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We Are—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
5 July 2020 at 18:46

We Are—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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5 July 2020 at 18:46

By: Patrick Murfin

We Are performed by Dr. Ysaÿe Barnwell and the UUA General Assembly 2020 Virtual Choir. A week ago today Unitarian Universalists around the world were able to log on to view the virtual Sunday worship service of the UUA General Assembly. The inspiring service was led by Rev. Joan Javier-Duval of the Unitarian Church of Montpelier, Vermont with Rev. Mykal Slack of Black Lives UU and included wonderful music. Particularly fine was We Are performed the GA virtual choir featuring a lead solo by the song’s composer Dr. Ysaÿe Barnwell. Dr. Ysaÿe Barnwell. composer of We Are. Barnwell was formerly a member of the a cappella ensemble Sweet Honey in the Rock and was a founder of the Jubilee Singers at All Souls Church, Unitarian in W...

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Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote—The 26th Amendment
5 July 2020 at 13:48

Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote—The 26th Amendment

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5 July 2020 at 13:48

By: Patrick Murfin

On July 5, 1971 the 26th Amendment which guaranteed 18 to 21 year old citizensthe right to vote in all elections was officially added to the U.S. Constitution. A Joint Congressional Resolution proposing the amendment had cleared both houses by March 23. On July 1 North Carolina became the 38th state to ratify the amendment—the necessary three quarters of the states. No other Constitutional amendment has come close to the speed in which the 26th Amendment was ratified—just 69 days. On July 5 President Richard Nixon signed official certification of the amendment.

The idea of reducing the voting age had been kicked around since West Virginia Democratic Senator Harley Kilgore proposed it 1941 with the vocal support of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt when the Draft was beefing up the Army on the eve of America’s entry into World War II. After the war began, the proposal was lost in the shuffle. The Cold War and the very hot war in Korea revived interest, but most states signaled their opposition. In his 1954 State of the Union address Dwight D. Eisenhower, became the first president to publicly support prohibiting age-based denials of suffrage for those 18 and older. By 1955 just two states—Georgia and Kentucky had taken action to lower the voting age, mostly due to internal political issues.

Students march for the vote circa 1968.

But the Vietnam war, in which reluctant youth were being drafted in large numbers as cannon fodderbecause the government feared the political consequences of wide-spread mobilization of the National Guard and the Reserves, brought the issue to a head once more. Promoted by a wave of student and anti-war activism demonstrations “Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote” became a powerful slogan. The student uprisings, urban rioting, and the violent confrontations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention caused many political leaders of both parties to find some way of mollifying the street rage.

In 1970, Senator Ted Kennedy proposed amending the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to lower the voting age nationally. On June 22, 1970, President but expressed his reservationsin his signing statement.

Despite my misgivings about the constitutionality of this one provision, I have signed the bill. I have directed the Attorney General to cooperate fully in expediting a swift court test of the constitutionality of the 18-year-old provision.

Oregon and Texas challenged the law in court, and the case came before the Supreme Court in 1970 as Oregon v. Mitchell. The Court struck down the provisions that established 18 as the voting age in state and local elections while upholding the extension of voting rights in Federal elections. The decision resulted in states being able to maintain 21 as the voting age in state and local elections, but being required to establish separate voter rolls so that voters between 18 and 20 years old could vote in federal elections—a bureaucratic nightmare that threatened to cause chaosin the up-coming 1972 elections.

Indiana Senator Birch Bayh rushed a proposed Constitutional amendment through his sub-committee an on to adoption by the Senate.

Indiana Democratic Senator Birch Bayh, the chair of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments had been holding hearings on an amendment to lower the voting age since 1968. After Oregon v. Mitchell, Bayh surveyed election officials in 47 states and found that registering an estimated 10 million young people in a separate system for federal elections would cost approximately $20 million and concludedthat most states could not change their state constitutions in time for the 1972 election, mandating national actionto avoid “chaos and confusion” at the polls. On March 2, 1971, Bayh's subcommittee and the House Judiciary Committee approved the proposed constitutional amendment.

The official Joint Resolution of Congress submitting the 26th Amendment to the states fro ratification

On March 10, 1971, the Senate voted 94–0 in favor of proposing the amendment and the House followed on March 23 by a vote of 401–19 in favor.

The proposed amendment read:

Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States, who are eighteen years of age or older, to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of age.

Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

On the very day the amendment was submittedby Congress Connecticut, Delaware, Minnesota, Tennessee, and Washington ratified it followed by Hawaii and Massachusetts the next day. After that it was a scramble by the states to get on board, although some did so reluctantly feeling that they were being fiscally blackmailed into taking action. Four additional states ratified it later in 1971 and South Dakota finally passed it in 2014. Seven states—Florida, Kentucky, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, and Utah—have still not taken any action on the amendment.

Richard Nixon signed the Amendment as a witness surrounded by Congressional pages.

After signing as a witness to the certification of the amendment by the Administrator of General Services Robert Kunzig President Nixon said:

As I meet with this group today, I sense that we can have confidence that America’s new voters, America’s young generation, will provide what America needs as we approach our 200th birthday, not just strength and not just wealth but the “Spirit of ‘76” a spirit of moral courage, a spirit of high idealism in which we believe in the American dream, but in which we realize that the American dream can never be fulfilled until every American has an equal chance to fulfill it in their own life.

But in fact Nixon feared that young voters would reject his re-election. Democrats we hopeful that they would. Neither was correct. Many of the youth activists were disillusioned by electoral politics after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the ’68 Democratic Convention debacle. They failed for the most part to rally to Senator George McGovern’s candidacy the way many had for Kennedy or had “come clean for Gene” McCarthy. McGovern accepted the nominationof a badly fractured and demoralized party and was star-crossed by disaster after disaster. Nixon romped to reelection in and Electoral College landslide carrying all states but Massachusetts and claiming 60.7% of the popular vote.

In subsequent elections voters 21 and under consistently registered and voted in far lower numbers than older voters. And polling showed that when they did vote, they were far from radical. Most consistently reflected the political parties and choices of their parents.

The youth vote did occasionally affect local elections, especially in college towns like Madison, Wisconsin where they helped former student activist and avowed Socialist Paul R. Soglin get elected and re-elected as Mayor. They also influenced hyper-local contests, especially in favor of school referendums.

A screen save from MTV's first Rock the Vote campaign in 1990.

Many attempts at mobilizing the youth vote have been made, most significantly MTV’s Rock the Vote Campaign that began in 1990. But young voters did not have a significant influence until Barack Obamafor whom they turned out strongly in 2008 and 2012. But they largely failed to show up for Congressional off year elections contributing Democrats losing the House of Representatives.

Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary campaign did mobilize many youth. The failure of significant numbers of them to support Hillary Clinton in November has been blamedfor her narrow loss to Donald Trump but in the end it was probably not the decisive cause of her defeat. This year beyond a hard core of support, Sanders did not do so well among younger voters, many of whom spread their support among his rivalsespecially Elizabeth Warren. They showed little enthusiasm for Joe Biden. Can he get them to turn out for him in the fall?

Youth leaders if the March for Our Lives have extended their activism to Vote for Our Lives.

Probably, because young voters especially regard another four years as an existential threat. The survivors of the 2018 Margery Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida organized the March for Our Lives movement and subsequent drive for youth voter registration. Many climate change activists women’s groupshave also backed action as have many Black Lives Matter marchers in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd and others. Voter registration drives have been ramped up across the nation and many hope that the wide-spread adoption of vote-by-mail during the Coronavirus pandemic will also increase the youth vote.

That’s what Trump and his Republican enablers fear, which is why they are pouring millions of dollars into backing wide-spread voter suppression.

Could this finally be the year when young voters finally live up to the full promise of the 26th Amendment?

WWUUD?
Independence or Interdependence That is the Question
4 July 2020 at 11:03

Independence or Interdependence That is the Question

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4 July 2020 at 11:03

By: Patrick Murfin

Congress Voting Independence by Edward Savage circa 1800.

Today is America’s great patriotic holiday. We call it the Fourth of July, or just the Fourth. But that is just a date. The official Federal holiday is called Independence Day in celebration of the adoption of the document that proclaimed separation from England, its King, and Parliament. The Fourth was the date that wrangling over the wording of the document was completed and the final draft was dispatched to the printer. The actual vote to approve independence had been cast by the Continental Congress two days earlier, July 2, 1776 and John Adams, the prime moverof the resolution believed that was the date which would be marked and celebrated.

The committee to draft an Independence resolution at work. Left to right Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman.

The soaring rhetoric of what we now call the Declaration of Independence was crafted mostly by young Virginia delegate Thomas Jefferson, a member of a committee that included Adams, senior sage Benjamin Franklin, plus Robert Livingston of New York and Roger Sherman of Connecticut—the latter two contributing almost nothing to the work. Jefferson was wounded to the quick that Congress slashed almost a quarter of hisverbiage, including passagesdecrying the slave trade. But his words still had undeniable power. As soon as a messenger could gallop to Massachusetts, General George Washington had them read to the assembled troops laying siege to British-held Boston.

The document began:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

The Declaration of Independence as first printed and circulated as a broadside.

After serving it purpose, the Declaration had no further legal importance. None of its noble sentiments had the force of law. Neither the Constitution, which formedour present government structure and was adopted years later after the conclusion of the lengthy Revolutionary War, nor the Bill of Rights made mention of them. In practice the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were severely limited and did not include at first even non-propertied citizens, let alone women, children, and slaves—all of whom were chattel of their masters—or the Native peoples with whom they shared the continent.

But Jefferson’s words would not go away and would time and again become a call to “the better angels of our Nature” in the words of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln famously drew inspiration from the document in the Gettysburg Address and in his Emancipation Proclamation, just as the ladies at Seneca Falls had paraphrased them in their Declaration of Sentiments on the Rights of Women. They would inspire abolitionists, the labor movement, Suffragists, the Civil Rights Movement, the struggle for lesbian/gay/transgender rights, as well as other peoples across the globe. Slowly, and at great sacrificesand often bloody cost Jefferson’s vision of liberty has become wider and more inclusive.

Some conservative intellectualsrecognizing the power of the inspiration now argue that the words were mere convenient propaganda of the moment and that only the “clear language and original intent” of the Constitution— meaning a government of, by, and for white propertied males—should bind society. So far that is a distinctly minority view, but present events show it is gaining traction.

Speaking of original intent, many Americans don’t have a clear understanding of what the Founders meant by Independence. We think of it as the national independence of a nation statecalled the United States of America. The Delegatessaw it as a declaration by 13 united sovereign states, here-to-fore colonies, in a loose alliance. Not a single delegate thought that they were creating a united nation and no state legislature would have approved of a document that made the claim.

The emergency of an already underway revolutionary war necessitated some cooperation among the former colonies as advocated by this famous political cartoon. But the reluctant snake was not really whole or healthy.

The minimal government overseen by the Continental Congress had almost no power over the states. It could only beg money to keep an Army in the fieldand could pass few laws binding over its member states. After the adoption of the documents only marginally more authority was granted under theArticles of Confederation in 1777 and its ratification by the States in 1781.

For its part the English Crown and Parliament likewise considered each of its rebellious colonies a unique entityand on that basis refused to treat with representatives of Congress until the French entered into the conflict and turned itinto a literal world war threatening to bleed and bankrupt the United Kingdom.

After the war was finally over the Articles proved too weak to perform basic functions including facilitating trade between the member states which were levying internal tariffs against one another. It also could not raise the considerable money needed to retire the enormous war debt—much of it owed to former soldiers and suppliers to the Army as well as bond holdersboth here and in Europe. After much wrangling and anguish, the states ceded some authority to a new government under the Constitution. But there was still not much sense of a National identity. Most people considered themselves citizens of their states.

Many historians credit Lincoln's Gettysburg Address for re-establishing the Declaration of Independence as a foundational national document and identifying it to with an indivisible nation.

It took decades for the interdependence of the states to begin to take hold—and that was mortally tested by sectional differences over slavery and the eventual Civil War. Most historians now believe that the United States finally consolidated as a nation at gun point after the great national conflagration. Two World Wars, the Cold War, and eventual national prosperity helped create a widely embraced national identity that we celebrate with much flag waving on the Fourth of July.

But even today, not everyone thinks it is a great idea—ask the League of the South, libertarian neo-confederate think tanks, and the rise of some of the new so-called Alt-right.

In the long run, probably more serious is the consequence of the globalization of theeconomy and the information revolution of the World Wide Weband computerization which many economists and futurists believe is rendering the old concept of national independence obsolete and perhaps even threatens the viability of nation states as the dominant institutions of the world.

The future is now for many globalists. Instantaneous communications; rapid transportation connections on land, sea, and air; and the trading system that has evolvedsince the end of World War II all mean that manufacturing will move wherever production costs—mostly labor—is the cheapest and natural resources compete in a global marketrequiring economies of scale. This has already destroyed the semi-autonomous economies of many nation states and redealt the wealth cards. There are winners and losers in this process, but both critics and enthusiastic supporters of the new system believe that it is mostly inevitable.

In this scenario, various international connections—treaty and trade agreements, transnational organizations from the United Nations to regional groupings like the European Union, banking and economicgroups like the International Monetary Fund, and Non-Governmental Organizations of many types largely supplant national governments. Developments like Bitcoin and other currency alternativeseven detach the world economy from the Dollar, Euro, Yen, Ruble and other national currencies.

A widely circulated anti-globalism meme.

Optimists hope that this interdependent world, after natural birth pangs, will result in a fairer and more equitable distribution ofwealth across the globe and ultimately raise the standard of living to billions while curbing the hoarding of wealth by rich nations, most notably the United States.

Pessimists fear instead that a libertarian global free market will turn into a Hobbesian war of all against allwith an unaccountable oligarchygaining the vast majority of benefits and most of the power.

The rise of populist nationalism represented by Donald Trump in the U.S; by forces in Europe where Brexit triumphed in Britain; neo-fascist governments in the Philippines, Turkey, Poland and other former Soviet satellites or republics; and Brazil are a direct result of resistance to the trend of global interdependence. It turns out people want not only economic protection for their narrow self-interest, but also to preserve their very identities which are defined by ethnicity, language, religion, and culture. They want to insure national independence.

Meanwhile the world is engulfed in crises—out of control climate changeand a global pandemic—that can only be addressed by global cooperation, the essence of interdependence.

This should not be and cannot be an either/or choice. The metaphor of choice is a magnet with its north and south polls which cannot exist without each other. The world will have to find way to be both/and—both independent and interdependent. There will be tensions and stress, but the alternatives are just choices of dystopian nightmares.

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The Real Birth of the Automobile Age and a Woman Driver
3 July 2020 at 11:05

The Real Birth of the Automobile Age and a Woman Driver

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3 July 2020 at 11:05

By: Patrick Murfin

Karl Benz, creator of the first modern internal combustion engine automobile.

On July 3, 1886 inventor Karl Benz rolled his latest creation, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, a light weight three wheeled carriage powered by an internal combustion engine of his own design onto the streets of Manheim for its first public demonstration.

There had been self-propelled road vehicles since Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot’s lumbering Fardier à vapeur, a heavy cart built to haul artillery for the French Army in 1769. Since then dozens of steam powered vehicles had been built and/or proposed. By the 1880’s Amédée Bollée of Le Mans was producing large, multi-passenger coaches and de Dion & Bouton were turning out light weight tri and quadricycles. But Benz’s gasoline powered Motorwagan is considered the first modern automobile and the direct ancestor of all that came that came after.

Benz's heiress wife Bertha financed her husband's inventions and we a shrewd businesswoman in her own right.

Benz, a successful engineer and developer of stationary engines for industrial applications, was financed by his heiress wife Bertha, a womanof strong mind and keen intellect in her own right who would be deeply involved in advising her husband on business matters. Benz’s German patent dated from his application on January 29 of that year.

Key to the tricycle was the light weight gasoline powered two-stroke piston engine that he had patented back in 1873. The version he mounted on his Moterwagen was a 954 cc single-cylinder four-stroke engine with trembler coil ignition which produced 2⁄3 horsepower (hp) 250 rpm, producing about the same power as a modern walk-behind self-propelled lawnmower engine. But it was powerful enough to propel the very light vehicle built on a tubular steel frame with thin wood panels. Each of the three wheels, specially designed by Benz, had wire steel spokes and hard rubber tires. The freely rotating single front wheel was steered by a tiller by a driver seated in front of the engine.

A museum replica of the Patent Moterwagan

The engine drove the two rear wheels with a chain drive on both sides. A simple belt system served as a single-speed transmission, varying torque between an open disc and drive disc. A large horizontal flywheelstabilized the engine power output.

That first put-putting prototype strikes us as not quite finished. There was an open crankcase. Into which oil dripped from an open pan on critical moving parts. Similarly there was neither a sealed gas tank as we know it or a carburetor. Gasoline (or another suitably combustible fluid) dripped from a small reservoir into a basin of soaked fibers that supplied a vapor to the cylinder by evaporation. There were also no brakes.

But Benz was not finished tinkering. Over the next year he built two more improved models. By the time of his Model 3 Moterwagen, it was powered by a new 2 hp engine capable of getting the vehicle up to a dizzying 10 miles per hour. It also had a real carburetor, gas tank, and manually operated brakes on the rear wheels.

All of these prototypes were all well and good, but perhaps Mrs. Benz was a trifle anxious for her investment to start paying off with sales. She recognized that the public interest had been piqued, but was far from convinced that the Moterwagen was a practical means of transportation. The shrewd and intrepid Bertha realized something more dramatic need be done.

Bertha Benz and her teenage sons posed for a photo, seen here tinted, recreating the beginning of her historic drive.

In early August 1888 supposedly without her husband’s permission—some historians doubt this claim—she gathered up her two sons, ages 15 and 14 and took the Model 3 out for a spin. A trip actually, all the way from Mannheim to her mother’s home in Pforzheim, a trip of about 60 miles which took her through the streets of Heidelberg and Wiesloch. The sight of a woman and two children zipping through the streets in a noisy, smoky contraption with no horse naturally attracted considerable attention.

Bertha was not only the driver and navigator, but the mechanic as well. When the carburetor clogged, she had no problem clearing it with her hat pin and she used her garter to insulate an exposed wire. When fuel ran low and no gasoline was available she purchased ligroin, a petroleum ether related to benzene, at the Wiesloch municipal pharmacy. Later when the wooden block of her brakes wore down, she found a cobbler to nail strips of leather on them, thus inventing brake pads on the fly.

Bertha made it safely to her mother’s by evening and sent husband a famous telegram explaining her whereabouts and how she got there. The next morning she drove home. She had proved the automobile was a reliable transportation option and that it could even be operated by an unsupervised woman. And as she hoped, the trip generated sales.

Afterwards her husband, at Bertha’s suggestion made brake pads standard equipment and added a second gear for aid in climbing hills.

An early ad for the Patent-Motorwagen featured an illustration of Benz at the tiller.

Over the next few years until 1893 about 25 Moterwagens were built and sold before Benz moved on to more sophisticated models.

Three years before Karl Benz died in 1929 he mergedhis Benz & Cie company with Gottlieb Daimler’s Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft to form what would become Mercedes-Benz.

Bertha Benz’ investment paid off. When she died at age 95 in 1944 she was a very wealthy woman indeed.

The route she took on her memorable 1888 drive has been named the Bertha Benz Memorial Route.

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Cecil and Sandra Bland—Whose Life Mattered and Where Were Your Priorities?
2 July 2020 at 12:12

Cecil and Sandra Bland—Whose Life Mattered and Where Were Your Priorities?

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2 July 2020 at 12:12

By: Patrick Murfin

Cecil, the majestic and photogenic lion in happier days with one of his harem and as a victim of a feckless dentist with a bow.

Note—This recycled post would ordinarily not see the light of day again as it was pegged to specific news articles. I rediscovered it, however, and thought that most readers would remember the news stories cited. Besides, I like the message. As predicted the original post did rouse some apoplexy and I was un-friended on Facebook by some seething animal lovers. Hyper-sensitive White guys were also not happy. One commentator on the original post took pains to complain that Black Lives Matter “only when they are shot by police” and not when Blacks murder each other—a patented accusation that not only misses the point of the movement but is a quick give away to not-so-cleverly hidden racial animus. I’ve added a lot of people on Facebook since then, and foresee another round of blithering. Meanwhile, despite years of protest, senseless police violence against Black folk and other people of color continues.

Get the tar pots boiling. Slashthose old pillows, you are going to need plenty of feathers. There is probably a decorative rail fence over in the neighbor’s yard. A lot of you will want all of the gear. A lot of you are seriously going to hate this post and be itching to ride the author on the rail straight out of town and off the internet.

In 2015 social media erupted with a virtual torrent of posts about Cecil, a particularly majestic African lionwho had somehow become an internet celebrity. The big cat was apparently lured out of a heavily protected Zimbabwe game reserve and killed by a bow hunter on what amounted to a canned hunt. The killer was quickly identified as a dentist from Minnesota who immediately became the most reviled and despised man on the internet and the object of a howling global virtual lynch mob. I would guess based on my Facebook page that 80 to 90% of the anguish and outrage came from tender hearted white folk who love animals.

I get it. I really do. We love animals from cute kittens to the endangered wildlife now routinely captured on breathtaking film by world class cinematographers for endless cable channel nature series. We are viscerally affected when we see them suffer. Hell, Jimmie Kimmel was in tears over the death of Cecil on his TV show.

And I am down with protesting needless cruelty and the wanton destruction of trophy hunting, poaching, baiting, and the like. Got a petition? I’ll sign.

The meme that caught my attention and got me thinking about this.

But as I scrolled down my Facebook news feed through the almost endless posts I noticed something. Most of the posts were from friends and acquaintances who otherwise never want to get political. Very nice people who post those kitten videos, pictures of their lunches, humorous memes, lots of family, and a heavy dose of nostalgia. People who for the last two years in the face of mounting evidence of structural racism and hair trigger police violence against People of Colorhave never been moved to say a word. People who are annoyed at and bewildered by all of the fuss and are frightened and offended by street protests. People who become exasperated by the whole thing and finally add a comment that “all lives matter” or who maintain that “those people must have done something wrong.”

If you heart is big enough and your willingness to get involved is strong enough for both Cecil and the parade of dead and maimed Black men, women, and children, I am not talking to you—and I did recognize quite a few of you.

I am talking to the rest of you with your moral blinders on and exquisitely refinedand limited sympathies. Let me put it bluntly…Your priorities are fucked up. And I am here to hold you accountable—a favorite term, after all, conservatives—for enabling racist, state and socially approved violence against people of color by your silence, squeamishness, and cowardice.

Sandra Bland and her violent arrest for apparently being an insufficiently submissive Black woman. Days later she was dead in a Texas jail.

The death of Cecil came a week after the troubling death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail. In some ways it does not matter if she was murdered in custody, or if she was driven by despair to harm herself. What is explicitly clear by the video captured by the police’s own camera is that in broad daylight a quite respectably dressed Black Woman was stopped for the very minor moving violation of a broken turn signal and within moments was dragged from her car, slammed violently to the pavement, injured, and ultimately arrested and hauled to jail on charges of resisting arrest. Once in custody authorities did what they could to prevent her from easily communicatingwith her distant family and threw every obstacle available to her ability to be released on bail. After her death county authorities rushed to defameher with claims that marijuana had been found in her system.

Now wind that scenario back to the beginning and imagine a white woman in an identical circumstance, even one who got sassy to the officer. Who honestly believes that she would not have been sent on her way with a scolding and a traffic ticket? Maybe the rate of assault and unjustified incarceration by police against Junior League members is so incredibly low by mere happenstance. Or not.

Yet so many defenders of Cecil could not work up a yawn about Sandra.

The execution of Samuel Dubose for not having a front licence tag. For a moment it looked like an officer would be held accountable. But nope.

Then body camera video was released of University of Cincinnati Police Officer Raymond Tensing executing Black motorist Samuel Dubose by shooting him at point blank range in the face through his open car window. Dubose was pulled over for the hideous crime of missing a front license tag and was slow to respond to a request for a driver’s license. These are not capital crimes. Neither was stealing cigars, selling individual cigarettes on the street, or a 12 year old playing alone with a toy gun in a park to rattle off just a few of the cases of the last two years. Fortunately in the most recent case, quite different from most of the others, local authorities moved quicklyon the overwhelming evidence. The University fired the officer and just one day after the video was released, the Grand Jury handed down an indictment for first degree murder. The Prosecutor even sounds serious about vigorously pursuing the case. We’ll see. [2020 Note—A 2016 trial ended in mistrial after the jury became deadlocked. A retrial begun in 2017 also ended in a hung jury. The charges against Tensing were later dismissed with prejudice.]

Once again so many Cecil fans could not bebestirred.

My Facebook feed is filled with commentary about those cases and others. But my feed, which includes many friends who are Black and other people of color, committed social justice activists, and religious leaders, may not much resemble yours. I hear a variety, even a cacophony of voices—even those of hyper-conservatives, gun enthusiasts, law and order hard liners, and a couple of openly avowed racists who have not de-friended me or been blocked for threatening physical attacks on me and my family. Everyone should be exposed to a variety of opinions and attitudes. Are you? Or do you close yourself to those who challenge a cocoon of safety and invulnerability?

The de facto community on my Facebook feed is not perfect. But some of us engage in the hard issues brought forth by the Black Lives Matter Movement, wrestle with how to best and most effectively act as white allies against racism, and even, most painfully of all, confront and acknowledge our white privilege and grapple with our own implicit participation in a system designed to promote oppression of minorities. We are no angles. Far less are we white saviors. But at least we are engaged.

Go ahead. Love Cecil. Seek justice, even revenge for his brutal death. But literally for Christ’s sake get your priorities straight and offer the same love and thirst for justice to your Black neighbors.

End of screed.

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Buffalo Soldiers Did the Heavy Lifting in Teddy’s San Juan Hill Charge
1 July 2020 at 12:10

Buffalo Soldiers Did the Heavy Lifting in Teddy’s San Juan Hill Charge

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1 July 2020 at 12:10

By: Patrick Murfin

This Landmark book for young adults and a Classic Comic Book both fired my boyhood hero worship of Theodore Roosevelt.

When I was a kid, Theodore Roosevelt was my hero. I know, incredibly dorky. But Teddy had been a fat, bookish kid with glasses, sort of like me, who grew up to have an exciting life. For a couple of years or so in my pre-teens I took to pinning the brim of my cowboy hat to the crown on one side with a U.S. Army insignia swiped from my Dad’s World War II uniform. I led an entirely imaginary “Junior Rough Rider” outfit in elaborate games of defending Cheyenne from foreign menace. I assure you that I could not get any of the other kids in the neighborhood to join me in this odd ball fantasy.

In school, much to the confusionand irritation of my teachers, I insisted on dating all of my papers 1905, the first year of Roosevelt’s second term as President. Much of Roosevelt’s appeal to me was his famous Charge up San Juan Hill. In later years I discovered that while T.R. did, indeed perform ably and bravely that day and that his Rough Riders fought well, it was not the whole story.

On July 1, 1898 the heaviest land combat of the Spanish American War took place in the Battle for San Juan Heightsduring the American drive to take the city of Santiago, Cuba.

With the outbreak of the War Roosevelt, a hyperkinetic New York politician who was serving ably as Assistant Secretary of the Navy—a post in which he had played a key role in building the Great White Fleet which made the U.S. Navy among the most modern in the world—yearned for military action on the ground.

Col. Theodore Roosevelt 1st Volunteer Cavalry after his brevet from Lt. Col.

He was not encouraged by President William McKinley in his first attempt to volunteer to raise a cavalryregiment for the conflict. He convinced his close friend Col. Leonard Wood, one of the most respected officersin the Regular Army and a medical doctor serving as an advisor to the President, to offer to lead a volunteer unit with Roosevelt as his second in command and in charge of recruitment. McKinley, needing to raise a large army quickly, reluctantly agreed.

Roosevelt famously recruited a unit that mixed cowboys who he was familiar with from his days as a South Dakota rancher, Harvard pals, and polo playing New York socialites.

Legendary Arizona lawman Bucky O'Niell was captain of a troop of Rough Riders raised in the West and including cowboys and veteran Indian fighters.

Among the Volunteers were a legendary western lawman, Bucky O’Niell, captain of a troop raised in Arizonaand at least one of the criminals he had once locked up serving under an assumed name. Like O’Niell, a former militia officer, many men were veteransof the Indian wars and provided leadership as junior officers and non-commissioned officers that was rare in Volunteer units. There were also swells like Hamilton Fish, grandsonof the New York Governor and Senator of the same name.

Roosevelt used his considerable influence, and some of his own wealth, to make sure that the men were armed with the same modern Krag-Jorgensen carbines used by the regular cavalry and generally had the most up-to-date equipment and the finest horse stock available. The unit was trained to the highest standards and the men, mostly expert horsemen, were soon considered the equal of regular troops.

300 pound Regular Army Major General William Shafter was the commander of V Corps in the drive to capture Santiago. He was an indifferent to incompetent senior officer.

Designated the First Volunteer Cavalry (1st U.S.V.C), the unit arrived by train with their horses, mules, and baggage at Tampa, Florida for disembarkation on May 29. They found a tangle of confusion and a shortage of ships. After days of dithering while troops fell ill with heat stroke and tropical infections, Major General William Shafter, a 300 lb. veteran regular army officer who turned out to be an indifferent bordering on incompetent commander of the V Corps for the campaign against Santiago, under pressure from Washington to move quickly ordered the Volunteers to board available ships without their horses, mules, and most of their equipment.

There was only room for eight of twelve companies. With Yellow Fever and Malaria already rampant a fourth of the men mustered and trained were unavailable by the time the ships landed in east of Santiago on June 21 and 22 the men were also demoralized by the loss of their horses and equipment.

Once on shore they became part of the cavalry division commanded by Major General of Volunteers Joseph Wheeler, a storied Confederate cavalry commander and longtime Democratic Representative from Alabama. McKinley had accepted Wheeler’s offer to serve and placed him in high command in the hopes that common wartime service would heal lingering sectional divisions. And in fact that was one of the results. Blue uniformed Federal troops were cheeredas they moved through the South to disembarkation points instead of stoned as some Yankees had feared.

Wheeler’s division also included the 9th and 10th Cavalry Regiments, Buffalo Soldier Black troops and tough as nails veteran Indian fighters from Ft. Leavenworth. Along with the Rough Riders and other regular army cavalry units, they had arrived without horses and baggage.

Wheeler was only a barely reconstructed Rebel. He hated Yankees and disdained the Colored troops under his command. But he was an aggressive officer. Two after days of landing Shafer had Wheeler dispatch a dismounted cavalry reconnaissanceof enemy lines in support of Cuban irregulars to find where the enemy might be dug in. He was under orders to hold the bulk of his troops to cover continuing landing operations. Instead Wheeler, acting on his own authority moved his men aggressively forward with the Rough Riders and 10th cavalry in the lead and provokeda pitched battle with the Spanish rearguard at Las Guasimas.

The troops were weakened by heat and disease and issued four days of rations and what ammunitionthey could carry. They had no baggage, logistical support, and had only two small field guns. Only officers were mounted. None of the men were trained as infantry or accustomed to long marches, especially in the stifling heat. For two hours the Spanish infantry, which enjoyed artillery support, mauled and stymied the American advance until the Spanish commander Major General Antero Rubín ordered an orderly retreat to more defensible lines.

During the battle a confused and excited Wheeler was heard rallying his troops with exhortations to “Get those damned Yankees!” War correspondents covering the battle reported a glorious victory. On the ground it was recognized as the near disaster it was.

An Unreconstructed former Confederate, Major General of Volunteers Joseph Wheeler (left) was in command of the cavalry in the Santiago campaign. Seen here with Lenard Wood who was brevetted to Brigadier General of the 2nd Brigade, and Col. Roosevelt of the Rough Riders.

The Spanish fell back on a well defended line of trenches and block housesincluding commanding positions on two hills of the San Juan Heights. After waiting for the rest of V Corps to land, Shafter ordered a general offensive against the Santiago defensive line on June 1. Wheeler had fallen ill with malariaand was replaced by his subordinate Brigadier General Samuel S. Sumner and Wood was brevettedto Brigadier to take command of Sumner’s 2nd Brigade. Roosevelt in turn was brevetted full Colonel in command of the Rough Riders.

Shafter had three divisions. He ordered the infantry of the 1st and 2nd Divisions, which included two other Black regiments, the 23rd and 24th Infantry (Colored), to the north to take the fortified stronghold at El Caney. This was to take no more than two hours then the divisions were expected to move up to support an attack by the dismounted cavalry on the heights.

But the 2nd Division under General Henry W. Lawton was held off by stiff Spanish resistance at El Caney for more than twelve hours. Brigades of the 1st Division came under withering firewhen they emerged from a tree lineat the base of the heights. The commander of the 3rd Brigade was mortally wounded the second he stepped from the tree line and two more officers assuming command were quickly wounded and had to be evacuated. The whole division was pinned down under intense fire in what became known as Hell’s Pocket while they waited on Lawton to come up.

The cavalry on the right of the line came up and also took heavy fire. With his men pinned in shallow trenches Capt. O’Niell of the Rough Riders exposed himself to enemy fire to calm his troops and was shot through the throat shortly after assuring a worried subordinate that “a Spanish bullet hasn’t been made that can kill me.”

Distressed, Roosevelt determined that their position was untenable and he must either withdraw or attack. He took a vague order to support the pinned down infantry on his left as an excuse to attack. Ahead of him was the smaller of two hills commanding the heights, dubbed Kettle Hill because a cauldron for boiling sugar cane was found near the base. Roosevelt formed his regiment under fire and moved out. He was the only officer mounted because he feared he might succumb to an asthma attack in the heat trying to climb the hill.

Tough veteran Buffalo Soldier cavalrymen.

Seeing the Rough Riders moving unilaterally, other units of Woods’ 2nd Brigade, including elements of the 10th and the white Volunteers of the 3rd Cavalry joined in the assault at the urging of 1st Lt. Jules G. Ord of the 10th. Further left the Black troops of the 23rd and 24th Infantry from the 2nd Division began moving without orders when they observed the advance...

Men started dropping of heat prostration on the climb. Others were riddled by heavy fire. Roosevelt lost his horse and sustained a light wound on the wrist but pressed forward. The dismounted cavalry, units now thoroughly mixed, pressed the frontal attackwith some of the 10th joining the Black infantry regiments on the left slope.

After sustaining heavy casualties the troops, Roosevelt near the van, took the summit sending the defenders to the protection of the fortifications and block house atop San Juan Hill itself. The first colors on the summit were the 3rd and the 10th Cavalry with the Rough Rider banner soon following. In fact troops of all units plus elements of the Black infantry took Kettle Hill, although Roosevelt and the Rough Riders would receive almost all of the credit in press accounts.

Meanwhile the men on top of Kettle hill were taking heavy fire from San Juan. General Wheeler, rising from his sick bed at the sound of battle, arrived on the scene to take operational command since Shafter was ill at his headquarters well behind the lines. He ordered the whole 1st Division under the command of Brigadier General Jacob Ford Kent forward and then re-took personal command of the cavalry.

Buffalo Soldiers advance on the Hights. By the end of the battle Black units, Rough Riders, and other white cavalry units were thoughly mixed and fighting side-by-side.

Kent’s Colored Infantry and elements of the 10th Cavalry were already advancing up the slope. Other units closed in support. Meanwhile the Cavalry at the top of Kettle Hill began an advance down the “saddle” between it and San Juan Hill and up the second. Young Ord was killed breasting the summit of the Hill his Black troops on his heels. The troops pressed on, taking the shell pocked block house in furious hand to hand combat.

Roosevelt led a last charge of the cavalry up to the top of the hill, sweeping it of Spanish and uniting with the exhausted black troops.

Shortly after the battle, Roosevelt posed with his Rough Riders atop San Juan Hill. The Buffalo Soldiers who had fought with them were notably not included.

Meanwhile other units of the cavalry’s 1st Brigade secured a smaller knoll on the Spanish right flank. The heights had been cleared, but fearing a counter attack, Wheeler ordered the exhausted men to throw up breastworksfacing the city of Santiago, a mile or so in the distance.

Roosevelt’s men did repulse one weak counter attack. But back at his headquarters in the rear Shafter feared a general counter attack and ordered a retreat to the original positions in the trenches as the bottoms of the hills. Unable to convince his superior to countermand the order, Wheeler on the scene simply ignored it and continued fortifying his position over night.

Lawton’s Division, badly roughed up at El Caney, finally arrived around noon on July 2. The position was now secure and artillery was brought up to the heights to threaten the city and a squadron of Spanish cruisers in the harbor. The cruisers were forced to flee the guns and ran into a waiting superior American Navy taskforce which destroyed them.

After a siege by combined American and Cuban nationalist forces, the Spanish surrendered Santiago on July 17. That completed major land operations in Cuba.

Troops who survived the shot, shell, and heat stroke of the Battle for San Juan Heights were ravaged by yellow feverand malaria. General Shafter petitioned Washington for a rapid withdrawal of V Corps calling it an “army of convalescents.” Concerned that the President would ignore the bumbling Shafter, a group of senior officers prevailed upon the politically well-connected Roosevelt to send a similar appeal on their behalf.

American evacuation began on August 7. Troops of the 9th Infantry (Colored) were left behind as an occupation force under the theory that their race and Southern origin would protect them from illness. It didn’t. By the time they, too, finally went home almost a tenth of their number came down with Yellow Fever.

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French Daredevil Walked a Wire and Became an American Superstar
30 June 2020 at 10:56

French Daredevil Walked a Wire and Became an American Superstar

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30 June 2020 at 10:56

By: Patrick Murfin

The Great Blondin on the rope high above the gorge below Niagara Falls. He had to freeze in this posission for several moments to accommodate the long exposure on a glass plate negative..

Back in 2012 the young scion of a legendary circus family, Nik Wallenda, strolled above NiagaraFalls on a high wire. The act was promoted by the local tourist industry which has been hurting. Evidently pilgrimagesto gawk at the Falls were not as popular as they used to be and newlyweds who can afford a honeymoon now seem to prefer localities with sandy beaches and palm trees. ABC Television broadcast the event, to tepid ratings.

Still, it was quite an accomplishment and Wallenda was the first to cross directly above the great cascadesrather than over the gorge below the Falls. ABC also demanded that the acrobat remain tethered to the wire so that in event of a slip he would not fall into the water.

Nic Walenda on his 2012 nationally broadcast walk directly above the cascades of Niagara Falls.

But on June 30, 1859 French born acrobat Charles Blondin took a stroll across the gorge bellow Niagara Falls on a rope 1100 feet long, 3¼ inches in diameter, 160 feet above the swirling water.

Over the next few months he crossed 17 more times in front of ever larger, more astounded crowds, each time with a new twist. He crossed blind folded, hopping in a sack, pushing a wheelbarrow, on stilts, and carrying his manager on his back. He balanced a chair on the rope and then stood on it. He stopped to take pictures of the crowd with a bulky glass-plate negative camera. Once he carried a small stove, stopped in the middle of the wire to cook and eat an omelet.

His picture graced the covers of popular magazines and newspapers were filled with his exploits. He became one of the first popular entertainment celebritiesin American history, known and admired even by those who would never see him perform.

Born Jean-Francois Gravelet in St. Omer, France, on February 28, 1824 his gymnast fatherencouraged his early interest in circus acrobatics. He tried to duplicate a high wire act that he saw in a traveling circus at age 5 by stringing a rope between two chairs. He showed such remarkable agility and great balancethat his father enrolled him in the Ecole de Gymase in Lyon.After six months of training was good enough to start performing successfully as The Little Wonder.

His father died leaving him an orphan and on his own at age 9, but he had no trouble finding work in circuses and in other venues. By 1851 he was so well known in Europe that the American theatrical impresario William Niblo recruited him to come to New York City to perform with the Ravel Troupe of acrobats at his famous Niblo Gardens.

The popular act toured the country for several years. Gravelet adopted the stage name Blondin or the Great Blondin because of his blonde hair. Blondin and the Ravel Troupe performed with an early incarnation of P.T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth and later he became part owner of his own circus.

Blondin married his first wife Charlotte in New York. The couple had three children, two of them born while on the road. In 1858 the troupe performed near Niagara and Blondin became obsessed with crossing the gorge on a tightrope. It took more than a year to secure the necessary permissions and make arrangements.

A British newspaper illustration of Blondin duplicating his Niagara stuns plus a bicycle ride over an English river.

The Niagara stunts made him in demand everywhere. He abandoned his long association with the Ravel Troupe and with the able assistance of manager Harry Colcord parlayed his fame into riches. He demanded a $500 minimum for a performance and at the height of his career made the astonishing sum of half a million dollars a year.

In 1861 he built a stately mansion named, aptly, Niagara Villa in Ealing, a village near London. Intending to retire, he found himself still in demand.

The Prince of Wales, who had witnessed one of the Niagara crossings, arranged for him to appear at the Crystal Palace where he duplicated many of his Niagara stunts in front of a painted backdrop of the falls. The renewed celebrity led to extensive tours of England and the continent.

A favorite of the Prince of Wales, Blondin starred at the famous Crystal Palace exposition in 1967.

His stunts only gained in audacity, including pushing a lion across the wire in a wheelbarrow. He frequently performed before as many as 10,000 paying customers. During another stint at the Crystal Palace Charles Dickens may have explained his popularity, “Half of London is here eager for some dreadful accident.”

Blondin continued to perform for three more decades adding new twists to his act, including using a bicycle. Other tightrope walkers complained that we was ruining their careers and risking their lives—audiences would accept nothing else but Blondin’s sensational stunts. He made occasional trips back to the United States in addition to shows in Britain and Ireland.

In his long career Blondin had occasional accidents, mostly due to equipment failure, but escaped serious injury. The worst accident occurred in Dublin in 1861, not long after he resumed performing. While performing 50 above ground his rope broke. Blondin was able to grab a hand hold, but the supporting scaffolding collapsed killing two workers. The acrobat was held harmless in an investigation but a judge said that the manufacture of the 2 inch diameter rope “had a lot to account for.”

At a Liverpool performance around the same time a guy wiresnapped while he was pushing the lion in the wheelbarrow entangling the wheelbarrow. Blondin extracted both himself and the cat from the mishap. Such displays of aplomb only won him a more devoted audience.

He made his final performance at Belfast, Ireland in 1896. He died the following year at his beloved Ealing home of complications of diabetes. He was mourned the world over, but nowhere more the Ealing, where he had become a beloved resident. He was buried next to his first wife and the mother of his children, Charlotte, who had died in 1888. His second wife, Katherine would be buried with them when she died in 1901.

This whimsical statue in Ladywoo, Birmingham, England commemorates Blondin's crossing of the Edgbaston Resevoir.

A statue to Blondin was erected in Birmingham, the site of one of his most famous and daring shows, the 1873 crossing of Edgbaston Reservoir. In Ealing his memory is honored by two roads, Blondin and Niagara Avenues, and in 1997 the Blondin Community Orchard was planted to make the centennial of the acrobat’s death.

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When a Prop Go Wrong—A Bad Day at the Globe
29 June 2020 at 10:39

When a Prop Go Wrong—A Bad Day at the Globe

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29 June 2020 at 10:39

By: Patrick Murfin

A prop cannon firing under the thatched roof set the straw on fire dooming the Globe Theater.

Folks who have been involved in theater, amateur or professional, love to swap yarns about various disasters in front of live audiences. Ask mesometime about when the set fell on my head in the middle of Jules Feiffer’s Little Murders at Shimer College.

But even the most grizzled theatrical veteran would have a hard time topping what happened to the cast of Henry VIII on June 29, 1613. During a performance a cannon sparked a fire in the Globe Theater’s thatched roof, burning the theater structure to the ground. Fortunately no one was seriously injured, although one actor was said to have suffered an indignity to his pants.

The Globe, of course, was the famous London theater where William Shakespeare had most of his plays produced and where he appeared in many of them as an actor. Henry VIII is today one of The Bard’s less produced plays, both because of the liberties taken with the well known historical facts of Henry’s reign and because of suspicionthat it was either co-authored or heavily tinkered with by another Globe playwright, John Fletcher.

The Globe was constructed from timbers of an earlier venueknown simply as The Theater in 1599. It was built on leased land and when the lease was up, the landlord claimed the building, which was owned by an association of actors. To retrieve their property the actors hired a carpenter, Peter Street and joined him in disassemblingthe building in December of 1598 while the landlord was celebrating Christmas in the country. The material was hidden until the next summerwhen it was floated across the Themes and the new theater constructed on marshy ground south of Maiden Lane.

The only known near contemporary illustration of the Globe theater by Wenceslas Hollar in 1642.

The new building evidently substantially re-created the original, although it may have been enlarged. The Globe was owned originally by six actors who were shareholders in the theatrical troupe The Lord Chamberlain’s Men. One of the six was a minority share holder, Will Shakespeare himself. The building was an open air amphitheaterabout 100 feet in diameter contained in a building three stories high. Although describedas The Wooden O and portrayed in the only contemporary sketch, by Wenceslas Hollar, archeological evidence now suggests that it may have been a twenty-sided structure.

Three levels of stadium stile boxes were protectedunder an over-hanging thatched roof were built on to the interior walls. Surrounding an apron stage about 43 by 27 feet and raised five feet was a large open area where groundlings paid a penny to stand and watch performances while their betters lounged in the boxes. As many as 3000 people could be jammed into the theater, which was one of London’s most popular places of amusement.

The design of the theater was believed to mimic the inn courtyards where traveling theatrical troupes performed in earlier days.

Shakespeare had retired by the time the second Globe, left, was erected, but his plays remained a staple of the resident company.

Shakespeare himself at about age 50 seems to have retired from active involvement in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men about the time of the fire, and perhaps because of it. When a second Globe was erected on the foundation of the first in 1614 he seems to be gone, although his plays continued to be revived as the source of most of the troupe’s material. He died in his home town of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616.

The new Globe continued on until something even moredeadly than fire befell it—Puritans. It was closed by order of the Cromwell government in 1642 and probably razed two years later to make way fortenements.

Dominic Rowan and Kate Duchene perform as the King and Queen Katherine in Henry VIII at Shakespeare's Globe. This time the place did not burn down.

In 1997 Shakespeare’s Globe, a modern reproduction of the first theater, opened a few yards from the original site and regularly produces plays from the Shakespeare cannon. Eleven years ago during a cycle of all of the Bard’s history plays Henry III received a rare revival there.

This time the cannon fired safely. Everyone was relieved.

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The Birth of Pride—Stonewall and The Night the Queers Fought Back
28 June 2020 at 11:03

The Birth of Pride—Stonewall and The Night the Queers Fought Back

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28 June 2020 at 11:03

By: Patrick Murfin

The Stonewall was a dive bar operated by the Mob in New York's Greenwich Village. It's patrons were outcasts and the most flamboyant of a rough streets scene--young hustlers, drag queens, butch lesbians. It was also an inter-racial scene that attracted police attention. Wealthier and more respectable Gays gathered and partied more discretely in posh clubs that authorities usually ignored.

Pride Month is drawing to a close with the anniversary of an unexpected uprising that started it all. This year the exuberant parades and festivalsthat have been the hallmark of Pride celebrations have been cancelled or muted by the Coronaviurs pandemic and lock down. Much of the observations have shifted to on-line and social media events. The internet is awash in rainbow Pride Flags and the updates to include transgender and People of Color. Those additions are particularly apt in light of the history of the spark that ignited the powder keg.

This Rainbow Flag update by Danial Quasar is one of the more popular versions that add recognition to the transgender community and People of Color.

June has also been the month of a new surgeof Black Lives Matter marches and protests in the wake of the murder by police of George Floyd and a long litany of others. Members of the LGBTQ of all races have been conspicuous participantsand leaders in these events. And that is also as it should be. Episodes of violence, arson, and looting as well as confrontations between demonstrators and militarized police and National Guardsmen set many tongues wagging bemoaning that “violence never accomplishes anything.”

In point of fact as much as I am a supporterof militant and creative non-violent direct action and civil disobedience as a tactic, I recognize along with Dr. Martin Luther King that, “Riot is the language of the unheard.” He recognized that the urban rebellions of the 1960’s grabbed the attention of somnambulantand complacent White America. Much of the early violence of the marches this month have been traced to right wing white Boogaloo activists trying to spark a civil race war, aggressive police action, and simple criminal opportunism, some was simple pent-up community rage. Anti-racistshave clearly defined the priorities of those more concerned with property damage than Black Lives.

In the end, the BLM movement will outlast the early violence and become a lasting voice for institutional and societal change. Just as Pride emerged from its violent birth.

Fifty one years ago on the night of June 27, 1969 something snapped when New York City Police made one of their regular raids on a Gay bar. Instead of meekly submitting to arrest, the denizens ofthe Stonewall Inn, a Greenwich Village bar operated by the Mafia and patronized by the most marginalized of folks—homeless street kid hustlers, drag queens, butch dikes, and others resistedwhen police started to arrest them.

The raid was conducted by a small team ofdetectives, uniformed officersincluding women led by Deputy Inspector Seymour Pine of the Public Morals Squad.

For some reason patrons refused to follow the familiar procedure of such raids—allowing restroom inspections of individuals in women’s clothing to determine if they were men and providing identification upon request. Dumfounded by resistance, police called for backup and patrol wagons. There was some scufflinginside.

The Stonewall Inn in 1969 looked just as seedy as it was.

Meanwhile some patrons who had been released were joined bypassersby outside the bar. The crowd quickly swelled. Taunts and jeers were exchanged between the police and crowd. The crowd began to interfere as drag queens were led to the wagons. When a lesbian made several unsuccessful attempts to escape, she was beaten and cried out to the crowd, “Why don’t you guys do something?”

That ignited the crowd which began pelting police with beer cans, coins, and rubble from a nearby construction site. They attacked the wagons, freeing some of those arrested. Police retreated into the bar and barricaded themselves. They grabbed some members of the crowd as they went, including folk singer Dave Van Ronk who had been playing at a nearby club and came out to investigate the ruckus, and Howard Smith, a writer for the Village Voice.

When a lesbian named Betty repeatedly tried to break away from custody and was roughly handled by several cops she famously pleaded, "Why don't you guys do something?" It became the Remember he Alamo battle cry of a movement.

Observers reported that the most aggressive members of the crowd were the young street kids. They used an uprooted parking meteras a ram to try and break down the doors of the bar and crashed through the plywood covered windows. When they got in police drew their pistols and threatened to shoot while rioters used lighter fluid to start a fire.

The Fire Department responded as the crowd outside grew to hundreds. The Tactical Police Force (TPF) arrived in riot gear to rescue the besieged officers in the saloon. They formed a phalanx and moved up the street being blocked and taunted by an impromptu kick line of drag queens and “sissies.”

Drag queens played a leading role in the resistance in the the nights that followed the police raid.

Rioters and police played a brand of violent tag around the narrow streets of the Village until after 4 AM.

Later that morning the riots were front page news.

And they were not over. The next night even larger crowds gathered in front of the building and fighting continued. Despite heavy rain there were sporadic eruptions the next two nights.

Meanwhile the Gay community, which had been largelyunorganized except for the small Mattachine Society which advocated a campaign to educate the public that Homosexuals were “normal,” began to meet and debate tactics. Thousands of flierswere printed for a Wednesday march.

The original rebellion, which had been entirely spontaneous, was already laying the groundwork for a new, open and defiant Gay movement. Taking cues from the Civil Rights Movement and the Peace Movement, which were also confronting authorities with a new militancy, and taking advantage of the traditionalanti-establishment radicalism of the Village, the beginning of a new movement was taking place.

On Wednesday the Village Voice—the most liberal paper in New York, carried a harshly critical piece on the riots describing participants as “forces of faggotry.” Angry demonstrators descended on the Voice offices that night and threatened to burn them down. Other violent confrontations erupted in the neighborhood as police tried to stop marchers, this time for the first time carrying signs and “making demands.”

That was the last night of disturbances, but things changed quickly over the next year. Two new militant Gay organizations emerged in New York, the Gay Liberation Front, which allied itself with the broader radical movement, and the Gay Activists Alliance which advocated a focused campaign demanding an end to police harassment and for broader rights for Gays.

Similar or allied groups sprang up in major cities and college towns across the country. New Yorkers founded three new newspapers, Gay, Come Out!, and Gay Power which soon had press runs of 2000 to 2500. Again, similar publications were founded across the country.

The Christopher Street March on the first anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion is considered the founding event of the Gay Pride marches now held internationally.

On June 28, 1970 the anniversary of what was now being called the Stonewall Rebellion was marked by Christopher Street Liberation Day and a 51 block marchfrom the Village to Central Park with thousands of marchers filling the streets. Marches were also held in Chicago and Los Angeles.

These became the Gay Pride Marches and annual events across the country. An indication of how accepted and mainstream Gay rights have become, at least in big cities, is that there are official floats sponsored by city sports teams. Politicians galore and all of the major media turn out to court the potent Gay vote and consumer demographic.

The 2019 Pride Parade in Chicago was typical of colorful and exuberant celebrations around the country which were now courted by politicians and corporations eager to cash in on a lucrative demographic.

Last year Gay Pride Parades also reflected a community increasingly under siege by a well-oiled and funded backlash led by religious zealots and abetted by the radicalized Republican Party eager to pander to a big part of itsbase. With Republicans in complete control of many governorships and State houses rafts of anti-Gay legislation have been enacted or proposed.

And now the Cheeto-in-Charge, who in an earlier incarnation had proclaimed himself a “friend of the Gays,” has lent his full blather and bluster to stoking the fires of repression. Trump has worked to strip protections against discrimination in agency after agency. The Supreme Court recently smiled on so-called religious liberty grounds for refusing service to Gays, lesbians, and transgender folk although it pleasantly surprised many by recently affirming the legality of marriage equality.

Marsha P. Johnson, a transgender Black woman, is now being recognized and celebrated as the person who threw the first brick at police on the night of the Stonewall uprising.

So it was not a surprisethat the LGBTQ community has enthusiastically joined in the BLM marches or that the debt owed to Black transgender women, drag queens, and butch dikes in the original Stonewall uprising has finally been recognized and celebrated. 51 years after the fact Pride Month has returned to its roots—Resistance!

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March March—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
27 June 2020 at 14:05

March March—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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27 June 2020 at 14:05

By: Patrick Murfin

March March by The Chicks.

Remember the Dixie Chicks, the female trio who shook up country music in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s? Texans singer Natalie Maines and multi-instrumentalist sisters Martie Erwin Maguire and Emily Strayer were Platinum Record artists and multiple Grammy, Billboard, Academy of Country Music, and Country Music Association Award winners. But it almost ended in 2003 when Natalie Maines told a British audience that they did not support the upcoming invasion of Iraqand were “ashamed” that President George W. Bush was from Texas. Overnight they became country music pariahs and their music was banned from country radio.

Critisism of President George W. Bush during the ramp up of the invasion of Iraq while the Dixie Chicks were on their Top of the World tour made them overnight country music pariahs.

They never really went away, although the country music establishment still shuns them. They became stars of the emerging Americana genre, cross-over pop, and were embraced by feminist and progressive fans. They came roaring back with a defiant single Not Ready to Make Nice off of the Taking the Long Way album and tour in 2007.

In March of this year, with 33 million albums sold, and sales of 27.5 million albums in the U.S. alone, the Dixie Chicks became the bestselling female band and bestselling country group in the U.S. during the Nielsen SoundScan era 1991 to present

Then this Thursday, June 25 inspired by the Black Lives Matter Movement and the waves of protest across the nation the trio dropped Dixie from their name like a statue of Jefferson Davis topplingfrom a pillar. Now simply The Chicks the also released a powerful new song March March with a stunning video directed by Seanne Farmer.

Introducing The Chicks.

The song and the video touch the multiple issues roiling America and responses to them. The productionalso checks and supports a list of activist organizations including Headcount Black Lives Matter, the Human Rights Campaign, American Civil Liberties Union, Supermajority Education Fund, March For Our Lives, Mi Familia Vota, Native American Rights Fund, Planned Parenthood, White People For Black Lives, the Innocence Project, and Proclaim Justice.

March March is truly an anthem for this moment. Thanks, Chicks!

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McHenry County Black Lives Matter Responds to Back the Blue Motorcycle Ride
26 June 2020 at 12:15

McHenry County Black Lives Matter Responds to Back the Blue Motorcycle Ride

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26 June 2020 at 12:15

By: Patrick Murfin

Black Lives Matter supporters will return to Veterans Acres in Crystal Lake where hundreds rallied peacefully on June 3. Youth led the way.

Until recently Black Lives Matter/George Floyd/I Can’t Breath protests in McHenry County have had the streets and parks pretty much to ourselves. Through most of June peaceful youth-led rallies and marches have brought hundreds, even thousands out in Woodstock, Crystal Lake, McHenry, Algonquin, Cary/Fox River Grove, Huntley, Harvard, and even tiny, rustic Richmond. Counter protestorsmanaged one under-attended event in Algonquin and individuals have heckled BLM protestors and buzzed events with flag-waving trucks shouting obscenitiesand threats. They have made their presence known mostly by hate-filled comments to newspaper reports, on-line mouth frothing, and cyber-stalking harassment of identified BLM leadersand participants.

Now as Illinois opens up in Stage 4 response to the Coronavirus pandemic and perhaps believingthat the local BLM movement is sputtering out a Back the Blue Motorcycle ride is scheduled for this Saturday, June 27. Ostensibly in defense of police who they claim are under siege following nation-wide Black Lives Matter marches, rallies, and civil disruption. But organizersare also critical of local municipal leaders and police chiefs who have not only been “soft” on our homegrown protestors, but have expressed solidarity with their cause, in some cases even taking a symbolic knee. Statements by rally organizers have also made it clear they want to signal the BLM movement that they risk a possible violent backlash.

Although they claim to be non-partisan pro-Trump and Second Amendment are heavily promoting the event in their circles. There will be no shortage of MAGA caps and Trump banners will be as common as Thin Blue Line flags. There will not, however, be many “pussy” face masks which they regard as a radical/liberal plot.

According to the Northwest Herald:

Former Crystal Lake resident Joe Alger and Woodstock Harley-Davidson owner Doug Jackson organized the Back the Blue Ride in light of protests surrounding the Minneapolis police killing of Black man George Floyd.

“The goal of this ride is to show those that hold the Thin Blue Line that we stand with them and against anarchy,” Alger said.

Throughout the years, Alger has participated in more than 45 rides for soldiers killed in action, he said…

… “I don’t believe there’s systemic racism in this country,” Alger said.

The bikers who have long made Woodstock Harley-Davidson their unofficial headquarters are not outlaw gang members. Most are middle-age and older white guys with comfortable incomes—the folks who can afford costly Hogs. They have gained local respect for their escorts of funerals of U.S, Troops and welcome home celebrations and for charities like the Marine Corps’ Toys for Tots campaigns. But any are also in Trump’s core base and the Resident has suggested several times that he believes that bikers will “ride to the rescue” to prevent a vast Democratic/liberal/alien/socialistplot to “steal” his presidency. Like some “fine people” in white nationalist groups, Trump apparently thinks that bikers will be his Brown Shirts. At least some of the riders on Saturday will share that fantasy.

McHenry Mayor Wayne Jett first enforced the Back the Blue Ride and then promised to attend a listen at the McHenry Black Lives Matter rally on Saturday.

Most local municipal leaders have stayed clear of endorsing the ride while promising to respect the rider’s freedom of speech. But McHenry Mayor Wayne Jett was an early and enthusiastic backer. Not only did he endorse the ride, but he ordered Back the Blue yard signswhich he was selling for $5 a pop. After McHenry BLM leaders reached out to him, Jett changed his tune. He now says he also shares the vision of police reform community leaders are pressing. He is now also offering and selling Black Lives Matter yard signs and says that money from the sale of both signs will go to support the work of Youth and Family Services of McHenry County which offers services to Latino and other minority youth. Jett also says he will attend a BLM rally in McHenry on Saturday as well as checking in with the bikers. We will see how well he performs that juggling act.

According to a Back the Blue organizer:

Riders will meet at 9:30 a.m. for registration at the Woodstock Harley-Davidson, 2235 S. Eastwood Drive. Anyone with a street-legal vehicle is welcome to join and fly their blue line or American flags, Alger said. Departure will begin at 11 a.m. with plans to visit the Woodstock, McHenry and Crystal Lake police departments.

“We will ride through the downtown area of Crystal Lake, McHenry and Woodstock with brief stops at each police department,” Alger said. “We will end up back at Woodstock Harley for hot dogs and fun.”

Alger said he won’t enforce the use of masks or other COVID-19 precautions, noting that “it’s not [his] job to police other people.”

Pointedly saying that they are not counter-protesting or opposing the Back the Blue ride, BLM leaders in McHenry, Crystal Lake, and Woodstock are planning on new rallies to back their calls for police reform and continue the conversation in McHenry County about white privilege and systematic racism.

Luis Eric Aguilar, a McHenry /BLM youth leader, met with Mayor Jett.

Luis Eric Aguilar, a McHenry youth leader explained:

I met with Mayor Wayne Jett and the McHenry PD today [June 24] to go over our peaceful protest and demonstration planned for this Saturday. The Mayor has agreed to attend and to listen! Furthermore, we are aware of the already planned 'Back the Blue Ride' and the Mayor and I agree that both groups are there to express their support for the PD and the community and that neither was created in counter of the other. This Saturday will be a celebration of the 1st amendment rights given to all Americans.

I may even have friends in that ride and I will still encourage them to join us in the conversation. Education is the first step. We may not agree on everything but across the country we are witnessing an awakening of knowledge towards racial justice.

One day, we will all look back at McHenry and celebrate its history. Our kids will have their generation issues and our job is to teach the right approach to creating actual and effective change.

Although the exact plans in Woodstock have not been posted as of this writing, Crystal Lake will have a rally from 10:30 to 12:30 at Veteran’s Acers on Walkup north of Route 176. This will be a rally with no march planned. The Back the Blue Ride will probably pass the park on its route.

The Crystal Lake call says:

This is a peaceful, family-friendly, coordinated event with McHenry, Crystal Lake, and Woodstock. It is a response to the “Back the Blue” ride that begins/ends at Woodstock Harley Davidson and makes brief stops at each of these police stations.

The originator of that event states that there is no such thing as systematic racism.

The purpose of our protest is to assert three clear messages. Everyone needs to know these messages. 1) Black Lives Matter, 2) systemic racism exists in nearly all facets of society, 3) it also exists in the police force which is why there is an important public discourse regarding defunding the police.

In McHenry a rally will be held between 1 and 2:30 pm at Knox Park, 333 Knox Drive.

Participants at Saturday’s BLM rallies are asked to wear masks, practice social distancing as much as possible, and wear black. I would add that those of us who are older and white respectthe outstanding leadership of our youth, Blacks, other People of Color, and other marginalized targeted communities like LGBTQ.

WWUUD?
When Ignatz Bopped Krazy Kat With his Last Brick
25 June 2020 at 11:17

When Ignatz Bopped Krazy Kat With his Last Brick

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25 June 2020 at 11:17

By: Patrick Murfin

Probably the most oft repeated gag in comix history--Ignatz mouse bouncing a brick over love-sick Krazy Kat's noggin. Yet it never grew old.

On Sunday, June 25, 1944 the full page color comic Krazy Kat made its last appearance in American Newspapers ending a thirty-one year run as a stand-alone strip. That was exactly two months since the deathof the odd, surrealistic strip’s creator, George Herriman on April 24 at the age of only 63.

Krazy Kat had amused and mystified the public for generations. Many simply did not know what to make of it, or Herman’s regular defiance of conventions of both comic form and substance. In fact it regularly polled among the least popular Sunday strips with the public and more than one local editor fervently wished that it would be canceled and replaced with something more to the popular. But it had what we now call a strong cult following including intellectuals, artists, writers, political dissidents, and Bohemians.

Most important, Krazy Kat had the enthusiastic backing of publishing Tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who loved the strip. It was a strange relationship—Hearst, a tyrannical autocrat with a knack for using cheap populism to cover reactionary politics, and Herriman, a mulatto journeyman cartoonist with anarchic tendencies. But Hearst so adored the strip that he ran it in all of his newspapers and signed Herriman to a life-time contract guaranteeing complete creative control with his King Features Syndicate.

Herriman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on August 20, 1880 to a mulatto Creole family. He came from a long line of free people of color in the city and was raised with Creole French as his first language even at that late date. Some of his ancestors were said to be active abolitionists and his father, a tailor, was a community leader.

For some reason when George was 10 years old the family moved to Los Angeles where he was educated at and graduated from the Catholic boys’ school St. Vincent’s Academy. While attending school he worked with his father in a tailor shop and as a baker’s helper. But his passion was art. Largely untaught, the boy spent his free time sketching.

He was light skinned enough to pass for white, which he did after leaving home and starting working. His somewhat kinky hair was generally hidden by the hats he almost perpetually wore. His racial identity was not an absolute secret—close friends knew and associates sometimes guessed. But after he married a white woman, his home town sweetheart Mable Lillian Bridge, in 1902 it became necessary to keep the secret guarded more closely. He was listed as Caucasian on his death certificate.

Herriman got his break before he knew it. Fresh out of high school in 1897 he sold a drawing of the Hotel Petrolia in Santa Paula to the Los Angeles Herald. That led to a $2 a week job as an engraver in the art department. He filled out this meager salary by getting spot assignments from the paper for occasional advertising artand even for political cartoons. He also began to freelance work to other publications.

But Herriman smelled better opportunities in New York City, the epicenter of the American publishing industry. In 1900 he hopped a freight and headed east. What Herriman found at first was hard times. He found work as a Coney Island carnival barker, but no sales for his drawings. Then one of the country’s premier humor magazines, Judge began picking up his stuff. He published 11 pieces there in 1901 and began experimenting with the then new multi-panel format of the comic strip.

By the end of the year Herriman was having success placing strips with newspaper syndicates, including Pulitzer’s, the Philadelphia North American Syndicate’sfirst comic supplement, and his first Sunday color comics with the T. C. McClure Syndicate. With this early success, he abandoned Judge and submissions to other magazines to concentrate in the rapidly expanding opportunities in newspaper comics.

George Herriman's early Musical Mose strip featured a Black protagonist who searched for acceptance by trying to pass with various European identities, always with disastrous results. It mirrored the light skinned New Orleans Creole's own life as he passed for white.

In 1902 he launched Musical Mose, his first strip with continuing characters for Pulitzer’s. The strips main character was a Black musician who often tried to pass for other ethnicities to get ahead, inevitably leading to discovery and humiliation. His characterizations of Mose and other black characters used the common stereotypesof the time—Black faces with big pop eyes and thick white lips. It was the caricature drawn from minstrel show black face. But his story line, which mirrored his own experience, was warm and sympathetic and the dialect dialogue often was near poetry. The same year he began two more successful strips, Proffesor Otto and his Auto, and the kid hero strip Archy Acrobat.

By the end of the year Herriman was famous and financially secure enough to marry and bring Mable to New York. He also became one of the first cartoonists to garner serious critical attention from the high brow set when poet La Touche Hancock penned an article in The Bookman called The American Comic and Caricature Artwrote, “Art and poetry is the characteristic of George Herriman. Were his drawings not so well known one would think he had mistaken his vocation.”

George Herriman and his bride Mable. After their marriage he had to completely hide his racial background to avoid running afoul of anti-miscegenation laws.

