the play the character is transformed into Col. Pickering, like Watson a veteran of the Indian Army. Pygmalion opened in London in 1914 with the object of Shaw’s unrequited love, Mrs. Patrick Campbell as Eliza. It was by far the most popular play Shaw had brought to the stage. But audiences were dissatisfied with the ending in which the now completely emancipated Eliza abandons the professor. During the run of the play the producers substituted a final scene in which Higgins appears at a window and throws flowers at departing Eliza, hinting that such a gesture would woo her back. Shaw was furious and added a postscript essay, What Happened Afterwardsto printed editions of the play to explain why that was impossible. He continued to fight attempts to soften the ending through revivals and other productions of the play. In 1937 Shaw licensed his plays to Hungarianproducer Gabriel Pascal for the cinema. He reluctantly agreed to allow Pygmalion be the first film on the condition that he retain full artistic control. Shaw collaboratedon the screenplay and wrote whole new scenes, including the ballroomscene where Eliza is put to the test of passing as a lady. Knowing Pascal wanted a happier ending Shaw offered to write a new final scene showing Eliza and her callow suitor now husband Freddy Eynsford-Hill tending their flower shop catering to gentlefolk. Instead, without Shaw’s knowledge, Pascal inserted a short scene following Eliza’s departure in which she returns with her bags and the self-satisfiedHiggins leans back, cocks his hat over his face and demands, “Eliza, where the devil are my slippers?” Shaw was outraged, but the scene stayed.  Leslie Howard as Professor Henry Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza Doolittle in the 1938 film version of Pygmalion. The 1938 film starred Leslie Howard and Wendy Hiller. It was a huge hit on both sides of the Atlantic and even won Shaw an Oscar for his contributions to the screenplay. Part of Shaw’s agreement with Pascal was that none of the plays could be made into a musical. He had earlier been greatly disappointed with The Chocolate Soldier, a Viennese operetta based on Arms and the Man. Despite numerous pleas over the years, Pascal could not get Shaw to yield. But when the old man died in 1950 at the age of 94, the producer approached Alan J. Lerner, the lyricist and librettist who had created Brigadoon with Frederick Loewe and Love Life with Kurt Weill. Lerner worked on the project intermittentlyfor two years before abandoning it. Other tried their hands at it—Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz and then Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the reigning kings of American musical comedy. Rogers told Learner that it was impossiblebecause “it has no sub-plot.” The other problem was the talky nature of the play and the lack of big scenes for an ensemble.  Frederick Loewe (left) and Alan Jay Lerner had to repair a fractured partnership to work on a musical version of Pygmalion with out even knowing if they could secure the rights. Lerner had become estranged from Lowe, his original partner on the project. But when he chanced on Pascal’s obituary in the newspapers, he decided to give the project a second chance. Reuniting with Lowe, Lerner realized that the key to the production was opening it up from the stage play, as Shaw himself had done with the addition of the ballroom scene in the film version. Lerner added other “action that takes place between the acts of the play” as Shaw had written them, notably the Covent Garden scene after Higgins departs in which Eliza sing Wouldn’t it be Loverly, Alfred P. Doolittle’s rollicking I’m Getting Married in the Morning number, and the extended Ascot racetrack scene. In between he preserved most of Shaw’s witty dialog and even the social messages. He did, however, retain the ending of the film, not Shaw’s beloved declaration of independence. Learner and Lowe went ahead with their work not knowing if they could get the rights from Pascal’s estate which was being managed with flinty business no-nonsense by Chase Manhattan Bank. There were other bidders, most notably MGM which tried threats to muscle Learner aside. He bet that when the time came the fact that he and Lowe had a completed libretto and score would tilt the bank in their direction. It did and they won the right to mount the musical on the stage. MGM would later have to spend a ton of money to buy Learner and Lowe’s show from them for the big screen. After securing the services of one of Broadways most successful directors, Moss Hart, attention turned to casting. Everyone’s first choice for Higgins was Noel Coward but he turned down the part. He did suggest that they try Rex Harrison who had starred in otherfilm adaptations of Shaw’s work. Harrison was a huge star in Brittan once dubbed Sexy Rexy for his appearances as a leading man in the ‘30’s and ‘40’s but he was less well known in the U.S. Harrison was interested but both he and the creative team were concerned with one little problem. Harrison could not sing, or rather he had a very narrow vocal range. After some tinkering by Lowe and handing the most soaring melodies off to other characters, it was agreed that Harrison could sing/speak his numbers.  