Since the cult classic movie Groundhog Day came out in 1992 the minor folk holiday of the same namehas taken on a new meaning.  Now it denotes being stuck in a time loop, living the same day over and over and over.  It has certainly seemed so the last four years as I predicted with dread in 2017:

Wake Up!

Groundhog Day 2017

6:00 am

Wake Up!

It’s yesterday again!

It will always be yesterday again.

If you don’t 

get your ass out of bed right now

and do something

today will replace it

in the time loop.

Trust me.

You don’t want that.

Today is going to be a

Motherfucker.

Wake Up!

—Patrick Murfin

But this year seems different, as if that old clock radio finally flipped over to a new day.  Who knows?  Maybe we learned something.  Anyway, the old ogre is gone and something resembling hope is in the air.  But whether there are six more weeks of Winter or not seems to depend on whether that hope is stronger than the despair of the raging Coronavirus pandemic that blew in like a lion last March.  I know, I dreadfully mix metaphors   

Meanwhile it is time to reflect on this strange demi-holiday.

Despite the despair of meteorologists and rationalistsGroundhog Day continues to grow in popularity and spread every year.  From an obscure folk custom observed by a handful of German immigrants and their decedents in isolate pockets of Pennsylvania in the late 18th and 19th Centuries it has spread nationwide. 

In 2015 Wikipedia identified no fewer than 38 woodchucks dragged from their winter hibernation and exposed to the sky across the U.S. and Canada.  Come hell or high water virtually every news broadcast in North America today will feature stories about one or more of the creatures and whether he—almost always identifiedas a male but most frequently a she—will see his shadow supposedly signifying six more weeks of winter weather.

These local observations got big boost with the release of the movie Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell in 1992.  The film has become a beloved classic with a cult following often compared to Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life.  It was filmed in my neck of the woods, as a noted TV weatherman used to say, in Woodstock, Illinois.

Just after 7 am Woodstock Willie will make his grumpy appearance from the Gazebo as he has every year since the film came out.  The city has stretched the celebration into a week-long festival in hopes of luring pilgrims and tourists.  It works.  The Woodstock ritual is now the second-most famous celebration in the country behind the original at Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, which the McHenry County town portrayed in the film.

But this year due to the plague most of the festive events in town have been canceled.  Willie will be yanked from his comfort but a thin crowd, masked and social distancing will observe standing in the deep snow on Woodstock Square.  At this writing it is not known if Willie will himself be masked, a precaution that also might save his handlers from being bitten.

Part of the spreading appeal of the celebrations is because they are a welcome, if silly, relief from the dreary tedium of the depths of the winter, long after the razzmatazz of the Holidays have past when everyone in cold climes is sick to death of snow, ice, howling winds, and leaden skies.  But a philosopher might speculate that the surging popularity of Groundhog Days mirrors the growing anti-intellectualism of modern America and the spreading animus to science now officially embraced by a major political party and reflected in rejection of evolution, denial of climate change, anti-vaccine hokum, and a general rejection of rationality.  Or maybe that would be reading too much into a harmless custom.

So how did all of this come to pass?  Some claim religious roots stretching back to Neolithic Europe.  The growing neo-pagan movement is explicit in laying claim to it, but Catholics have their own customs which may, or may not have been cribbed from older traditions.

Groundhog Day has been traced to pre-Christian Northern European folk traditions stretching back in the mists of time.  It isnotoriously difficult to pin down precise origins of such oral traditions or to know the complete religious significance of them.  Tales about a beast—usually envisioned as a bear or a badger that had powersto predict or control the weather seem to have originated in Norse and/or Germanic tribal societies and spread by diffusion or osmosis to other European peoples including the Slavs to the east and the Celts to the south and west.  The celebration of the animal was tied to the half-way point between Winter Solstice—Yule—and the Spring Equinox. 

Although most of the animal and weather lore that leads directly to Groundhog Day are of Northern European origins, modern Wiccans and neo-pagans have identified it with the Celtic festival of Imbolcone of the four seasonal quarter festivals along with Beltane (Spring/Easter), Lughnasadh (Mid-Summer) and Samhain (Fall/Halloween) that fall between the solstices and equinoxes.  Traditionally it was a festival marking the first glimmers of spring while still in the grip of the cold and dark of winter.  As such it was distantly related to transition predicted by the Norse totem animal, but had no known direct corresponding myth.

Instead it celebrated the goddess Brigid patroness of poetry, healing, smith crafts, midwifery, and all arts of hand.  In some stories her feast on February 1 celebrated her recovery after giving birth to the God—the Green Man—who will come into his own and rule from Lughnasadh to winter. 

In Ireland with the coming of Christianity the Goddess and her festival became identified with St. Brigid of Kildare, along with Patrick and Brendon one of the three Patron Saints of the country.  Now thought to be apocryphal, St. Brigid in lore was first recorded in the 7th Century and expanded upon by later monks and scribes.  She was described as the daughter of a Pict slave woman converted by Patrick himself. Born in 451 in Faughart, County Louth  she became a holy woman, nun, and abbess who founded a monastery on the site of an ancient temple to the Goddess Brigid in Kildare.  She assumed many of the pagan goddess’s attributes and performed many miracles.  Stories about the Goddess and the Nun are so intertwined that it is impossible to figure out if the holy woman was real or an invention of the Church intended to comfort convertswith familiar and beloved tradition.

Today the best known tradition associated with the Feast of St. Brigid is the making of the off-center straw crosses from last season’s straw that are hung as talismans in Irish homes through Lent until Easter.

Almost all of the original traditions associated with the Goddess Brigid and Imbolc had been eradicated or simply faded away 18th Century even in Gaelic speaking regions.  In the 20th Century Wiccans and other neo-pagans have attempted to revive the old Celtic traditions and in the process invented rituals and lore to fill in the lost gaps.  Many believe the Quarter Festivals and old Gods and Goddesses are accessible spiritual metaphors for worshipof the natural world and the timeless rhythm of the seasons.

That included borrowing from St. Brigid, as well.  Her straw crosses are now described as not Christian at all but as ancient symbols representing the Four Quarter Festivals and the Four Cardinal Directions.  There is no way to prove or disprove that assertion.

The Rev. Catharine Clarenbach, a Unitarian Universalist minister explained how modern practitioners view Imbolc in an entry on Nature’s Path, a U.U. pagan experience and earth centered blog hosted by the religious site Patheos.  She called it “a light not heat holiday” in which the slowly lengthening days and first tenuous hints at Spring-to-come give hope to those trudging through the hard days. “When people are desperately ill, hope can fuel the long slog toward wholeness and healing, even if that healing is not a cure.”

That certainly ennobles the day beyond the giddy fantasy of groundhog magic.

But our trail to modern Groundhog Day does not end with the re-invention of Imbolc.  Indeed other than sharing a date, the two celebrations have little in common.

Over in England and Scotland a different Christian tradition evolved—Candlemas observed on February 1, the eve of St. Brigid’s Day and often confused as British equivalent.  But Candlemas has very early 4th Century Christmas roots as the Feast of the Presentationcelebrated by early Church patriarchsincluding Methodius of Patara, Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory the Theologian, Amphilochius of Iconium, Gregory of Nyssa, and John Chrysostom.  It celebrated the presentation of Jesus at the Temple in Jerusalem as an infant. 

The celebration slowly spread from the Levant to the rest of the Church and Roman Empire.  When the date of Christmas was finally fixed on December 25, the Feast of the Presentation was added to the liturgical calendar forty days later on February 2.  That date by happenstance nearly coincided with the old Roman festival Lupercalia which simultaneously celebrated the Roman version of the Greek God Pan who was sacred to shepherds in the Spring lambing festival and Lupa the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus, legendary twin founders of Rome.  In evolving Roman practice it had become a major popular holiday in Rome itself and associated with the revelry and abandon of other feasts.  Lupercalia was outlawed by the ascendant Christians but still widely, if covertly, celebrated by ordinary Romans.  The official Feast of the Presentation, coming just before Lent was hoped to ease acceptance of Church teachings.

Pope Gelasius I began calling this festival, which set off the carnival season, the Feast of the Candles, later known as Chandelours in parts of France, the Alps, and the Pyreneesand as Candlemas in Britain.  It connections to Lupercalia have caused some modern neo-pagans to view that celebration as a Latin equivalent of the German and Norse totem animal observations.  That is highly speculative and tenuous at best.

But in Scotland we do find Candlemas as the first indication that the Northern European custom had been introduced to Britain.  An early Scots Gaelic proverb went:

The serpent will come from the hole
On the brown Day of Bríde,
Though there should be three feet of snow
On the flat surface of the ground.

Although it was a serpent, not a bear, that was mentioned, the emergence of a totem animal to herald Spring was clearly there.  Over time looking for badgers stretching their legs at Candlemas became a folk tradition in rural areas of Scotland and England. 

Without mention of an animal witness this early English verse asserts

If Candlemas be fair and bright,
Winter has another flight.
If Candlemas brings clouds and rain,
Winter will not come again.

But that custom was never wide spread and did not seem to have traveled to the New World with early settlers from the colonies.

It took German peasants lured to frontier areas of Pennsylvania in the late 1700s to do that.  The use of groundhogs for prognostication rather than bears or badgers—both of which were far more dangerous and hard to manage than the lumbering and common local rodents—was well established when the first recorded noteof the celebration was made in English in an 1841 diary entry by Morgantown shopkeeper James Morris:

Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.

All across central and western Pennsylvania where Germans had settled in large numbers local Groundhog lodges sprang up in many towns to celebrate the annual appearance of the weather predicting critters.  An elaboratecommunal meal called a Fersommling featuring groaning tables, orations, skits, and music led up to a ritual presentation of the local groundhog.  These lodges and festival gatherings were also an important tools to preserve German culturalidentity in communities pressed hard by Englanders—native English speakers.  Only the Pennsylvania Dutch dialect was allowed to be spoken at 19th Century Fersommlings fines levied for each English word uttered.

In 1887 in a burst of civic boosterism Colby Camps, editor of the Punxsutawney Spirit promoted his home town as the official Groundhog Day home and the local beast, always named Phil generation after generation regardlessof gender, as the town’s official meteorologist.  The first story rapidly got picked up by other local and national publications which eagerly reported the result of Phil’s observation.  It became an annual tradition and publicity for the event and town grew year after year.

By the 1920 towns from the East Texas Hill Country and North Carolina, many with their own German immigrant populations, to Ontario and French speaking Quebec were hosting their own celebrations. 

Then, as noted, the 1993 movie inspired still more.

Today the accuracyof the various groundhogs is in dispute.  Backers, including local Groundhog society boost accuracy rates of between 80 and 90%.  Cold hard statistical analysis refutes that unsubstantiated claim.  A study of several Canadian towns with Groundhog celebrations dating back 30 to 40 years found only 37% rate of accuracy.  The record at  Punxsutawney dating all the way back to that first 1887 outing is hardly better—only 38%.  Both are much worse than random 50/50 odds.

John O’Hara was one of those mid-century American novelists who soared to fame and acclaim.  But like a supernova his flame seems to have burnt out.  In his day he was as controversial as he was famous.  His defenders like John Updike compared him to Chekhovand wag Fran Lebowitz tagged him “The real F. Scott Fitzgerald.”  But many critics dismissed him as a hack turning out sensationalized pot boilers for a low brow audience.  O’Hara himself said simply, “Being a cheap, ordinary guy, I have an instinct for what an ordinary guy likes.”

Of course O’Hara never really considered himself neither cheap nor ordinary.  He spent a life time chaffing against the social slights suffered as an outsideron the edge of social respectabilityand resenting that his father never sent him to Yale.  All of this became grist for his short storiesand novels, but also earned him a well-deserved reputation as a needy social climber.

O’Hara was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania on January 31, 1905.  The town, 90 miles northwest of Philadelphia, was in the heart of the state’s coal country on the banks of the Schuylkill River.  The river also provided power for a textile industry that included the Phillips Van Heusen Company of shirt fame.  The mines and textile mills generated enough local nabobs to populate mansions in a swanky part of the otherwise grimy city.  O’Hara’s physicianfather grew rich enough to live there.  But the O’Hara’s, Irish Catholics, were excluded from polite society tightly guarded by a WASP elite.  Both father and son bitterly resented it.

John’s father imbued him with the idea that if he went to Yale, it would be the ticket to respectability and acceptanceboth yearned for.  In pursuit of that dream his father had high academic expectations for his son and little tolerance for not meeting them. He was sent to Niagara Prep in Lewiston, New York where he was named class poet but was otherwise a lackluster student.  To teach the boy a lesson of what life would be like without college, his dad sent him to work in the steel mills over summer breaks.  John hated the humiliation even more than the back breaking labor.

His disappointed father felt he had not earned the right to attend Yale and refused to send him.  Moreover when the elder man died shortly after John’s graduation and he left no provision in his willfor his education.  It was a bitter blow from which he literally never recovered, spending the rest of his life pining for Yale and all it could have brought him.