Comic strips and Sunday features came and went in those early years. They were never meant to be eternal. If they ran their course of popularity or if Herriman simply became board with them they were canceled and a new strip would replace them the next day. Working for various syndicates he produced strips in all kinds of genres—strips about sailors, cowboys, a domestic, and Major Ozone’s Fresh Air Crusade for the World Color Printing Company.

He also got work as an illustrator at the New York World where his work accompanied local news commentary, then at New York Daily News where he did an even greater variety of work, including for the first time sports illustration. Then he moved for the first time to a Hearst paper, the New York American where he was paid “commiserate to his noted abilities,” which meant very well indeed. The paper then had no daily comic section so he was assigned as a sports cartoonist. Soon he was considered among the best in that highly specialized business. But a change of editors at the American reduced the use of cartoons in the sports section in favor of more photographs so in 1906 Herriman left the paper and returned to Los Angeles with his wife.

Herriman as a sports cartoonist. Any modern baseball fan will recognize the same behavior.

Back home he was able to continue to send his work to World Color. He added two more Sunday strips to Major Ozone and began to contribute to the Los Angeles Times as a freelancer. But he was soon back in the Hearst fold as the Los Angeles Examiner’s principle cartoonist. His work regularly appeared on the front page and throughout the paper. Circulation soared. Herriman was so busy, and well paid, that he let his World Color contract go and stepped away from comic strip work for nearly three years except for a very short lived sports themed strip in 1907. In 1909 he was back with the free loader strip Barron Mooch for Hearst and came back to World Color with two Sunday strips Alexander the Cat and Daniel and Pansythe latter was his first all-animal strip. For the Examiner he experimented with teen girl strip and then came out with a cigar chomping duck, a margin figure in some of his earlier sports cartoons. Gooseberry Sprig featured an all avian cast and some of the characters would be incorporated into the Krazy Kat universe.

In 1910 Herriman was recalled to New York to work on Hearsf’s other paper there, New York Evening Journal once again as a sports cartoonist. Within week of arrival he launched a new domestic strip, The Dingbat Family featuring the frazzled father E. Pluribus Dingbat. After a few months Herriman tweaked the strip and renamed it The Family Upstairs focusing on Dingbat’s constant frustration with his noisy and annoying upstairs neighbors who were never seen.

For the full page Sunday strip, Hearst wanted to save the bottom row of panels so that local papers could sell advertising there if they could. To fill that space for the papers that did not run the ad, Herriman created a mini-strip in which the upstairs neighbor’s pet, called simply Kat was tormented by a nameless mouse. In a few short weeks the mouse first bonked Kat in the head with a brick. Sometime later Kat kissed the sleeping mouse revealing for the first time an unrequited love for the tormentor. The bare bones of greatness were now in place.

The basement strip soon became so popular that it began to take up all of the panels on the bottom half of the Sunday page. In the summer of 1912 Herriman sent the Dingbats on an extended summer vacation and the sub-strip took over the entire page as Krazy Kat and I. Mouse. The Dingbats returned but the summer replacement was so popular that Krazy Kat became an independent daily strip in October of 1913. Herriman had finally found enduring characters and an enduring strip.

A comic love triangle--Krazy Kat loved Ignatz despite being beaned almost daily, Offssa Pupp loved Krazy Kat and tried to protect him/her from the mouse who was a defiant anarchist who could never be controled.

It took some time for Krazy Kat to evolve into its most familiar form. But from the beginning the basic elements were there. Krazy Kat was from the beginning oddly either gender neutral or able to freely switch from male to female. Herriman used pronouns for both sexes interchangeably. Sometime Krazy Kat acted in ways that seemed feminine, other times not. In any case he/she was love sick over Ignatz a mouse that hated him/her and not only spurned the affection but sought every opportunity to knock Krazy Kat out with a brick. Offissa Pupp, a police dog rounded out the main character triumvirate. He sought to protect Krazy Kat from Ignatz, sometimes preventing assaults, other times hauling the offender to his jail. As the strip progressed Offissa Pupp fell in love with Krazy Kat who remained oblivious of the obvious crush.

From this simple, repeated situation a world slowly developed. Dialogue was written phonetically in a peculiar accent that was never quite identifiable but sounded to some as close to Yiddish accented New York English. Others thought it mimicked his New Orleans Creole accent called Yat. Here are some examples:

A fowl konspirissy – is it pussible?

Can you unda-stend a Finn, or a Leplender, or a Oshkosher, huh?

there is a heppy land, fur, fur a-wa-ay

The characters, especially Krazy Kat, often launched on long soliloquies that had to be squeezed into cramped dialogue balloons or exchanged philosophic observations and whimsy. It was the poetic content of the dialogue that struck and attracted many sophisticated admirers.

The southwestern landscape of Coconino County.

Visually from the beginning Herriman had his cast, filled out with walk-ons by a variety of supporting characters, many of them borrowed from earlier strips, performed against changing backgrounds of potted trees, odd building, pyramids, and temple like structures. At first the setting seemed vaguely urban, as befitted the strip’s New York roots. But in 1913 after visiting and becoming enthralled with the landscapes of New Mexico including the Enchanted Mesa, the Monument Valley, and high dessert Coconino County he explicitly set the story in his own fictional Coconino County and the background reflected the mesas, and cliffs, adobe buildingswith roof tiles, cactus, Navaho pots and blankets, and Mexican motifs.

After relocating back to Los Angeles with his wife and family in 1922, Herriman would make annual trips to the desert country and decorated is mission style home with Southwestern art andartifacts.

Starting in 1916 Krazy Kat added a full black and white Sunday page. Herriman was able to break away from rigid rows of cells. He employed mixed sizes of blocks, unusual shapes, canted sometimes a different angles. Some people found it chaotic, but art experts recognized meticulous compositionand dynamic balance.

George Herriman self-portrait with his characters in 1922.

Those same critics recognized Krazy Kat’s kinship to the evolving European Surrealist movement even before Andre Breton articulated it in his 1925 manifesto. In the May, 1922 issue of Vanity Fair, literary critic Gilbert Seldes identified Herriman’s work with the films of Charley Chaplin in the widely read and cited article Golla, Golla the Comic Strip’s Art and expanded on it in his 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts in which he attacked conservative tendencies that excluded artists in the popular arts, such as Herriman and Chaplin, from being considered alongside traditional artists. Krazy Kat got a whole chapter entitled The Krazy Kat That Walks by Himself, which became famous critical writing on the strip. It was not only the earliest case of giving legitimacy to the comic strip medium as art, but it was a pioneering statement on popular art which now receives full serious attention. Vanity Fair backed up their critic by inducting Herriman into its Hall of Fame in the April 1923 issue.

Another sign of highbrow acceptance was Adolph Bolm’s jazz-pantomime ballet written by composed by John Alden Carpenter and performed in New York in by the Ballet Intime. Herriman himself illustrated the libretto and designed the costumes and scenario.

Back in California, Herriman made friends with his fellow popular artist, Chaplain. It was a mutual admiration society. Herriman presented Chaplain with a color drawing of him in his Little Tramp persona. He also had launched a new strip, Baron Bean‍, in 1916 after the Dingbats ran its course featuring a down-at-the-heels English aristocrat and his even scruffier valet as they wandered around America, an obvious salute to Chaplain.

An ad for Mintz's Krazy Kat cartoons which bore little resemblance to Herriman's conception. He created a Felx the Cat clone with elements ripped off from Disney's Mickey Mouse as well.

Several different studios launched Krazy Kat animated short series beginning with Hearst’s film company in 1916. Herriman was not involved in any of the projects and apparently had no interest in them, despite his personal close association with several film figures after his return to Los Angeles. After the John R. Bray Studio films of the early ‘20’ which hewed closely to Herriman’s style and characterizations, other studios took wide liberties with the material. In 1925 animator Bill Nolan who had worked on the early Felix the Cat shorts, brought out a series in which Krazy Kat was transformed into a Felix rip-off. After the enormous success of Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse new Winkler studios head Charles B. Mintz, who had previously stolen Oswald the Rabbit from Disney, transformed the series again into a cute clone of Mickey complete with a pet dog and look-alike girl friend. Herriman’s original version seemed totally lost. Mintz continued to produce these shorts until he lost control of his studio to Harry Cohn at Columbia.

It was not until decades after Herriman’s death in 1962 the King Features authorized a new cartoon series for the syndicated TV market bundled incongruously with Beetle Baily and Snuffy Smith for a Saturday morning local TV block, that Krazy Kat was finally brought to sound film looking and sounding like what Herriman had created. 50 shorts were made at Czechoslovakian and Australian studios. Penny Philips voiced a feminine Krazy Kat and veteran voice actor Paul Frees was Ignatz. The animation was not high quality, but the cartoons introduced Krazy Kat to the baby boom generation.

Back in ‘20’s, Herriman continue to produce new comic strips including Us Husbands and Bernie Burns. After the latter strip ended in 1932, he concentrated solely on Krazy Kat for the newspapers. He did get one on-going commission for which he did the second most famous work of his career—illustrating Don Marquis’spopular Archy and Mehitabelbooks.

A column head for Don Marquis's daily Archy and Mahitabel feature.

Also in 1932 the full page Sunday strips went color in the Hearst supplements after a short time of being dropped altogether as an economy move during the Great Depression. That brought the feature to full maturity. Herriman reduced the dense cross hatching that distinguished the black and white strips and took full advantage of a brilliant color palate reflective of the sky colors, red earth, and Navaho designs of his beloved Southwest.

Otherwise the ‘30’s were a rough decade for Herriman. His beloved wife was killed in an auto accident in 1931. He mourned deeply and never remarried. Then two years later his 30 year old daughter died suddenly. His own health was not good, perhaps aggravated by an unscientifically balanced vegetarian diet the often left him week. In 1939 he had have kidney surgery in 1938 requiring a ten week post-op recovery during which time King Features ran old strips. It was one of the rare interruptions in his grueling production schedule.

On the business side the number of papers carrying Krazy Kat dwindled to just 30, almost all of them Hearst owned. By contrast a popular contemporary strip with which it had one successful competed, Bringing Up Father, ran in over 3,000 papers. Herriman realized the syndicate could not be recouping the $750 a week guaranteed in his contract with Hearst so he voluntarily offered to take a pay cut. Hearst, still a fan, turned him down. The problem was that the lowly educated readership that Hearst papers appealed to did not understand the sophisticated strips and Sunday pages. And many of Herriman’s devoted fans could no longer stomach the reactionary Hearst papers and refused to support them with their nickels.

But he soldiered on into the 40’s although his health was delicate. He was taken to the hospital in much weakened condition where he was diagnosed with non-alcoholic cirrhosis of the liver. He died leaving a few weeks of un-inked pencil drafts of the strip and Sunday feature which were finished by other artists. After they ran out, Hearst declined to keep the strip alive under another artist, as he usually did. No one could have match Herriman’s creative genius.

In 1946 admirer e. e. cummings wrote the introduction to the first book collection of Krazy Kat Sunday pages. His original color rendering were soon selling in New York art galleries for hundreds of dollars each.

Herriman was cited as a major influence by generations of cartoonists, even those whose style and content seemed to have little to do with him like Charles Schulz. Walt Kelly’s Pogo, Berkeley Breathed’s Outland and Opus, and Stephan Pastis’s Pearls Before Swine where the character Rat resembles Ignatz, including a tendency to bop other characters in the head were all directly indebted to Herriman. Patrick McDonald of Muttsclearly is inspired by Herriman’s drawing style and is the co-author of Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman.

But Herriman’s most enduring disciples were the graphic novelist Art Spiegelman of Maus and the underground cartoonists of the ‘60’s and ‘70’s especially R. Crumb who has been described as a spiritual descendant.

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Hopalong Cassidy—Scruffy Cowhand to Shining TV Hero
24 June 2020 at 11:31

Hopalong Cassidy—Scruffy Cowhand to Shining TV Hero

WWUUD?

24 June 2020 at 11:31

By: Patrick Murfin

William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy on his white stallion Topper.

Summer daysmore than 60 years ago in Cheyenne, Wyoming we spent our days recreating in detail elaborate cowboy sagasthat lasted all day—or even all week. The we was my twin brother, Tim, a rotating cast of neighborhood kids—principally Joe Miranda and his assorted younger siblings—and when she was in town our cousin from Des Moines, Linda Strom. For authenticity real prairie started abruptly at the end of our block complete with sagebrush, tumbleweeds, and low button cactus. But the back yards the neighborhood with their lilac caves, wild rose hedges, palisade fences, brick walls, window wells, and the low flat roofs of car ports provided plenty of locations for ambushes and shoot-outs.

We had regular and defined parts. Tim, handsomeand charismatic was always Roy Rogers. Linda was Bell Starr. And me? I was Hopalong Cassidy.

***

On June 24, 1948, a little less than a year before I was born, Hopalong Cassidy premiered on NBC Television. It was the first western series on the infant medium and it was wildly successful. So successful that it introduced an era lasting more than 30 years when horse operas dominated the small screen.

Clarence Mulford in 1928 banging out another Hopalong novel.

The character of Hopalong Cassidy was first introduced in 1904 in short stories by 21 year old Clarence E. Mulford, a native of Streator, Illinois, while he was living and working in Fryeburg, Maine. He was a fan of western lore who wanted to create more realistic stories than the simple daring-do of the old dime novels. Through research, his tales were filled with accurate details of ranch life, cowboy outfits and gear, and location. But at heart he was still a Victorian moralist with a hero performing nobly.

Cassidy started out as a twenty-something ranch hand elevated to foreman of the sprawling Bar-20 Ranch. He was rude, crude, and slovenly, attributes that hid his finer qualities. Hoppy, as he was called, got his name from sustaining a bullet to the leg in an early story, and lingering disability did often come into play.

Beginning with Bar-20 in 1906 Mulford churned out 28 novels through Hopalong Cassidy Serves a Writ in 1940. Enormously popular he was a major rivalof Zane Grey, the leading western novelist of the day. But the Hopalong series was the first in the genre to have continuing characters and story points from book to book. And unlike other series, Mulford’s cowboy hero and his associates, rivals, and foils aged and evolvedas the series continued.

Hopalong's first appearance in a novel, 1907.

In 1935 Mulford’s near contemporary Harry A. Sherman bought the film rights to the book series and set up his own independent production company to make the movies. Sherman was originally an exhibitioner who had made good money when he became the distributor for D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in the Western states in 1915. He had always wanted to go into production and the deal with Mulford gave him his chance.

Papa Sherman, as he was known, produced more than 50 low budget two reel westerns in the series through 1944. Although cheaply made cinematography by Russell B. Harlan and others was far above average for Poverty Row and gave the series a more expensive look.

Sherman employed a regular sort of stock company with many characters and actors carrying over from film to film. Veteran George Hayes, an early silent leading man who had become a stock villain at other studios, established his new sidekick character, Gabby Hayes by growing a salt-and-pepper beard, removing his false teeth, and donning a battered black hat with a turned up front brim. Many later stars got their starts in these production and others found work on the down sides of their careers. Familiar costars included Victor Jory, Lee J. Cobb, Richard Dix, George Reeves, Robert Mitchum, and Albert Dekker.

Robert Mitchum got an early screen credit as a bad guy in 1943's Hoppy Serves a Writ, the last of the film series produced by Harry Sherman.

Although independently produced, the films were released through major studios, first Paramount and later United Artists, which guaranteed placement in better movie houses, usually as the bottom of a double bill with an A picture. The movies were a bonanza for the distributors who attracted the nickels of millions of kidslined up for Saturday matinées and early weekday shows that often otherwise ran to near empty houses.

What made the movie series so popular were some key decisions by producer Sherman. First and most important was the selection of a star. He turned not to some handsome young stud or a veteran of other westerns, but to a silent screen leading man fallen on hard times.

William Boyd as a silent era matinee idol.

William Boyd,born on June 5, 1895 in Hendrysburg in Belmont County, Ohio had been a highly successful leading man and a favoriteof big time directors like Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Under contract to Radio Pictures at the height of his career he was pulling down$100,000. That came to a screeching halt, however in 1931 when wire services picked up a story from the Los Angeles newspapers about the arrest of another actor, William “Stage” Boyd, on gambling and liquor charges. Unfortunately the wrong actor’s picture accompanied the article. Citing the morals clause of his contract, Radio Pictures dumped him and he found himself virtually black listed in Hollywood.

Having lived life large with a big house, fancy cars, and all of the accouterments of stardom along with the loss of his investments in the Great Depression, it did not take long for Boyd to fall into virtual poverty. He scrounged for work sometimes finding small supporting roles as a businessman or professional under the name Billy Boyd, he was still living hand to mouth when he responded to Sherman’s casting call.

Sherman was inclined to cast Boyd in the supporting role of Red Connors, an older hand on the Bar-20 and Hoppy’s frenemy. Boyd begged to be considered for the lead role despite not having any experience in action pictures and barely able to stay on board a horse. A screen test earned him the job—unlike other candidates, he could act.

So instead of a handsome young buckaroo Sherman found himself with a middle aged, silver haired hero.

The second big decision was to completely re-imagine the character. Instead of the hard drinking, rough talking cowhand in rags in the first film Hop-Along Cassidy the lead was transformed into a gentlemanly teetotaler who ordered sarsaparilla at the bar, who was unfailingly courteous to women, and always let the bad guy slap leather first or throw the first punch. And instead of tatters, Hoppy was adornedin close-fitting black from the tips of his handsomely tooled Texas cowboy boots to the Ten Gallon black Stetson on his head. Boyd was not the first cowboy star to buckthe white hat rule—Tom Mix and Ken Maynard had occasionally worn them—but he was the first to make it a regular trade mark.

And not just any range pony would do. Hoppy was mounted on a magnificent white stallion, Topper who made the later TV Lone Ranger’s Silver look like a puny runt. Of course Hoppy sat comfortably in a handsomely tooled black saddle.

This recipe was enough for the new series to successfully compete against the singing cowboy movies of Gene Autry, John Wayne as Randy, and that upstart Roy Rogers who had come to dominate the B movie westerns. And unlike the products of Republic and other studios who usually set their films in the modern west with telephones, automobiles, and radio, the Hopalong series remained rooted in stories of the Old West.

The final decision was to chuck Mulford’s stories and novels as source material. It was just too hard to adapt the stories to Hoppy’s new image. While keeping Hopalong rooted to the Bar-20, he was given more freedom to roam becoming something of a knight errant with pearl handled revolversrighting wrongs across the west.

Silent screen actor and stock villain in early western talkies, George Hayes began a hugely sucesful second career billed as Gabby Hayes, the comic side kick first of Hopalong and later with Gene Autry, John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Randolph Scott.

In the films Cassidy was usually accompanied by either an elderly comic side kick or a hero worshiping youthor, most frequently, both. These were not characters, but types whose names and particulars changed as different actors filled the slot. George Hayes was the first sidekick, Windy Halliday billed for the first time as Gabby. Very popular with audiences he left the series in a salary dispute and moved on to Republic where he was soon paired with Gene Autry, John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and later at other studios with Randolph Scott. He was replaced first by Britt Wood as Speedy McGinnis and then by comedian Andy Clyde as California Carlson who lasted through the end of the movie series.

The juveniles, eager and well-meaning but trouble prone, were played by James Ellison, Russell Hayden, George Reeves, and Rand Brooks. Hayden went on to a substantial career in two reel westerns and B gangster flicks. Reeves, of course, rose to fame as TV’s Superman.

Meanwhile Mulford, the creator of the original character was making out well not only from royalties from the films but from renewed interest in his books. From 1935 to 1940 he wrote three new Hopalong books reflecting the hero as he appeared in the movies. He also went back and re-wrote many of his earlier titles adapting them to movie goers’ expectations.

Despite the continuing popularity of the series, Sherman dreamed of becoming a producer of quality A pictures. He announced he was ending the series in 1944. By then his star William Boyd had become very identified with the part. He had learned how to ride passably and how to duke it out with the bad guys. He enjoyed the adulation of young fans—and the substantial income he earned from special appearances with Topper. He gambled his entire future on Hopalong Cassidy, mortgaging virtually everything he owned to buy both the character rights from Mulford and the catalog of movies from Sherman.

And then he set out, with his own production company, to continue the series. He churned out 12 more films. But he had even less production money than Sherman and the pictures were visibly cheaper.

They heyday of the two reel western was coming to an end. Major distributors were dropping them. Unless he had the money to upgrade to color, as Roy Rogers was successfully doing, there seemed little hope. The principle culprit was the rise of a new competitive medium, television, which threatened to keep all of those Saturday afternoon popcorn munchers at home.

Boyd, with everything to lose, decided to throw in with the butcher who was cutting the throat of his golden goose. In 1948 he approached NBC Television which aired a handful of his old films. The response was so overwhelming that before Boyd could get in production with an original series for the air, the network put up a regular series drastically edited to a half hour format from the 66 original movies.

The opening credits for the NBC repackaging of the Hopalong films included the the introduction from the 1935 first film, Hop-Along Cassidy even though the character no longer had a hyphenated name.

The series premiered on June 24, 1949. It was the first regular western series on television and a huge hit. By 1950 Boyd was a megastar, his picture as Hopalong Cassidy adorning the covers of national magazines like Look, Life, and Time.

An astute businessman, Boyd was the first western star to see the value in merchandising. He licensed hundreds of products bearing his likenessas Hopalong. Most famously the cowboy was the first ever to appear on a school lunch box causing sales for Aladdin Industries to jump from 50,000 units to 600,000 units in just one year. Hoppy merchandise generated $70 million in revenue for more than 100 companies. In 1950 Boyd personally earned over $800,000 in licensing, endorsements, and public appearances.

The huge success of the Hopalong Cassidy school lunch box helped launch the age of tie-in merchandising and helped make William Boyd very rich.

Boyd did get up production of his new originals series with Edgar Buchanan as Red Carlson, the character Boyd had first auditioned for, now upgraded to the comic sidekick. Broadcast as a separate series from the re-packaged movies, this show was rated No. 7 nationally in 1950. Boyd also starred in a radio version which began on the Mutual Network in 1950 and jumped to CBS where it ran until 1952 with movie side kick Andy Clyde back to reprise California Carlson.

Fawcett Comics had been running a series of comic bookssince 1946 which was taken over by DC Comics in 1954. The now highly collectable books ran through 136 issues through 1959. Western Publishing issued several coloring books. January 1950 Dan Spiegel began to draw a syndicated comic strip with scripts by Royal King Cole which lasted until 1955.

In 1950 a deal with Castle Films brought the original movies distributed by Paramount to the home market in 15 mm sound and 8 mm silent versions. These stone age videos enlivened many a child’s birthday party.

Both versions of the TV series and the original movies were all available in TV syndication until they were withdrawn from circulation in the late 1960’s.

Boyd, now wealthy, retired with his fifth wife to Palm Desert, California where he had significant real estate and development holdings. Suffering from Parkinson’s disease as he aged he shunned photographs and interviews so that he would not disappoint the memory of his fans. He died in 1972 in Laguna Beach at the age of 77.

Hopalong Cassidy did not die. He did become hard to find for a while. Boyd’s heirs licensed restored prints of the films to the basic cable Western Channel in the mid-1990’s where they ran until they were again withdrawn in 2000. DVDs for home viewing are hard to findoutside of a couple of cheaply made compilation discs and an expensive package of the whole television run.

The character as envisioned originally by Mulford was resurrected in four novels by western novel master Louis L’Amor and in a series of short stories in Follow Your Stars by Susie Coffman in 2005. Some of Mulford’s original novels have been reprinted, along with a few of the versions he revised to fit the movie character. Readers are advised to check carefullywhich they are buying as the originals are considered far better.

And, of course, Hopalong replays eternally in the memory theater of his now aging fans.

WWUUD?
Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner—An Equal Opportunity Mississippi Lynching
23 June 2020 at 10:18

Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner—An Equal Opportunity Mississippi Lynching

WWUUD?

23 June 2020 at 10:18

By: Patrick Murfin

Norman Rockwell, the beloved painter and illustrator of a pleasant America, was deeply moved by the Civil Rights movement and shocked the nation with his depiction of the murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner

June 21 was not only the anniversary of the hanging of the Molly Maguires noted in yesterday’s blog post, but also another important event in the strugglefor social justice in America—the murder of three young civil rights workers in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. Their story reminds us that before young white people took to the streets this month in unprecedented numbers in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and in protest to the police killings of George Floyd and other African-Americans and People of Color, an earlier generation put their lives on the line in the segregationist South where the Ku Klux Klan still terrorized with near impunity.

They were fewer in number than today’s young activists who have taken to the streets in every corner of the country including small towns and white suburbs where they were totally unexpected. The Freedom Riders and voting rights activists of the ‘60’s came mostly from Northern university enclaves and were often red blanket babies and frequently Jewish. My own best friend from high school, Jon Gordonwent down in the summer of 1967 and thankfully returned safely. I wished then that I had gone with him instead of spending the summer washing dishes at a Skokie Howard Johnson’s.

If the Police Gazette daring doand James McParlan’s handlebar mustache make the Molly McGuire case seem too quaint, many of us of a certain age still have vivid snowy black and white TV images stuck in our heads keeping alive the memory of the murders of three young civil rights activists in the Freedom Summer of 1964.

Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner.

It still made news 52 years later in 2016 when Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood announced an end to the active Federal and State investigations into the 1964 killings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in Mississippi. The announcement came just days after the death of Judge Marcus D. Gordon, who oversaw the 2005 murder trial at which Edgar Ray Killen, a Ku Klux Klansman and Baptist preacher who was believed to be the prime mastermind of the crime was finally convicted. Hood told reporters:

The FBI, my office and other law enforcement agencies have spent decades chasing leads, searching for evidence and fighting for justice for the three young men who were senselessly murdered...It has been a thorough and complete investigation. I am convinced that during the last 52 years, investigators have done everything possible under the law to find those responsible and hold them accountable; however, We have determined that there is no likelihood of any additional convictions. Absent any new information presented to the FBI or my office, this case will be closed.

The news came as no surprise to any of the victims’ families. After so many years most, if not all of the others involved in the crime are likely dead—Killen turned 91 in prison—as are almost any witnesses. The likelihood that new physical evidence may show up has diminished to the vanishing point.

The case was also been kept alive in the press and public awareness due to the diligent work of the Andrew Goodman Foundation which encourages young people of all religious backgrounds to be engaged in social justice work and continues to campaign for the preservation and extension of voting rights which are under pressure from a wave of suppression laws enacted across the Old South and states with Republican governors and Legislatures. Andrew Goodman’s brother, David is the effective public face of the foundation.

Then there was the troubling role of FBI informants within the Klan. Although J. Edgar Hoover planted spiesin both the civil rights camp and in various Klan groups and White Citizen’s Councils, he was clearly more fixatedon discrediting the Civil Rights Movement, particularly its charismatic leaders like the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., than he was with White terrorists. He was also loath to disclose how deeply his informants were involved in several high profile cases, including the murders of the Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo during the Selma Campaign—so deeply they may have been directly complicit in brutal crimes.

The film Mississippi Burning starring Gene Hackman and Willem DaFoe as the lead FBI investigatosr on the case started a trend in films about the Civil Rights movement that put white heroes at the center of Black stories.

Like the Molly Maguires this case got its own movie, a much more successful film. 1988’s award winning Mississippi Burning told the brutal tale of entrenched Southern Racism. It starred Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as a pair of FBI agentswho diligently and doggedly investigated the crime. Widelypraised at the time of its release, the film set a pattern for other movies about the Civil Rights era which always centered on white heroes relegating black victims and civil rights workers alike to secondary roles in their own stories. And the ironyof the FBI as heroes was not lost on many who lived through those times.

By the summer of 1964 the Civil Rights movement had matured. The non-violent civil disobedience campaigns of the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and other groups had won some local victories and the near passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which had cleared a 57 day long Senate Filibuster just two days before the murders. But progress was painfully slow and everywhere bitterly resisted, often with violence. The Movement was experiencing internal stresses due to tactical differences, jealousies, and rivalries between groups and leaders, and the early stages of restiveness among younger militants over the limitations of non-violence in the face of increasingly brutal attacks.

CORE was gaining a reputation for both a more confrontational approach than Dr. King’s SCLC and for going into the heartof the Black Belt to work in small towns and rural communities with long-term organizing projects. It declared that summer to be Freedom Summer and publicly vowed to bring up to 30,000 volunteers into Mississippi to set up Freedom Schools and conduct voter registration drives. Although that number was wildly exaggerated, it got the attention of Whites, many of whom flocked to join the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a splinter group founded and led by Samuel Bowers and which had a reputationof being much more aggressive than older Klan organizations. It was also very active in recruiting among local law enforcement officers.

Student volunteers for COREs Freedom Summer voter registration project in Mississippi join hands and sing as the prepare to head south.

Andrew Goodman was a 20 year old New York student and activistfrom a Red Blanket secular Jewish background. Michael Schwerner was a 24 year old from a comfortable suburban background who graduated from Cornel University and was in graduate school at Columbia University. Like Goodman he came from a Jewish family. His classmate and friend at Columbia, the diminutive Robert Reich, later a Secretary of Labor and now a progressive social media star, remembered him as a “Gentle giant” who protected him from campus bullies. Both Goodman and Schwerner became involved with CORE while in school and eagerly signed up to join the volunteers heading to Mississippi for the Freedom Summer.

Once in state they were teamed with James Chaney, a 21 year old working class Black man from Meridian, Mississippi who was already a Civil Rights veteran. Two years earlier in 1962 he had participated in and endured the attacks on the Freedom Rides on interstate busses. He had joined CORE and was already experienced inorganizing voter registration drives in his home town. Of the three young men Chaney was the only one remotely aware of how dangerous their work would be.

Chaney and Schwerner were assigned to organize Freedom School in Neshoba County to prepare local Blacks to pass the tough comprehension and literacy tests required by the state. These tests were a huge hurdle to voting and even answering every question correctly did not guarantee that it would be correctly marked. Many would be voters had to take the testrepeatedly. Part of the training at the school was in how to behave when turned down to prevent immediate arrest for causing a disturbance.

The pair kicked off their organizing attempt with speeches at Mount Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, Mississippi. Local members of the White Knights of the Klan immediately got word of the effort and began monitoring the pair’s travels and activities. They also wanted to attract more CORE volunteers to the area with the intent of targeting them. They burnedthe Mount Zion Church knowing that CORE would respond. It did and Goodman soon joined the other two.

The ruins of the Mt. Zion Methodist Church in Longdale, Mississippi where where James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner spoke on Memorial Day.

Early on June 21the trio met in the Meridian offices of CORE’s ally in the Freedom Summer project, the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) to investigate the Mount Zion arson. Schwerner told the staff to start searching for them if they were not back by 4 p.m. After visiting Longdale the began the return to Meridian on State Rt. 16 to the county seat at Philadelphia where they planned to pick up Rt. 19 back to their base.

Just inside the Philadelphia city limits they experienced a flat tire, probably the result of sabotage to the vehicle or sharp objects strewn it its path. As the car limped down the road they were almost immediately pulled over by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Ray Price who apparently had been following them. Price radioed Harry Wiggs and E. R. Poe of the Mississippi Highway Patrol for assistance. Chaney, the driver was arrested on the impossible charge of speeding over 65 MPH. The other two were held for investigation. All were taken to the Neshoba County Jail on Myrtle Street and held incommunicado.

By 4:45 alarmed staffers began calling authorities, including the Highway Patrol, in search of information on their whereabouts. They were given no information.

Still prevented from making a phone call, all three were released at 10 that night. They were followed by Deputy Price as they headed south on Rt. 19. A Highway Patrol car sitting conspicuously at outside Pilgrim’s store dissuaded them from trying to stop and use the phone. Meanwhile a mob of White Knights gathered in two cars drinking and arguing who would have the privilege of killing the men who were now literally fleeing for their lives. Philadelphia Police Officer Burkes told the men in the cars where to find the trio with instruction to “go get them.”

One of the two cars broke down and six of the men jammed into Horace D. Barnette’s ’57 Ford Fairlane for the pursuit. Meanwhile Deputy Price stopped the CORE station wagon which had turned west on State Rt. 492 in an attempt to elude any pursuers. He turned the men around and moved them back on Rt. 19 to Philadelphia, strait into path of the oncoming lynchers. The police cruiser and Fairlane boxed in the station wagon and steered it onto nearly deserted Rock Cut Road where they stopped at a secluded intersection with another County Highway. The three Civil Rights workers were dragged from their car.

Alton W. Roberts, 26, a dishonorably discharged U.S. Marine who worked as a salesman in Meridian shot both Goodman and Schwerner at point blank rangeafter asking Schwerner, “Are you that Nigger lover.” Chaney was singled out for a beating and then shot in the stomach by James Jordan and then finished off with another shot to the head by Roberts.

After the murders the bodies were loaded into their station wagon which was driven by prior arrangement to Old Jolly Farm owned by Olen L. Burrage southwest of Philadelphia and placed on a red clay dam on the property. Herman Tucker, a heavy machinery operator, was at the dam waiting for the lynch mob’s arrival with his bulldozer, which he used to cover the bodies.

Goodman was apparently not yet dead when he was covered. When his body was finally recovered red clay was found in his lungs and clenched hands.

After the job was done Deputy Price told the men:

Well, boys, you’ve done a good job. You’ve struck a blow for the white man. Mississippi can be proud of you. You’ve let those agitating outsiders know where this state stands. Go home now and forget it. But before you go, I’m looking each one of you in the eye and telling you this: “The first man who talks is dead! If anybody who knows anything about this ever opens his mouth to any outsider about it, then the rest of us are going to kill him just as dead as we killed those three sonofbitches tonight. Does everybody understand what I’m saying. The man who talks is dead, dead, dead!

The burnt out station wagon used by the Civil Rights Workers was quickly discovered confirming the worst fears for their fate.

Tucker was assigned to dispose of the CORE station wagon by driving it to Alabama. Instead he ditched it near a river along Highway 21 in northeast Neshoba County and set it ablaze. That proved to be a fatal mistake. After the Meridian COFO office, the initial target of an FBI surveillance team already stationed in town, reported its three volunteer missing, J. Edgar Hoover reluctantly moved to begin a search. He was acting under pressure from Attorney General Robert Kennedy who also ordered 150 additional agentsfrom New Orleans to the scene. The burnt-out station wagon was accidently discovered the next day by two Native Americans who reported it to the Meridian Agent in charge, John Proctor. Kennedy then ordered hundreds of sailors from the Naval Air Station Meridian to search the swamps of Bogue Chitto for the bodies. Top Special Agent Joseph Sullivan was brought in from Memphis to lead the investigation. Proctor and Sullivan would be the modelsfor the fictional FBI agents in Mississippi Burning.

That search turned up unexpected results. The bodies of college student Charles Eddie Moore and a sawmill worker from Franklin County, Mississippi were found badly decomposed in a riverchained to a Jeep motor. Although neither 19 year of old Black man was known to be involved in Civil Rights work, they were picked up while hitch hiking in May on suspicion, beaten, tortured, and interrogated before being dropped into the river alive. The bodies of five other recently murdered young black men from rural towns in the area who were never reported missing were also turned up. It was grizzly evidence of a well-oiled and active night riding operation.

Acting on a tip from a mysterious Mr. X the FBI dispatched searchers to Burrage’s farm where the bodies were discovered 44 days after their abduction and murder. The case unraveled from there.

National outrage about the murder of the idealistic young Northern volunteers was used by President Lyndon Johnson to leverage final passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on July 2. As many noted even at the time, the death of their Black comrade Chaney alone would hardly have caused a ripple in Congress. The case along with the deaths of White volunteers the Rev. Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo during the Selma Campaign the next year was also credited with the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Outrage over the murders help secure passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Lyndon Johnson presents Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr with a ceremonial pen following a signing ceremony at the White House.

You may have noted the greatand specific detail known about exactly how the murders were committed and by whom. Exactly how do we know so much? Good question. Although the FBI may not have had informants within the inner circle of those who plotted and planned the murder as well as the lynch mob that carried it out—although some historians believe that at least one of the men may have been a deep cover informant never revealed by the agency because he was actively involved in the killings—there were informants in the wider White Knights of the Klan organization. Take Mr. X. Forty years after the fact he was identified as Mississippi State Trooper and Klan member Maynard King who was enlisted as an informant by Agent Sullivan.

Other informants were on hand on for instance on June 7 when White Knights Imperial Wizard Bowers told a secret rally:

This summer the enemy [CORE] will launch his final push for victory in Mississippi…there must be a secondary group of our members, standing back from the main area of conflict, armed and ready to move. It must be an extremely swift, extremely violent, hit-and-run group.

So the FBI was aware that a serious and violent plot against Freedom Summer volunteers was afoot weeks before the murders. After the fact other informants associated with the Klan but never identified by Federal agents passed bits and pieces of information they picked up from the loose lips of participants or second hand from others.

In late November 1964 the FBI accused 21 men of conspiracy to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. Most of the suspects were arrested by the FBI on December 4, 1964. Mississippi officials declined to prosecute any of the men for murder so Assistant Attorney General John Doar led a star crossed Federal prosecution for conspiring to deprive the three activists of their civil rights. 18 men including Sherriff Rainey and Deputy Price were originally indicted. Travis M. Barnette, owner of a Meridian garage where much of the planning was done, and James Jordan who was the first to shoot Chaney both confessedand would testify at upcoming trials. Jordan’s testimony was particularly damming.

The faces of evil--members of the lynch mob who carried out the murders: Top Row, L-R: Deputy Cecil R. Price, Travis M. Barnette, Alton W. Roberts, Jimmy K. Arledge, Jimmy Snowden. Bottom Row, L-R: Jerry M. Sharpe, Billy W. Posey, Jimmy L. Townsend, Horace D. Barnette, and James Jordan who confessed and testified against the others

Despite strong evidence, the case hit snag after snag. After several false starts and bringing the case back to a Grand Jury once, the U.S. v. Cecil Price et. al. came to trial on October 7, 1967 in the Meridian with Federal Judge William Cox, an ardent segregationist, presiding. An all-White jury included one admittedformer Ku Klux Klan member. When the jury deadlocked despite overwhelming evidence, Cox admonished them with an Allen charge for the minority to reconsider its judgement.

On October 20 Cecil Price, Imperial Wizard Bowers, Alton Wayne Roberts, Jimmy Snowden, Billey Wayne Posey, Horace Barnett, and Jimmy Arledge were convicted and sentenced to between 3 to 10 years. After losing their appeal all went to prison, but none served more than six years. They were the first white men convicted of a fatal crimeagainst civil rights workers. The cases of E. G. Barnett, a candidate for Sheriff, and preacher Edgar Ray Killen, believed to be the principal mastermind of the plot ended in a hung jury. Prosecutors declined to re-try them. No charges were brought against several other men known to be involved in the wide-spread plot.

Edgar Ray Killen, mastermind of the plot was finally convicted of the three murder in a Mississippi court in 2005.

After years of investigation by intrepid journalist Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson Clarian-Ledger and the work of High School teacher Barry Bradford atStevenson High School in Lincolnshire, Illinois and three of his students, Allison Nichols, Sarah Siegel, and Brittany Saltiel who produced a documentary film on the case and helped uncover new evidence, Mississippi prosecutors were finally pressed into bring murder charges against Killen. At age 80 he was convicted and sentenced to three consecutive 20 year terms in 2005. He died in prison on January 11, 2018, six days before his 93rd birthday.

WWUUD?
Guerilla Class War—The Molly Maguires, The Coal Barons, and The Pinkertons
22 June 2020 at 10:24

Guerilla Class War—The Molly Maguires, The Coal Barons, and The Pinkertons

WWUUD?

22 June 2020 at 10:24

By: Patrick Murfin

Old Movie fans will remember the 1970 big-budget epic The Molly Maguires with Sean Connery as Pinkerton detective and spy James McParlan and Richard Harris as a leader of the secret society of Irish coal miners.

You may remember a sentence or two in your high school American history book about the Molly Maguires—that they blew things up and terrorized bosses in the Pennsylvania coal mines before be rooted out by a Pinkerton spy and given their just deserts on the gallows. Those of a certain age and inclinationmight recall the 1970 mega-budget Paramount box office flop, The Molly Maguires starring Sean Connery as the tough miner bent on revenge for a thousand injustices and Richard Harris as James McParlan theconflicted but heroic Pinkerton who befriends him and then betrays him.

The shadowy Molly Maguires emerged in the anthracite coal fields of eastern Pennsylvania in the post-Civil War era when a rapidly industrializing nation relied on the production of the mines for fuel and to feed the insatiable steel blast furnaces. Unable to find enough Yankee farmers sons to descend into hell for dangerous jobs with scant wages, mine owners increasingly relied on immigrant labor—first the skilled and experienced coal miners of Wales and Lancashire but ultimately on the abundant unskilled displaced peasants of Ireland.

Attempts to form a union, The Workers Benevolent Association (WBA), were led by the skilled American and Welsh workers were repeatedly squelched by mine owner violence and intimidation. Although as many as 80% of the region’s miners, including the mostly Irish pit men who did the hardest and most dangerous labor, had little voice within the union largely because the leaders shared the same disdain of the Micks as their bosses.

Those Irish miners died regularly in cave-ins and explosions, who were cast aside like rubbish when injured or maimed, jammed into barelyhabitable shanties, in perpetual debt to company stores, and subjected to cuts in their meager wages with every downward economic tic—cuts that were never restored when things began to hum again. Yet they seemingly had no recourse.

But they did have a tradition brought with them from the Auld Sod. Over there a tradition of secret societies arose under the oppressive rule of the British, their imposed nobility and large landlords. Called at various times and under various circumstances Whiteboys, Peep o’ Day Boys and Ribbon Men these groups protested rack rents, evictions, and other injustices with frightening visits from masked and disguised men, beatings, tar and feathering, and occasional arson and murder. Although hunted by authorities, strict secrecy avoided most prosecutions and the terror that they inspired in local landlords often led to at least temporary concessions andrelief. In the rural environs of the big cities like Dublin, Belfast, and Cork these groups also had nationalist sympathies and character and included both Catholic and Protestant tenants.

The Whiteboys were one of several Irish secret societies that took revenge on landlords, tax collectors, and other oppressors.

In the rural and Gaelic speaking west similar secret societies sprang up in the 1840’s in reaction to a wave of evictions and in reaction to the wide spread misery of the Potato Famine. These groups had little or no connection to the nationalist movement and were exclusively Catholic and sectarian in as far as many big landowners were Protestants and Anglo-Irish. By 1845 there was a document outlining the rules of a secret society under the name title Address of “Molly Maguire” to her children which was published in Freeman’s Journal. By the 1850’s and ‘60’s groups identified as Molly Maguires were operating in Liverpool, the English destination of many rural laborers fleeing devastated Ireland and the jumping off port for many Irish immigrants to America.

Historians are divided on whether the Pennsylvania miners brought a formal secret society with them and simply re-established it in the new country or if the Mollies of Ireland and Liverpool inspired a copycat movement as conditions in the mines deteriorated during and after an 1873 Panic. Most suspect the latter, although some men might have been involved in the earlier societies and been familiar with their structures and oaths. Although episodes of violence and retribution had been retroactively blamed on the Molly Maguires since the mid-1860’s there had been a lull, almost extinction, of outburst until the crash and subsequent depression.

Franklin B. Gowen, President of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Co.was the man behind plans to break the Union and stir up then smash the Molly Maguires.

At the same time the major mine bosses unitedunder the leadership of Franklin B. Gowen, the President of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, and of the Philadelphia and Reading Coal and Iron Company and decided to use the opportunity of widespread unemployment to break the union at its weakest spot—the mistrust and hostility of the conservative skilled workers for the Papist Irish. To accomplish this Gowen engaged the services of the Pinkerton Detective Agency which had a well-established record of breaking unions. He assigned the company to work with the Pennsylvania Coal and Mine Police, a semi-private, semi-official paramilitary police used to terrorize and persecute the union and its supporters.

Irish born operative James McParlan was assigned to go undercover and infiltrate both the union and any secret societies operating in the region under the alias James McKenna. McParlan, in his detailed reports to his superiors, claimed that he easily gained the full confidence of both Union leaders and certain Irishmen with influence over their fellow workers. But he rued slow progress—he was unable to make any connection to a secret society and violence in the region continued its long lag.

An illustrated newspaper illustration imagined a secret Molly Maguire meeting in 1974.

That ended soon enough with a sharp rise in assaults, and even murders. Some historians believe that at least some of this violence can be attributed to Pinkerton and Coal and Iron Police activity in order to arouse alarm about an alleged Molly Maguire threat. They point out that many of the victims were leading union men and Irishmen who were painted as informers. The deaths of the union men increased the alienation between the union leadership and the Irish. Others believe that McParlan and other agents acted as agents provocateurs goading miners into the violence. A minority of ideologically business friendly historians totally buy McParlan’s claims that he eventually ferreted out a major conspiracy without contributingto it.

Pinkerton spy James McParlan in the 1880's.

McParlan identified a secret organization with the Ancient Order of Hibernians, an open and legal benevolent society similar to many others established by immigrant groups. He inferred that the AOH and the Mollies were in reality one and the same organization and acted in concert with the Union to attack its enemies. Others believe that the miners used the cover of the Hibernians, who could meet openly, to conduct the separate affairs of the secret society. The trouble is that no trace of that secret society, not a single document, confirms the existence of the Mollies or another society. The AOH, which is still in existence, has always stoutly denied that their Pennsylvania lodges and the Molly Maguires were associated. All we do know is all of the men eventually arrested and charged via McParlan’s investigation were members of the Hibernians.

McGowan, according to documents, decided to force the union into a strike which began on January 1, 1875 and then break it by a combination of brute force by the Coal and Iron Police, and dividing the men along ethnic lines. Alan Pinkerton himself suggested the formation of vigilantes to attack supposed and identified Mollies. After a spate of killings and assaults, including the suspicious murders of union men, a vigilante group did stage an attack on a home killing one man and one woman and wounding two who got away. The house had been identified by McParlan in his reports as belonging to a Molly. The spy, however, was so outraged that the vigilantes had used his intelligence to kill a woman that he angrily turned in his resignation. Pinkerton mollified him with claims that they had not shared his information and was induced to stay on.

Meanwhile the Coal and Iron Police arrested and imprisoned most of the union leadership on charges of conspiracy in May. By July miner’s families were starving and vigilante attacks on union men were spreading fear. The strike was broken and the men forced to return to work with a devastating 20% pay cut.

McParlan noted that only after the strike did many rank-and-file Irish miners swing their allegiance to the supposed Molly Maguires. Even after continue attacks by vigilantes, the Mollies were slow to respond. McParlan, now claiming to have “infiltrated their inner circle,” likely egged on plans for revenge. Finally there was a spate of killing attributed to the Mollies.

Four of the accused Molly Maguires are marched to their execution on June 21, 1877.

Based on McParlan’s testimony a number of men were arrested by the Coal and Mine Police. Three men accused of killing Benjamin K. Yost, a Tamaqua Borough Patrolman, went on trial separately. One, James Kerrigan, who was the brother of McParlan’s fiancé, turned state’s evidence and implicated three more men. Franklin Gowan personally prosecuted the cases which hit a snag when Kerrigan’s wife testified that he had committed the murder and had tried to save himself by pinning it on innocent men. The trial ended in a mistrial. At a second trial Mrs. Kerrigan was mysteriously unavailable to testify and all five men were sentenced to hang while Kerrigan was set free.

McParlan’s testimony also resulted in the conviction of five men in other cases. In all ten men were sentenced to hang. The sentences were carried out in two groups on June 21, 1877—six men were hanged in the prison at Pottsville and four at Mauch Chunk in Carbon County under the protection of heavily armed Pennsylvania Militia. But it was not over. Ten more men were hanged over the next year.

The Molly Maguire Memorial in Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania depicts a single miner awaiting the noose.

Labor “peace” was thus restored in Pennsylvania coal fields—at least until the rise of the United Mine Workers and the work of Mother Jones led to new campaigns—and suppressions—in the 1890’s and beyond.

McParlan, celebrated as a great hero in the popular press, had a long career with Pinkerton, by the turn of the Century he was in charge of western operations out of the Denver office. He employed cowboy/gunman Tom Horn, who killed ten men and a boy for Wyoming cattle barons at war with small ranchers. Horn was famously hanged, but McParlan and the Pinkertons escaped blame for the murders.

Later he famously Kidnapped Big Bill Haywood and two other officers of the Western Federation of Miners and transported them in sealed train from Denver to Idaho to serve time for the bomb murder of Idaho ex-governor Frank Steunenberg in 1905. But his plan to frame the men for a conspiracy was foiledby defense attorney Clarence Darrow. They were acquitted and the actual, undisputed bomber, known as Harry Orchard who had been induced by McParlan to implicate them, was convicted of the murder.

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That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
21 June 2020 at 19:00

That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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21 June 2020 at 19:00

By: Patrick Murfin

That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine by Gene Autry.

It’s Father’s Day. Not surprisingly there are a lot fewer songs about fathers than mothers—and some of them don’t exactly paint a flattering picture of pater familias. Think Papa Was a Rolling Stone or Madonna’s Papa Don’t Preach. There is the schmaltzy O, Mine Papa from the turn of the 20th Century Yiddish theater, which Eddie Fisher turned into a surprise hit in the early 1960’s. But today’s pick is an equally sentimental ditty—That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine.

A songbook of Gene Autry's early colaborations with Jimmy Long including That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine.

In 1931 railroad telegrapher Gene Autry was struggling to emulate his hero Jimmie Rodgers as a recording artist. One of his best pals and mentorswas another Oklahoma railroader, Jimmy Long. Together they wrote and recorded That Silver Haired Daddy of Mineas a duet. It turned out to be Autry’s first hit. Four years later after establishing himself as hillbilly radio starhe reordered it again as a solo on the Vocalian label selling more than 5 million copies in the middle of the Depressionwhen record sales were generally way off. It made Autry a major star.

The poster for Tumbling Tumbleweeds, Gene Autry's first starring role for Republic Pictures.

Republic Pictures, a B-movie mill quickly snatched Autry up and transformed him into a singing cowboy. After briefly appearing as a musical specialty act in the studio’s two-reelers, he was featured in his first staring roll in 1935’s Tumbling Tumbleweeds. Gene played a singing cowboy in a medicine show who came home after 5 years to find his father had been murdered and his best friend charged with the crime. Naturally, he had to ferret out the real bad guys. The film also featured Smiley Burnette who became Autry’s first regular side-kick and chaste love interest Lucile Browne and Black comedian Eugene Jackson as Eightball, an embarrassingly stereotyped third banana. The film was a huge hit and Autry reigned as Republic’s biggest star until he interrupted his career to serve as an Army Air Corps pilot flying C-47 cargo planes over the Hump from Indiato Burma and China.

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Revisiting Summer Solstice/Father’s Day—Slightly Out of Sync Murfin Verse
21 June 2020 at 09:27

Revisiting Summer Solstice/Father’s Day—Slightly Out of Sync Murfin Verse

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21 June 2020 at 09:27

By: Patrick Murfin

The Green Man, pagan ruler of Midsummer.

Five years ago Father’s Day fell on June 21, which was Summer Solstice. Such calendar coincidences move me to the commission of poetry like a prune juice and X-Lax smoothie facilitates an explosive bowl movement. Depending on your outlook the results may be equally as messy and disgusting. This year the Solstice fell yesterday, June 20 with Father’s Day hot on its heels today. Close enough to revisit some old verse.

Some ancient peoples marked the Solstice occasion with such astonishing precision involving monoliths, mounds, and monuments that it has enabled a basic cable cottage industry of pseudo-science documentaries speculating about aliens. But for many others, the precise date was hard to pin down. Changes to the length of day were too subtle to be measured precisely. Instead they spread out the celebration over a cluster of days under various names. Modern Pagans, who have made up a lot of stuff to fill in the gaps of what is known call those days Litha after and old Anglo-Saxon name for a summer month. Taken together the various pre-Christian celebrations are often lumped together as Midsummer, as good a name as any.

The Old Man as Green Man, ready to sprout oak leaves.

Was Father’s day, at least subconsciouslyset in spitting distance of Midsummer if not on the precise day? Probably not. But there are those who say that there is no such thing as pure coincidence. Call it kismet or serendipity, it was enough to set my head spinning and impel my fingers on the keyboard.

My father, W. M. Murfin in Cheyenne, 1959.

Summer Solstice/Father’s Day

June 21, 2015

Perhaps, after all, I am the Green Man,

and my Father before me

who took to the woods with rod and rifle

and his father before him

who grew strawberries by the porch

and the fathers before him

who were orchard men in Ohio

and back to those earlier yet

who pulled stones from Cornish fields

for their masters.

Save the complexion, I look the part enough

With shaggy goatee, wild eyebrows,

and neglected hair which could sprout

oak and ivy.

But my wild forest years are well behind me,

I plant nothing but my feet on the sidewalk

and my butt in a desk chair,

I raise nothing but questions, concerns,

and indignation,

my fertility was snipped away

long decades past

my virility—don’t make me laugh,

no Goddess awaits in a glade

under the triumphant Sun.

Perhaps I am not the Green Man after all

just an old fool and fraud,

but, hey, isn’t that all that is needed

to be just Dad instead.

—Patrick Murfin

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Summertime—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
20 June 2020 at 21:04

Summertime—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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20 June 2020 at 21:04

By: Patrick Murfin

Summertime performed by Louis Armstorng and Ella Fitzgerald.

Today is the Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere and we would be remiss if we didn’t take musical note of the occasion. There are so many great summertime songs that it would be hard to choose among them, except for the one great American classic that stands head and shoulders above them all—George Gershwin’sSummertime.

Porgy and Bess colaborators George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward in Charleston, South Carolina.

Summertime is Gershwin’s aria 1935 opera Porgy and Bess with lyrics by DuBose Heyward the white South Carolinian author of the novel Porgyon which the opera was based. Ira Gershwin was also credited as a co-lyricist by Heyward, who was also a poet, was the sole author of Summertime.

The song was first sung in the opera by Abbie Mitchel as Clara and later reprised by Anne Brown as Bess singing to Clara’s orphaned baby after she and her husband drowned in a storm. Mitchel made the first recording of the song with Gershwin at the piano and conducting the orchestraon the 78 rpm album George Gershwin Conducts Excerpts from Porgy & Bess.

Abbie Mitchel as Clara first sang Summertime on stage and recorded it with Gershwin.

Porgy and Bess, although not a hit in its first Broadway production went on to be one of the towering achievements of the American musical theater, oft revived as both a stage musical and as a full-blown opera. Gershwin’s great gamble was to synthesize Black folk blues and jazz and to dare to present a Black cast of classically trained singersmostly stripped of minstrel show stereotypes on Broadway. His devotion to Heyward’s text and vision and his generosityin collaboration created something magical.

Billie Holiday’s 1936 recording was the first to hit the US pop charts, reaching #12. Other versions to make the pop charts include those by Sam Cooke in 1957, Al Martino 1960, The Marcels in 1961, Ricky Nelson in 1962), and the Chris Columbo Quintet in 1963. The most commercially successful version was by Billy Stewart, who reached #10 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and # 7 on the R&B chart in 1966. But perhaps the most beloved recent version was by Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Critic David Starkey wrote that Joplin sang the song “with the authority of a very old spirit.”

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong's 1958 Verve LP was one of several collaborations between the two jazz greats.

There have been many other outstanding versions, but this collaboration by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald is truly extraordinary.

Then maybe we will get to some of those also-ransummertime songs later.

The Sun Shines Today on Summer Solstice

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20 June 2020 at 19:10

By: Patrick Murfin

Note: As with so much else the Coronavirus pandemic has put the kibosh on many Summer Solstice observations—Stonehenge is closed and the best the Brits can do is watch the mystical moment on the BBC. Yet whatever we puny inhabitants of the Earth do or think, the astronomical event is inexorable. Although the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, has been marked and celebrated across cultures since pre-historic times, it is today celebrated mostly—understandably—in the most northern climes. A day on or near the Solstice is still a widely celebrated public holiday—Midsummer’s Day—in most of Scandinavia, the Baltic nations and in Quebec. It is a widely observed unofficial celebration ...

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How Boston’s Anglican Church Became the First U.S. Unitarian Congregation
19 June 2020 at 10:46

How Boston’s Anglican Church Became the First U.S. Unitarian Congregation

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19 June 2020 at 10:46

By: Patrick Murfin

King's Chapel, Boston shortly before the turn of the 20th Century.

In most of the brand spanking new United States, the stone church in Boston would be the most respectable place of worship in town. In fact, in most of the Middle and Southern states, Pennsylvania excepted, it would have been the officially established church. But in Boston, hot bed of Puritanism and cradle of the Revolution, King’s Chapel was seen by many as an alien force. It was the lone outpost of Anglicanism in the city, a member of the recently formed Episcopal Church, now officially free of its connections to the British Crown.

Boston was a well-churched town, dominated by independent Congregational parishes and their increasingly theologically liberal ministers. Most of those ministers had rejected the hell-fire-and-damnation rigid Calvinism their ancestors and had embraced a theology based on rationality and influenced by the Enlightenment. Theologically, they embraced elements of Arminism which rejected Pre-destination, salvation by faith alone, and unimpaired freedom of the will. They were also influenced by Arianism, an even older theological position declared hereticalby early Church Councils, which asserted that Jesus, the Son of God, was not eternal and coequalto God—a denial of the Trinity as taught by most Christian churches since the 4th Century. Within the next forty years these churches and ministers would break from orthodox Congregationalism to become openly Unitarian.

So it comes as a surprise to many that it was the Anglican congregation that by a vote of the Proprietors of the church revised the Book of Common Prayer to omit all references to the Trinity. They thus beat the liberal ministers by adopting the first avowedly unitarian theology and liturgy on June 19, 1785.

This is how it came to be.

The Anglican congregation was organized at a meeting held in Boston’s Town Hall on June 15, 1686, 56 years after the city had been founded by the Puritans. The founders were mostly recent immigrants from England—traders, master craftsmen, government officials, and those who wished to rise in the Empire. The Boston clergy, still at that point piously Puritan, were mightily upset and did everything in their power to prevent the establishment of the church. It was a sign of the waning authority of their once near absolute dominance of local government that they failed to do so.

A wood cut view of the first Anglican chapel in Boston under the shadow of Beacon Hill.

The congregation built a small wooden church at the corner of Tremont and School Streets. It worshiped there for 60 years as the building fell into disrepair. Meanwhile the Congregational churches were building magnificent brick churches with soaring spires. When the Anglicans attempted to purchase more land adjacent to their tiny lot to build a new Church, once again the majority clergy fought them. After difficult negotiations, the land was purchased and a cornerstone for the new building was laid in 1749.

Heavy blocks of gray granite from quarries in Quincy, encased the original wooden chapel. When the new walls were completed, the old church was taken apart board by board and disposed of through the windows of the new building. The wooden church’s beams and rafters were shipped to Lunenburg, Nova Scotia to build a new Anglican church there which stood until burning down in 2001.

The new church building with a squat tower over the main entrance, intended as the base of a steeple that was never built, was completed in 1754. It became one of the first churches in New England with an organ—the Puritanical Congregationalists rejected most liturgical music except for Psalms. In 1772 a large bell, cast in England was hung in the squat tower. That bell crackedin 1814 and was personally re-castby Paul Revere. It still calls worshipers to Sunday services today.

As tensions between the Crown and it restive colonists worsened, King’s Chapel became more and more identifiedwith loyalists. When troops were quartered on the city, many officersattended services at the church. With the outbreak of hostilities in 1775, the church was identified with the occupying authorities. When the British evacuatedthe city many of the Loyalist parishioners and the Rector, the Rev. Henry Canerset sail for exile in Nova Scotia.

The church was closed. In May of 1776 the church was re-opened for the funeral of Patriot hero Dr. Joseph Warren, who had been killed in the attack on Breeds Hill the previous June—the battle we know as Bunker Hill. Warren’s body had been stripped, mutilated, and dumped in a shallow grave with another soldier by the British. His brother’s found him and Paul Revere identified the corpse by an artificial tooth he had implanted in the Doctor.

Many influential early Bostonians lie in the Burial Ground next to King's Chapel including Patriot hero Dr. Joseph Warren. It is now included on the city's Patriot Trail.

After the elaborate funeral and internment in the adjacent Burial Grounds, Patriots showed their disdain for the Anglican church by briefly using it as a stable for Continental Army officers’ horses. Later the church building was opened sporadically for worship by Patriot members of the congregation and Congregationalists from Old South Meeting House.

Without a Priest, it was difficult to sustain an Anglican congregation. Even after the war remaining tensions made it difficult for British priests to be assigned or American ones trained and ordained. In 1782 remaining members re-organized and hired Harvard educated James Freeman to lead the church as a Lay reader and teacher. Freeman was, unlike the Arian ministers of the Standing Order (Congregationalists), influenced by the Socinian theology of James Priestly and English Unitarianism. He requestedthat the congregation not requirehim to read the Athanasian Creedwhich affirmed the traditional Trinity.

Unable to secure an Anglican Priest after the Revolution, the church hired James Freeman of Harvard as a Lay Reader and later ordained him as Rector without laying on of hands of an Bishop which led to Freeman and the congregation being expelled from the new American Episcopal Church.

Despite this un-orthodoxy, Freeman was popularwith the congregation and was asked to become its minister after only 6 months. Meanwhile he continued to study Priestly and another prominent English Unitarian, Thesophilus Lindsey and became more firmly Unitarian in his theology. He began preaching a series of sermons on the subject in 1784. To his own surprise, the congregation was largely amenable to his emerging thought. The following year he submitted his own revisionof the Book of Common Prayer eliminating all references to the Trinity. That book, revised and updated, remains in use at worship in King’s Chapel to this day, making it unique among all member congregations of what is now the Unitarian Universalist Association.

The title page from the Book of Common Prayer edited by Freeman to omit references to the Trinity. With some adaptations if remains in use to this day at King's Chapel making it unique among member congregations of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA)

But I am getting ahead of myself. Back then, despite the break with orthodoxy, the congregation hoped to remain Anglican and to obtain ordination for Freeman. Bishop Samuel Seabury, and even the much more liberal Dr. Samuel Provost, bishop-elect of New York rejected the application.

The congregation decided in 1787 to go ahead on its own with a lay ordination of Freeman as the “Rector, Minister, Priest, Pastor, and Ruling Elder” of Stone Chapel, as the church was known in those post-Revolutionary days. Freeman was effectively excommunicated from the Episcopal Church and the congregation expelled from the Communion.

Freeman continued to serve the church nearly until his death in 1826.

By that time the local Congregational ministers, led by William Ellery Channing had openly embraced Unitarianism, albeit a version different in details than the Socinism espoused by Freeman, and a de-facto new denomination was being born. King’s Chapel became part of that and future ministers would be trained and ordained under Unitarian authority.

King's Chapel from a mid-20th Century tinted linen souvenir post card.

But the Church as always remained unique, cleaving to that revised Book of Common Prayer. It has been an outpost of Christianity in denomination eventually dominated by Humanism and now embracing’s multiple Sources and theological diversity. It resisted for a long time such Unitarian Universalist innovations as chalice lighting and Flower Communion.

The interior of Kin's Chapel includes the elevated pulpit under a canopy, high pew boxes, and Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass windows on the lower level below the balconies.

Ministers today still preside from the high pulpit overlooking the rows of high-backed pew boxes. Light filters through beautiful Louis Comfort Tiffany stained glass windows installed in the early 20th Century. It is a vital and thriving congregation with an active social justice agenda, a renowned music program and large ministerial staff. that recently included a Rabbi.

But if you go to worship on Sunday morning and open those Prayer Books in the pews, you will be transported to the days when Episcopalians became Unitarian.

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Juneteenth from Blackish—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
18 June 2020 at 20:32

Juneteenth from Blackish—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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18 June 2020 at 20:32

By: Patrick Murfin

Juneteenth from Blackish

Despite my promises, it has been a week since the last entry for the Murfin Home Confinement Music Festivalbut today is the Black celebration of emancipation and holiday Juneteenth. My blogpost this morning described its history and significance. But it turns out that the ABC sit-com Blackish covered the same ground in a much more entertaining, animated format. Think School House Rock for adults and a social justice sensibility with just the right amount ofchip-on-the-shoulder.

Aloe Blacc

The song Juneteenth was written and developed by singer/producer Aloe Blacc and The Roots, the award-winning hip-hop band fronted by drummer Questlove which is also the house band for the Tonight Show With Jimmie Fallon.

The Roots with Questlove, center.

The animation which features the voices of Questlove and Blackish cast members including Anthony Anderson and Marcus Scribner was created by Shaw Wonders, a Grammy and MTV Award winning celebrity artist and designer. Wonders first rose to prominence as the creative force behind the TLC music video Waterfalls and is noted for his celebrity portrait prints.

The cast of Blackish

Together this team put together one of the most entertainingand eye-opening TV segments of all time.

Juneteenth—The Jubilee of Emancipation

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18 June 2020 at 09:34

By: Patrick Murfin

Note: The Black holiday and celebration Juneteenth which commemorates a date on which slaves in Texas finally learned of the Emancipation Proclamation made unaccustomed news this month when Donald Trump announced he would resume his campaign rallies on this particular date in Tulsa. The selection of Tulsa was a double slap in the face to Black Americans and a racist dog whistle to his white nationalist base because it was the site of the deadliest race riot in American history in which hundreds were murdered and a whole thriving Black community erased in 1921. You may remember our recent post on the Tulsa Race Riot. A public uproar caused the Resident to change the original date, but despite protests and the concerns over a dangerous, packed indoor rally during a new surge in Coronaviris cases, the Cheeto-in-Charge will go ahead with his Make America Hate Again fest. Today we will look back to discover the amazing history of Juneteenth.

Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on September 22, 1862. Word spread through the slave grapevine pretty quickly in much of the Confederacy and, as Lincoln had hoped, many slaves abandonedtheir plantations and sought the safety of Union forces where ever they could. Not only did this cripple the Rebel economy, but the refugees formed a pool of laborers, teamsters, and—eventually—troops in support of the war effort.

But things were differentin Texas on the western edge of the Confederacy. Word was slow getting there. After the fall of Vicksburg in 1863 Confederate territory west of the Mississippi was pretty well cut off from the eastern states. Although word might have leaked through in some places, around Galveston, the main port for the exportation of cottonfrom East Texas, slave owners evidently were pretty successful in keeping their property from learning that they were free.

Junteenth is now the largest and most widespread of all of the local Jubilee celebrations of Emancipation.

Far from themain theater of the war, the last battles were fought in Texas along the Rio Grande on May 13 and Major General Kirby Smith, commander of the Trans-Mississippi Districtbecame the last major Rebel commanderto formally surrender on June 2.

On June 18 Major General Gordon Granger landed on Galveston Island to take possession of Texas for the Union. The next day, June 19^,the General was said to have stepped onto thebalcony of the Ashton Villa Hotel and addressed a large crowd of Blacks. He read them his General Order #3:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

On June 19, 1867 Major General Gordon Granger read the order announcing Emancipation in Galveston, Texas

The announcement set off joyous celebrations and the word spread across Texas. The next year, former slaves marked the occasion with more celebrations, which soon became a yearlyevent. These were similar to those that occurred across the South on local anniversaries of the Jubilee Days of Emancipation.