Julie Andrews, a young British singer/actress was a sensation as Eliza Doolittle in the Broadway Production of My Fair Lady. Casting Eliza was more difficult. The part was first offered to Texas-born Mary Martin who wiselyconcluded that she was unsuited to play a Cockney. Gertrude Lawrence who Learner had envisioned for the role when he first started work on the project in 1950 had inconveniently died in 1952 and was unavailable. They finally settled on a young English singer/actress, Julie Andrews. Legend would have it that she was plucked from obscurity for the part, but she already had one Broadway hit under her belt, The Boyfriend. The cast was rounded out with veteran character actor and music hall performer Stanly Holloway as the philosophic dustman Alfred P Doolittle; Robert Coote as Col. Pickering; John Michael King as Eynsford-Hillwho got to sing On the Street Where You Live, the show’s only love song; and Kathleen Nesbitt as Higgins’s mother. The title My Fair Lady made oblique reference to the title Shaw used in early drafts of Pygmalion, Fair Eliza, and to the repeated refrain from the nursery rhyme London Bridge is Falling Down. The show almost did not go on for its firstperformance in out of town tryouts in New Haven, Connecticut. Hours before the curtain Harrison became frightenedby the pit orchestra that was much larger than anything he had encountered inrehearsals. Fearing that they would down him out, he told producers that, “that under no circumstances would he go on that night...with those thirty-two interlopers in the pit.” He then locked himself in his dressing room. After fruitless pleading, producers decided todismiss the company for the night and make an announcement to the audience that was beginning to assemble. Less than an hour before curtain time, Harrison got a grip on himself and emerged from the dressing room. Producers frantically recalled the cast and the show went on. It ended with a thunderous standing ovation. Everyone knew that this would be ahit. Indeed it was. The original cast album became a perennial hit. After Edward Mulhare and Sally Anne Howes took over the parts on Broadway, Harrison, Andrews and most of the original cast took the show to London where it debuted at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in the West End on April 30, 1958. The show would run for 2,281 performances there. Since then there have been numerous revivals in both New York and London, each wining slews of awards for its casts just as the original production swept the Tony Awards. There have been touring companies, productions in almost every language conceivable—an interesting challenge for a play revolving around English pronunciation,—regional, community, college, and high school productions.  In 1964 MGM brought My Fair Lady to the screen as one of the grandest of its musicals. But not without controversy. Although Harrison, Holloway, and other members of the Broadway cast were signed, studio big wigs did not think Julie Andrews was a big enough star to carry the expensive film. They cast Audrey Hepburn as Eliza. Broadway fans were furious. Many vowed never to see the film—a threat virtually none of them carried out. Hepburn’s songs were dubbed by Marni Nixon, the soprano behind many non-signing Hollywood actresses. A few years ago the Wouldn’t It be Loverly scene surfaced with Hepburn singing. She turns out to have had a pleasant, if breathy voice, and acquitted the song quite well. But convention decreed a traditional stage soprano sing the part. If the movie could be made today, she would probably be allowed to sing her own songs. Andrews got her revenge, however, when she was cast the same year in Mary Poppins which became Disney’s biggest grossing live action picture. She also took home the Academy Award for Best Actress. Hepburn herself was not even nominated despite turning in a charming performance. Not the My Fair Lady was snubbedat the Oscars. The film took home the statuettes for Best Picture; Best Director, George Cukor; Best Actor for Harrison; and five other awards. In addition Learner was nominated for Best Adapted Screen Play, Holloway for Best Supporting Actor, and Gladys Cooper for Best Supporting Actress as Mrs. Higgins. It remains one of the most beloved films of all time. |