Rather than attend a lesser school which he might be able to work his way through, O’Hara went to work as a reporter on the local Pottstown paper.  Among his assignments was covering the PottsvilleMaroons, the town’s short-lived entry into the infant National Football League. 

But he soon threw even that up, going, as he described it, “on the bum. I traveled out West, worked on a steamer, took a job in an amusement park.”    Great experience for a writer, but for him a constant reminder that he had been “cheated” of a better life.

Eventually O’Hara drifted to New York City determined to become a writer.  He took a cheap room and began writing.  He supported himself with book and film reviews while concentrating on short stories. In 1928 the first of those stories appeared in the still young New Yorker.  He would soon become a fixture in its pages, publishing more than 200 stories in the magazine over the next decades.  The stories featured a keen eye for the detailsof life and sharp, believable dialogue.  They were often set in a thinly veiled version of Pottsville named Gibbsville and chronicled the lives and foibles of both the local elite and those who aspired to crash their party.

The stories were highly regarded and established O’Hara’s reputation.  They were even said to have established the New Yorker style of short story.  Updike and other future contributors like Saul Bellow were directly in his debt.

In 1934 O’Hara published his first novel, Appointment in Samarra which he had been working on for years.  The novel describes how, over the course of three days, Julian English, the owner of the Gibbsville Cadillac dealership and a younger member of the WASP social clique, destroys himself with a series of impulsive acts, culminating in suicide. O’Hara never gives any obvious cause or explanation for his behavior, which is apparently predestined by his character.  The novel was a critical—mostly—and popular success.  No less than Ernest Hemingway enthused, “If you want to read a book by a man who knows exactly what he is writing about and has written it marvelously well, read Appointment in Samarra.”  On the other hand Sinclair Lewis castigated the book as vulgar for it oblique but frank sexual episodes.

What is left of O’Hara’s literary reputation today rests on the short stories and this first novel.  In 1998, long after the literary establishment had turned on O’Hara, Modern Library ranked Appointment in Samarra 22nd on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.  As a result at least one critic said its placement on the list “was used to ridicule the entire project.”  Harsh.

If contemporary critics thought O’Hara’s first book was vulgar, they hadn’t seen anything yet.  BUtterfield 8 was based on a real life juicy scandal of speakeasy days when the dead body of a young woman named Starr Faithfull was found drown on Long Beach in Long Island. She was shown to be a goodtime girlof easy virtue who drank and partied too much.  Her back story even included a childhood molestation by a former mayor of Boston. O’Hara made her Gloria Wandrous and put her in a mutually destructive an obsessive relationship with—you guessed it—a wealthy WASP.  A classic O’Hara story, according to one reviewer, in which he “He plumbs the fault lines of society where the slumming rich meet with the aspiring poor.”  Of course the book had plenty of juicy sex.

It is best known now for the 1960 film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Laurence Harvey which took considerable liberties from the book—including resetting it in contemporary New York.  But like the novel, it sizzled with sex and won Taylor an Academy Award as Best Actress.

In 1940 O’Hara stitched together a popular series of stories that he ran in the New Yorker about a second rate nightclub entertainer in Chicago, a certified heel and louse, with big ambitions.  Written in the form a series of letters from Joey to his much more successful pal Ted, Pal Joey was more character study than story. 

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart inspired by the success of Porgy and Bess, which was based on a gritty novel, were on the lookout for darker, more serious material when they came on O’Hara’s book.  They enlisted the author to write the script for a new kind of musical.  The show Pal Joey opened to acclaim in 1940, just months after the book hit the stores with Gene Kelly in a star making turn in the lead.  The show featured two great American standards, If They Ask Me, I Could Write a Book and Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered.  It became the third longest running show of Rodgers and Hart’s long collaboration.  But it was also controversial.  Radioeffectively banned playing songs from the show through most of the 1940’s because of their frank lyrics.  It was considered un-filmable in a Hollywood built on sunny, optimisticmusicals.

It was not until 17 years later that Pal Joey finally made it to the screen in an adaptation staring Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth, and Kim Novak and featuring additional Rodgers and Hart songs cribbed from other shows, including My Funny Valentine.  The play, now considered a landmark classic, has been revived several times on Broadway and in London.

During World War II O’Hara returned to journalism.  He was a war correspondent in the Pacific Theater, although he would have preferred a gentleman’s commission like the graduates of Ivy League colleges received—or maybe an OSS posting like so many old Yalies.

After the war he returned to New York more confident in his own greatness as a writer on one hand and more than ever resentful of what he believed was the back hand snubbing by the snooty aristocrats of publishing and critical circles.  The more wounded he was, the harder he tried to become one of them.  He aped their manners, style of dress, and distinctive speech patterns.   He studied and memorized trivia and minutia about the Ivy schools and even the elite prep schools that fed them.  He stalked social gatherings.

But in perfect imitation of the self destructive social climbers of his fiction, O’Hara only further alienated the closed club he yearned to join.  Then he would get belligerent.  A leading critic referred to him simply as “a well known lout.”  The harder he tried, the harder the critics—most of them—got on his work.

He continued to churn out novels—O’Hara was nothing if not prolific—but most did not catch on.  Finally in 1955, the same year his reputation was somewhat buoyed by the release of the film version of Pal Joey, he won a highly controversial National Book Award for Ten North Fredrick, the story of Joe Chapin, an ambitious man who yearns to become President and his long suffering patrician wife, two rebellious children, and mistress.  The book was made into a film in 1958 starring Gary Cooper.

O’Hara had one more moderate success as a novelist before critics started simply ignoring his work and the public stopped buying.  In From the Terrace he painted a picture of a young lawyer from a family of small city aristocrats.  His mother has been driven to drink by a neglectful and distant father.  His wife is socially ambitious, self-pitying, and unfaithful.  The man finds solace with a young, tenderhearted exotic—read Jewish—do-gooder in the city.  O’Hara himself wrote the screenplay for the 1960 film version starring Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, and Ina Balin.

Probably contributing to O’Hara’s fading reputation as a novelist was his decision to become weekly book columnist for the Trenton Times-Advertiser, and a biweekly column, Appointment with O’Hara, for Collier’s magazine. In both venues he proved himself to be, “simultaneously embarrassing and infuriating in his vaingloriousness, vindictiveness, and general bellicosity.”  He bemoaned never receiving any academic honors, despite his firm conviction that he was the greatest living American Novelist.  He openly invited Yale to finally recognize his genius.  Yale considered it groveling and did not deign to respond.

But he still yearned for vindication. Privately, he told friends that he expected to be the next American recipient of the Nobel Prize.  He wrote to his daughter “I really think I will get it,” and “I want the Nobel prize... so bad I can taste it.”  It was not to be.  The next American to win the prize for literature was John Steinbeck in 1962.  He could barely conceal his disappointment.

When he took this act to a broader stage as a nationally syndicated columnist based at Newsday in 1964, O’Hara showed himself to be not just a conservative, but a vicious reactionary.  Many young writers had suffered the stings of class prejudice. Most of them became liberals, even radicals.  Not O’Hara.  Just as he assumed the proper suites and accents of the WASP elite, so did he assume what he believed were the politics of the very richest barons of theboardroom and denizens of the old school clubs.

In his first Newsday column O’Hara proclaimed his willingness to spit in the eye of his critics: “Let’s get off to a really bad start.” He endorsed Barry Goldwater for President claiming that he spoke for the stolid fans of Lawrence Welk and blaming the downfall of the country on those who loved the jazz of Black musicians like Lester Lanin and Dizzy Gillespie.  Then he railed at Martin Luther King’s Nobel Prize.  It was downhill from there, week by week more antagonistic and outrageous.  Papers started dropping the syndicated feature.  In 53 weeks Newsday canceled the column.

The super rich graduates of his beloved Yale might have nodded approval, but the literary establishment was notoriously liberal.  The columns were like thumbs in their eyes.  O’Hara had successfully poisoned the well.

O’Hara continued publishing to diminishing success.  The last novel published during his life time was The Ewings in 1970.  A sequel to that novel more came out posthumously.  Neither was successful.

O’Hara died in Princeton, New Jersey, his longtime home, on April 13, 1970 at the age of 65. Just to make sure that everyone knew just who he was, he had this inscription carved on his headstone, “Better than anyone else, he told the truth about his time. He was a professional. He wrote honestly and well.”  The final hubris of Pal Johnny. 

The recently departed in shame occupantof the White House hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office.  Old Hickory was the president that the Resident admired most because they shared so many traits.  Both were vain, quarrelsome, given easily to offense, relentlessly vindictive to his enemies, autocratic while appealing to the poor, uneducated, and resentful as their champion.  He was also an unapologetic racist who gloated in his Indian removal policies and defended slavery.  He was also, as we will see, the sworn enemy of the just emerging labor movement.  All of these “virtues” made it easy for the Cheeto-in-Chargeto ignore Jackson’s opposition the Second Bank of the United States,  his opposition to protective tariffs, and his swift defense of the Union in the South Carolina Nullification Crisis.  But then Trump was a man of no firm convictions, only tactically useful stances.  Among President Joe Biden’s first acts of cleansing was replacing the Jackson painting with a portrait founding statesmanand scientist Benjamin Franklin.

A canal connecting the navigable waterways of Virginia with the Ohio River had been George Washington’s dream first.  And a big one.  Decades later it seemed that despite enormous obstacles, it was finally coming to pass.  But on January 29, 1834 the hundreds of immigrant Irish, Dutch, German laborers downed their picks and shovels in protest to the brutal conditions of hewing the ditch by hand from the stony soil of Virginia (now West Virginia) from first light to the descending gloaming seven days a week.  Blacks were also on the job—mostly slavescontracted from local plantations—but whether they joined the impromptu strike is unclear.  Slave or free all were ill clothed and given little more than a single thin blanket in the brutal winter weather.  Wages—for those who got paid at all—were less than a dollar a dayand the use of tools and such were charged to the workers.

As the laborers downed their tools Supervisors and foremen on the job were roughed up and some Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Company property was damaged. 

The company claimed insurrection and riot and appealed for aid.  In Washington, DC the crusty and volatile Andrew Jackson wasted no time in ordering Federal Troops to suppress the “rebellion.”  It was the first time the Army was ever called upon to suppress a strike.  It would not be the last.

When they arrived on the scene the smartly dressed Army Regulars had no trouble putting down the strike by men armed only with stones and brickbats.  It is unclearif shots were fired or if the flash of bayonets was sufficient to dispersethe strikers, who had no organizationor union.  A few identified“leaders” were arrested, others fled.  Most of the men sullenly went back to work under armed guard.  It is presumed that any slaves who participated where much more brutally handled by their ownersor overseers with the lash.

It all began before the Revolution.  Virginia planter, surveyor, and militia officer Col. George Washington had vast land claims in the Ohio wildernesswhich he dreamed of filling with settlerson 99 year leases to the land that he owned.  But besides persistent hostility by Native American nations, and the British policy of confining legal settlement to the east of the Allegany Mountains, the biggest obstacle to making those dreams come true was the near geographic impossibility of easy access to and from the land.  Those mountains divided the watershedsof the Ohio and Potomac rivers and provided a rugged barrier to even land access.

Washington wanted to build canals, complete with locks to raise boats to higher and higher elevations to circumvent and push past the rapidswhich were the navigable limits of the Potomac.  In 1772 he received a Charter from the Colony of Virginia to survey possible routes.  But before work could progress beyond the planning stage, the Revolution intervened and Washington was occupied elsewhere.

But he never forgot the pet project.   Back home at Mount Vernon in 1785 Washington formed the Patowmack Company in. The Company built short connecting canals along the Maryland and Virginia shorelines of Chesapeake Bay.  The lock systems at Little Falls, Maryland, and Great Falls, Virginia, were innovative in concept and construction. Washington himself sometimes visited construction sites and supervisedthe dangerous work of removing earthand boulders by manual labor.   

Now confident that his scheme would work, Washington began to plan more inland sections.  A call to another job—as President of the United States—interrupted his plans, but he looked forward to resuming work in retirement.

Unfortunately that retirement did not last long and when the great man died in 1799, the Patowmack Company folded.

Almost 25 years later, in 1823 Virginia and Maryland planters began to fret that the Erie Canal, which was nearing completion in Upstate New York would leave their region far behind in economic growthas all or most of the productionfrom the rapidly growing states north of the Ohio would be funneled to the Great Lakes, and via the Canal and Hudson Riverto New York City.  They organized and got chartered the new Chesapeake & Ohio Canal Company.

Five years later in 1828 Yankee born President John Quincy Adams, probably with some qualms about the possible effect on the westward spread of slavery, ceremonially turned the first spade of earth.

Progress was slow and arduous as the canal ran parallel to the Potomac.  There had been other sporadic work stoppages.   Difficulties in the era of repeated financial panics also interrupted work.  Then there was bad weather, the increasingly difficult terrain, and even a cholera epidemic.  In late 1832 the ditch finally reached the critical river port of Harpers Ferry.  Workers were pushing on to Williamsport when the trouble broke out.