The Texas observances quickly became major annual events in Black communities. By 1870 the day became known as Juneteenth and various traditions started to be associated with it. Outdoor gatherings of extended families, churches, or communities grew to be all day festivals. The day typically began with Gordon’s order being read or the text of the Emancipation Proclamation followed by recitations of family stories, singing songs like Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, dancing, the recitation of poetry, and prayer. The central event of the day was usually a community-wide barbequeand pot luck.

The first Junteenth celebration one year after the news arrived in Texas. Note the many celebrants in Union Army forage caps and fragments of uniforms. In addition to those who had served in the ranks during the war, many other collected the garments while serving as teamsters or laborers for the Army. Others acquired the gear as surplus after the war.

Because slave codes often forbade those in bondagefrom wearing finery of any kind, by the late 19th Century people turned out in their very best clothes. There were sports of various sorts, particularly baseball, races, and—particularly in West Texas—rodeos.

In many towns local blacks pooled their fundsto buy land for the annual gatherings. These Juneteenth Grounds have since become city parks in places like Houston and Austin.

Late 19th Century ladies in full finery drive a carriage decorated for a Juneteenth parade.

Needless to say, large, exuberant gatherings of Black people frightened and alarmed many whites. There were attempts to discouraged participation, but the celebrations continued. The Depression took a toll on observances as families were dispersed, and many rural Blacks sought work in cities where employers did not take kindly to taking days off of work. Younger folks also began to look on the gatherings a simply old fashioned.

The Civil Rights movement reignited interest in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. After Martin Luther King’s assassination the Reverend Ralph Abernathy promotedcelebrations of Juneteenth during the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington. Observances began to spread beyond Texas.

In 1997, the founder of the National Juneteenth Celebration Foundation (NJCF), Ben Haith, created the Juneteenth flag. Raising of the flag ceremonies are now held in Galveston as well other cities across the country. It is raised after the U.S. flag and the national anthem and before the anthem Lift Every Voice and Sing. Here Buffalo Soldier reenactors hoist the colors.

By 2000 a movement arose to make Juneteenth a holiday of some sort in all statesand recognition by the Federal Government. It is an official state Holiday in Texas and 36 states have granted some sort of recognition. The celebration has even gathered momentum in Africa and other places around the world.

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Bunker or Breed’s Hill—The Most Famous Battle You Probably Have All Wrong
17 June 2020 at 11:18

Bunker or Breed’s Hill—The Most Famous Battle You Probably Have All Wrong

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17 June 2020 at 11:18

By: Patrick Murfin

Colonial Militia under Col. John Stark repelled the first British assault against their hastily thrown up defenses on the left of Breed's Hill.

The Battle of Bunker Hill is so famous that the most historically illiterate Americans—and there are a lot of them—have at least heard of it and can probably figure out that it was fought during the Revolutionary War. Many may recall from High School or an old Peabody and Sherman cartoon that an order was issued—“Don’t shoot until you see the whites of their eyes.” Whatever that meant. And most will assume it was a great American victory for George Washington. Almost all of that would be wrong or misunderstood. The real story is more complex and interesting.

By mid-June 1775 the Colonial rabble-in-arms had kept the English army bottled up in Boston since April 19 when they chased them back to the city after the battles of Lexington and Concord during a costly, harassed retreat. Meanwhile the original force of Massachusetts Militia and Patriot Minutemen on the mainland surrounding the city swelled to more than 15,000 with volunteers and Militia from Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire all under the overall—but loose—command of Artemas Ward, a veteran Militia and Provincial troops colonel with combat experience in the French and Indian War.

Boston was a near island in Boston Harbor where 6,000 regulars under General Thomas Gage were holed up. The bulbous shaped Peninsula was connected to the rest of the mainland by the Charlestown Neck. All that separated it from the Charlestown Peninsula on the mainland was a narrow Charles River. Gage could be resupplied by sea so that the Patriot siege, which blocked re-provision from mainland farms, was not totally effective. He had also received reinforcements including the arrival of three subordinate generals—William Howe, John Burgoyne, and Henry Clinton.

Shortly after their arrival on May 25, Gage convened councils of war at which they discussed plans for a break-out. By June 12 they had arrived on a plan. First the English would seize via a boat landingand fortify Dorchester Heights located on the knob of a mushroom shaped peninsula jutting from the mainland south of Charlestown then march on Roxbury to secure the flank. Then the main body of troops would rush across the Neck and secure the highlands overlooking the city from behind the village on the salt flats of the Charlestown Peninsula. The Peninsula had been a kind of no man’s land since Clinton had retreated to the city.

Dr. Joseph Warren was a much beloved senior Patriot leader. His well oiled intelligence operation inside Boston helped alert Colonial forces that General Gage planned a break-out from the besieged city. He had just been elected a general of the new Massachusetts Provisional Army, but word of his appointment never reached him. He turned down field command of the defense and on the day of the battle marched out as a civilian fighting in the ranks like a common soldier.

But Boston was still just sort of an overgrown small town in which secrets were hard to keep. Fortunately for the rebels, two leading Patriots, Dr. Joseph Warren and James Otis maintained an effective intelligence operation in the city—the same one that had discovered the plans to march on Concord to seize the Patriot arsenal there. There was plenty of loose tavern talk and the civilians on whom British officers were quartered or their servants passed on information. So did the occasional visitor. One of those was a New Hampshire merchantwho returned to his home by ship. The Patriot Committee of Safety in Exeter, New Hampshire dispatched a warning to the Massachusetts Provisional Congress confirming the rumors gathered by Warren’s operation.

On June 15 the Massachusetts Committee of Safetydirected General Ward to occupy and fortify the Dorchester and Charlestown Heights. Ward gathered his own senior officers for their council of war. Key to the plan was occupying and fortifying Bunker Hill, at 110 feet high the most commanding of the hills on the Heights which also included lower Breed’s Hill closer to the exit from the Neck. There had already been some preliminary excavations on Bunker Hill which would give the occupying Colonial troops a head start at digging in. From Bunker Hill the Rebels command Boston with artillery. It was a good plan with every chance of success.

The next decision was the selection of a commander for the mission and units. Ward initially offered command to the highly respected Dr. Warren, who was popular with the troops. But Warren had never been a Militia officer and declined. He would join the ranks as a civilian and fight as a common soldier.

Gen Israel Putnam, Colonial Commander

Over-all command fell to Connecticut General Israel Putnam, who had served in Rogers Rangers in the French and Indian war. Massachusetts Militia Colonel William Prescott, a veteran of King George’s War and the Siege of Louisburg and the Battle of Fort Beausejour in the French and Indian War, was given command of the troops assigned to take the heights. He commanded 1500 Militiaman and Volunteers from his own regiment and Putnam’s Connecticut Regiment to be commanded in the field that day by Thomas Knowlton.

On the night of June 16 Prescott led his men onto the Charlestown Peninsula. There he conferred with Putnam and his chief engineer Captain Richard Gridley. The three men disagreed about the best placement of defensive works. What happened is not exactly clear, but Prescott, against his original orders from Ward, decided to concentrate his troops on Breed’s Hill, closer to Boston, but lower. He set his men out to begin digging a square of fortification trencheson the top of the smaller hill. Those fortifications could not be completed before daybreak.

In Boston General Clinton spotted the Rebels digging in on the Charlestown Heights while on evening reconnaissance. He recognized the need forswift action to prevent the rebels from completing their work and installing artillery. But he could not rouse Gage and Howe from over-confident disdain of their rabble enemy and get them to immediately dispatch troops.

Around 4 am Royal Navy ships in the harbor also spotted activity and began lobbing shells at Breed’s Hill temporarily delayingexcavations. The fire was temporarily suspended by Admiral Samuel Graves who was irked that it was undertaken without his order. By this time Gage was finally aware of the seriousness of the situation and directed Graves to open fire from all available ships as well as from Army artillery positions on Copp’s Hill in Boston opposite Breed’s Hill. Despite a lot of noise, the soft earth of the hill top absorbed most of the damage and work was able to continue, even incorporatingshell craters into the defenses.

Daylightalso alerted Prescott to a flaw in his decision to fortify Breed’s Hill—it stood relatively isolated on the salt flats and could be easily flanked. He desperately ordered the beginning of construction of breastworks running down the east side of the hill. He did not have enough men to fortify the west side.

Meanwhile the English dithered. They had too many Generals. Clinton still pressed for an immediate attack. Howe and Burgoyne, both contemptuous of the Colonial rabble saw no need to rush, confident that Redcoat Regularscould sweep the defenders aside in good time. Howe was placed in command of an attack.

Cautious Gen. William Howe commanded in the field.

It took Howe several hours to gather his infantry and then to inspect them on formal review. Meanwhile boats were gathered to ferry the troops across the water to a corner of the Charlestown Peninsula known as Moulton’s Point. It took several trips to bring all 1,500 men across. The plan was for Howe to lead the major assaultdriving around the left flank to take the Rebels from the rear. Brigadier General Robert Pigot on the British left flank would lead the direct assault on the hilltop redoubt, and Marine Major John Pitcairnwould command the reserve.

Howe had most of his men ashore by 2 pm, but then spotted Rebels on Bunker Hill. Mistaking Prescott’s secondary defenses for a major reinforcement, the ever cautious Howe held up his attack and sent word back to Boston for reinforcements of his own. He sent some light infantry to take up forward positions on the left, alerting the Patriot army to his ultimate intentions. Then he ordered his men to break out their mess to await help.

Surveying the situation, Prescott issued his own appeal for reinforcements. Among those responding were Dr. Warren and an old warhorseMilitia officer, Seth Pomeroy who also elected to fight as if a private since his own command was not engaged. Prescott ordered the Connecticut men under Knowles to occupy and hastily finish breastworks on the left which consisted of a rude dirt wall topped by fence rails and hay bales. 200 men from the 1stand 3rd New Hampshire regiments, under Colonels John Stark and James Reed arrived just in time to occupy the end of that line—the gap Howe could have used had he not dallied. They extended the line further to the low tide mark of the Mystic River. Stark placed a stake in the ground before the defenses and gave orders that no one should fire until the English passed the mark.

Other reinforcements arriving to take their places in the redoubt or along the breastwork were elements of the Massachusetts regiments of Colonels Brewer, Nixon, Woodbridge, Little, and Major Moore, as well as Callender’s company of artillery.

There was confusion despite the best efforts of General Putnam to straighten out the situation as subordinate commanders misunderstoodtheir orders or disobeyedthem. Some troops sent from Cambridge came under British cannon fire and balked at crossing the Neck to Charlestown. Others reached the foot of Bunker Hill but milled around uncertain of what to do.

Finally at 3 pm the 47th Foot and the 1st Marines arrived from Boston to reinforce Howe. Meanwhile General Pigot’s forces including the 5th, 38th, 43rd, and 57th Regiments were taking losses from colonial sniper fire from the village on the salt flats. Admiral Graves responded with incendiary shells that set the village on fire sending up plumes of smoke. An offshore wind kept the smoke from obscuring the main battle site, although colonial observers on the mainland were unable to follow the action because of it.

Howe led his attack of Light Infantry and Grenadiers on the American left. The Light Infantry attempted to make an end run along the sandy beach of the river at low tide while the Grenadiers attacked the main breastwork. A single errant Rebel shot elicited an early and ineffectual volley from the English. After that the Americans held their fire until Colonel Stark’s marker was passed. Then they set off a murderous volley. The advancing English got off one of their own. But the Rebels, shooting frombehind cover and able to steady their aim on the fence rails fired with deadly accuracywhile the British un-aimed musket fire mostly sailed over the heads of the defenders. The English took devastating losses including many officers and fell back in disarray.

From an eye witness sketch--the second assault on Breeds Hill. Note the village ablaze on the left and the open ground over which the British had to advance exposing them to murderous aimed vollies from behind the defenses.

On the other side of the battlefield Pigot, still taking losses from snipers, saw the disordered retreat on the left and fell back himself. Both forces regrouped on the field and changed objectives. Pigot, now reinforced with the 47th and the 1st Marines, would directly attack the redoubt at the top of the hill. Howe would shift his main attack away from the beach to concentrate on Knowles’s Connecticut men closer to the slope of the hill.

The second attack was even more devastating to the British as the Colonists once again held their fire for a single, devastating volley at short range. A British action report stated that “Most of our Grenadiers and Light-infantry, the moment of presenting themselves lost three-fourths, and many nine-tenths, of their men. Some had only eight or nine men a company left ...” Pigot’s attack on the redoubt likewise was sent reeling back.

By this time the Rebels were running short on ammunition. Many had entered the fight with only three to five balls for their muskets. General Putnam was urgently trying to get reinforcements from Bunker Hill to Breed’s with only limited success.

The third attack focused all forces on the Redoubt. The Patriots got off another effective volley but the British were able to press on finally reaching the breastworks where their bayonets were lethally effective against the rebels who could only fight back using their muskets asclubs. Prescott ordered the redoubt abandoned and helped cover the retreat personally using his ceremonial sword to fight off bayonets. He was said to be the last man to get out. Dr. Warren was killed in the retreat.

The chaos as the British finally overwhelmed the breastwork redoubt at the top of Breeds Hill in a bayonet attack is better r reflected in this depiction than in the rigid lines of advancing automatons in familiar depictions.

Effective cover fire from Stark and Knowles on the flank prevented the retreat from becoming a complete rout. Most troops got over the Charlestown Neck safely and in relatively good order.

But there was no question the Colonists had tactically lost the battle. At the end of the day Howe’s troops occupied the battle ground including the heights which had threatened Boston. But it was at best a Pyrrhic victory. The British lost 226 killed with over 800 wounded, including a large number of officers among them Col. James Abercrombie in command of the Grenadiers, Marine Captain Pitcairn, and virtually all of Howe’s staff officers.

General Clinton confided to his diary after the action, “A few more such victories would have shortly put an end to British dominion in America.”

In contrast Colonial losses were 115 dead, 305 wounded, and 30 captured. They also had proven to themselves that they could fight, at least from behind defenses, on an equal with British Regulars. Among the most regretted losses were four out of the five then irreplaceable cannon used in the battle. But the most widely mourned loss was the death of the beloved Dr. Warren. He had just been voted a Major General’s commission in the Massachusetts Provincial Army on June 15 but had not yet received it when he marched off with his musket on his shoulder.

John Trumbull's heroic Death of General Warren was in the tradition of many fallen commanders paintings, notably Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe but it was historically wrong on most counts.

Warren’s body was desecrated by the British in the days after the battle. Navy Lieutenant James Drew, of the sloop Scorpion, “…went upon the Hill again opened the dirt that was thrown over Doctor Warren, spit in his Face jump’d on his Stomach and at last cut off his Head and committed every act of violence upon his Body.” Ten months later Paul Revere recovered his friend’s body, identifying the head by a tooth he had made and placed in Warren’s jaw. He was re-buried with military honors at Grainery Burial Ground. His body was moved twice more finally coming to rest in 1855 in his family vault in Forest Hills Cemetery. Warren’s death was also commemorated in the idealized heroic painting, The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker Hill by John Trumbull.

After the initial shock of losing the Hill wore off, the Rebels began to realize what they had accomplished. The battered and ever cautious Howe refused Clinton’s urging to immediately follow up with an attack on Wards now understandably disordered main camp in Cambridge. The Colonial army had time to regroup, lick its wounds, and appreciatethat they had stood up to the vaunted Redcoat regulars.

In Boston Gage was taken aback by the scope of the losses. His gloomy official reportto London predicted that “a large army must at length be employed to reduce these people” and that it would have to include hired foreign troops. Despite the accuracy of the prediction, Gage was dismissed three days after the report was received. Howe, the actualarchitect of the calamitous victory, was rewarded with overall command in the Colonies. He would never again attempt a serious break-out from Boston.

General George Washington, newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of a barely formed Continental Army was in New York City on his way to assume command of the siege when he received an account of the Battle from the Massachusetts Committee on Safety. The report exaggerated British losses and papered over the difficulties Putnam had experienced trying to assert command, but it heartened the new commander. He arrived on July 2 to find the army in some disarray and a general stalemate between the two sides. He spent the next months gaining the confidence of his new command and its officers, reorganizing—basically creating—the Continental Line while trying to keep his Militia and volunteers on duty. There were a few indecisive skirmishes and both sides suffered near starvation and from small pox outbreaks over an exceptionally harsh winter.

But that same snowy winter allowed the rotund young former bookseller Col. Henry Knoxto drag the heavy cannons captured at Fort Ticonderoga overland. Some of the cannon, under Knox’s command were able to begin shelling Boston on March 2, 1776. On March 5 Washington moved more cannon to the commanding Dorchester Heights in an overnight surprise operation. That placed the fleet, as well as the city under Continental guns. An astonishedHowe is said to have proclaimed, “My God, these fellows have done more work in one night than I could make my army do in three months.” It was checkmate and game over. After delays because of unfavorable winds, British boarded ships and sailed from the city on March 17. American troops, all handpicked for earlier exposure to and survival of small pox, led by Artemas Ward entered the city on March 20.

The first campaign of the American Revolution has ended in less than two years with a stunning victory for the Continentals. But it might never have been possible if the defenders of Breed’s Hill had not cost the British so dearly.

The battle quickly settled into legend. Even though the action occurred primarily on Breed’s Hill, Putnam and Ward stubbornly referred to it as the Battle of Bunker Hill in honor the intended target for fortification in their original plans. The name stuck. Most Americans have never heard of Breed’s Hill.

But the greatest legend was the story that Col. Prescott—usually misidentified by his old Militia rank of Captain—had ordered his troops “Don’t fire until you see the Whites of their Eyes.” before the initial Redcoat assault. He assuredly never said any such thing. The notion seems to have come either from Col. Stark’s stake marker or orders being issued up and down the line to hold fire until the last possible moment to conserve ammunition and for the deadliest effect. Variations of the Whites of their eyes command had been used by several European commanders dating back to the Swedish General and King Gustavus Adolphus in the 16th Century and was said to have been repeated by General James Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham, when his troops defeated Montcalm’sFrench army below Quebec on September 13, 1759. The veterans of the French and Indian Wars among senior Colonial commanders would have been familiar with the idea and phrase.

The Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown. The statue of Col. William Prescott, and undeniable hero of the engagement, was added latter reinforcing the myth that the officer had given the order, "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes"

By the early 19th Century the phrase, with Prescott’s name usually attached, was a staple of school books.

On June 17, 1825, the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument on Breed’s Hill was laid by the Marquis de Lafayetteand orated over by Daniel Webster. The 220 foot high obelisk was completed in 1843 and dedicated on June 25, 1844. Daniel Webster again gave the main address.

WWUUD?
Legal Lynching in South Carolina—Frying an Innocent Child
16 June 2020 at 11:01

Legal Lynching in South Carolina—Frying an Innocent Child

WWUUD?

16 June 2020 at 11:01

By: Patrick Murfin

14 years old in South Carolina in 1944 and accused of a double murder and rape, George Junius Stinney, Jr. had no chance of a fair trial.

Note—Yesterday we discussed a lynching—one of literally hundreds of murders of Blacks that was unusual only for occurring in Duluth, Minnesota, so far north the some of the mob wore overcoats in June. Today we turn our attention to a case that proves that “swift justice” achieved the same results legally. And the victim this time was the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th Century.

The slender 14 year old was led to the execution chamber at South Carolina’s Central Correctional Institution in Columbia on June 16, 1944. He was so small that he did not fit well into the adult size electric chair. The Bible he had carried with him to his doom was taken from him and used as an impromptu booster seat. Officials struggledwith the straps that held him down because they could not be properly tightened down to his scrawny arms and legs. The face mask hung loosely. With the first jolt of 2,400 Volts the mask was knocked off of his face revealing his wide open, tear filled eyes, contorted features, and frothy drool. One wrist broke free of the restraints as his body spasmed violently. Two more jolts were administered before George Junius Stinney, Jr. was finally declared dead after four minutes.

By the way, Stinney was Black. But you probably knew that even if you never heard this story before.

He was killed just 83 days after two white girls, 11 year old Betty June Binnicker, and 8 year old Mary Emma Thames were found murdered in Alcolu, South Carolina, a timber mill company town. Shortly before the girls were last seen, witnesses said they saw Stinney chatting with them. That encounter was the only evidence linking the boy with the crime. There were no witnesses to the murder and no physical evidence of any kind. Three police officers would testify that he confessed the crime to them, which Stinney would deny at his trial. His alibi was summarily dismissed as a “lie Niggers tell” and no effort was made toconfirm it.

11 year old Betty June Binnicker was the oldest of two white girls who went to pick flowers and were never seen alive again. Her skull was caved in and there was evidence she was raped.

The sketchy known facts of the case were that the two girls set off on their bicycles on Thursday, March 24 to pick flowers. It was Easter break. On their way they passed the Stinney house where George was in the yard with his sister and asked him if he knew where they could find maypops, an early blooming purple vine flower in the passion flower family. In the small town of just a few hundred residents, almost all of them employeddirectly or indirectly by the Alderman mill and related companies, and Black and White residents separated only by the railroad tracks, the children knew each other, at least by sight. The girls rode off and were not seen alive again.

When the girls did not return home by evening, an intense search was launched. Their bodies were found the next morning in a shallow ditch partially covered by water. Both had received blunt force trauma to the head and face smashing their skulls. Although no weapon was found the coroner later concluded that a hammer was the likely cudgel. It had to have been wielded with great force. June Binnicker suffered bruising around the vagina and was probably raped.

Police quickly zeroed in on Stinney who was arrested within hours. Some time elapsed between the arrest and when he was brought to county jail during which time the arresting officer claimed he had confessed. No further investigation of the crime was conducted.

George Stinney, Jr. and a not much older unnamed inmate being brought into the North Carolina Death House to await execution.

A Coroner’s inquest quickly concluded that Stinney was the likely culprit. He was indicted and brought to trial with dizzying speed. The trial itself, conducted, of course, before an all-White jury lasted only a day. The prosecution called the police to testify about the alleged confession despite the fact that no written record of the confession had ever been made. The appointed defense counsel, a tax commissioner who was running for higher office, did not challenge the testimony or present any evidence or witnesses himself. The whole trial took less than two and a half hours. The jury formally retired and returned in less than 10 minutes with a verdict of guilty of first degree murder. The judge wasted no time in passing sentence.

The South Carolina press and even many of the state’s beleaguered liberals proclaimed satisfaction that “justice has been allowed torun its course” and that the boy had not been dragged from jail and lynched. But it was rough justice and pretty much just a lynching under cover of law.

A gruesome but necessary reminder--the State of North Carolina carefully photographed Stinney's severed head to document the execution. Deep burns are plainly visible.

The boy’s father, George, Sr. had immediately been fired from his job in the mill when his son was arrested and the family was so threatenedthat they fled town and went into hiding. George Jr. never saw any of them again. They dared not attend the trial or even visit him in jail. The boy had to endure his ordeal utterly alone.

The case quickly faded from public awareness and was tucked away in that pocket of convenient amnesia that was a characteristic of the Jim Crow South and the decedents of perpetrators.

In 1988 interest in the case was revived by David Stout’s Roman a clef novel Carolina Skeletons, which won the Edgar Alan Poe Award for Best First Novel. A TV movie adaptation was made in 1991 with Lou Gossett and Kenny Blank as the boy seen in flashbacks. Blank was nominated for an award as Best Young Actor in a TV Movie. In both the book and the movie an investigation made by a family member years after the crime and execution suggest that the boy was innocent and that powerful local forces were out to prevent the truth from being told.

That theory began to have some support in 2004 when local historian George Frierson began an investigation with the assistance of volunteer lawyers. Eventually Frierson claimed “there has been a person that has been named as being the culprit, who is now deceased. And it was said by the family that there was a deathbed confession.” The alleged culprit was a member of a prominent but unnamed local family and at least one of his relatives was on the initial Coroner’s Jury. Although that person and family have not beenpublicly identified because of threatened legal action, it is said that many old timers can figure it out from Frierson’s description.

George Fierson, second from right, was the local historian who investigated the case and uncovered evidence that Stinney was innocent. Lawyers Steve McKinzied, Shaun Kent, and Ray.Chandler worked on the appeal that ultimately cleared the boy.

In 2013 lawyers who had worked with Frierson, Steve McKinzie, Matt Burgges, and Ray Chandler filed an appeal for a new trial after attempts to get relief through the state’s Pardon and Parole Board were rebuffed.

In December 2014 despite a vigorous defense of the original prosecution and verdict by South Carolina’s Black Solicitor General Ernest A. Finney III Circuit Court Judge Carmen Mullen vacated the original conviction. She found that no defense was offered the jury and in the absence of corroboratory evidence the confession was likely coerced and inadmissible.

The late ruling for justice was not universally accepted. Surviving relatives of the girls and of the police officer involved all publicly stand by the original verdict. Generally favorable press coverage of the decision resulted in waves of racist howls anguish and some not-so-veiled-threatsin the on-line comments in newspaper and TV news web pages.

WWUUD?
Minnesota Not So Nice—Strange Fruit Hung from Northern Trees
15 June 2020 at 11:16

Minnesota Not So Nice—Strange Fruit Hung from Northern Trees

WWUUD?

15 June 2020 at 11:16

By: Patrick Murfin

Jubilant Whites celebrate the beating, torture, and lynching of three Black circus roustabouts in Duluth, Minnesota in 1920. This image was printed on postcards and sold briskly for years after the lynching, as described by Minnesotan Bob Dylan in the openings verse of Desolation Row.

Ida B. Wells and the Black press including W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Crisis and the Chicago Daily Defender had long exposedlynching as a brutal tool of oppressionin the Jim Crow South. Later Billie Holiday would singabout the Strange Fruit she witnessed dangling from lamp posts and bridges on her tours of the South. Lynchings were a terrible thing, civilized people agreed, but they were a Southern thing.

That’s why much of the nation was shocked to learn that on June 15, 1920 that three Black circus workers were dragged from a Duluth, Minnesota jail, beaten, and hung by a howling mob of as many as 1,500 citizens.

The busy Lake Superior port and principle city of the Iron Range, with a tiny Black population of its own, seemed like the last place in the country to expect such an outrage. It was a city of hard working immigrants, most of them Finnish, Norwegian, Swede, and German. Many of them, especially the Finns, were Socialists, Wobblies, and now Communistswith roots in the labor and union movements. It was not that violence itself was unexpected there, it was just that it was not associated with the epic labor battles that had long raged across the Iron range.

During the World War “decent citizens” had been worked up into a frenzy of patriotismand had come to view the immigrant radicals, most of them opposed to the war, as threats. The refusal of workers to abide by patriotic calls for labor peace and keep up the flow of vital taconite ore to the freightersand down to the steel mills of Gary and Chicago stoked more outrage.

In September of 1919 a young Finish immigrant, Olli Kinkkonen, thought by a mob to be a Draft dodger, was beaten, tarred, and feathered, and lynched in a downtown park. No one was ever chargedor tried for that murder. So violence and lynching were not unknown in Duluth.

1919 had also been a year when race riots erupted in Chicago and in other Midwestern cities where waves of Blacks from the South had poured into the cities to take war time jobs. Although Duluth, with only a handful of Blacks residents, had escaped the rioting, they had not escaped the national hysteria that followed.

So the stage was set for the unexpected.

Lured by advertising like this for the John Robinson Circus, two young people were drawn to the grounds to watch the set up--and maybe for a romantic rendezvous.

The circus was in town. On June 14 the John Robinson Circus, a mid-sized traveling show, rolled into town. As always, the arrival of the circus stirredlocal excitement. Two young people, Irene Tusken, 19, and James Sullivan, 18 were among the many who came down to the grounds where the show was being set up to watch the excitement. The Circus encouraged that—it was good for ticket sales. By design or otherwise Tusken and Sullivan, who had arrived separately, got together on the grounds. They drifted around to the relative isolation of an area behind the big top. A gang of Black roustabouts was unloading the menagerie tent nearby.

What happened next is a matter of confusion and controversy. There may—or may not—have been some kind of confrontation between Sullivan and some of the roustabouts. Later that evening police received a call from Sullivan’s father claiming that his son had been attacked and robbed. The boy was questioned and told police that five or six of the workers attacked and robbed him and then raped Tusken as he was held at gun point. Tusken seemed frightened and confused, but generally went along with Sullivan’s story.

All 150 Black workers from the circus were rounded upand lined up against the railroad tracks. Sullivan was brought there to identify the alleged assailants. He identified six and said a few others might have been involved. The six were taken to jail.

Overnight rumors flew around town, including reports that Tusken had been murdered. In fact the story of the rape fell apart almost immediately. A doctor examining her the next morning foundno physical evidence of assault—bruising, scratches, abrasions—or of semen.

The respectable press of Duluth reported the mob action but also fanned the flames by publishing exagerated claims and rumors.

Local newspaper reports sensationalized the charges, rumors ran rampant. Through the day of the 15th a crowd grew around the jail until it became a mob of more than 1,000. An attack on the jail was expected. Authorities ordered deputies, guards, and police on the scene not to resist an attack with firearms.

When the mob moved on the jail, police fought back as best they could with fire hoses and truncheons. But they were vastly outnumbered and after a vicious melee in which men on both sides wereinjured they were overwhelmed. In fact the resistance had only inflamed the mob who managed to seize three men—Elias Clayton, Elmer Jackson, and Isaac McGhie. They were beaten inside the jail and then hauled to the street where they were put on sham trial.

They were taken to the center of town, the corner of 1st Street and 2nd Avenue East where they were beaten again and hung from a lamp pole. The mob posed for pictures with the bodieswhich were published in the press and later sold as souvenir post cards.

The three other men suspected in the rape were still in the jail. A shifting mob kept up a presence outside, threatening a new attack. But it was not until the next morning that National Guard troops arrived to secure the jail and its prisoners who were moved to the St. Louis County Jailunder heavy guard.

The Duluth Ripsaw, scandal sheet which often was at odds with local authorities broke the news that the alleged rape victim was never raped at all bring the whole case into doubt.

As the rape case against the victims evaporated over the next few days, the mob action drew national headlines. Most were condemning. Some Southern papers, however, openly gloatedthat Yankees were now awakening to the threat to white womanhood and were taking vigorous “corrective action.”

But next door in Superior, Wisconsin the local police chief pledged that, “We are going to run all idle Negroes out of Superior and they’re going to stay out.” How many were actually rousted and deported is not certain, but all of the Blacks employed by a carnival visiting the city were fired and told to leave the city.

A Grand Jury was empanelled on June 17, but despite loads of evidence including photographsand the open boasts of ringleaders, the jury had a hard time brining indictments. After a struggle, 37 were indicted for participating in the lynching, 25 for rioting, and 12 for first degree murder. Several were indicted on multiple charges. In the end only three were convicted of rioting.

Of the Blacks suspected in the alleged rape and assault, the three survivors from the jail and four others were indicted for rape, but the charges against all but two were dropped. William Miller was acquitted and Max Mason was convicted and sentenced to serve seven to thirty years in prison. Amid growing public outrage, Mason was released from prison after only four years on the proviso that he leave Minnesota and never return. Somehow I suspect he was never tempted to violate that provision.

Like many places after such a shameful atrocity, Duluth tried hard to forget it ever happened. Willful amnesia it’s called. But nagging reminders kept popping up.

Young Minnesotan Bob Dylan wrote of the lynchings in his classic 1965 song Desolation Row.

In 1965 Duluth born Bob Dylan, whose father was five years old and living two blocks from the lynching in 1920 opened his song Desolation Row with a reference to that awful night:

They’re selling postcards of the hanging

They’re painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town

In 2003, after a long public campaign, a stunning monument to the three lynching victims was unveiled—a plaza including three seven-foot-tall bronze statues across the street from the site of the lynching. The Clayton Jackson McGhie Memorial was designedand sculpted by Carla J. Stetson, in collaboration with Anthony Peyton-Porter, a California-based Black writer who had taken an interest in the case.

Bas relief images of the three lynching victims over look a downtown Duluth plaza near the scene of their murders.

At the dedication Warren Read, the great-grandson of one of the most prominent leaders of the lynch mob told the crowd:

It was a long held family secret, and its deeply buried shame was brought to the surface and unraveled. We will never know the destinies and legacies these men would have chosen for themselves if they had been allowed to make that choice. But I know this: their existence, however brief and cruelly interrupted, is forever woven into the fabric of my own life. My son will continue to be raised in an environment of tolerance, understanding and humility, now with even more pertinence than before.

Read has since written The Lyncher in Me, a memoir of his family and of his own search for reconciliation with the decedents of Elmer Jackson.

WWUUD?
My Flag, Your Flag, Our Flag?
14 June 2020 at 12:15

My Flag, Your Flag, Our Flag?

WWUUD?

14 June 2020 at 12:15

By: Patrick Murfin

Note: We’ve been here before but this entry is lightly updated to account for current catastrophes especially the Black Lives Matter movement, Coronavirus pandemic crisis, and Trumpista bellicose faux patriotic posturing.

In case you hadn’t noticed today is officially Flag Day, a demi-holiday easily overlooked. It is celebratedby displaying the American Flag. Veterans’ groups often organize solemn flag disposal ceremonies.

No other country on earth makes quite the fetish of its flag as does the United States. The word idolatry comes to mind. At its worst it elevatesthe symbol—the Flag—over the substance—the democratic values espoused in the Declaration of Independence and protected by the Constitution. It is an absolute truism that those who wrap themselves most in the Flag—and these day that is not just a figurative term—are the most disingenuous and dangerous. Witness any Donald Trump performance.

Donald Trump practically swaddles himself in flags. It's a tell--the more and bigger flags, the greater the lies and attacks on fundamental Constitutional and American values.

On the other hand—especially those who served in the Armed Forces or who were raised in a veteran’s household—have been taught to respectthe Flag and “the nation for which it stands.” I still hang the Flag on my house on patriotic holidays and always place my hat over my heart when it passes by in aparade. It’s just the way I was raised.

Part of the national devotion to the Flag comes from an odd combination of cultural coincidenceand calculated political strategy. Our National Anthem, not officially adopted until 1931 but widely used on patriotic occasions for more than a century prior, may be the only national song about a flag.

In the years after the Civil War the Grand Army of the Republic promoted flag waving as a triumphant poke-in-the-eye to defeated Confederates and as a test of patriotism in a way virtually unknown in the antebellum years.

Not widely displayed except at military posts, on Navy ships, and on some Federal buildingsprior to the Civil War, the Grand Army of the Republic heavily promoted its use after the war in a spirit of triumphalism of the Union over the vanquished South. For that reason display of the national flag was highly unpopular in the South until World War I.

The Pledge of Allegiance was penned by Francis Bellamy, a Baptist minister and socialist, for use during celebration the 400th anniversary of the supposed discoveryof the New World by Christopher Columbus. Quickly adopted by schools as part of the daily ritual of beginning classes, the Pledge does not swear allegiance to the government—an inclusive tip-of-the-hat to resentful former Rebels—or even to the Constitution, but to a symbol, the Flag.

Immigrant children were taught to salute the flag in public schools like this one in New York City where they would be punished for speaking their native languages. Photo by Jacob Riis.

By the turn of the 20th Century the Flag was being used as a symbol of assimilation for the waves of emigrants swamping our shores—and as a test of their loyalty. The most popular composers of the era—the March King John Philip Sousa and Broadway’s George M. Cohan made literal flag waving as popular as moon-June-spoon ballads.

During World War I, the Woodrow Wilson administrationused flag imagery as part of their very sophisticated domestic propaganda operation designed to rouse support of the war effort and raise Liberty Loans. After the war, the Flag was used to rally support for suppression of the labor movement, radicalism, Socialism, and Communismsaid to represent sinister alien ideologies.

Although the America First movement during the 1930's attracted some genuine anti-war sentiment, much of its leadership, including Charles Lindbergh, were pro-fascist. Like other right-wing movements before and since they used the flag as "proof" of their patriotism. Pictured is a mammoth Madison Square Garden America First Rally in 1937.

Wilson proclaimedthe first official Flag Day in 1916. In 1949, with the country in the grips of yet another Red Scare, Congress made it an official Federal Holiday, although withholdingthe paid days off for Federal employees standard for other holidays.

June 14 is Flag Day because on this date in 1777 the Continental Congress passed the Flag Act which officially described a newnational banner:

Resolved: That the flag of the United States be made of thirteen stripes, alternate red and white; that the union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation.

The new official flag—not, by the way, likely first sewn by Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross—was based on the unofficial Grand Union flag used by General George Washington during the Siege of Boston. That flag had the same thirteen alternating red andwhite stripes but had the British Union flag in its canton. Of course, that was before Independence was declared in July of 1776. It wouldn’t do to keep the reference to the British flag.

We will put it succinctly. No, Betsy Ross did not sew the first American flag.

The Act was vague—it did not describe the arrangement of the stars in the field, how the stars should be shaped, or even how large the field should be. Local flag makers working from the sketchy descriptionproduced many variations with five, six, and even twelve pointed stars; with stars of different sizes; and many variations of arrangement. Also the shade of blue used for the field depended largely on whatblue cloth the maker might have at hand.

The familiar thirteen stars in a circle was not only not standard, some historians doubt if it was used at all during the Revolutionary War. Others believe that it might have been the flag used at the British surrender at Yorktown.

After Vermont and Kentucky were added to the Union two additional stars and two stripes were added. It was this flag that was the Star Spangled Banner observed still flying over Ft. McHenry in Baltimore harborafter an all-night British naval bombardment in 1815. It became apparent that with more new states, adding stripes would quickly become clumsy. In 1818, after five more states were added, Congress fixed the number of stripes at thirteen with an added star for each new state.

But it still did not specifically designate an arrangement for the stars. During the Civil War flags with all manner of arrangements were used. It was not until the creation of the 48 star flag in 1912 that a specific arrangement was established. The current 50 star flag has been in use since July 4, 1960 after the admission of Hawaii to the Union. This year will mark the 60th anniversaryof that flag, which has been in service longer than any previous national banner.

For some Black Lives Matter protesters the flag is a symbol of white privialage and historic denial of the basic humanity of Black and other People of Color.

Today the flag is waved by forces on both sidesof the great social and political divide even as the nation for which it stands seems to teeter perilously on the verge of a second civil war. Both sides claim to love their country but have seemingly irreconcilable notions about what America is, what it means, and what it should become.

For some Trump supporters the Cheeto-in-charge is the flag.

I’ve got my flag today and I believe it stands for “Liberty and Justice for All.” What does your flag mean?

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Born This Way—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
13 June 2020 at 22:48

Born This Way—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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13 June 2020 at 22:48

By: Patrick Murfin

Born This Way by Lady Gaga

In honor of LGBTQ Pride Month and especially the Woodstock Pride Promenade tomorrow, June 14 from noon to 3pm one of the most popular gay anthems seems more than appropriate. I remember marching with PFLAG, McHenry County Pride members, and others of us from the Tree of Life UU Congregation in a Crystal Lake Independence Day Parade a few years ago behind a decorated pick-up truck blasting Born This Way. Even an old breeder like me was joyously bopping down the street and the crowds all along the route cheered and danced along too. It’s that kind of song.

Members of PFLAG, McHenry County Pride, and the Tree of Life UU Congregation lined up for the Crystal Lake Independence Day Parade in 2015, A sound system on the red Jeep blasted Born This Way and we all bopped along the parade route.

Born This Way by Lady Gaga was the lead single from her second studio album of the same name and co-writtenby Gaga and Jeppe Laursen. It was developed while Gaga was on the road with The Monster Ball Tour. Inspired by ‘90s music which empowered women and the gay community, Gaga explained that Born This Way was her freedom song.

The song reached #1 in over 25 countries and was Gaga’s third single to top the Billboard Hot 100 chart and has sold 8.2 million copies worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling singles of all time.

The accompanying music video was inspired by surrealist painters like Salvador Dalí and Francis Bacon. Gaga was depicted as giving birth to a new raceduring a prologue. After a series of dance sequences, the video concludes with the view of a city populated by this race. Critics noted the video’s references to the work of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Björk, and the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen, as well as to Greek mythology.

Lady Gaga has literally put her money where her mouth with the Born This Way Foundation which has donated millions to empower oppressed communities.

Gaga performed the song at the 53rd Grammy Awards after coming out of an incubating vessel. Born This Way was later performed on TV shows, such as Saturday Night Live, Dick Clark’s New Year's Rockin’ Eve and Good Morning America, and as part of her Super Bowl LI halftime show.

Alice Cooper, Madonna, Katy Perry, Maria Aragon, and the castof the TV series Glee have covered the song.

Lady Gaga wrote Born This Way while on her 2011 Monster Ball Tour and added a performance to the second half of that tour.

Gaga said in a Billboard interview:

I want to write my this-is-who-the-fuck-I-am anthem, but I don’t want it to be hidden in poetic wizardry and metaphors. I want it to be an attack, an assault on the issue because I think, especially in today’s music, everything gets kind of washy sometimes and the message gets hidden in the lyrical play. Harkening back to the early ‘90s, when Madonna, En Vogue, Whitney Houston and TLC were making very empowering music for women and the gay community and all kind of disenfranchised communities, the lyrics and the melodies were very poignant and very gospel and very spiritual and I said, “That’s the kind of record I need to make. That’s the record that’s going to shake up the industry.” It’s not about the track. It’s not about the production. It’s about the song. Anyone could sing Born This Way. It could’ve been anyone

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The World’s Oldest Alliance—London and Lisbon
13 June 2020 at 12:34

The World’s Oldest Alliance—London and Lisbon

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13 June 2020 at 12:34

By: Patrick Murfin

The Anglo-Portuguese Treaty, signed on June 13, 1373, marked the earliest formal recognition of an alliance that already had roots more than 200 years old and has remained in effect, with a brief hiatus, ever since. That makes the relationship by far the oldest in-force alliance in the world.

Friendly relations started as Christian Portugal was beginning to establish itself. Back in 1147 a joint army of Norman, English, Scottish, Flemish, Frisian, and German Crusaders arrived at the port of Porto in June of that year after bad weather forced the fleet that had departed from Dartmouth to seek shelter on their way to Jerusalem. Once there Portuguese King Alfonso I presented them with a Papal document authorizing the extension of the Second Crusadeto include the Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula. The king negotiated an agreement with the visiting knights and men at arms for them to join him in a siege of Moorish Lisbon in exchange for the right to loot and plunder the city and hold its nobles for ransom. 17,000 Crusaders joined with Alfonso’s 7,000 man force to lay siege to the city. After four months the Moors surrenderedand true to their words the Crusaders sackedthe city with the zeal and efficiency. Many of the knights found the city so attractive that they stayed and settled there. Others participated in the conquestof the towns of Sintra, Almada, Palmela and Setúbal. Their decedentsmerged with the Portuguese nobilityproviding blood links between the countries.

The Moors surrender the English-led Crusaders after the Siege of Lisbon.

An informal alliance between England and Portugal was formed in 1294. It was officially sealed with 1373 treaty between King Edward III of England and King Ferdinand and Queen Eleanorpledging “perpetual friendships, unions [and] alliances” between the two nations. By this this time both nations had established themselves as sea faring countries with similar interestsin trade, access to European ports, and fisheries.

In 1385 a crisis that began with the death of Portuguese King Ferdinand I died in 1383 leaving no male heir. His daughter, Princes Beatrice had been wed to King Juan I of Castile who then laid claim to the Portuguese throne. Portuguese nobles and particularly the powerful merchants of Lisbon refused to recognize the claim and selected João or John, the Grand Master of the Aviz Order and a bastard son of Peter I, as Rector and Defender of the Realm. John called upon English support and was sent a force of yeoman longbow men who trained the Portuguese in the new tactics that had defeated the French at Crécy in1346 and Poitiers 1356. The effective use of the bowmen and Portuguese crossbowmen against an advancing force of heavy cavalry squeezed into a narrow front defeated an invading Castilian army in April 1384 at the Battle of Atoleiros.

English longbowmen and tactics developed in battles with heavy French cavalry at Crecy and Poitiers helped the Portuguese defeat a larger Castilian invading army at the Battle of Atoleiros in 1384.

The following year King Juan personally led a massive new invasion army accompanied by 2000 French heavy knights, plus allies from Aragon and Italian principalities. At the Battle of Aljubarrota 6,500 Portuguese and 100 critical English bowmen destroyed the Castilian joint force of more than 31,000. King John was forced to run for his life, deserting his un-horsed chivalry. About 5000 invaders were killed outright in the battle and almost as many including hundreds of captured French knights who were hacked to death as prisoners and fleeing stragglers who were attacked by villagers and peasant.

John was crowned undisputed King of Portugal establishing the new Aviz dynasty. He was naturally grateful to his English allies. When the ambitious John of Gaunt, son of the late king Edward III of England and father of the future King Henry IV, landed with an army in Galacia, a kingdom north of Portugal whose ruler was a vassal of Juan of Castile,to press a flimsy claim on the Castilian throne, the Portuguese monarch was glad to lent him support.

John of Gaunt’s venture petered out, however, when expected support from dissident Castilian nobles failed to materialize. He accepted what amounted to a large bribe and annual pension to renounce his claims on the Castilian throne and go away. On the way out, by way of thank you he gave his daughter Philippa of Lancaster to be the bride the Portuguese king.

The marriage between King John I of Portugal and Philippa of Lancaster.

Close relations were further enhanced with the new Treat of Windsor in 1386 which said:

It is cordially agreed that if, in time to come, one of the kings or his heir shall need the support of the other, or his help, and in order to get such assistance applies to his ally in lawful manner, the ally shall be bound to give aid and succor to the other, so far as he is able (without any deceit, fraud, or pretense) to the extent required by the danger to his ally’s realms, lands, domains, and subjects; and he shall be firmly bound by these present alliances to do this.

As the new queen Philippa had extraordinary influence. Not only did she promote English interests and trade—cod and woolens for wine, cork, salt, but she introduced the manners and formality of a Norman Courtto Lisbon, thereby strengthening her husband’s position as a truly national ruler with a compliant aristocracy. More importantly, she gave birth to five sons and insisted on the finest education for each. These sons would fortify the Aviz Dynasty lead to Portugal’s Golden Age as a world power.

Philippa’s eldest son, Duarte, wrote books on morality and religion became king in 1433. Pedro, who travelled widely and had an interest in history, was Regent from 1439 to1448 after Duarte died of the plague in 1438. Ferdinand the Saint Prince became a crusader and in the attack on Tangiers in 1437. Perhaps most important was Henrique, known to history as Prince Henry the Navigator the instigator and organizer of the Portugal’s early voyages of discovery which in turn led to a world girdling empire in the Atlantic, in Africa, Asia, and South America.

Through those glory years the English-Portuguese Alliance held firm, cemented by both nation’s rivalry with and fear of rising united Spain.

A sixty year disruption of the alliance occurred when the Spanish House of Hapsburg established the Portuguese Philippine Dynasty after the House of Aviz petered out. Philip II of Spain assumed the Portuguese throne as Philip I of that country. Dynastic union meant a de facto end of Portuguese independence and placed it in the camp of England’s greatest enemy.

The Iberian Union ended when the Portuguese rebelled against Philip III (Philip IV of Spain) and set John, 8th Duke of Braganza, a descendent of one line of the Aviz, on the throne as King John IV. After the Portuguese Restoration War, 1640-1668 and the firm establishment of Portuguese independence and the Restoration in England, the old alliance was back in force as if it had never gone out effect.

Over the tumultuous centuries that followed the alliance would be repeatedly invoked.

During the War of the Spanish Succession, 1701–1714 following the death of the last Spanish Hapsburg, Charles II, Portugal was initially aligned with France. But after the major English and Allied victory at the Battle of Blenheim, in which distant Portugal was not directly involved at all, the traditional alliance was invoked and Portugal changed sides. It actively joined a war in which it had previously been principally an onlooker. Lisbon was opened to the Royal Navy and Austrian Hapsburg Arch Duke Charles, crowned Spanish King in Vienna, arrived in the country to lead a large Allied army in an invasion of Spain to combat the French backed Bourbon claimant. Portuguese troops fought alongside the Austrians, English, other Allies, and Spanish nobles who rallied to the cause. In the end of the long and complicated war Bourbon Philip V did sit on the Spanish throne, Gibraltar was in the hands of the English, and the French lost much of their holdings in North America and Caribbean spice islands. The Portuguese gained the favor of the ascending world power, England and the protection of its Navy for their maritime trade.

During the Seven Years War, the world-wide war ignited, as you might recall, by an attack by Virginia militia Colonel George Washington on French and native forces near present day Pittsburgh, the Spanish launched an invasion of Portugal in 1762. The English responded with thousands of troops reinforcing the Portuguese army. The combined forces repeatedly routed and nearly destroyed the Franco-Spanish Army. In South America the Spanish and Portuguese fought to a virtual draw, but due the disastrous defeat of Spain in Europe, Portugal was able to regain lost territories and even claim some Spanish lands.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Portugal tried to maintain neutrality while continuing to trade with England and her colonies. In reprisal Spanish and French forces again invaded, nearly overrunning the country and sending King John VI to seek refuge in the Viceroyalty of Brazil, transported by the Royal Navy. Portuguese forces and irregulars joined in the guerilla campaign against the French, fought principally in Spain and supported the Duke of Wellington’s victorious army. With Brazil the seat of the Empire during the war, its status and power grew. Eventually, in 1822 it would become an independent Kingdom when Regent Prince Dom Pedro refused to return to the mother county and proclaimed himself Emperor of Brazil.

Dom Pedro, self-proclaimed Emperor of Brazil relinquished his claims on the Portuguese Crown to his daughter Maria and landed a large army in his motherland with the support of the Royal Navy in 1834.

In the tumultuous aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, the Portuguese Civil War erupted in 1828 caused by the rival claim to the throne by two brothers, Dom Pedro of Brazil and Miguel. Neither Brazil nor Portugal desired a united crown so Dom Pedro relinquished his claim to his daughter Maria and a liberal Constitutional Council. Miguel, with the support of Portugal’s autocratic nobility and of France, raised an army that bloodily defeated the liberals and instituted a notoriously repressive five year rule by Miguel. In 1832 Dom Pedro arrived via London and landed a large army at Porto with the aid and protection of the Royal Navy. The United Kingdom recognized Maria and the Liberals and were responding under the old treaties and alliances. By 1834 Miguel was forced to renounce his claim to the crown and Maria was restored.

A cartoon mocks John Bull as a bully threatening an old and enfeebled Portugal and it little King.

The long cherished alliance was strained almost to the breaking point in 1890. Portugal claimed a large swath of territory between its African colonies of Angola on the west coast and Mozambique on the Indian Ocean on the basis of discovery, exploration, and territorial continuity. But the claims ran counter to British interests, particularly Cecil Rhodes’s powerful British South Africa Company, the African Lakes Company and British missionaries—Protestant—operating in the region. The British were near the height of their Imperial power and nearly drunk with a sense of entitlement and invincibility. Egged on by Rhodes and pressed at home by the Church of England and Methodists who were determined not only to save native souls, but save them from Portuguese Catholicism, the British government issued the Ultimatum of 1890 demanding that the Portuguese evacuate troops from key posts and effectively claimed sovereignty over the territory. The ultimatum stated:

What Her Majesty’s Government require and insist upon is the following: that telegraphic instructions shall be sent to the governor of Mozambique at once to the effect that all and any Portuguese military forces which are actually on the Shire or in the Makololo or in the Mashona territory are to be withdrawn. Her Majesty’s Government considers that without this the assurances given by the Portuguese Government are illusory. Mr. Petre [British legate in Lisbon] is compelled by his instruction to leave Lisbon at once with all the members of his legation unless a satisfactory answer to this foregoing intimation is received by him in, the course of this evening, and Her Majesty's ship Enchantress is now at Vigo waiting for his orders.

That was a none-to-veiled threat that Lisbon would be shelled by the Royal Navy unless it immediately acceded. The by this time much weakened Portuguese had no choice to bow to the haughty British. They were force to sign an 1890 Treaty of London which ceded much of the disputed territory. But the Portuguese Parliament refused to ratify it and popular street demonstrationsin Lisbon brought down the government. Rhodes also opposed the treaty because he coveted more territory. He sent his private company troops into the area and attacked Portuguese garrisons inflicting heavy casualties. The British government bowed to Rhodes demands and drafted a second treaty which gave Rhodes his land and compensated Portugal with remote territory along the Zambesi River.

The Portuguese people never forgave this national humiliation. It festered in public resentment for 20 years and was the primary cause of the Republican Revolution of 1910. That followed the assassination of un-popular King Carlos I and his heir, Prince Luís Filipe in 1908. The new republican government was naturally hostile to the British.

When World War I broke out four years later the Republican government was loath to come to the aid British and tried to maintain neutrality. But when the Germans attacked Portuguese East Africa the country had to appeal for help from the British and troops based in South Africa. Once in the war Portugal even contributed some troops to the Allies fighting on the Western Front in France.

In World War II Portugal once again tried to maintain neutrality, with British approval. Both countries knew that Portugal’s entry into the war would result in an invasion by Spain and Franco’s battle hardened and modern army and air forcesagainst which Portugal would have been helpless. That would have brought Spain into the war on the side of the Axis. From total control of the Iberian Peninsula, it would have poured troops into North Africa linking up with the Italians in Libya and pushing south as well as east. The British also prized neutral Portugal as a windowon an otherwise hostile continentand a place from which to launch espionage and covert operations. But in 1943 as German submarine warfare in the Battle of the Atlantic was wreaking havoc with convoy operations supplying beleaguered Britain. It invoked the old alliance and was granted use of the Azores for Naval operations and a base for anti-submarine air patrols. In addition thousands of heavy bombers and transports refueled there on the way from North America to Britain.

In the postwar years, Portugal and Britain maintained a close relationship. In 1959 Portugal joined the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), a British dominated alternative trade organization to what was then known as the Common Market which also included Austria, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland. In 1973 Britain abandoned the EFTA and Portugal and Denmark followed it into the European Economic Community (EEC.)

When India in 1961invaded Portuguese India, by then reduced to the coastal enclaves of Goa, Daman, and Diu, it invoked the treaty and appealed for British aid. The British sensibly did not want to engage in a war with its former colony, which had one of the largest armies in the world. The best that they could do was offer Portugal diplomatic support.

It was Britain’s turn to invoke the alliance in 1982 when the Azores once again offered support for the Royal Navy in the Falklands War with Argentina. It has not been invoked for military operations since.

But Portugal has joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and therefore its military and defense cooperation with Britain occurs mostly in that context. Politically they are aligned through membership in the European Union as well.

Huge and sustained left-led anti-austerity protests put Portugal at odds with the European Union (EU) After Brexit the Tory British government hopes to make Portugal one of its first partners in a new bi-lateral trade agreement.

The Portuguese people rose up against draconian austerity measures demanded by the European Union in exchange for some relief to its massive debt. Conservative British governments backed EU pressure on hard-pressed states including not only Portugal but Spain, Italy, and Greece. Portugal remained in the EU after Brexit ending that phase of political cooperation. But the British believe that Portugal will be an early target for negotiations on a new direct nation-to-nation trade deal.

But after 647 up and down years, the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance remains in effect.

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Don’t Let a Pandemic Get You Down—Woodstock Pride Promenade is On!
12 June 2020 at 12:48

Don’t Let a Pandemic Get You Down—Woodstock Pride Promenade is On!

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12 June 2020 at 12:48

By: Patrick Murfin

Last year the Woodstock County Pride Fest on Woodstock Square was a mind blowing enormous success. Thousands thronged the Square for a lively programand visited the colorful booths and display tables of local social service agencies, activist groups, businesses, and supportive churches. The parade was impressive and welcomed by crowds thronging the streets around the Square. Pretty good for a first time event in a county many were afraid to even come out in a decade ago. Everyone was eager for an even biggerand better event this year. Then that damned Coronavirus pandemic and lock-down scrubbed the Fest for 2020. Bummer. A home decorated for last week's Buffalo Grove Pride Drive. But event sponsor Woodstock Pridefound a...

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Fun With Flags—Denmark’s Nordic Cross Set a Trend
11 June 2020 at 09:52

Fun With Flags—Denmark’s Nordic Cross Set a Trend

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11 June 2020 at 09:52

By: Patrick Murfin

The Danish national flag featuring the Nordic Cross--the koffadiflaget.

With a big tip-o’-the-hat to Dr. Sheldon Cooper and his popular cabal access show Fun With Flags, today we share the story of the Nordic Cross and how it got on the flags of all of those folks with blond hair, social democracy, great health care, better sex lives than you or me, and generally the happiest people in the world. Hey, if the Cross on the flag helps, I’m willing to donate at least the field in the Stars and Stripes.

The Nordic Cross symbolized Christianity, of course, and particularly the Lutheranism that became the state religion of the Nordic Nations. It has a long horizontal cross bar and the upright was “shifted to the hoist”—the mast or flag pole—leaving the two inner fields as squares and the two outer fields one and half times the width of the inner ones. Trust me, the design is not as complicated as the written description. In fact it is simplicity itself as the national flags using it are unadorned by bars, shields, or other devices.

Blame it all on Denmark which on June 10, 1748 adopted the Koffardiflaget as a civil ensign for use by its merchant ships. As was the case with other national flags, as opposed to the personal banners of sovereigns, the flag identifying merchant or naval vessels quickly became internationally recognizedand a de facto national flag before ultimately being adopted as an official emblem.

The Danish design was simplicity itself—an off-center white cross with narrow arms and upright on a crimson field.

A recreation of the personal banner of William the Conqueror. Some dispute the early use of the Nordic Cross.

Of course, the Nordic Cross was far older than any national flag. The personal banner of William the Conqueror, decedent of Vikings, featured the cross on a red field with arms of two lions in the upper left field on a swallow tail pennant. It also appeared on the arms and banners of various nobles and local rulers not only in Scandinavia, but in the low countries, northern Germany and the Baltic region. The Teutonic Knights used a black cross on a white background when they held sway from Northern Germany, through Poland and up into Lithuania.

The Scandinavian nations had a complicated history with various parts uniting voluntarily, being forced to unite, sometimes sharing a monarch but not national identity, and at war with one another until the modern independent nations were established when Sweden gained its independence from Norway in 1905 and Finland split from Russia after the 1917 Revolution. But with the exception of Finland with its own unique ethnicity and Uralic language, the Scandinavian nations mostly shared a common ethnic—Norse—identity, customs, pre-Christian and Christian religious traditions, and related languages.

Nordic flags, from left to right: the flags of Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Denmark.

One by one each of the nations adopted national flags featuring the Nordic Cross.

· Norway in 1821 featuring a blue field with a red cross superimposed over a larger white cross.

· Sweden in 1906 featuring a light blue field and a gold cross.

· Iceland although loosely ruled by Norway until 1814 and tied to the Danish Crown from 1380-1945 adopted its flag in 1915 with a red-on-white cross on a blue field.

· Finland in 1918 featuring blue cross on a white field.

The Inuit majority of Greenland rejected the Norse Cross but maintained the colors of the Danish flag.

The only nation not using the Norse cross is Greenland which gained home rule from Denmark in 1975 and virtual national autonomy in 2009. It earlier flags were based on the Danish banner. Unlike the other nations of the region, the ethnic Norse are a minority in Greenland. The indigenous Inuit are the majority. When Virtual independence was achieved a flag with a white cross on a light green background was proposed, an acknowledgement of still being part of the Danish Realm. But the Inuit preferred a distinctive national banner and a proposal designed by Thue Christiansen was adopted in 1985. It features two equal horizontal bandsof white (top) and red with a large disk slightly to the hoist side with the top half red, the bottom half white. The red and white colors recall the Koffardiflaget.

Many local flags around the world incorporate the Norse Cross. In the United Kingdom the Orkney and Shetland Islands in the North Sea off of Scotland both of which were once Norse fifes use the cross on their flag, as does Yorkshire West Riding, once a part of the historic Danelaw. In the Balkans flags proposed or considered as national banners for Estonia and Latvia incorporated the Cross.

The Nordic Cross was nearly overwhelmed on the War Ensign of Nazi Germany.

Nazi Germany, which often looked at Norse mythology for inspiration incorporated the Cross in its War Ensign, which is now forbidden to be displayed. A black Iron Cross was displayed in the upper inside field and a large swastika medallion covered the intersection of the Norse Cross which was black on white on a red field. Leave it to the Germans to over engineer a simple concept.

For some reason the Nordic Cross shows up, sometimes highly stylized in the flags of several Brazilian states and municipalitiesdespite it being a Portuguese speaking nation and heavily Catholic. Why is anybody’s guess.

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Planting the Flag in Asia—The First American War in Korea
10 June 2020 at 11:58

Planting the Flag in Asia—The First American War in Korea

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10 June 2020 at 11:58

By: Patrick Murfin

A Korean map of the Hermit Kingdom. The Han is the second major river from the south pictured on the map, the water way to the capital Hanyang (modern Seoul.)

A fat book could be made out of forgotten and neglected American foreign wars or interventions. Take the war in Korea, for instance. No, not the one when Harry Truman sent American forces to try to repel an invasion of the South by the Communist North in 1950, although I know veterans of that conflict have taken to calling it a forgotten war. No, I have in mind an action nearly 80 years earlier. Never heard of it? Well pull up a stool and I will tell you all about it.

In American military and naval annalsit is listed, mostly as a footnote, as the United States expedition to Korea of 1871. It is best remembered as the first foreign conflict in which Medals of Honor were awarded. The Koreans, who have a keener memory of such things, call it the Shinmiyangyo.

Korea in the late 19th Century was one of the most isolated nations on earth. The history of this peninsular nation in northern Asia was a tragic one of repeated invasions or attempted invasions by neighboring China, Japan, and Manchuria. The response of the ruling Joseon Dynasty which came to power in 1392 and had ruled and shaped the nation as a Confusion culture and state, was extreme isolationism—a virtualexclusion of all contact and trade with the rest of the world. That policy was being tested again by pressure from Japan, the introduction of Catholicism by missionaries in the late 18th Century, and demands of European powersfor concessions and trade privileges.

In 1866 after eight fruitless week of battle a French expeditionary force failed to capture the citadel of Gsnghwua and was forced into a humiliating withdrawal.

In 1866 the French launched a punitive expedition against Korea in retaliation for a massacre of Catholics that included French Priests and to demand trade concessions. A sizable French force landed on the fortress island of Ganghwa which guarded the approach to the capital of Hanyang, modern day Seoul. After six weeks of fighting, the French were ignominiously forced to withdraw. The ruling Joseon Dynasty, previously weakened by internal dissent was strengthenedand but also deluded about its military capacity. It re-affirmedits isolation and in the West became known as the Hermit Kingdom.

As for the United States, having spanned its own continent and emerged united from the Civil War, the country continued to look westwardto the Pacific all the way to the shores of Asia to expand its influenceand to secure free and equal access to the trade of all Asian ports. Spurred on by the Navy, a force in search of a mission to keep it afloat in peace time, the government followed a policy to open trade relations with all nations and to check the growing power of its greatest rival the British Empire with its strong presence in China and naval superiority.

The first catalyst of the U.S action against Korea was the fate of the General Sherman, an American side wheel commercial steamerthat had been hired by an English firm in China to try to open trade with Korea in 1866, the same year as the French adventure. The belligerent American Captain of the ship would not take a refusal to allow it to dock and captured Korean officials sent to inform him of the government policy. He then tried to move up river firing cannon as he went. The Koreans rallied and after several days of fighting and the loss of several Junks, the General Sherman was destroyed and her surviving crew taken captive—and were likely executed.

Also of official concern was the possible fate of Americans who were shipwrecked in Korean waters, although in the one confirmed case, the survivors were well treated and sent to China from where they could be repatriated. Finally, the U.S. sought to open Korean ports and sign a trade agreement.

The iron hulled and screw propelled steam frigate the USS Colorado was the flagship of the American squadron on the 1971 Korean expedition.

Early April 1871 what might be called a heavily muscular diplomatic mission set sail for Korea. In Command was Rear Admiral John Rogers on board the USSColorado the flagship of the Navy’s Asiatic Squadron, an iron-hulled three masted steam screw frigate which had seen service in the Civil War. On board to handle negotiations was Frederick F. Low, the United States Ambassador to China. Also in the squadron were four other warships, the sloop of war USS Alaska, the armed tug USS Palos, the side-wheel gunboat USS Monocacy, and the screw sloop USS Benicia.

Admiral Rogers might be forgiven if he envisioned having the success and glory the Commodore Mathew Perry found in opening trade with Japan in 1854.

"Men in /white" were encountered by Admiral Roger's crew. These Korean officials later taken captive were photographed on the deck of the Colorado in their traditional attire.

On June 1st Rogers arrived in Korean waters and successfully put men ashore to attempt to contact authorities. He crew reported encountering “men in white”who were reluctant to talk to him or take any message to the Emperor in his capital of Hanyang. Rogers’s men ashore reportedly politely told the Koreans that they would be exploring the area and “meant no harm.”

The Admiral then led his ships to the entry of the Han River leading to the capital—where foreign ships wereexplicitly forbidden to go. The flotilla came under ineffective cannon fire from fortresses on Ganghwa. The ships were not badly damaged, due “to the bad gunnery of the Coreans, whose fire, although very hot for the fifteen minutes in which they maintained it, was ill-directed, and consequently without effect.”

A council of war on board the USS Colorado. Admiral John Rodgers is the one leaning over the chart.

Rogers hotly demanded an official apologyfor the “unprovoked attack” and gave the Koreans a ten day deadline to reply. When those days lapsed, he quickly swung into action with a punitive raid on Ganghwa Island.

On June 10 hostilities began with an attack on the lightly defended Choji Garrison on the Salee River. The Koreans, members of the Tiger Hunters led by General Eo Jae-yeon were crudely armed with matchlock muskets which had been obsolete for nearly a hundred years in the West.

A force of 546 sailors and 105 Marineswere put ashore to move on otherobjectives supported by 12-pound howitzers and guns from the flotilla. They quickly moved on and captured Deokjin Garrison, and Deokjin Fort, which they found abandoned. The Koreans fell back and regrouped at the well-fortified citadel of the Gwangseong Garrison. As the Americans advanced on the fort an attempt to flank it was repulsed.

American forces established strong artillery batteries on two hills overlooking the fort which was pounded by extensive shelling abetted by fire from the USS Monocacy operating close to shore in shallow Han River waters.

U.S. Sailors stormed the citadel of Gwangseong in heavy hand to hand fighting.

Navy Lt. Hugh McKee led a chargeon the damaged fort. The Korean defenders with their slow loading matchlocks were hardly able to get off a single volley of fire before McKee reached the top of the wall leading his troops. He was felled by a ball immediately. Right behind him Commander Winfield Scott Schley personally shot the Korean who had wounded McKee. Several seamen rushed to the aid of McKee, fatally wounded in the groin. Meanwhile two Marines, Corporal Charles Brown of the USS Colorado’s guard and Private Hugh Purvis of the USS Alaska’s guard captured the personal flag of Eo Jae-yŏn and Private James Dougherty shot and killed the General. Carpenter Cyrus Hayden, a sailor from the USS Colorado planted the American Flag on the ramparts under heavy fire.

Korean dead in the breached citadel.

The whole battle for the fortress lasted 15 minutes from the breach of the walls. The surviving garrison, including the deputy commander, was taken prisoner. In all of the action that day the Koreans lost 243 dead and 20 captured, most of them wounded. American losses were three dead, including McKee, and ten wounded.

It was a brilliant military victory, especially considering that the Americans accomplished in a single day what the French had failed to do in six weeks.