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On March 13, 1852 the first cartoon featuring a figure identified as Uncle Sam appeared in the New York Lantern, a weekly paper. But Uncle Sam as a personification of the United States dates back to the War of 1812when a sharp tongued but shrewd Yankee farmer was used to disparageMr. Madison’s War. This first reached the printed page in the 1816 book The Adventures of Uncle Sam in Search of his Lost Honor by one Fredrick Augustus Fidfaddy, an obvious nom de plume.  Was Troy, New York Army purchasing agent Samuel Wilson really Uncle Sam? I wouldn't bet on it. Some trace the nameto a Troy, New York man, Samuel Wilson, known locally as Uncle Sam, who inspected provisions purchased for the Army. He affixed a stamp with the initials U.S. to the goods. Although monuments have been erected celebrating Sam Wilson as Uncle Sam, most scholars now scoff at the idea. More likely Uncle Sam is simply derived from the initials U.S. on military buttons and branded on Army mules and horses.  Uncle Sam supplanted and earlier figure, another Yankee named Brother Jonathan who appeared in the humor magazine Puck. Sam seems to have appropriated Jonathan's wardrobe. By the time of the Civil War, Uncle Sam had displaced Puckmagazine’s Brother Jonathan—another Yankee—and was rivaling the allegorical female figure of Columbia as a national personification. Cartoonistsin popular magazines like Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated were showing him complete with white chin whiskers, striped pants, and an old fashion cut-away coat.  The most famous Uncle Sam of all was created by illustrator James Montgomery Flagg and used on this famous Army recruiting poster which adapted Lord Kitchener's pose in an equally famous World War I British poster. The most famous version of Uncle Sam is the one created by James Montgomery Flagg in 1916 featuring a grim Uncle Sam pointing directly at the viewer. The original version was featured on the cover of Leslie’s Weekly with the phrase “What are you doing for Preparedness.” It was soon made into an Army recruiting poster with the bold words, “I Want You for the U.S. Army.” The pose and slogan were actually adapted from a hugely popular British recruiting poster featuring the image of Lord Kitchener. The poster was re-issued during World War II and versions of it can still be found in most recruiting stations. The iconic image has been parodied many times.  Uncle Sam has been appropriated by both political parties and by the Left and the Right, but as a nationalist symbol he has often been adopted by racists, xenophobes, and anti-immigration zealots. Sam worked his way into popular culture in many ways. As accurately portrayed in the classic MGM musical bio Yankee Doodle Dandy, George M. Cohan’s father portrayed Uncle Sam in the Four Cohan’s vaudeville act and George employed him in his patriotic musical extravaganzas. The Uncle Sam stilt walkers became a staple of circuses and Fourth of July parades. He has been employed in countless animated cartoons and is regularly exploited in advertising. In the 1960’s and’70’s Lar “America First” Daly was a perennial candidate for Mayor of Chicago, Governor of Illinois, and President of the United States always campaigning in an Uncle Sam hat and suit. Uncle Sam hats were a regular motif at Tea Party events and Republican campaign rallies. But don’t blame Sam, it’s not his fault. |
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Raoul Walsh behind the camera as young director. |
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As second unit director of The Life of General Villa shot on location in Mexico with Pancho Villa and his Army of Northern Mexico, Walsh filmed actual battle scenes. |
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Walsh as John Wilkes Booth in The Birth of a Nation. |
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Walsh's first wife, actress Miriam Cooper. |
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The Big Trail in 1930 for Fox was an expensive epic that could not recoup its massive costs. The failure was a set back for director Walsh and his star discovery, a very young ex-USC football player he renamed John Wayne. |
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Walsh listening to a screen writer with Rita Hayworth and Olivia de Havilland on the set of The Strawberry Blonde. |
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Pal James Cagney visiting Errol Flynn and Walsh on the set of They Died With Their Boots On. |
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James Cagney in the terrifying climax of Walsh's White Heat a top a burning oil refinery. |
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Walsh on the set of A Band of Angels with Yvonne De Carlo and Clark Gable. |
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Walsh brought Leon Uris's novel Battle Ground to the big screen with Aldo Rey. Tab Hunter, and James Whitmore was a big hit. His follow-up, Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead was not. |
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Walsh could cut a dapper figure. |
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Memes reflect the call of poetry in these times. |
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Philip Charles Denofrio, raconteur, sonnet maven and host of poetry nights at the Hidden Pearl in McHenry is one of the featured poets. |
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Patrick Murfin, author of We Build Temple in the Heart and Tree of Life Social Justice Team Chair will host the evening. |
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Extinction Rebellion, the youth-led movement inspired by Gretta Thungburg, is one of four grassroots resistance groups which people can vote to support with suggested donations of $10 or more. |