Work continued with more interruptions and a lawsuit between the Canal Company and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad about a right of way to cross from the Virginia to the Maryland side of the river also complicated matters. 

In 1850 the canal finally reached Columbia, Maryland far short of the goal of connecting with the Ohio.  But by that time the rapid spread of railroads, particularly the B&O, had rendered completing the project obsolete.  Washington’s grand canal never got any further.

But the existing ditch was still useful.  Boats, originally romantically named gondolas and later called barges, used the water way until it finally went out of business in 1924.

Today you can visit the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal National Historical Park and hike along the tow path.

The bloody tradition of using Federal troops as strike breakers out lived the canal. 

Note:  Pete Seeger passed away six years ago this week on January 27, 2014 at age 94. That makes this year the 100th anniversary of his birth, a milestone that will be well celebrated throughout the year. He missed some tumultuous times and we all missed his strength and encouragement.  Of course hard times and struggle was no stranger to Pete.  But despite decades on the front lines of fights for worker’s rights, civil rights, peace and environmental justice and the sacrifices that he made, Pete remained remarkably optimistic.  He had faith in We the People.  He would have loved to play this month at Joe Biden’s inauguration as he did with Bruce Springsteen and his grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger for Barack Obama.

Pete Seeger was born in New York City on May 3, 1919.  His father, Charles Seeger, was a noted musicologist.  Both of his parents taught at Julliard School of Music.  The whole family was musical.  His younger half siblings Peggy and Mike, born to his father’s second marriage, also became noted folk musicians inspired by travels with their father on music collecting trips to the rural South. 

On one of those trips young Pete first heard and was enthralled with the sound of the five string banjo. By the time he was 16 and a student at Avon Old Farms private prep school in Connecticut he was playing the instrument in jazz combos. 

Seeger began studies at Harvard, where he founded a radical newspaperand joined the Young Communist League.   But in 1938 at the age of 19 he took a job as an assistant to Library of Congress folk archivist Alan Lomax, a close friend of the family, on one of his song collecting forays through the South.  The recordings made on that trip included some of the most influential ever made.  Seeger helped record Huddy Ledbetter—Leadbelly—among others.

He moved to New York City in 1939 and was introduced by Lomax to a circle of folk musicians and activists clustered around Greenwich Village.  He adopted the claw-hammer banjo stylehe heard at mountain barn dances.  He dropped out of school and was soon performing many of the songs he had learned with Lomax as he bummed around the country.

In 1940 he met Woody Guthrie, the singing Oklahoma exile who had become a popular California radio performer, when they sang together at a benefitfor migrant farm workers. The experience electrified Seeger.  He now knew with certainty what he wanted to do with his life.  The two became close friends and sometime performing partners.    He sang and played in saloons, churches, and, most of all, in union halls. 

Back in 1940 the loose Greenwich Village crowd formed the highly political Almanac Singers, which became troubadours of the labor movement and of radical causes.  The group was more like a large collective of singers who performed together in various settings and combinations.  The core included Millard Lampell, Lee Haysand Sis Cunningham.  In 1941 Woody Guthrie joined the group.  Others who participated in the group at one time or another included Lomax’s sister Bess Lomax Hawes, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Cisco Huston, and Burl Ives.

Following Pete’s natural inclination toward pacifism and the Communist Party’s opposition to American entry into World War II prior to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, the group released a three disc, six song 78 rpm album called Songs for John Doe.  Singing on the record were Seeger, Lampell, Josh White, and Sam Gary. 

Less than a month after the record was released, the invasion of Russiachanged everything, rendering the songs obsoleteand an embarrassment as the Party and singers rapidly shifted gears.

A second album, Talking Union was released in the summer of 1941 and featured the labor songs that members of the group had been singing in union halls and on picket lines for the previous two years.  The album included now classic union songs—Talking Union Blues, Get Thee Behind Me, Satan, Guthrie’s Union Maid, and Florence Reece’s coal mine strike song Which Side Are You On?  This time out Hays joined Seeger and Lampell in the lineup. 

A third and final album, Deep Sea Chanteys and Whaling Balladscame out later that year, this time with Guthrie also singing.

Despite an already developed pacifist streak, Seeger shared Guthrie’s fierce anti-fascism—Guthrie’s guitar had a sign on it, “This machine kills fascists.”  When the U.S. joined the war, the Almanac Singers broke up and Seeger, who had previously protested the Selective Service Act, was drafted and willingly entered the Army.  He spent his war in G.I. entertainment shows.

While in the Army in 1943 Seeger wed Toshi-Aline Ohta, the daughter of an exiled Japanese Marxist and American mother who he knew from his days in Greenwich Village.  The couple’s legendarily close and supportive marriage lasted nearly 70 years until her death in 2013.

Seeger quit his membership in the Communist Party in the late ‘40’s and after the revelations of the worst of Stalin’s crimeslater said he regretted not having done it earlier.  But he refused to apologize for it and said that he remained a “communist with a small c.”

Back home after the war Seeger resumed his career as an itinerant folk musician and activist.  In 1948 he joined with his former Almanac Singer partner Lee Hays, and with Ronnie Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman to form a new group, The Weavers.  In between performing for 1948 third Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace, the Weavers quickly became a popular touring and recording group.  They popularized songs like On Top of Old Smokey, Kisses Sweeter than Wine, and Seeger’s version of a South African song, Wimoweh (The Lion Sleeps Tonight).  By 1950 they were radio regularsand were called America’s favorite singing group.  No less a folk music aficionado than Carl Sandburg said, “When I hear America Singing, the Weavers are there.”  In 1950 they made a #1 hit recordwith their version of Ledbelly’s Goodnight Irene. 

The same year Seeger made his first solo record, a 10 inch album called Darling Corey, one of the first releases on the seminal Folkways label.  The Weavers’s popularity continued to grow with television appearances.  A Christmas Eve 1955 Carnegie Hall concert featuring the Weavers was regarded by many as the beginning of the folk music revival of the late Fifties and early Sixties. 

But trouble lay ahead.  Called before the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee Seeger asserted his First Amendment rights and scolded the committee for trying to outlaw political thought and speech.  The defiance made national headlines.  Seeger was a hero to many, but the Weavers were blacklisted from radio and television, lost their Decca recording contract, and saw concert dates cancelled across the country. 

Pete Seeger testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAAC).  He refused to answer questions but did not invoke the Fifth Amendment but claimed that the hearing were an un-Constitutional attack on his First Amendment Rights of Free Speech and Assembly.

Worse, in 1957, Seeger was indicted on ten counts of contempt of Congress.  The case dragged on for years.  He was convicted on all counts and sentenced to ten concurrent one-year prison sentences.  The convictions were finally overturned on appeal in 1961. 

In the meantime the stress caused the Weavers to break up and Seeger struggled to make a living as a solo.  But times and attitudes were changing. The Kingston Trio picked up Seeger’s Where Have All the Flowers Gone? In 1961, even before his conviction was overturned his old friend, the legendary producer John Hammond, signed Seeger to a Columbia Records contract and released his first record on the label, Story Songs. 

Seeger was still banned from commercial television however.  Hootenanny refused to book him causing the show to be boycotted by Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, and other top acts.  But in 1965 and ‘66 Seeger made the series Rainbow Quest at WNJU-T, a New York UHF station broadcasting mostly Spanish language programing.  Few people saw the first run, which was virtually directed by Toshi.  Pete and a guest would sit on straight back chairs by a simple table and swap songs and stories without a studio audience.  Guests included many old friends like Baez and the likes of Johnny Cash, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi John Hurt, Doc Watson, The Stanley Brothers, Elizabeth Cotten, Patrick Sky, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Tom Paxton, Judy Collins, Donovan, Richard and Mimi Fariña, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.  Some years later PBS picked up the 39 shows for syndication on their affiliates and millions finally saw them.

The Smother’s Brothers famously broke the network TV ban when they booked Seeger.  His first song was broadcast, but the second, his searing indictment of theVietnam War Waist Deep in the Big Muddy was cut by censors.  After a confrontation with the series stars, CBS relented and let Seeger perform the song on a subsequent program.  But the controversyhelped doom the popular TV show.

The folk music revival was in full swingand so was the Civil Rights Movement.  Seeger was often on the picket lines throughout the South.  In June of 1963, Seeger returned to Carnegie Hall.  An album recorded live at the event was released under the title We Shall Overcome. It reached number 41 on the album charts and remained on the charts for 36 weeks.  The title song was a re-working of a picket line song We Will Overcome by Lucille Simmons by Seeger and friends at the Highlander Center, the training ground of Civil Rights leaders and workers. A month later Seeger appeared at the Newport Folk Festival with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs.  The era of protest music was officially launched. 

Seeger introduced his own songs, including Where Have All the Flowers Gonewhich became a hit for the Kingston Trioin 1962 and If I Had a Hammer, co-written by Lee Hayes, and recorded by Petefr Paul and Mary, to appreciative audiences in these years.  His recording of Malvina Reynolds’s Little Boxes even climbed into the pop music charts. Baez, Peter Paul and Mary, and The Byrds all had hitswith Seeger songs. 

Through the late sixties and into the seventies, Seeger threw himself into opposition to the Vietnam War.  He sung to innumerably rallies and at countless benefits and collected legions of new young fans.  The highlight came in 1968 when Seeger sang to 500,000 people at the anti-war March on Washington where his fellow performers included Woody’s son Arlo Guthrie, John Denver and Peter Paul and Mary. 

After seemingly rootless decades, Seeger decided to settle down on the banks of Hudson River where he and Toshi had bought land and built a log cabin in 1949. But the pollutionthat had turned that beautiful and historic river into an open sewer stirred Seeger to action again.  In 1968 he launched the restored sloopClearwaterfrom which he campaigned forenvironmental causes for the rest of his long life.

His relentless attack on General Electric for dumping PCBs in the river led to a historic law suit and a clean-up that is still going on today.  About the same time he joined the U.U. Community Church of New York City and has sung at many U.U. churches since.

In 1994 the nation that had tried to put him in prison awarded Seeger the Presidential Medal of the Arts in a Kennedy Center ceremony.  In 1996 Arlo Guthrie and Harry Belafonte were the presenters when Seeger was inducted as a roots influence into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Acclaim continued with an honorary degree from his alma mater, Harvard, which had once enforced the blacklist against him and a two Grammy Awards for Best Traditional Folk Album and one for his children’s album,  Tomorrow’s Children.  All told, Seeger recorded over 100 albums.

In his later years Seeger’s singing voice was ravaged and his fingers sometimes painful with arthritison the banjo.  But a good cause could still call him out.  He would scratch out a few bars of a song then, encourage the audiences to join in the familiar songs, and let younger musicians perform.  He remained clear eyed and clear headed with the same sense of selfless dedication and love of music that have propelled him for over his long life.

With grandson and frequent singing partner in his later years Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Bruce Springsteen Seeger led a huge crowd to an emotional singing of Woody Guthrie’s This Land is Your Land at Barack Obama’s first Inaugural.

In 2012 he performed at Carnegie Hall again for his annual Clearwater benefit.  At the end of the show he invited the audience to walk with him down to the Occupy Wall Street encampment.  Hundreds followed him out of the hall and to the park where he stood on a park bench and sang for the protestors.  Vintage, irrepressible Pete.

Pete Seeger finally took his last breathon January 27, 2014 at age 94.  When he died Pete was probably the most beloved American—unless you were among those who were the targets of his loving outrage.

Note:  By coincidence, yesterday’s post about the fate of the cow pony Old Blue touched on one of the same series of storms as this entry which made the winter of 1886-87 so memorable on the High Plains.  .

The winter of 1886-87 was the most brutal ever recorded over a wide swath of the West.  East of the Rocky Mountains from Indian Territory to Montana storm after storm dumped white stuff on the open range where much of the nation’s beef was raised.  The Great Blizzard of ’87, which lasted for ten days from January 9 to 19, was worst in Montana.  Sixteen inches of snow came down the first 16 hours amid driving winds and temperatures that dipped to -47˚.  And it just kept coming.

Cattle, already weakened by a summer droughtand poor grass, floundered and died by the hundreds of thousands.  As ranchers began to try to dig out of drifts that covered theircabins and reached high lofts of their barns, they hoped things would get better.

But on January 29 at Fort Keogh—named for a captain in General Custer’s doomed 7th Cavalry command—near Miles City in southeastern Montana huge flakes began to fall.  And I mean huge.  Flakes were gathered and measured at 15 inches across and 8 inches thick weighing several ounces.  Men, horses, and cattle were actuallyinjured by the falling flakes, the largest ever recorded anywhere.  The reports were so outlandish that they might have been dismissed as tall taleshad they not been witnessed and attested to by a whole Army post.

More blizzards fallowed in February.  When the spring thaw finally came, coincidentally unleashing devastating floods, the corpses of millions of cattlelittered the plains.  The industry was virtually wiped out and the old system of open range feeding neverrecovered.

So, campers, if it’s been a rough winter where you are, thank your lucky stars the flakes of Fort Keogh did not fall again on you.