Despite the military glory, the diplomatic mission ended in abject failure. Rogers tried to use his prisoners as bargaining chips to demand negotiations with the Koreans. The Koreans, for their part, flatly refused to negotiate, or even to take back the prisoners, who they considered traitors for surrendering. The squadron stood off Korean waters until July 1 fruitlessly waiting to begin talks. Frustrated and with fuel for his ships running low, Rogers had to break off contact and return with his primary objectives un-met. In the end Rogers left as empty handed as the French.

Korean Headquarters Flag captured by marines Private Hugh Purvis, USMC, Corporal Charles Brown, and Captain McLain Tilton on board the USS Colorado after the battle.

The U.S. was unable to establish relations with Korea until 1886, after the Japanese forcibly opened trade there and the British had extracted concessions.

Nine sailors and six Marines including McKee, Brown, Purvis, Dougherty, Hayden, and three sailors who came to the aid of McKee were awarded the Medal of Honor. Admiral Rogers never found the fame and glory of Commodore Perry and faded intohistorical obscurity.

North Koreans re-enact the Shinmiyangyo annually and celebrate the defenders as national martyrs and heroes.

For the Koreans, especially, in the Communist North, which now so closely resembles the Hermit Kingdom, the whole experience of 19th Century contact with the Americans is celebrated. A story was invented making an ancestor of Kim Il Sung, the founder of the People’s Republic of Korea and of the dynasty that has ruled ever since, the local commander who sank the General Sherman. The American spy ship the USS Pueblo which was captured by the North Koreans in 1968 is now anchored at the site of the destruction of the General Sherman. And the fallen garrison of Gwangseong are celebrated as martyr/heroes like the Texicans at the Alamo.

Which is why you probably never heard of America’s first Korean War.

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Cry No More—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
9 June 2020 at 21:04

Cry No More—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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9 June 2020 at 21:04

By: Patrick Murfin

Cry No More by Rhiannon Giddens

Last night Tree of Life UU Congregation held a Parking Lot Vigil in memory of George Floyd at the same time a public viewing was being held in his home town of Houston, Texas. We were just one of several faith communities holding similar vigils at the same time, organized by the Faith Leaders of McHenry County. Ours was a powerful and moving experience. A high light of the event was a performance by Cassandra Vohs-Demann and Billy Seger of Cry No More.

Cassandra Vohs-Demann and Billy Seger perform Cry No More at the Tree of Life UU Congregation George Floyd parking lot vigil while observing social distancing.

They could not have picked a more appropriate song. Rhiannon Giddens wrote Cry No More in 2015. She described the circumstances:

The massacre at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, in June is just the latest in a string of racially charged events that have broken my heart. There are a lot of things to fix in this world, but history says if we don't address this canker, centuries in the making, these things will continue to happen. No matter what level privilege you have, when the system is broken everybody loses. We all have to speak up when injustice happens. No matter what. And music is one of the best way I know to do so.

Cry No More was inspired by the 2015 murders by a white supremacist at Mother Bethel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. But it is just as timely today.

Giddens is an extraordinary young artist. She is a major star in what is now called American Roots Music—a mix of traditional folk, county, bluegrass, blues, and gospel that is an alternative to Nashville basedand radio driven commercial country music. She got the attention of many people who do not follow that musical niche when she was featured extensively in Ken Burns’ epic Country Music PBS series. She defies expectations because she is a Black artist in a mostly white genre.

The amazing Rhiannon Giddens.

Giddens was born February 21, 1977 in Greensboro, North Carolina and is a founding member of the country, blues and old-time music band Carolina Chocolate Drops, as the lead singer, fiddle and banjo player. In addition to her work with the Grammy-winning Chocolate Drops, Giddens has released two solo albums, Tomorrow Is My Turn I 2015 and Freedom Highway in 2017. Her latest album, There Is No Other, is a collaboration with Italian multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi was released in 2019. She appears in the Smithsonian Folkways collection documenting Mike Seeger’s final trip through Appalachiain 2009, Just Around The Bend: Survival and Revival in Southern Banjo Stylesand in 2014, she participated in the T Bone Burnett-produced project The New Basement Tapes along with several other musicians, which set a series of recently discovered Bob Dylan lyricsto newly composed music. That is an eclectic body of work by anyone’s standards.

Today’s video was shot at the United Congregational Church in Greensboro and features its choir.

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Hush Little Baby (Mockingbird) —Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
8 June 2020 at 21:35

Hush Little Baby (Mockingbird) —Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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8 June 2020 at 21:35

By: Patrick Murfin

Mockingbird (Hush Little Baby sung by Peter Paul & Mary In honor of one week old Matilda Mokoto Holmes coming home from the hospital to the Murfin estate in Crystal Lake we are sharing a traditional American folk lullaby, Hush Little Baby which is sometimes called Mockingbird. Matilda with Dad John Holmes, What did he promise her? Hush, Little Baby probably originated in the South, but similar songs date back to at least the 18th Century in the British Isles. The lyrics promises all kinds of rewards to the child if they are quiet. The simple structure allows more verses to be added ad lib . It has been performed and recorded by many artists including Joan Baez, Burl Ives, Regina Spektor, Nina Simone, The Weavers, the Mormon Taberna...

A Parking Lot Vigil for George Floyd

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8 June 2020 at 09:05

By: Patrick Murfin

The Faith Leaders of McHenry County which began meeting via Zoom to help coordinate responses to the Coronavirus pandemic and lock down has now stepped up to organize a memorial for George Floyd this evening, June 8 at 7 pm Central Daylight Time. Faith communities around this county in the northwestern Chicago metropolitan area will gather on their own grounds for George Floyd Parking Lot Vigils. Their call said: Join the Faith Leaders of McHenry County as we strive for something new challenging racism for peace and justice. We are coming together for 8 minutes of silence as we remember George Floyd and honor his family for a joint memorial in the parking lots of Houses of Worship across the county. Bring your own candle and joi...

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Gandhi in Natal—His First Act of Civil Disobedience
7 June 2020 at 10:32

Gandhi in Natal—His First Act of Civil Disobedience

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7 June 2020 at 10:32

By: Patrick Murfin

A museum diorama of Gandhit being thrown of a train in Natal in 1893 for refusing to give up a first class seat that he had paid for.. His first act of civil disobedience.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi had just arrived in Natal, a British colony in southern Africa. He was at the time a 33 year old upper casteHindu lawyer educated in England.

Despite excellent credentials, his attempts to start a practice in his native India had failed because he was too shy to address the court. After being reduced to drafting legal documents for the poor for tiny fees, he had been offered a contract to serve a Muslim owned business in Africa.

At the time many Indians were enticed to the British colonies to serve as laborers—native Blackswere often regarded as “unsuitable” for hard labor. Most of the laborers were Hindu. A largely Muslim elite established themselves in business, often brokeringthe importation of low caste Hindus and other trade.

Conditions in his new home were startlingly different than he had known either in England or in an India from which he had become somewhat cultural estranged from. Not the least of the differences was the rigid racial barriers he encountered.

On June 7, 1893 Gandhi was thrown off a train at Pietermaritzburgafter refusing to move from the first class accommodations that he had paid for. After lodging a protest, he was allowed to travel in first class the next day. However after transferring to a stagecoach, he was beaten by the driver and once again thrown off. In later years he would look back on these incidents and consider his refusal to be displaced in each case represented his first, instinctive acts of civil disobedience.

They would not be his last. He was soon in trouble for defying a judge in court who ordered him to remove his turban.

Gandhi as a young lawyer in Natal, 1885

Gandhi remained in South Africa for another 19 years, until 1914. His experiences there as he rose to leadership of the Indian community and began his campaigns of civil disobedience and passive resistance were the cruciblein which his whole philosophy came to maturity. It is also where he came to grips with his Indian identity. Importantly, he came to consider being an Indian as something that transcended the rigid divisions between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, although he personally came to fully embrace the Hinduism to which he had once been indifferent.

In 1894, just a year after arriving and his first humiliating experiences, Gandhi founded the Natal Indian Congress to unite all natives of the sub-continent. Within a few years it was a powerful political and social organizationwilling and able to confront injusticewhether at the hands of exploitative employers or colonial authorities.

By 1897 his efforts were so resented by Whites that he was attackedby a mob in Durbin and had to be savedby the efforts of the wife of the local Police chief. Despite his experience, he refused to press charges against the identified leaders of the attack, establishing his principle of never relying on the courtsfor redress of a personal injury.

Gandhi (middle row center) with the volunteers of the 2nd Indian Stretcher Bearer Corps during the Zulu uprising, in 1906 in South Africa.

Early in 1906 colonial authorities in Natal declared war on local Zulus in rebellion over being taxed. Gandhi had not yet become totally estranged from British rule. He felt that if Indians served the British during the conflict in non-combatant roles, it would soften the hearts of authorities to the plight of his community. Gandhi organizedand commanded a corps of Indian stretcher bearers for the Ambulance Service. He was only in active service for two months and it is somewhat unnerving to see his photographin a military uniform with a jaunty broad-brimmed hat pinned up on one side. The experience did teach him that armed resistance to the overwhelming power of the British was futile. And he quickly realized that neither he nor his people were recognized or rewarded for their service.

Gandhi (center) with his secretary, Sonia Schlesin, and his colleague Mr. Polak, both white Jews, in front of his Law Office, Johannesburg, South Africa, 1905.

His influence was spreading beyond Natal. Later in 1906 he helped organize Indians of the Transvaal, a former Boer republic which had only recently and with great brutality been brought under British rule. Attempting to ease tensions with its bitter former foes, the British colonial administration introduced a measure calling for the registration of all Indians, a measure supported by the Boers. Gandhi organized a mass protest meeting in Johannesburg, where he outlined his strategy based on his evolving philosophy of Satyagraha, the “devotion to truth.” He asked his followers to defy the law and accept the resulting punishment.

Indian laborers organized by Gandhi and the South African Indian Congress on peaceful but defiant march in 1913.

That set off a seven year struggle marked by brutal repression of the Indian community including beatings, shootings, and mass arrests. Gandhi himself was jailed on numerous occasions. But despite the repression the demonstrations remained resolutely non-violent. As Gandhi expected, the image of repeated brutality toward peaceful and unarmed Indians eventually raised enough public outrage that Jan Christian Smuts, the powerful ex-Boer general who had become Prime Minister of the new Union of South Africa, was forced to negotiate with his old opponent and reach a compromise favorable to the Indians. The result was the Indian Relief Act of 1914. Gandhi had shown that his policy of non-violent resistance could produce dramatic results.

Later that year Gandhi returned to India, where he would soon apply what he had learned to the long struggle for Indian Independence.

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When the Lights Go On Again—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
6 June 2020 at 20:47

When the Lights Go On Again—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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6 June 2020 at 20:47

By: Patrick Murfin

When the Lights Go On Again (All Over the World) by Vaughn Monroe and his Orchestra.

Posts for the Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020have been sporadic over the last few days due to both excited preparations to welcome new grand baby Matilda home and my participation in and obsession with the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder by police of George Floyd and way too many other African Americans, people of color, and other oppressed minorities. But I realize that many of us are still sheltering at home during the Coronavirus pandemic, so I hope to do better in offering a bit of musical relief for you.

Today we are inspired by the 76th anniversary of D-Day when a generation of Americans and our allies fought Nazism. Today we have a would-be Führerin the White House who wants to use the pretext of Black Lives Matter and George Floyd protests to stage a fascist putschwith the support of White Nationalist militias and extremist groupsand militarized federal police forces under the command of the Justice Department.

Bennie Benjamin and Sol Marcus (shown) along with Eddie Seiler wrote When the Lights Go On Again.

When the Lights Go On Again was written in 1942 by Bennie Benjamin, Sol Marcus, and Eddie Seiler in 1942 inspired by the black outs in British cities during the German Blitz bombing campaign. The refrain of the song was also referenceda quote by Sir Edward Grey on the eve of the World War I, “The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our life-time,” but was intended to offer a more optimistic vision of a sure victory.

Bennie Benjamin was an African American songwriter born in the American Virgin Islands and with his frequent partner Sol Marcus wrote hits like I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire, Till Then for the Mills Brothers, Lonely Man for Elvis Presley, and Please Don’t Let Me be Misunderstood for Nina Simone and The Animals from the early ‘40s through the mid ‘60s.

The song was popular for the duration of the war but was widely sung and played after V-E Day when the troops and their loved ones at home both looked forward to reunionsand re-starting interrupted lives.

Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra in an early 1940's club date. Note the Allied flags decorating the band stand.

When the Lights Go On Again was first recorded in 1943 by Vaughn Monroe and His Orchestra and quickly zoomedto #1 on American charts. Monroe was a baritone crooner, trumpeter, big band leader, and occasional actor born in Akron, Ohio in 1911. He formed his big band in 1940 and was soon recording on the RCA Victor subsidiary label Blue Bird in 1940 but was soon a mainstayof the parent label. He was also a very popular radio performer and was often considered to be a serious rival to Bing Crosby. His signature song was Racing With the Moon and other hits included In the Still of the Night; There! I’ve Said It Again; Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow; and Someday (You’ll Want Me to Want You.) In the late ‘40s and early ‘50s he had a string of western hits most notably Ghost Riders in the Sky, Cool Water, and Mule Train.

A poster for the York Musical Theater company's revival of the musical When the LightsGo On Again in 2015.

Roy Sault wrote When the Lights Go On Again, an English musical that told the story of a family living in England during World War II, and ends in a VE/VJ Day party. The music in the show consisted of 28 war-time favorites, including The White Cliffs of Dover, We’ll Meet Again, and Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree.

Here hoping we have a happy outcome from our current crises too.

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When Fighting Nazism on the Beaches was the Biggest Undertaking in the History of the World
6 June 2020 at 10:08

When Fighting Nazism on the Beaches was the Biggest Undertaking in the History of the World

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6 June 2020 at 10:08

By: Patrick Murfin

Note: We seem to be in the middle of a Fascist coup attempt by would-be Führer Donald Trump as we battle white supremacy, racism, and violent police oppression. At this very moment when the world seems teetering on the edge of something, we should remember when we as a people fought real Nazis…

When it comes to World War II, certain dates are etched indelibly into the American consciousness, even occasionally piercing the historical unawareness of young people now generations removed from the events. December 7, Pearl Harbor Day is one. August 6 when the U.S. dropped the first Atomic Bomb making the end of the war with Japan inevitable is another.

So is June 6, known without further explanation as D-Day.

American troops pinned down on Omaha Beach, June 6, 1944.

On June 6, 1944 the Allies invaded Nazi occupied France under the overall command of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. It is the iconic event of World War II in the American memory.

It was the largest coordinated movementof men, arms, and materiel in history and had to be conducted in enough secrecy to surprise the Germans who had at least 55 divisions in France while the Allied effort could only put 8 ashore to secure the beachhead on the first day.

British paratroopers loading for their missions to be dropped behind the German beach defenses and secure roads and bridges inland.

Nearly 2 million soldiers, sailors, and airmen were involved in the total Operation Overlord, including those landed after the first day. 195,000 Naval personnel manned 6,039 vesselsincluding 1,200 warships and 15 hospital ships. The United States alone shipped 7 million tons of supplies, 14 billion pounds of material including 448,000 tons of ammunition.

Air operations in support of D-Day, which began in April, included 14,000 missions with a loss of 2000 air craft and 12,000 airmen before the landing. 127 planes were lost on D-Day alone.

On June 6th U.S. casualtieswere reported as 6,603 including 1,465 dead. While these are awful numbers, there were several Civil War battleswith greater dead. The Soviets suffered more single day casualties four or five times. And losses per men engaged in some Pacific landings were more than 5 times as high. Total allied casualties that day among U.S., British, Canadian, Free French, and Polish troops are estimated to be in excess of 10,000. German losses are less well documented but are estimated between four and nine thousand.

A fraction of the cost--American dead at the water line on Omaha Beach

After the beachhead was secured hundreds of thousands of men and tons of supplies landed across those sands because the Allies did not control any deep water French port for weeks. By July 14 over a million men had come ashore.

But heavy German resistance confined the invaders to a small zone around the landing beaches until a breakoutbegan on July 25.

U.S. Army Air Force B-26 Marauder medium bombers over the invasion fleet to pound German positions

Once free, the Allied advance across France was remarkably swift. Despite setbacks like the Battle of the Bulge in December and delays in getting a bridgeheadacross the Rhine into the German heartland, by the following April British and American units from the west met up with Soviet troops from the east. Within a few days of that Hitler committed suicide, Berlin fell, and the German High Command surrendered unconditionally.

It has been my honor to know several men who either fought on D-Day or who landed on the Normandy beaches over the next few days. One of them was my late father-in-law, Art Brady.

After last year's spectacular 75th anniversary ceremonies in Normandy this year's observations will be curtailed and muted due to the Coronavirus pandemic and the accelerating loss of invasion veterans. Seen here are British D-Day vets with their service escorts

All of them are gone now. Within a few years the last of the veterans of D-Day will go the way of the ghosts of Gettysburg and Belleau Wood. The latter battle, coincidently, reached its peak on another June 6 in 1918 when U.S. Marines suffered their worst single day losses in history.

So much war. So much grief.

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Surprise Surprise! George Floyd et al Ignite McHenry County
5 June 2020 at 13:27

Surprise Surprise! George Floyd et al Ignite McHenry County

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5 June 2020 at 13:27

By: Patrick Murfin

The call for the youth-led march and rally on Woodstock Square. 400 or more showed up.

Who would have thought that the murder by police of a Black man in a distant city would touch off more than a week of sustained and militant action by hundreds of people in McHenry County, Illinois? That’s right, the suburban/exurban/rural county in the northwest boonies of the Chicago metropolitan area which was 90.1% white by the 2010 Census and until recently an unassailable conservative Republican bastion has been swept up in a national Black Lives Matter movementthat has seen demonstrations in more 450 citiesand towns across the United States.

Of course since 2010 the Latino communityhas grown and there has even been a modest influx of African Americans but my guess is the 2020 Census will show only about 2% Black residents.

Activism of all sorts has been on the rise since the electionof Donald Trump including Women’s March events, March for Our Lives and National School Walk-out anti-gun violence actions, March for Science and climate change, immigration justice rallies, and LBGBQ Pride events each of which have turned out hundreds. Meanwhile grass roots progressive Democrats have changed the political landscape carrying the county for Barack Obama, Senator Tammy Duckworth, and Representative Lauren Underwood.

A lot of that activity was organized by a small overlapping core of activists, many of the women and/or gray haired elders like the Old Man who pens this blog.

But the energy and leadership behind the current wave of protest has been entirely different—young people under the age of 25 most of whom have had no relationship with existing organizations. Inspired by the nation-wide protests, the local movement was spontaneous and without either charismatic figure head leadership or organizational backing. Protests in different towns have been organized independently. Those taking the lead include Black and Latino high schooland college students but also white youth allies. They also include significant numbers of LGBTQ and gender queer young people showing that the movement has a clear understanding of intersectionality.

A portion of the crowd in Woodstock on Sunday listen to speakers before taking off on a march around the Square.

Crowds at marches and rallies in Huntley, Woodstock, McHenry, Crystal Lake, and Harvard have included up to 600+ participants, 80-90% young and reflecting the local demographics mostly white. Geezers like me who have turned out have been happy to simple foot soldiers in the struggle taking our cues from collective youth leadership. All of the actions have been entirely peaceful.

The first action I participated was in Woodstock on Sunday May 31. There were well over 400 in attendance—enough to completely and continuously surround the Square in an angry and determined but entirely peaceful march. Better yet more than 85% of the marchers were under 25. Many geezers my age stayed home due to health concerns. At 71 years old, I have some of those too and I got winded after three laps around the square. Most of the young folks kept up the march for at least an hour and a half. My granddaughter Mathildawas born earlier that day and I felt I owed it to her to leave her with a betterand more just world than the dangerous crappy one into which she was just born.

Protesters in Crystal Lake lay face down with hands behind their backs in front of the City Hall.Police Headquarters.

Yesterday afternoon I was at an even larger event that began in Crystal Lake’s Veterans Acres Park and marched several blocks to the City Hall/Police Department and lay down silently on our stomachsfor the nine minutes that George Floyd had a cop’s knee on his neck. Safe to say Crystal Lake had never seen anything like that.

A separate youth led group is planning two days of Crystal Lake Protests For Black Lives today, June 5 and tomorrow June 6 both beginning at 11 am at the five way intersectionof Crystal Lake Road, Walkup Road, and Grant Street near The Cottage pub and will participate in the first civil disobedience in the McHenry County protests—intermittent occupation of the streets. Crystal Lake Police are not expected to take action against the protestors. The group will then march to the Gazebo by the Metra Station on Woodstock Street for a short rally.

Details on Saturday’s march through Crystal Lake’s downtownand rally at the Gazebo will be announced later. Both days rally speakers will be exclusively Black and other minorities to lift up often unheard voices.

On Monday, June 8 McHenry County Faith Leaders are planning a George Floyd Memorial Service at 7pm at churches across the county. The faithfulwill gather in the Church parking lotsor on the grounds observing safe social distancing for services to coincide with the public viewing at The Fountain of Praise Church in Houston, Texas where Floyd was an active member before moving to Minneapolis. There will be prayers and eight minutes of silence in memory of Floyd and other victims of racial oppression. The congregations will acknowledge their own privilege and repudiate the systematic racism embedded in their churches. Check with your own church to see if it is participating.

McHenry County Faith Leaders plan George Floyd Memorial Services at churches in McHenry County.

The Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road in McHenry will host one of the memorial services on its grounds.

The is so much going on now in McHenry County that it entirely possible that other local actions have been planned that I don’t yet know about. Keep your eyes peeled for them.

And thanks for the new generationshowing us all the way. They/we/I are not giving up!

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A Legendary Transcontinental Rail Dash Was Just Press Agent Hype for an Actor
4 June 2020 at 09:42

A Legendary Transcontinental Rail Dash Was Just Press Agent Hype for an Actor

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4 June 2020 at 09:42

By: Patrick Murfin

A Courier & Ives print of the Lighting Express, right, on an early leg of the Transcontinental.

If you were paying attention at all in school, and I’m sure you all were, you know that when the Golden Spike was driven to symbolically link the Union Pacific and Central Pacific Rail Roads on May 10, 1869 that the Transcontinental Railroad linked the East and West Coasts in one shimmering steel ribbon. Close, but not quite. Most folks thought New York City and San Francisco were the two termini. But there was no railroad bridge yet from Manhattan across the East River to New Jersey. In California the Central Pacific still ended in Sacramento and travelers those first months had to proceed to the Bay Area by river boat or stage coach. In November the CP’s subsidiaries the Western Pacific the San Francisco Bay Railroads completed the final leg of the route, connecting the state capital to Oakland. But to get to fabled San Francisco travelers had to board a ferry to cross the Bay.

When the Central Pacific RR's Leland Stanford drove the final Golden Spike to complete the link with the Union Pacific at Promontory Point, Utah in 1869 it did not actually complete a genuine uninterrupted coast-to-coast transcontinental connection.

In between coasts, the Union Pacific started west from Omaha, Nebraska but there was no bridge over the Missouri River to Council Bluff, Iowa to connect to the Chicago and Northwestern line running east. Fortunately, thanks to a shrew railroad lawyer named Abraham Lincoln in a case representing the Illinois Central, railroads had won the right to span the Mississippi River even at the hazard of river boat operations so that great obstacle could be crossed.

But there was a snarl in Chicago where all of theprinciple railroads in the eastern half of the country had terminalsbut not direct connections. Passengers from the east had to get off a train at one station and go several blocks to pick up another heading west—and the railroads pointedly did not even synchronize their arrivals and departures to make that smooth or convenient. All freighthad to similarly be switched from one line to another. East of Chicago passengers had to switch railroads two more times before glimpsing Manhattanfrom the Jersey side.

By 1876 some of those problems had been overcome. A bridge had finally been built over the Missouri and there was some schedule cooperation in Chicago although trains still needed to be changed. The trip from almost coast to almost coast still took about 7 days, but that was a vast improvement over months overland by wagon or stage coach or by steam packet around the Horn. Theoretically, however, it should have been possible to shave days off that time.

The idea of a dash from coast to coast for the express purpose of setting a recordwas a natural. One might suspect that it was part of the grand hoopla that year around the National Centennial and the great Exposition in Philadelphia. Or that it was promoted by the Federal Government to highlight fast postal service and emphasize national unity in the post-Civil War Era. Or that the railroads themselves thought up the stunt to promote their service. The eventual trip accomplished all those things, but none of them were the reason it was actually done.

The coast-to-coast dash promoted Lawrence Barrett in Shakespeare's Henry V.

It was just a good old fashion theatrical press agent gimmick. A New York impresario and flack named Henry Jarrett managedthe Broadway Booth Theater where Lawrence Barrett and company were just about to finish up a successful run in Shakespeare’s Henry V. They had been booked into a top San Francisco theater following the New York run. Barrett was a popular actor but not on the world famous level of Edwin Booth in whose honor the New York house had been named and on the far away West Coast he was something of an unknown. Since he had to get star, cast, sets, costumes all the way across the country anyway, Jarrett hit on the idea of chartering a private trainto deliver the company in record breaking time. He knew that the public would eat up the story.

Arranging for a private train was no difficulty. It was done all of the time by the wealthy. The trickwould be getting all five railroadsover which the train would have to roll to clear their tracks for a through express which would force any train ahead of them passenger or freight onto a siding until the express high balled through. Each of the roads would have to carefullypre-position fuel and water stops and have relief train crews at the ready. They would also have to undertake unusual coordination with connecting lines to insure the smooth transfer of the train to each new line’s engine.

Jarret was a smooth talker and got each of the railroads—the Pennsylvania; the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago, the Chicago & North Western, the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific—to buy into the plan, and at an exceptionally low price of not terribly much more than First Class accommodations of everyone on board. He began to hype the trip with storiescarefully planted in all of the leading New York dailies and national newspapers by greasing the palmsof compliant reporters and editors when necessary. The telegraph spread the story across the country and even to Europe. Jarrett emphasized fact that the play was going to close less than 24 hours before cast, sets and costumes raced west to open in San Francisco only a few days later. This assured that every single Broadway performance was sold out right up to closing night. And tickets out west were already selling like hot cakes.

By the time the train was ready to leave reporters from the Times of London and James Gordon Bennett, Jr.’s New York Herald were on board to cover the trip from beginning to end. Along the route other reporters would get on for a while, get their interviews with the star and other members of the cast, and hop off to file breathless stories.

After crossing the Hudson by ferry early on June 1, 1876 passenger boarded the train which pulled out of the Pennsylvania RR’s Jersey City Station shortly after their arrival. It would travel 24 hours a daywith only the briefest stops for fuel, water, to exchange crews, or attach new engines.

The train provided luxury accommodations. The star and leading actors, producer, and director rode in the luxury of the Pullman Palace Hotel Car, the Marlborough and dined on fine cuisine said to rival Delmonico’s famous New York eatery in a beautifully appointed dining car The crew, reporters, and the personal servants of the cast, and various hangers on traveled in a First Class Pullman Sleeping car. Each railroad along the route assigned their fastest and most modern locomotivesand best, most experienced engineersto the train.

Members of the transcontinental party including cast members of Henry V and reporters. Star Lawrence Barrett is third from left and press agent/organizer Henry Jarrett.is third from right.

As it sped westward the train picked up two distinct nicknames. Some of the press picked up an early railroad telegrapher’s alert bulletin to the line ahead, “The Lightning Express is on the way.” Jarrett was thrilled with the monikerand adopted it for his own promotional uses. Meanwhile the Post Office saw the opportunity to promote its fast rail service. It loaded all of the mail due for shipment to the Orient from San Francisco and issued a special postmark for the “Jarrett & Palmer Fast Trans-Continental Express.” Some contemporary accounts and much of the historical writing done about the trip uses the name the Transcontinental Express.

Others tried to hitch their stars to the fame of the train. The New York Times was not yet the newspaper of record, but it was a rising competitor with the then dominant Herald for leadership among respectable broadsheets. The paper made sure that bundles of the early edition were rushed to the ferry to accompany the cast so that they could be placed in the baggage cardestined for Chicago. The train rolled into the Windy City very same day it was published in New York beating the Herald by half a day. Later the Times would make special arrangements with the railroads to near duplicate this feat on a basis helping establish it as a major national paper.

The trip was not without its hitches. Even the most modern locomotives of the day were not designed for sustained speedsabove 60 miles per hour. All four of the eastern lines scheduled at least one change of engine to prevent failure. And not every transfer of engines and crews worked perfectly smoothly. But by the time the express crossed the Missouri it was well ahead of time. And all along the way whole towns turned outwhen alerted that the train was coming by telegraph just to watch it flash by.

A commemorative silver box engraved for passengers with tickets for each leg of the transcontinental dash.

The great challenge was the final Central Pacific’s final 875 mile leg from Ogden, Utah to Oakland which encompassed not only the most miles but crossed the burning Salt Flats and deserts of Utah and Nevada and then had to climb and pierce the mighty Sierra Nevadas in California. The CP elected to use just one engine under the control of a single chief engineer for the entire trip. The engine was the modern #149, the Black Fox, a McQueen Locomotive Works 4-4-0 unit. The engineer was veteran Henry S. (Hank) Small. His hand was on the throttle most of the way with short spells of reliefby other engineers.

There were risks. In the vast expanses of the West there were often hundreds of miles between towns and maintenance rail yards, any mechanical failure could doom the enterprise. And much of the way was single track mainline making it impossible to switch in case the track was damaged. That is exactly what happened in Utah where a flash flood washed away a section of track. Crews of Chinese laborers and mostly Irish gandydancers worked feverishly to complete a temporary bypassbefore the express came through. They just made it. Instead of stopping and waiting for construction, the train only had to temporarily slow down to pass.

Further west smoke alerted the crew to a tinderbox fire on an axle. Rather than stop for repairs a trainman leaned far out with one foot on the car’s foot bar and one hand on a ladder rung, opened the axle access hatch with his other hand, stuffed the reservoir box with oil soaked cotton, and added more oil from a can to lubricate the overheated axle. The train barely slowed down as he hung there by one hand. The axle cooled and the express rolled on.

As they approached the Sierras, the brakes on the Pullman Palace Car failed. Since the car could not be replaced, two empty baggage cars were attached behind it on the train to provide extra brakingas the train made the steep descentinto California from the mountains. In those days each car had hand operated brakes manned by brakemenstanding on ladders at the top rear of each car.

The Lightning Express was greeted with huge crowds when it rolled into Oakland. Photo from a popular series of parlor stereoscopic cards of the trip.

Despite these misadventures the train rolled into Oakland on June 4, 1876 in a record shattering 3 days, 11 hours and 39 minutes. That was a full 12 hours before its projected arrival, setting off a scramble to rearrange the planned welcoming ceremonies. None the less, huge crowds and every available dignitary were on hand to greet the train and escort the passengers to a waiting ferry to San Francisco where another crowd awaited.

Jarrett, Barrett, and the company were feted at a grand banquet in the city. Engineer Small was hailed as a hero and Jarrett arranged for a gold medal to be struck for him. The publicity stunt was a huge success. Henry V had a long run to nothing but packed houses and star Barrett became a household name.

The country was still buzzing about the trip for the next three weeks until word of Custer’s Last Stand pushed it from the news.

To accomplish the trip the train often had to speed along over 60 MPH. Taking into account stops it averaged 41 MPH over the whole length of the trip. At the time 40 MPH was top speed on most trains and daily averages were about 20 MPH.

Today Amtrak coast-to-coast service claims to beat the Lighting Express time by more than three hours but admits it seldom makes the run on schedule.

For comparison a comparable automobile trip today over Interstate Highway with drivers constantly relieving one anothercan be driven almost exactly 2 days. Current Amtrak passenger serviceover roughly the same route is scheduled for 3 days, 9 hours and 15 minutes, only 2 hours faster than the Lightning Express. Of course even Amtrak will admit that it seldom meets that schedule.

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June is Bustin’ Out All Over—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
3 June 2020 at 19:40

June is Bustin’ Out All Over—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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3 June 2020 at 19:40

By: Patrick Murfin

June is Bustin' Out All Over from the movie Carousel.

Was there ever a month greeted so exuberantly as this one in Richard Rodgers’s and Oscar Hammerstein II 1945 Broadway musical Carousel with June is Bustin’ Out All Over?

As a follow up to the enormous success of their 1943 breakthrough Oklahoma! the duo wanted to mount another musical with a distinctively American setting but they turned to a nearly 40 year old European modernist theater classic as their inspiration. Ferenc Molnár’s 1909 play Liliom, was transplanted from its Budapest setting to a Maine coastal village and mill town. The original play might today have been classified as magical realism with a tough guy carnival roustabout dispatched from heaven to help the daughterhe fathered on an innocent young woman. Despite the magical elements, the play was often dark with the seduction of the girl, his physical abuse of her, a crime, and his death.

It is quite possible that the musical could not be mountedas a new work on Broadway today with a male lead abuser sympathetically portrayed. And a famous scene where the now teen-agedaughter feels his slap and is told by her mother that it could be a sign of love would probably never make it to the stage.

The original 1945 Broadway poster fir Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel.

Carousel opened on Broadway on April 19, 1945 with John Raitt as Billy Bigelow and Jan Clayton (future mom on TV’s Lassie) as Julie. While not as big a smash hit as Oklahoma! the musical became an oft revived staple of American theater. Broadway revivals included 1954 and 1957 productions by the New York City Center Light Opera Company. Both times, the production featured Barbara Cook, though she played Carrie in 1954 and Julie in 1957, with Howard Keel as Billy. A 1992 London East End revival came to Broadway in 1995 with Michael Hayden as Billy, Sally Murphy as Julie, and Audra McDonald as Carrie, a Tony winning best supporting actress role. In 2019 Jessie Mueller was Julie, Joshua Henrywas Billy, and opera diva Renée Flemingwas Carrie.

The 1956 movie poster for Carousel.

Most of us are most familiar with the 1956 20th Century Fox wide screen film adaptation starring Gordon MacCrae as Billy and Shirley Jones as Julie. June is Bustin’ Out All Over featured Claramae Turner as Cousin Nettie Fowler, Barbara Ruick as Carrie and a large ensemble. The number seamlessly introduced the June Is Bustin' Out All Over Ballet.

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Unchecked Racism During the Good War—The Zoot Suit Riots
3 June 2020 at 11:08

Unchecked Racism During the Good War—The Zoot Suit Riots

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3 June 2020 at 11:08

By: Patrick Murfin

Animator Tex Avery's Big Bad Woolf in a zoot suit--a lecherous predator of Red Riding Hood.

The mention of zoot suits these days conjures up fuzzy, even nostalgic memories—the ogling, lecherous Big Bad Wolf in Tex Avery’s classic Red Riding Hood cartoons; clips from old black and white Big Band movies with Lindy Hop and Jitterbug dancers; even teenage Dodie Steven’s already anachronistic 1959 hit Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces. But in the midst of World War II the flamboyant outfits had become youth culture symbols especially popular in minority communities from coast to coast and were widely viewed as flagrant defiance of war time austerity and patriotic rationing.

In 1943 they became the flashpoint of days of rioting as Marines and Sailors roamed the streets of Los Angeles assaulting zoot suiters—mostly Mexican youth—with the open encouragement of the city’s Newspapers and the abetted by the LAPD’s notorious vigilante Vengeance Squad.

Zoot suits spread from Harlem and other East Coast Black centers with the assistance of Big Band hep cats like Cab Calloway.

The zoot suit arose out of the Big Band Jazz scene and among vipers—marijuana users (think Cab Calloway)—in the late 1930’s as a mark of defiance to the Squares. Like many trends on the cutting edge of culture it probably started in Eastern Black communities, but quickly spread. By 1940 the outfits had become especially popular with California’s Mexican Pachucos, youth who flauntedtheir flashy, expensive outfits and enjoyed a wild night life of partyingand clubbing. The term originated in El Paso, Texas and was brought to the Los Angeles area with the huge migration of Mexican-Americans—Chicanos—and Mexican immigrants to the area during the Depression which accelerated with the availability of war production jobs. Pachucos and their female equivalent, Pachucas, who sometimes cross dressed in zoot suits, formed street gangs and became linked in the public mind with street crime.

Zoot suits featured a long coat tailored at the waist and billowingpleated pants pegged at the ankles. Accessories included broad brimmed, low crowned hats with wide bands, brightly colored ties, pointed toe shoes with stacked heels and thick soles, and long watch chains. No question about it, they were eye catching.

In 1942 in order to conserve wool for uniforms, the War Production Board issued strict regulationson how much material could be used in men’s suits. The regulations meant to reduce wool use in suits by 26% and encouraged “new streamlined suits by Uncle Sam.” They affected the voluminous pants and suit coats favored as pre-war business attire, but also effectively outlawed zoot suits. Major manufacturers quickly compliedand ended their production of the style.

But in California small tailor shops continued to supply the demand in apparent defiance of the regulations. Young Latinos with money to spend from war jobs continued to buy the expensive suits. And, of course, many had zoot suits produced before the restrictions. The press railed against theunpatriotic defiance and spared noracial insults in singling out the Mexican community adding allegations of being slackers despite the fact that a much higher than average percentageof young men in the community were in the armed services and their workers were essential to war production.

An L.A. Pachuco zoot suiter and a fashionable Pachuca.

Tensionswere further heightened by sensational press reports of Pachuco gang activity and street crime. In one sensational case nine young gang members were accused of a murder in which the victim’s body was found in a dump. Off-duty police acting as the Vengeance Squad began sweeps of the East LA barrio and popular night spots all over the city targeting zoot suit wearing suspected gang members for assault and summary punishment.

All over California tensions also rose between service men and zoot suiters because of the alleged lack of patriotism for defying rationing. But typical conflicts between soldiers, sailors, and Marines and locals over women added fuel to the fire. Attractive young Pachucas in sexy dresses, gowns, and their own versions of zoot suits were out on the streets frequenting night clubs, dance halls, and theaters. They were often approached and harassed by groups of servicemen on leave. Many fights resulted.

On May 30 a large group of sailors began hassling a group of young women and were attacked by zoot suit wearing men. In the melee that resulted one sailor suffered serious injuries and several others were badly roughed up.

On the evening of June 3, 1943 11 sailors in Downtown Los Angeles got into a confrontation with a band of Pachucos and were beaten. Once again the police Vengeance Squad swung into action in the word of the Los Angeles Timesbreathless reporting, “seeking to clean up Main Street from what they viewed as the loathsome influence of Pachuco gangs.”

Hundreds of sailor rampaged against zoot suiters or any young Mexicans or Chicanos they could find, but as this picture shows they were joined by Army Air Corps men, Marines, and White civilian thugs.

The next day, with the apparent winking approval of base authorities, more than 200 sailors piled into taxis to invade East LA. Their first victims were a group of 13 and 14 year olds, some of them wearing zoot suits who they attacked and beat. Those in zoot suits were strippedand their clothes burned on the streets. Adults of both sexes in the neighborhood who tried to come to the boys’ defense were likewise attacked. The sailors moved on to other targets, invading movie theaters, forcing the management to turn up the house lights, and dragging zoot suiters and other young men to the stage where they were stripped, beaten, and their clothes and bodies urinated on. Night clubs were invaded. Men were pulled off of busses. And not just Mexicans—Filipinos, Blacks, and anyone with a dark complexion.

Zoot suiters were attacked, beaten, and publicly stripped as police looked on or actively participated.

As word spread hundreds more Sailors and large numbers of even more aggressive Marines converged on the city and on Barrios from San Diego to San Jose. Mobs marched down streets accompanied and escorted by police who not only did not interfere but often participated. No young Latin with or without a zoot suit was safe from attack. Pachucas were especially targeted and many were sexually assaulted. When one young woman was arrested in possessionof brass knuckles the press reacted hysterically.

Rioting continued for days and spread across Southern California. The press, especially the Times applauded the rampaging sailors and Marines, spared no racial animus toward Mexicans, and generally threw gasoline on aroaring fire.

Pachucas were swept up by police out of dance halls and movie theaters, dragged off of buses just for their style. But the gangs of service men also sexually assaulted many which fueled Pachuco resistance and escalated the violence.

Navy brass was slow to react. They continued to issue passes in large numbers during the first days of the disturbances and maintained that their personnel were merely defending themselves. The Shore Patrol was conspicuous for its absence on the streets in the heart of the riot zones. Finally late on June 7, after the reeling Pachuco gangs rallied to organize resistance to the attacks and injuries to sailors and Marines began to climb, the Brass acted. They cancelledall shore leave and confined men to their bases and ships. The Shore Patrol was finally dispatched in numbers with orders to retrieve service members on the scene. None were ever charged by the service for any offences committed during the riot. In fact rumors later swirled that the Marines quickly promoted men who were reported to have shown “leadership ability under stress” during the fighting.

The Los Angeles City Council passed a resolution condemning “pleated pants” as gang apparel in much the same way later municipal bodies would try to ban gang colors or, more recently, drooping pants. Despite the ballyhoo no actual ordinance banning zoot suits was adopted.

Many of the young men swept up by police remained cheerily defiant enraging White public opinion.

By mid-June rioting and fighting died down in L.A. Official reports indicate that more than 150 were injured badly enough to seek treatment and police had arrested more than 500 Latinos on charges ranging from rioting to vagrancy in the city alone. Although the figures for the injured are probably grossly under reported, there were no known deaths during the disturbances due largely to the fact that neither the service men nor Pachuco gangs used fire arms.

As things died down in California, copycat anti-zoot suit rioting spread across the country to cities in Texas and Arizona where Chicanos were targeted northern cities such as Detroit, New York City, and Philadelphia, where Blacks were often singled out. But even white hipsters were not immune. Two members of Gene Krupa’s big band were beaten up for wearing the band’s stage costumes. In Harlem a young zoot suit street hustlernamed Malcolm Little—the future Malcolm X—was caught up in fighting.

In Harlem a young street hustler named Malcolm Little was caught up in attacks on zoot suiters.

The Federal Government, which was trying to shore up relationswith Latin America to counter Nazi activity there, became alarmed when the Mexican government vigorouslyprotested the abuse of its nationals and warned of possible severe diplomatic consequences. The government was particularly concerned that Mexico might cut off the supply of bracero migrant farm workers who had become absolutely essential in bringing in the nation’s crops as traditional American migrants joined the military or flocked to cities for big paying defense jobs.

Under Federal pressure California Governor Earl Warren ordered the creation of the McGucken Committee to investigateand determine the cause of the riots. Its 1943 report, found racism to be a central cause, and blamed the press for aggravating the situation by emphasizing zoot suits in any report of Latino crime. In response appointed the Peace Officers Committee on Civil Disturbances, chaired by Robert W. Kenny, President of the National Lawyers Guild to make recommendations to the police. In a tradition of post-riot soul searching familiar to us today, human relations commissions were established and Police Departments were instructed to institute training on treating all residents equally. You can draw your own conclusionsabout how effective that was.

But not everyone was on the same page. L.A. Mayor Fletcher Bowron angrily dismissed the McGucken Committee conclusion of racism. The fault for the riots, he maintained laid with the criminal culture of the Pachucos and zoot suiters on one hand sailors and Marines led by white Southerners, who came out of a region in with both overt legal and socially sanctioned racial discrimination. It was just a clash of cultures, he maintained, with the good [White] citizensof the city, including the police, caught in the middle.

Anecdotal evidence does show that Southerners may have played leading roles in the violence, but it is clear that white sailors and Marines from all parts of the country were involved.

Also arriving in Los Angeles to cash in on the situation was California Un-American Activities Committeeunder State Senator Jack Tenneywhich declared that it had evidencethat Nazi saboteurs were behind the riots. That evidence was never produced and the Committee did not even hold hearings. Yet wide-spread publicity around the claim made sure that many Californians were convinced it was true.

The Los Angeles Times did everything in its power to inflame the riots as they continued, kept stoking racial animosity in every way possible throughout the War, and savagely attacked Eleanor Roosevelt for expressing concern and sympathy with the victims.

Eleanor Roosevelt in one of her My Day newspaper columns wrote “The question goes deeper than just suits. It is a racial protest. I have been worried for a long time about the Mexican racial situation. It is a problem with roots going a long way back, and we do not always face these problems as we should.”

The Times, owned by the rabidly anti-Roosevelt Chandler family, erupted with predictable furry. It repeated the accusations of Nazi sabotage by the zoot suiters and it accused Mrs. Roosevelt of having “Communist leanings and stirring race discord.”

Although the Zoot Suit Riots have been nearly obliterated from history for White Americans, for Chicanos and other Latinos they represent a critical cultural moment and are in enshrined in their collective memory.

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That Time That a President Robbed the Cradle
2 June 2020 at 10:21

That Time That a President Robbed the Cradle

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2 June 2020 at 10:21

By: Patrick Murfin

White House wedding day.

It was a quiet, dignified affair, if somewhat subdued because of the august personage of the groom, a portly 49 year old life-long bachelor. The ceremony, witnessed by a handful of family, friends, and the groom’s staff, was held in an elegant second floor parlor known as the Blue Room overlooking a spread of lawn. A military band led by a fellownamed John Philips Sousa provided the music, his own composition for the occasion. The bridewas a stunning 21 year old brunettein a simple white brocaded dress. She wore no veil. At the conclusion of the service the new husband did not offer his new wife the customary kiss. He had been advised that it might look unseemly. Instead the couple led the assembly to another well-appointed room where an afternoon reception was laid. After a suitably brief attendance the couple retired to their private quarters.

There was no honeymoon at Niagara Falls, the popular destination of thefashionable. They were both, after all, from nearby Buffalo, New Yorkand had presumably seen them before. Instead the busy man returned to his official duties the next day. He did not even have to leave home. His office was on the premises. There he presumably scanned the morning newspaper to see what notice had been taken. The wedding had created, as was to be expected, something of a stirbut so far none of the scandal some had feared. He was, after all, the sitting President of the United States, Grover Cleveland and the bride, the former Frances Folsom, had official been his ward since the death of her father, a former law partner.

The lovely bride, the former Frances Folsom.

It was the first and only marriage ceremony by a President ever held in the White House. One other Chief Executive, John Tyler, had been married while in office but did not hold the nuptials at the White House. The widower had married the 25 year old daughter of a New York Congressman who had been killed, along with senior members of the administration, when a gun exploded on the deck of the USS Princeton as the couple flirted over tea below. That marriage turned out to be a long and happy one with seven offspring. But people had forgotten about Tyler, the first accidental president and a deeply unpopular one who had also become the only former Commander in Chief to take up arms against the government he had once led as a delegateto the Provisional Confederate Congressand Congressman elect of the Rebel House before his death.

Later another Presidential widower, Woodrow Wilson would marry Edith Bolling in 1915 during his first term, but again would have the union solemnized in a church. The formidable Edith would go on to pretty much run the country after her husband suffered a stroke campaigning for his beloved League of Nations.

Baby Ruth Cleveland about age 8 was a celebrity in her own right.

The future for Cleveland and his wife was sunnier than either of the other matches. The couple’s first daughter, Ruth, was born while Cleveland was on hiatus from the presidency in 1891 but was raised in the White House during his second, non-consecutive term. Baby Ruth, as she was called in the press, became the object of national adoration. Unfortunately she died at age 12 in 1904 of diphtheria. The nation mourned and the Curtiss Candy Company named a candy bar after her, or at least that is what they told the lawyers for the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth.

The Clevelands had four other children, including Esther who was born in 1893 in the White House, the last Presidential baby born there until John John Kennedy.

Cleveland left office when William Jennings Bryan and the Populists seized control of the Democratic Party in 1896. He supported a break-away Gold Democrat ticketthat was trounced at the polls. Republican William McKinley swept into the White House.

The Cleveland family with their four surviving children in retirement in New Jersey.

The Clevelands moved to an estate in Princeton, New Jersey where he served on the Board of Trustees of the University. They raised their growing family and the former President still occasionally weighed in on national issues, particularly for Hard Money and the Gold Standard. Always conservative, he disparaged agitation for Women’s Suffrage.

In declining health he died of a heart attack on June 28, 1908. His last words were reported to be, “I have tried so hard to do right.” He was buried in the Princeton Cemetery of the Nassau Presbyterian Church. Nearly 40 years later Frances was laid alongside of him.

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All Through the Night (Ar Hyd y Nos) —Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
1 June 2020 at 22:14

All Through the Night (Ar Hyd y Nos) —Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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1 June 2020 at 22:14

By: Patrick Murfin

Ar Hyd y Nos/ All Through the Night sung by Aled Jones, a mass Welsh male chorus, and Libera.

Way too much death and fear of death these days whether from the Coronaviurus epidemic of police violence against the Black community, people of color, and other marginalized and dehumanized targets. We have to face and fight both. But we can really use some good news and hope as well like the birth of my Granddaughter Matilda Monoko Holmes yesterday. How better to greet her than with on one of the loveliest lullabies ever sung—All Through the Night.

Ar Hyd y Nos—All Through the Night in English is a Welsh song sung to a melody that was first noted in Edward Jones’ Musical and Poetical Relics of the Welsh Bards in 1784. The most commonly sung Welsh lyrics were written by John Ceiriog Hughes (1832-1887), and have been translated into several languages, including English , most famously by Sir Harold Boulton (1859–1935.) One of the earliest English versions, to different Welsh lyrics by John Jones, was by Thomas Oliphant in 1862.

The song is a perennial favorite popularwith traditional Welsh male choruses, and is sung at festivals in Wales and around the world.

It is also sometimes considered a Christmas carol—Mary singing to the infant Jesus-- has been performed by many artists on Christmas albums, including Olivia Newton-John and Michael McDonald, and Cerys Matthews on her 2010 album Tir.

Aled Jones first rose to fame as a /Welsh choir boy and boy soprano recording more than a dozen album before his voice changed at age 16. He subsequently became a successful baratone, actor, and television host.

The version we are hearing today comes from a 2002 BBC program Songs of Praise from St David’s Hall in Cardiff. It features a solo sung first in Welsh and then in English by Aled Jones, a native Welsh speaker and former child prodigy, backed with a traditional Welsh male chorus and Libera, a Black gospel choir.

To Matilda Mokoto Holmes on Her Birth

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1 June 2020 at 11:49

By: Patrick Murfin

To Matilda Mokoto Holmes on Your Birth

May 31, 2020

I understand you can’t read this. You have been very busy getting born, learning how to breathe and such. Hopefully your mother will keep a copy of this to share with you on some appropriate birthday a few years from now.

On the day you were born the sky was crystal blue and everything was lush green bursting with young life to greet you like the young ducklings on the pond and bunnies in their burrows. The Web of All Existence greeted you.

Brand new and with your parents John and Maureen.

Your Mom and Dad were there, of course. It couldn’t have happened without them. And frankly you were a lot of work to get born. It was even a little scary but your new life prevailed. You were welcomed in the arms of love.

A whole tribe waits anxiously to greet you—two grandmas, aunts, uncles, cousins, and an odd old Papa. By the way you were an aunt yourself the minute you were born and your niece Sienna who is just one year older than you will be your playmate and guide for years of coming adventures. And did I mention the dogs Piper and Ginger who will protect you from marauding pirates and Piper at least will curl up to sleep with you.

Some of you clan--Papa, your Mom, Aunt Heather, and Aunt Carolynne. There are lots more.

You will come home in couple of days or so with your Mom to Grandma Kathy and Papa’s little house. It will be your first home. You will have others, but that first one is very special. Grandma will spoil and play with you. Papa will take you on his walks—the stroller is ready to be your carriage into the world—and looks forward to singing strange lullabies to you and reading books with you when you are a little older.

The date you were born used to be Memorial Day before that holiday got moved. And in a way that connects you to two great grandfathers, Papa Art Brady and Papa Willard Murfin who were soldiers in World War II which will be 100 years past when you are a young woman. In fact you are connected to ancestors on both sides of your family whose interesting lives made yours possible. You are part of a great river of humanity.

Beyond your kin and home there are many friends waiting to greet you and support you on your life journey—your folks’ friends, your whole neighborhood, the Sisters Grandma Kathy works with, and the good people at Papa’s church. It takes a village to raise a child and you have many villagers to guide you.

The day you were born everyone wore masks.

But I am sorry, not everything was pixie dust and unicorns on the day you were born. The wide world was a freighting mess. You were born in the middle of the great Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 which is why no one but your Mom and Dad could be with you in the hospital. Even after you get home many of your clan will have to wait to see you and play pass the baby until it is safe. People will wear masks on their faces. They are scared for themselves—and for you.

Climate change—I am sure you will have heard of this when you can finally read it—is making over the world. Where you live it will be hotter and wetter, snowier in the winter, apt to big and dangerous storms. Everything will change from the way things once were. Your parents and grandparents will have to do everything they can to keep that change from being catastrophic.

The country you live in is rent by bitter division. Ominous forces are at work. The free democracy of your parents and ancestors is threatened. Fascism—I am sorry you will have to learn what that is—looms and some long for a civil war. Many good people, however, are doing everything they can to prevent that and to leave you a free and safe country. But it will be a struggle.

Even sadder, on the day you were born cities across America were torn by demonstrations, protests, riots, looting, and violence. All because Black people in this country are not safe from violent assault by police and because a long sad history of white oppression has been unmasked again. Your world will not be safe until Black children are safe.

The day you were born Papa was here to help make the world better for you.

That is why Papa on the day you were born went to Woodstock to hold a sign that said Black Lives Matter and march around the Square with hundreds of others. He pledges to spend the rest of his life fighting to give you a better world than the one in which you were born.

The ancient Chinese had a curse—“May you live in interesting times.” You were born on a day in the middle of interesting times. Bless you as you make your way through them.

With all of the love in the world,

Papa

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Sunshine of Your Love—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
31 May 2020 at 20:58

Sunshine of Your Love—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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31 May 2020 at 20:58

By: Patrick Murfin

Sunshine of Your Love by Cream.

And now in honor of a glorious sunny dayhereabouts, something completely different, psychedelic, loud we present Sunshine of Your Love from 1967 by what some consider to be the first rock super group Cream.

The band was formed in 1965 by lead guitarist Eric Clapton formerly with the Yardbirds and John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers; drummer Ginger Baker of The Graham Bond Organisation; and lead singer, bassist, and piano player Jack Bruce also of The Graham Bond and briefly with the Bluesbreakers as well. Despite their close association Baker and Bruce detested each other and often fought to the edge of physical violence. The laid-back Clapton got along well with both and facilitated mutual cooperation.

Cream--Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce, and Eric Clapton in 1967.

The band was a stripped down trio and eschewed back-up studio musicians or singersand their first English record producersworried that they would produce enough “sound to fill up the record.” Boy, were they wrong.

Their first album Fresh Cream included immediate British hits Rollin’ and Tumblin’, Spoonful, and I’m So Glad.

Despite the success because they were so different from other British Invasion groups they were little known in the U.S. Disc jockey and rock producer Murray the K booked them for the bottom act of a six band bill to play nine dates at the RKO 58th Street Theatre in New York City. for one of his tour packages in 1967, effectively limiting them to one song per set.

Between appearances they recorded their second album Disraeli Gears at Atlantic Studios in New York during May 1967. Despite a volume of material, the album only took three and a half days to complete and the band’s work visas expired the day of the last session. Released on November 2, the album was a huge success this time on both sides of the puddle as well as Australia. And in the wake of that chart-topping success Fresh Cream finally broke out in the U.S.

Sunshine of Your Love which became Cream’s signature anthem and their biggest single hit began as a bass phrase or riff developed by Jack Bruce after being inspired by Jimmy Hendrix. Clapton and lyricist Pete Brown later contributed to the song while a distinctive tom-tom drum rhythm was developed by Baker and sound engineer Tom Dowd. It was truly a collaborative effortpulled together in record time.

Bruce, Baker, and Clapton reunited for the first time in 25 years for their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) certified the single gold on September 26, 1968, signifying sales in excess of 1,000,000 copies. In the US, it became one of the best-selling singles of 1968 and one of the best-selling at the time for the Atlantic group of labels. In 2004, the song ranked # 65 on Rolling Stone magazine’slist of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, in 2005, Q magazine placed it at #19 on its list of the 100 Greatest Guitar Tracks Ever!, and in 2009, VH1 included it at #44 on its list of the Top 100 Hard Rock Songs. The song is on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of the 500 Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll.

As for Cream, they were inducted collectively and individually in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But their shooting star burned out quickly mostly due to the clashes between Baker and Bruce. After their 1968 album Wheels of Fire the group officially broke up but reunited in 1969 for a final studio album Goodbye after a short farewell tour. The trio did not perform together again for 25 years when they somewhat reluctantly took the stage together for a performance at the Hall of Fame induction.

Cream lead guitarist Eric Clapton.

Individually Clapton was the most successful post-Cream with Blind Faith, another super group which included Baker, Steve Winwood of Traffic, and Ric Grechof Family. Then came a stint as lead guitarist for Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, and fronting his own group Derek and the Dominos as well as a very successful solo career.

Ginger Baker revolutionized rock drumming including being the first to have an extended drum solo in a number the way the Gene Krupa did in big band jazz.

Baker formed his own group Ginger Baker’s Air Force and surprisingly worked on several projects with Bruce despite their continued antagonism. After less successful efforts he mostly dropped from sight for years to establish a recording studio in Lagos, Nigeria where he recorded African musicians and western artists, most significantly Paul McCarty and Wings for Band on the Run. After a brief reunion tour with Cream, Baker was mostly inactive on the musical scene while he battled heroin addiction and an array of health issues. He died on October 6, 2019 at the age of 80 at a hospital in Canterbury after being injured in a home fall and suffering a heart attack requiring surgery.

Bruce was a lead guitarist, singer, and songwriter for Cream and a restless seeker of new musical horizons while battling addiction.

Bruce was considered to be one of the most important and influential bass guitarists of all time. Rolling Stone magazine readersranked him #eight on their list of 10 Greatest Bass Guitarist Of All Time, In his post-Cream years he collaborated with several different artists and began to move from hard rock and blues to new forms including jazz and jazz fusion. He released several critically acclaimed solo and collaboration albums that were not, on the whole, very commercially successful. As noted he frequently worked with Baker, an association than neither could every really break. His battles with alcohol and addictionwere even more serious and destructive than Clapton’s and Baker’s. After he finally beat addiction in 2003 he was diagnosedwith liver cancer. In 2003, he underwent a liver transplant, which was almost fatal, as his body initially rejected the new organ. He recovered, and in 2004 re-appeared to perform Sunshine of Your Love at a Rock Legends concert in Germany organized by the singer Mandoki. He followed that with the Cream reunion concert in 2005.

Bruce died of liver disease on October 25, 2014, in Suffolk, England, at age 71. His funeral was held in London on November 5, 2014and was attended by Clapton, Baker and noted musicians Phil Manzanera, Gary Brooker, Vernon Reid and Nitin Sawhney among others. Dozens assembled at the Golders Green Crematorium paying a last tribute singing together including Bruce’s best frenemy, Ginger Baker.

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Race War in America Then and Now—Running the N*ggas Out of Tulsa
31 May 2020 at 10:13

Race War in America Then and Now—Running the N*ggas Out of Tulsa

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31 May 2020 at 10:13

By: Patrick Murfin

Looting and violence in Minneapolis was started by window smashing whites, not Anti-Fascists as they pretended to be but white supremacists organized to ignite the Boogaloo--race war..

Donald Trump likes some very fine people—Proud Boys, White Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and Klansmenwho are now more or less promoting open race war in America. The Resident might settle for a civil war with racist overtone if it will savehim from electoral defeat this November and likely criminal charges to follow. Many of his followers like the tune just fine. Now comes news that the white instigators of violence, looting, and arson in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Nashville, Denver, Seattle, and other cities during angry but peaceful protests following George Floyd’s murder were organized white nationalists including the Proud Boys. They even have a term for it—the Boogaloo. Maybe it’s time to remind ourselves just exactly what race war looks like.

The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was one of the ugliest and largest scale atrocities endured by a Black community in American history. In a 16 hour long well-orchestrated rampage by white mobs supported by police and National Guardsmen the Greenwood District, the wealthiest Black community in the United States, was burned to the ground and erased. Anywhere from 50 to 300 were killed—no one will ever know exactly—and over 800 were injured while two Black hospitals were burned to the ground. 6,000 residentswere arrested, detained, and essentially deportedfrom Oklahoma. Yet within a year an official silence descended over the city. No mention was ever made that it happened. For decades it was a non-event except in the memory of those who survived. This story first was posted here on this date in 2012 starts off with a last survivor.

Otis C. Clark, a last survivor of the Tulsa Race Riot lived to finally tell his story.

Otis G. Clark did not quite make it. One of last known survivors and an eyewitness old enough to remember the two days of horror known as the Tulsa Race Riots died on May 21, 2012 in Seattle. He was reputed to be 109 years old.

That would have made him 18 years oldwhen violence broke out in Oklahoma’s oil boom town on May 31, 1921. A lifelong resident of the Greenwood neighborhood, the thriving center of a flourishing African-American community, the young man spent a night of terror dodging rampaging white mobs and then witnessed his family home being burned to the ground, along with almost all of the neighborhood.

Clark made it to the railroad yards with others and hopped a northbound freight to safety and a new life. It was in interesting life, too. After drifting around taking all sort of jobs, he ended in California where he became Joan Crawford’s butler. Then he turned to preaching and was advertised as The World’s Oldest Evangelist.

Like many traumatized survivors, Clark seldom spoke of his ordeal until a resurgent Black community in Tulsa began demandingthat the city face its dark past in the 1970’s. Since then he often shared his story and his powerful eyewitness testimony helped bring the story to new light.

He told Tim Madigan, author of The Burning: Massacre, Destruction, and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, “We had two theaters, two pool halls, hotels, and cafes, and stuff. We had an amazing little city.”

The business district of the thriving Black Greenwood neighborhood. Its prosperity and the airs of the "uppity niggas" who lived there enraged the Southern and Texas whites who had also flooded into the oil boom city and was the real cause of the riot.

Greenwood was a bustling place. In addition to the amenities mentioned by Clark there were two newspapers, several churches, a branch library, and a thriving business strip. Residents of the neighborhood worked in Tulsa business and homes.

In the early days when Oklahoma Territoryhad been carved out of the Indian Territory once promised in perpetuity to tribes relocated there from all over the United States, there had been the kind of easy going informal meritocracy of the frontier. Black cowboysworked the ranches. Black homesteaders busted the tough prairie soil. Blacks were adopted and assimilated into the Cherokee and other tribes. Black whores serviced white customers and visa-versa. Blacks came as construction laborers and oil field roughnecks.

But in post-World War I American racial attitudes were polarizing and deteriorating rapidly. The Federal government had long since abandoned Reconstruction in the states of the old Confederacy and had ceased to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment which promised equal justice before the law,and had abandoned enforcement of Civil Rights laws. Jim Crow reigned across the Southand was spreading to border and western states.

Racial tensions had heightened during and after World War I. Labor shortages had empowered blacks to leave sharecropping and head to big citiesfor good paying industrial jobs. The plantersand local oligarchs resented the loss of their semi-chattel. White workers in cities worried that their wages were being undercut. Horrible race riots had broken out in Chicago in 1919 where white gangs rampagedthrough Black neighborhoods.

Blacks, on the other hand were feeling moreempowered than they had in years. Many placed high hopes that the record of Black troops in the war, and their service on the home front would earn them respect and greater freedom. Many of their leaders had promised them that would be the case.

Returning veterans, toughened by war, were less likely to meekly submit to indignities. Incidents flared across the country. There was also the beginning of a movement against the lynch law that was spreading across the South and mostly targeting blacks.

About the same time D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation opened across the country to ecstatic reviews. It glorified the defense of outragedsouthern womanhood from “arrogant and ignorant” Reconstruction Black politicians and their carpet bagger and scallywag allies by the heroically portrayed Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat with Southern rootsscreened the movie at the White Houseand endorsed it. Wilson also systematically dismantled the last little Federal civil rights enforcement and re-introduced segregation in Federal facilities nation-wide.

A new version of the Klan, started as a sham by hustlers looking to peddle sheets, crosses, and memorabiliaspread like wildfire across the nation. It often took deepest roots outside of the old Confederacy.

By 1921 Tulsa, whose population had swelled to over 100,000 in the oil boom including many new White residents from Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and southern Missouri, was a tinder box ready to explode.

It didn’t take much.

The man known as Dick Rowland and whose accidental brush with a downtown Tulsa female elevator operator was the excuse for the riot was known as James Jones when he attended Booker T. Washington High School and is the tall athlete with the team ball in this yearbook photo.

On May 30 Dick Rowland, a Black shoe shiner got on a downtown elevator and in the process evidently stepped on the foot of the operator, a White woman named Sarah Page. She let out a yelp of pain or a scream. By afternoon rumors were racing through the city that Rowland had attacked her. He was arrested and taken to jail.

The next day the city’s afternoon newspaper, the Tulsa Tribune not only reported on Rowland’s arrest, but positively claimed that he had attempted torape Page. Going further, an editorial titled To Lynch a Negro Tonight has widely been regarded as a signal for a lynch mob.

Supposedly liberal newspaper publisher and editor Richard Lloyd Jones was also a prominent leader of the Tulsa Unitarian church. His editorial is considered by many historians to be the "signal" for a lynch mob to march on the courthouse. Shown later in life, he remained for decades a respected Tulsa community leader and today the airport is named for him.

That might not be too unexpected of a newspaper that identified itself as Democratic in a town with a big Southern White population. But the Tribune was owned and edited by Richard Lloyd Jones, a self-described liberal crusader. Jones was the son of the legendary progressive leader of the Western Unitarian Conference and the Unity movement, Jenkin Lloyd Jones and was an experienced journalist and former editor of Collier’s and Cosmopolitanmagazines and of the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison. That same year Jones was instrumental infounding All Souls Unitarian Churchin the city. Despite all of this, he evidently quickly adopted the predominant racial attitudes of the White population.

Copies of that issue of the Tribune have mysteriously vanished from the paper’s own archives and from the files of local libraries. They exact wording of the editorial has been lost. But enough witnesses later remembered it so that there can be no doubt that it was, indeed, published.

If Jones, or members of his staff, wanted to signal a lynch mob, they succeeded. A mob began to form outside the Tulsa County Courthouse at 7:30 and continued to grow in numbers and ferocity through the evening. It demanded that Rowland be handed over for “summary justice.” Authorities, who had been criticized for handing over a white youthto a lynch mob eight month earlier, refused.

When word reached the Greenwood neighborhood a group of about 20 veterans armed themselvesand proceeded to the courthouse to offer themselves as deputies to defend the jail. Their offer was flatly refused. The men returned to the neighborhood.

The angry mob tried to break into the National Guard Armory to obtain more arms, but was turned back by Guardsmen. Reports of this filtered back to Greenwood in a garbled manner and believing that it was the Courthouse being stormed, a second, larger group of armed volunteers responded to the courthouse after 10 P.M. They were again turned down.

As the group attempted to leave, scuffles broke out between them and the mob. A shot was fired, by whom and at whom it is not known. A full blown riot erupted.

Whoever labeled this picture now in the collection of the Tulsa Historical Society was not ashamed to boast about the intent of the riot.

The enraged White mob fanned out over the city seeking black targets. Black Veterans held a line for a while along the railroad tracks. Meanwhile a Black man was killed in a downtown movie theater, the first known fatality. Any Blacks found on the streets were attacked. Men inautomobiles sprayed gunfire into Black businesses and homes. Around midnight fires were set in the Greenwood business district which rapidly spread as the Fire Department refused to respond. By morning most of the neighborhood lay in ashes.