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The Land Act of 1820 is a nearly forgotten piece of legislation passed by Congress which opened the Old Northwest Territory and Missouri to an avalanche of new settlement. It was a byproductof the Missouri Compromise. Population growth in the west had been stymied by the almost constant bloody Indian warfare in the region from the end of the Revolution through the War of 1812 and by the high land pricesand large minimum parcels required by the Land Ordinance of 1785. When a financial panic swept the nation in 1819 it became impossible for most would-be settlers to borrow the money needed to legally buy the land. To escape high land prices mostly Scotch-Irish pioneers often pushed out ahead of land surveyors and squatted on land. When the governmentcaught up with them they argued that their improvementson the land should be subtractedfrom the cost. They were often displaced and pushed further west. 
To make settlement more affordable and thus to reduce squatting, the new act reduced the minimum tract from 160 to 80 acres, a manageable family farm in the generally rich soil of the west. Buying land exclusively on credit—as was common among land speculators—was eliminated. The price was reduced from $1.65 (set in 1804) to $1.25 per acre with a relatively affordable $100 down payment. The very poorest, who probably could not even afford the necessary tools and equipment necessary to bring the land into production, were eliminated, but the cost was low enough to be manageable by many. Although speculators could still form land companies and buy large blocks of tracts, the recurring financial panics over the next few years drove many to bankruptcy while owner-operated farms could endure hard times on a subsistence basis. 
In the end most of the farm land in the region sold at, or not much above the Federal price. The success of the policy was astounding. Illinois, for instance, had a population of about 55,000 in 1820. Over the next 40 years the population doubled every ten years to almost 900,000 in 1860. Land sales were vigorous enough that even at the reduced price enough revenuewas generated to operate the nearly skeletal Federal government. In fact they provided enough income that they were largely responsible for the Federal Debt to be completely paid off and retired—if only briefly—during the administration of Andrew Jackson. Such a rapid explosion for population also had a dramatic effect on government as new Congressional seats were allotted with every new census giving the west considerable regional clout. By the eve of the Civil War the states covered by the act were no longer on the frontier. They were well settled, prosperous, and with the advantages of easy access to marketsvia the great river system and the new railroads, had become the bread basket to the nation. |
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March 7, 1965 was Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. On that day massed Alabama State Police attackedpeaceful demonstrators attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on a march from Selma to the state capitalat Montgomery to protest suppression of voting rights. Members of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been conducting voter registration drivesin the area since 1963 and had encounteredescalating violence. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,efforts stepped up. On July 6 of that year SNCC leader John Lewisattempted to lead a march on the county court house to register voters. He and other marchers were beaten and arrested. A few days later a local judge handed down a sweeping injunction against more than two people assembling to even talk about voter registration.  Two SCLC organizers arrived to join the voter registration effort. Diane Nash like John Lewis was a veteran of the Nashville public accommodation sit-in campaign of 1960. Her husband, Rev. James Bevel was also a seasoned non-violent activist. Together they were two of the best the organization had. SNCC leaders appealed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). SCLC leaders including the Rev. James Bevel, who had been conducting his own voter registration projects, and his wife, Diane Nash, a SNCC founder who had cut her teeth in the Nashville youth crusade sit-ins with Lewis, came to Selma to join the effort. But the national organization, busy with other efforts, had not yet committed. Finally, on January 2 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Selma bringing with him the national spotlight and officially launcheda new Selma Voting Rights Movement. Marches on court houses resumed there and in surrounding counties.  