The grim reality is that 76 years after the world got confirmation of the breadth of the Holocaust anti-Semitism is on the rise in the United States and in Europe.  As the last survivors of the death camps and the Allied soldiers who liberated them dwindle the collective memory has dimmed.  Pollsconstantly show that younger people are at best foggy on the reality—many can’t place World War II within 50 years on a time line, are unsurewho the combatants were and on who was responsible for barely understood atrocities.  Holocaust denial is on the rise spread mainly by those who try to mask their own intentionsto “complete the job.”  Right wing nationalism is on the rise in Europe making substantial gains in several national parliaments and coming to power in Poland and other Eastern European Countries. 

In the U.S. White nationalism has broken out of the pariah fringe of society and is making a bid for respectability as it is given barely concealed wink and nod support from the former Resident himself.  Deadly mass shootings at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh and at a kosher grocery in New Jersey as well as a mass stabbing attack on a suburban New York home Hanukkah celebration were only some the most widely noted events.  Vandalism and attacks on synagogues, cemeteries, schools, and other Jewish institutions are on a sharp rise.  Anti-Semitic flyers and propagandaare being posted at colleges, universities, and high schools as well as in suburban communities.  The insurrectionist attack on the Capitol included individuals with swastika tattoos, a Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt in addition to members of anti-Semitic neo-fascist groups like the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys.  Even as White nationalist, racist, and anti-Semitic groups have lately been purged by Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms they find homes elsewhere and on the so-called Dark Web

Confounding attempts to counter these dangerous trends is the Israeli government’s campaign to tarevery critic of its brutal and unrelenting attacks on Palestiniansin Gaza, the occupied West Bank, and now in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, and other cities as anti-Semites.  The former Cheeto-in-Charge was happy to echo those charges and to support efforts to virtually outlaw calls for economic and cultural boycotts of the Jewish state.  Trump, who was been largely silent during Israel’s escalating attacks and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s announced plans to recognize and annex all of the illegal settlements in the West Bank, chose Holocaust Remembrance Day to host the Prime Minister and his chief political rival Benny Gantz to push a  secret “peace plan.” 

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It will be observed—celebrated is certainly the wrong word here—in ways big and small, significant and trivial in many places across the world.  The commemorationcomes on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in Poland by the advancing Red Army on January 27, 1945.  American, British, Canadian, and other Allied Forces liberated other camps, but Auschwitz was the pinnacle of efficiency for the Nazi industrialization of mass murder.

On the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation the United Nations General Assembly held a special commemorative session.  The following November the General Assembly created the memorial day, which was first observed in 2006.

In November of 1944 as the Red Army advanced from the East and the Allies pressed on the Western Front, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the beginning to the eradication of evidence of the death camps in Poland.   Gassing operations were suspended and crematoria at Auschwitz were ordered destroyed or, in one case, converted into a bomb shelter.  As things got worse, Himmler ordered the evacuation of the camps in early January directing that “not a single prisonerfrom the concentration camps falls alive into the hands of the enemy.”

On January 17, 58,000 Auschwitz detainees were set on a death march west towards Wodzisław Śląski. Approximately 20,000 Auschwitz prisoners made it to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where they were liberated by the British in April 1945.

But that left over 8,000 of the weakest and sickest abandoned with scant supplies.  The Red Army 322nd Rifle Division arrived 10 days later to find 7,500 barely alive and 600 corpses lying where ever they finally collapsed.  They also found much evidence of the greater crimes Himmler had hoped to hide—370,000 men’s suits, 837,000 women’s garments, and 7.7 tons of human hair. Coming in the midst of the Yalta Conference and other war news, the liberation received scant news attention at the time.  And the Soviets, who were at best ambivalent at the highest levels about what to do with the liberated Jews, did little to publicly celebrate their role in the liberation, at least at first.

It was only after survivors reached the West and eventually Israel as refugees, that Auschwitz emerged as a special, horrific symbol of the whole Holocaust.

The publication of the Diary of Ann Frank, Ellie Wiesel’s Night, and other memoirs by survivors, camp liberators, and on-the-scene journalists made deep public impressions in the West as did filmslike Stephen Spielberg’s Shindler’s List.  Evidence of the Holocaust has been carefully preserved at Israel’s Yad Vashem, the world central archiveof Holocaust-related information and at Holocaust museums in many major cities.  Public acknowledgement of the Holocaust probably peaked internationally around the turn of the 21st Century and has been eroding since then.

Last year the 75th anniversary was marked by a special meeting at the Fifth World Holocaust Forum at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.  Over 50 international leaders including French President Emmanuel Macron, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Britain’s Prince Charles, and American Vice-President Mike Pence were on hand for the event.  They heard Netanyahu denounce critics of Israel as Anti-Semites and to beat the band for an international attack against Iran.   Other leaders, except Pence, generally distanced themselves from Netanyahu’s remarks and spoke in platitudes of varying degrees of sincerity about preventing any future genocide.

Today there will be solemn remembrance gatherings at the sites of most of the World War II death camps and in cities around the world

Together we can truly pledge “Never Again!”  and mean it for Jews and for the modern targets of repression, oppression, apartheid like ghettoization, and even actual genocidal attacks including the Kurds and the Palestinians.

Mary Tyler Moore died January 25, 2017 in Connecticut.  The star of two of television’s most beloved, iconic, and influential sit-coms, a shrewd businesswoman and powerful producer, Oscar nominee for a type cast shattering dramatic role, philanthropist, activist, and feminist was 80 years old.  She had been suffering complications of Type 1 diabetes in recent years which had left her nearly blind.  Few actresseshave been as loved by fans and show business insiders alike,

Moore was born on December 29, 1936 to a comfortably middle class Catholic family in Brooklyn, New York.  When she was eight years old the family moved to Los Angeles where she decided to become a dancer at age 17 while attending Immaculate Heart High School in Los Feliz, California.

She got her first break as Happy Hotpoint, a tiny dancing elf onappliance commercials during aired during broadcasts of the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.  She auditioned for the role of Danny Thomas’s oldest daughter in Make Room for Daddy, but was turned down because “no daughter of mine could have a nose that small.”  She became the sultry voiced receptionist on Richard Diamond, Private Detectivewho was only shown from the waist down, and featuring Moore’s shapely dancer legs. 

By the late ‘50s Moore was appearing regularly as a guest star in numerous TV series including, Bourbon Street Beat, 77 Sunset Strip, Surfside Six, and Hawaiian Eye—all detective shows from the Warner Bros. assembly line—as well Wanted Dead or Alive, Steve Canyon, Thriller,  and Lock-Up.  Finally it was Danny Thomas, Sheldon Leonard’s partner in the production company who remembered the “girl with three names” and recommended her to him Sheldon Leonard for the new show he was developing with writer/comedian Carl Reiner.

The Dick Van Dyke Show, which premiered on CBS on October 3, 1960 was something different—it split its time and attention between Rob Petrie’s—Van Dyke—job as head writer of a comedy/variety show and his home in suburban New Rochelle, New Yorkwith his beautiful and somewhat neurotic young wife, Laura.  In this it echoed the show biz/domestic split of the classic I Love Lucy and Thomas’s Make Room for Daddy.  The couple did have a child, a grade school age boy named Ritchie, but plots seldom revolved around him and he did not even appear in many episodes.  At home the story was all about Rob and Laura, played by raven-haired Mary Tyler Moore.

Although Van Dyke had a certain youthful Midwestern charm, Moore was noticeably younger than her husband which was explained in backstory episodes showing Rob meeting her while serving as a sergeantin an Army entertainment troupe and she was a 17 year old dancer.  That background also allowed Moore to dance in the series, both in the living room of their home and with other cast members in productions for the mythical Allen Brady Show.  It also showed of her long legs, but not as on Richard Diamond in short skirts.  Instead they were tightly encased in capri pants, a choice Moore herself insisted upon because unlike previous domestic icons on TV like Harriet Nelsonor Donna Reed, “real housewives don’t vacuum in full skirted dresses and heels.”  Sponsors and the network were mortified and fearful but Moore took the considerable risk of sticking by her guns.  It was a modest but real assertion of independence and even feminism.  Women, it turned out, loved the pants and they became a fashion rage.  As for the men, they thought they looked just great on her despite—or because of a “certain cupping under” which emphasized the shape of her butt. 

The show ran for 5 seasons and could have gone on but Van Dyke wanted to concentrate on his increasingly successful movie career which already included Bye, Bye Birdie and Mary Poppins.

The Dick Van Dyke Show was nominated for 25 Primetime Emmy Awards and won 15 including a nod to the program as Best Comedy and Best Achievement in Comedy, for Reiner as a writer and producer, for Jerry Paris as a director, and to all of the principal cast members.

In 2002, it was ranked at 13 on TV Guide’s 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time.  And has been in continual syndication or on basic cable since its first run.

During the run of the show Moore married CBS producer Grant Tinkler.  It was her second marriage.  The first to the “the boy next door” Richard Carleton Meeker in 1955 produced a son, Richard Jr.  That marriage ended in divorce in 1961.  She married Tinkler a little more than a year later.

Moore moved on to movies under contract with Universal Pictures where she made 1967's Thoroughly Modern Millie in 1967 with Julie Andrews, and the 1968 films What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?with George Peppard, and Don’t Just Stand There! with Robert Wagner.  Memorably she played a nun opposite Elvis Presley in Change of Habit in 1969.  That flick was a box office disappointment on first release but has become a cult favorite.

Meanwhile Moore and Tinkler formed a new production company, MTM Enterprises in 1969 and successfully pitched new sitcom to CBS for the 1970 season.  The Mary Tyler Moore Show turned out to be even more successful than The Dick Van Dyke Show and was culturally significant in profound ways.

In the show Moore portrayed Mary Richards, a thirty-something single woman who arrives in Minneapolis to start a new life and career.  Just what she was doing since presumably graduating from college is never quite clear but the lyrics to the show’s catchy theme song, Love is All Around by prolific 70’s tunesmith Paul Williams indicate she may have had a bumpy ride.

How will you make it on your own?
This world is awfully big, girl this time you’re all alone
But it’s time you started living
It’s time you let someone else do some giving.

Love is all around, no need to waste it
You can have a town, why don’t you take it.
You’re gonna make it after all
You’re gonna make it after all.

Mary landed a job as sort of a Girl Friday in the newsroom of a third rate local TV station and launched a career in which she would steadily advance first to a news writer then to a producer.  Earlier Marlo Thomas had been the first to portray and “independent single woman”—if you forget about early television’s Our Miss Brooksand Private Secretary—in That Girl!  But Thomas’s character was an actress/model who sometimes took odd jobs rather than a career woman and much of the show focused on her Doris Day-like virginal relationship with her boyfriend.  Although The Mary Tyler Moore Show did not spend a lot of time on Mary’s love life, it was tacitly understood that she was no naïve maiden saving herself for the right man.  One episode made headlines when Mary casually decided to go on the Pill.

Mary became the focal point of her work place, relied upon by her crusty managing editor Lou Grant (Ed Asner); the pompous, vain, and ignorant anchorman Ted Baxter (Ted Knight); world weary writer Murray Slaughter (Gavin McLeod); and was vexed by a seemingly sweet but back stabbing cooking show host Sue Ann Nevins (Betty White.) 

On the job Mary fought for equal pay with the men in the newsroom and gently confronted prejudiceabout what a woman could do.

She found a not terribly grand or glamorous apartment in a converted Victorian mansion where she made friends with another single woman, sharp tongued Rhoda Morgenstern, a Brooklyn Jewish transplant with a woeful love life, and somewhat more reluctantly with landlady Phyllis Linstrom, a middle aged woman with an always unseen husband Lars.

In seven seasons the show was almost always in the Nielson top 20 and was early appointment TV for many.  The episode featuring the funeral of Chuckles the Clown, the station’s children’s show host who was trampled by an elephant while walking in a parade dressed as a giant peanut, is usually considered one of the top five funniest TV comedy episodes of all time.   The show garnered a then record breaking 29 Emmy’s including 5 for Moore personally as an actress.

The city of Minneapolis commemorated the program with a life sized statue of Moore tossing her knit cap in the air on the site where the famous opening sequence was filmed.

MTM productions spun off successful programs featuring Rhoda, Phyllis, and Lou Grant.  The company also made The Bob Newhart Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, The White Shadow, St. Elsewhere, Hill Street Blues, and Remington Steele making it one of the most powerful companies in TV.  Moore was compared to Lucille Ball and her Desilu Productions, but she was the first to admit that she was never the hand-on producer Ball becameand that her husband Grant Tinkler managed the company.  Still, the company made her enormously wealthy and catapulted Tinkler to the position of Chairman and CEO of NBC from 1981 to 1986 after his divorce from Moore.  Moore left the management of the company in the hands of Arthur Priceunder whose management it went into a slow decline and was sold in 1986 to Jim Victory Television.  The company and its valuable catalog changed hand several more times and is now owned by the Walt Disney Company.