But the worst was not yet over. Leaders planned an all-out systematic military style assault on the community at dawn as dazed survivors of the fires roamed the streets. The National Guard was mobilized, but rather than being sent to protect Greenwood, it was dispatched to screen upscale White neighborhoods from non-existing attacks.

The mob struck at dawn as planned, un-opposed by authority. Black defenders were out gunned and quickly over-run. Untouched areas were put to the torch. Blacks moving were shot on sight. A well known local surgeon Dr. A. C. Jackson tried to surrender, but was summarily executed on the spot. The mobs spared neither women nor children when found. There were reports of gang rapes. And the mob was heavily armed. At least one machine gun was used and there were reports of firebombs being hand dropped from a bi-plane.

When out of town Guardsmen finally arrived at 9:30 in the morning, it was virtually all over. The entire neighborhood was smoldering wreckage. More than one thousand homes and businesses were destroyed, while credible estimates of riot deaths range from fifty to three hundred, virtually all Black, with hundreds injured.

The city was placed under Martial Law. Many Greenwood residents, like Clark fled. Others determined to stay, erecting shanties and living intents for more than a year.

The National Guard marches Blacks detained to a Bull Pen at a local sports stadium.

Official investigations resulted in not a single charge being brought against a White man for the violence. An all-WhiteGrand Jury officially blamed Blacks for the violence and determined that all actions by Whites were acts of “self-defense.”

Ironically Rowland, the supposed attacker of a White woman, was found not-guilty on all counts. But the damage was done.

The events of 1921 were for years expunged from Tulsa’s official memory. A conspiracy of silence and fear settled over the city that lasted for decades.

As historians began dredging up the sordid past in the 1980’s pressure began to mount for some kind of official acknowledgment of what had happened. Finally in 1997 a special State Legislative Commission was formed to investigate the “incident” and report back with recommendations for action. The Commission’s report, issued in 2001, put the blame squarely where it belonged and castigated local and state authorities at the time not only for ignoring the crisis, but for actively abetting attacks on the Black community. The report called for reparations to be paid to survivors for losses, similar to the reparations granted survivors of a similar riot against the Black town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923. The legislature let the report languish without action.

The Unitarian Universalist Church of All Souls, recognizing the historic complicity of one of its leading founders, joined with the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Restoration, College Hill Presbyterian Church, and Metropolitan Community Church United to attempt to raise at least symbolic reparations. The Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) contributed $20,000. Combined with local donations $28,000 was made available to the rapidly dwindling numbers of survivors. In addition the UUA gave a $5000 grant to the churches operating together as the Tulsa Metropolitan Ministry for continued anti-racism work.

Today All Souls is the largest congregation under one roof in the UUA with over 1,500 members. It is noted for its social justice activism. After espousing universal salvation and losing his mega church African American Pentecostal Bishop Carlton Pearson, his followers, and ministry were invited by Rev. Marlin Lavanhar and the congregationto bring their New Dimensionsministry to All Souls.

The Tusa Race Riot memorial

In 2010 the John Hope Franklin Reconciliation Park, named for the eminent Black historian, was dedicated in Tulsa near the center of long vanished Greenwood. It features a dramatic memorial plaza and monument.

As for the Tulsa Tribune, it remained in the hands of four generations of the Jones family until it ceased publication in 1992.

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Chicago’s Memorial Day Massacre—A Bloody Walk on a Prairie
30 May 2020 at 11:15

Chicago’s Memorial Day Massacre—A Bloody Walk on a Prairie

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30 May 2020 at 11:15

By: Patrick Murfin

The Memorial Day Massacre--American Tragedy, 1937, by Philip Evergood was based on a press photograph.

Eighty three years ago today it was hot and muggy in Chicago. But the sun was shining brilliantly. Due to a week old strike and the Memorial Day holiday, the giant steel mills nearby were not belching their customary heavy smoke. Maybe those unaccustomed dazzling skies contributed to the air of a holiday outing as steel workers, their wives in their finest summer dresses, and their children converged by bus, trolley, auto, and foot on Sam’s Place, an erstwhile dime-a-dance hall, turned into a makeshift soup kitchen and strike headquarters on theSoutheast Side less than a mile from the Republic Steel mill.

It was May 30, 1937. TheSteel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC), the pet project of John L. Lewis’s Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), had shocked the nation earlier in the year by bringing industry behemoth U.S. Steel under contract by infiltrating the company unions and having them vote to affiliate. Faced with rising demand from an apparent recovery under way from the depths of the Depression on one hand and a popular, labor friendly administration in Washington on the other, the nation’s dominant steel company quietly surrendered.

Buoyed by the success, organizers turned their attention to Little Steel, the smaller, independent operatorsin Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Chicago and other grimy industrial cities. But the bosses of Youngstown Sheet and Steel, Republic, Bethlehem, Jones and Laughlin and others were a tougher bunch than the Wall Street stock manipulators that ran the huge rump of the old Steel Trust. In fact they had nothing but contempt for the monopolists, their old business enemies, and their “weakling” attitude toward unionization. Little Steel vowed to fight. Tom Girdler, President of Republic, had said that he would go back to hoeing potatoes before he met the strikers’ demands.

The ferocity of the opposition to unionization was not just empty rhetoriceither. They had shown they meant business in blood on more than one occasion. Famously in Youngstown, Ohio back in 1916 strikers accompanied by their wives and children marched from the slums to the gates of the Sheet and Tube mill to keep strike breakers from reporting to work. Inside the gates a small army of private security forces responded by throwing dozens of tear gas bombs. As the thick, poisonous haze hung over the workers obscuring their vision, guards unleashed volley after volley of rifle fire directly into their ranks. The exact toll may never be known as workers were afraid to bring the wounded to medical attention. At least three were killed, probably twice that many including women. Twenty-seven injuries were confirmed, but strikers made oral reports of more than a hundred. Enraged as the dead and wounded lay bleeding on the ground the strikers attacked the guards with stones and bricks and perhaps apistol shot or two before retreating to town.

Little Steel strikers remembered Youngstown 21 years earlier.

In rioting over the next two days, workers burned much of the town’sbusiness district only to be eventually crushed by Ohio National Guard troops. The memory of those events was still fresh to workers more than twenty years later. Especially when Little Steel bosses quietly let it be known that they had been stockpiling armories for years and were ready, even eager to repeat the carnage.

The USWOC called their national strike against Little Steel a week earlier. In Chicago it had been marred by predictable violence, particularly on the part of the Chicago Police Department which had a long history of being used as armed strike breakers. Beatings and arrests on the picket lines were occurring daily. Some strike leaders had been kidnapped and held incommunicado. For their part senior police officers were “subsidized” by corporate bosses who also bought political clout with the usual campaign contributions and bribes to local officials. They also pledged to reimburse the city for police overtime during the strike. In addition the still largely Irish Catholic force was kept inflamed by homilies preached in their parishes deriding USWOC as “Godless Communists.”

Despite this, moral among the strikers was high. After only a week out, families had not yet felt the full pinch of lost incomes and strike soup kitchenskept them fed. Organizers made a point of engaging workers’ wives from the beginning, including them in planning and giving them important support roles. This was critical because many a strike had been lost in the past when families went hungry and the women urged their men to return to work.

As the large crowd gathered at Sam’s Place for the first mass meeting of the strike, vendors plied the crowd with ice cream, lemonade, and soft drinks. Meals were passed out from the soup kitchen. Other families munched on sandwiches wrapped in wax paper brought from home. Many of the men passed friendly bottles as they settled into a round singing—mostly old Wobbly songs including Solidarity Forever and Alfred Hayes’s I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.

Then came the rousing speeches. Joe Webber, USWOC’s main organizer pointed his finger at the distant plant. The plan was to establish the first mass picket at the gates of the Republic Works. Some workers carried homemade signs. Organizers passed out hundreds of pre-printed placards stapled to lathing emblazoned with slogans.

With a sense of a gay holiday parade the strikers marched away from Sam’s Place behind two American flags singing as they went one block up the black top and then turned into the wide, flat prairiethat separated them from the distant plant.

Many of the surviving press photos--the police confiscated and destroyed as much film as they could lay their hands on--was damaged. Still, they tell an unmistakable story. Police continue to beat the helpless in the pile while launching more tear gas as firing at those still fleeing.

Historian/novelist Howard Fast later described the scene.

…snake-like, the line of pickets crossed the meadowland, singing at first...but then the song died as the sun-drenched plain turned ominous, as five hundred blue-coated policemen took up stations between the strikers and the plant. The strikers’ march slowed—but they came on. The police ranks closed and tightened… now it was to unarmed men and women and children that a police captain said, “You dirty sons of bitches, this is as far as you go!”

About two hundred and fifty yards from the plant, the police closed in on the strikers. Billies and clubs were out already, prodding, striking, nightsticks edging into women’s breasts and groins. It was great fun for the cops who were also somewhat afraid, and they began to jerk guns out of holsters.

“Stand fast! Stand fast!” the line leaders cried. “We got our right! We got our legal rights to picket!”

The cops said, “You got no rights. You Red bastards, you got no rights.”

Even if a modern man’s a steelworker, with muscles as close to iron bands as human flesh gets, a pistol equalizes him with a weakling—and more than equalizes. Grenades began to sail now; tear gas settled like an ugly cloud. Children suddenly cried with panic, and the whole picket line gave back, men stumbling, cursing, gasping for breath. Here and there, a cop tore out his pistol and began to fire; it was pop, pop, pop at first, like toy favors at some horrible party, and then, as the strikers broke under the gunfire and began to run, the contagion of killing ran like fire through the police.

They began to shoot in volleys. It was wonderful sport, because these pickets were unarmed men and women and children; they could not strike back or fight back. The cops squealed with excitement. They ran after fleeing men and women, pressed revolvers to their backs, shot them down and then continued to shoot as the victims lay on their faces, retching blood. When a woman tripped and fell, four cops gathered above her, smashing in her flesh and bones and face. Oh, it was great sport, wonderful sport for gentle, pot-bellied police, who mostly had to confine their pleasures to beating up prostitutes and street peddlers—at a time when Chicago was world-infamous as a center of gangsterism, assorted crime and murder.

And so it went, on and on, until ten were dead or dying and over a hundred wounded. And the field a bloodstained field of battle. World War veterans there said that never in France had they seen anything as brutal as this.

Because workers were afraid to bring their injured to hospital, the exact casualty count may never be known for sure. Ten men were confirmed dead. All shot in the back. More than 50 gunshot wounds were reported. At least a hundred were badly injured, many more with scrapes, bruises, and turned ankles from police clubs and the panicked stampede to escape.

Many reporters and photographerswere on the scene. Police confiscated most of their film. Newsreel cameras caught the action, but the companies were pressured not to show the footage. The next day, led by the rabidly anti-union Chicago Tribune, most of the press dutifully recorded that the police had come under attack by fanatic Reds and had acted in self-defense.

The rabidly anti-union Tribune spread the lie that Communist radicals had attacked police. They threatened their own reporters who knew better.

Although covered in the labor press, the nation as a whole was kept in the dark about what had happened. Even the workers supposed friend Franklin D. Roosevelt, pretty much accepted the official account and told reporters that “the majority of people are saying just one thing, ‘A plague on both your houses.’”

A Cook County Coroner’s Jury ruled the deaths that day as justifiable homicide. Not only was no action taken against any of the police involved that day, but senior officers were commended and promoted.

The truth about what happened was very nearly suppressed, as so many atrocities committed against working people had been. But a single newsreel cameraman saved the footage he shot from the roof of his car. Some of the photographers on the scene retained their shots. The stills and the moving pictures were placed on exhibit during the hearing on Republic Steel Strike held by a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Education and Labor almost a year later. A shocked nation saw for itself the senseless, unprovoked brutality of the police.

The Ladies Day massacre outside of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube plant later in July showed that Little Steel Bosses were still committed to smashing the strike with brutal force.

As for the strike, it dragged on through the summer, as did regular violence on picket lines. Then on July 19th it was Ladies Day on the picket line in front of the Republic Steel mill in Youngstown. After company guards assaulted one of the women, they were pelted with rocks and bottles. Retreating into the plant, in an eerie replay of the 1916 violence, guards let loose with tear gas and then opened fire, many firing down on the crowd from virtual snipers’ nests. At least two were killed and dozens wounded. Once again the National Guard was called in and the town became a virtual occupied territory. The strike was crushed and workers went back.

But the Steel Workers turned to the new National Labor Relations Boardfor help. They complained of unfair labor practices by the Little Steel companies. The case took years to resolve. But in 1942, with another war on and the need for industrial peace, the NLRB ordered the companies to recognize what had become the United Steel Workers Union.

The Memorial Day Massacre victims remembered.

Today a local union hall stands on the site of Sam’s Place. The Republic Mill and other Little Steel plants are closed and pad-locked eyesores or have been torn down for largely undeveloped parkland.The City seeks desperately to find some way to redevelop what are now called simply Brown Fields. At one time the site was suggested as one possible future home for Barack Obama’s Presidential Library but it was passed over. USW members and the Illinois Labor History Society sometimes gather in remembrance of that terrible day. And the last aging survivors, including some of the children present, fade away one by one, their stories untold.

The Republic Steel Memorial Day Massacre Sculpture, created by former Republic Steel employee Edward Blazak, was dedicated in 1981. Originally located near the main gate at 116th Street and Burley Avenue, it was rededicated in 2008 and relocated to 11659 South Avenue O, at the southwest corner of the grounds of a Chicago Fire Department station.

But this year, of course, the Coronavirus lockdown in Chicago will preclude any public communication. Newscasts are filled with images of new police violence against protestors of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis and other cities including Louisville, Kansas City, Denver, and Atlanta when they are not showing heedless Americans swamping beaches and bars as the Coronavirus shifts into a second wave.

This year again there will scant mention of the Memorial Day Massacre or coverage of commemorations. Seems like Chicago is still eager to forget.

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Strange Fruit—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
29 May 2020 at 21:49

Strange Fruit—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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29 May 2020 at 21:49

By: Patrick Murfin

Strange Fruit sung by Billie Holiday

We interrupt our Home Confinement Music Festival to take sad and outraged note of another deadly plague—the lynching of Blacks and other people of color due to lives devalued by systematic racism and white privilege. Yes, the lynchings that Ida B. Wells wrote about 130 years ago, that the NAACP investigated and exposed begging 100 years ago, and that Billie Holiday sang about 80 years ago are still with us, they just look different. Most of the time instead of hangman’s nooses or stakes and pyres we now have police violence and white nationalist inspired vigilantism, Instead of a howling mob we can have a single white woman set up a Black man for possible police execution with a feigned hysterical call.

This poster is being sold to raise money for the ACLU's continued responses to police violence and murder;

The same old shit wrapped up in a pretty bow for the 21st Century. Just ask George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Amand Aurbry, and Christopher Cooper to name just a few of the most recent victims.

AbelMeeropol cited this photograph of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, August 7, 1930, as inspiring his poem.

Strange Fruit was written in 1937 as a poem by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish poet, writer, teacher, activist and songwriter under his pseudonym Lewis Allan, as a protest against lynchings. He published the poem under the title Bitter Fruit in The New York Teacher, a Teachers Union magazine. He had asked others, notably Earl Robinson to set his poems to music, he wrote the music for Strange Fruit himself. Meeropol, his wife Anne, and Black vocalist Laura Duncan performed it at Madison Square Garden rally.

Abel Meeropol wrote the kyric and music for Strange Fruit and first sang with his wife Anne at a Madison Square Garden rally 1939.

Accounts are conflicting on exactly how nightclub chanteuse and band singer Billie Holiday got the song. We do know that despite fearing to sing it because it might make her a target of racial assault herself, that she first performed in in 1939 at Café Society in Greenwich Village, New York's first integrated nightclub. She continued to sing the piece, making it a regular part of her live performances with special demands for her performance venues—she would close with it; waiters had to stop all service in advance; the room would be in darkness except for a spotlight on Holiday’s face; and there would be no encore. During the musical introduction to the song, Holiday stood with her eyes closed, as if she were evoking a prayer.

Fearing boycotts Southern record stores and retribution against the affiliates of its CBS Radio Network Holliday’s regular label, Columbia Records, refused to issue a recording and her regular producer John Hammond, usually an outspoken liberal, refused to work on it. Eventually Milt Gabler, whose Commodore label produced alternative jazz, got one time agreement from Columbia to release a version with Frankie Newton's eight-piece Cafe Society Band on April 20, 1939.

A photographer captured Billie Holiday singing Strange Fruit as she recorded it in 1939

Holiday recorded two major sessions with the one in 1939 and another in 1944. The song was highly regarded; the 1939 recording eventually sold a million copies, in time becoming Holiday’s biggest-selling recording. She continued to sing it live in all of her appearances for the rest of her troubled life. She became so identified with the song that she is often credited erroneously as a writer or co-writer.

The song has been covered by others, most notably in a searing performance by Nina Simone. Diana Ross sang it in the 1972 bio pick Lady Sings the Blues.

The movie poster for the melodramatic bio-pic Lady Sings the Blues.

The extraordinary honors for Holiday’s masterpiece recording include: election to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1978; Best Song of the Century by Time magazine in 1999; one of 50 recordings chosen that in 2002 to add to the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress; one of the Top 20 Political Songs by The New Statesman in 2010; as the #1 of 100 Songs of the South by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2011; and t was also included in the list of Songs of the Century by the Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Once described a “declaration of war” and “the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement,” Strange Fruit horribly relevant yet again.

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Toaster Pops Up to Make the Great American Breakfast Possible
29 May 2020 at 10:47

Toaster Pops Up to Make the Great American Breakfast Possible

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29 May 2020 at 10:47

By: Patrick Murfin

Inventor Charles P. Strite with his patent number enjoying toast from his invention.

It took a few years, but American breakfast tables were on their way to being revolutionized when Charles P. Strite filed his application for a patent on the electric pop-up toaster on May 29, 1919.

Toasting bread to preserve it by removing moisture dated back to Roman times. In the 19th Century various devices were invented to hold slices of bread over an open flame for toasting. But it was a tricky process requiring diligenceand constant attention and a lot of bread simply went up in flames.

In the 1890’s inventors in England and the United States patented similar devicesthat toasted bread over heated electrical wires one side at a time. The devices were crude, expensive, and dangerous since the glowing filaments were openly exposed. They also frequently failed or burst into flame because the temperatureto toast bread—better than 350º Fahrenheit—caused filaments in the air to melt or ignited near-by combustibles.

A side opening exposed filament two slice toaster. The bread had to be flipped to toast both sides.

The discovery of a strong nickel-chromium alloy by Albert Marsh made modern electrical toasters practical. George Schneider of the American Electrical Heater Company soon patented a toaster using Marsh’s alloy. There was a race among dozens of companies to produce practical toasters.

In 1909 the General Electrical Company’s Frank Shailor patented what would become the first really successful devise, the D-12 Toaster. In 1914 Lloyd and Hazel Copeman perfected a toaster that could flip the bread to face the heating filaments without having to touch it by hand. Competing companies had to either license the Copeman patents for the Automatic Toaster—as did Westinghouse—or find new ways to expose both sides to heat.

Dozens of different devices were introduced, but none were really satisfactory until Strite, a master mechanic at a Stillwater, Minnesota plant got tired of burnt toast in the company cafeteria. Tinkering away, he used a mechanical timer and springs to create a toaster that would “pop-up” a slice of bread that had been heated by filaments on both sides when it reached the correct heat to brown the bread. He was granted his patent in 1921 and founded the Waters-Genter Company to manufacture and market the toasters to restaurants.

The instruction booklet for the first single-slice Toastmaster for home use.

Originally assembled by hand, they were far too expensive for home use. The first 100 were sold to the Childs restaurant chain. By 1926 the company improved production techniques and redesigned the machine for home use under the brand name Toastmaster. After 1938 he chrome sides of the toasters were etched with a triple loop logo meant to resemble the heating filaments inside. The Edison Company eventually absorbed the Toastmaster brand. Through various owners the name and basic design have continued to be marketed to this day.

Toastmaster toasters and other appliances were manufactured in a plant in Algonquin, Illinois in McHenry County until the 1990’s. Now all products are produced offshore, mostly in China.

Although popular, it took another invention to really send sales through the roof and make the toaster a center piece of every home kitchen.

Otto Rohwedder's final prototype bread slicer in 1930 also wrapped the loaves in paper to keep them fresh. Just five years after it was introduced to the baking industry, 80 % of bread was sold pre-sliced

Bread was sold through local bakeries in whole loaves. It had to be hand sliced at home to be put in the toaster. As anyone who has ever tried it can attest, it takes a very sharp knife and some skill to slice white bread to a proper thicknesswithout either mashing the loaf or sawing it to crumbs. Which is why prior to 1930 most people probably had biscuits or cornbread with breakfast than toast. But in 1928 Otto Frederick Rohwedder patented an automatic bread slicing machine that also wrapped and sealed the sliced loaf in protective waxed paper.

In 1930 the Continental Baking Company introduced Wonder Bread and within just three years pre-sliced bread outsold whole loaves across the country. With perfectly formed slices, sales of Toastmaster toasters skyrocketed as well.

The classic art deco design of the two-slice Toastmaster pop-up was little changed for decades.

In the 1930’s the two slice Toastmaster was introduced and remained little changed through the rest of the century. Most other home toaster brands were very similar. Four slice models were introduced to speed breakfast for larger families and in the late 20th Century toaster slots were widened to accommodate the rising popularity of bagels far beyond their urban Jewish roots.

In the ‘60’s and ‘70’s front loading toaster ovens came into fashion and promised to be handy for heating TV dinners and other cooking chores as well but the rise of the microwave oven—which can’t toast—took up the kitchen counter space formerly used by the ovens. Homes that had replaced their pop-up toasters with them had to revert back.

A vintage GE toaster oven and broiler.

Toastmaster toaster and its main competitors had been a not-inexpensive small appliance designed to be durable over a life time and easily repairable by any handy man. Many modern replacements made in China or elsewhere in Asia replaced heavy-dutychrome and Bakelite constructions with light weight plastic and other materials. They cost less than $15 at big box discount stores. They break or fail after two or three years of regular use and are intended to be disposable and cheaply replaceable.

Pass the butterand jam please.

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We’ll Meet Again—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
28 May 2020 at 21:44

We’ll Meet Again—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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28 May 2020 at 21:44

By: Patrick Murfin

We'll Meet Again sung by Vera Lynn

We’ll Meet Again, like other World War II separation songsseems especially apt as we miss physical contact with loved ones during our Coronavirus isolation. But the most beloved of all British wartime songs and its revered singer Vera Lynnhas officially been turned out for new duty during the current crisis.

The first British sheet music for We'll Meet Again surprisingly did not feature Vera Lynn or an explicit war time context. That was quickly remedied in subsequent issues.

We’ll Meet Again was written by English songwriters Ross Parker and Hughie Charles in1939, the earliest day of the war. It quickly became popular with the troops on their way to a doomed defense of France that ended with the evacuation of Dunkirk. Lynn sang the song on radio and everyone one with a phonograph in the United Kingdom wanted a copy. And she sang it hundreds of time in personal appearances for soldiers, sailors, and airmen encouraging them to join her on the final choruses. In 1943 she took it to the screen in a British Columbia pictures film.

Lynn sharing tea with soldiers and sailors from a YMCA special train car. The troops adored her.

For some reason Columbia did not heavily promote the movie in the U.S. and her famous recording only got to #29 on this side of the pond, though singers like Dinah Shorecovered it. In fact most Americans best remember record as the song Slim Pickens rides a nuke to doomsday in Stanley Kubrick’s1964 Dr. Strangelove or How I Stopped Working and Learned to Love the Bomb.

We'll Meet Again and Vera Lynn were invoked by the Queen in her rare special TV broadcast about the Coronavirus emergency. Just 9 years younger than Lynn, she was herself a World War II veteran.

The indestructible Lynn sang the song in Londonon the 60th anniversary of VE Day in 2005. On April 5, 2020, Queen Elizabeth II referenced the song in a rare televised address that aired on the BBC in which she expressed her gratitude for the efforts people are taking to mitigate the Coronavirus pandemic and acknowledged the severe challenges being faced by families across the world. The Queen, of course, was a young Princess was an Army lorry driver during the War. The reference spurred a cover by Katherine Jenkins with Lynn on a video screen to benefitthe National Health Service (NHS) charities, which made it to # 72 on the UK Singles Chart. Then in May Lynn’s original recording was re-released for the 75thanniversary of VE-Day reached #55.

Still hale and hearty 103 year old Dame Veratook the attention graciously.

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Sojourner Truth—What She Really Said in That Famous Speech
28 May 2020 at 09:19

Sojourner Truth—What She Really Said in That Famous Speech

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28 May 2020 at 09:19

By: Patrick Murfin

Sojourner Truth giving her famous speech at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in Akron in 1851.

On May 28, 1851 fifty-four year old Sojourner Truth mounted the platform and addressed the delegates to an Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron. The meeting was held only three years after the inaugural Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York.

Truth was a former slave who had gained fameas a lay preacher and abolitionist speaker. Accounts differ as to whether she was fully welcomed or if there were some women afraid that her presence would antagonize men otherwise sympathetic to her cause. But Truth was already friendly with leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and most of her audience that day were either already convinced abolitionists, or at least sympathetic.

The speech Truth gave has outlasted any other comments at the meeting and it is widely quoted by both feminists and African-American activists. But the speech she gave may not have been the one widely quoted with its repeated refrain of “Ain't I a Woman?”

Truth was born a slave in 1797 in Swartekill, New York. Her birth name was Isabella Baumfree, one of thirteen children. The Hardenbergh family which owned her was from old Dutch colonial stock and Dutch was her first language. She was soldalong with a herd of sheep at the age of nine to English speaking tavern keeper John Neely for $100.

By her later accounts Neely beat and raped her. She was sold twice more becoming the property of John Dumont of West Park in 1810. Conditions were less harsh than with her previous owners and Isabella, called Belle, labored there for several years. She fell in love with a slave named Robert from a neighboring farm, but his owner forbad the relationship and beat him so severely that he later died. Robert fatheredher first two children.

In 1817 Dumont selected another of his slaves, Thomas, to be her husband and he fathered three more children by 1826.

Under New York’s gradual emancipation law slavery would officially end on July 4, 1827. Dumont had promised her release early in exchange for “doing well and faithful,” but reneged after a hand injury left her less than a fully effective worker. Feeling cheated but determined to be fair to her master, she spun him 100 lbs. of wool, what she thought her remaining time was worth and escaped with her infant daughter.

She could not take her other children because even under emancipation they would be held as bond servants until they were 21. She found a sympathetic home with Isaac and Maria Van Wagener who took her in and settled her debt with Dumont for $20. She stayed with them until emancipated under the law.

Learning that Dumont had illegally sold her five year old son south to Alabama, she sued her former master with the support of the Van Wageners and after several months was able to recover her son. She was the first Black in New York State to successfully sue a white man.

During her time with the Wagner family she experienced a religious conversion and became a devout Christian.

Sojourner Truth's association with the religious fraudster Robert Mathews led to her indictment for the murder of her previous employer. After a sensational trial se was aquitted.

In 1829 she moved with her son Peter to New York City to serve as housekeeper for evangelist preacher Elijah Pierson. Through Pierson she met the religious charlatan Robert Matthews, a.k.a. Matthias Kingdom and the Prophet Matthias who had bilked Pierson and several others out of two houses and large sums of money. Bella went to work for him in 1832. When Pierson died a short time later both she and Matthews were charged with his murder but acquitted. Mathews headed west in an attempt to strike up an alliance with the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith leaving Belle behind.

Despite the notoriety of the trial she was able to scrape together a living in the city. Her son Peter signed on whaling ship in 1839 and after three letters never heard from him again.

In 1842 she adopted the name Sojourner Truth because, “The Spirit calls me and I must.” She became a Methodist, and like many others became a lay preacher and traveling evangelist mixing in a heavy dose of abolitionism. Gaining a reputation she was invited to join Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Massachusetts in 1844. One of many utopian social experiments of the era, the Association was founded by abolitionists and supported women’s rights and pacifism. Other members of the association included leading abolitionists William Lloyd Garrison and Fredrick Douglass. Like other communal experiments of the era, the Northampton Association collapsed 1847 and Truth went to work as a housekeeper for Garrison’s brother-in-law.

The front piece and title page of the first edition of Sojourner Truth's memoirs.

While there she dictated her memoirs to her friend Olivia Gilbert. In 1850 Garrison arranged a private printing of The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave. The book was widely read in liberal circles and cemented Truth’s reputation. The same year she was able to buy her own home in Northampton for $300 and attended the first full National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts where she shared the platform such leaders as Lucy Stone, Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, Ernestine Rose, Antoinette Brown as well as old friends Garrison and Douglass. More than 900 people attended the convention, which attracted wide, if sometimes derisive, coverage.

Truth came to the 1850 meeting in while on a western speaking tour with abolitionists George Thompson. The first published version of her speech was transcribed by local newspaperman Marius Robinson and was published a month after the event. The speech was stirring and contrasted the leisure afforded white women who were “put on a pedestal” with the grim “work or die” reality for Black women both slave and free. But it was rendered a standard English and nowhere included the words “Ain’t I a woman.”

Those were included, along with idiomatic—and stereotypical—southern Black speech patterns in a version of the speech published 13 years after it was given by one of the meetings organizers, Frances Dana Barker Gage. Gage’s version is the one widely quoted today. Yet it has its many doubters. It is unlikely that Truth, a native Dutch speaker who had spent her entire life well north of the Mason-Dixon Line, spoke with any kind of southern drawl, Black or otherwise. On the other hand, supporters of the Gage version argue that Robinson “cleaned up” Truth’s raw language for his genteel readers.

More telling are factual inaccuracies in the Gage version, including the claim that she had 13 children “most of which” were sold into slavery. In fact she had five children, one of whom was temporarily sold into slavery. Gage also embellished the circumstances of the speech, making it sound as if Truth spoke to a hostile audience, whereas contemporary accounts, including her own, attested to a warm reception. The speech as recorded by Gage in 1863 began:

Wall, chilern, whar dar is so much racket dar must be somethin' out o' kilter. I tink dat 'twixt de niggers of de Souf and de womin at de Norf, all talkin' 'bout rights, de white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all dis here talkin' 'bout? Dat man ober dar say dat womin needs to be helped into carriages, and lifted ober ditches, and to hab de best place everywhar. Nobody eber helps me into carriages, or ober mud-puddles, or gibs me any best place! 'And ain't I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain't I a woman?...

By contrast Robinson recorded:

I want to say a few words about this matter. I am a woman's rights. I have as much muscle as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and husked and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that? I have heard much about the sexes being equal. I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now...

To my ears, the originally published journal sound much more likely to have been given by a woman who had been raised in the North, had spent many years in association with highly educated people, and made a living as a preacher and speaker.

Truth spent the next decade touring in support of abolition and women’s rights working in close association with Robinson. She had many colorful encounters with hostile audiences, including one where a hecklerinsisted that she was a man so she opened her shirt to show her breasts.

In 1856 she sold her Northumberland home and moved to the Battle Creek, Michigan area which she would consider home for the rest of her life. The household in her new home included a grown daughter, Elizabeth Banks and two grandsons.

Sojourner Truth in her later years.

With the outbreak of the Civil War she saw her older grandson, James Caldwell enlist in the famous Black 54th Massachusettswhile she recruited other blacks to rally for the Union. In 1864 she was called to Washington to join the National Freedman's Relief Associationto improve the lot of newly freed slaves. She met President Abraham Lincoln, and almost a hundred years before Rosa Parks insisted on riding Washington horse car trolleys effectively, if temporarily ending segregation on them.

She tried to claim her 40 acres and a Mule as a freedman herself, appealing to President Ulysses Grant himself in 1870. But despite seven years of effort was turned down because she was a woman and had been freed by a northern state years earlier.

The Sojourner Truth Memorial statue in Florence, Michigan.

Truth resumed speaking tours after the war then returned to Battle Creek to try to vote in the 1872 Election. But she was tiring out. Sojourner Truth died in her Battle Creek home on November 26, 1886 at the age of 86.

Amelia and Those Shocking Bloomers

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27 May 2020 at 10:17

By: Patrick Murfin

Amelia Bloomer should be remembered as one of the founding sisterhood of the women’s movement as an attendee of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, a lifelong suffrage and temperance reformer, a pioneering female journalist, and the first American woman to ownand publish a newspaper. But she is not. Instead she is remembered for a fashion fad or, if you prefer, a radical attempt to reform women’s clothing that she neither invented nor was the first to wear.

Amelia Jenks was born on May 27, 1818 Homer, New York on the southern end of the Finger Lakes District. Her family was respectable people of limited income but who encouraged all of their children to get some education. Amelia, a very bright child, got a rudimentary education in local schools. At the age of 17 she was among the first generation of young women who for whatever reason did not immediately marry, but became school teachers.

After a year, she relocated to Waterloo, New York, seat of Seneca County where she lived with her newly married older sister before taking a job as a live-in governess to the Oren Chamberlain family.

In 1840 Amelia married attorney Dexter Bloomer and moved to a large, comfortable home in nearby Seneca Falls. There her life, you should pardon the pun, began to blossom. Not only was she now a member of the comfortable and respectable middle classwith a fine husband and growing family, that husband was unusually supportive of her expanding her universe. Dexter recognized her keen natural intelligence and encouraged her to read widely and acquire in that way the education she had missed. He also made pains to include her in conversationsabout the politics and current affairs in which he was interested.

In addition to his law practice Bloomer published the local newspaper, the Seneca Falls County Courier. He encouraged Amelia to become a contributor to its columns and as time went by and as he was increasingly engaged in his law practice, she informally assumed some editorial duties.

Amelia Bloomer as a young woman in Seneca Falls, New York.

Amelia also found a close, supportive circle of friends. It was an unusually sophisticated group, going beyond the swapping of recipients, embroidery parties, quilting bees, prayer meetings, and gossip sessions that were the expected purview of “hen parities.” The women, mostly Quakers and Universalists, were widely read and included active reformers interested in abolition of slavery, temperance, and, increasingly, the rights of women. The group included Elizabeth Caddy Stanton, an attractive young mother about Amelia’s age who had even ventured to far off London to attend an anti-slavery conventiononly to be debarred from participating on account of her sex. On her return Stanton and her close friend, Quaker Mary Ann McClintock began to focus discussions in the group more closely on women’s issues.

In the summer of 1848 Stanton and McClintock, leaders of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, decided to hold a hastily called convention to discuss women’s rights and take advantage of a visit by the well know Quaker lay minister and reformer Lucrecia Mott’s to the area.

Although Bloomer, whose own activism had to this point been concentrated in Temperance work, was not one of the core organizers, she made sure that Stanton’s call to convention was published in the Courier and by exchangein most of the newspapers in UpstateNew York. When the Convention convened on July 19 Bloomer does not seem to have been in attendance. Perhaps she was among those who could not squeeze into the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, which was mobbed by an unexpectedly large crowd of both women and men. But Bloomer did manage to find a seat in the balcony on the second day and thus got to hear the debate about the Declaration of Sentiments. All but a final demand added personally by Stanton—one calling for the extension of suffrage to women—passed unanimously, but that clause stirred vigorous debate. Even Lucrecia Mott opposed it. Stanton argued passionately for and it was eloquently defended by Fredrick Douglass. She also heard Mott’s stirring speech that night. She was both impressed by it all and more determined to make the cause of women her own.

Bloomer came into full ownership of the early newspaper for women The Lilly making her the first woman to publish a newspaper in the United States.

Shortly after the convention the Seneca Falls Ladies Temperance Societywas founded and launched a newspaper for “private circulation to members.” From the beginning, Bloomer assumed editorial direction of The Lily. At first, aside from Temperance appeals, the paper copied other publications for the ladies and included recipes, homemaking tips, and advise for domestic tranquility. But Bloomer was soon turning more of its pages over to women’s issues. She invited Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to contribute.

By 1850, perhaps because some members of the Temperance Society were uncomfortable by the new direction, the Society dropped its sponsorship. Bloomer assumed ownership and total editorial control. She became, almost accidentally, the first woman to publish a newspaper in the United States. And it was successful. Circulation climbed to more than 4,000 copies, many of them being sent by mail all over New York State and into New England. Its influence grew.

Bloomer later described why she shifted the focus of The Lily to women’s rights,

It was a needed instrument to spread abroad the truth of a new gospel to woman, and I could not withhold my hand to stay the work I had begun. I saw not the end from the beginning and dreamed where to my propositions to society would lead me.

The fortune of the newspaper and Bloomer’s fame took an unexpected turn in 1851. Temperance activist Libby Millerthat year adopted the fashion first suggested in the health fad magazine the Water-Cure Journal in 1849. Miller considered it a more rational costume for women who were encumbered by yards of cloth skirts and layers of petticoats. The loose trousers, similar to those worn in the Middle East and Central Asia were gathered at the ankles and topped by a short dress or skirt and vest were first called Turkish Dress. Miller’s campaign to have the outfit adopted widely received a boost when the famed English actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble began to wear it publicly.

Stanton was an early adopter of the fashion and wore it on a visit to Bloomer that year accompanied by Miller, probably with copy in hand for The Lilly. Bloomer’s first reaction was unadulterated joy at the liberation of the new style. She quickly adopted it as her own and began to vigorously advocate it in her publication.

Her articles were picked up by other publications, including Horace Greeley’s sympathetic New York Tribune. From the Tribune the subject of “pantaloons for ladies” for ladies went the 19th Century equivalent of viral. Unfortunately most of the press was not as supportive as Greeley. They mockedthe fashion and all who wore them, singling out Bloomer for scorn. Soon they were calling the outfit itself Bloomers. Reaction ranged from bemusement, to savage satire in editorial cartoons, to the expected thundering of preachers denouncingthe “debauchery of our daughters.”

Amelia Bloomer posed for this daguerreotype in the outfit that was begining to be named for her in 1851.

Bloomer was a bit mortified by the attention but refused, at least at first, to back down.

The costume of women should be suited to her wants and necessities. It should conduce at once to her health, comfort, and usefulness; and, while it should not fail also to conduce to her personal adornment, it should make that end of secondary importance.

Despite the scorn and criticism, Bloomers did take off, at least among independent minded women, including the first generation of female college students. A Bloomer Ball for elegant ladies was organized in New York City. And the fashion was readily adopted by female travelers and in the west where commodious skirts were an impairment and inconvenience.

Who was the typical Bloomer wearer? I picture spunky young Louisa May Alcott, a grown up Tomboy who wanted to carve out an independent career as a professional writer.

Bloomers were ridiculed in cartoons on both side of the Atlantic. Most of them, like this one from England in 1851, suggested that wearing the garment would result in role reversal and the emasculation of men.

By the end of the 1850’s the fad, never widely adopted by respectable middle class women was dying out. Even Bloomer herself was having second thoughts. She believed that the wide spread introduction of crinoline, which made those layers of petticoats lighter in weight and less uncomfortable in oppressive summer heat, made Bloomers obsolete.

The Civil War revived some interest as some nurses adopted the costume—although not those under the command of notoriously prudish Dorothy Dix. Later in the century they were adapted as undergarmentsto replace petticoats and in a simplified form as athletic wear for college girls. There was a revival of interest during the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago where suffragist Lucy Stone extolled them in a speech at the Women’s Pavilionand a fashion show displayed up-dated versions.

Bloomers made something of a comeback after suffragist Lucy Stone extolled them at the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago and got another boost from the bicycle craze around the turn of the 20th Century.

Still, it took Hollywood icons like Gloria Swanson, Gene Harlow, Greta Garbo, and Katherine Hepburn being photographed in slacks to begin to make pants acceptable on women. They really took off during home front and uniformed service during World War II and became everyday fashion wear standard for by most women by the ’60’s and ‘70’s.

Despite wide spread use and acceptanceHillary Clinton found out that her pants suits could still used against her as a symbol of an aggressive, assertive, unfeminine, and dumpy woman.

But arguably none of that might have come about without Amelia Bloomer’s earnest advocacy.

As for Bloomer herself, in 1853 she closed The Lily and moved with her husband and family to Ohio and then to Council Bluff, Iowa two years later. She continued to contribute articles to the now growing feminist press, including Stanton’s and Susan B. Anthony’s The Revolution which bowed in 1868 and acknowledged Bloomer’s inspiration and example. Bloomer would open and edit small publications in Iowa as well.

She dedicated herself to the struggle for women’s rights and suffrage and led campaigns in Nebraska and Iowa, and served as president of the Iowa Woman Suffrage Association from 1871 until 1873.

Bloomer in Council Bluff, Iowa--no longer wearing Bloomers a a leading suffragist.

Bloomer died on December 30, 1894 in Council Bluffs. Although honored at the time as a women’s rights pioneer, her contributions, except for her association with the Bloomer, have nearly been forgotten. Bloomer House in Seneca Falls was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 and in 2002 the American Library Association has produced Amelia Bloomer List annually in recognition of books with significant feminist content for young readers.

When Anthony Met Stanton, is a life sized bronze statue in Seneca Falls, depicting Amelia Bloomer (center) introducing Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Caddy Stanton in May 1851.

2of9Elizabeth Cady Stanton home, part of Women's Rights National Historical Park, Seneca Falls, NY. (Michael Schuman)

3of9Elizabeth Cady Stanton home, part of Women's Rights National Historical Park, Seneca Falls, NY. (Michael Sc

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Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival
26 May 2020 at 19:00

Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival

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26 May 2020 at 19:00

By: Patrick Murfin

Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time sung by Gene Austin. The lilacs finally came into bloom on one of the two new small bushes Kathy and I planted last year. Elsewhere hereabouts there are spectacular displays on mature bushes. I celebrated by posting a shot of a glorious row of bushes blooming along the railroad embankment in Woodstock a few years back as the cover on my Facebook page. It’s something to gladden the heart and senses in these doleful days. That got me to recall another of sentimental popular ballad— Jeannine, I Dream of Lilac Time. Lilacs in Woodstock are my Facebook cover today. Lilac Time was a 1928 silent romantic war film starring Colleen Moore and Gary Cooper following up his role in Wings as yet another ...

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Civil Air Patrol Birthday Sparks Murfin Cadet Memoir
26 May 2020 at 11:22

Civil Air Patrol Birthday Sparks Murfin Cadet Memoir

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26 May 2020 at 11:22

By: Patrick Murfin

The official seal of the re-chartered Civil Air Patrol in 1948.

On May 26, 1948 Congress passed a bill re-chartering and organizing the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) as a voluntary civilian auxiliary to the United State Air Force.

The organization had its roots in ramp up for Civil Defense on the eve of the U.S. entry into World War II. New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was acting in his capacity as national Director of Civilian Defense when he signed an Administrative Order creating CAP on December 1, 1941. The idea was to engage the large body of civilian general aviation pilots and planesin support of the war effort. The pilots were mainly over-aged, disqualified for medical reasons, or exempt from military service on other grounds. Most of their aircraft would have been grounded for the durationto conserve fuel if not enrolled for service.

A World War II recruiting poster for the Civil Air Patrol under the Office of Civilian Defense.

Flying mostly single engine private planes, CAP pilots served the cause by acting as couriers and occasional transportation of individual personnel, flying border surveillance, and participating in searchand rescue missions for the many military planes that went down in accidents over the U.S. But its most memorable role came in anti-submarine patrol and warfare. CAP costal patrol pilots flew 24 million miles, located 173 enemy submarines, attacked 57, hit 10 and sank two. Sixty-four members of the CAP, mostly pilots and observers, were killed on duty during the war.

A CAP plane making a bombing run in anti-submarine action.

Despite the success of the program and the eagerness of war time volunteers to continue service, the Defense Department was reluctant to continue the program. They worried about civilian pilots coming under the jurisdiction of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and liability for civilian losses.

The renewed charter made CAP more explicitly civilian and forbade future use in combat roles. Despite the civilian nature, it came under the authority of the Air Force and was led by a three star general. Units were arranged in regional command, 52 Wings—one for each state, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia—and local Squadrons and Flights. Members are organized on a military basis with rankand uniforms, but are un-paid, and must pay annual dues and provide their own uniforms, essentially identical to those worn by the USAF.

So, you may ask, why am I spending valuable blog time on such a relatively obscure organization? Because during my last two years in Cheyenne, Wyoming the CAP was a big part of my life. I was a Civil Air Patrol Cadet, and damn proud of it.

The image of me in any sort of militaryesque uniform will undoubtedly stun and confound many who know me. But I grew up the son of a decorated World War II veteran. The homes of almost every one of my friends prominently featured framed photos of dads, uncles, brothers, and occasional mothers in uniform. I was consumed with old war movies on the afternoon TV movie matinee and plowed through my father’s large collection of paperback war novels and memoirs starting with Audie Murphy’s To Hell and Back. I had played war in the back yard and in the school yard as often as cowboys and Indians. I yearned for glory. I wanted to be a hero. I wanted more than anything else to wear a uniform in my own framed portrait.

I was not a likely recruit. In ninth grade I was pudgy, flabby, unathletic, a bookish kidwith thick glasses and few friends. I had quit the Boy Scouts barely making Tenderfoot. But I wanted to belong to something other than the Dudes and Dames Square Dance Club. I wanted to be in ROTC, but it was only offered at Cheyenne Central High and I was destined to go to East where they offered the opportunity to wear the blue jacket of the Future Farmers of America instead. Sorry, but not interested.

Then I caught sight of a smart looking unit of CAP cadets in the Frontier Days Parade. It was a natural. Cheyenne, after all was an Air Force town, home to Frances E. Warren AFB, the first ICBM base in the country.

Later that summer I prevailed on my Dad to take me to Tuesday night Flight meeting. That meant going on base.

Dad drove through the long parade ground at Frances E. Warren Air Force Base, former Ft. Russell, a cavalry post, on my way to my first CAP meeting.

Warren had been an Army Cavalry post until World War II. We drove down the long parade ground lined on each side by sturdy red brick buildings. Deep in the base we took a left and after a bit arrived at a run down two story building that the Air Force had no better use for. It doubled as Wyoming Wing Headquarters and home of the Cheyenne Squadron and Cadet Flight. As unpromising as I was I was allowed to sign some papers, told where to buy a summer suntan uniform and patches, and to come back next week to be sworn in.

A CAP Wyoming Wing shoulder patch.

At my first official meeting I was thrilled when during inspection the Senior Member in charge told me not to come back without shaving the downy fuzz from my cheeks. Never felt so grown up.

Meetings consisted of an inspection, a little close order drill, orders of the day, and classes to prepare us cadets to move up through the ranks as we passed a series of tests—basic flight theory, Air Force history and structure, aerospace technology, radio procedures, search and rescue procedures, “leadership” and such. Occasionally a Chaplin would show up and exhort us to “remain pure,” whatever the hell that meant.

On weekends we sometimes had fatigue duty around the building or special assignments. We were victims in a Civil Defense drill once, another time we tested a new fallout shelter in the State Highway Department building by staying in it all weekend while pretending the Ruskies had nuked town—an event locals expected at any minute. We did training to provide ground support for search and rescue missions.

The Wyoming Wing had one air plane--it's pilots flew their own air craft on many missions--a World War II Stinson L-5. This one is shown in it Army Air Corps markings.

We were shown the Senior Squadron’s only plane—a flimsy looking Stinson L-5 observation plane from World War II, basically a military version of a Piper Cub. Some of the Cadets got to go up in it. I never did. I did, however, take a ride with the rest of the flight in a Wyoming Air National Guard C-47, a military DC-3 with the cabin stripped down to haul cargo or passengers on uncomfortable jump seats and benches.

The best part, of course was the uniforms. You had sun tans—open collar with short sleeves for summeror long sleeves with a tie. Class A’s were Air Force blue blouses and trousers worn with a blue overseas cap. My Class A’s had an Eisenhower style short jacket. Fatigues were olive drab worn with high top black boots and the kind of rigid kepi that went out of style with the U.S. forces when Fidel Castro wore them. But there were plenty in the surplus stores where we cadets shopped for our uniforms. I thought I looked sharp in all of the uniforms—except the fatigues. No one in history has looked sharp in fatigues.

New Jersey CAP cadets shown in front of a C-47 transport in the 1950.s. A few years later our uniforms were much the same except we wore Air Force blue overseas caps and sometimes wore open collar short sleeve sun tans as well.

Despite my shortcomings, I advanced through the ranks. Near the end of my second year I had made staff sergeant. And then because all but one of our Cadet officers transferred out with their parents on active Air Force duty, I was made temporary second lieutenant and appointed Flight Adjutant. I fairly burst with pride when I pinned the round pips of rank to the epaulets of a brand new full length Class A blouse.

The summer after my sophomore year, I was sent to a weeklong Encampment at Lowry AFB in Denver for advanced training with Cadets from several western Wings. My CO did not want to send down a contingent without a more senior officer, so I was made a temporary captain—two pips on the summer collar.

For a week, we lived the life of Basic Airman recruits. Housed in barracks we were roused at 5 A.M. to shower, make our bedsand report to P.T. following which we marched to mess. There were classes morning and afternoon plus fatigue duty around the barracks and grounds. We were taken to a jet fighter flight line and allowed to sit in a flight simulator. But the highpoint—which had been built up to us all week a test of our endurance—was being put in a pressure chamber and then exposed to the equivalent of sudden loss of cabin pressure at 50,000 feet. As predicted several of us got sick. My ears popped painfully and I didn’t get back full hearing for days. But I felt like a he-man.

During CAP summer encampment at Lowry AFB in Colorado we stayed in barracks like these and marched in formation to mess and classes.

At this point I was actually considering a career in the Air Force. I knew my eyesight would prevent me from ever becoming a pilot and that my deficiencies in math and physics would preclude any of the many technical jobsin that most technical of all of the services. I decided I might become a public information officer. I spent some Saturday mornings at the Base Public Information Office. I even typed up some short articles on CAP activities for the Base newspaper and sent my first press releases to the local newspapers.

Not long after returning from Denver, I was given yet another un-earned temporary promotion to Cadet Major and was designated as Cadet Wing Adjutant for the coming year. But before I could even buy the three pip insignia, my dreams of glory were dashed. My father announced that we were moving to Chicago—Skokie actually.

Although I had planned to transfer to the Illinois Wing, I would have had to revert to my real rank—staff sergeant. Somehow I never got around to it. Skokie offered new opportunities for a bookish kid. Within a year I was marching against the Vietnam War and beginning to think about resistingthe Draft when I turned 18.

But somewhere there is a photo taken by our neighbor Bill Miranda. I’m fully decked out in my Class A’s. It was taken in my staff sergeant stripes instead of officer pips. But I smiled at the camera from behind thick horn rim glasses. Just like those pictures of my Dad’s generation. Only I had a giant zit on my chin. Oh, well.

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When Johnny Comes Marching Home and Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
26 May 2020 at 00:40

When Johnny Comes Marching Home and Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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26 May 2020 at 00:40

By: Patrick Murfin

When Johnny Comes Marching Home by Mich Miller's Chorus.

Today we are going back to the origins of Decoration/Memorial Day and making it our first two-fer! When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again is one of the best known of all Civil War Songs but the song of anticipated triumph was something of a white wash on an earlier and far grimmer Irish song.

The original sheet music acknowleged Patrick Gilmore's band but credited his alias Louis Lambert as the writer.

The lyrics to When Johnny Comes Marching Home were written by the Irish-American bandleader Patrick Gilmore while he was serving as band master to the 24th Massachusetts Infantry in 1863. The sheet music was published that year by Henry Tolman & Co. crediting words and music credited to Louis Lambert. Although Gilmore was already a famed bandleader before the war he thought that the French sounding pseudonym might seem more romantic and sophisticated. After the song’s initial wild success he was proud to proclaim authorship.

But he didn’t claim to write the music. In 1883 he described the melody as:

…a musical waif which I happened to hear somebody humming in the early days of the rebellion, and taking a fancy to it, wrote it down, dressed it up, gave it a name, and rhymed it into usefulness for a special purpose suited to the times.

The tune Gilmore adapted was the Civil War drinking song Johnny Fill Up the Bowl. The melody was even older than that, stretching back to the Seventeenth Century ballad The Three Ravens.

Patrick Gilmore and his band in the 1870's.

After the war Gilmore was asked to organizea musical victory celebration in New Orleans. That success emboldened him to undertake two major music festivals in Boston, the National Peace Jubilee in 1869 and the World’s Peace Jubilee and International Musical Festival in 1872. These featured monster orchestras of massed bands with the finest singers and instrumentalists including the only American appearance by the Waltz King Johann Strauss II. They cemented Gilmore’s reputation as the leading musical figure of the age. Coliseums were erected for the occasions, holding 60- and 120,000 persons. Grateful Bostonianspresented Gilmore with medals and cash, but in 1873 he moved to New York City where he built Gilmore’s Concert Garden, which became the first Madison Square Garden. Then he took his band on acclaimed tours of Europe.

He was during his lifetime bigger than John Phillip Souza and lived long enough to make early Edison cylinder records.

Gilmore was back in America preparing an 1892 musical celebration of the quadricentennial of Christopher Columbus’ voyage of discovery, when he collapsed and died in St. Louis at age 64.

But Gilmore never acknowledged the influence another song—Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye. As an Irishmen from the Auld Sod, he must have known that one.

The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem.

Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye was written in the voice of a young lass made pregnant by a lad who ran away to be a soldier. She sees him on his return from serving in a foreign war in a British Red Coat in the late 18thor early 19th Century. It was a powerful anti-recruiting song especially popular with the Fenians. Although presumed to be older it was not published in Londonuntil 1867 and was credited to Joseph B. Geoghegan, a prolific songwriterand successful music hall performer. It was set to the same melody as When Johnny Comes Marching Home because that was already a familiar tune on both sides of the Atlantic. Most musical scholars believe it had an older folk origin, but some believe it was penned by Geohegan as a rebuke to triumphant bravado of Gilmore’s song.

Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye sung by the Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem.

Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye was re-popularized when The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem recorded it in 1961. During the Vietnam conflict it became an anti-war and anti-draft anthem.

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Decoration Day or Memorial Day—The Solemn Tradition Continues
25 May 2020 at 11:13

Decoration Day or Memorial Day—The Solemn Tradition Continues

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25 May 2020 at 11:13

By: Patrick Murfin

An early 20th Century Decoration Day post card.

Today is, of course, Memorial Day in the United States. The Uniform Holiday Act, passed in 1968, set 1971 as the year the Federal government would begin observing the holiday on the last Monday of May giving Americans a three day holiday weekend to start the summer season, to be balanced by a three day Labor Day weekend in September. Of course this year that three day weekend seems swamped by long Coronavirus isolation.

Veteran’s organizations were nearly unanimous in opposition to the move fearing that it would dilute the observance as families planned fun activities instead of solemnly commemorating the war dead. Several states refused at first to change their observances in conformity with the Federal law creating two Memorial Day holidays. That proved unworkable and eventually all fell in line.

Of course the veterans groups were right. Attendance at their paradesand cemetery services dropped off in favor of barbecues or a day at the beach.

The origins of the solemn rituals go back to the end of the Civil War. Almost as soon as the firing stopped communities were gathering to honor their dead, which in the sentimental 19th Century naturally meant trekking out to local cemeteries to festoon the graves with flowers. Some credit the first organized commemoration to Confederate widows.

Former slaves in Charleston, South Carolina form up for the dedication of the cemetery they built for the graves of Union prisoners of war on May 1, 1865. Some consider this the first Memorial Day.

Others say that former slavesin Charleston, South Carolina originated it when they reburied Union soldiers who died in a Confederate prisoner of war camp there and dedicated the cemetery they created as a Union graveyard. A local newspaperreported that up to 10,000 people, mostly former slaves, were present for a dedication of the cemetery on May 1, 1865 marking the occasion with singing and prayers.

This dramatic and impressive equestrian monument to General John A. Logan, Civil War hero and first Commander of the Grand Army of the Republic, sits atop a prominent mound in Grant Park in down town Chicago. Ironically it became a rallying point for anti-war demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the scene of a bloody police charge.

Some kind of local observances sprang up in towns and cities both north and south. Waterloo, New Yorklays claim to the first Decoration Day, as it became known with an observance on May 5, 1865. It was surely just one of many. But the friendship of the local leader of the celebration, General John Murray with General John A. Logan, the first Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic (G.A.R) planted the idea of creating a national observance. On May 5, 1868 Logan issued G.A.R. General Order No. 11instructing local posts to participate:

i. The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

We are organized, comrades, as our regulations tell us, for the purpose among other things, "of preserving and strengthening those kind and fraternal feelings which have bound together the soldiers, sailors, and marines who united to suppress the late rebellion." What can aid more to assure this result than cherishing tenderly the memory of our heroic dead, who made their breasts a barricade between our country and its foes? Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains, and their deaths the tattoo of rebellious tyranny in arms. We should guard their graves with sacred vigilance. All that the consecrated wealth and taste of the nation can add to their adornment and security is but a fitting tribute to the memory of her slain defenders. Let no wanton foot tread rudely on such hallowed grounds. Let pleasant paths invite the coming and going of reverent visitors and fond mourners. Let no vandalism of avarice or neglect, no ravages of time testify to the present or to the coming generations that we have forgotten as a people the cost of a free and undivided republic.

If other eyes grow dull, other hands slack, and other hearts cold in the solemn trust, ours shall keep it well as long as the light and warmth of life remain to us.

Let us, then, at the time appointed gather around their sacred remains and garland the passionless mounds above them with the choicest flowers of spring-time; let us raise above them the dear old flag they saved from dishonor; let us in this solemn presence renew our pledges to aid and assist those whom they have left among us a sacred charge upon a nation's gratitude, the soldier's and sailor's widow and orphan.

It is the purpose of the Commander-in-Chief to inaugurate this observance with the hope that it will be kept up from year to year, while a survivor of the war remains to honor the memory of his departed comrades. He earnestly desires the public press to lend its friendly aid in bringing to the notice of comrades in all parts of the country in time for simultaneous compliance therewith…

To this day, Logan’s order is often read at Memorial Day observances conducted by the American Legion, Veterans of Foreign Wars, and other veterans’ organizations.

Decoration Day was soon observed across the North, and at Union cemeteries in the South. For many years it was confined to the Yankee deadand was thus boycotted by Southern states, most of which designated their own separate memorial days for the Confederate dead. It was not until after the Spanish American War in 1898 in which Southerners served in arms under the Stars and Stripes once again, that the notion began to spread of honoring all of the war dead—although this was fought tooth and nail by the GAR. The South began to share the May 30th date, but tended to call their observances Memorial Days to differentiate them from the GAR’s Decoration Days.

A Confederate Memorial Day ceremony at the Woodington Universalist Church in Lenoir County, North Carolina 1920.

After World War I it became common to include the dead of that war—and later all wars—in the commemorations and the use of the term Memorial Day became more common even in the North. But it was not until 1967 the Congress officially changed the name.

In 1915 Moina Michael of Georgia, inspired by the poem In Flanders Fieldsby John McCrae conceived of the idea of making and selling paper flowers for the support of maimed soldiers. When the U.S. entered the war in 1917 she began selling her poppies on Decoration Day to honor the dead of all wars. She later donated proceeds to French and Belgian war orphans. The poppy tradition spread to other Allied countries. After the relief organizations she had been donating to disbanded after the War, Michel approached the Veterans of Foreign Wars,who adopted Memorial Day poppy sales in 1922. Two years later they inaugurated their annual Buddy Poppy sales. Soon no respectable American would be seen on the streets on Memorial Day without a Poppy.

Comemorated on a U.S. Postage stamp, Moina Mitchell was inspired by the popular poem In Flanders Fields to make and sell paper poppies to raise funds for the relief of Belgian and French refugees and war orphans in the Great War. After the war she approached the Veterans of Foreign Wars who began selling their Buddy Poppies in 1922.

It became a tradition to decorate soldier’s graves by Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, and veteran’s organizations who placed small flags on the graves of veterans, not only at National Cemeteries, but in local graveyards as well. But like the parades and cemetery programs in which General Logan’s Order is read, prayers are uttered, politicians orate, high school bands play patriotic music with sometimes straggling lines of elderly veteransrattling off vollies of rifle fire in the salute to the flag, that is in abeyancemost places this year.

A Boy Scout planted flags on soldiers' graves at a National Cemetery.

This year President Donald Trump will tear himself from the golf course for annual wreath laying ceremony at Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Arlington National Cemetery. Along with First Lady Melania Trump he also will travel to Baltimore to visit Ft. McHenry which survived British Bombardment during the War of 1812 inspiring the Star-Spangled Banner.

The visit will come in spite of a plea for Trump to rethinkhis visit from Baltimore Mayor Bernard “Jack” Young, who said it will send the wrong message at a time when he is asking the city’s residents not to travel. Baltimore, like other major cities with large, dense impoverished neighborhoods is of particular concern for public health officials worried about the spread of coronavirus.

A golfing Trump superimposed over the Sunday New York Times front page filled with the names of Coronavirus victims.

Reckless disregard of basic health concerns for a photo op is standard operating procedurefor the Cheeto-in-Charge.

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My Buddy—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
24 May 2020 at 18:59

My Buddy—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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24 May 2020 at 18:59

By: Patrick Murfin

My Buddy sung by Henry Burr. Memorial Day is inevitably taking on new significance as Coronavirus deaths in the U.S. top 100,000 with no end in sight and the people are being purposefully turned against each other nearly to the point of civil war by a crazed and vicious Presidentand the oligarchs who support and encourage him. It is beyond tragic. Today and tomorrow we will sharesongs of love and separation identified with two of our nation’s wars. The losses we are enduring today are no less heartbreaking. My Buddy is popularly assumed to be a song about World War I Doughboys, but it was not written and recorded until 1922, four years after the war ended and makes no referenceto it. It was composed by Walter Donaldson, wit...

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The Greatest Real Estate Deal of All Time Wasn’t and Cursed All it Touched
24 May 2020 at 11:39

The Greatest Real Estate Deal of All Time Wasn’t and Cursed All it Touched

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24 May 2020 at 11:39

By: Patrick Murfin

Almost everything is wrong with this 19th Century depiction of the sale of Manhattan Island to the Dutch under Peter Minuit including the squatting Canarsie tribe being depicted in Plains Indian attire and the trade goods offered by the Europeans.

On this day in 1626 the greatest real estate deal in history went down. But the real winner in the deal is not the one you have been told about.

Due to a simplistic account in a 19th Century popular reader, almost any American will tell you that Manhattan Islandwas bought by the Dutch from local Indians for “$24 in beads and trinkets.” Those with especially acute memories might recall the alleged sharpie who hoodwinked the natives with his paltry offering was Peter Minuit, Governor of the North American colony owned by the DutchWest Indies Company.

There are several things wrong with this version. First and foremost is that the trade goods Minuit offered were not the trade trifles mentioned, but a selection of metal tools and implements including axe heads, knives, awls, needles, cast iron kettles, as well as cloth. They were valued by Minuit at 60 silver guilders, a significant sum. Depending on who is doing the reckoning and how inflation over nearly four centuries is figured, that would be worth well more than $1000 in today’s cash.

But as one historianpoints out, the value of the items to the natives was probably much morethan the actual monetary value. Most of these items had been virtually unobtainable, although a few had found their way ashore from other European ships or have been traded down from New England or far away New France. A historian described it as a significant “high-end technology transfer, handing over equipment of enormous usefulness.”

Peter Minuit--a colonial governor for both Dutch and Swedish mercantile firms.

But it was the natives who Minuit dealt with that may have been the real sharpies. He assumed he was doing business with the Lenape; a powerful and extensive tribe that held sway over what is now the Delaware Valley including much of modern New Jersey and over the area around the mouth of the Hudson River including Manhattan and much of Long Island. They were a sedentary people engaged in extensive agriculture and both coastal and inland fishery, including the harvesting of oysters. Relatively large villages relocated within the range every year or so, returning to previous sites when the land rejuvenated itself.

Evidently the local Lenape, however, were not using Manhattan at the time the Dutch arrived. Instead, they made sort of a sub-lease agreement with the much smaller Canarsie tribe who shared some of Long Island with them and a dozen other small bands. The Canarsie, who were harvesting oysters and gardening on the island, could hardly believe their good fortune. They gladly sold the Dutch what didn’t belong to them and retreated to Long Island with what they must have considered a fortune.

A previous governor had established Fort Amsterdam on the southern tip of the island the year before. Minuit now felt secure enough in his sale to begin settlement of a new colonial capital Nieuw-Amsterdam. Eventually the Lanape, who became the chief partners of the new colony in the fur trade, complained about the Dutch squattingon their land and another purchase had to be arranged. The exact price paid in this second deal is lost to history, but the Lenape likely did pretty well in trade goods themselves.

The fates of all parties to the deal were unhappy.

In 1631 Minuit was fired by the Dutch West India company for failing to meet expectationsfor the fur trade and was accused of skimming accounts for his own benefit. Enraged, he returned to Europe and offered himself to the Swedes, an ascending power eager to get into North American colonization. In 1638 he returned as Governor General of New Sweden and established Fort Christiana new modern day Wilmington, Delaware. He was killed later the same year on a return voyage to recruit more settlers. He sailed via the Caribean to pick up a load of tobacco to make the journey profitable for the company and perished in a hurricane near the island of St. Christopher. His colony lasted a dozen more years until a later Dutch governor, Peter Stuyvesant conquered it in 1655.

The Canarsie, one of thirteen small tribes on Long Island, allied themselves with the much more powerful Mohawks from the mainland for protection. They lived in relative harmony with the Dutch until a later governor, William Kieft, launched a war on local tribes. A massacre of the village of Pavonia united all of the tribes in a general uprising in 1643. The ensuing warwas devastating to both settlers and the tribes. Peter Stuyvesant eventually negotiated a peace. Many Canarsie converted to Christianity during the period of peace and continued to farm and fish in the area.

The Dutch persuaded the 13 tribes of Long Island not to pay tribute to their traditional protectors, the Mohawks. In 1655 a large Mohawk war party invaded Long Island and massacred most of the local tribal residents.

Descendants of the Canarsie sill living in Brooklyn participated in this 1937 re-enactment of their real estate scam at a public school.

A remnant of the Canarsie later sold most of their remaining land to the British, after they seized New Amsterdam. Small numbers continued to live and farm in rural Brooklyn into the 19th Century. A unit of Canarsie volunteers served the Civil War. Eventually descendants of the tribe became absorbed by the white community and the tribe disappeared into the mist of history.

The much larger Lenape at least persist as a people. Their culture was much disrupted by the arrival of the Dutch, Swedes, and the English. In order to obtain much desired trade goods, they abandoned much of their traditional agriculturaland fishery based economy to pursue the fur trade. This took them deep into hostile territory dominated by the Mohawk and other Iroquoian people. By the late 18th Century pressure from the Iroquois and expanding European settlement forced most major bands to re-settle west of the Allegany Mountains in what is now western Pennsylvania and along the Ohio River. Remnant bands in the east were mostly absorbed by other tribes or by neighboring white settlements.

A traditional eastern Lanape Village before their culture was disrupted and they were forced out of their original range.

After the signing of the Treaty of Easton in 1758, most the remaining Lenape were forced to move west out of their lands in Delaware, New Jersey, eastern New York, and eastern Pennsylvania into what is today known as Ohio. A large number of Lenape were converted by the Moravians, a German pietistic sectthat practiced pacifism. These “Praying Indians” settled west of Ft. Pitt along the Ohio River with their missionaries.