They body of Jimmie Lee Jackson, first martyr of the Selma campaign. After leading a night march to the Perry County Court House in Marion, Jackson was shot trying to protect his mother and grandfather from a beating by police who charged into a cafe where they had taken refuge. His death galvanized the campaign locally, but attracted little national press attention. On February 18 a young man, a Baptist elder who had tried four times to register, Jimmie Lee Johnson was shot trying to defend his mother and grandfather from police clubs after a night march on the Perry County court house in Marion. When Johnson died of his wounds days later, Bevel called for a protest march on the state capital from Selma on March 7. On the day of the march John Lewis, the Rev. Hosea Williams of the SCLC, and local leaders like Amelia Boynton led about 600 marchers. When they attempted to cross the bridge, they were met bymassed troopers and ordered to disperse. Lewis attempted to speak to the commanding officer but was shoved to the ground and beaten. Police charged the crowd with clubs and gas. Mounted officers attacked from the flanks. Scenes of horrific violence were captured on film and soon broadcast on television helping to swing public sympathy to the marchers. King responded with a call torally in Selma for a second march. Hundreds from around the country, including many clergy, responded to the call. Lawyers appealed to Federal Judge Frank Minis Johnson, who was suspected to be sympathetic, to lift the local ban on marches. The judge took the issue under advisement but issued a temporary restraining order against resuming the march until he could make hisruling. With thousands gathered, King felt he had to move but did not want to alienate the judge. On March 9 he led about 7,000 to the bridge but then knelt in prayerand turned the crowd back, a move that was harshly criticized by SNCC leaders.  Rev. James Reeb, a young Unitarian Universalist minister was with two other when he was beaten to death by Klansmen in Selma on the eve of a second march. The death of a white minister did grab attention and President Lyndon Baines Johnson used it to advance the Voting Right Act of 1965. That evening three Unitarian Universalist ministers, James Reeb, Clark Olsen, and Orloff Miller who had responded to King’s call were attacked and beaten outside a Selma cafe known to be a hangout for Klansmen. Reeb died of his wounds on March 11 in Birmingham after the Selmahospital refused to treat him. On hearing of Reeb’s death the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Association meeting in Boston voted to adjournand re-convene in Selma. UUA President Dana McLean Greeley and eventually half of the active ministers in the Association headed south. The death of a white minister galvanized public opinion in a way that Jimmie Johnson’s had not. A shaken President Lyndon Johnson submitted a Voting Rights Act to Congress on March 15 after failing to get Governor George Wallace to back off from attacks on demonstrators. A week after Reeb’s death Judge Johnson finally issued the long-anticipated rulingupholding the First Amendment rightsto assemble and protest.  John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, Juanita Abernathy, Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King, Frederick Reese and Hosea Williams lead the March through Montgomery to the Capitol. On March 21 the final and successful marchon Montgomery set off with King, Lewis, Bevel, Williams leading the way with a bevy of national clergy. They were protectedby 2,000 Federal troops and U. S. Marshalls on the four-day march through hostile territory to the capital. After a triumphant rally on the capitol steps, Viola Liuzzo, a young Detroit mother and U.U. laywoman was driving a black marcher back to Selma, when she was shot by Ku Klux Klan members. A federal informant was in the Klansmen’s car.  Tennessee born Viola Liuzzo, a white U.U. laywoman and mother from Detroit marched from Selma to Montgomery often barefoot as in this photo. She was murdered driving a Black Marcher back to Selma after the final rally at the State Capital. She was the third of the Martyrs of Selma who also included Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels who was shotgunned to death on August 30 after spending a week in jail for a Lowndes County, demonstration, a part of the greater Selma campaign. The Voting Rights Act passed Congress and was signed into law by the President on August 6. Within year 7000 new Black voters were enrolled in Selma’s Dallas County. In 1966 Sheriff Jim Clark, who was responsiblefor much of the early violence in Selma, lost his bid for re-election. John Lewis would go on to be elected to Congress. The Edmund Pettus Bridge is now marked as part of the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Trail, a National Historic Trail.  