The end of her marriage to Tinkler was part of a dark time for the woman that the public associated with perkiness and spunk.  She had been diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes at 33 in 1969 just as she was getting set to launch her eponymous show.  Although she was able to control the illness, the effects worsened over the years and were the cause of serious health issuesin the final decades of her life.  She became an activist for diabetes researchand was the long time chair and public face of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, now known as the JDRF.

After all of her success, Moore struggled establish a lasting new television program.  Later forays into series programming, including two variety shows and two short lived sitcoms were notable failures. Her movie career fizzled after the box office failure of Change of Habit.  To cope with the disappointments and frustrations she turned increasingly to drink and like her former TV husband Dick Van Dyke, she struggled with alcoholism.  She chronicled that battle in her 1995 memoir After All.

In 1980 Moore was cast against type as the cold mother who rejects her surviving son after his brother and her favorite died in a sailing accident in Ordinary People.  Robert Redford’s directorial debut was one of the most admired films of the year and earned six Academy Award nominations and won four including Best Picture and Best Director.  Moore was nominated for Best Supporting Actressand won a Golden Globe to add to her crowed trophy case.

She could hardly enjoy the success.  On October 14, 1980, less than a month after the premier of Ordinary Moore’s only child, 24 year old Richard died of a self-inflicted shotgun wound.  Moore always maintained that the death was accidental but it was ruled a suicide.  The loss was devastating to her.

In 1983 Moore found some peace and comfort when she married Dr.Robert Levine who she met while he was treating her mother.  They made their home in New York City and in Connecticut where he remained devoted to her through her increasingly fragile health until she died.

Moore appeared as a guest on various TV programs and starred in several made for TV movies including Stolen Babiesfor which she won another Emmy in 1993.  Notably she reunited with surviving members of Dick Van Dyke Show in a 2004 TV movie.  Her last work was on an episode of Hot in Cleveland in 2012 that reunited her with series regular Betty White as well as Mary Tyler Moore regulars Cloris Leachman, Valerie Harper, and Georgia Engel.  The reunion was partly the result of Harper’s announcement that she had inoperable brain cancer and Moore’s own fragile health.

Increasingly, Moore spent her energy in philanthropic pursuits.  In addition to her work with the JDRF she raised money for Civil War landmark preservation in honor of her father’s lifelong passion.  She was especially interested in animal welfare.  She worked with Farm Sanctuary to raise awareness about the process involved in factory farming and to promote compassionate treatment of farm animals.  A long-time vegetarian, she promoted a meatless diet.  With close friend Bernadette Peters she founded Broadway Barks an annual pet adopt-a-thon in New York City.  The two also campaigned together to get the city animal control agencies and shelters adopt a no-kill policy.

With Joe Biden’s incoming administration, there has been a lot of attention to his relations with the pressand plans for White House communications. He immediately reinstated routine daily briefings by his Press Secretary Jen Psaki, which his predecessor had abandoned entirely for months at a time before a Fox News-like blonde was brought on to calmly lie. 

The former Cheeto-in-Charge ditched formal press conferences when he found himself challenged and often being bested in sparring matches with reportersfrom the “Fake News” media.  He held joint press appearances with visiting foreign dignitarieswhere he would often take the bait of off-topic questions and babble embarrassingly off-script.  Latter he appeared for a while at daily press briefings on the Coronavirus sharing the podium with his medical experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci, hack political appointees, and Vice President Mike Pence who was put in charge of the Covid-19 Task Force.  That pretty much ended when he suggested ingesting bleach as a treatment.  He went “over the heads” of the media to use Twitterto stir up his followers,  In the end most of his exchanges with the press were sometimes shouting answers to questions yelled at him as he boarded Marine One.

Biden, by contrast, has been before the microphones and cameras daily as he announces his Cabinet appointments and policy initiatives, usual taking at least some questions.  He promises to conduct a transparent administration and the White House Press Pool has been assured that he will also conduct full-blown press conferences.

Biden is old enough to remember President John F. Kennedy’s adroit useof the televised press conference to speak to the American people.  On January 25, 1961 JFK had the first live TV press conference at the State Department auditorium where there was ample space for the more than 200 reporters then covering the White House.  Kennedy’s good-looks, wit, and charm and a bantering stylewith his questioners made the broadcasts some of the original must-see-TV and helped cement the image of Camelot.

Kennedy’s press conferences were so masterful and well-remembered that many people think he invented them.  Not so.  Presidents have been meeting with White House press corps since at least the Woodrow Wilsonadministration.  Before that chief executives occasionally sat for interviews but most communicated in speeches with the press not allowed to ask questions. 

From Wilson to Harry Truman’s early presidency, press conferences, as they came to be called, were conducted around the President’s desk in the Oval Office.  Other than still photographs no recordings were made. The sessions were held under the rule “for background only” meaning that the President could not be quoted directly without his permission.  In fact, by tacit agreement if the President inadvertently stuck his foot in his mouth, reporters often help him craft a more tactful response.  According to an article on the White House Historical Society web site:

President Truman, for example, was able to back away from a comment about Senator McCarthy that he made in a March 30, 1950, press conference. Truman said: “I think the greatest asset that the Kremlin has is Senator McCarthy.” When one of the reporters commented that the president's observation would “hit page one tomorrow,” Truman realized he had better soften the statement. He “worked” with reporters and allowed the following as a direct quotation: “The greatest asset that the Kremlin has is the partisan attempt in the Senate to sabotage the bipartisan foreign policy of the United States.”

During this period it may come as a surprisethat not-so-silent Calvin Coolidge conducted by far the most of these sessions—521 or an average of 93 a year.  But he seldom approved direct quotes.  Franklin D. Roosevelt cultivated war relationships with the rapidly growing press corps of the Depression and World War II often calling reporters “Boys” in an affectionate congenial way not as an insulting put-down. And of course they were, with rare exceptions, all male.

During the Truman administration the press sessions outgrew the Oval Office and the President moved them to the Indian Treaty Room in the East Wing of the Old Executive Office Building now known as Eisenhower Executive Office Building.  The ornate and formal roomwith marble floors and vaulted ceiling had previously been used as a library for the War and Navy Departments. Initially the same off-the-record rules applied in the new venue.

Under Dwight Eisenhower the press conferences officially went “on the record.”  The old informality and familiarity was replaced with more structure.  The President had to prepare himself much more carefully for each encounter to avoid embarrassing misstatements or errorsresulting in a dramatic reduction in how often they were conducted. 

Eisenhower held the first press conference to be broadcast on January 19, 1955.  He announced the event as an “experiment.”  It was filmed and segments were aired that evening on the short 15 minute network TV news programs and more extensive clips were sometimes shown on the Sunday morning news programs.  Newsreels, which were still a staple at movie theaters also showed clips.

After his success during his debates with Richard Nixon during the 1960 Presidential campaign Kennedy felt both confident and comfortable on TV.  He moved his first press conference from the over-crowded and noisy Treaty Room to the State Department auditorium and opted for a live broadcast.  He read a prepared statement on a faminein the Congo, the release of two American aviators from Soviet custody, and impending negotiationsfor an atomic test ban treaty. Then he opened the floor for questions from reporters, answering on a variety of topics including relations with Cuba, voting rights, and food aidto impoverished Americans.

His successors all tinkered with the format and location. 

The program broadcast during the day—and later sometimes in the early evening—was such a success that Kennedy repeated it about every two weeks, a more frequent schedule than any of his successors. Presidents Nixon and Ronald Reagan cut back the number of press conferences to approximately one every two months. They were moved to the more “Presidential” location of the East Room of the White House. And they were often held in the evening to attract a larger audience.  But that annoyed viewers and outraged network executives who lost lucrative prime time advertising revenue.  During the administration of Bill Clinton the networks rebelled and refused to broadcast the evening press conferences unless they were assured spectacular news would be made.  Chief executives turned more and more to prime time addresses from the Oval Office in times of crisis and found multiple other ways to communicate with the press.  The number of formal press conferences declinedadministration by administration.

The press also changed.  In addition to traditional print and broadcast media, alternative web-based outlets, including those with heavy political bias on both the left and right became more important and demanded to be added to the official press pool.  Presidents also became more comfortable using those outlets.  The last disgraced occupant began to use them almost exclusively.

It remains to be seen how President Biden will adapt the tradition to his new circumstances. 

Note:  Anti-immigrant demagoguery is nothing new in American politics.  Chicago’s Levi Boone was a spiritual and political Godfather to Donald Trump and his ilk.

Dr. Levi Boone was a mass of contradictions.  A twigof the expansive Boone family tree—he was Daniel’s great-nephew—he overcame early poverty to become a university trained medical doctor and established a practice in Chicago just as the former trading post villagewas establishing itself as a city.  He was admired for his skill, commitment to the community, and as a lay pillar of the Baptist Church.  Yet he was also an avowed racist and a nativist who made keeping the city White, native born, and Protestant the hinge of his political career which included a tumultuous term as Mayor.  You can see how well that project turned out.  When he died on January 24, 1882 it was in a city where the “alien scum” he despised already outnumbered the “real Americans.”

Levi Day Boone was the seventh son of Squire Boone, Daniel’s nephew, and was born on the family farm near Lexington, Kentucky on December 8, 1808.  In the tradition of the Boone family Squire marched off to join General Andrew Jackson in his war against the Creeks in 1814.  He was severely injured at the climactic Battle of Horseshoe Bend which crushedthe Red Sticks.  Squire returned home a cripple and never really recovered. He died of the lingering after effects of the wounds in 1818 when Levi was only nine years old.

The family was left in dire poverty, but was still respectable.  That helped young Levi gain admission Transylvania University, the first college west of the Appalachians and the training ground of the upper South’s political and social elite. While Levi was reading medicine there, Henry Clay was professor of law.  He graduated in 1829.  His medical degree made him one of only a handful of college trained doctors in the West.

In the Boone family tradition, Levi looked for opportunities yet further west. By 1831 he established practice in Hillsboro, Illinois, a still rustic pioneer village southwest of Springfield.  When the Black Hawk War broke out he enlisted in the Militia.  He rode with the cavalry under the command of Major Isaiah Stillman and took part in the humiliating defeat known as Stillman’s run.  After his first enlistment expired, Boone re-enlisted in the more appropriate role of surgeon.

Back in Hillsboro, the young Doctor’s prospects immensely improvedby the time honored method of marrying up and well.  He wooed and won Louise M. Smith, daughter of Theophilus W. Smith, a Justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.  The fertile couple would go on to have 11 children.

The conclusion of the Black Hawk War opened up previously closed territoryto the west and north of Chicago and the village began its rapid expansion as aregional transportation hub.  Chances to advance in the world were much greater there than in a rural backwater like Hillsboro.  Boone relocated there and hung up his shingle in 1834.  A year later he was already a prominent citizen and was a founder and first Secretary of the Cook County Medical Board.

He was also an early and leading member of the First Baptist Church which was organized in 1833 just before his arrival and was just the third church in the town.  His tenure there as an Elder was not without controversy.  In 1843 he delivered a lecture at the church on the justification of slavery in The Bible which caused a schism in the congregation.  Outraged, thirty-two members resigned their memberships and founded the rival Tabernacle Baptist Church which resolved in its Charter that “Slavery is a great sin in the sight of God, and while we view it as such, we will not invite into our communion or pulpit those who advocate or justify from civil policy or the Bible, the principle or practice of slavery.”  Boone and pro-slavery Southerners remained in firm control of First Baptist.  In an ironic modern twist, First Baptist is now the Chicago anchor of the liberal American Baptist Convention (Northern Baptists) and has been an overwhelmingly Black church since the late 1960s.

Levi Boone was not the only member of the sprawling Boone clan to settle in Northern Illinois in those years.  Up north in western Lake County, soon to be split off as McHenry County, Levi’s cousins and Daniels grandsons George and John Boone became the first White settlers of McHenry Townshipand established a grist mill on the Fox River.  Within a few years after a nasty spate of land claim lawsuits, the brothers pulled up stakes and moved further west were they helped found Boone County.

Meanwhile Chicago received it City Charter in 1837 and the construction of the wagon roads and work on the Illinois and Michigan Canalbegan to attract large numbers of immigrant laborers to the area.  Although most settled south of the new city limits, some had begun to bleed into the municipal boundaries alarming men like Boone.  For them, the situation rose to a crisis when the Canal was finally opened in 1848 causing an explosion in population.  Even more immigrants poured into the region spurred by the Potato famine in Ireland and the failed revolutions in the German states in 1848.

Bridgeport, at the head of the canal fast became a transportation hub and manufacturing centerwhere Germans refugees and more recent Irish immigrants crowded alongside the families of the Irish laborers who had built the canal.  When it was annexed into the City, the native Protestant ascendency was suddenly threatened.

Levi Boone saw the threat clearly and sprang into action.  He hitched his star to the rising American Party, the political face of the semi-secret Know Nothing anti-Catholic and anti-Immigrant movement that was reaching its peak of national influence.  In 1855 he swept to victory as the Mayor of Chicago over incumbent Lawrence Milliken with nearly 53% of the vote.  His coat tails were long enough to carry along with him 7 members of the Board of Aldermen. 