In the French and Indian Wars more warlike bands allied themselves with the French and were present at the Siege of Ft. Pitt.

During the American Revolution bands of the tribe, by then generally known as the Delaware, split allegiances between the British and the colonists. Several large bands relocated to the Sanduskyto be closer to the British strongholdof Ft. Detroit. Others scouted for the Americans, or in the case of the Praying Indians tried to remain neutral. Coshoctonwas the main town of the Delaware friendly to the colonists. They hoped to form an all Indian state within the infant republic. But after their chief, White Eyeswas killed, probably by American militiamen, many of the warriors from Coshocton joined their kinsmen with the British.

Massacre of the Praying Indians by the Pennsylvania Militia and their native scouts.

American Colonel Daniel Brodheadled an expedition out of Fort Pitt and in 1781 destroyed Coshocton. Surviving residents fled to the north to the British. The next year the peaceful Moravian missionary village of Gnadenhutten was attacked by Pennsylvania militia. At least 96 men, women and children were massacred.

Various Delaware bands were caught up in the continuing fierce warfare along the Ohio frontier after the Revolution. Some took up arms again with the British in the War of 1812. After the capture of Ft. Detroit in that war, northern Delaware bands, including some of the Moravians relocated to what is now western Ontario.

Most of the remaining American Delaware ceded their lands in Ohio in the Treaty of St. Mary’s in 1814. Bands took up lands in Indianaand Missouri. In 1829 yet another treaty, the Treaty of James Fork pushed the tribe yet further west. In exchange for the Indiana and Missouri lands they received grantsin Kansas.

The Delaware became active as guides and trappers in the trans-Mississippi West and frequently served as scoutsfor the Army. They were prominent in the Seminole Wars and were among those with John Charles Frèmont when he entered California during the Mexican War. Later they would be guides for emigrant trains to the west.

A Delaware couple in the late 19th Century, probably in Indian Territory (Oklahoma). Their dress was reflective of cultural contact with other tribes and adaptations in their generations of being pushed ever west.

Despite loyal service the Delaware were again pushed from their lands. Most relocated to Indian Territory by 1860. They were forced to buy lands from the Cherokee. In 1979 The Bureau of Indian Affairs ceased to recognize the OklahomaDelaware as a separate tribe and began to count them as Cherokee. That decision was overturned in 1996. A challenge by the Cherokee to the reinstatement caused a see-sawing legal battle with the tribe stripped of recognition again and then having it restored. As of 2009 they have had tribal status and the same year reorganized under the Oklahoma Indian Welfare Act with a tribal government of its own.

Other small bands of Lenape or Delaware are scattered from New Jersey to Wisconsin but have no formal recognition. In Ontario decedents of the Lenape of Ohio still live on four reservations.

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You Are My Sunshine—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
23 May 2020 at 21:13

You Are My Sunshine—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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23 May 2020 at 21:13

By: Patrick Murfin

You Are My Sunshine by Jimmie Davis.

We’ve shared a lot of songs about sunshine here at the Murfin Home Confinement Music Festivaland they are all about hope and good cheer. But in one of the most beloved country music songs of all time heartbreak lurks behind a lilting melody. You Are My Sunshine is most closely associated with Jimmie Davis and therein lays an interesting and not always happy tale.

One story is that Oliver Hood wrote the song in the early 1930’s and first performed it at a Veteran’s of Foreign Wars Convention in Georgia. But was also attributed to one of Hood’s musical associates, Paul Rice of the Rice Brothers and that clarinetist Pud Browncontributed to an arrangement that broke with string band conventions with aWestern swing feel. It was first recorded in 1939 by the Rice Brothers Gang on Decca and the Pine Ridge Boys on Blue Bird.

Davis heard the song from the Rice Brothers while they were appearing on Shreveport, Louisiana radio station KWKH, the future home of the Louisiana Hayride. Davis and his collaborator Charles Mitchell boughtthe song and rights from Paul Rice and put his own name on it, a practice not uncommon in the pre-World War IImusic business. Although Davis never claimed to have actually written the song his name was credited on all of the literally hundreds of subsequent recordings of it and did everything in his power to make the song his own.

The sheet music for You are My Sunshine clearly identifies Jimmie Davis as one of the songwriters.

Davis recorded You Are My Sunshine in Decca’s New York City studios with an arrangement that replaced a fiddle lead with steel slide lap guitar and a jazzy clarinets break on February 5, 1940. It was an immediate regional hit. Later that year both Bing Crosby and Gene Autryscored top national hits with the song and delta blues guitarist Mississippi John Hurt as well as the ultimate dance band square Lawrence Welkalso covered it showing the appeal of the song well beyond it country roots.

The song has been recorded so often that it is one of the most commercially programmed numbers in American popular music across multiple genres. Just a few of those who have covered the song are Doris Day, Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, Ike & Tina Turner, Andy Williams, The Beach Boys, Aretha Franklin, Anne Murray, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash.

I personally learned the song off of a Gene Autry record as a boy in Cheyenne and it has been in my song circle repertoire of drunken caterwauling.

As for Jimmie Davis, well, he was a piece of work. He was born as James Houston Davis according to Census records to impoverished sharecroppers on September 11, 1899 in Beech Springs, southeast of Quitman in Jackson Parish in north Louisiana. He was the youngest of 11 children and neither her nor his parents knew how old he really was, guesses ranged from 1898 to 1904.

Despite the odds against him Davis managed to graduate from Beech Springs High Schooland the New Orleans campus of Soule Business College. Davis received his bachelor’s degree in history from the Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College in Pineville, Rapides Parishand a master’s degree from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His 1927 master's thesis, Comparative Intelligence of Whites, Blacks and Mulattoes examined the intelligence levels of different races. Keep that in mind.

During the late 1920s, Davis taught history (and, unofficially, yodeling) for a year at Dodd College for Girls in Shreveport while he began performing locally in the fashion of his idol Jimmie Rogers. He even began using the name Jimmie instead of James. Like Rogers many of his early recordings were raunchy blues tuneslike Red Nightgown Blues. Some of these sides included slide guitar accompaniment by Black bluesman Oscar “Buddy” Woods. By the late ‘30’s he was a successful fulltime musician with a strong regional following.

Following the success of You Are My Sunshine, Davis appeared in Western films in Hollywood. He spent enough time in California that he became part owner of a night club which sometimes featured integrated acts.

Jimmie Davis in his first term as Louisiana Governor.

His folksy demeanor made him a natural at politics. Davis was elected in 1938 as Shreveport’s Public Safety Commissioner, the equivalent of police chief under the City Commission form of government. After four years in Shreveport City Hall, he was elected in 1942 to the Louisiana Public Service Commission, the rate-making bodyin the capital, Baton Rouge.

State Democratic Party powerhouses tapped Davis to run for governor in 1944 as a foil to the populist Long machine of built by assassinated boss Hughie Long. Like the Longs, Davis’s base was among the poor “rednecks” of northern part of the state. The entire campaign was built around You Are My Sunshine which Davis sang at every campaign rally, often from astride a horse named, you guessed it Sunshine. He won in a landslide.

Davis’s term as governor was not distinguished. He allowed officials selected by Party regulars and powerful business interests run things and make policy. He spent much of his term absent from Baton Rouge in California for movies and making continued public appearancesas a singer. As a staunch anti-Longite he managed to get respect from Louisiana liberals, such as they were. He earned the gratitude of national Democrats by keeping Louisiana from jumping ship from Harry Truman’s 1948 presidential campaign to Strom Thurman and the Dixiecrats.

It's not every low budget western from a Poverty Row studio that could boast of a sitting governor as one of its stars.

Louisiana limited governors to a single non-consecutive term so Davis left office after that election. He kept his hand in state politics but turned his main attention back to his music career reinventing himself as a White gospel singer performing widely at churches, revival meetings, and religious conventions. But no matter how many old-timey hymns he included in his performances, he always managed to throw in You Are My Sunshine.

In 1960 Huey Long’s brother Earl Long was finishing up a term as governor and hoped to retain power with an anointed successor while being elected Lt, Governor until he could run again. Davis was called back to prevent that. Despite a previous reputation as a relative racial moderateas the Civil Rights Movement swept across the South he reinvented himself as a strict segregationist for a bitter three-way Democratic primary. Like George Wallace in Alabama, Davis refused to be “out niggered.”

In his second term Davis proved his segregationist credentials by creating the Louisiana State Sovereignty Commission, which operated from 1960 to 1967. It “espoused States rights, anti-communist and segregationist ideas, with a particular focus on maintaining the status quo in race relations. It was closely allied with the Louisiana Joint Legislative Committee on Un-American Activities. In this term business interests, especially the gas, oil, and petrochemical industries had even more overt control over state government. As in 1948 Davis came to the aid of national Democrats by offering tacit support to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, to secure the state’s hold on pending offshore oil revenues.

In his second term as Governor Davis was still riding Sunshine to the Louisiana capitol building in Baton Rouge, the modern skyscraper build by Huey Long.

Davis made one more attempt to return to power in 1971 in a crowded Democratic field, but his populist act was not fooling anybody any more. He finished a pitiful fourth place in a special December run-off primary with only 11.8 % of the vote.

In 1972 he was said to be on George Wallace’s short list as a vice presidential running mate after Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who got the nod and former Governor Orval Faubus.

In the 1990, after segregationist Democrats realigned themselves with “states’ rights” Republicans Davis endorsed GOP candidates including State Representative Woody Jenkins the U.S. Senate against Democrat Mary Landrieu of New Orleans, and Governor Murphy J. “Mike” Foster, Jr. who was seeking re-election in 1999. Against African-American Democratic Congressman Bill Jefferson of New Orleans.

Davis died on November 5, 2000. He had suffered a fall in his home some ten months earlier and may have had a stroke in his last days. He was 101 years old.

No matter what you think of Davis, You Are My Sunshine is still a hell of a good song.

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Remembering the War Dead, All of Them With Murfin Verse
23 May 2020 at 10:51

Remembering the War Dead, All of Them With Murfin Verse

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23 May 2020 at 10:51

By: Patrick Murfin

Memorial Day is tomorrow. It will be different than any other year. Many of us feel that we have been trapped in a never ending three-day weekend for more than two months. Although many states are cautiously—or flagrantly incautiously—beginning to reopen most of the usual celebrations—parades and cemetery ceremonies have been canceled, even the decoration of soldiers’ graves with American Flags by the Boy Scouts. And in many places, including Illinois, home barbeques are supposed to be limited to 10 or so people who must observe social distancing.

Most years for a lot of folks it’s just the beginning of a long weekend and the start of summer. And that’s ok. You can go elsewhere to be scolded for forgetting the sacrifices of the war dead. Just about every newspaper in the country will serve up an editorial on the subject plus letters from the VFW. But a lot of us do hold it in our hearts for very compelling and complex reasons.

Those of us who will go church services today will hear various reflections on the meaning.

My Unitarian Universalists, who tend to be, on the whole, anti-war folks, often find themselves conflicted. How do we honor the final sacrifices of warriorswithout necessarily honoring or glorifyingwar itself? How can we express sincere love of country while acknowledging itsfrequent errors and injustice? Can we place our hands over our heartsand bow our heads as a distant Taps is blown and a flag is lowered to half-staff without feeling hypocritical? Can we twist a Poppyaround a button without embracing the jingoism of some veterans’ organizations? It was F. Scott Fitzgerald who reminded us that “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time and continue to function.” As for me, I choose to lay my symbolic wreath on the memorials to departed souls.

The question for some might be which souls. Do some get left out?

The bombing of civilians at Guernica during the Spanish Revolution shocked the world but became the model of modern war.

Remembrance of the war dead is all well and good. But, especially in modern wars, soldiers, sailors, and airmen are only a fraction of the victims. Civilians, both those who just got in the way—collateral damage in the cold, efficient jargon of the military—and those murdered as a matter of strategyand policy dwarf the dead in uniforms.

Despite international treaties and high minded and high flown declarations of noble intentby governments, insurgents, and other involved factions, the accepted dogma of modern warfare is that civilian deaths, the more brutal and indiscriminatethe better, will “demoralize” the enemy and “sap them of the will to resist.”

This is utter hogwash. It has never been the case. Civilian deaths simply inflame the passions of the targeted peoples, raise their determinationto both resist—and if possible wreck vengeance. It also sets up generational resentments and enmities that threaten to rekindle conflicts again and again.

Ask the “indomitable” people of London. Or for that matter the Germans under Allied carpet bombing or the Japanese whose wood and paper cities flashed over in fire storms even before we dropped atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Although the Axis Powers were eventually overwhelmed by superior military and industrial capacity, the war was not shortenedby even one day by demoralization due to civilian deaths. Even in the case of the Atomic bomb drops—which were widely viewed as forcing the Empire of Japan to surrender before a hugely costly invasion of the Home Islands—it was not the vaporizationof the population of two cities that caused the ultimate surrender, but the calculation of the General Staff that the military would be rendered uselessby atomic attacks on their forces and equipment.

Modern terrorism is the war of the weak against the strong. And it assumes that enough mayhem will break the will of whatever presumed oppressor. But there is no real difference between leaving a bomb in a mailbox and flattening a neighborhood with drones. It is simply a matter of scale and technological sophistication.

All modern war is, in essence, terrorism.

Israeli bombing of densely populated Gaza is terrorism on a grand scale in retaliation for the primitive terrorism of home made and largely ineffective rockets.

In the mid 1990’s I was asked to write a poem for a Memorial Day Sunday service at the Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock. I was asked to write something that memorialized ALL of the war dead. Using the headlines of the day—a time when our nation was supposedly at peace—I came up with In the Century of Death.

A "grainy photo on page six of a million tires burning..."

In the Century of Death

They are like that grainy photo on page six
           of a million tires burning somewhere in New Jersey.
We shake our heads
           and click our tongues
          with disapproval and dismay,
          reflect a split second
          before we turn the page
          and hurry on to check out
                Ann Landers,
                the crossword puzzle,
               National League standings
               or the price of gold in London.

They are the dead,
            an uncounted century
            of waste and carnage,
          stacked as carelessly and deep
            as those tires,
           alike the cast off refuse
            of industrial efficiency.

And like those tires they earn
a moment of our passing pity
            in the rush of our busy lives
               between work and soccer practice,
                    haircut and committee meeting.

Unless by accident we are near
          and a pungent change of wind
                stings our noses and eyes with acrid smoke
                    and oily ash drifts
                    onto our own innocent cheeks.

—Patrick Murfin

Note: This poem appeared in my Skinner House Meditation Manual, We Build Temples in the Heart, published in 2004 in Boston.

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A Temple Monument to Books—The New York Public Library
22 May 2020 at 09:13

A Temple Monument to Books—The New York Public Library

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22 May 2020 at 09:13

By: Patrick Murfin

The grand and glorious New York Public Library in a hand-tinted linen post card from the early 1930's

There may be taller buildings. There may even be more beautiful buildings. There are certainly more profitable usesfor prime Manhattan real estate. But maybe no building in New York City is more justifiably admired and beloved than the Main Branch of the New York Public Library which opened its doors for the first time on this date in 1911 at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street.

It was recently named the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building in honor of the billionaire banker who pledged $100 million to restoration and repair of the structure. It hardly put a dent in his personal fortune. Schwarzman made headlines in 2012 when he compared President Barack Obama’s proposal to raise taxes to “Hitler’s invasion of Poland.” Luckily, no one outside his immediate family and his billionaire buddy former Mayor Michael Bloomberg ever uses that name for the iconic building.

Several smaller libraries were consolidated into a new city institution in the late 19th Century. Big gifts from a bequest by former Governor and Democratic Presidential Candidate Samuel J. Tilden and from library patron and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie made possible the erection of an imposing building.

A rough design of the building was developed by the System’s first Superintendent, Dr. John Shaw Billings. His vision was the basis for a well-publicized competition among the top architectsin the country. A relatively little known firm, Carrère and Hastings,won for its Beaux-Arts design.

In this 1920's cartoon famous writers are depicted using the Reading Room. The most recognizable is James Joyce with the dramatic wing on his hat.

Construction beganin 1897 and the cornerstone laid in 1902. It was the largest marble building ever constructed in the United States with walls three feet thick. It cost a hefty $9 million when that was an almost unimaginable sum. It took 14 years for master craftsmen, many of them European trained masons, to complete the building. It took more than a year just to move in and shelve on miles of book cases from the collections of the consolidated libraries.

President William Howard Taft joined Governor John Alden Dix and Mayor William Jay Gaynor for the opening ceremonies.

New York Herald coverage of the library dedication.

The library was not only immediately one of the largest in the world, it was noted for an efficient system to produce volumes from the vast stacks and deliver them into the hands of patrons within moments. The first book checked out, a scholarly study of the ethical works of Friedrich Nietzsche and Leo Tolstoy in German was in the hands of the library patron in just 11 minutes.

The most famous feature of the library is the grand and vast Rose Main Reading Room. Walls are lined with reference books, two rows of large tables accommodate readers, researchers, and students and the room is appointed with crystal chandeliers, brass lamps, and comfortable chairs. On sunny days the room is flooded with light from a row of large arched windows. The room has been featured in movies, described in novels, and memorialized in poemsby the likes of E. B. White and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The Main Reading Room of the Library is an impressive public space with the reverence of a Temple.

Almost as famous are the two proud lions which flank the wide stairsto the main entrance. Original named, Leo Astor and Leo Lenox in honor of two of the library’s principal founders, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia dubbed them Patienceand Fortitude during the Great Depression when the great reading rooms were filled with the out-of-workpassing the time away in self-improvementand when some of the homeless reportedly found ways to sleep in the stacks.

One of the Library's famed pair of guardian lions.

It took until the 1970 for continual acquisitions to fill up the generous space that had been included in the original designs. In the 1980’s the building was expanded by 125,000 square feet and literally miles of new shelf space by constructing an underground addition below Bryant Park.

Work began in 2007 to clean and restore the begrimed and damaged exterior of the building and remodeling continued inside. More work with Schwarzman’s—and other donors—money continues to be done.

Meanwhile Mayor Bloomberg slashed the operating budget of the Library, closed many branches, and reduced hours open to the public. Money for new acquisitions was cut to the bone.

The grand and beloved edifice is in danger of rotting from the inside byneglect.

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Your Feets Too Big—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
21 May 2020 at 21:08

Your Feets Too Big—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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21 May 2020 at 21:08

By: Patrick Murfin

Your Feets Too Big by Fats Waller.

We celebrated the 114th birthday of legendary composer, stride piano master, singer, and outsized personality Fats Waller on a blog post this morning. I’m not sure how I can shoehorn this into a Coronavirus confinement theme except to say that if Your Feets Too Big doesn’t bring you joy, you are probably already dead.

Waller made the theatrical film short Your Feets Too Big in 1941 for the short-lived Minico Productions and was intended for release on bills at movie houses for Black audiences. Chances are that few whites saw it in theaters then although they may have caught it when it was packaged two years later for distribution with MGM’s Stormy Weather.

It was not a Waller original. It was composedin 1936 by Fred Fisher with lyrics by Ada Benson and was recorded by both Waller and The Ink Spots in 1939. The song became most closely associated with Waller who ad-libbed his own lyrics such as “Your pedal extremities are colossal, to me you look just like a fossil” and his catchphrase, “You know, your pedal extremities really are obnoxious. One never knows, do one?”

The film featured a snappy young man in a zoot suit and large white shoes and eight attractive dancers. The song is actually an extended double entendre correlating the size of a man’s feet to the length of a certain other appendage.

Fats Waller hitting the keys at home. Note the portrait of the Black World War I officer on the wall--maybe the pilot who flew his ashes?

When Waller died two years after making the short Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. who delivered the eulogy at a Harlem funeralthat attracted more the 4000 mournerssaid that Waller “always played to a packed house.” Afterwards, he was cremated and his ashes were scatteredover Harlem from an airplane pilotedby an African American World War Iaviator flyer.

Fats Waller wanted to go out with style.

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Fats Waller—King of Stride Piano…And the Pipe Organ?
21 May 2020 at 11:33

Fats Waller—King of Stride Piano…And the Pipe Organ?

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21 May 2020 at 11:33

By: Patrick Murfin

Fats Waller at the piano in an iconic image--bowler hat and eubulent personality..

Fats Waller was big in every way—big in girth, big in talent, big in personality, big in Jazz. Unlike other pioneers of the new American music on piano like classically trained Scott Joplin of Memphis or the master of the New Orleans whore house blues Jellyroll Morton, Thomas Waller who was born in Harlem on this date in 1904 cut his musical teeth playing organ for street crusades and revivalsled by his father, a lay Baptist preacher with a following in the growing Black community.

He first played a foot pumped portable reed organ but learned piano, mostly on his own, while attending local public high school. By the age of 15 he was playing organ at the Lincoln Theater, a vaudeville and silent movie house on 135th Street. He was so successful that he abandoned his father’s hope that he would become an evangelist to dedicate himself to music. Not just any music, but to jazz which was sweeping New York and the nation as World War I raged in far off Europe.

Quickly picking up the nickname Fats, for obvious reasons, young Waller continued to earn money playing in movie houses through the mid-1920’s well after he was established as a piano recording artist. But he did things on those big old movie palace and church pipe organs that no one had ever heard before. In 1927 and ’28 he recorded several sides of jazz on the pipe organ, a sound never before heard. He also continued to play organ on one of his two regular New York radio programs late in that decade, Moon River. He also performed organ pieces by Bach for select audiences in which he showed mastery of classical technique.

Waller recorded several sides on the Hammond electric organ helping to popularize the instrument in American homes. Earlier he had also recorded on pipe organs.

But I am getting ahead of myself. Despite his talent as an organist it was as a piano player and singerthat Waller made his mark. About the time he began his work at the Lincoln Theater, Waller won an amateur contest playing and singing stride pianist James P. Johnson’s Carolina Shout. Incredibly, he had learned to play the number by watching the keys moved from a player piano roll. By 1919 he had written his first piano rags, Muscle Shoals Blues and Birmingham Blues which he would record in his first sessions three years later.

After Waller’s mother died in 1920 and somewhat estranged from his father for his refusal to go into the ministry, he went to live with the family of well-known Harlem piano player, Russell B. T. Brooks, and soon became a student of his hero, James P. Johnson.

Still a teenager Waller was making a decent living from his theater work and from playing piano in Harlem dives and nightclubs. He picked up more money cutting piano rolls, which still rivaled gramophone recordsin popularity. During these years in addition to tutelage from Brooks and Johnson, he may, according to his own unconfirmed accounts, taken some formal training with professors from Julliard. At any rate, he learned to read and write musical notation, which other pioneers like Jellyroll Morton could never do.

At the age of 18 the prodigy made his first recordings as a soloist of Okeh Records including his own piano rags. He also began recording as pianist for a number of blues singers including Sara Martin, Alberta Hunter, and Maude Mills. In ’23 he collaborated with Clarence Williams to write and publish Wild Cat Blues which Williams reordered. Soon he was regularly writing songs for other artists.

Waller was an early radio star--one of the few Black performers to headline shows on network radio in the early 1930's.

The same year he began his first radio program, a series on a New Jersey station which proved so popular that he was signed to WHN in New York. In addition to his organ music program he also launched Fats Waller’s Rhythm Club which had a long run on the station. By 1934 Waller’s house band for the program solidified into a tight six piece combowith which he recorded as Fats Waller and His Rhythm.

But first Waller began regular collaboration with a number of lyricists, the most important of whom was Andy Razof. Together they collaborated on a number of shows, some of which made the jump from Harlem to Broadway including Keep Shufflin’ in 1928, Load of Coal, and Hot Chocolates in 1929. In Harlem the musical was a showcase for Cab Calloway, but Louis Armstrong took over on Broadway. Among the memorable songs from that show was Ain’t Misbehavin’ which became one of Armstrong’s signature songs and Waller’s most famous composition.

Waller copyrighted over 400 songs either alone or in partnership with various lyricists. There may have been hundreds more not copyrighted, bits of ephemeraperhaps used in a single performance or broadcast.

Despite being prolific and busy as a composer and as a performer, in the late ‘20’s Waller was often hard up for cash due to his appetite for plenty of food, drink, and good times and would sometimes sell songs for a flat fee which other usually white artists published and used as their own. Many of these were novelty songsfor vaudeville and nightclubs with a short expected shelf life. But others were more substantial. There is almost irrefutable evidence that Waller sold I Can't Give You Anything but Lovewith lyrics by Razof to white composer Jimmy McHugh and lyricist Dorothy Fieldsfor $500. The two included it in their show Blackbirds of 1928. The song became a jazz standard. Waller would later have radios shut off if the song came on the air. A similar claim has been made for The Sunny Side of the Street, also attributed to McHugh and Fields.

If those classics slipped through his fingers, however, there were plenty more to which Waller can lay undisputed claim.

In 1927 Waller signed with Victor, the principal label for the rest of his life. His first issues were on the pipe organ—W. C. Handy’s St. Louis Blues and his own Lenox Ave. Blues. With Victor he recorded in various combinations including Morris’s Hot Babes, Fats Waller's Buddies—one of the earliest interracial groups to record—and McKinney’s Cotton Pickers.

But he really stood out as a solo performer on piano and singing. A series of his Victor solo sessions are now considered the purest and best examples of the Harlem stride piano. These records included Handful of Keys, Smashing Thirds, Numb Fumblin’, and Valentine Stomp. He also recorded sessions with Ted Lewis in 1930, Jack Teagarden in 1931, and Billy Banks’s Rhythmakers 1932.

Gene Sedric, a clarinetist who played with Waller on some of his 1930s recordings explained why Waller was so sought after as a collaborator in the recording studio, “Fats was the most relaxed man I ever saw in a studio, and so he made everybody else relaxed. After a balance had been taken, we'd just need one take to make a side, unless it was a kind of difficult number.”

Waller took his radio studio band on tour as the nucleolus of Fats Waller and His Rhythm .

In ’34 Waller put together his most important band, mostly from musicians on his radio show. They played together on numerous sides and in public performance through much of the rest of the decade. Musicians included Herman Autrey (sometimes replaced by Bill Coleman or John Bugs” Hamilton), Gene Sedric or Rudy Powell, and Al Casey.

Also in the ‘30’s Waller played frequently in California where his stage presence was a big hit. With an ebullient personality he salted quips and jokes between songs. He had also mastered so many styles from rag to what was becoming known as Dixieland, blues, and of course his signature stride that his performances were always varied and nuanced. He could drive hard and dirty or melodic and soulful as in his and Razof’s lovely Honeysuckle Rose.

That winning style won him parts in two otherwise forgettable B musicals in 1935—Hooray for Love for RKO and King of Burlesque for 20th Century Fox.

Waller also showed himself adaptable to changing tastes, which were leaving small jazz bands behind in favor of big bands and swing. In fact he had recorded his own composition Whiteman Stomp with Fletcher Henderson pioneering big band way back in ’27. He was comfortable in almost any style. He began to take a band originally put together by Charley Turner, his base player on the road. With the addition of most of the Rhythm personnel Waller’s big band was a success both on tour and on wax beginning with their first recording in 1935 of a version of I Got Rhythm with a memorable cutting contest of alternating piano solos by Waller and Hank Duncan.

Waller was always most at home in Harlem. Seen here grabbing a hot dog lunch off of a street peddler's cart.

Other big bands of the era were influenced by Waller and his style, but none more than those of pianists Count Basie and Duke Ellington who acknowledged the influence of his stride style and often performed his songs.

In ’38 Waller took the core of the band on tour to Europe where he experienced great success. Spending considerable time in London Waller recorded with his Continental Rhythm consisting of a few regulars and English session men. He also indulged an old passion and also recorded a number of songs for EMI on their Compton Theatre organ at Abbey Road Studios.

A second European tour the next year was cut short by the outbreak of World War II. Semi-stranded in London, Waller composed and recorded his most ambitious work yet—his London Suite, an extended series of six related pieces for solo piano: Piccadilly, Chelsea, Soho, Bond Street, Limehouse, and White Chapel. It is Waller’s bid to be considered a serious composer like Duke Ellington, rather than just a hit song machine.

Waller on the set with Bill "Bojangles" Robinson on the set of Stormy Weather just weeks before his death.

Back in the States, Waller was never more popular. He toured extensively. And in 1943 he was called to Hollywood to participate in the most prestigious Black musical ever made by a major studio—MGM’s Stormy Weather with Lena Horne and Bill Robinson, in which he led an all-star band including Benny Carterand Zutty Singleton. He also collaborated with the lyricist George Marion, Jr. on the score for the stage show Early to Bed which opened for Boston tryouts in October.

During a solo engagement at the Zanzibar Room in Hollywood, Waller was taken seriously ill. He decided to try to return to New York by train. He died on the way of pneumonia on December 15, 1943, just weeks after wrapping up filming on Stormy Weather.

Waller's 1943 funeral at Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr.'s Absyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem.

Back in Harlem the popular Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. preached at a funeral attended by more than 4,000 mourners who spilled out onto the street. Surveying the scene Powel noted, “Fat’s always played to a full house.”

The original Broadway cast album cover for Ain't Misbehavin' , the show that made Nell Carter and Andre DeShields stars.

Interest in Waller has never waned. His songs continued to be recorded and interpreted by jazz and pop artists. In 1978 Ain’t Misbehavin’ exploded on Broadway with an ensemble cast including Nell Carter, André DeShields, Armelia McQueen, Ken Page, and Charlayne Woodard performing an uninterrupted parade of Waller’s music. It won the Tony for Best Musical and a Best Actress in a Musical for Carter. The original cast album became a break away hit. The show was remounted in London, and restaged with the original cast on Broadway ten years later to equal acclaim. Touring companies with the Pointer Sisters, and more recently American Idol contestants have also met with success.

Your just can’t keep a piano man down.

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Here Comes the Sun—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
20 May 2020 at 21:06

Here Comes the Sun—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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20 May 2020 at 21:06

By: Patrick Murfin

Here Comes the Sun by The Beatles.

After days of sodden skies, rains, and flooding the Sun has come mostly backand promises to linger for a couple of days or so. You can probably guess what that means. Yep, a visit from the four lads from Liverpool on their penultimate studio album Abbey Road in 1969. No song posted in this series probably has needed less introduction, but here goes anyway.

The album cover from Abbey Road might feature the most iconic image in rock and roll.

Abbey Road, named for the EMI recording studio used by Apple Records, came together during a period when The Beatles were undergoing stress with the different aspirations of its member John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr. Their former producer George Martin, sometimes called the Fifth Beatle, was called back to work on the album and reluctantly agreed only if the boys adhered to disciplined and cooperative work.

Were Harrison and Lennon channeling old West gunfighters or Hasidic Jews in this promotional photo shoot for the Abbey Road album?

Harrison wrote Here Comes the Sun while idling away time in his best friend Eric Clapton’s garden and played acoustical guitar and was lead singer on the track. McCartney provided backing vocals and played bass with on drums. Lennon was recuperating from a car accident and did not perform on the track. He may also have been perturbed by the close collaboration between Harrison and McCartney who had objected to Yoko Ono’s presence at the recording sessions. Martin added an orchestral arrangement in collaboration with Harrison, who overdubbed a Moog synthesizer immediately before the final mix.

Here Comes the Sun was the lead song on Side B of the album and was never released as a single. Many criticsconsidered it to be the best cut on what easily became a classic album.

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Growing up in Jeans and the Man Who Put America in Denim
20 May 2020 at 11:15

Growing up in Jeans and the Man Who Put America in Denim

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20 May 2020 at 11:15

By: Patrick Murfin

In high cowboy blue jean splendor for Cheyenne Frontier Days circa 1958 or '59--Tim Murfin, next door neighbor Sharon Niddlekoff, Patrick, and cousin Linda Strom..

Like most American guys, I grew upin my blue jeans, at least after my twin brother and me prevailed upon our mother not to make us go back to school in corduroy slacks and suspenders for-christ-sakes. We had to have them. All of our favorite cowboys in the old two reel westerns that played on TV every afternoon wore them and so must we. We rolled the bottoms up, which was good for mom, because they gave us growing room. A sturdy pair could last a couple of years. When they inevitably wore out at the knees, Mom would repair them with iron-on patches.

Mom was too cheap to pay for Levisor Lee Riders. She generally stocked up on ours with store brands from J.C. Penney’s or Montgomery Ward’s. Like real Levis, they were stiff and scratchy when new—chapped the hell out of my inner thighs when I walked. Mom liked that look and at first starched our jeans to preserve it. Stoppingthat was an epic battle all its own. The dye in these off brands ran even more than Levis. Our jockey shorts were the same color of blue as an old church lady’s hairfor the first few wearings. Eventually, however the jeans settled down to soft comfort and a far lighter hue. Neither of the high schools I attended allowed jeans at school. But I was out of slacks as soon as possible after school and on weekends. They were all I took to college, except for one pair of slacks for chapel services and faculty dinners.

From then on, it was all about the jeans. I will even admit to a pair or two of elephant bells, then flairs and boot cuts before going back to old straight leg jeans like I wore in school. But now I could buy them by length as well as waist so no more roll-ups. I settled into a daily uniform of jeans and a chambray work shirt, denim pearl snap, or plaid flannel depending on the season. So did a lot of other guys. By the time I was in my mid-40’s I had teen-age daughters who were all about designer jeans. I remember the near heart-attack the first time Carolynne demanded a pair Jordache jeans that cost more than I made in a day. I grew even more perplexed and outraged when first stone wash, then acid wash, and finally pre-worn complete with rips and tears became teen must-haves.

At an IWW CTA fair hike picket in Chicago in 1970--boot cut jeans and a fringed leather hippie sash for flare.

It was all about denim in the ’80’s. But fashion was also pressing prices of my work-a-day attire of choice up. Wranglers, the least expensive of the big three brands got to $40 a pair and house brands only $5 or so less. To keep my daughters fashionable, I sank to the cheapest jeans of all—no-names from discount houses. The dye wasn’t really denim blue, it was a sort of purple and the stitching was in white thread instead of gold or blue. They tended to fall apart after two or three washings, so the $5 investment in a pair was not worth it.

I swallowed hard and began paying the damn $40. But not for long, my body was changing—and not for the better. Jeans made for 20 year olds didn’t fit right anymore and even relaxed fits or embarrassing pairs with elastic waist bands did not entirely solve the problem which was caused by the combination of my expanding waistline, lack of ass, and short, stubby legs. My funny looking body made up its 6’2” height in a freakishly long torso. I started wearing pants out not in the knees, but along the seams of the crotch where the material began to pull apart after just a few washings. After my last pair of $40 jeans bit the dust in this way after only a dozen or so launderings, I had enough.

I gave up my beloved jeans, which were as much a part of my identity and image as my cowboy hats. But khaki slacks were $15 a pair if you took a pass on Dockers and bought the house brands at Wards or K-Mart. And they were versatile. They were fine for everyday wear with just a buttoned sport shirt. Throw on a dress shirt, tie, and sport coat and they were fine for almost all businessand dress up occasions short of a wedding or a funeral.

The khaki years--walking with the Democrats in the 2015 Crystal Lake Independence Day parade.

For my work as a school custodian I got blue work pants to go with my uniform shirts. The same worked when I began working second jobs as a as a gas station/convenience store clerk. When I had the part-time job as maintenance at a local mall, I had similar brown twill pants for my tan shirts.

But most of the time it has been khakis for many years, a choice made by a lot of other duffers and men who just don’t give a damn anymore. I never had to match my pants with my shirt or jacket. Didn’t have to even think about them. Just pulled ‘em from the closet and put ‘em on until the cuffs frayedor I stained them with some kind of food or drink catastrophe. Even then they were good a while longer to mow the lawn in or do other dirty work that I couldn’t shirk or avoid.

I got older yet and began to see men my age still in their jeans. A lot of them looked good. They looked comfortable. Some, the guys with big bellies like mine hanging over the belt and pushing the jeans down past the ass crack, lookedridiculous. But not as ridiculous as the guys in sweats, cargo pants, and most shorts. I may have been square, but at least I had my dignity. Or so I told myself.

Then about three years ago I found some house brand jeans that looked durable for about what I was paying for my khakis. I bought a pair on a whim. They were roomier than what I wore in my younger days but skinny jeans are just for young dudes and hipsters. The pants were comfortable. I bought another pair and then another.

The Old Man back in jeans in the fall of 2018.

After I retired from my day job they were about all I wore except to church on Sundays then after a while decided that a sport coat and jeans were as acceptable as a jacket, tie, and khakis. Since the Coronavirus lock down, I haven’t worn anything else. But that still makes me more formal than the many guys my age I know who haven’t been out of sweats or shorts.

All of this is a useless, rambling introduction to the true topic—the official birthday of blue jeans as we know them. On May 20, 1873 Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis obtained a patent on a new style of rugged and durable work pants.

Levi Strauss about the time he was establishing himself in San Francisco.

Strauss was born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Buttenheim, Germany on February 26, 1829. When he was 16 he accompanied his motherand two sisters to the United States to join two brothers who had an established J. Strauss Brother & Co a successful wholesale dry goods business in New York City. Young Levi moved quickly to Louisville, Kentucky where he dealt in his brother’s dry goods.

After the Gold Rush of 1849 Levi was selected by the family to open up operations in bustling San Francisco where one sister was already in residence. He arrived by ship from New York in 1853 with a load of goods from his brothers and set up an emporiumhe called Levi Strauss & Company. He resisted the impulse of other would-be merchants to go to the gold fieldsto find riches in the mines, a decision that ruined most of them. Instead he was content to collect the gold from the miners by supplying them with hard-to-get-dry goods at steep prices. With the added cost of transportation by ship and merchandise of all types scarce, Strauss was able to charge all that the market would bear and still thrive.

Employees of Levi Strauss & Company circa 1880--mostly office workers and clerks but three men sitting on or standing by a crate are wearing the company's signature jeans both over and tucked into boots.

His well-established business outlasted the Gold Rush and was soon supplying goods to far flung corners of the rapidly developing West. A big demand was always for durable trousersthat could hold up under the rugged conditions of placer and hard rock mining. In 1872 a major customer for Straus’s fabric, a tailor named Jacob Davisapproached Levi with an idea to reinforce pockets and other points of stresslike the bottom of the fly with copper rivets. The pair entered business together and obtained their patent for “Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Opening.” They called their product waist overalls, because they eliminated the bib common on a lot of work pants.

Hard working miners seldom looked this neat in Levi's product as in this advertisement . Note denim blouse--the ancestor of today's popular jean jackets.

Legend has it that the first pants were made from coarse brown duck fabric. And some early pairs were made this way. But the company soon found denim, by tradition dyed blue, was far more durable and was marketing most pairs in that fabric within the first year. In an early example of trademark branding, the company began to affix a leather tag to the back of the waist band with an illustration of two mules trying to pull a pair of trousers apart. The illustration of strength helped sell the product, which was ubiquitous among miners and other hard working outdoor laborers in the West by the turn of the 20th Century.

Levi Strauss' trademark and label advertised the rugged strength of the pants.

Some folk believe that Strauss introduced denim to the States, importing his fabric from Nimes, France where it had been produced for centuries. But Strauss bought his denim from well-established American weavers and dyers who had been producing the cloth for decades for use in overalls and dungarees.

Many fabrics were commonly used for work pants—home spun, coarse woolens, and Irish laborers introduced mole skin. Dungarees were among the most common. They were originally made from Dungi, a durable and heavy cotton fabric originally used as sail cloth and imported by the English from India. Like European denim or jeans, the cloth was commonly dyed with indigo.

As early as the Revolutionary War George Washington specified blue died dungarees as the field uniform of artillerymenwho often had to do hard labor moving heavy cannon over muddy ground.

The Master of the Blue Jeans portrayed this beggar boy in a tattered jean jacket circa 1600.

Dungi was similar to, but not identical with denim and jeans, two fabrics which originated in Renaissance Europe. Jeans were originated in Genoa, Italy in the 17th Century. The material was a kind of fine wale cotton corduroy which was died blue and became in inexpensive fabric widely used in work garments of the poor. An unknown artist now known simply as the Master of the Blue Jeans left 14 exquisite painting of poor people in the easily recognized fabric.

Soon another fabric center, Nimes, was trying to duplicate the cloth that they named after the French pronunciation of Genoa—Gênes. The fabric of Nimes was not identical to the original. It was coarser and heavier, although nearly identical in color. Because it was heavier it was popular in work smocks and jackets, and was also used as a cover for merchandise lashed to the decks of sailing ships. Their fabric became known as d’Nimes—literally of Nimes—or denim.

By the early 19 both fabrics were circulating in world trade and manufacturesin Britain and the United States began to copy them. The names jeans and denim became interchangeable.

Early American work pants were very loose fitting often held up by one incorporated diagonal strap running from the waist on one side to theopposite shoulder or were bib style. When no strap or bib was present they were held up by suspenders. Sailors often wore light cotton pants held up by rope belts. But belts were uncommon in most men’s pants.

When Levi introduced belt loops to some models of their jeans around the turn of the 20th Century, the pants quickly gained wide acceptance with another group of rugged outdoor workers—cowboys—who found that suspenders often snagged on brush or gear. Range photos show that the adoption spread quickly.

Real cowboys were used in many of the early two reel western movies and so were blue jeans, rolled up at the bottom to display highly tooled Texas styled boots. Little boys and little girls across the country saw and wanted the same look. Soon Levis and other jean companies had a whole new market. But school officials, Churches, and places like theatersoften found jeans unacceptably informaland they were banned from those places routinely. Which helped give the pants the extra allure of forbidden fruit.

Jeans also spread slowly east as they were adopted by more and more factory and construction workers. Hundreds of thousands of men first encountered them in Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps during the Great Depression. During World War II the Army issued loose fitting dungarees as fatigues for stateside duty. Navy enlisted men eschewed traditional white bell bottoms for a tighter fitting style of jeans for everyday work and battle wear aboard ship. And women flocking to the Defense Plants got their own jeans—usually buttoning up the side instead of the front.

It turned out that James Dean's jeans made a more enduring fashion statement than his red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause.

After the war both sexes took to wearing jeans as weekend wear or for chores like gardening. When James Dean wore a pair in Rebel Without a Cause, they became the instant uniform of rebellious youth. Marilyn Monroe did the same thing for tight fitting, shape enhancing jeans for women in The River of No Return.

In 1973 Levis revolutionized the jeans business by introducing their 501 jeans which were preshrunk. It was now possible to buy jeans close to the size you could actually wear—being made of cotton there was still some, although much less, shrinkage. That also meant you could by jeans the right length. Good bye rolled up pant legs. Other manufactures followed. Jeans also generally replaced the traditional fly buttons with heavy duty copper Zippers.

The continuing fashion for tattered and pre-ripped jeans remains a profound mystery to the Old Man.

The first pre-washed jeans and decorated jeans were introduced by retailers in New York City in the mid ‘60’s inevitably leading to the era of designer jeans.

Today even though their peak popularity in the 1980’s has passed, jeans are still probably the most common leisure and work wear in the United States. Most people own three or more pair at any time. And the look has been just as popular in France where the fabric originated and where nearly as many jeans are now sold annually as in the United States.

WWUUD?
In Spite of Ourselves—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
19 May 2020 at 19:08

In Spite of Ourselves—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

WWUUD?

19 May 2020 at 19:08

By: Patrick Murfin

In Spite of Ourselves by John Prine with Iris DeMent.

Folks are wearingon each other’s patience after weeks of close confinement. My wife Kathy and I were snapping at each other like alligators in a feeding frenzy this morning over what can best be described as the most trivial irritations. Perhaps disharmony had seeped into your own ideal relationships as well. Hopefully no one has come to blows or is seeking a reliable contract killer who will practice correct social distancing.

John Prine's In Spite of Ourselves album cover.

But even under these trying circumstances the late, great John Prine and Iris DeMent, an Arkansas born singer/songwriter, offer hope for overcoming the bullshit. In Spite of Ourselves was the title track of Prine’s 13th studio album of released in 1999. The album was Prine's first release since successfully battling throat cancer and featured duets with well-known female folk and alt-country vocalists including DeMent, Connie Smith, Lucinda Williams, Trisha Yearwood, Melba Montgomery, Emmylou Harris, Dolores Keane, Patty Loveless, and his wife, Fiona Prine.

John Prine and Iris DeMent.

Critic David Cantwell of No Depression singled out In Spite of Ourselves as the best duet on the album and wrote that the album “is a solid collection of country duets, and if nothing else, it proves that Prine has great taste in old country songs... not to mention great taste in what used to be called “girl singers.”

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Post Cards—From the Poor Man’s Telegram to Souvenir Collectables
19 May 2020 at 10:22

Post Cards—From the Poor Man’s Telegram to Souvenir Collectables

WWUUD?

19 May 2020 at 10:22

By: Patrick Murfin

Both a souvenir and a novelty picture post card. Wish you were here....

Over the vigorous objections of the United States Post Office on May 19, 1898 Congress passed the Private Mailing Card Act allowing private printing companies to produce postcards.

Privately printed cards first appeared in 1861 under an earlier act and the first card bearing images were copyrighted the same year.

The Post Office had been printing and selling official post cards since 1877 for a penny apiece, less than half of the postage for a first class letter. They had rapidly become popular with the poor and those who had quick messages and no desire or expectation of privacy. One wag called them “slow telegrams” comparing them to another terse but far more expensive means of communication. They contributed to the explosion of Post Office business after the Civil War along with innovations like direct business and home delivery in urban areas and railway mail sorting which slashed delivery times. Most official postcards were plain with a pre-printed stamp and space for an address on one side with the message written on the reverse. But the Post Office did offer a limited number of decorated souvenir post cards with engraved decorations on the address side that were proving increasingly popular.

A late 19th Century official Post Office post card with decorative images.

Private companies were allowed to print cards, but regular first class postage had to be affixed instead of the pre-printed post card rate, a powerful disincentive. The Post Office was loathe to forgo the advantage this gave them and the growing stream of revenue. But printers—many of whom were not so coincidently in the newspaper business—got the ear of Republicans who were in firm control of both Houses of Congress, with their complaints of unfair government competition. The Post Office never stood a chance. President William McKinley signed the Act into law.

There were restrictions. The private printers could not use the words post card or postal card. Instead they had to clearly identify their product with the words Private Mailing Card Messages were not allowed on the address side of the private mailing cards, as indicated by the words “This side is exclusively for the Address,” or slight variations of this phrase. If the front had an image, then a space was left for a message.

A Private Mailing Card authorized by Congress.

The Post Office must have discovered that there was no revenue loss from selling stamps for private cards over their own cards with printed postage because after four years in 1901the Post Master General Charles Emory Smith voluntarily loosened regulations and allowed printers to use the words Post Card instead of Private Mailing Card and dropped requirement for a fine-print explanationthat they were produced under the Private Mailing Card Act. At the time the sales of souvenir post cards with photos taking up the entire front of the card was booming. But that eliminated the space for a message and the Post Office still did not allow anything other than address info on the back. That rendered these types of cards of zero use for conveying any message other than the implied, “Hey, look where I am.”

It wasn’t until the Universal Postal Union which governed international mail cards produced by governments could have messages on the left half of the address side in 1907. Congress acted quickly to authorize private printers to do the same. It ushered in the period known as the Divided Back Era by collectors and set off huge new demand. There was now space to scrawl “Wish you were here” or “home on the 10 o’clock train next Friday” in the somewhat limited space made available. Producers ramped up production and images were produced of landmarks in even the sleepiest rural hamlets, hence a glut of shots of muddy main streets, local churches, and Civil War monuments that can be found nearly by the bale at post card collector shows. The wide variety of images and the improving quality including bright color lithography by German companies for the American market meant this period is also called the Golden Age of Post Cards.

An example of the hyper-local post cards issued by small town printers--an early 20th Century view of the Woodstock, Illinois Presbyterian Church, one of a series featuring every church in town.

That ended when World War I abruptly disruptedthe supply of German cards. Even the best American technology could not match the color printing quality of the European cards and interest in collecting post cards, which had become an extremely popular hobby declined, as did sales. During the war American printers produced cards with white borders to save ink and were sometimes faced with card stock shortages. Most of the souvenir cards of this period now included a short description of the front image on the message half side of the back, reducing the available space for writing.

Novelty cards with cartoons and funny sayings also became popular, some becoming iconic like the many versions of a gap-toothed hick kid with a cowlick and the words “Me Worry?” which eventually morphed into Alfred E. Newman of Mad Magazine. Bathing beauties and cars were other popular themes. Companies also produced Holiday cards for all occasions and advertising pieces.

The fore runner of Mad Magazine's Alfred E. Newman was featured on several novelty post cards

Ordinary folks could make their own post cards with the introduction of the Real Photo postcards produced using the Kodak postcard camera. The postcard camera could take a picture and then print a postcard-size negativeof the picture, complete with a divided back and place for postage. These could be sent in to Kodak which would print them on glossy photo stock like that used in Brownie snapshots. They were also used by small town companies for the limited runs needed by the local pharmacy, hotel, or even funeral parlor. These became so popular other suppliers entered the market, but Kodak continued to dominate this which continued popular well in to the 1930s.

Commercial post cards got a huge boost in 1931 when Curt Teich & Co. introduced a new process of printing on high quality rag count. These so-called linen cards had a rich texture and could hold brighter inks and dyes thanprevious methods. The result was often almost painting like with highly saturated colors. Many were hand tinted from black and white originals. These cards are now highly prized by collectors.

A hand tinted linen post card of the Wyoming State Capitol building in my old home town of Cheyenne. I have a framed copy hanging in my home study.

The linen cards dominated the market until the introduction of photochrom color postcards by Union Oil Co. for sale at its Western gas stations in 1939. Printed on high glossy stock the public embraced the “more realistic” images and they had almost completely replaced the linen cards by the early 1950s.

Post card remained popular through most of the rest of the century. But the introduction of e-mail, cheap digital cameras and eventually cell phones, and social media rendered post cards obsolete as a means of communication. All of the folks back home can now access dozens of your personal photos, including ubiquitous selfiesinstantly instead of getting a single post card two days after you already got home.

A contemporary stock glossy print souvenir post card.

As sales shrank, so did the number of companies producing cards and the images available. Virtually gone now are almost all hyper-local cards. Each major city or tourist attraction now is represented by a very limited number of stock cards which are harder and harder to find. They are gone now from most gas stations, restaurant and hotel racks, drug stores, and are even harder to find at souvenir stands and air ports. Those that are sold are packed in the luggage as cheap souvenirs and seldom mailed. After all, it costs 35 cents to mail a post card now and almost no one has the right stamp so those that are mailed usually have a regular First Class stamp pasted on them.

Oh, and almost no one collects new ones anymore.

WWUUD?
We Gotta Get Out of this Place—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
18 May 2020 at 22:27

We Gotta Get Out of this Place—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

WWUUD?

18 May 2020 at 22:27

By: Patrick Murfin

We Gotta Get Out of this Place by The Animals.

More than two months of Cronavirus confinement for many of us and yesterday’s torrential downpour and nuisance flooding in these parts have pushed a lot of us over the edge. A primal scream seems called for. We have just what you need courtesy of The Animals.

The Animals were an English rhythm and bluesand rock band, formed in Newcastle upon Tyne in the early 1960’s. They band moved to London upon finding fame in 1964. The Animals were known for their gritty, bluesy sound and especially for their deep-voiced front man Eric Burdon. Their breakthrough #1 hit The House of the Rising Sun turned a New Orleans honky-tonk blues about a girl gone wrong turned brothel whore into a blues lament for a lad led astray and set the tone a raw edged style quite different from those nice boys The Beatles or even the blusier rockers The Rolling Stones. But unlike those other British bands, they did little original music of their own creations relying instead on covers, adaptations, and professional songwriters. Their hits included It’s My Life, Inside Looking Out, I’m Crying, and Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood.

The Animals in 1965-- Eric Burdon, vocals'Alan Price, Keyboards' Chas Chandler,bass; Hilton Valentine, guitar; John Steel, drums.

Under the name Eric Burdon and the Animals, the much-changed line-up moved to Californiaand achieved new commercial successas a psychedelic and hard rock band with hits like San Franciscan Nights, When I Was Young, and Sky Pilot, before disbanding at the end of the decade. Altogether, the group had ten Top Twenty hits on both the UK Singles Chart and the BillboardHot 100 In the U.S.

Burdon was the working class son of an electrical repairman who described his childhood as a dark nightmare” that “should’ve been penned by Charles Dickens.” Due to the river pollution and humidity in Newcastle he suffered asthma attacks daily. During primary school, he was “stuck at the rear of the classroom of around 40 to 50 kids and received constant harassment from kids and teachers alike”. He went on to describe his primary school as “jammed between a slaughterhouse and a shipyard on the banks of the Tyne. Some teachers were sadistic—others pretended not to notice—and sexual molestation and regular corporal punishment with a leather strapwas the order of the day,”

Eric Burdon circa 1968.

He developed an early interest in American jazz—Louis Armstrong was his first hero—and later blues. He switched from jazz trombone to singing while studying at the Newcastle Art College. He hung out with a tough and hard drinking crowd from which the original members of The Animals were recruited before moving to London. He was only 23 when The Animals hit with House of the Rising Sun.

After the Animals broke up Burdon went on to front Californian funk rock band War in 1970 with singles like Spill the Wine, Tobacco Road, Paint It Black, and They Can't Take Away Our Music. Since the mid-70’s he has performed as a solo act and with several bands under different names. He continues to work today at age 79.

Burdon still going strong in 2018.

Today’s song We Gotta Get Out of This Place was written by the Brill Building songwriting Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and originally intended for the blue eyed soul Righteous Brothers who had achieved their hit with the duo’s You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ but was snatched up by Mickie Most, the Animals’ producer. The song was recorded in England at Columbia Gramophone studios. Two takes were recorded, one released in the United Kingdom and another released by the band’s American label MGM. There were only minor variations in a line or two of lyrics but many critics thought that the American version feared a rawer and more emotional reading by Burdon.

The song reached # 2 on the UK pop singles chart on August 14, 1965 held out of the top slot by the Beatles Help! And made it to #13 on the U.S. pop singles chart but its cultural importance transcended those numbers. Burden heartfelt performance was a reflection of his own experiences in Newcastle—the bleak town he had to get out of.

We Gotta Get Out of this Place was voted the #1 by the troops themselves like the grunt in Ken Burns' and Lynn Novick’s documentary series The Vietnam War

It resonated first with teenagers and was soon a defiant scream and became an anthem of defiance at high school proms and graduation parties. But it was really adopted by U.S. troops in Vietnam. It was central to the G.I. grunt’s soundtrack to the war and was later used in theatrical movies like Hamburger Hill and the TV series Tour of Duty and China Beach.

In a 2012 keynote speech to an audience at the South by Southwest music festival, Bruce Springsteen performed an abbreviated version of the Animals’ song on acoustic guitar and then said, “That’s every song I’ve ever written. That’s all of them. I’m not kidding, either. That’s Born to Run, Born in the U.S.A.”

Surely it is just as apt for our current sequestration.

WWUUD?
Bath School Disaster—Eerily Familiar but Almost Forgotten
18 May 2020 at 09:09

Bath School Disaster—Eerily Familiar but Almost Forgotten

WWUUD?

18 May 2020 at 09:09

By: Patrick Murfin

Stunned family and community members gather at the wreckage of Bath School.

Note—The press took note that for the first time in years there were no school shooting attacks in April due to the Coronavirus shutdown—a rare good side effect of the world-wide pandemic closures like clear skies and cleaner water. On the other hand, right-wing “patriots,” White nationalists, neo-Nazis and Klansmen, and gun-toting Trumpists have been emboldened to besiege state capitals, threaten governors and law makers, and intimidate nurses and first responders who get in their way. Meet Donald Trump’s scruffy new Brown Shirts. A glimpse at a horror of the distant past is evocative of the current moment.

The most surprising things about the Bath School Disaster, a bomb attack on a Michigan elementary school on May 18, 1927 in which 45 people, mostly students, died and more than 50 were injured is not that it happened at all. It is that it seems so modern, so predictable, as if it was an item on last night’s news; that the perpetrator’s biography and motives are so similar to members of right wing fringe and hate groups of today; and that it has been virtually forgotten despite being the worst mass killing at a school in U.S. history.

Andrew Kehoe and his wife Nellie in their Michigan farm house.

The facts are these. On the morning of the attack 55 year old Andrew Kehoe awoke on his farm near the village of Bath, Michigan. He had planned and prepared for the day’s events down to the last detail for weeks, if not months. He may already have killed his wife who had been critically ill and had returned from a sanitarium stay for treatment of tuberculosis two days earlier. He moved her body in a wheel barrow to a chicken coop. He went to the barn and tied the legs of his two horses together so they could not be rescued. Then using incendiary devices of his own design set off by a detonator set fire to the house and all of the outbuildings.

He had already placed hundreds of pounds of explosives—two bombs made of dynamite and pyrotol, a World War I surplus incendiary then used by farmers to remove tree stumpsand clear ditches—one in the basement under each wing of Bath Consolidated School. The bombs were wired to timed detonators set to go off shortly after the time Kehoe finished setting the arson of his home.

The Fire Department and neighbors were rushing to the scene of the farm at 8:45 when they heard a huge explosion. Fifteen minutes after the start of classes the bomb under the north end of the school went off turning that half of the building into an instant smoking ruin. The bomb detonator under the south wing failed to go off and was later discovered by rescuers.

Kehoe calmly drove to the school. He had packed his truck with more explosives and crammed metal debris of all types behind the bench seat to act as shrapnel. He was armed with a lever action Winchester rifle. He arrived at the school about 30 minutes after the explosion. He pulled up to the scene and waved over School Superintendent Emory E. Huyck, with whom Kehoe had often clashed. Some witnesses thought they could see a struggle between the two at the window of the truck. Moments later Kehoe fired his rifle into the explosives in the cab setting off a second explosion. The blast killed him, Huyck, Postmaster Glenn Smith, a retired farmer, and hapless G. Cleo Claytonwho a second grader who had miraculously survived the first blast. It was one on of the first recorded uses of a second bomb to attack those who we would today call first responders.

The mangled wreckage of Kehoe;s truck after the second explosion.

The scene at the school was heartbreaking and chaotic. Surviving first grade teacher Bernice Sterlingtold the Associated Press:

It seemed as though the floor went up several feet…After the first shock I thought for a moment I was blind. When it came the air seemed to be full of children and flying desks and books. Children were tossed high in the air; some were catapulted out of the building.

Monty Ellsworth, a neighbor of the Kehoes, recalled:

There was a pile of children of about five or six under the roof and some of them had arms sticking out, some had legs, and some just their heads sticking out. They were unrecognizable because they were covered with dust, plaster, and blood. There were not enough of us to move the roof.

He volunteered to drive back to his farm to get heavy rope to help pull the roof off. It was on the way that he encountered Kehoe going the opposite direction in his truck. Kehoe grinned and waved at him.

Hundreds of men from the surrounding farms and village soon swarmed the debrisin a desperate search for survivors. Mothers ran to the scene and fell screaming as the mangled bodies of their children were retrieved or sat in a bewildered, catatonic shock. They were joined by scores of fire fighters from Lansing and other communities. Local contractorsarrived with heavy equipment.

When more than a dozen Michigan State Police arrived, they ordered rescue efforts suspended until a search for more explosives could be conducted. That’s when the second bomb in the south basement was found. Its alarm clock detonator, also set for 8:45, had apparently become dislodgedby the shock of the first explosion saving scores of lives.

Dr. J. A. Crumand his wife, a nurse, had both served in World War I. They set up a primitive sort of triage center on the floor of their pharmacy. Ambulances, trucks, and auto rushed critically injured survivors to Sparrow Hospital and St. Lawrence Hospital in Lansing.

Headlines from the newspaper in near-by Lansing, Michigan.

Thirty-eight elementary students and six adults including two young women teachers were killed in the two blasts at the school. Fifty-eight were injured, most seriously. The incalculable trauma to surviving children, their families, and rescuers would linger for decades.

So who was this Andrew Kehoe who was capable of master minding a terrorist attack that would be the envyof any modern menace?

Kehoe was born in Tecumseh, Michigan on February 1, 1872. After his mother died when he was quite young, his father remarried. Kehoe clashed repeatedly with his stepmother. When he was 14 years old the woman splashed fuel oil on herself as she attempted to re-fill an oil stove, igniting her clothes. Or so the boy told authorities. He said he tried to save her by throwing a bucket of water on the flames, which only spread them. She died in agony days later.

But the boy was exceptionally bright and a tinkerer, perhaps inspired by tales of Thomas Edison and other inventors. He went on to study electrical engineering at Michigan State University in Lansing. While a student there he met and apparently fell in love with Ellen “Nellie” Price a lovely young woman from a wealthy family. Either the family disapproved of Kehoe, or he felt he had to establish himself before marriage. At any rate, he went west seeking opportunities and Ellen apparently pledged to wait for him.

Kehoe worked as an electrician for several years in St. Louis. While there he suffered a severe head injury in a fall which may—or may not have—had an effect on his personalityand behavior.

At the late age of 40, he returned to Michigan in 1912 and married Nellie. They lived a nomadic existence for the first several years, moving from town to town around the state as Kehoe tried to find whatever it was he was looking for. The couple had no children.

In 1919 the couple bought a 185-acre farm outside the village of Bath from Nellie’s aunt for $12,000. Kehoe paid $6,000 in cash and took out a $6,000 mortgage. Once on the land he insisted on unusual “modern” farming techniques and spent much of his time tinkering with farm equipment to make his vision of a completely mechanized operation a reality. Not all of his efforts were successful. An attempt to hitch multiple mowers to his tractor left swaths uncut and was difficult to maneuver. He would sometimes just abandon his hay fields in frustration. The farm did not prosper.

Kehoe also exhibited a vicious temper, noted by all of his neighbors. He shot a dog for wandering onto his property, and beat a horse to death. He engaged in several feuds and was noted for not being able to abide with being disagreed with or deferred to.

The Bath Consolidated School District building, the modern pride of the rural community, before the bombing.

In 1922 voters in the rural townshipvoted to close the various one room schools scattered around the farm land and build a modern consolidated school with multiple classrooms and students separated by grade level. It was an educational reform that was picking up steam across the Midwest. Evidently progressive Bath was among the early communities to adopt the system.

Kehoe bitterly opposed the referendum. His ire was further raised when a new property tax was levied to support the construction of the school and the operation of the consolidated district. The school opened in 1923 and was the pride of the community.

Kehoe made himself the voice of all of those disgruntled by the tax. In 1924, thanks to the low voter turn-out in such elections, Kehoe was elected Treasurer of the School Board. He was notoriously difficult for other board members, all supporters of the new system. He railed against every expenditure no matter how small or essential. He regularly demanded that tax rates be slashed. And he clashed with the Superintendent who he repeatedly accused of fiscal mismanagement and fraud. Several times he engaged in shouting matches at Board meeting and stalked out when, inevitably, he did not get his way.

His self-proclaimed frugality extended to other matters. Both he and his wife were Catholics and she was quite devout. But he refused to pay the parish assessment and out of embarrassmenthis wife, in declining health, stopped attending services. He also regularly disputed bills from local merchantsand suppliers.

In 1926 he was briefly appointed Bath Township Clerk, a position that carried with it a modest salary. Later that year he ran for election to the job but was soundly defeated. The rejection may have been the final straw.

His financial situation was by this time desperate. What money he had went mostly to Nellies repeated hospitalizations. The bank began foreclosure proceedings. Neighbors noted that he stopped working his farm entirely and was even more aggressive than usual. At least one thought that he might be contemplating suicide.

Instead Kehoe was meticulously spending what little money he had left on explosives and other equipment to carry out his plan, which was well under way by March of 1927. Still a Board member he had keys to the school and easy access to set his bombs in furtive night visits.

If this portrait of a delusional, paranoid, and resentful tax and government hater sounds familiar, it’s because Kehoe has so many modern clones—personal bombs on the fringes of the militia movement, and the so-called Patriot movement ready to go off at any minute. In fact if many of them ever heard of Kehoe, he would be their hero.

But there is a kind of amnesia about the event. The very name Bath School Disaster seems to deny what it was—a bombing and a terrorist attack. Perhaps because it was too painful, the bombing is seldom mentioned in Michigan and absent from school curricula. It is recalled by a couple of historical markers. And in 2014 a private foundation finally got around to buying markers for the last two of the unmarked graves of victims whose families were too poor to erect them.

The sign Kehoe left on his fence to greet responders to the fires and explosions at his farm.

Kehoe left no suicide note. But he did hang a hand stenciled sign on his fence that greeted the firefighters who responded to the explosions and blazes at this farm. It said, “Criminals are made, not born.”

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Don’t Let the Rain Come Down—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
17 May 2020 at 21:12

Don’t Let the Rain Come Down—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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17 May 2020 at 21:12

By: Patrick Murfin

Don't Let the Rain Come Down by the Serendipity Singers.

It’s an all-day rain event in these parts with maybe heavy thunder boomersthis evening. Coming on the heels of a major gully washertwo days ago most of northeastern Illinois is under a flood advisory. It’s enough to make a body shout don’t let the rain come down. Which brings us to today’s Home Confinement Music Festival feature by the Serendipity Singers.

The group originated on the campus of the University of Colorado in the early 1960’s as the Newport Singers—a tip-o’-the-hat to the famous folk festival which they aspired to be invited to. They performed extensively in the Rocky Mountain Denver-Boulder Front Range region in 1963 before moving to New York with most of their original members to crash the Greenwich Village folk scene. They were in the mold of other clean-cut groups off the college campuses like the Brothers Four and New Christy Minstrels which sought a nichebetween folk traditionalists and the scruffy, scary emerging protest music scene.

After changing their name to the Serendipity Singers the group’s rise was astonishingly swift. New York pro Bob Bowers became the group’s musical director and helped then develop a play list of mostly original material. Fred Weintraub owner The Bitter End Café featured them in a series of performance leading to appearances on six episodesof ABC TV’s Hootenanny show in the fall of ’63. That in turn got them a recording contract with Philips Records. The experience must have been head-spinning.

The Serendipity Singers' self-titled debut album on Philips was a big hit.

In 1963 The Serendipity Singers was the group’s first album and included Don’t Let the Rain Come Down (It Takes a Crooked Man) went to #6 on the Billboard Hot 100 list and #2 on the magazine’s Adult Contemporary chart. The song also was nominated for a Grammy for Best Performance by a Chorus 1965. Their follow-up single Beans in My Ears hit #30 on the Hot 100 and #5 on the AC chart a few months later. Amazingly that song was banned by several radio stations and the Ed Sullivan Show for “encouraging dangerous behavior in children.” That was about as controversial as the group got.

For a year or so they were a hot commodityon the TV variety show circuit. In addition to the Sullivan Show they were seen on Hollywood A Go-Go, Shindig!, The Dean Martin Show, and The Tonight Show. Then almost as fast as their rise came a decline with the full brunt of the British Invasion. They made five more albums for Phillips through 1965 until cut by the label.

The group was a popular TV attraction. Here they host an episode of Hullabaloo.

The make-up of the group roiled with departures of most of the original members and a rotating cast of replacementsamong them folk singer and storyteller Gamble Rogers who toured with them for a few months in 1966. In 1967 they signed with United Artists Records and tried to shift to a more electric sound. They only released one album with UA before the last of the original members left the group in 1970 and sold the rights to their name.

Various line-ups toured as the Serendipity Singers into the early 21st Century, the most successful led by Laura McKenzie which made a series of mostly holiday themed syndicated TV shows in the early ‘90’s.