The 50th Anniversary march included President Barack Obama and his family, Congressman John Lewis and other veterans of the original march and former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura. Always outspoken, Diane Lewis boycotted the reunion march to protest Bush's inclusion. In the 50th Anniversary year of 2015, tens of thousands joined Congressman Lewis and other veterans of the original marches along with President Barack Obama, his family, and former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura in a symbolic and triumphant march across the Bridge. The same year the film Selma directed by Ana DuVernayand starring David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, and Oprah Winfrey opened to high praise, great reviews, and a slew of awards and nominations. Now, five years latter race relations fester in the wake of a resurgence of White nationalism and the Ku Klux Klan and similar hate groups and Republicans in states North and South alike, Congress, and in Donald Trump’s White House and Justice Department launch wave after wave of voter suppression initiatives, the legacy of Selma has never been more meaningful.  This year Congressman Lewis, who is battling pancreatic cancer was joined four Democratic presidential candidates—Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma Sunday. Earlier members of a Selma congregation turned their backs on Bloomberg as he spoke at the church in protest to his stop and frisk racial profiling policies as Mayor. Former Vice President Joe Biden who enjoys overwhelming support by Southern Black voters was given a pass for his absence but some thought the no-show by Senator Bernie Sanders was a slap and an indication of his disconnectionwith the Black community despite Sanders’ long history of Civil Rights activism dating back to his days as a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and arrests in Chicago in the ‘60’s. In his comments Congressman Lewis said: Fifty-five years ago, a few of our children attempted to march ... across this bridge. We were beaten, we were tear-gassed. I thought I was going to die on this bridge. But somehow and some way, God almighty helped me here…We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before… I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to give in. We’re going to continue to fight. We need your prayers now more than ever before. We must use the vote as a nonviolent instrument or tool to redeem the soul of America… To each and every one of you, especially you young people ... go out there, speak up, speak out. Get in the way. Get in good trouble. Necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America. |
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The caucus and primary results map after Super Tuesday--Biden 10 states, Sanders 6 + split with Buttigieg in Iowa, Bloomberg U.S, Virgin Island (not shown. Biden surged ahead in delegate count. Note—I started this post the morning after Super Tuesday. It was painful. And with the subsequent rapid events, I had to scrap, edit, and do-over sections multiple times. Even as I type this and prepare to post, something else may have made the whole exercise obsolete. But for what it’s worth, here is my take. This is not the post I had intended to write. The plan was to do the Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout endorsements in the March 17 Illinois Primaryin the aftermath of Super Tuesday voting. But the results Tuesday night, which the TV talking heads kept calling stunning or “couldn’t be foreseen”, upset that apple cart. The reanimation of Joe Biden’s corpse after a big win in South Carolina and drinking the fresh blood of Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and the long-time-in-the-refrigerator plasma of Beto O’Rourke was a painful gut punch to progressive Democrats especially Elizabeth Warren fans—my personal favorite—and a stake-in-the-heart to Republican re-tread Michael Bloomberg. Recapping what you have probably already heard:  · Biden swept the South by comfortable margins on the strength of the continuing affection for him among African-Americanvoters. He took Massachusetts despite running behind the combined progressive vote of Sanders and Warren with Maine a near toss-up and scored wins in Minnesota, Oklahoma, and perhaps somewhat surprising in Texas. He did well among older white voters except for a sliver of unrepentant ‘60’s radicals who turn out to vote in greater percentages than other demographics.  · Sanders underperformed expectation and nowhere seemed to build on the enthusiastic base of his 2016 run. He won only his home state of Vermont by a narrower than expected margin plus Colorado and Utah with continuing strong support among younger voters and Latinos in the West. He is still the heavy favorite in the big prize, California but complete results from that state won’t be reported for days and his margin looks likely to be narrower than expected. In a mild surprise, he came in second to Biden in Texas where he led in early returns but where voter suppression manipulations of polling place may have skewed the results. In most states in play, Sanders did not crack 30% of the total vote despite consistent national polling that showed him as easily beatingTrump in November. And despite a spate of important endorsements by key Black leaders he did not pick up any increased support from Black voters. Except for Millennials and younger voters, he did not do well among women, many of whom have bitter memories of his 2016 campaign against Hillary Clinton and the Bernie-or-Busters who sat out the election in November. He continues to be the strong favorite among younger voters, but their turn-out did not quite match 2016.  · The big loser Tuesday night was Bloomberg. It was a ray of hope on an otherwise dismal night that despite spending hundreds of millions of his own money and torturingus all with unremitting TV advertising for months, flooding social media with ad buys, aggressive direct mail, and hiring staffers by the carload all he had to show for it was a win in American Samoa. Americans were flat out not buying what he was selling and resented another Billionaire trying to buy the election and they recognized a Democrat by convenience only as an unwelcome interloper. He counted on Biden’s collapse to become the savior of panicked anti-Sanders establishment Democrats. He missed the necessary 15% mark to earn delegates in Texas and will probably do the same in California. Despite defiant talk early Tuesday, after the results began coming in Bloomberg slunk back to New York to “consider his options.” Wednesday he announced he was suspending his campaign and endorsing Biden. He even promised to keep his huge field staff on his payroll until November to work with Biden, which would be a big boost. In retrospect it may be that Warren’s greatest service was knee capping Bloomberg in his first debate effectively exposing him as the weak candidate he really was.  · Warren failed to even win her home state of Massachusetts, coming in third there despite her general popularity there as a Senator. A strong favorite of many women and progressives leery of the second-comingof Sanders because of her well-articulatedand detailed plans on all major issues except perhaps for some voters in Minnesota Warren failed to pick up much support from female drop-outs Kamala Harris and Klobuchar and although she picked up late support from Emily’s List, the feminist super-pac she has not marshalled the support that Clinton commanded last time out. In Michigan Tuesday night she vowed to stay in it to the Convention in the hopes that she could pick up support in up-coming votes in Mid-West Rust Bucket states and New York. But she would have to battle Sanders’ appeal to Obama-turned-Trump voters and the mathematics of Biden becoming and “inevitable” choice. He hopes to survive to become a second or third ballot alternative to beat Biden at the convention rapidly evaporated. There was natural pressure on her to drop out and join with Sanders in a unified progressive front but personal relations between the two former Senate colleagues and progressive allies have become strained to the breaking point. On Thursday Warren bowed to the inevitable in a gracious and moving statement in Massachusetts. For every American who desperately wants to see our nation healed and some decency and honor restored to our government, this fight goes on. And sure, the fight may take a new form, but I will be in that fight, and I want you in this fight with me. We will persist… Gender in this race, you know, that is the trap question for every woman. If you say, “Yeah, there was sexism in this race,” everyone says, “Whiner!” And if you say, “No, there was no sexism,” about a bazillion women think, “What planet do you live on?” I promise you this: I’ll have a lot more to say on that subject later on.  Warren demurred from making any quick endorsement. Ultimately, of course, she will. In the meantime both of the Old White Men will court her and probably offer a Vice Presidential nod. But Warren, who cares deeply for her avid supporters, will undoubtedly want to see what they think. Judging from comments I have seen that could break either way. · In the end, Biden was the beneficiary of what Chris Mathews used to call “Big Mo”—momentum. Not only did he gather most of the votes of the late drop-outs, he got the lion’s share of late deciders. Many of these were Democrats who always said that they would support anyone who could beat Trump even if he/she did not agree with them on all issues. Even a majority of Democrats who agreed with Sanders and Warren on issues like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, student loan forgiveness, and income inequality feared that Bernie’s socialist brand would frighten voters away in November. It might not be fair and you can blame the media or a cabal of party elites but the perception was undeniable. I have known Sanders and Warren supporter who came to that conclusion in the last days and bit their tongues and voted for Biden. Ideological purists will complain that this was the worst sort of lesser evilism but I think it was something else—it was a defensive throw-on-brakes-the-runaway-train-before-it-hits-the-washed-out-trestlefor a last shot to beat Trump and avert out-and-out fascism. At stake are critical Supreme Court appointments and rolling back the most dangerous of Trump’s many executive fiats with the support of a Democratic House majority and maybe even control of the Senate. Not such an irrational thought even if Biden will not move forward with the most ambitious progressive reforms and programs. All of that you probably