On close examination, Boone’s election might have been the result of the most massive voter fraud in the city’s tainted political history.  Somehow few of the ballots from newly annexed Bridgeport were collected or counted.

Despite the sputtering outrage of his new, but disenfranchised constituents, Boone pressed forward with a broad and aggressive anti-immigrant agenda.  The first order of businesswas banning the non-native born from city employment regardless of citizenship status.  Next up was a complete reorganization of the city’s multiple police forces.  He combined the Day Police and the Night Watch into a single police forcewith 3 eight-hour shifts and requiredthe police to wear uniforms for the first time. 

Although this seems like a harmless, even progressive, step, the ouster of foreign born officers of the two original forces had disastrous consequences.  The Germans, who were on those forces in large numbers, were culturally attuned to order and discipline and made excellent, and by the standards of the time, largely incorruptible servants of the local power structure.  The Irish provided the muscle needed in crime ridden slum neighborhoods.  The American born street toughs recruited by the city turned out to be, form the outset, highly corruptible and undisciplined.  That was overlooked since their main function was not preventing crime or capturing offenders, but the intimidation of immigrants in their communities and at their jobs.  They were an occupying armyout to harass and intimidate a despised minority.  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it. 

Next on the agenda was a so-called Temperance campaign.  Boone himself was not an abstainer.  He indulged in the perfectly American beverage of choice—whiskey.  But as a Baptist he was pledged to temperance, which was understood as a movement to prevent the lower classes from becoming burdens on society from the abuse of alcohol and resulting crime, idleness, and destruction of families.  It had been a current in Protestant Reformism since the late 18th Century but had taken off as a social movement in tandem with the rise of immigrant populations in big cities.  It was the respectable, posing as beneficent, face of Know Nothing bigotry.  In Chicago respectable upper and middle class reformers who would not publicly associate themselves with the cruditiesof Know Nothingism had supported Boone’s slate because of his pledge to rid the city of saloons.

It seems that the main enemy was that alien drink, beer.  Real Americans drank whiskey.  But Germans made their Beer Halls the social centers of theircommunities—and a place where their radicals could stir up trouble.  The Irish congregated in their grubbytaverns and although traditional consumers of poteen and other liquors, had taken to beer as a cheaper way to get falling down drunk. 

A state-wide ban on liquor sales and taverns backed by the Know Nothings and powerful Protestant preachers, based on a recently enacted law in the state of Maine was widely expected to pass.  Boone moved first in anticipation of that. He launched his assault by pushing through new license fees which raised the annual cost from $50 to $300, well beyond the means of many small proprietors, but affordableto the downtown Hotels, middle class resorts, and private clubs frequented by the better Protestant classes.  Not only that, but licenses had to be renewed every three months with all of the attending bureaucratic inconvenience, inspections, and opportunities to deny renewal for petty offences.  Almost immediately hundreds of taverns and beerhalls were unable to obtain or renew their licenses.  Many, probably most, defiantly remained open anyway or moved to thinly disguise their operations as restaurants or grocery stores.

Things really came to a head, however, when Boone ordered his new Police Force to enforce a long ignored ordinance forbidding alcohol sales on the Sabbath.  Sunday was the only day of rest for workers who labored ten, twelve, even fourteen hours the other six days at back-breaking jobs.  In working class neighborhoods men—and often their wives and whole families—adjourned directly from Sunday morning Mass to friendly watering holes for the only social conviviality they were apt to enjoy all week.  The attack on Sunday drinking was, directly, an attack on immigrants and Catholics.  The targets understood that perfectly.

On April 21 several tavern owners were arrested in a police sweep.  Outraged patrons chased the police and their Paddy Wagons—guess how they got that name—downtown to near the Cook County Court House where street fighting erupted.  As word spread across south side working class neighborhoods more headed to the central business district.  Mayor Boone ordered the swing bridges over the Chicago River pivoted to prevent access.  Scores were trapped on the bridges and police opened fire on them with their pocket revolvers.  Some armed rioters returned scattered fire. 

In the end the Lager Beer Riots resulted in tens of thousands of dollars of property damage in the business district, at least one dead rioter and scores more injured, and one police officer shot in an arm that required amputation.  Even many of the cities hard drinking native workers lost sympathy with the Know Nothings.  And the business classes who had supported the anti-saloon campaign were losing their enthusiasm for the project.

State wide the emerging new Republican Party checked the American Party’s ambitions and by means of an alliance with the growing German population largely engineered by a downstate lawyer named Abraham Lincoln, the state-wide alcohol sales ban was easily defeated.   Meanwhile the national American Party was deflatingalmost as fast as it had blown up, divided by the rising issue of slavery. 

In Chicago, Boone realized that he would not be able to disenfranchiseBridgeport and other immigrant neighborhoods a second time.  Armed militias were being organized to guard the polls and ballot boxes and make sure that votes would be delivered safely to the County Court House for counting.

Boone was licked and he knew it.  He didn’t even bother to run for a second one year term.  His aldermen also either withdrew or were dumped by voters. 

Boone’s short-lived political career may have been over, but not his brushes with controversy.  After the election of his old nemesis Lincoln as President and the outbreak of the Civil War the doctor swung his affiliations to the Copperhead Democrats.  His primary allegiance was to the South and the preservation of slavery.  In 1862 he was arrested on suspicion of helping a rebel prisoner of war escape and being part of network of southern sympathizers running a sort of reverse Underground Railroad.  He was held for several weeks without being formally chargedat Camp Douglas on the South Side until his friends secured his release on the grounds of his service to the community as a physician.

After that, Boone lived out his life quietly, practicing medicine and presumably basking in the affectionof his large family and a few close friends.  The city practically forgot himand little notice was taken when he died at the age 73.  He was buried safely among the Chicago Protestant elite at Rosehill Cemetery.

Although it barely made a ripple in the American press and media something astonishing happened while we were focused on an insurrection, an inauguration, and the Coronavirus pandemic.  The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), a/k/at the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty came into force yesterday, January 22 making the ultimate weapons of mass destruction internationally illegal.  Of course not a single bomb was disarmed and no defiant malefactor states held accountable.  Yet however simply symbolic, the Treaty represents a major breakthrough and offers some dim hope that the famous Doomsday clock might be turned back just a bit.

The Treaty came into effect after Belize, Jamaica, Malta, Nauru, Nigeria, Niue, Sudan, and Zimbabwe either signed or acceded to the agreement in 2020 bringing the total number of supporting states to 86 signatories and 51 parties. 

Who didn’t sign?  Every acknowledged or suspected nuclear power—the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea—or states on the verge of developing weapons like Iran.  Most reasonably advanced industrial nations with accessto plutonium or enriched uranium can probably jointhe nuclear club within a few years of intentional development.  Of these with at least rumored aspirations only Brazilhas signed.

Only a handful of small Western European nations—Ireland, Austria, Liechtenstein, San Marino, the Vatican, and Malta are in the pact. No members of NATO are. In Eastern Europe Kazakhstan is the lonely member of the anti-nuclear agreement.

So who do we thank for this international breakthrough?  Almost all of Latin America and the Caribbean, much of Africa, Southeast Asia and Oceania.  Many of the signatories were among the smallest nations on Earth in both population and land masspunching way above their weight.

Some may wonder why if the treaty doesn’t include those with the ability to blow up the world and is apparently toothless for enforcementwhy it matters at all.  Its proponents assert that is an “unambiguous political commitment” to achieveand maintain a nuclear-weapon-free world.  Unlike a comprehensive nuclear weapons convention, it is not intended to contain all of the legal and technical measures required to reach the point of elimination. Such provisions will instead be the subject of future negotiations,  

The Ban Treaty will help stigmatize nuclear weapons, and serve as a catalyst for a move to elimination.  Unlike other weapons of mass destruction—chemical and biological—or recklessly indiscriminate to civilian populations—anti-personnel landminesand cluster munitions—nuclear arms are not prohibited in a comprehensiveand universal manner.  The Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) of 1968—the oldest and most important curb on such arms, contains only partial prohibitions, and nuclear-weapon-free zone treatiesprohibit nuclear weapons only within certain geographical regions.

The origins of the treaty can probably be traced directly back to the Ban the Bomb movement of the 1950’s and the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Britain in 1981, and 60 years of peace activism as expatriate American singer and activist Peggy Seeger, a long-time resident of the United Kingdom, pointed out yesterday.

That anti-nuclear activism as waxed and waned over the decades and has often been overshadowed by anti-war activism on specific conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.  But it never went away.

Proposals for a nuclear-weapon-ban treaty first emerged following a review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 2010, at which the five officially recognized nuclear-armed state parties—the U.S. Russia, Britain, France and China—rejected calls for the start of negotiations on a comprehensive nuclear weapons convention. Disarmament advocates first considered starting this process without the opposed states as a path forward and a less technical treaty concentrated on the ban of nuclear weapons appeared to be a more realistic goal.

Three major intergovernmental conferencesin 2013 and 2014 on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons, held in Norway, Mexico, and Austria, strengthened the international resolve to outlaw nuclear weapons. The second such conference, in Mexico in February 2014, concluded that the prohibition of a certain type of weapon typically precedes, and stimulates, its elimination.

In 2014, a group of non-nuclear-armed nations known as the New Agenda Coalition (NAC) presented the idea of a nuclear-weapon-ban treaty to the NPT state parties as a possible “effective measure” to implement Article VI of the NPT, which required all states parties to pursue negotiations in good faith for nuclear disarmament. The NAC argued that a ban treaty would operate alongside and in support of the NPT.

In 2015, the UN General Assemblyestablished a working group with a mandate to address “concrete effective legal measures, legal provisions and norms” for attaining and maintaining a nuclear-weapon-free world. In August 2016, it adopted a report recommending negotiations in 2017 on a “legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their total elimination”.  The vote on the resolution was 123 in favor, 38 against, and 16 abstaining.  North Korea was the only country possessing nuclear weapons that voted for this resolution, though it did not subsequently take part in negotiations.

The United Nations Conference to Negotiate a Legally Binding Instrument to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons, Leading Towards their Total Elimination first met in March 2017 at U.N. Headquarters in New York City.  132 nations participated.  At the end, the President of the negotiating conference, Elayne Whyte Gómez, permanent representative of Costa Rica to the UN in Geneva, called the adoption of a treaty by July 7 “an achievable goal”. Representatives from governments, international organizations, and civil society, such as the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, noted the positive atmosphere and strong convergence of ideas among negotiating participants. They agreed that the week-long debates had set the stage well for the negotiations in June and July.

After  Gómez presented a first draft of the treaty in May several European and NATO nations noted that draft Article 1, 2aprohibiting any stationing of nuclear weapons on their own territorywould require them to end contractson nuclear sharing with the U.S.  They therefore refused to participate in on-going negotiations.  The only NATO member participating in the treaty negotiations was the Netherlands which came under enormous diplomatic pressure from America and Germany.

The second conference started on15 June and was scheduled to conclude on July 7, with 127 out of 193 UN members participating.  On June 27 “Join and destroy” language was added for current nuclear powers which was somewhat modified later.  A new provision added acceptance of the peaceful use of nuclear technology.

A final third draft clarified language but also debated a limited escape card. The withdrawal clause provided “in exercising its national sovereignty, [...] decides that extraordinary events related to the subject matter of the Treaty have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country”. The majority perspective was that this conditionwas subjective, and no security interests can justify genocide, nor can mass destruction contribute to security. Since a neutral withdrawal clause not giving reasons was not accepted by the minority, the respective Article 17 was accepted as a compromise. Safeguards against arbitrary use are the withdrawal period of twelve months and the prohibition of withdrawal during an armed conflict.

The much tinkered with final draft was adopted on July 7 was with 122 countries in favor, 1 opposed (Netherlands), and 1 abstention(Singapore). Among the countries voting for the treaty’s adoption were South Africa and Kazakhstan, both of which formerly possessed nuclear weapons and gave them up voluntarily. Iran and Saudi Arabia also voted in favor of the agreement although Iran seemed to be in development of the weapons and the Saudis had financed Pakistan’s Islamic Bomb and was suspected of planning to buy the results for its own use.

Not every nation that voted for adoption ultimately officially signed the treaty or became parties to it.  57 nations signed in 2017.  Others followed in fits and starts over the last three years until the critical mass to make the treaty official international law.

Will the treaty have any effect on the nuclear powers or potential powers?  Probably not.  The incoming Biden administration is expected to resume negotiations with Iran over the agreement that Trumpabandoned in which they agreed to halt arms development.  It will also probably lean on Israel on their implied threats to use the nukes that they pretend not to have against regional rivals.  They may also attempt to help resolve volatile nuclear tensions between India and Pakistan.  Relations with North Korea are entirely unpredictable.  The administration remains committed to the traditional American position of nuclear deterrence, although it might be amenable to negotiations to stave off an expensive new arms raceand perhaps somewhat reduce the Pentagon nuclear arms budget.  Might being the operative word.