In 1999, most the Serendipity Singers’ original members reunited for a concert for the first time since 1966 at Branson, Missouri’s Celebrity Theater as part of the Fifth Annual Cruisin’ Branson Lights Festival. A number of the group members reunited again for the 2003 PBS special and DVD release of This Land is Our Land: The Pop-Folk Years. Billed as A Serendipitous Reunion, the group sang, Don’t Let the Rain Come Down, Down Where the Winds Blow, and Waggoner Lad.

That the same year that the folk music mockumentaryA Mighty Wind did a send-up of just such a show. The New Main Street Singers in the movie were based on the Serendipities and the New Christy Minstrels.

The New Main Street Singers featuring John Michael Higgins and Jane Lynch on the left in the movie A Mighty Wind were modeled on the Serendipity Singers.

As for Don’t Let the Rain Come Down, it was based on a traditional English nursery rhyme The Was a Crooked Man. The song was first recorded as Crooked Little House by Jimmie Rodgers with songwriting credits to Ersel Hickey, an American rockabilly singer, and Ed E. Miller.

Bob Bowers with group members Bryan Sennett and John Madden completely re-imaged the song as a calypso number for the Serendipity singers. On the single and album it was initially credited as traditional but later issues on compilation and live albums credited Sennett and Madden as the writers. Shortly after its initial success it was covered by The Brothers Four, Trini Lopez, and Ronnie Hilton in the United Kingdom.

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Former Irish Monk Put World Navies Under Water
17 May 2020 at 11:18

Former Irish Monk Put World Navies Under Water

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17 May 2020 at 11:18

By: Patrick Murfin

John Philip Holland in the conning tower of one of his submarines.

A bookish looking chap in a bowler hat, walrus moustache, and spectacles so Irish that he had a Gaelic name—Seán Pilib Ó hUallacháin—in addition to his Anglicized moniker, climbed into a vessel of his own creation and sank beneath the waters off ofNew Jersey. It was May 17, 1897 and John Philip Holland successfully demonstratedthe first submarine having power to run submerged for a considerable distance and the first to combineelectric motors for submersible operations and a gasoline enginefor surface cruising. In short he had invented the first entirely practical submarine.

Within three years the boat was snapped up by the U.S. Navy and commissioned the USS Holland, the first of five the inventor built for the service. The Royal Navy bought the design and launched their own HMS Holland, the first of their Holland class subs. The Japanese Imperial Navy was close behind building their own, slightly larger boats based on Holland’s design. Engineers working for the Kaiserliche Marine—Imperial German Navy—soon made additional improvements which rapidly made the initial Holland generation of subs obsolete. A naval arms race was on and warfare at seawas forever changed.

There had been earlier attempts at underwater craft dating back to antiquity. Legend has it that Alexander the Greatwas towed by war galleys in a submersible glass vessel—a form of diving bell. The operative word here is legend. There were several recorded designs for various underwater contraptions and a few actually built, with uniformly disastrous consequences in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Cornelius Jacobszoon Drebbel, a Dutchman in the service of James I of England, designed and built the first successful submarine in 1620. It’s exact design is not known, but several witness attest to demonstration on the Thames. The craft was some sort of enclosed boat that was moved by a small crew using oars. Breathable air was supplied by a process using saltpeter to create oxygen. Despite the success further design work based on it by others that seldom left the page.

Bishop John Wilkins of Chester was the first to describe the use of submersible boats in naval warfare in his Mathematical Magick in 1648:

Tis private: a man may thus go to any coast in the world invisibly, without discovery or prevented in his journey.

Tis safe, from the uncertainty of Tides, and the violence of Tempests, which do never move the sea above five or six paces deep. From Pirates and Robbers which do so infest other voyages; from ice and great frost, which do so much endanger the passages towards the Poles.

It may be of great advantages against a Navy of enemies, who by this may be undermined in the water and blown up.

It may be of special use for the relief of any place besieged by water, to convey unto them invisible supplies; and so likewise for the surprisal of any place that is accessible by water.

It may be of unspeakable benefit for submarine experiments.

There were further experiments in France and Germany in the last decade of the 17th Century and in the first half of the 18th Century there was something of a measurable mania with more than a dozen patents granted. Few of these progressed to the stage of working models let alone vessels capable of carrying men. But in 1747, Nathaniel Symons patented and built the first known working example of the use of a ballast tank for submersion. He used leather bags that could fill with water to submerge the craft. A mechanism was used to twist the water out of the bags and cause the boat to resurface. After that, development stagnated until technological developments of the Industrial Age made rapid advances possible, especially in creating reliable underwater propellant for extended voyages and in air re-supply.

David Bushells Turtle submarine

Americans were among the first to try and use submersibles in war operations. It did not go well. The Turtle in 1776 was a hand-powered egg-shaped thing-a-ma-bob designed by David Bushnell, to accommodate a single man. It was the first submarine capable ofindependent underwater operation and movement,and the first to use screws for propulsion. A patriot, Bushnell built his device to attach mines or torpedoes to the hulls British ships in New York harbor. Apparently after several unsuccessful attempts the Turtle operated by volunteer Sgt. Ezra Lee, prepared to attack the flagship of the blockade squadron, HMS Eagle. She foundered and sank probably because Lee became too exhausted by the strenous effort to move the ungainly craft through turbulent water in the Bay.

In 1800 the French Navy built and sailed on the Seine the Nautilus designed by American Robert Fulton. It had a sail for use on the surface and a screw propeller powered by two men—the first known use of dual propulsion on a submarine. It proved capable of using minesto destroy warships during demonstrations. It is considered the first truly operational submarine. But despite his triumphs and significant support in the Navy, Fulton could not interest the land minded Napoleon Bonaparte to buy the boat. Undeterred, Fulton took it across the Channel where the Royal Navy also ultimately rejected it as well. Disappointed, Fulton returned to the U.S. where he enjoyed greater success with the first commercially viable river steamboat.

Robert Fulton demonstrating the Nautilus for French officers in 1800.

Further experiments continued in Latin America, Germany, and especially France over the next decades.

The first real application of submarines in war came during the American Civil War. The Union obtained the French designed Alligator. The promising craft was the first to use compressed air supply and an air filtration system. It was the first submarine to carry a diver lock, which allowed a diver to plant electrically detonated mines on enemy ships. Initially hand-powered by oars, it was converted after 6 months to a screw propeller powered by a hand crank. She carried a crew of 20. After successful trials the Alligator sank under tow unmanned on its way to its first combat. A later Union developed sub, the Intelligent Whale, was not ready for sea trials until after the war ended. It was abandoned after 20 lost their lives in the tests.

The Confederacy, desperate to break the blockade of its ports, was keenly interested in submarines. Most sank or failed tests. The best known was the CSS H. L. Hunley, named for its designer and chief financier, Horace Lawson Hunley. The ship carried a crew of eight including the captain/pilot and was propelled by a hand cranked screw. It had no air supply beyond what was sealed in the cabin giving it limited range and submersion time. A mine was attached to a long front spar which was used to attach it to the hull of a targeted ship. The Hunley then had to maneuver away from its target and detonate the mine at a safe distance. Essentially she was a death trap. She lost half of her crew in one test dive. Then on February 7, 1864, the Hunley sank the USS Housatonic off of Charleston Harbor, the first time a submarine successfully sank another ship. Unfortunately in maneuvering away, she sank taking with her all hands. In recent years the Hunley was famously raised and restored and is on display at the Warren Lasch Conservation Center, in the former Charleston Navy Yard.

The ill-fated CSS Hunley on dock awaiting deployment.

After the Civil War there was an international race to develop more practical and seaworthy Naval submarines. The development of the self-propelled torpedo in 1866 which meant that submersables could more safely attack at a distance from the target encouraged widespread experimentation and inovation. During the 1870s and 1880s, the basic contours of the modern submarine began to emerge, through the inventions of the English inventor and curate, George Garrett, and his industrialist financier Thorsten Nordenfelt, and a certain Irish inventor.

The 1879 Garrett Resurgam—the second he built with that name—was the first steam powered submersable and was controlled by a pair of hydroplanes amidships. Swedish industrialist Nordenfelt built a series of warships based on incremental improvements of Garrett’s designs and peddled them to the navies of Greece, its enemy the Ottoman Empire, and the Russians. The Ottoman Abdül Hamid became the first sub to succesfully fire a self-propelled torpedo while submerged.

Despite these developments, submarines were still limited in range and dangerously unreliable which is where John Philip Holland comes in.

John Philip Holland, Jr. was born on February 21, 1841 in Liscannor, County Clare, in remote western Ireland’s Gaeltacht region. His father was a member of the British Coastguard Service who manned a lifeboat for shipwreck rescues. His mother, Máire Ní Scannláin (Mary Scanlon) spoke Gaelic exclusively and English was a second language in his home. He did not learn proper English until he was sent to St. Macreehy’s National School which by law offered instruction only in English. He continued his education and mastery of English in 1858 with the Christian Brothers in Ennistymon.

After completing his education, Holland joined the Christian Brothers and was a teacher, mostly of mathematicsat several schools around Ireland. His interest in submarines was sparked by reading press accounts of the famous ironclad duel between the USS Monitor and CSS Virginia (a/ka/ Monitor) in 1862. He recognized that the battle had altered the future of naval warfare. Heavily armored steam ships seemed to be nearly invincible to traditional solid shot naval artillery ammunition and even bounced explosive rounds. He became convinced that underwater attack would be critical in attacking the new classes of warships which were soon rapidly being built by world navies. He doodled and sketched and eventually submitted a rough design proposal to the Royal Navy in hopes of getting funded. The Navy was not interested in the scribbling of an Irish Monk.

Never a hale and hearty man, ill health prompted him to leave the Christian Brothers in 1873 and as part of a second wave of Irish immigration from the Western counties, came to America. At first he worked for an engineering firm doing calculations. During this period he slipped on ice in Bostonshattering a leg. During a lengthy bed-ridden convalescence, Holland returned to working on refinements of his submarine design. He was encouraged by Fr. Isaac Whelan, a priest who helped attend his recovery.

Holland submitted a proposal to the U.S, Navy in 1875 but was again turned down. Whelan may have been the connectionto a new client ready and eager to build and deploy a secret weapon—the Irish Republican Brotherhood—Fenians—which was well financed by wealthy Irish-Americans. Always plotting, the Brotherhood hoped to use Holland’s boat to attack and sink British shipping in Canadian waters to spur a war between the U.S. and Britain that would divert enough English might to leave the door opento a successful rebellion in Ireland.

he Fenian Ram on display with a memorial to Holland. Her capabilities piqued the interest of the U.S. Navy.

Holland relocated to sea-side Patterson, New Jersey where he taught at St. John’s Catholic Schoolfor six years while he worked on designs, and built models and prototype. By 1881 the Fenians were so encouraged that they upped their development money allowing Holland to leave teaching for good to concentrate on building a practical ship. He completed the Fenian Ram but soon had a falling out with the IRB leadership over disputed payments. Despite its name the Fenian Ram was armed with a clever nine-inch pneumatic gun eleven feet long, mounted along the boat’scenterline and firing forwardout of her bow. It operated like modern submarine torpedo tubes—a watertight bow cap was normally kept shut, allowing the six-foot-long dynamite-filled steel projectiles to be loaded into the tube from the interior of the submarine. The inner doorwas then shut and the outer door opened. 400 psi of air was used to shoot the projectile out of the tube. To reload, the outer door was again shut and the water in the tube was blown into the surrounding ballast tank by more compressed air. She could have been deadly.

But without a buyer the Fenian Ram and another improved proto-type, Holland III lay idle until 1883 when the Brotherhood stole both boats and took them to New Haven, Connecticut. But they had no one who knew how to operate them. Sheepishly, they asked Holland for help. He understandably turned them down flat. The Ram was put in storage but hauled out in 1916 and put on display in Madison Square Garden to raise funds for victims of the Easter Rising. Eventually she was purchased for display at the Patterson Museum where she can be seen today.

But the reported capabilities of the Ram and the Holland III finally attracted the attention of the Navy whose encouragement helped secure private investment. Holland continued to build ever better prototypes until his1897 demonstration. The Navy purchased and commissioned that boat as the USS Holland in 1900.

A year earlier the Holland Torpedo Boat Company, later reorganized as the Electric Boat Company, was created with Holland as the chief engineer and Isaac Leopold Rice as President. The company got a commission to build six more Holland class subs at the Crescent Shipyard in Elizabeth, New Jersey.

The launch of the HMS Holland I at Vickers Ship Yard, October 2, 1901.

In 1901 the Royal Navy decided to overlook Holland’s Fenian connections and Irish Republican sympathies and ordered a boat from him. And Holland’s company was quite willing to oblige. A virtual clone of the American ship, the HMS Holland I (or HM Submarine Torpedo Boat No 1) was built in high secrecy at the Vickers Maxim Shipyard at Barrow-in-Furnessand entered service in 1902. She was paired with a sister Holland boat and tender to comprise the First Submarine Flotilla. She almost saw action in 1904 when the Flotilla was dispatched to attack Russian ships that mistakenly sunk a number of British fishing vessels in the North Sea. Diplomacy diffused the crisis and the ships were recalled before they went into action.

HMS Holland I, several years obsolete, was decommissioned in 1914 and sunk under tow to the scrap yard. She was subsequently refloated and is now on display at the Royal Navy Submarine Museum.

The Russians built a fleet of Holland class boats under license and the Japanese bought 5 Holland boats which were assembled at the Yokosuka Naval Arsenal. Later with the assistance of Electric Boat engineers they built two more, larger subs based on the Holland model. The Russo-Japanese War of 1905 presented the occasion for the use of the new subs in combat. The Russians assembled 7 subs at Vladivostok into the world’s first operational submarine fleet with the boats taking turns on 24 hour patrols. In April the Russion sub Rom was fired upon by Japanese surface torpedo boats but withdrew safely. The Japanese fleet never had time to deploy.

Developments by the Germans made the Holland generation obsolete within ten years. The U.S. Navy decommissioned the USS Holland as early as 1905. Far more advanced subs were engaged in World War I in which submarines played a significant role.

John Philip Holland late in life.

Holland didn’t quite live to see it. He diedon August 12, 1914 in Newark, New Jersey at the age of 73. He worked on submarine designs for more than fifty of those years. Not bad for a former Monk and mild mannered school teacher with no engineering or naval architecture training whatsoever.

His company, Electric Boat, is now part of the mega defense contractor General Dynamics and continues to be the primary builder of U.S. Navy submarines.

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Starlight on the Rails—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
16 May 2020 at 21:41

Starlight on the Rails—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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16 May 2020 at 21:41

By: Patrick Murfin

Starlight on the Rails by Utah Phillips.

I was reminded that yesterday would have been Bruce Phillips’ 85th birthday. My old friend and Fellow Worker in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was one of the towering figures of American folk music and an inveterate organizer and trouble maker. Back around the time I first met him about 1971 or ’72 on a self-organized tour of folk clubs, saloons, and occasional college coffee houses he was billing himself as U. Utah Phillips the Golden Voice of the Great Southwest. He hung his hat at the IWW General Headquarters Hall on Lincoln Avenue in Chicagoon that trip and jungled up on a folding army cot in the Library. One of the brilliant original songs he played and sang back then was Starlight on the Rails.

The original sleeve from Utah Phillips' album Good Though on Philo Records, 1973,

The song was featured on his breakthroughPhilo album Good Though! in 1973 along with other now classic songs including Queen of the Rails, Daddy What’s a Train—try not tearing up for that one—, Phoebe Snow and the famous moose turd pie story. It was also the title piece for his 1974 song book,

Utahy's 1974 songbook Starlight on the Rails & Other Songs.

Perhaps Starlight on the Rails resonated especially for me was that like Utah I also grew up “way out west where the states are square” and as a boy in Cheyenne, Wyoming watched the last of the great steam locomotives—the Union Pacific Big Boy engines and listened for their whistles on back-yard campouts under the canopy of the Milky Way.

In this recording the song is prefaced by the sounds of locomotive and a recitation of quote by novelist Thomas Wolf from Of Time and the River. Utah’s close friend and folk music mentor Rosalie Sorrels from Idaho sings harmony on the cut.

Utah Phillips a folk elder, Wobbly Old Timer, and transmitter of an oral tradition of resistance and solidarity.

For me, now an old man confined to walking a few blocks on the streets of a Midwestern berg during the Coronavirus lockdown, Starlight on the Rails represents a longing to get away and frankly to be young again.

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The Root of Root Beer and Charles Elmer Hires
16 May 2020 at 09:49

The Root of Root Beer and Charles Elmer Hires

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16 May 2020 at 09:49

By: Patrick Murfin

Pharmacist, teetotaler, and entrepreneur Charles Elmer Hires.

Root beer is fading fast. Once one of America’s favorite soft drinks it is in danger of joining other 19th Century concoctions in obscurity. Sarsaparillahas already virtually disappeared except for Western theme parks and roadside tourist attractions. Ginger ale survives mostly as a cocktail mixer. Cream Soda, both clear and tawny, lingers in some isolated regional niches. Sure, you can still get root beer in bottles and cans at the local storeand fill an enormous cup at a gas station/convenience store pop machine but it has been largely eclipsed by ubiquitous colas, super sweet sodas, and more recently iced teas and energy drinks. The soda fountains and root beer stand drive-ins that once fueled its popularity have virtually vanished.

The once popular beverage originated with Charles Elmer Hires, a Philadelphia Quaker druggist on May 16, 1866 according to several sources. But that year Hires, who was born in 1851, was only 15 years old and while he was working as a clerk in a local drug store, had not yet opened his own shopand certainly was not on a honeymoon in New Jersey where, according to the tale, he was inspired by the female proprietor of the hotel served a hot drink she called root tea.

The information on the inspiration may, or may not, be accurate, but the date is clearly wrong, yet persists across multiple sources. Hires was an enterprising youngster, however and raised the money to open his own store before he was 20 by the sale fuller’s earth—a pharmacy staple—he obtained, you should excuse the expression, dirt cheap from the potter’s clay dug up in the excavation of foundations near his employer’s shop. He married shortly after and was soon marketing an early version of his invention around 1871.

No surprise there. Pharmacists concocted most of the classic American soft drinks in the post-Civil War eraand peddled them as miraculous health elixirs. They took off because they tasted better than most patent medicine and did not have the high alcohol content of those bottled remedies. In fact Hires, like other druggists, was a teetotaler and Temperance advocate who promoted his beverage as a booze alternative. Most druggists also continued to make money on the high proof patent medicines which they could piously claim as medically beneficial. It was the best of both worlds and for several decades made the local drug storeone of the most lucrative of Main Street businesses—and a social center.

An early ad for Hires' Root Beer--for just a quarter the box could make 5 gallons of root beer at home when mixed with water, sugar and yeast.

The root in his root tea inspiration was sassafras, long regarded as having medicinal benefits. He was soon selling his more concentrated powdered version in packages for home use. Water, sugar, and yeast need to be added. But you could still not buy a glass in his shop.

It wasn’t until 1875 that he began to market a syrup to other pharmacies, some of whom had opened the latest fad—the soda fountain. These were the first to mix soda water and sell it by the glass.

The next year the 1876 Centennial Expositionin his own home town, Philadelphia, represented a golden marketing opportunity to expand his business. Somewhat reluctantly he was persuaded by the Reverend Dr. Russell Conwell, a prominent temperance leader. to open up a refreshment kiosk at the fair where he sold “the temperance drink and the greatest health-giving beverage in the world.” He was also now selling his product as root beer, not root tea. Fellow temperance advocates had convinced him that the name would attract hard drinking Pennsylvania working men and offer them an alternative to the stuff from breweries. When heavily charged with soda, the drink even raised a lager-like head of foam to complete the illusion.

Needless to say, the exposure from the fair helped Hires’ product take off and he was soon shipping his extract syrup far beyond the City of Brotherly Lovejust in time for the explosion of popularity of soda fountains.

As late as the 1920's Hires was still marketing his root beer in the home mix box along side of bottled and soda fountain versions.

In 1886 Hires followed the lead of other pharmacy created soft drinks like Coca-Cola and Dr. Pepper and began to sell a bottled version of his root beer for home consumption. By the turn of the century, Hires bottled root beer was sold nationally and was featured at many soda fountains.

Naturally, other manufactures entered the fraywith their own creations, some of them mildly alcoholic—usually less than 2% or about the same as near beer. Most, like Hires, used a sassafras base but one early competitor, Barq’s, which was founded in 1898, employed sarsaparilla instead with a variety of other flavoring herbs and spices.

In 1919, just in time for both Prohibitionand the triumph of the automobile, Roy Allen opened a root beer stand in Lodi, California, which led to the development of A&W Root Beer. Aside from roadside service convenience, A&W’s big innovation was serving its signature drink in frosted glass mugs. This was soon copied by most soda fountains and by upstart competitors like the Midwest’s iconic Dog n Suds carhop served drive-ins of the 1950’s.

Prohibition did indeed spread the popularity of root beer, just as it did for most carbonated soft drinks. The Depression somewhat nicked sales, and many adults returned to guzzling the real stuff, but the popularity of the drink with children and teens still made it a good business.

Snoopy quaffing a few root beers with Bill Mauldin was an annual Veterans Day feature in Peanuts.

In the ‘50’s and ‘60’s root beer held its cultural niche. It was the proclaimed favorite of Dennis the Menace in both comicsand on the TV sitcom. And every year on Veteran’s Day in Peanuts Snoopy in his World War I Ace outfit would “head over to Bill Malden’s for a root beer quaff.”

How successful root beer was as a deterrent to alcohol is open to question. It was my beverage of choice as the kid growing up in Cheyenne, but the attraction was that it looked so much like real beer in those frosty mugs with the head of foam. I felt grown up drinking them, pretending it was real beer. It turned out to be a training beverage and no deterrent at all.

We owe the now very hard to find root beer in a frosty mug of A&W and other popular drive in root beer stands.

But the soda fountains and drive-ins are the stuff of mere nostalgia now. Try finding a frosty mug of root beer. And it just ain’t the same in a foam cup over chipped ice.

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Somewhere Over the Rainbow—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
15 May 2020 at 22:17

Somewhere Over the Rainbow—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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15 May 2020 at 22:17

By: Patrick Murfin

Somewhere Over the Rainbow sung by Judy Garland with Harold Arlen on piano for a 1940 San Francisco concert.

We are celebrating the birthday of L. Frank Baum, the creator of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz and his surprising prairie populist and feminist credentialsin a blog post earlier today. His children’s book series is still well beloved but his creation is best remembered for the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz which is revered as one of the great classics of American film and for a song Judy Garland sang early in the movie which became her theme song.

The song was composed by Harold Arlen for the MGM musical fantasy with lyrics by Yip Harburg. Arlen’s music perfectly captured both wistful longing and hope. Harburg’ words, however, came closer to reflecting Baum’s idealistic radicalism than anything else in the film. It resonated perfectly with a nation just emerging from a grim decade of the Great Depression. Harburg, who had collaborated successfully with several composers, was known for the social commentary of his lyrics, and his left/liberal sensibilities. He championed racial and gender equality, labor movement, and was also an ardent critic of organized religion. Baum would have heartily approved of it all.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow collaborators Yip Harburg (left) and Harold Arlen.

Although he was never a member of the Communist Party and critical of its authoritarianism, Harburg he was a member of the Socialist Party, and joked that Yip referred to the Young People’s Socialist League, the Yipsels. He was also involved with other radical, pro-labor and civil rights groups. His best known Broadway show, Finian's Rainbow in 1947 was probably the first Broadway musical with a racially integrated chorus line, and featured his When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich. In 1950 he was hauled before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blackballed in the entertainment industry for a while. He was better able to return to work on the stage than in Hollywood.

He died of a heart attack while driving on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California, on March 5, 1981at the age of 84.

Judy Garland as Dorothy Gale sang Over the Rainbow as a tornado threatened in the opening black-and-white sequence of The Wizard of Oz in 1939.

As for the song, it was the hands down winner of the 1940 Academy Award for Best Original Song. Garland’s original recording—not the same version as in the film—was ranked the #1 recording of the 20th century in a poll conducted by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The American Film Institute named it the best movie song on theAFI’s 100 Years...100 Songs list. Garland sang the song at almost all of her concert performances and countless times on radio and TV broadcasts.

Last year’s acclaimed late-life bio flicJudy sang a gut wrenching version for a scene of Garland’s final Talk of the Town concert in London in 1969. Zellweger reaped numerous awards including the Oscar for Best Actress for the performance.

Despite Garland’s almost total identification with the song, today the version most searched for on Google is the 1993 recording by Hawaiian ukulele player with a falsetto voice, Israel Kamakawiwoʻole.

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The Prairie Radicalism of the Real Wizard of Oz—L. Frank Baum
15 May 2020 at 09:20

The Prairie Radicalism of the Real Wizard of Oz—L. Frank Baum

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15 May 2020 at 09:20

By: Patrick Murfin

L. Frank Baum looking far more prosperous than he ever was. No matter how much money the Oz books and their stage adaptions made him, he promptly lost the cash in one failed business venture after another.

The 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz remains the one of the most popular films of all time, beloved by every new generation exposed to it.

But however entertaining, it obscuresthe raging Prairie Populism and open feminism that the creator of the original stories espoused.

L. Frank Baum, one of America’s the most prolificand enduring children’s authors, was born on May 15, 1856 in Chittenango, New York. His father had made his fortune in the Pennsylvania oil boom and manufactured lubricants. His motherwas an outspoken feminist. The family lived comfortably in a large home.

Frank, one of ten children, was a sickly boy with a heart condition. Protected from strenuous activity, including usual childhood rough house play, he was tutored at home and spent most of his time readingand playing fantasy games with his siblings. Although enthralledwith the magic of fairy tales, he was repelled by the frightening violence of the Brothers Grimm and by the heavy moralizing. At an early age he decided that he wanted to create magical stories for modern children that dispensed with the violence, stock characters,and monsters of the European tales and which reflected American attitudes and outlook.

Baum as a very unhappy military school cadet in 1868.

After an unhappy two year brush with military school, Baum dropped out and decided to make his own way in the world. He first took up journalism and quickly had some success, becoming a reporter on the New York World and shortly after founding a newspaper in Pennsylvania. He also took up raising exotic chickens, edited a magazine for poultry farmers, and wrote a book on the Hamburg breed in which he specialized.

At the age of 25 Baum went to New York to study acting and appeared in several shows. Because of his family’s wealth Baum was pursued by producers to invest in their shows with promises of good roles. His life-long interest in the theaterbrought him repeatedly to bankruptcy. Baum’s father built him his own theater, or “Opera House” in Richberg, New York where he founded his own company and began writing plays for it.

The Maid of Aaranwas a modest success in 1882 which he wrote, produced, directed, and starred in. He also composed the music. The songs were integrated into the story, almost unheard of in American musical theater at the time. While touring with this show, the Richberg theater burned down during a performance of another play, the ominously titled Matches.

Baum--young actor and playwright, 1881

The same year he married Maude Gage, the daughter of Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of the leading Suffragists and feminists and close associate of Elizabeth Cady Stanton who Baum adored and who deeply influenced his political and religious thought—he was a consistent advocate of women’s rights and became, like Matilda, a Theosophist.

With a new family to support, Baum left the theater to try his hand atbusiness. First he worked as an axle grease salesman for his father, and then in rapid succession he tried and failed at other businesses and occupations changing careers as“other men change their shirts.” He opened a general merchandise store in Aberdeen, Dakota Territory where his willingness to extend credit to drought strapped local farmersled to failure. He then returned to journalism as the editor and publisher of a weekly newspaper which, though nominally Republican was a staunch advocate for voting rights for women and was familiar with and sympathetic to emergingPopulism. His mother-in-law lived with his wife and growing family—four children—during this period.

When the newspaper failed in 1891 the family moved to Chicago where Baum wrote for the Evening Post. He founded and edited a journal forprofessional window dressers, published his first book—on breeding Hamburg rabbits, and became a traveling salesman. Mathilda Gage encouraged Baum to write and publish the tales he was already telling his own children.

His first effort in 1897, Mother Goose in Prose was a success with illustrations by leading artist Maxwell Parish. With Parish in demand by leading national magazines, Baum teamed up with artist W.W. Denslow for Father Goose, His Book, which became the bestselling children’s book of 1898.

In 1900 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz made Baum famous. The characters were symbolic--the Scarecrow stood for embattled farmers, the Tin Man industrial workers, and the Cowardly Lion the working class unaware of its own power and cowed mirage of invincibility of the robber Barron ruling class--the Wizard himself.

But it was his next book in1900 which really established him—The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It was a sensation and the public demanded more. And Baum gave it to them. Baum collaborated with producer Fred R. Hamlin and composer Paul Tietjens on a “musical extravaganza” based on the book. It opened in Chicago then on to Broadway for a very successful run. The show touredthe country for ten years.

Modern critics have recognized the themes of populism in the Oz books and noted his strong female characters, both heroines and villinesses.

Baum returned to Oz in 1904 with the publication of The Marvelous Land of Oz and there after produced a new Oz book almost every year until he died—a total of 16 titles in all, the last published posthumously. Several times he tried to end the series, but returned to it by popular demand or when one of his business ventures failed again.

Meanwhile Baum wrote other children’s books under his own name and various nom-de-plumes. In addition there were numerous short stories, poetry collections, adult novels, and theater pieces, and screen plays. The output was prodigious.

Braun moved his family to Hollywood in 1911 and was forced into bankruptcy the following year by the expenses of an odd lecture, film and theater piece called The Fairylogue and Radio-Plays and weak sales of some of his non-Oz books. He had to sell the rights to many of his earlier works to recover and redoubled production of Oz books.

But the siren call of the theater was irresistible to Baum. He joined and wrote most of the material for Harry Marston Haldeman’s group The Uplifters, which also featured Will Rogers. Baum’s last full scale play was The Tic Toc Man of Oz, which was successfully produced in Los Angeles but could not find a producer in New York.

His Magesty the Scarecrow of Oz was one of the most successful of the films written and directed by Baum for his own movie studio. The earliest version of Wonderful Wizard of Oz came to the screen in 1902 and there was another version in 1910. After Baum's death comic Larry Semon starred in another version in 1925, all long before the MGM Technicolor musical extravaganza in 1939.

Baum also was interested in motions pictures and in 1914 founded his own company, The Oz Film Manufacturing Company to produce Oz films. Several were made to critical acclaim, but box office failure. An attempt to reorient the company to adult audiences as Dramatic Feature Films by Baum’s son Frank Joslyn Baum ended in failure by 1917.

The failure of his cinema dreams took a toll on Baum’s always fragile health. On May 5, 1919 he suffered a stroke and died just days short of his 63rd birthday.

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Rain Drops Keep Fallin’ on My Head—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
14 May 2020 at 19:01

Rain Drops Keep Fallin’ on My Head—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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14 May 2020 at 19:01

By: Patrick Murfin

Rain Drops Keep Fallin' on my Head sung by B.J. Thomas. Yesterday sunshine. Today rain. That’s life in a nutshell with or without Coronavirus confinement. Today’s song, Rain Drops Keep Fallin’ on My Head, shares one thing with yesterday’s We’ll Sing in the Sunshine— a nearly insanely catchy tune. Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head was written by the power duo of Hal David and Burt Bacharach for the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid which starred Paul Newman, Robert Redford, and Katherine Ross. It won an Oscar for Best Original Song and David and Bacharach also won for Best Original Score. Rain Drops Keep...

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Bad Day on Bloody Island— Just Another Army Massacre of Native People
14 May 2020 at 07:58

Bad Day on Bloody Island— Just Another Army Massacre of Native People

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14 May 2020 at 07:58

By: Patrick Murfin

Pomo survivors of the massacre on the island in Clear Lake were gunned down by militia men as they swam to shore. The few who got away were hunted along the Russian River and 50 more were killed over the next days.

Recent headlines showing that the Navaho Nation is suffering the most extreme outbreak of Coronavirus cases in the United States and that the leaders of two Sioux reservations in South Dakota have been threatened by the openly anti-Indian Governor for taking precautions to limit travel into and out of their land while the state is under some of the loosest restrictions in the country illustrate that the more than 400 year war of occupation against our native peoples never really ended. A look back at an egregious but little known atrocity reminds us of that genocidal struggle.

May 15, 1850 was a very bad day for the Pomo, a Native American people from northernCalifornia that you have probably never heard of. Because no one wants to talk about them, or what happened that gruesome day when Lt. Nathaniel Lyon led troopers of the U.S. First Dragoons Regiment, against a village on an island in Clear Lake. Sketchy and contradictory accounts claim that between 100 and 400 mostly women, children, and old men were killed and another 50 or more were run down and slaughtered as they tried to escape along the Russian River.

Of course massacres of Native villages were not even then something new. They were, you should pardon the expression, as American as apple pie. And before the first protest, let me acknowledge that there were also massacres of white settlers committed by various tribes. What should probably be called the 400-year-long War of the Conquest of North America was brutal and terrible—a conquering people on one side and a desperate, doomed defense on the other, quarter not asked and seldom given.

The trouble is after all these years, even after school textbooks have taken a more sympathetic view of the native resistance, popular culture has kept the memories of hair-raising, bloody Red savages committing unspeakable atrocities on nice settler women in gingham and sunbonnets and their innocent, adorable blond children alive and well. Burning villages and troopers tossing papooses on their sabertips, not so much.

And it is also important to remember that the cycle of massacre and mayhem generally started with the invader/settlers. Way back in 1637 in the Pequot War, English colonists and Mohegan and Narragansett allies, launched a night attack on a large Pequot village on the Mystic River in present-day Connecticut, where they burned the inhabitants in their homes and killed all survivors, for total fatalities of about 600–700. And the village that was attacked had not even been involved in the minor depredations in Massachusetts Bay which started the war.

That also started a pattern. White militia and later regular troops could not tell “good Indians” from “Bad Indians.” They all looked alike to them, and frankly they did not give a damn. Time after time peaceful bands, even allies, were attacked and brutalized because they were easy to find and at hand. Notable instances include the massacre of the Praying Indians—a village of Lenape (a/k/a Delaware) who had been converted by pacifist Moravian missionaries—by Pennsylvania Militia in 1782 and the infamous Sand Creek Massacre by the Colorado Volunteer Cavalry who attacked an massacred Black Kettle’s peaceful Cheyenne who were flying an American flag in 1864. The Bloody River Massacre, as we shall see, fit into the same familiar pattern.

Since native warriors were notoriously hard for militias or Army troops to engage in the field—they tended to break up into small groups after raidsand melt into whatever wilderness was available—settler troops early on began seeking out villages which, even if hostile were usually empty of warriors. That became pretty much standard U.S. Army operational tacticsin the Indian warfare after General William Henry Harrison and his troops pushed deep into Shawnee territory to attack Prophetstown, seat of Tecumseh’s and the Shawnee Prophet Tenskwatawa’s confederacy. The idea was to disrupt the food supply of the tribes and to force them to come to the defense of their homes. After destroying several impotent villages, Harrison finally fell upon the main camp of hostiles defending Prophetstown and decisively whooped them at the Battle of Tippecanoe. After that searches and attacks on villages became standard operating procedure. Again, the hapless Pomo fell victim to the same strategy.

The Pomo had one of the most unfortunate of histories. At the dawn of the 19th Century it is estimated about 10,000 of the loosely related peoples now lumped together as Pomo lived in a broad swath of northern California as hunter/gatherers and fishers who also traded with neighboring tribes for items using the magnesium rich red clay of the region which was used in making beads, dyes, and face paint. Not politically united, they lived in small bands or clans and spoke 7 related, but mutuallyunintelligible languages.

They had largely escaped the slavery and misery of the Mission Indian further south. But as Europeans pressed more deeply into north, they came under pressure. They were attacked by Russian fur traders who wanted to force them to abandon their traditional hunting and fishing to trap for trade goods. Then the Dons of California began to arrive with pieces of paper from a far off king giving them huge land grants.

Without central leadership and lacking a well-developed warrior culture the Pomo around the Big Valley Region and Clear Lake, were easily turned into semi-enslaved peons on Salvador Vallejo’s vast 1844 grant from Mexico, Rancho Lupyomi. The men were turned into vaqueros as Vallejo and his brother introduced beef cattle to the range. Women were discouraged from traditional fishing and foraging and some were turned into house servants. Life was hard, and punishments cruel, but it was about to get worse. Much worse.

When engaging in seasonal fishing in Norther California lakes, Pomo bands built tule reed structures like this. Elsewhere the built a variety of crude huts out of whatever materials were available.

That same year American settlers aided by explorer and U.S. Army Captain John C. Frémont acting on his own authority established the Bear Flag Republic. Meanwhile the United States and Mexico went to war. Commodore David Stockton and the Pacific Squadron arrived to claim California and General Stephen Kearny led 150 Dragoons overland from Kansas via Santa Fe, New Mexico. After several battles with the Californios, California was secured and later ceded by Mexico to the U.S. in the treaty of Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Under the circumstances American settlers Andrew Kelsey and Charles Stone were able to force a purchase of a large number of Vallejo’s cattle and established a ranchero of their own in 1847. With a handful of hired men, they raided Pomo villages, rounded up men women and children, and made them build a stockade in which to imprison themselves. All arms, down to simple knivesand hatchets, as well as fishing gear were confiscated. With their wives and children held hostage, the men were once again used as vaqueros—and in back breaking laborbuilding the grand hacienda and outbuildings, digging wells, erecting fencing, and other work. Women and girls were called to the house as sex slaves for the masters and beaten, sometimes to death if they resisted.

Rations for the enslaved Pomo were four cups of crudely milled flour a day—no meat or protein. It was hardly enough to survive on and soon many were dying of starvation and disease. Then, things got even worse.

In 1849 Kelsey took 50 of the Pomo men as laborers on expedition to the new gold fields to try back-breaking placer mining. Kelsey got sick. His claim did not produce and in desperation he sold all of his slave’s rations to other miners. Most of the Pomo starved to death and only two made it back with Kelsey.

The remaining Pomo at the hacienda were becoming desperate. Under the leadership of Chief Augustine two of the men stole Stone’s horse in an attempt to kill a cow and smuggle the meat back to the stockade. But in a thunderstorm, Stone’s horse ran off. Knowing that the enraged Stone would wreck vengeance, horrible vengeance, Augustine had his wife, a maid in the hacienda, pour water on all of Kelsey and Stone’s gunpowderrendering it useless. At dawn the men armed only with a handful of hastily made and crude bows, cudgels, farm tools, and stones attacked the house in force. Kelsey quickly fell with an arrow and died. Stone tried to escape by a window and to run for cover. It is said that Augustine personally found him and crushed his head with arock.

The Pomo knew there would be trouble. They hastily gathered all of theprovisions they could carry, rounded up the families, and fled northhoping to join up with other Pomo bands.

Nathaniel Lyon as a Brigadier General and Commander of the Department of the West during the Civil War.

Word of the killing quickly reached a U.S. garrison and Lt. Lyons set out in pursuit. He got word of a large Pomo fishing camp on an island known to the Indians as Badon-napo-ti (Island Village), at the north end of Clear Lake. Lyons assumed the fugitive Pomo had headed there. He was wrong, those Pomo steered clear of the lake as they made a dash north towards Oregon Territory. The Pomo on the island did not even speak the same language and were, as far as they knew, at peace with the United States. Most were Habematolel Pomo of Upper Lake and from a band from the Robinson Rancheria. Most able bodied men were off hunting in the north leaving the fishing and drying of the catch to their women and children.

When Lyon arrived on the scene he recognized that the Island afforded the Indians some natural protection. He quickly sent to the Arsenal at Beniciawhere he obtained two small brass field guns and two whale boats that were hauled overland. Outfitting each boat with the cannon in the prow, he launched them in secret from the southern shore of the lake. Meanwhile highly undisciplined mounted militia joined his Dragoons.

On the morning of the attack Lyon opened fire on the village from the boats attacking the south end of the island. That naturally sent the inhabitants of the camp stampeding in a panic to the north of the island where they were cut down by musket fire from the wooded shore. The cavalry then splashed across the shallow water and began cutting down everyone they encountered with saber slashes. Babies and small children were bayonetted by dismounted troops and their bodies thrown into the water.

The Army encountered virtually no resistance. Lyon reported three light injuries. Almost every living person on the island was killed. Many of those who tried to escape in the water were shot as they swam or drowned. A few made it to shore and a desperate run for safety.

One six year old girl, Ni’ka managed to escape the slaughter by hiding under the water and breathing through tulle reed. Later known as Lucy Moreshe became a folk hero to her people and her descendants continue to work to memorialize the massacre.

Lyon ordered his men to pursue the escapees and as noted over the next few days they hunted down and killed about 50 survivors. A general war againstall native people in the north continued for month with members of any and all tribes ruthlessly killed whenever they were encountered. Large numbers of usually drunken Militia did most of this dirty work, but the Dragoons also participated.

Lyon, already cited for bravery in the Mexican War for capturing enemy cannon in the Battle for Mexico City,was proclaimed a hero all over again and his advancement in the Army was assured. He was soon sent to Bloody Kansas where conflicts with Missouri Border Ruffians made him an ardent anti-slavery man and loyal Republican. In 1861 as commander of the St. Louis Armory, he kept the powder and weapons there out of the hands of the pro-Confederate state government, secretly armed Republican Wide Awake militia, and attacked Governor’s Jackson’s camp, marching his prisoners through St. Louis. He also ordered his troops to fire onrioting southern sympathizers killing 75.

For his ruthless efficiency, Lyon was promoted to Brigadier General and made Commander of the Department of the West, relieving the incompetent but politically well-connectedJohn C. Frémont. Lyon at the head of Federal regulars and four quickly mustered and armed regiments of loyalUnionist Missouri Volunteers pursued Jackson and his troops across the state. After forcing the Rebels out of the capital of Jefferson City, he beat them at the Battle of Booneville, forcing them to retreat to the southwest.

On August 10, 1861 he caught up to the force of the Missouri Militia and Confederate troops under the command of Ben McCullochnear Springfield at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek. Lyon was killedduring the battle while trying to rally his outnumbered soldiers. Although the battle was a technical Confederate victory, it broke the power of the south to operate conventional forces in the state and kept Missouri in the Union. That made Lyon one of the first great martyr heroes of the Union.

Keeping the noble hero’s reputation untarnishedonly partly explains how the Massacre at Bloody Island was quickly strippedfrom California’s collective memory.

As for the scattered Pomo survivors of the nasty little war, they lived on in small bands, many of them back in virtual slavery to local rancheros. Later, despite pleas for a unified reservation with enough land to hunt and fish, the local bands were assigned small Rancherias on marginal land. They were among the poorest of California Indians, and that is saying a lot. They survived on the tiny plots through much of the 20th Centurybut current policy aims to move them to urban areas.

As brief as it is, the original Bloody Island historical maker was riddled with errors and glorified the massacre as a battle. Protesters have smeared the marker with red paint in protest. A more historically correct marker was erected near the passing highway in 2005 by the state of California and the decedents of a Pomo girl who survived the massacre by hiding in the lake and breathing through a tule reed.

As for the battle ground, Clear Lake was drainedand “reclaimed” for agriculture in the 1930’s. The island is now a mound rising from the dusty lake bed. It is a California State Park. In 1942 an outfit called the Native Sons of the Golden West erected a historical marker a third of a mile off of U.S. Highway 20 noting that it was the site of a Battle between Cavalry under “Captain” Lyon and Indians under Chief Augustine. It attracted few visitorsas the entire episode goes unmentioned in California history texts.

A more historically correct marker was erected near the passing highway in 2005 by the state of California and the decedents of a Pomo girl who survived the massacre by hiding in the lake and breathing through a tule reed.

Just to set matters straight, however, a second plaque was erected in 2005 by the Department of Parks and Recreationand the Lucy Moore Foundation, telling the story in greater, and more accurate detail.

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We’ll Sing in the Sunshine—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
13 May 2020 at 20:45

We’ll Sing in the Sunshine—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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13 May 2020 at 20:45

By: Patrick Murfin

We'll Sing in the Sunshine by Gale Garnett.

Another near-perfect if delightfully cool afternoon here in the boonies of the Chicago metroplex. On my daily stroll I found myself singing an old song that I fell in love with back in 1964 when I was a nerdy Cheyenne teenager—We’ll Sing in the Sunshine by Gale Garnett. It was a big hit that summer but both the song and singer seem to have faded from popular memory.

Gale Zoë Garnett was a 22 year old Canadian singer when she broke out with her own original song. What made the song so memorable, besides the catchy hook were the lyrics which stood a traditional male love ‘em and leave ‘em trope on its head. Medieval bards and Childe Ballads through American folk music, blues, and pop to rock and soul were all filled with charmingly roguish and romantic foot-loose roamers who dally with comely lasses and move on with just a twinge of regret because, well, that’s just the kind of man they were. Sometimes, just sometimes, a line or two might consider the girl heartbroken and/or ruined as an afterthought.

Garnett’s song about a girl promising only to dally with lad before she will “be on my way” turned the tables. It was a directed product of the post-Pill Sexual Revolution of the mid-‘60’s and she was in her mini-skirts and long black hair was the perfect messenger.

Garnett was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and moved to Canada with her family when she was 11. She made her public singing debut in 1960, while at the same time pursuing an acting career, making guest appearances on TV shows like 77 Sunset Strip. She made her New York nightclub debut in 1963 and was signed by RCA Victor Records that same year. The next year RCA released her debut album My Kind of Folk Songs and We’ll Sing in the Sunshine was the run-away hit off of the LP.

A re-issue of Garnett's first album more prominantly featured the title of her big hit.

The song hit #4 on the Billboard Hot 100, #2 in Canada, #1 on the Adult Contemporary singles chart for seven weeks, and a Top 50 Country hit. The record waltzed away with the Grammy for Best Folk Recording.

Garnett never matched that success again although she did continue to record with more success in Canada than south of the border. In the late ‘60’s she made a leap to psychedelic folk rock her new band The Gentle Reign. She has continued to act, most notably voicing the character Sharon in the 1967 Rankin-Bass animated TV special Monster Mash Party and as Aunt Lexy in the 2002 sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Garnett was a perfect '60's groovy chick with big talent.

On stage she starred in a Canadian production of Hairand in 1975, co-wrote with Tom O’Horganthe music for Starfollowers in an Ancient Land, an Off-Off Broadway production at the La MaMa Experimental Theater Club in New York City’s East Village in addition to appearing in the play. She also wrote and performed two one-person theater pieces, Gale Garnett & Company and Life After Latex.

Garnett has turned increasingly to writing in recent years branched out into journalism, writing essays, columns, and book reviewsfor various newspapers and magazines. She published her first novel, a romance, Visible Amazement in 1999. She followed with Transient Dancing in 2003, the novella Room Tone in 2007, and her latest release Savage Adoration in 2009.

She is still alive, well, and active at age 77.

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Slave Stole Ship, Crew, Family, and Become First Black Warship Captain
13 May 2020 at 11:29

Slave Stole Ship, Crew, Family, and Become First Black Warship Captain

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13 May 2020 at 11:29

By: Patrick Murfin

Robert Smalls was just 23 years old when he stole the CSS Planter and delivered her, the crew, and his family to the Union.

At the risk of being crude, and perhaps irredeemably sexist, there are some acts so audacious that the English language seems inadequate to describe them without resort to certain old vulgarities. The word I have in mind today is balls as in big fat hairy balls. That is certainly what it took for Robert Smalls, then a 23 year old slave to calmly sail away in a Confederate side-wheel Steamer under the guns of at least one fortress and a Rebel flotilla to deliver theship, cargo, crew, and passengers to the welcoming arms of the United States Navy. This is what happened.

Smalls was a skilled pilot and a trusted slave of whose owner had every expectation of loyalty from a man raised above the drudgeryof servitude in the fields or on the docks. Robert Smalls had worked himself up from a Hotel porter to a stevedore and finally a wheelman in the port of Charleston, South Carolina. Various employers compensated Smalls’ master,Henry McKee of Beaufort, South Carolina for his services and supplied him with basic food, clothing, and housing near the docks for him and his wife—an enslaved hotel maid and their three children. A wheelman was the name given to title given to Black pilots who were responsible for controlling ships as they navigated the dangerous waters of Charleston harbor. The respected word pilot was reserved for white men doing the same job for some of the best wagespaid any workers in the South.

On the morning of May 13, 1862 Smalls calmly boarded the CSS Planter, a mid-sized side-wheel steamer built and launched in Charleston just two years earlier for the costal trade. She was currently in Service of the CSA Army Engineer Department under the command of Brigadier General Ripley as an armed dispatch boat and transport. She was partially laden with a cargo of ammunition and explosives. With him came an all slave crew of seven.

Earlier under cover of darkness seven passengers, five women and three children—Small’s wife and children and the wives of other crew members—had boarded and were secured out of sight in the hold.

The Planter as a Confederate supply ship and converted to a gun boat commanded by Robert Smalls in U.S. Army service.

Smalls knew that the captain of the Planter, C. J. Relyeawould be ashore on business well away from the port area. The ship was one of several Small regularly piloted through the waters of the harbor to open sea. Gambling that he would attract no undue attention, Small hoisted theConfederate Stars and Bars flag,built a head of steam and had his crew cast away from the dock before 5 am that morning.

He would have to sail passed several armed ships in the harbor and under the guns of a succession of shore batteries and fortresses guarding the South’s most important Atlantic blockade running port, including those of the mighty formerUnion bastion Fort Sumter whose bombardment a little more than a year earlier had started the war. As he passed each ship and fort, Small blew his steam whistle in customary salute. Since the Planter and its Black pilot were familiar sights, she aroused no suspicion.

When the ship broke out into open water and was beyond the reach of Sumter’s big guns, Small hauled down the Rebel colors and hoisted a White flag. Hoping against hope that the US Navy blockaders outside the harbor would recognize his intentions, he made straight for the USS Onward, an armed Clipper Ship prized for her speed in chasing down blockade runners.

Fortunately the Onward’s captain held his fire and with some astonishment accepted Smalls’ surrender of the Confederate ship.

The next day the Planter with Smalls in command was sent on to Flag Officer Samuel Francis Du Pont, the senior Captainin charge of the Charleston Blockade flotilla, at Port Royal, South Carolina. In addition to the valuable cargo, Smalls also brought vital intelligence for Du Pont—news that the Rebels had abandoned defensive positionson the Stono River allowing U.S. forces to seize them without a bloody fight.

Smalls and members of his crew, including his brother, were celebrated in the North, especially in the Radical Republican press.

The news of the Smalls exploit electrified the Northwhich was starved for good news in a war that was, on the whole, going very badly. Abolitionists and others who were campaigning, so far unsuccessfully, for the employment of Blacks and escaped slaves in the war in combat roles, were encouraged. A special bill sailed through Congress and sent to the willing President on May 30, to award prize money equal to half the value of the ship to Smalls and his crew. Of that, Smalls was personally due one third. But the government undervalued the ship at $9,000—she was actually worth about $67,000—so that Small’s portion was only $1,500. And neither Smalls or his crew were ever awarded prize money, as was customary, for the value of the cargo estimated to be worth over $10,000 at war-time prices. Still for a former slave, the prize money represented an unheard of fortune.

Du Pont accepted the ship into the Navy as the USS Planter. She was first put under the command of Acting Master Philemon Dickenson and when transferred to North Edisto under Acting Master Lloyd Phoenix. Smalls was retained by the Navy as pilot, prized for his intimate knowledge of coastal waters and worked on several ships, including the Planter. As part of the South Atlantic Blockade Squadron she saw action over the summer of 1862, including a joint expedition under Lieutenant Rhind with the USS Crusader in which troops were landed at Simmons Bluff on the Wadmelaw River, where they destroyed a Confederate encampment.

Despite her successful service, the Planter presentenced a significant problem for the Navy—she burned relatively hard to come-by wood for fuel instead of the abundant coal supplied by the fleet. That fall she was transferred to the Army and sent for service near Fort Pulaski on the coast of Georgia. Smalls and his old crew were assigned to the delivery and then accepted into Army service. He was appointed the regular pilot of the Planter,

On December 1, 1863, the Planter was caught in a crossfire between Union and Confederate forces. Captain Nickerson ordered Small to surrender. He flatly refused recognizing that he and the crew would not be treated as prisoners of war but would be summarily executed. Smalls asserted commandand piloted the ship out of range of the Confederate guns.

This act might have been regarded as a mutiny and resulted in his death by hanging. But Smalls luck had not run out. His superiors recognized his bravery and the cowardice of Captain Nickerson. He was appointed captain of the Planter, becoming the first Black man to command a United States ship of war. Smalls continued to serve as captain until the army sold Planter in 1866 after the end of the war.

The Planter continued in civilian service for another ten years. Then on March 25, 1876 she ran aground and was damaged trying to save a disabled schooner. The captain beached herto try to repair a staved-in hull. But a gale blew up and dragged her back to sea where she foundered. After the crew abandoned ship, she sunk. When informed of her loss, Smalls tearfully said that it was “like losing a member of my own family.”

Six years ago this month the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that they had found the wreckage of the Planter in shallow wateroff the coast.

As for Smalls, if he had done nothing else in his life, he would be noteworthy. But his wartime adventure and service were just Act I in a remarkable life.

After the war Smalls returned with his prize money and earnings from his service to his hometown of Beaufort where he bought his former master’s house. He lived there with his wife, children and elderly mother until her death. He later even took in his former master’s infirm widow. He went into business with Richard Howell Gleaves operating a store for Freedmen.

Smalls became an early leader of the Republican Party in Reconstruction Era South Carolina. He was a delegateat several Republican National Conventions and participated in the South Carolina Republican State Convention. Smalls served as a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1865 and 1870 and the state Senate between 1871 and 1874. He even served briefly as the Commander of the South Carolina Militia with the rank of Major General.

Prosperous businessman, respected South Carolina Republican leader, and four times United States Congressman Robert Smalls.

In 1874, Smalls was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served from 1875 to 1879. From 1882 to 1883 he represented the 5th Congressional District in the House and the 7th District and served from 1884 to 1887. That was four terms in Congress, the last two after the withdrawal of Union troops from the South and the rise of Jim Crowe.

He was targeted by Democrats for retribution and charged and indicted on phony corruption charges in the letting of a government printing contract. It took a high level deal swapping Democrats charged with election fraud and intimidation to keep Smalls out of prison.

He was one of the last Southern Blacks to serve in Congress and his four terms made him the longest serving Black Congressman until Adam Clayton Powell.

Smalls at a 1911 Republican Party event.

After leaving Congress he was appointed U.S. Collector of Customs in Beaufort, serving from 1889 to 1911 except for the four years of Democrat Grover Cleveland’s second term.

Smalls died on February 23, 1915 at the age of 75 and was buried in his family plot in the churchyard of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in downtown Beaufort.

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The Mother of Nurses for National Nurses Month—Florence Nightingale
12 May 2020 at 09:38

The Mother of Nurses for National Nurses Month—Florence Nightingale

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12 May 2020 at 09:38

By: Patrick Murfin

Florence Nightingale--The Lady with the Lamp of the Crimean War.

As we noted recently Nurses have become the special iconic heroes of the Coronavirus pandemic. Also this is officially National Nurses Month largely because this is the birthday of Florence Nightingale who is credited with founding modern nursing as a profession.

Britain and America each have iconicnurse heroines. But other than sharing a common calling, horrific experience in war, and a steely determination, Florence Nightingale and Clara Barton could not have been more different.

Nightingale was the daughter of a wealthy landowner and member of the British ruling class. Barton came from a struggling but respectable family of middling means. Nightingale struggled to gain acceptance for nursing as a respectable occupation for gentle women. SpinsterBarton had no choice but to work spending years as a school mistressbefore volunteering without trainingto serve the Civil War wounded. Nightingale came from a family with Unitarian connections but was a devoted Anglican. Barton was raised a Universalist who had no religious affiliation in later life, but credited her ethics to her childhood faith. Nightingale was interested in the professionalization of nursing, sanitation practices, and what we would now describe as holistic medicine. Barton cared about the amelioration of suffering and building a new model of active charity and volunteerism. Disabled by illness and perhaps Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Nightingale had to largely retire from active nursing and administration within a few years of returning from the Crimean War and spent the rest of her long life as a semi-invalid, writer, and researcher. Nightingale never embraced feminism, was in fact openly critical of it and cultivated the support and friendship of powerful men. Barton, although necessarily careful to curry support for the American Red Cross from the President and Congress, was supportive of women’s suffrage.

Clara Barton, America's Angel of the Battlefield, was inspired by Nightingale but very different from her.

But, of course, Nightingale’s famous example inspired and motivated Barton in her own career.

Florence Nightingale was named for the city of Florence, then the capital of the Duchy of Tuscany on May 12, 1820. Her father, born William Shore, inherited a rich country estate from his mother’s family and assumed their name, Nightingale.

In 1825 the family returned to England where they took up residence in a large and elegant new country home on the familial estate, Lea Hall in Derbyshire. The following year her father bought a second estate, Embley Park, in Hampshire. Soon after he was appointed the High Sheriff of Hampshire. The family divided their years between the two country seats.

Nightingale was home tutored, like most of her class, but benefited from parents who allowed her to study deeply beyond the narrow instruction usual for women of her class and place. By here late teens she was as academically accomplished as most university educated men.

Her mother, despite progressive social views and ardent abolitionism, was a Victorian traditionalist when it came to the role of women. She ardently opposed young Florence’s announcement that she was determined to find a career in service, and particularly in nursing. Women nurses were not unheard of. But other than Catholic and Anglican nursing orders, it was considered an unskilled jobfor the lowest orders of society. Because they were required to come into close physical contact with patients, including men, it was assumed that they were degraded and likely to service their charges sexually as well. In fact, secular nurses were often regarded as little more than prostitutes.

Despite her mother’s opposition, in 1844 Nightingale launched a round of visiting hospitals in London and elsewhere, observing conditions and techniques, and eventually volunteering her services. She rejected an ardent suitor, politician and poet Richard Monckton Milnes, for fear that marriage would interfere with her calling. She continued her hospital visits for 14 years, eventually attracting the attention and support of others.

Florence Nightingale as a teen age beauty about the time she renounced romance and declared her determination to pursue nursing.

In 1849 Nightingale undertook extensive travels in Europe, Turkey, and Egypt. He mother probably hoped the Grand Tour would divert her from her purpose. She was dead wrong. She used the trip to make visits to hospitals and study nursing techniques. In Egypt she visited a convent of nursing sisters of St. Vincent de Paul in Alexandria, where she was impressed by the order and discipline that made their care superior to anything she had found in Europe.

Later on the journey she spent considerable time at the Institute of Protestant Deaconesses at Kaiserswerthin Germany. The institute had been founded for the care of the destitutein 1833 and had grown into a training school for women teachers and nurses. She described the event as the turning point of her life. She returned to the Institute in 1851 for four months of medical training—the only formal nursing education she ever received. She vowed to establish similar training programs in England. Her accounts of her experiences there, The Institution of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine, for the Practical Training of Deaconesses, etc, was her first major publication and drew attention for her plans in England.

Nightingale’s sister also published her extensive correspondence describing in detail her experience in Egypt and “The Orient” which showed her as a gifted travel writer and astute observer of life and customs in other lands.

During these travels Nightingale also made contact with important British political figures also traveling abroad, especially Sidney Herbert, who she met in Rome. Herbert was a former Secretary at War in the Tory government Sir Robert Peel and would be called back to that post during the Crimean War. He became a lifelong devoted friend and supporter of Nightingale.

Back home, Nightingale resumed her round of hospital visits will arguing for opening nursing to respectable women and for formal schooling for them.

In 1852 she finally got a position where she could put her ideas into practiceas the Superintendent of the Institute for the Care of Sick Gentlewomen in London. It may not have been tending to the poor as she one day hoped to do, but it was a start. In her relatively short tenure at the Institute, she inaugurated formal training for her nurses.

About the same time, probably against his wife’s wishes but bowing to the inevitable, Florence’s father settled an £500 annual income on her allowing her to live comfortablywhile pursuing her career.

What interrupted Nightingale’s new job was the onset of the Crimean War, as foolish a major power conflict as was ever fought. France under the newly minted Emperor Napoleon III, Britain and Russia chest bumped over the rotting but still alive corpse of the Ottoman Empire. The immediate cause of the war, Russia’s occupationof Ottoman provinces along the Danube ostensibly in defense of Orthodox rights, was voidedwhen Austria threatened to join the coalition against the Tsar and Russia withdrew its troops. Undeterred, the war went on anyway, fought mostly in naval actions on the Black Sea beginning in 1853 and on the Crimean Peninsula with the siege of the port of Sevastopol in September of 1854. Large, stupidly led Ottoman, French, and British Armies slogged it out against stubborn Russian resistance, cholera, and other epidemics.

Considered the first modern war because of the use of steam powered war ships, iron clad floating batteries, railroads, telegraph lines, massed artillery, the war quickly turned into a charnel house. And for the first time reporters traveling with the armies got word back to London and Paris by wire within hours of actual events. Newspapersquickly filled with grim stories.

Word also got back to England about the suffering of the British wounded in comparison to the French, who had better organized medical services and hospitals. Nightingale offered her services and her friend Herbert, back as Secretary at War, quickly accepted the offer and promised his full support and all of the supplies she needed.

Nightingale set sail for the war zoneon October 21, 1854 in charge of a hastily recruited force of nurses including 10 Roman Catholic nuns, 8 Anglican Sisters of Mercy, 6 nurses from St. John’s Institute, and 14 from various other hospitals.

Nightingale rejected the services of Jamaican traditional healer/doctor Mary Seacole who made it to the Crimea on her own and served much closer to the front lines than Florence. After brief recognition the memory of her service was nearly erased by Nightngale's fame.

She declined the services of Mary Seacole a Black Jamaican traditional doctor. Seacole traveled to the Crimea anyway at her own expense and served valiantly near the front lines. Briefly honored upon her return to England, her memory was virtually erasedas Nightingale’s reputation soared.

Florence’s group arrived early in November 1854 at Selimiye Barracks in Scutari, Istanbul, 250 miles across the Black Sea from the Crimea. Thousands of British wounded were warehousedthere with almost no support. This would be Nightingales main base throughout the war.

She found appalling conditions:

There were no vessels for water or utensils of any kind; no soap, towels, or clothes, no hospital clothes; the men lying in their uniforms, stiff with gore and covered with filth to a degree and of a kind no one could write about; their persons covered with vermin . . .

We have not seen a drop of milk, and the bread is extremely sour. The butter is most filthy; it is Irish butter in a state of decomposition; and the meat is more like moist leather than food. Potatoes we are waiting for, until they arrive from France . . .

Nightingale appealed through correspondent William Russell of the The Times for supplies and assistance. The Times organized relief drives and supplies began to trickle in by year’s end.

Contemporary illustrations in the British Press could not begin to capture the horror and suffering amid the primitive conditions at Nightingale's hospital at Scutari.

Despite improvements and the best efforts of her overworked nurses, death rates actually climbed in the hospital in the months after Nightingales arrival due to sanitary conditions and overcrowding. Cholera, typhus, and typhoid swept the wards. Over 4,000 men died there over the winter.

Meanwhile the government commissioned a prefabricated hospital and dispatched it to the scene under the civilian leadership of Dr. Edmund Alexander Parkes. When it arrived and was set up nearby, its death rates were less than 1/10th of those at Suctari under Nightingale’s care.

In March of 1865 a Sanitary Commission arrived from home which flushed the sewers at Suctari, after which deaths dropped sharply. Nightingale did not recognize theconnection however, and credited the improvement to nutrition and nursing care.

Despite their limitations, Florence and her nurses worked tirelessly, none more so than their leader. In addition to her administrative duties, she spent much time in the wards. And because the prejudice against nurses persisted among Army authorities, only Nightingale was allowed on the wards at night to aid the ill trained and sometimes brutal male orderlies. She visited bedsides carrying a lantern, earning her the nickname Lady with the Lampamong her charges.

Russell spread the word of her service back home where she was hailed as a hero. The Nightingale Fund for the training of nurses was set up under the stewardship Herbert while she was still abroad and an astonishing £ 45,000 was raised by 1859.

In May of 1855 Nightingale finally made it to the Crimea, inspecting hospitals near the front at Balaclava. While there, she fell ill with “Crimea Fever” and lay dangerously near death for 12 days. She returned to Suctari weakened. But she resumed her duties and even returned Balaclava in March of 1856, remaining there until after active fighting ceased on the peninsula when the hospitals there were closed in July.

Florence Nightingale after her return from the war. After the Queen herself she was the most famous and admired woman in Britain.

In August Nightingale boarded a French ship and returned privatelyto England where she was hailed as a great heroine. She was introduced to Queen Victoria herself and presented the monarch with a report on conditions. Her fame even crossed the Atlantic where Henry Wadsworth Longfellow memorialized her in Santa Filomena

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

In 1860 with money from the Nightingale Fund the Nightingale Training School at St. Thomas' Hospital opened in London. Nurses there were trained in a course of study designed by Florence. She was, however, too ill to accept thesuperintendency of the new school. She also raised money for the Royal Buckinghamshire Hospital near her family home. But her days as an active nurse and administer were over.

Nightingale busied herself with a close study of statistics from the various hospitals and medical facilities in the war. What she discovered caused her to dramatically re-assess her own views. In 1859 she published her findings in Notes on Matters affecting the Health, Efficiency and Hospital Administration of the British Army in which she acknowledged the supreme importance of sanitation in reducing hospital deaths. In 1859 an army medical college was opened at Chathamand the first military hospital was established in Woolwich in 1861 following the advice laid out by Nightingale.

That was followed in 1860 with Notes on Nursing which laid down theeducational program adopted at the St. Thomas school and others throughout Britain.

When the Sepoy Rebellion broke out in Indiain 1857, Nightingale volunteered once more to go abroad. But her health would not permit it. Instead she undertook a deep study of India and wrote many articles about the sub-continentover the next several years, including a detailed proposal for digging wells in Indian villages.

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Nightingale continued to write and was honored time and again over the next decades. She participated as far as she was able in events like the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee.

Nightingale died in London, on August 13 1910 at the age of ninety and was buried in the family plot at East Wellow, Hampshire after an offer of burial in Westminster Abbey was turned down by her family. Memorial services took place in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

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Blue Skies—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
11 May 2020 at 19:14

Blue Skies—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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11 May 2020 at 19:14

By: Patrick Murfin

Blue Skies sung by Willie Nelson. We are celebrating Irving Berlin’s birthday over at the Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout blog. And what better way these days than to celebrate with maybe his most cheerful song— Blue Skies. The song was composed in 1926 as a last-minute addition to the Rodgers and Hart musical Betsy . The show running for only 39 performances but Blue Skies was an instant success leaving the principal composing team’s work in the dust. On opening night audience demanded 24 encores from star Belle Baker. The song was also a celebration, after the death of his first born sonas an infant, of the birth of Berlin’s daughterMary Ellin. Irving Berlin at the piano belting out one of his own songs. In 1927, t...

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The Songwriter of the American Century—Irving Berlin
11 May 2020 at 11:12

The Songwriter of the American Century—Irving Berlin

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11 May 2020 at 11:12

By: Patrick Murfin

Irving Berlin--American master song smith.