have already heard. But if the contest has finally been narrowed down to a mano a mano brawl between Biden and Sanders, what is the way forward? It’s not really over yet. Sanders has a narrow path to the nomination if he does well in the Rust Belt states, Pacific Northwest, and New Yorkespecially with a boost from Warren and/or her supporters. He could still arrive at the convention with the most elected delegates or at least close behind Biden. But there is not much room for him to pick up additional support from the so-called super delegates who are mostly office holders and party regulars. And there seems no way for him to scoop up more support after a first ballot. But things could still change before the Convention. · Biden can be Biden—commit some gaffe or series of gaffes that make him look either dodderingor like an idiot. · At his age a health crisis is not out of the question. Nor is, alas, an assassination attempt. · The Coronavirus could become pandemic or an unforeseeable national emergency could alter the election environment overnight. · Some of the mud slung by the Trump campaign, Rudy Giuliani, or partisan Senate investigations could stick, at least in the public mind. · Chaos stirred up by Russian election meddling could sow greater division among Democrats, possibly even engendering a full scale party split. · Worst case scenario—Trump could become emboldened enough to stage a real anti-democratic (note small d) preemptive coup. In a tight two-person race much will ride on each candidate’s selection of a running mate and the timing of the anointment. Unveiling one at Convention is an old-fashion non-starter. Each needs to make a choice that would broaden their base and reach-out to parts of the party where they are weakest. But both may have trouble overcoming their own predispositions. Sanders with a clear ideology will want someone committed to his vision. Elizabeth Warren would fit that bill perhaps picking up support from women but she is unlikely to settle for second place instead of an influential Senate seat unless she feels that Sanders’ age will make him a one term president. His ticket would get the greatest boost from a strong Black second. Kamala Harris probably wouldn’t consider it. Corey Booker or a senior House Democrat might. His best bet would probably be former Georgia governor candidate and anti-voter repression activist Stacey Abrams who has already announced her willingnessto run for vice-president on any Democratic ticket. It would be a wise choice for Sanders, but he is still apt to pick a more obscure white guy with solid social democratic credentials. In his heart of heart Biden has just one dream running mate—Michelle Obama which would tie him more strongly than ever to the Obama/Biden team that he made the centerpiece of his early primary campaigns. Barack Obama did not endorse Biden or any other candidate in the primaries but each of the final four ran spots with the former president singing their praises. Privately Obama made no secret of his feelings that Sanders must be stopped and he was widely seen as helping orchestrate the quick withdrawals and Biden endorsements by the other proclaimed moderates. Rumors swirled that despite long denying any political aspirations for herself Michelle could be available as a fire wall to save Biden. Now that he might not need a firewall, could Michelle consider the second spot? It would make her an immediate favorite in 2024 if Biden opts for a single term. The most admired American womanwould certainly be an attractive pick. But I am dubious about whether she is really up for it. Absent Michelle, Elizabeth Warren would be a good pick to unify the party, but the same arguments against her acceptance—minus, perhaps, a personal feud—apply as to her availability to Sanders. Biden has his Black base loyally sewn up so he doesn’t need any other Black person except Michelle on the ticket. He could really use a woman. Klobuchar does not expand his base. Perhaps he could consider former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill who is available without leaving a critical Senate seat, or former Planned Parenthood chief Cecile Richards. I suspect trolls have circulated speculation that he might even tap Hillary Clinton—a move that would signal a direct attempt to drive Berniecrats out of the party. On the other hand he could pick a much younger running mate to reassure those who worry about his age—Buttigieg and O’Rourke are the most obvious choices but Representative Juan Castro could drain support for Sanders among the Latino voters he has been courting. All of this, of course, is just hot stove league bull shitting. For many of us now the wounds of Warren’s shipwreckon the shoals of misogyny are too raw and painful to play the game. Eventually, as Facebook friend said, “We will be good soldiers and unite behind the nominee [probably Biden] but we need some time to rage and grieve.” |
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Trump hands off hot potato to designated patsy Mike Pence. |
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