In Russia Vladimir Putin has been belligerent on nuclear weapons believing that they are essential to rebuilding Russian prestige and influence as a world power.  He has promoted the use of tactical nuclear weapons which could be deployed if NATO presses too closely in the old Soviet sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. He even hinted that they might be used in the ongoing low-grade war in Ukraine.  He has also touted the possible developmentand deployment of a new super weapon that would make Western nuclear deterrence and the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) obsolete sort of like the Doomsday machine in Stanley Kubrick’s How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

The future of real nuclear elimination lies with the people of the world who might launch a major international uprising if annihilation once again overtly threatens us all.

Note—It has been a tumultuous time here at this modest blog and in the country.  It may now be some relief for us to return to our more customary humdrum business such as looking in the nooks and crannies for interesting tid bits.  If you have been missing that, here it is.

When The Power of Sympathy: or, The Triumph of Nature was issued anonymously in Boston on January 21, 1789 the publisher, Isaiah Thomas & Company, promised that the book was, “Intended to represent the specious causes, and to Expose the fatal CONSEQUENCES, of SEDUCTION; To inspire the Female Mind With a Principle of Self Complacency, and to Promote the Economy of Human Life.”  And sure enough the book was salted with pious admonitions to virtue and all of its sinners met disastrous ends. 

But perhaps the readers snatched up copies for another reason—the plot of what is considered the first American Novel was “ripped from the headlines,” a Roman à clef on a still fresh and juicy scandal involving Perez Morton’s incestuous seduction of his sister-in-lawFanny Apthorp who became pregnant and committed suicide, while Morton escaped legal punishment. And, hey, who wouldn’t want to read about that?

The author, William Hill Brown happened to be Morton’s neighbor and knew all of the juicy details, but the case was gossip fodder in Boston.  Brown was the son of a famous clock maker—the one who built the big clock for the steepleof the Old South Church.  He was born to the craftsman’s second marriage in 1765and was always sickly.  He was encouraged to take up literature by his older step brother, the artist Mather Brown.  He would go on to have a romantic story, Harriot, or the Domestic Reconciliation published in the first issue of Massachusetts Magazinelater in the year.  He would follow those up with a play based on the capture and execution of Major Andre in the Benedict Arnold West Point spy case, a series of verse fables, Penelope a comedy in West Indies style, essays, and a short second novel about incest and seduction, Ira and Isabella, all published posthumously.   

Later in 1793 Brown went south to study law in a climatemore suited to his health.   He died of tuberculosis inMurfreesboro, North Carolina on September 2, 1793 at the age of 28.  His literary reputation did not long out live him.

Of course not putting his name on that novel didn’t help.  Novels, which were coming into vogue in England, were considered trifles for bored housewives and probably dangerous to their morals.  The women of Boston were snatching up copies practically from the docks.  Preachers thundered condemnation of them as salacious, seductive, and sinful.  And of course most were, which was their appeal.

Gentlemen read lofty things—endless volumes of sermons from the leading divines, bare knuckle partisan newspapers, the classics in Greek and Latin, philosophy in French and German, and, of course, poetry both epic and lyrical.  They could not deign to read such trash.  But if truth be told, late at night safely locked in their studies, I suspect many more than would admit it found themselves aroused and titillated by the popular tales of lust and just retribution. 

It is natural then that throughout most of the 19th Century The Power of Sympathy was popularly supposed to be the work of a woman, as were so many of the English titles reaching America shores.  When Arthur Bayley, editor of The Bostonian, republished it in serial on its centennial, he attributed it to Sarah Wentworth Morton, a poetessand the wife of Perez Morton and sister of Frances Apthorp.

It did not take later scholars, however, too much digging to uncover the true author.

As for the novel as an art form, it took decades to shuck its reputation—and in the loftier precincts of the New England elitenever quite did.  As many remember banning books in Boston—mostly novels—was still a big deal into the 1950’s. 

Slowly in the 19th Century British imports from Austin, Dickens, Thackeray, et al raised the level ofrespectability among the middle classes—but still mostly women.  James Fennimore Cooper in America began popularizing more masculine novels as adventure stories, broadening the appeal.  Serious writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville began working in the form—Hawthorne bringing a new depth to the traditional tales of the wages of sin and Melville having a hard time making a living peddling adventure yarns with, you should pardon the expression, depth.  Julia Ward Howe became the first American to have a run-away, must-read best seller with her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin that blended the novel’s traditional shocking themes with a searing abolitionist message.

It was not until the second half of the 19th Century that the novel really took off as a popular and literary art form in America and not until the early 20th Century that it finally blew poetry out of the waterto become the pre-eminent literary form.

The book that started it all, The Power of Sympathy, being out of copyright and therefor cheap, can be found today, if you look very hard, in paperback editions, including a Penguin Classic edition.  I never found any one who read it.  And neither have I.  

Note—Four years ago after a sadder Inauguration I posted this contemplation.  It is relevant again because the former Cheeto-in-Charge spent his last day issuing pardons and commutations.  He surprised many when he did not pardon himself, his children and accomplices in numerous crimes, and close cronies like Rudy Giuliani.  He disappointed the followers who stormed the Capitol at his behest, Proud Boys, Q-Anons, and suburban moms alike.  The list did include the reptilian fascist Steve Bannon—at best an on again, off again ally who probably has some very damaging dirt on him.  Also the brother of former Chicago Bears great Brian Urch and an Illinois village president charged with an illegal gambling scheme, politically connected business moguls, real estate barons and disgraced former members of Congress.  He played a see-I’m-not-a-racist card by including rappers  Lil Wayne and Kodak Black and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.  Most of his list included low level drug offenders serving long sentences, but on the balance those leand heavily to “nice White guys” over Blacks.  Of course Barack Obama pardoned or commented three times that total as he left the Oval office.  That prompted the following post.

Barack Obama spent the last days of his days in office churning out sentence commutations.  Hundreds were given to non-violent drug offenders facing draconian sentences under the exceptionally harsh Federal Sentence Standards, the most vindictive in the world.  But there are so many of those victims of the failed war on drugs that the commutations hardly made a dent in the American gulag.  Also given leniency were some white collar criminals, the kind of offenders that drew the more stingy grace of Obama’s predecessor George W. Bush.  Even a beloved baseball icon, Willie McCovey of the San Francisco Giants who was convicted on Income Tax evasion was one of 64 that drew and outright pardon from the President. 

Most controversially Obama commuted the sentences of whistleblower Chelsea Manning, the former Army Private Bradley Manning, and Puerto Rican nationalist leader Oscar Lopez.  Inexplicably he did not commute the sentence of ailing American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier who has been behind bars for 40 years and will now surely die in prison.

However disappointing and mystifying that travesty of justice was, Obama gets credit for at least wrestling with the catastrophic effects of the lock-‘em-up-and-throw-away-the-key mania Americans.

No one, except possibly sex offenders, gun nuts, and White nationalist terrorists should expect any such displays of mercy from the incoming occupant of the Oval Office.  On the contrary.  Look for him and his administration to swell the prison population with those who resist his autocratic rule, immigrants, and minorities of every sort.

Forty-four years ago today another incoming president on his first day in office, January 21, 1977 issued a blanket amnesty of most draft evaders, including those who went to Canada or assumed new identities and went underground in the states.

President Jimmy Carter’s controversial act, which brought harsh criticism from veterans’ organizations and near mutinous grumbling from some high level officers in the military, was not unexpected.  It fulfilled a campaign promise.  The idea was to put the bitter national divisionsover the Vietnam War and Nixon years behind us, or in Carter’s own words, “to bind up the nation’s wounds.”

The accidental President, Gerald Ford, had issued a conditional pardon for draft offenders, including those who were abroad, in September of 1974.  That was mainly toprovide cover on the left for his pre-emptive pardon of his predecessor, Richard Nixon for any offenses that he “may have committed.”  The Ford conditional pardon is generally better remembered than Carter’s much more substantial action because of that linkage despite requiring those who accepted the pardon to work in alternative service occupations similar to those of conscientious objectors for six to 24 months.  Far fewer men than expected took Ford up on his offer.

Carter’s action was much more sweeping, but a little noticed provisionsaid that amnesty would be given to all offenders who requested one.  Some resistors refused to make a requestbecause to do so was an admissionthat they had committed a crime in the first place.  Many, many more were unaware, because of hazy press coverage, that they had to make a request.  The Justice Department did not even make a cursory effort to inform the eligible by a letter to a “last known address.” 

The wording also was unclear on an important point for men like me—did the amnesty cover those who were already convicted and had served sentences for draft offenses?  I don’t think that last point has yet been fully answered.

None-the-less tens of thousands of draft refusers, evaders, and military deserters acted on the assumption that they were covered and the Justice Department de facto ceased actions against anyone who could have been covered by amnesty.  

During the war, and continuing after it ended until Draft call-ups stoppedin 1973, 209,517 men were accused of violating draft laws, and another 360,000 were never formally charged.  Around 100,000 went abroad, 90% of them to Canada.  The exact number who went “underground” has never been established, but is thought to be in the tens of thousands.

Upwards of 50,000 of those in Canada chose to stay there rather than return home.  Most were granted Landed Immigrant status and eventually Canadian citizenship.  A highly educated group with significant resources, these people had an impact on Canada.  Many became leading figures in academia, the arts, and in politics.  They are widely creditedwith/accused of moving Canadian politics generally to the left.

Likewise a good, but unknown, number of those who went underground chose to continue to live their lives under the identities that they assumed.  In the 1960’s and early 70’s it was absurdly easy to establish a new identity.  It is thought that as this cohort becomes eligible for Social Security or die many of these assumed identities will unravel.

As for an old Draft con like me, I never got any amnesty papers.  But I have lived my life quite openly, and even drawn some modest attention to myself.  So far so good. 

Four years ago with Donald Trump taking an oath he never meant to keep, my mood was very different than the joyful celebration today.  This poem was an introduction to my Poems of Resistance, the bulk of all my verse these last years

January 20, 2017

The locomotives are aligned on a single track,

            throttles lashed wide open,

            the engineers jump as they pick up speed

            belching black smoke and urgency.

The time has come, nothing can stop it now.

There is nothing to do but stare slack jawed

            or turn your head and cringe.

If in your enthusiasm for the spectacle

            and to get your money’s worth

            for the excursion ticket,

            you crowd too eagerly close,

            you are riddled with cast iron shrapnel

            and scalding steam.

It’s exactly like that.

—Patrick Murfin

Four years ago after Donald Trump won an Electoral College victory over Hillary Clinton despite the fact that she won a clear majority of the popular vote outrage spread quickly, especially among women.  Feminists and their allies deplored the ascent of the misogynist, serial sex abuser, chronic liar, business fraud, charlatan, and sociopathic egomaniac.  So they did something about it.

Just a day after the 2016 election Teresa Shook of Hawaii created a Facebook event and invited friends to march on Washington in protest.  Several similar posts were made independently and soon the women and some feminist mendiscovered each other and began cooperating.  None of them were marquee names in the Women’s Movement, the Clinton campaign, or the Democratic Party.  In addition to middle class white women an informal core group of organizers included African Americans and other People of Color, immigrants, Muslims, members of the LGBTQ communities, and other oppressed groups.

Their efforts were a classic example of bottom-up organizing taking advantage of new social media tools to create an organic movement.  And they did it in an astonishingly short time.  As planning went forward on a March scheduled for January 21, the two days after the inauguration organizers did get the endorsement and technical support from major organizationsincluding Planned Parenthood, the Natural Resources Defense Council, AFL–CIO, Amnesty International USA, the Mothers of the Movement, the National Center for Lesbian Rights, the National Organization for Women, MoveOn.org, Human Rights Watch, Code Pink, Black Girls Rock!, the NAACP, the American Indian Movement, Emily’s List, Oxfam, Greenpeace USA, and the League of Women Voters.  All of those organizations would help recruit marchers from their own memberships and be represented on the speaking platform the day of the march.  But so did scores of other less well known and local groups from a broader movement that was beginning to characterize itself as the Resistance.

March organizer made it clear from the beginning that they planned to adhere to “the nonviolent ideology of the Civil Rights movement.”  In addition to keep the momentumfor change going instead of being dissipatedin a one-time cathartic event organizers posted the 10 Actions for the first 100 Days campaign for joint activism.

While organizers had originally expected over 200,000 people, the march ended up drawing between 440,000 to 500,000 in Washington D.C.  It dwarfed the feeble turn-outfor Trump’s inauguration by at least three to one and probably more.

The march was famous for the knitted pink pussy cat caps that many of the marchers wore initiated by Krista Suh and Jayna Zweiman.  More than 100,000 people down-loaded the pattern for the cap and dozens of small providers vended them on line.  The design was inspired by the resemblance of the top corners of the hats to cat ears and attempts to reclaim the derogatory term pussy, from Trump’s widely reported 2005 remarksthat women would let him “grab them by the pussy.”