Say happy birthday to Israel Isidore Baline, born May 11, 1888 in the city of Tyumen in the Ural Mountains 1200 miles west of Moscow. His father, a Canter, moved his family to the relative safety of the United States in 1893 after Cossacks burned the Jewish Quarter of Tyumen to the ground. Only three years later his father was dead and the eight year old boy had to quit school and work as a news butcher—a street peddling paper boy—for pennies a day.

He left home at 14 to leave his mother one less mouth to feed and began to support himself singing for tips in saloons, eventually working up to being a song plugger at Tony Pastor’s seminal night club.

Berlin in costume in some sort of parade in New York City in 1911, his break-out year with Alexanders Rag Time Band.

He changed his name to Irving Berlin and began to try his hand at songwriting. His first success was Alexander’s Rag Time Band in 1911 which became a sensation after he wrote words to go with his musicand got it placed in a Broadway review. Its fresh sound and syncopated rhythm helped set off a new national rage for Rag Time music, which had gone out of fashion a decade earlier.

Self-taught on the piano—he never could play in any key but F—and unable to read music, none-the-less he eagerly launched himself on a career as a songwriter. His first Broadway show, Watch You Stepin 1914, starred dancing sensations Verne and Irene Castle and included several hits including Play a Simple Melody, the first of his famous “double” songs in which two different melodies and lyrics are counterpointed against one another.

He would continue to write for Broadway and films for the next 60 years producing an unrivaled string of hits that included, A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody, Always, Blue Skies, God Bless America, and There’s No Business Like Show Business to name just a few.

Nearly as patriotic as George M. Cohan, Berlin penned Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morningfor his World War I camp show with an all doughboy cast, Yip Yip Yaphank. God Bless America was also written for that revue but somehow failed to make the cut. In 1938 he gave it to Kate Smith for a special 20th anniversary Armistice Day Broadcast and it became a virtual second national Anthem. He toured for three and a half years to post in the U.S. and Europe with a second all-GI review This Is the Army in which he sang This is the Army Mr. Jonesin GI uniform. The show became the basis of a 1945 film of the same name staring Ronald Regan and Joan Leslie in which Smith reprised God Bless America. Berlin signed over all royalties from that song to benefit the Boy Scouts of America earning them millions of dollars.

Berlin, a secularized Jew, is also known for his holiday songsincluding Easter Parade and White Christmas both of which were featured in the 1940 film Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire. Easter Parade was the only song not written from the movie. It first appeared in the 1933 revue As Thousands Cheer which presented each number as an item in a newspaper, Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webboriginally song. Holiday Inn essentially transformed the newspaper items for holiday throughout the year stitched together by the thinnest of plots. Both Easter Parade and White Christmas were again featured two in enormously successful self-titled movie musicals. Crosby’s 1948 re-recording of White Christmas remains America’s favorite secular Christmas song and is an annual seasonal hit. For decades it held the record as the bestsellingrecording of all time.

The Easter Parade number with Clifton Webb and Marilyn Miller from As Thousands Cheer on Broadway in 1933.

Early Berlin Broadway revues included now embarrassing blackface minstrel numbers and some of those were carried over to the silver screen. But Berlin was a staunch advocate of civil rights and a long-time member of the NAACP. In As Thousands Cheer Ethel Waters sang Supper Time, a lament for the lynching of her husband of which she said “If one song can tell the whole tragic history of a race, Supper Time was that song. In singing it I was telling my comfortable, well-fed, well-dressed listeners about my people...those who had been slaves and those who were now downtrodden and oppressed.” Not surprisingly Hollywood film makers concerned with being able to show films in the segregated Southnever included Supper Time in any of the several movies they built around the Berlin song book.

Show business itself was often a theme for Berlin including numbers presented as vaudeville acts like A Couple of Swells. And of course There’s No Business Like Show Business from his most successful book musical Annie Get Your Gunhas become the enduring anthem of the entertainment industry.

Berlin and bride Dorothy depart on their ill-fated honeymoon to Cuba.

Berlin’s personal life from the days when he was singing on the streets for pennies on was reflected in his music. His first wife, 20-year-old Dorothy Goetz was the sister of E. Ray Goetz one of his early collaborators. She died tragically of typhoid contracted during their Cuban honeymoon in 1912. Grief stricken, Berlin could not write for months. Then his first composition was also his first ballad, the heart felt When I Lost You.

Berlin and his second wife Ellin MacKay at their New York City Hall wedding--the beginning of an enduring 63-year marriage.

In 1924 Berlin married Ellin Mackay, and Irish-American Catholic heiress whose father bitterly opposed the marriage. He wrote the enduring classic love song Alwaysfor her and signed over to her personally rights to the song to make up for being disinherited by her father. The rights to that one song alone would make her independently wealthy. Their marriage remained a love affair and they were inseparable until Ellin died in July 1988 at the age of 85. They had four children during their 63 years of marriage: Irving, who died in infancy on Christmas Day 1928; Mary Ellin, Elizabeth Irving, and Linda Louise. Blue Skies in 1926 was a jubilant celebration of his first daughter’s birth.

Berlin wrote in many styles over his long career but is perhaps best remembered for his simple, direct, and heartfelt love songs with lilting melodies and lyrics that seemed an extension of everyday speech. A classic example was What’ll I Do? From 1924.

Berlin never gave up his love of singing his own songs. This is from a 1930's outdoor concert and radio broadcast.

In all Berlin wrote around 15,000 songs. Many of them are as fresh today as when first written and continue to be recorded by artists in a number of styles. Berlin died in his adopted home town of New York in 1989 a year after Ellin at the age of 101.

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M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World to Me)—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
10 May 2020 at 19:00

M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World to Me)—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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10 May 2020 at 19:00

By: Patrick Murfin

M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World to Me) Sung by Henry Burr. It’s Mother’s Day and how better to celebrate than with the first recording of the song most closely identified with the holiday. M-O-T-H-E-R (A Word That Means the World to Me) was written by lyricist Howard Johnson, also known for such hitsas I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for Ice Cream and When the Moon Comes over the Mountain , and music by Theodore Morse in 1915. Henry Burr at the recording microphone in the 1920's. It was recorded by prolific Canadian-born tenor Henry Burr who recorded thousands of songs for various labels under various names. He was very popular in the 1910's and had the most #1 hits in the decade. His most successful record wa...

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Julia Ward Howe and the First Mothers’ Day Proclamation—A Disrupted Heritage
10 May 2020 at 09:39

Julia Ward Howe and the First Mothers’ Day Proclamation—A Disrupted Heritage

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10 May 2020 at 09:39

By: Patrick Murfin

Peace organizations have used Julia Ward Howe's Proclamation with material like this circulated by the Peace Alliance.

The usual touching Mother's Day serviceswill have to be held virtually for Congregations across the U.S.A today. If mothers are not the topic of the sermon or homily, they are sure to be rememberedin prayer, sung to or about, and honored in some way. Unitarian Universalist congregations will be among the most enthusiastic celebrants. An in scores of those congregations this morning the sermon will credit Julia Ward Howe’s 1870 Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the Worlda/k/a the Mothers Peace Day Proclamation as the authentic origin of the American observation. Some will completely ignore Anna Jarvis, the West Virginia spinster who spent her life campaigning to establish an annual Day honoring mothers and then defending it from rampant commercialization. Worse yet some ministers will actually denounceJarvis as a fraud and the usurper of a crown that rightly should rest on Howe’s brow.

It is understandable, Howe, most famous as the author of the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the most popular female poet in the country, was one of our own—a life-long Unitarian. Moreover, she was a social justice hero—not only an abolitionist but a women’s suffrage and rights advocate and a peace activist. And the pacifism reflected in her declaration is highly valued and admired by many modern UUs.

The trouble is that although the Proclamation attracted wide attention and comment in both the U.S. and Europe it did not result in any action. There never was a strike for peace by mothers. No observance was organized anywhere. It turned out to be a fine flight of rhetoric but a blind alley leading nowhere.

Anna Jarvis of West Virgina was the true Mother of Mother's Day

When Anna Jarvis began her ultimately successful crusade to honor mothers, she made no mention of Ward or her Proclamation. Her celebration had no political or social agenda whatsoever. It was entirely about sentimental adoration.

Despite this there are distinguished U.U. ministers with more impressive letters stringing out behind their names than you can shake a stick at will tell the folks in the pews that they are Facetiming Mom to brunch after church because of Julia Ward Howe.

Howe is best remembered for the words to the Battle Hymn of the Republic, to which a generation of young men marched to their death in the Civil War. She spent the rest of her long life as a champion of many causes and of social justice. But having seen firsthand the dreadful slaughter of war—even a just war in a righteous cause—she dedicated her greatest energies to preventing war.

The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 caused her to attempt to mobilize women around the world for peace. She called for June 10th to be celebrated annually as Mothers’ Peace Day. Her proclamation of the day, characteristically in verse went as follows:

Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World

Again, in the sight of the Christian world, have the skill and power of two great nations exhausted themselves in mutual murder. Again have the sacred questions of international justice been committed to the fatal mediation of military weapons. In this day of progress, in this century of light, the ambition of rulers has been allowed to barter the dear interests of domestic life for the bloody exchanges of the battle field. Thus men have done. Thus men will do. But women need no longer be made a party to proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror. Despite the assumptions of physical force, the mother has a sacred and commanding word to say to the sons who owe their life to her suffering. That word should now be heard, and answered to as never before.

Arise then...women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts!
Whether your baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:
“We will not have questions answered by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country,
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the voice of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says: “Disarm! Disarm!
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe our dishonor,
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil
At the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace...
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God—
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.

—Julia Ward Howe

The memory of Howe’s words would wax and wane with public sentiment about war—revived as pacifism—and isolationism—thrived during periods of war weariness and forgotten if not vigorously erased when patriotic fever worked up a bloodlust for war. Nobody but that iconoclast Mark Twain brought it up during the Spanish American War.

When Woodrow Wilson made Anna Jarvis’s celebration a national holiday by proclamation to be celebrated annually on the second Sunday in May, he was aware of Howe’s declaration and was worried that some might try to graft its pacifism onto the new holiday. So he tried to wrap honoring Mothers with patriotism, as if mothers elsewhere did not deserve the veneration as nurturers of patriots. He added the stipulation that the day should be celebrated with displays of the Stars and Stripes, a jingoistic touch never mentioned or advocated for by Jarvis.

During both World Wars I and II and the Red Scares and hysteria that followed them Howe’s Proclamation was virtually suppressed. It remained obscure during the Cold Warand almost faded to a neglected footnote.

Another Mother for Peace, most famous for this iconic poster, used JuliaWard Howe's Proclamation during the Vietnam Era.

During the Vietnam War it was somewhat resurrected by the women’s organization Another Mother For Peace and by both Quaker and Catholic peace activists.

It really spread like wildfire in UU circles in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the ramp-up of the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Pacifism and/or anti-war activism was popular and spreading rapidly through both clergy and members in the pews. Many of the sermons preached today were based on widely circulated articles printed then. And Howe gave credibility to those who were then trying to get the UUA to declare itself a Peace Church.

That effort ultimately failed, but Howe and Mother’s Peace Day have found new advocates.

The Black Lives of UU's Mother's Day bail out campaign had become an annual event.

Recently, however, Mothers Day took on new meaning. Black Lives of UU issued an extraordinary challenge in response the crisis of mass incarceration that leaves many mothers separated from their children because of the hostage extortion of high cash bail which is levied disproportionately against women of color and often for minor and non-violent offenses. In the wake of the White Supremacy Teach-in which over 500 UU congregations have held in 2017, they are asked those congregations—and others—to pledge $5000 each to a national fund to bail mothers out of jail. That effort fell short—five grand was a lot of money for most moderately sized congregations—but a considerable amount was raised and the campaign has been renewed every year.

Front line maternity ward medical staff bring comfort to new moms who had to give birth without the partners and families during Coronavirus quarenteen.

This year the shadow of the Coronavirus will make the sacrifices of mothers on the front lines of the medical emergency, the momsat home juggling work and children’s educations, and the frail and/or dying elder mothers cut off from the comfort of the human contactwith their families all the more poignant.

Both Howe and Jarvis could have agreed on that.

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This Changed Everything—The Pill, the Sexual Revolution, and the Counter Revolution
9 May 2020 at 07:00

This Changed Everything—The Pill, the Sexual Revolution, and the Counter Revolution

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9 May 2020 at 07:00

By: Patrick Murfin

A Canadian bottle of Searle's Enovid contraception tablets a/k/a The Pill/ It’s hard to believe that only sixty years ago today in 1960 the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally approved marketing G. D. Searle Pharmaceutical Corporation’s Enovid as an oral contraceptive. That makes May 9 sort of the birthday of The Pill. Of course its story goes back earlier. Pioneering birth control advocate Margaret Sanger had long sought a safe and reliable form of contraception that women themselves could use and control unlike condoms. In 1953 she brought her long-time associate and supporter Katharine McCormicktogether with noted hormonal biology researcher Dr. Gregory Pincus who had been trying to develop a contraceptive since...

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That Lucky Old Sun—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
8 May 2020 at 20:26

That Lucky Old Sun—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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8 May 2020 at 20:26

By: Patrick Murfin

That Lucky Old Sun sung by Johnny Cash.

The Sun is shining brightly in McHenry County but temperatures are plunging and it will be well below freezing Saturday morning with the possibility of a flake or two in the air. That’s a recipe for Coronavirus ambivalence and angst just the mood for Johnny Cash’s version of That Lucky Old Sun with music by Beasley Smith and words by Haven Gillespie. Like Ol' Man River, its lyrics contrasted the toil and intense hardshipof the singer’s life with the obliviousnessof the natural world.

Frainkie Laine was featured on the sheet music for That Lucky Old Sun.

The song was clearly written to reflect the experienceand voice of a Black laborer or sharecropperbut Frankie Laine first scored a #1 hit with it in 1949 with another White singer, Vaughn Monroe hard on his heels. Louis Armstrong only reached #24 the same year.

Other significant covers over the years included Pat Boone (yeesh!), Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Tom Jones, George Benson, and Willie Nelson.

A grizzled Johnny Cash in his late years.

But Cash’s version is practically a scab ripped of wound. In 2000 Cash released American III: Solitary Man, the third and final album in his Amirican series. Between American II: Unchained and Solitary ManCash’s health seriously declined and he was hospitalized with pneumonia. The illness forced him to curtail his touring. The album contained his response to his illness with selections like Tom Petty’s I Won't Back Down and version of U2’s One. Cash’s deep voice was rawer and raspier and stripped down arrangements by producer Rick Rubin let the songs shine, as one reviewer put it, as a “raw-boned meditation on redemption and death.”

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The Other Inventor—Radio Day Celebrates Popov’s Claim
8 May 2020 at 09:37

The Other Inventor—Radio Day Celebrates Popov’s Claim

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8 May 2020 at 09:37

By: Patrick Murfin

Alexander Popov--Russia's claimant as the inventor of radio.

We think we know with certainty the inventor of many of the devices that transformed the world in the span of about 100 years from an agricultural and muscle—human or animal—powered society little changed for millennia. But often things are less clear than our tidy history texts would have it. Many technologies like the automobile or television have multiple creators any one of which could be credited depending on what is defined as critical to the modern devise. Sometimes the same results were obtained earlier than generally credited using technology that was ultimately ignored or abandoned. Sometimes the time is simply right and all of the groundwork has been laid so that individuals make the same breakthroughs almost simultaneouslyand completely independently. Who gets the credit might be, as in the case of the telephone, be who wins the race to the patent office or has the sharpest lawyers as was the case with more than one of Thomas Edison’s creations. Others might have gotten into the air before the Wright Brothers, but only their invention led directly to a worldwide industry.

Then there is the case of Alexander Stepanovich Popov who certainly built and demonstrated a gadget that had all of the essential elements of a radio receiver but did not at first conceive of its application as a communications device. The Russians, as they are wont to do, proudly proclaim him as the inventor of the radio and celebrate the anniversary of his presentation of a scientific paperon May 7, 1895 as Radio Day.

Popov was born on March 16, 1859 the son of an Orthodox priest in Krasnoturinsk, Sverdlovs Oblast in the Urals. Although interested in science from an early age, his father was determined to make him a priest and sent him to a seminary at the provincial capital of Yekaterinburg. But after completing his basic education he rebelled and refused to continue on to theological school. Instead in 1877 he enrolled at St. Petersburg University where he studied physics. Popov was a brilliant student and graduated with honors in 1882, He stayed at the university as a laboratory assistant and doing the equivalent of graduate studies while getting hands on experience with laboratory equipment and testing procedures.

In 1883 he left the university for a better paying and more prestigious position as an instructor at the laboratory at the Russian Navy’s Torpedo School at Kronstadt.

Of course in Kronstadt Popov was not doing abstract basic research. He was more engineer than scientist, working on practical problems for the Imperial Navy which was straining to join other great powers in modernizing their fleet. One of the problems that he was investigating was the failure in the electrical wire insulation on steel ships. He discovered it was caused by electrical resonance which in which oscillation in high frequency electrical current seemed to be somehow communicated over at least short distances led him to further research on that topic. That in turn led him to interest in the mysterious waves discovered by German physicist Heinrich Hertz in 1888.

A trip in 1893 for the scientific conferences held in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago brought Popov up to speed with the most recent and important discoveries in the fast moving research into Hertzian waves. The next year he read about the accomplishment of Englishman Oliver Lodge who at a memorial lecture in London after Hertz’s demonstrated a device that showed what he considered the “semi-optical” nature the waves could cross distances and physically affect the behavior of target material.

Lodge constructed a detector called a coherer, a glass tube containing metal filings between two electrodes. When waves emitted from an antenna about 50 feet way were applied to the electrodes, the coherer became conductive allowing the current from a battery to pass through it, with the impulse being picked up by a mirror galvanometer. After receiving a signal the realigned metal filings in the coherer had to be reset by a manually operated vibrator or by the vibrations of a bellplaced on the table nearby that rang every time a transmission was received.

A recreation of Popov's Lightning Detector.

Popov concluded that a similar but improved and more sensitive device could detect lightning, which had been shown to emit Hertzian waves at a considerable distance giving the crews of steel ships time to prepare for approaching storms.

Because I am lousy at technical description we’ll let Wikipedia summarize Popov’s Lightning Detector:

…the coherer was connected to an antenna, and to a separate circuit with a relay and battery which operated an electric bell. The radio noise generated by a lightning strike turned on the coherer, the current from the battery was applied to the relay, closing its contacts, which applied current to the electromagnet of the bell, pulling the arm over to ring the bell. Popov added an innovative automatic reset feature of a “self tapping” coherer where the bell arm would spring back and tap the coherer, restoring it to its receptive state. The two chokes in the coherer’s leads prevented the radio signal across the coherer from short circuiting by passing through the DC circuit. He connected his receiver to a wire antenna suspended high in the air and to a ground. The antenna idea may have been based on a lightning rod and was an early use of a monopole wire aerial.

Got that?

Popov described his devise in the paper On the Relation of Metallic Powders to Electric Oscillationsdelivered to the Russian Physical and Chemical Society in St. Petersburg on May 7, 1898 which the Russians, and most of the countries which were in the sphere of influence of the former Soviet Union celebrate as the birth of radio. But there is scant evidence and considerable doubt that he actually demonstrated creation when he read his paper that day. Still his paper attracted considerable international attention, including reaching the Italian Guglielmo Marconi who was interested in applying Hertzian wave to wireless telegraphy.

Popov's main rival for the title of Father of Radio--Marconi with his radiotelegraph equipment.

Popov evidently did not at first recognize that his lightning detector could also be a communications devise. It is unclear if he was aware of the near simultaneous work being done by Marconi. But we do know that his earliest confirmed public demonstration came on March 24, 1896 when he set up a transmitter and a receiver in buildings on different St. Petersburg campuses and transmitted a Morse code message that rang the bell on the receiver and was transcribed onto a blackboard. The message reportedly spelled out “Heinrich Hertz” in the Cyrillic alphabet. Popov was reportedly moved to create an improved devise and demonstrate it after reading Marconi’s 1896 patent application for a radio telegraph system. He had not taken any patents of his own.

Marconi had demonstrated his radio telegraph system employing significant differences and improvements over Lodge and Poplov’s early work by transmitting a message over half a mile in mid-1895, which was well documented and bolstered by the patent application which is why most Western countries credit the Italian as the inventor of practical radio. Marconi was also relentless in promoting his invention and exploring commercial applications.

Popov’s system was taken up and improved upon by French entrepreneur Eugene Ducretet and began manufacturing equipment in competition with Marconi’s system in 1898.

A poster for a 1948 Soviet bio-pic about Popov references the dramatic communication with the stranded General-Admiral Apraksin.

Popov meanwhile set about making his system useful to his masters in the Czarist Navy. He achieved ship-to-shore communication over a distance of 6 miles in 1898 and 30 miles in 1899. In 1900 he set up a station on Hogland Island in the Gulf of Finland to relay communications with the battleship General-Admiral Apraksin which had run aground and then been iced in. The ship was equipped with one of his transmitters but was too distant to communicate with the Russian Naval bases on the mainland. The Hogland station acted as a relay to shore from where the signals were forwarded to Naval Headquarters by land line. In the months before the ship could be reached and rescued more than 400 messages passed through the station between ship and shore. The celebrated incident cemented the potential for radio in nautical safety.

Now a Russian celebrity, Popov was appointed a professor of the Electrotechnical Institute in 1901 and made its Director in 1905. He did not live long to enjoy his new position. He died of a brain hemorrhage on January 13, 1906 at the age of just 46. The Institute was later re-named in his honor, just one of many tributes showered on him by the Czarist government and its Soviet successors.

Popov’s family was Romanoff loyalists who fled Russia to Manchuria in the dangerous chaos of the Revolution. Eventually the extended family made it to the United States where his relatives and descendants have become distinguished scientists and academics in their own right.

One of several Soviet era or Russian postage stamps honoring Popov and/or Radio Day.

Despite their apostasy, the Soviet government in its nationalistic mode promoted Popov as the inventor of radio, along with other Russian inventors who could lay some claim to key inventions and technological innovations. Some of those claims are ridiculous and flimsy, but Popov probably merits at least equal billing with Marconi in the West.

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Zip A Dee Doo Dah—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
7 May 2020 at 21:55

Zip A Dee Doo Dah—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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7 May 2020 at 21:55

By: Patrick Murfin

Zip A Dee Doo Dah sung by James Baskett in Song of the South.

No song exudes the exuberance of Spring like Zip A Dee Doo Dah. In Disney’s 1946 break though combination of live action and animation it had everything—a pleasant rustic lane, chirping blue birds of happiness, clouds of pink cherry blossoms, and a carefree singin’ Darkie. Uh oh—that’s where the storm clouds rolled in that pretty much kept the filmand James Baskett’s performance as Uncle Remus from public viewing for 50 years.

The film was based on Georgia author Joel Chandler Harris’s collections of re-told Gullah folktales narrated by Uncle Remus, a kindly, happy-go-luck plantation worker in the Reconstruction era South. Written in what passed for Black dialect the stories related the adventures of Br’er Rabbit, Br’er Fox, and Br’er Bear with roots going back to African tribal yarns to entertain a young white boy with fables with hidden life lessons.

Harris, an Atlanta journalist, considered his wildly popular books to be tributes to the stories he heard as a boy regionalist writers who used dialect in their work.

The original Disney theatrical poster for Song of the South featured only the white actors and cartoon characters so the film could be advertised and shown in the segregated South.

Walt Disney had wanted to bring the stories to the screen since the success of Dumbo in 1941 but shifting to war-time shorts and training films put the project on a back burner for years. When it was revived Baskett, a busy radio actor with a little film experience, who had voiced Preacher Crow in Dumbo was his first choice to play Uncle Remus.

The movie was a big success and Zip A Dee Doo Dah, written by Allie Wrubel and Ray Gilbert, won the 1947 Academy Award for Best Original Song. But Baskett was not nominated for either Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor. There was considerable controversy over the snub and protests organized by the pesky NAACP. In 1948 the Motion Picture Academy tried to atone by presenting Baskett with a special Oscar—the same designation once used for an award to Shirley Temple. It was the first time any type of Academy award was presented to a Black man—Hattie McDaniel had previously won Best Supporting Actress in Gone With the Wind.

Ingrid Bergman presented James Baskett with his Special Oscar.

When live filming began in 1945 Baskett was only 41 years old. Although he had a full head of gray hair, he was much more youthful looking, and thinner, than the elderlyUncle Remus. A grizzled beard, a good deal of make-up, ragged clothes, and a beat-up hat transformed the actor.

With the Academy Award under his belt and a regular part on the half-hour radio versionof Amos ‘n’ Andy Baskett was looking forward to a booming career when he suddenly died of a heart attack on July 9, 1948. He was only 44 years old.

Disney re-released Song of the South just once and showed clips from the film on the Disneyland and Disney’s Wonderful World of Color TV shows. But by the late ‘60’s the film was under attack as pandering to racist stereotypes by organizations that included the NAACP which had once championed it. Disney withdrew the film from circulation and from the regular rotation of the studio’s video re-issues.

Zip A Dee Doo Dahwas included in various CD collectionsof Disney songs, and, as we see, is seen on YouTube. You can be the judge of how appropriate it is.

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75 Years Ago—Nazi Surrender Ended Fighting in Europe but Not the War
7 May 2020 at 09:18

75 Years Ago—Nazi Surrender Ended Fighting in Europe but Not the War

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7 May 2020 at 09:18

By: Patrick Murfin

A French post card depicting the German surrender at Reims from a painting by Lucien Jonas for the Musee de l' Armee in Paris.

Seventy-five years ago today on May 7, 1945 representatives of the German High Command signed articles of unconditional surrender to the Allies at a French school house in Rheims used as the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF).

It had been apparent for weeks that the German position was hopeless. Pressed on all sides, the Soviets were about to take Berlin when Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker leaving Grand Admiral Karl Donitz as his successoras President of the Reich. Dönitz realized his only duty was ending the war as quickly as possible on the best possible terms for Germany. He immediately began back channel negotiations.

Meanwhile German armies began surrendering regionally. German forces in Italy lay down arms on May 1. Berlin surrendered on May 2 and two separate armies north of Berlin capitulated.

On May 4 Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery accepted the unconditional surrender of all German forces in Holland, Northern Germany, Denmark and all naval forces in the area. General Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedberg, acting on orders from Dönitz initially offered surrender to Western allies alone leaving the option for his troops to turn around to face the Russians. Montgomery coldly refused leaving the Germans no other choice by surrender.

The same day troops in Bavaria, the state whose mountains were once considered as a fallback position for a drawn out campaign of guerilla resistance, surrendered. From the Channel Islands—held by Germany even after the Normandy Invasion—to Prague one after another German forces capitulated.

Dönitz was informed that any surrender had to be conducted by a representative of the German High Command. This was because the Allies did not want a repeat of the Armistice of the First World War which was signed by the government, not the military leading to the charge that the Army had been “stabbed in the back,” a key propagandapoint when Germany re-armed.

On May 6 Dönitz dispatched Colonel General Alfred Jodl, Chief of the German General Staff to Reims with orders to offer surrender to Western forces only—exactly the same terms turned down my Montgomery two days earlier. Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower harshly excoriated Jodl and bluntly demanded unconditional surrender to all allies or face continued prosecution of the war. Informed of the terms, Dönitz wired his consent.

Celebrating after the German surrender at Reims were General Ivan Susloparov, General Walter Bedell Smith, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Royal Air Force Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder.

At 2:41 local time Jodl signed the Instrument of Surrender. Eisenhower pointedly and as an intended snubdid not personally accept or sign for the Allies assigning his Chief of Staff, the brusque General Walter Bedell Smith, to be principal signer for the Allies. Also signing was General Ivan Susloparov, Soviet liaison to SHAEF. Susloparov signed before he could get full authorization from his government so it was understood that a second surrender would be signed with the Soviets on the Eastern front. French Major General François Sevez signed as the official witness.

The surrender of all hostile forces was set for May 8, 11:01 pm Central European Time. Shortly after midnight on May 8 the second surrender signing was conducted at the seat of the Soviet Military Administration in Berlin. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, of the Soviet High Command was the principal Allied signatory and was joined by British Air Chief Marshal Arthur William Tedder, as Deputy Supreme Commander SHAEF. American Lt. General Carl Spaz, Commander of United States Strategic Air Forcesin Europe; and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny of the First French Army were witnesses. Signing for the Germans were Admiral Hans-Georg von Friedeburg, Commander-in-Chief of the Navy; Colonel-General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff of the Luftwaffe; and Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Staff of the German Armed Forces also signing on behalf of the Army. The signing was completed fifteen minutes after midnight.

By the terms signed in Rheims, fighting had already ceased just over an hour earlier.

When the news of the surrender broke there were joyous street celebrations like this one in London.

News of the end of the war in Europe broke on May 8, with spontaneous celebrations erupting across Europe and North America. Street celebrations in Britain and France were especially jubilant.

President Harry Truman announced the end of the war in a somber broadcast with the words that “Flags of Freedom fly all over Europe today,” while reminding listeners that the war against Japan continued. The knowledge that a long bloody war against Japan might still stretch ahead with American troops taking most of the casualties in a final assault against the home islands somewhat restrainedcelebrations in this country.

This knowledge also haunted many allied troops in Europe, who knew that they might be shipped to the Pacific. Indeed some Air Force and Naval units were almost immediately re-directed and some of the crack U.S. Airborne, Infantry, and Armored divisions which had been in the thick of fighting for months were slated for re-assignment, as were many individual G.I.s whose units would be dissolved.

Isolated German units continued to surrender for about a week.

Not all fighting ended on May 8. Field Marshal Ferdinand Schörner of the Army Group Centre fought on in Austria and Czechoslovakia, but the Soviets turned all of their considerable might against him and by May 15 ceased all offensive operations with mop up in Czechoslovakia completed.

The last battle in the war took place on May 15 in Slovenia and the last shots were fired on the Dutch island of Texel where Ukrainian prisoners of war had rebelled against the German occupiers on April 5 and kept up a guerilla campaign against them. The German garrison had simply been forgotten in the shuffle and was afraid if they surrendered to the Ukrainians they would be executed en masse.

A final bit of business was dissolving the German Government under Dönitz. The Allies had concentrated so hard on getting the armed forces to lay down their arms that they had neglected to demand that civil authority be transferred to them. Worse, they had neglected to outline how a military occupation would work. On May 28 a rather junior British officer was dispatched to the town of Flensburg to read to Dönitz Eisenhower’s edict dissolving the government and arresting all of its members.

In the meantime, local commanders took charge where they were. On June 9 the Allies officially signed a Declaration Regarding the Defeat of Germany and the Assumption of Supreme Authority by Allied Powers taking over civil authority at all levels in occupied Germany.

Details of the shape of the occupation—and of the post war world—were agreed to at the Potsdam Conference by Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill (replaced after this agreement was reached at the Conference by Clement Attleewhen Churchill stunningly suffered an election loss) and Soviet leader Josef Stalin. The agreement divided Germany, and its capital of Berlin in zones of Allied control.

On December 13, 1946 President Truman finally declared that hostilities between the United States and Germany had ceased.

The less dramatic and nearly forgotten final official end to World War II with the signing of Treaty on the Final Settlement with respect to Germany in 1990. Seen Left to right: Roland Dumas (France), Eduard Shevardnadze (USSR), James Baker (USA), Mikhail Gorbachev (USSR), Hans-Dietrich Genscher (FRG), Lothar de Maizière (GDR) and Douglas Hurd (United Kingdom).

Yet the war was not technically over. Even after the establishment of the German Federal Republic (West Germany) as a U.S. ally and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) in 1949, the U.S. felt it needed the fiction of an official state of war to maintain authorityfor stationing troops in Germany.

Congress adopted a resolutiondeclaring a formal end to hostilities in 1951. Official occupation continued until 1955 when the West German government was given full sovereignty.

In September 1990, more than 45 years after the surrender the Four Powers—the U.S., Britain, France, and the U.S.S.R—finally signed a Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany with both German Federal Republic and the German Democratic Republic which allowed the two German states to unite, which they did on October 3, 1990. The war was finally, officially over.

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The Lusty Month of May—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
6 May 2020 at 20:37

The Lusty Month of May—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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6 May 2020 at 20:37

By: Patrick Murfin

The Lusty Month of May from Camelot sung by Julie Andrews.

Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote “In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewehad a much randier assessment in their 1960 Broadway musical Camelot.

The musical was adapted from T. H. White’s 1958 The Once and Future King, the same Arthurian novel on which Disney based it’s 1963 animated film The Sword in the Stone. It was directed by Moss Hart and ran on Broadway for 873 performances, winning four Tony Awardsand spawning several revivals, foreign productions, and the 1967 Warner Bros. film Camelot. The stellar original cast included Richard Burton as King Arthur, Robert Goulet as Lancelot, David Hurst as Merlin, and Roddy McDowell as Mordred. Julie Andrews who broke out to American stardom in Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady was the duo’s first and only pick to play Guinevere.

Lerner & Loewe's struggles to get Camelot on Broadway were chronicled in a Time cover piece.

Andrews was famously snubbed by Warner Bros. when Audrey Hepburn was cast as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. Despite film musical triumphs in Disney’s Mary Poppins and the mega-hit Sound of Music and solid dramatic roles in The Americanization of Emily and Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtin, she did not appear in the 1967 film. Miffed by Jack Warner’s insult, Andrews declined an offer to sell. Largely in solidarity with her Burton, Goulet, and McDowell did likewise replaced with non-singer Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Harris, Franco Nero, and David Hemmings respectively.

John F. Kennedy was famously fond of Camelot and frequently played the enormously successful original cast album in the White House. In a 1963 Life interview, Jacqueline Kennedy, referenceda line from the Lerner and Loewemusical to describe the Kennedy era White House—Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.” The martyred President’s friend and speech writer Ted Sorensen cemented the public identification of the administration with Camelot in his subsequent books Kennedy in 1965 and The Kennedy Legacy in 1970.

The original Broadway Camelot poster.

In the play July Andrews’ Guinevere was hardly the nearly pristine white goddess portrayed in Le Morte d’Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory and subsequent romances. Instead she was a headstrong lass quite smitten by the attentions of Arthur. And she was not shy about flaunting it in the song The Lusty Month of May.

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Oh The Humanity!—A Ball of Fire and the End of a Dream
6 May 2020 at 09:47

Oh The Humanity!—A Ball of Fire and the End of a Dream

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6 May 2020 at 09:47

By: Patrick Murfin

Thanks to newsreels, dozens of photographers, and the chilling live radio coverage, for the first time Americans and people from around the world were witnesses to a great disaster. The impact was profound.

On May 6, 1937 a dream died with a bang, along with 37 souls. Up until then, the future of trans-oceanic and other mega-long distant air service looked like it belonged to lighter than air craft. Airplanes, it was thought, were too limited by fuel needsand lift capacity to economically serve this need. They were alright for military use, that had been proven, and had a place supplementing good rail service in shorter distance travel, but the great dirigibles held the promise of connecting the world with fast, reliable passenger service and a lift capacity that could also eventually become a major freight hauler.

All of that changed when the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg ignited and crashed in a fiery infernoas it attempted to dock with its mooring mast at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station in New Jersey. The event was captured in all of its dramatic horror by newsreel cameras and described in a live remote broadcast by WLS Radio of Chicago.

Dirigibles were a refinement on the concept of a powered balloon developed by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin beginning in 1899. Unlike their predecessors, Zeppelin’s creation featured a light but rigid cigar shaped envelope inside of which lighter than air gas was contained in a series of tanks or bladders. The envelope provided additional space inside which could be used for freight or passengers. The ships were powered by two or more gasoline or diesel engines and a cab extending below the envelope served as a pilot station.

German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin invented and developed the dirigible--a semi-rigid lighter than aircraft capable of long distance flight and significant lift for military, passenger, or freight service.

Zeppelin built several models of increasing size and lift potential over the years. In the World War I they were pressed into military service and famously bombed London.

The British, French, Italians, and the U.S. all scrambled to enter the field with lighter than air craft themselves. But crashes and failures dodged all attempts. The British R34 became the first dirigible to cross the Atlantic in 1919, but it crashed in a storm two years later. A larger sister ship R38 exploded in 1921 when its frame snapped, unable to stand the strain causing a spark which ignited explosive hydrogen gas used for lift.

The U.S. hardly fared better. It ship, the U.S. Navy’s ZR1 Shenandoah was built in 1923 and used non-combustible helium for safety. Despite this advantage Shenandoah broke up in a thunderstorm over Ohioin 1925 killing 19 of 43 crewmen.

The Navy, which remained committed to lighter than air ships, commissionedthe Zeppelin company to build it a ship as part of war reparations from defeated Germany. The commission kept the company alive while Germany was forbidden by treaty from building airships for its own use. Delivered to the Navy in 1924 it was also designed for use with helium. Designated ZR3 Los Angeles it became the most successful large dirigible yet with a capacity for 30 passengers in addition to crew. It made more than 250 flights including trips to Puerto Rico and Panama.

The Navy's Macon was an aircraft carrier which could launch and retrieve Sparrow Hawk scout biplanes from the exterior platforms on either side of the ship. The idea was to be able to cover wide areas giving the Navy long distance eyes in search of any enemy fleet, in anti-submarine operations, or for search and rescue. She and her sister the Akron represented the pinnacle of military development of the dirigibles.

Impressed, the Navy arranged for the Zeppelin company to license the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company to build ships of German design. The results were the Akron and the Macon both of which could serve as aircraft carriers capable of launching and retrieving 5 light scout planes. Delivered in 1931 both ships went into service. But the Akron but was lost in a storm over the Atlantic in 1933 and the Macon crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 1935. The Navy then abandoned building new rigid airships, although it continued to fly the Los Angeles.

Meanwhile the British re-entered the race with two new mammoth airships, the largest ever built. The R-101, the largest ship ever to fly with a passenger capacity of over 100, crashed and burned near Beauvais, France, on October 4, 1930 killing 48 of 54 aboard. The slightly smaller R-100 made a successful round trip to Montreal, Canada, but was withdrawn from service and ultimately scrapped after the R-101 disaster.

Despite the dismal safety record, the fact remained that no dirigible ever manufactured by the Zeppelin company in Germany had ever crashed. They seemed immune from the stresses of extreme weather that had doomed most other ships.

Following the success of its Los Angeles for the U.S. Navy, the Zeppelin company began construction of a new airship for German civilian use. The Graf Zeppelin completed in 1928 was meant to be a prototype and a demonstration for a new generation of air ships meant for passenger packet and airmail service. It was a huge success. It made a trans Atlantic flight to Lakehurst in October and was welcomed with great ballyhoo including a New York ticker-tape parade for the crew and a reception at the White House. The next year she completed a round the world trip that officially began and ended in Lakehurst after she had crossed the Atlantic again. After that there were triumphant tours of Europe and trips to South America. Crossing from Germany to Lakehurst became almost routine, if not yet regularly scheduled.

The company planned for a larger airship to inaugurate regular scheduled service. Plans for that ship, designated LZ-129 had to be reconsidered after the R-101 disaster. The ship was made heavier and stronger, but also intended for the safer helium being successfully used by the U.S. Navy. As the ship was being re-designed the Nazis came to power in Germany. Despite the resistance of old Count Zeppelin company operating chief Dr. Hugo Eckener impressedthe Graf Zeppelin and future air ships into a new state owned air line. From then on German airships would be ablaze with the Nazi swastika on their tail fins and the air ships would become propaganda tools for the Third Reich.

Last triumphant moments for the sleek symbol of Nazi pride--the Hindenburg soars over New York City on May 6, 1937.

The new ship was dubbed the Hindenburg by Eckener in honor of the former German President Paul von Hindenburg, much to the annoyance of Nazi authorities who had hoped the ship would be named for Hitler. She was tested in March of 1937. But due to the rise of German militarism, the Zeppelin company was unable to obtain helium from the United States, the only nation with a capacity to produce it in large quantities. Helium was restricted as a strategic material. Eckener was forced to fly the new ship with dangerous hydrogen under pressure from the government.

After a series of trial flights and an extensive propaganda tour of Germany the Hindenburg made its first trans Atlantic flight to Rio de Janerio, Brazil. The ship was then put into the long dreamed of regularly scheduled service. In 1936 she made ten trips to Lakehurst and seven to Rio.

The Hindenburg left Frankfurt for Lakehurst on May 3, 1937 on its first scheduled round trip between Europe and the United States that season. She arrived over New Jersey three days later but attempts to land were delayed until a line of thunderstormspassed Lakehurst. The press was out in force to cover the still unique event.

When the weather cleared, the Hindenburg made a routine descent. Just after she had dropped bow lines to be taken up by Navy personnel on the ground, the ship was rocked by an explosion. Fire erupted about a third of the way from the ship’s stern. She dropped to the ground in 37 seconds and was completely engulfed in flames in moments. WLS announcer Herbert Morrison famously sobbed “Oh the Humanity!” as he attempted to describe the horrible scene.

His clothing burned off Walter Banholzer is led away for medical assistance by a Navy ground crewman and a Zepplin company steward, both as shocked, stunned, and traumatized as the survivors of the crash.

Amazingly, of the 36 passengers and 61 crew on board, only 13 passengers and 22 crew and one ground crew member died. Others were severely injured including those with horrible burns. Whatever the toll, it was enough to end lighter than air travel. German invincibility in the air was disproven and the image of the burning ship was seared into the public imagination. The Graf Zeppelin was withdrawn from service and work on its replacement, Graf Zeppelin II was scrapped.

Although many theories abound as to the cause of the explosion ranging from spontaneous combustion to sabotage, no cause has ever been proven. Ultimately, any airship using explosive hydrogen and at the mercy of any stray spark was probably doomed. We will never know if the safe operation of the ship with helium might have led to continued development of lighter than air fleets.

The compressed laboratory of wartime soon produced technological innovations that made trans oceanic service by fixed wing aircraft not only possible but routine.

Today, despite some efforts to revive them as freight handlers, lighter than air ships are mostly to blimps, much smaller gas filled bags used for advertising and as camera platforms for sporting events.

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Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with Flor de Toloache—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
5 May 2020 at 19:00

Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with Flor de Toloache—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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5 May 2020 at 19:00

By: Patrick Murfin

Celebrate Cinco de Mayo with Flor de Toloache. Nothing could be more gay and cheerful than celebrating Cinco de Mayowith mariachi flair especially when performed by Flor de Toloache who defy stereotypical macho expectations A every hearty partier will tell you Cinco de Mayo in the U.S. it has become kind of second St. Patrick’s Day decked out in sombreros and serapes instead of emerald green, toasted to with Coronas with lime and shots of tequila instead of Guinness and Jamison’s, and laid out with two-for-one taco deals instead of corn beefand cabbage plates. It is celebrated without apparent irony even by those who cheer Trump and who send semi-literate screeds to the newspapers railing against those damned lazy, criminal immigr...

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Rev. Dan Larsen Presente!
5 May 2020 at 09:55

Rev. Dan Larsen Presente!

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5 May 2020 at 09:55

By: Patrick Murfin

Rev. Dan Larsen at the pulpit of the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock for the dedication of the new UU sources windows in the social room.

We received word late Sunday that the Rev. Dan Larsen, Minister Emeritus of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, Illinois passed away in hospice care at the Florence Nursing Home in Marengo. There was something very fitting about a man who loved preaching as much as Dan making his exit on the Sabbath.

He had serious, long term health issues including chronic heart failure and life-long battle with depression but like many nursing homes, there was a Coronavirus outbreak in his. There is no word on if the viral infection may have caused or contributed to his death. But I know one thing—if he had been healthier he would have been organizing the residents and staff to take action and demand ample personal protection, disinfection, social distancing, and support from the inept and chaotic Federal authorities who seem contentwith writing off the old and weak in support of profit. That was the kind of guy he was.

Back in January 2013 I posted about Dan Larsen referencingan even earlier nomination of him as an exemplar of Courageous Love for the UUA’sthen new Standing on the Side of Love campaign. Here it is again with some edits and updates. Dan Larsen Presente!

I had lunch today at Angelo’s on the Square in Woodstock. Locals all know the joint, the classic Greek-American family style restaurantwhere folks gather for a reasonably priced meal and a chance to chat leisurely without being rushed. Business and social chatter at the tables was the order of the day as the carillonin the Opera House tower rang the noon hour.

I was joining my old minister, mentor, and collaborator on twenty years’ worth of social justice projects and causes, Dan Larsen. The occasion was social, of course, two old cronies catching up. But there was also some business at hand, some fences that needed mending, and some boundaries established.

We had butted heads pretty seriously lately at meetings of the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation [Tree of Life] in McHenry which I now chair. It not that we disagreed about issues so much as differences of leadership styles and over process fueled by our mutual passion. Dan was having a hard time adjusting to no longer being in charge and as I grow older I find I am becoming a crankier old coot with less patience than I should have.

Anyway, we talked it out like grownups, each made agreements to do better, and we found our way ahead. There’s lots of work for the Committee and the Congregation ahead. We parted warmly, eager to resume a long and fruitful collaboration.

When I got back to my basement office [Oaktree Capital], I took a moment or two to search out potential topics for this daily blog post. In the process I discovered that it was exactly two years ago today, January 25, 2011, when The Standing on the Side of Love campaign asked for stories of Courageous Love to fill a map on their web pagewith inspirations in advance of Valentine’s Day. I was delighted to share the story of the Rev. Dan Larsen who has been standing on the side of love for a very long time and posted a version on this blog. This is pretty much what I sent them.

Rev. Dan Larsen helping to lead McHenry County's first immigrant justice march from Woodstock Square to the County Government complex with Magier Rivera and Carlos Acosta.

The Rev. Dan Larsen is the usual suspect. Recently retiredfrom a 19-year ministry at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Woodstock, Illinois and named minister emeritus, Rev. Larsen was the one person the local media knew that they could count on when issues around social justice and discrimination of any kind arose. They knew that one way or another Rev. Larsen and his church would be involved.

Dan Larsen has been Standing on the Side of Love for a long time. In conservative, overwhelmingly white McHenry County, located in the far northwestern corner of the Chicago Metropolitan Area, he stood for love and justice when few others dared to.

Almost immediately upon assuming the Woodstock pulpithe reached out to the Latino community creating the first county-wide Hispanic Concerns Task Forceand battling housing discriminationand other hurdles faced by that community. As numbers of Latinos in the county swelled, so did an ugly racist backlash and in recent years a virulent anti-immigrant sentiment fueled by groups like the Illinois Minutemen. Rev. Larsen helped organize and lead the county’s first big immigration reform march and organized proteststo Minutemen meetings. At church, he developed special outreach and service programs for the community, including a weekly group for Latino women that combined help with learning English with support in finding employment and, when necessary, assistance.

When a faction of the Ku Klux Klan targeted McHenry County in 1997 with a rally at the County Government Center, Dan Larsen helped organize an interfaith alternative event on historic Woodstock Square. That event eventually became the Diversity Day Festival which ran annually through 2010, intentionally bringing together people of different racial, ethnic, religious, language, physical and mental challenges, gender, and sexual orientation. The Festival, held in late September or early October, helped local Muslimsintroduce themselves as a human community in the dark days after the 9/11 attacks. It was also the first public forum in the county in which Gays and Lesbians felt comfortable in participating.

Rev. Dan Larsen leading a silent march from the Congregational Unitarian Church to the Woodstock Square Civil War Monument in 2012. Larsen always made the Memorial Day services about all the war dead--veterans, non-combatants, collateral damage, and even enemies united in death.

Starting with work educating the public about the real truth about the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the early 1990’s when local media and authorities were spreadingboth panic and blame on the Gay community, Larsen has been an advocate for Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, and Transgender community. He offered the church buildingas the only safe haven in McHenry County for Gay and Gay ally groupsto meet. A support group became McHenry County Pride, the first openly gay organization in the county, which continues to meet at the church. The church also housed a pioneering counseling program for Gay teens, who were often the objects of bullying and violence in their high schools, and is the home for the county chapter of PFLAG. Larsen helped the Congregation become certified as a Welcoming Congregation and becoming a comfortable home for Gays and Lesbians. He pioneered in performing religious union ceremoniesin the county and forthrightly advocated marriage equality. When a proposal to bring the rowing events of the Gay Games to nearby Crystal Lake, Larsen publicly spoke out at meetings packed by screaming protesters of the Park District’s decision to allow the use of the Lake. All of these activities have frequently drawn public and private threats of violence against Larsen and the Church.

Rev. Larsen asked “How Do We Support Our Troops?” He argued that, for him, the best way to support the troops is to end the war so they “don’t have to be killed and don’t have to kill.”

This just skims the surface of a remarkable dedication to justice. It fails to mention his outstanding workin the peace movement and in advocacy for health care reform, among other issues.

Just after announcing his retirement, Larsen was diagnosed with advanced throat cancer. After several months of intense treatment, he is on the road to recovery with a good prognosis. And he is back in the saddle working with many of the same groups he reached out to as an active minister. He was recently elected president of Principled Minds, a local non-profit that partners with other organizations to develop documentary and educational programsdesigned to fight racism, discrimination, and school bullying.

During the Tree of Life Congregations campaign for marriage equality, Minister Emeritus Dan Larsen (center in tan coat) participated in a road-side vigil in McHenry.

Since I finished the paragraphs above, Dan has had some hard times. Is beloved wife and supporter Pat succumbed to a long battle with breast cancer. He was naturally overcome with grief and has had serious problems with depression. Despite surviving the throat cancer, Dan developed several other health problems himself. He has lost a lot of weight and sometimes looks, well, frail. Even his loyal companion, the Boxer Snoop Dog had his own brush with cancer and nearly died last fall.

Meanwhile Dan had to adapt to a new relationshipwith his old congregation, which among other things physically moved away to a new building in McHenry. That meant backing away from involvement at the church to facilitate a transition to new leadership and to let our new minister, the Rev. Sean Parker-Dennison, settle in without having to look over his shoulder. But that distancing came just as he needed the supportof his old friends and community the most.

Dan Larsen in a Tree of Life directory photo.

Dan eased back into things by re-joining the Social Justice Committee just about the same time I was elected Chair. The ability to work on issues he cares deeply about gave him purpose. I watched him improve physically the more he became engaged.

So I we were able smooth over our difficulties, and work together for a while. Meanwhile Dan served as pastor to a couple of small non-UU congregations. When those petered out he continued to seek new assignments or pulpit supply opportunities while he was in and out of hospitals multiple times for heart failure. Unfortunately his mental health also deteriorated. He felt angryand marginalized by his old Congregation and picked fights with some of his closest friends. Bitternessand resentment stalked his final years and he did not go gentle into that goodnight. One bright spot was the loving support he found with a woman in a Marengo church.

Over the last year or so I saw Dan on the few occasions when he came to Sunday morning services at Tree of Life, and had a last conversation with him on a Metra platform early last fall. I sent a final card after learning he had entered hospice last Wednesday. I don’t know if he ever read it. I hope he did. I wanted to tell him one more time how much I loved him.

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It Could Have Been Me—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
4 May 2020 at 21:22

It Could Have Been Me—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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4 May 2020 at 21:22

By: Patrick Murfin

It Could Have Been Me by Holly Near.

It’s the 50th anniversary of the Kent State shooting. You probably noticed. It has been all over social media, especially posts from geezers like me old enough to remember it and to have participated in the aftermath. I don’t know exactly how this fits into our Home Confinement Music Festival except it should not go unnoticed and the fact that perhaps the deep divisions the shooting had on society then are mirrored by those over the Coronavirus lockdown and response today.

The sleeve to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's single Ohio.

Kent state inspired a remarkable number of songsand musical commemorations. The best known of course is Ohio written by Neil Young for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. It is ubiquitous and you have probably seen at least some postings of it. Other songs included English singer/songwriter Harvey Andrews Hey Sandy for victim Sandra Scheuer, Steve Millers’ Jackson-Kent Blues from the Steve Miller Bandalbum Number 5, The Beach Boys’ Student Demonstration Time on Surf's Up with new lyrics by Mike Love for Leiber & Stoller’s Riot in Cell Block Number Nine, Bruce Springsteen’s Where Was Jesus in Ohio, actressand singer Ruth Warrick’s 41,000 Plus 4—The Ballad of the Kent State, Dave Brubeck’s cantata Truth Is Fallen, and Barbara Dane’s The Kent State Massacrewritten by Jack Warshaw on her 1973 album I Hate the Capitalist System.

But today we are sharing the very personal It Could Have Been Me written and performed by Holly Near. Near was never a rock or pop sensation and although a gifted and prolific singer/songwriter never really fit into to the folk music niche. But she cultivated a devoted following for her feminist, LGBTQ, and social protest music that has endured for decades. Among her beloved songs is Singing For Our Lives which is included in the hymnal of the Unitarian Universalist Association Singing the Living Tradition, under the title We Are A Gentle, Angry People.

Holly Near in the mid 1970's.

Near recorded It Could Have Been Me in 1973 at a live performance for her 1975 A Live Album. In our YouTube clip Near’s spoken introduction is nearly inaudible but hang in there, her beautiful clear voice soon comes in. The song was done a cappella as were many of her stage performances.

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The Not So Golden Anniversary of Kent State and Murfin Memoirs of the Days Following
4 May 2020 at 10:50

The Not So Golden Anniversary of Kent State and Murfin Memoirs of the Days Following

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4 May 2020 at 10:50

By: Patrick Murfin

Ohio National Guardmen take aim on retreating student demonstrators on the Kent State campus. Note the officer with the pistol who may have given an order or signal to tire.

Fifty years ago today on April 4, 1970 Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on student anti-war demonstrators on the very middle American campus of Kent State University. Four students were killed by the gunfire—Jeffrey Miller, Allison Krause, William Schroeder, and Sandra Scheuer. Only Miller was an active participant in the protests that day, Krause and Scheuer were sympathetic bystanders, and Schroeder was a totally non-involved ROTC student killed at a distance while walking from a class. Nine other students were injured. No Guardsman was seriously injured.

The Guardsmen were said to have fired spontaneouslyin fear of being attacked by the demonstrators. But film evidence shows the demonstrators were retreating and more than a 100 yards down a slope from the troops. There is also now considerable evidence that an officer with a pistol ordered or signaleda command to fire.

John Filo's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of 15 year-old Florida runaway Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller.

Full accounts of the shootings, the days of unrest prior to the fatal afternoon, the aftermath, and the investigations can be found in several online sources including author William A. Gordon’s website in support of his book Four Dead In Ohio: Was There a Conspiracy at Kent State?; the Kent May 4 Center, an off-campus resource; Kent State’s own May 4, 50th Commemorationsite; and the handy and generally reliable Wikipedia entry.

There are also official Ohio State and FBI investigations that must be taken with tablespoon-fulls of salt. Among the scores of books I still recommend the very readable Kent State: What Happened and Whyby novelist James A. Michener which was rushed to publication in 1971. Without the considerable evidence later uncovered, Michener concluded that the shooting was a “tragic accident.” But the book is excellent in putting a human face on the participants and victims and especially in disclosing the raw generational divide in the aftermath that had one survivor being told by his parents that he should have been shot. Some of those family rifts, not only at Kent State but around the country between demonstrators and their silent majority parents have still not healed and there were grandparents who never met their grandchildren and now aging adult children who were never welcome at their parents’ funerals.

The paperback edition of James A. Michener's early book on the tragedy.

The Kent State killings and the murders of Black Jackson State University in Mississippiwere an outgrowth of a May 4th national Student Strike against the war. In the wake of the Kent State massacre that strike blossomed into hundreds of demonstrations all over the United States including university occupations, pitched street battles, and mass demonstrations that continued for more than a week.

A poster for the May 4th student strike against the invasion of Cambodia and on-going War in Vietnam.

Despite the spasm of rage and militancy, student anti-war activism subsidedconsiderably over the next two or three years. Leadership of a mass anti-war movement shifted to the respectable middle class and efforts like the Vietnam Moratorium. Ohio Governor James Rhodes and President Richard Nixon were both convinced that the shootings successfully broke the back of student radical activism. More recently Donald Trump hinted that similar “very rough treatment” would solve the problems of Black Lives Matter and Native American anti-pipelineprotesters.

The Official Kent State University commemoration logo.

There would have been elaborate commemorationstoday at Kent State, which now takes pains to honor the victims, but those fell victim to the Coronavirus pandemic lock down. Instead several events including a virtual candle light vigil, a noon Eastern Daylight Time ceremony, and exhibitsand panel discussions will stream at and be made available on YouTube.

For many of my generation Kent State and its aftermath were central life altering events in our lives. What follows is an account of my own small part in those events, as best as my poor memory can reconstruct things 50 years later.

My Own Private Kent State

I must have been at my brother Tim’s (later known as Peter) apartment on Sheridan Road near the Morse Ave. Beach when we got the news of the shooting. Oddly, unlike other Great Events, I can’t fix in my mind the moment I heard the news.

Rather than hopping on the L to get to my own school, Columbia College, a small communications college located on a few floors of a commercial building at Grand Ave. and the Inner Drive north of the Loop, my brother convinced me to go with him and his friends to his campus, Kendall College in Evanston. Kendall was then a small, private two year college mostly drawing students from the northern suburbs. Neither the school nor my brother was particularly politically active. Tim was the center of acid dropping spirituality and the self-appointed guru to a circle of acolytes, many of them fellow students at Kendall. He said he left the Revolution to me. When we arrived on campus, students were in full possession of the buildings and the administrationwas nowhere to be found, although some facultywas on hand mingling with the students. There was no police presence; it was as though the administration had simply abandoned the school to the students.

Students rallied on the Northwestern campus. The night of May 4 they erupted onto Sheridan Road and erected barricades that stayed in place for days. Some students from near-by Kendall College went over to join them.

Some folks had gone over to join Northwestern students at barricades erected on Sheridan Road. Others milled about trying to figure out what to do. One student was working a Ham Radio and gathering informationfrom actions at campuses across the country. We soon realized that this could become an asset.

Phone connections were somehow made with students from campuses across the Chicago area and we fed them news gleaned from the Ham operator. Not all of that information was reliable, some turned out to be wild rumor, but enough was good so that it became apparent that we were part of a spontaneous nationwidestudent uprising that was growing by the hour.

Besides participating in the phone network, I started posting the news on large sheets of paper, updated regularly throughout the night to keep students informed. I called them the Joe Hill Memorial Wall Posters and had about a dozen of them lining hallways by the time the night was over.

There were also informal discussions all night. I was considered a real live activist because of my connections with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and my input was probably given more credence than I deserved. By morning I had agreed to return to campus later and set up some educational programs, which I did do, although Kendall never became a hot bed of radicalism.

In the morning, running on adrenalin, I headed down to Columbia. Columbia was a commuter school specializing in communications and the arts—broadcasting, photography, theater, dance, and writing. With no one living on our non-existent campus, I was not sure what I would find. There were no classes but it wasn’t exactly a strike either because the administration was totally supportive of the student cause and offered the facilities of the school free to the movement.

I headed down to the print shop in the basement, where I worked as one of two printers. We ginned upour little A.B. Dick 360 and Multilith 1250 offset presses and were soon turning out hundreds, even thousands of flyers, posters, handbills, and other material advertising actionsacross the city and region.

This banner hanging from an occupied campus building somewhere in America summarized the mood of outrage and defiance that swept campuses.

I have no recollection of how, but I was selected as one of two representatives from Columbia to a city wide student strike committee. I believe it was Wednesday when a couple of hundred folks met at the Riviera Theater in Uptown to plan coordinated actions.

The meeting was a perfect example of sometimes chaotic participatory democracy, but a consensus was arrived at to have a unified, city wide march and demonstration downtownon Saturday. I was named to the demonstration organizing committee with students from University of Illinois Circle Campus, University of Chicago, and Roosevelt, among other schools. Many of the others members were in SDS. Others were Trotskyites, who made something of a specialty of organizing big demonstrations. There was a sprinkling of Anarchistsas well. But the ideological wars that wracked campuses were suspended—mostly—in the face of the common emergency. Another meeting the following day was held at Circle Campus.

Again, I have no memory of how, but I was selected to try and negotiatewith Chicago Police in what most felt was the vain hope of avoid an attack by authorities the day of the March. Given the background of the Police Riots against demonstrators during the 1968 Democratic Convention, at protest marches connected to the trial of the Chicago 7, and the virtual street warfare around the Days of Rage in October ’69 there was little reason to hope for a better outcome.

Late Thursday afternoon I was escorted through an eerily quiet Police Headquarters to the office of Deputy Superintendent James Riordan. I believe I may have been taken through a route intended to keep rank and file police from seeing that the brass was meeting “the enemy.” Riordan was cordial. We shook hands. We both clearly understood the potential volatilityof the situation. I told him that organizers intended an entirely peaceful march and pointed to some earlier mass marches that had gone off without a hitch. I also pointed out that there had been no significant acts of violence on any of the Chicago area campuses even at Northwestern with its barricades or the building occupations at other schools. I said that we would have marshals to keep our demonstrators in line and moving and to discourage break away marches. Although others were trying to obtain a parade permit, I said that we intended to exercise our free speech rights and march with or without one.

Riordan said he understood and said that the police did not want to provoke a confrontation and would be as “restrained as possible.” I told him that we expected police would line the rout of march, but that putting those officers in full riot gear or having them stand with batons conspicuously exposed might be provocative under the circumstances. Riordan made no explicit promises but indicated that if we kept our people in line there would be a kind of truce. I got the distinct impression that higher-ups had already decided to try to avoid more bad national press.

A peaceful Kent State student strike march much like the one in Chicago.

All during this period, although I was known to be a Wobbly, I was not acting in any way as a representative of the union. I did inform the Chicago Branch of developments and the branch decided to participate in the march. That Saturday rather than joining other “leaders”—and I use that term in the loosest possible manner—in the front of the march or joining with Columbia or Kendall college contingents, I marched as a rank-and-file member of the IWW behind our black and red banner. Although riot equipped police were on hand, they were kept largely out of sight. Officers lining the route wore standard blouses and soft caps. Their batons were kept under their coats. The march and rally went off without a serious hitch or any violence, which is more than can be said of marches in other cities.

Later, I reported on the events in the pages of the Industrial Worker.

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Down to the River to Pray—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
3 May 2020 at 19:24

Down to the River to Pray—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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3 May 2020 at 19:24

By: Patrick Murfin

Down to the River to Pray by Tiffany Goodrick and Virtual Choir.

It’s a beautiful Sunday hereabouts, perfect for the old-timey folk gospel song Down to the River to Pray. The exact origins of the song are obscurebut undoubtedly from enslaved people in the ante-bellum American South.

The earliest printed version of the song, titled The Good Old Way, was published in Slave Songs of the United States in 1867 contributed by George H. Allanof Nashville, Tennessee. Another version, Come, Let Us All Go Down, was published in 1880 in The Story of the Jubilee Singers; With Their Songs, a book about the Fisk Jubilee Singers.

Fugitive slaves following the North Star to freedom. Black spirituals like Down to the River to Pray and Follow the Drinking Gourd contained coded instructions.

Like many slave spirituals, this one has dual meanings—overtly Christian referencing baptism and salvation, and coded symbolism for the escape to freedom and the underground railroad. The River may be the Ohio which separated slave states from free. The starry crown may be the Big Dipper and North Star which showed the way for the fugitives.

The earliest recording by the Price Family Singers in Atlanta in 1927 on the Okeh label used the title I Went Down to the Garden. In 1940 Leadbelly recorded it for Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress.

Down to the River has been associated with full emersion baptism.

Despite the Black origins by the early to mid-20th Century the song had diffused to the Appalachian South where it was sung in primitive Baptist and Pentecostal churches where White worshipers understood the lyrics literally and were sure that the River was the Biblical Jordan. Doc Watson recorded it for Vanguard in 1960. As a Country folk hymn it became known to wider audiences when Allison Krause recorded it for the O Brother, Where Art Thou? Soundtrack in 2000. Today it is more commonly associated with white country gospel than black.

But not matter which tradition, it was perfect for unaccompanied close harmony singing in impoverished congregations and was often used for full emersion baptism services. But it is also a favorite of my Tree of Life a capella choir.

Tiffany Goodrick.

This version has become a Cornavirus isolation and YouTube sensation. Organizer Tiffany Goodrick, a Christian music artist and song leader, described how her Virtual Choir worked: “The 36 voices you hear were all recorded separately at different times and in different locations. Each woman had only the melody playing in her ear and then sang the part that she wanted, no music was written out. All videos were recorded using cell phones.

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In Flanders Fields—The Poem of the Great War
3 May 2020 at 09:48

In Flanders Fields—The Poem of the Great War

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3 May 2020 at 09:48

By: Patrick Murfin

Canadian poet, artilleryman, and medical officer Lt. Colonel John McCrae. It’s only been three days since I wrapped up the National Poetry Month series, but here I am already, back to verse. This time it is history that that, in the immortal words of Sonny Corleone“keeps pulling me back in.” It was 105 years ago today during World War I that Major John McCrae, a gunnery and medical officer of a front line Canadian regiment scribbled the first draft of the poem while sitting in the back of an ambulance in Flanders, the Dutch speaking region of northern Belgium. It was just after the long and bitter 17 day Second Battle of the Ypres during which the Germans unleashed one of the first mass usesof poisonous chlorine gas of the ...

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Beltane Fire Dance—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020
3 May 2020 at 02:02

Beltane Fire Dance—Murfin Home Confinement Music Festival 2020

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3 May 2020 at 02:02

By: Patrick Murfin

Beltane Fire Dance by Lorena McKennitt.

In addition to May Day, International Labor Day, yesterday was the much older celebration of Beltane in Celtic traditions and Walpurgisnacht, a thinly Christianized celebration of the Night of the Witches in Germanic and some Norse cultures. Both are half season holy days marking the mid-pint between the vernal equinox and the summer solstice. Here in Northern Illinois the weather was damn near perfect—mild and sunny during the day, nature erupting everywhere, and perfectly mystical that night with occasional clouds scudding past a half moon. Somewhere there were neo-pagans dancing around a firein the woods.

An Irish Beltane bon fire.

Among the many customs ancient and re-created in both traditions are the bonfires lit to warm the earth and summon a sleeping earth goddess and the warming sun that brings forth a lush natural re-birth. In danceand art the Goddess often trysts with the Green Man who will rule at Midsummer.

The Earth Goddess and the Green Man.

To sing about all of this we have Loreena McKennitt, a Canadian singer, composer, harpist, accordionist, and pianist known for her Celtic, World, and New-Age music. Her pure, ethereal soprano is well belovedand she has sold more than 14 million albums world-wide.

Loreena McKennitt.

This version of Beltane Fire Dance was recorded before a live audience for her 2007 album Nights from the Alhambra.

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The Birth, Bloom, and Bust of Black Baseball
2 May 2020 at 10:38

The Birth, Bloom, and Bust of Black Baseball

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2 May 2020 at 10:38

By: Patrick Murfin

National Negro Baseball League founder Rube Foster with his Chicago American Giants. One hundred years ago today, May 2, 1920, the first game between teams of the brand new National Negro Baseball League (NNL) was played in Indianapolis. The league was the brainchild of Rube Foster, a pitcher who had been managing Negro teams, semi-pro and professional since 1907. The league was formed that February at a meeting held in a Kansas City YMCA. The charter teams were the Chicago American Giants, Detroit Stars, Kansas City Monarchs, Indianapolis ABCs, St. Louis Giants, Cuban Stars, Dayton Marcos and Chicago Giants. Foster’s own Chicago American Giants dominated the league in the early years, winning the first four consecutive cham...