In addition to the hundreds of thousands pouring into the nation’s capital for the protest, hundreds of officially unrelated sister marchers were organized in cities big and small across the United States, Canada, and the world, including a massive march in Chicago which I joined along with three Metra train carloads from McHenry County.  Between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people participated in these marches in this country, approximately 1.0 to 1.6 % of the U.S. population making it by far the largest mass protest in American history. Worldwide participation has been estimated at over seven million.

Nor did the movement fade away.  Annual marches continued and in 2016 there was a special Fall March to the Polls event to boost registration and voting in the midterm elections.

This year due to the Coronavirus pandemic and the heavy security in Washington after the storming of the Capitol by Trump’s minionsand White supremacist insurrectionaries, organizers discouraged mass events.  Instead a number of virtual events were posted around the country.

Compare a genuine mass movement of the people to the shady plot to overthrow democracy this year.  Don’t let anyone try to tell you, as some right-wing media is trying to do, that the two events had anything in common.

Note:  I have posted this in one form or another on or around the Martin Luther King Day Federal Holiday for 12 years.  Long time readers may be sick of it.  Some of those who were offended in earlier rounds have left the building in a huff—or come to see that maybe it was not so far off the mark after all.  The thing is, year by year, it becomes more relevant.  This year, of course, things are different amid the restrictions of the Coronavirus on most public observances and the looming inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on Wednesday in the midst of an on-going racist coup attempt.

Today is the Federal Holiday celebrating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He was born on January 15, 1929 and was assasinated on April 4, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee.  It was a long, hard fought effort to create a federal holiday, following proclamations in several states.  President Ronald Reagan signed the legislation creating the holiday in 1983 and it was first celebrated nationally in 1986.  The senior George Bush moved the date to the third Monday in January. 

Despite the national observance, several states refused to enact state proclamations. After a national economic boycott threatened the Super Bowl in Arizona, the holiday was officially observed in all 50 states for the first time in 2000.

Depending on your state, schools may or may not be open.  It they are you can count on some kind of touchy-feely programming that will assure children that once, long, long ago things weren’t so nice for Black people, but thanks to Dr. King everything is just fine now.  A tremendous amount of time will be spent emphasizing his non-violence and schools now routinely use the occasion as a center piece in their violence prevention programs.  They will also emphasize tolerance of those who are different—which it turns out may be the red-headed kid or the girl with a lisp. 

As laudable as these things are, children are not apt to be told that their grandparents may just have been the ones doing the oppression of Black folk.  Nor are they given any real sense of Dr. King as a truly revolutionary figurewillfully defying the power of the state, demanding true systematic change, addressing class inequality, and in time of war leading an opposition to that war.

In cities, towns, and villagesacross much of the country, there will be obligatorycivic observations.  These most often take the form of prayer breakfasts, dutifully attended by local dignitaries of all races.  While some local Black preacher may take the occasion to lay out some harsh truths or even demand attention to continuing injustices, everybody will applaud politely.  Politicians will parade to the podium with bromides.  Someone—preferably the precocious son of a Black preacher—will intone words from the I Have a Dream Speech, and at the end maybe everyone will join handsand sing We Shall Over Come.  I bet you have been to just this kind of event.  Hell, I’ve even helped plan and put them on.

In fact this morning here in the Northwest boonies of the Chicago area I will be attending the FaithBridge Annual MLK Breakfast featuring Dr. Mark A. Hicks of the UUA’s Meadville Lombard Seminary this morning at 8 am virtually.

The day is typically celebrated with nostalgic clips of the March on Washingtonon the news, maybe a documentary or two on Public Television.

Many of the people who hated Dr. King when he was alive or who are their spiritual descendants will blandly join in the celebrations.  And then they will turn his words against him.  When you hear a plump politico with a honeyed accent quote, as they all love to do, the one phrase from the I Have a Dream speech where he spoke about the little children being judged not on the color of their skins but on the strength of their characters, watch out.  That hack is about to use Dr. Kings words to attack that dream.  He will say that now that we have erased statutory discrimination, any lingering program that gives disadvantaged minorities the slightest leg-up is itself discriminatory.  He will claim that Dr. King would want a perfectly color blind society.  Unspoken is his deep conviction that in such a color blind society, white menwill rise like cream and be restored to their rightful place on top of the ladder—as if they had ever really lost it.

Two years ago among the leading hijackers of Dr. King’s legacy was the despicable Vice President Mike Pence.  In an appearance of CBS TV’s Meet the Press he actually quoted King to support trading Donald Trump’s phony Border Wall for temporary relief from deportation of the DACA Dreamers.  Fox News and newer, even more vicious alternatives will easily match that outrage today.

Dr. King will also be lauded for his non-violence, which will be translated into passivity.  Law breaking—including the kind the Civil Rights Movement routinely used—will be denounced.  No word will be uttered that Dr. King’s non-violence actually expected toprovoke violent opposition and used that response to tweak the conscience of a democratic nation. 

Since Dr. King’s time, police departmentshave been provided with new arms and tactics.  New crowd control methods and security provisions make the kind of marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations led by King either difficult or kept far away from threatening the safety of those being protested, as was seen repeatedly in attackson the Occupy Movement, Black Lives Matter protests, and at Standing Rock. New restrictions on the press—and when that doesn’t work outright attacks, arrests, and physical intimidation—keeps reporters from fully reporting on acts of civil disobedience so that the public consciousness may be safely left un-tweaked.  Of course as events at the Capitol showed that militaristic capacity was not used against White insurrectionists.

A few of years ago, rising to a new level of audacious gall, a senior Pentagon official, in a program marking Dr. King’s birth at the Department of Defense, actually argued that the Nobel Peace Prize winner would understand and approve of the “work of our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

We are told that because Dr. King was a faithful Baptist, he would not today support Gay, lesbian, and transgendered people and that it is a mockery to compare their struggle to the Civil Rights Movement.  The Black church is divided on this—even Dr. King’s children are—but it is hard to imagine his rejection of justice for them.

Likewise some Black leaders will claim, especially in their own communities, that Dr. King fought just for them, that gains he fought for should not be extended to the growing Latino minorities that threaten to displace them as the most oppressed.

All of this is possible because more than 50 years after his death Martin Luther King has been sanitized.  He has been scrubbed clean of the any semblanceof actual humanity, any personal foibles or flaws, and midnight doubts or struggles of the soul.  He has become an empty vessel into which can be poured a safe and bland pudding which can placatepesky Blacks with a pat-on-the-headwhile protecting the status-quo.

Enough!  The real, flesh and blood Dr. King would have none of it. 

Let’s remember him today for who he was, not who the charlatans want to make him out to be.  And let’s remember that as great as he was, he was one man.  Let’s not denigrate the truly historic sacrifices of thousands and thousands of ordinary people who repeatedly literally put their lives on the line—and continue to do so today.  Let’s celebrate him and them by rededicating ourselves to standing up as they did, by putting our bodies, when necessary, on the line to achieve his true dream of an equitable and just society.

And let’s embrace the new generation of committed and imaginative young Black leaders who are making sure America learns that Black Lives Matter and have energized new civil rights/economic justice movements like the Moral Monday Marches and the new Poor People’s Campaign.  If we are White, let us battle our own egos and fragilities, our fantasies of being White rescuers, commit to understand White privilege and systematic racism, and allow us to become true allies respectful of the leadership of the oppressed.

Note: Friday was the actual birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  The public Holiday in his honor will be tomorrow, Monday, January 18.  I will have more to say about that then in my annual rant.  Since the attempted coup attack on the Capitol last week was in many respects both a White insurrection against a multi-racial society, one of a long stream of such violent historical spasms and an assertion of the control of society by a wealthy elite, re-examining the real but radical vision of Dr. King is more important than ever.

When the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was being held in jail in Alabama in 1963 he received a letter signed by several well-known White self-proclaimed racial moderates and liberal ministers who decried the unpleasantnessand social disruption of the on-going campaign against racial discrimination in Birmingham.  Since he had unaccustomed time on his hands he took the time to patiently, even lovingly explain the situation in America’s most segregated city and why he and the Black citizens of the city were compelled to launch their campaign of non-violent direct action braving beatings, dogs, firehoses, threats, bombings, and jail to do so.

But he also chastised the ministers’ smug assumptions and refusal to either take any risks to correct the underlying cause of the unrest or dirty their handsin labor to correct it.  “Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.” He said that the white church needed to take a principled stand or risk being “dismissed as an irrelevant social club.”

That message could not be more pointed or relevant today.  The decedents of those nervous and alarmed clergy can still be found in too many pulpitsand in the pews of good Christians who in today’s moral crisis fret that the simple declaration of the fact that Black Lives Matter is somehow racist; that a broken window, scuffle with police, or the disruption of holy commerce is somehow more terrible than Black bodies in the streets or whole communities living in the terror of a virtual occupation.  Ministers who do speak out, even in many liberal congregations face backlashfrom both pledging members and the wider communities in which they must work.

If he had lived the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 92 years old.  Nothing would have surprised him more than that.

Most folks know and can quote snatches of two or three of his most famous speeches.  The TV will play clips of the I Had a Dream speech given at from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at 1963’s March on Washington for Jobs and Justice.  Maybe they will also show a tad of his prophetic I Have Been to the Mountain Top speech given to a church audience in Memphis the eve of his assassination.

His more devoted fans treasure other things, perhaps most notably his Letter from the Birmingham Jail.  But that still make liberals uncomfortable.

The quotes most apt to surface are about non-violenceor his blander paeans to brotherhood.  That’s because the largely White establishment media wants to use his birthday and the official holidayas a sop to Blacks on one hand and an only thinly veiled, almost hysterical plea to them “Don’t hurt us!” on the other.

Today, I would like to celebrate with a collection of quotes from Dr. King that illustrate exactly how radical, even revolutionary, he was.  Let him speak for himself.

Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.

Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies—or else? The chain reaction of evil—hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars—must be broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

I submit to you that if a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being. It is part of the earth man walks on. It is not man.

That old law about “an eye for an eye” leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too conservative.

In 1934 a shadowy figure approached a highly decorated retired Marine Corps Major General with a startling proposal.  The officer was offered the opportunity to lead a force of thousands of Veterans largely recruited from the ranks of the American Legion on a march on Washington intended to depose President Franklin D. Roosevelt.  As the “Man on the White Horse” the General would be installed as a figurehead dictator taking orders from a cabal of wealthy bankers and industrialists.  The plan was frankly modeled on Benito Mussolini’s Italian Fascists and Adolph Hitler’s use of disgruntled veterans as shock troops for a coup d’etat.  Boy, did they pick the wrong guy!

Smedley Darlington Butler was born July 30, 1881, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. His parents were descended from local Quaker families.  His father Thomas was a lawyer, a judge and was later served for 31 years as a Congressman who became Chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee during the Harding and Coolidge administrations.

His son attended a local Friends school and then the prestigious prep school Haverford School where he was an outstanding athlete and scholar.  In his senior year and against his father’s wished the boy dropped out in his senior year to enlist in the Marine Corps for the Spanish American War.  The school later awarded him diploma anyway.

Butler lied about his age to receive a direct commission as a Marine second lieutenant.  In the short war he served briefly a Guantánamo Bayafter its capture by American forces and then spent four months as a Fleet Marine on the armored cruiser USS New York.  He mustered out of the service in February 1899 but re-enlisted in April with a promotion to first lieutenant.

That was just in time to be sent to Manila for the Philippine Rebellion.  He experienced his first combat when he In October 1899, he saw his first combat action when he led 300 Marines to take the town of Noveleta from Filipino troops of the newly declared  Philippine Republic.  After this victory he showed his devotion to the Corps by getting a very large Eagle, Globe & Anchor tattoo started at his throat and extended to his waist. 

In 1900 as an officer in a company slated to be posted to Guam he instead was sent to China aboard the USS Solace to help put down the Boxer Rebellion.  He took part in the Battle of Tientsin on July 13, 1900, and in the subsequent Gaselee Expedition, during which he saw the mutilated remains of Japanese soldiers. When he saw another Marine officer fall wounded, he climbed out of a trench to rescue him and was shot in the thigh. Despite his leg wound, Butler assisted the wounded officer to the rear.  Although he was ineligible for the Medal of Honor which was then reserved for enlisted personnel only he was sited for bravery by his commanding officer and received a brevet commission as Captain.

Butler spent much of his subsequent career which saw a steady advancement in rank in the so-called Banana Wars in Central America and the Caribbean.  In 1903 he served in Hondurassupposedly to defend the U.S. Consulatebut in fact to defend the government held by large landowners and allies of American fruit companies against Bonillistarebels, Despite writing home that he was leading an expedition by boat to “to land and shoot everybody and everything that was breaking the peace,” he found that the mere presence of his troops caused the rebels to melt away only to return and take control of the town of Trujillo when he withdrew.

After returning home and marrying Butler was assigned garrison duty in the Philippines in 1908.  He always chaffed at the boredom of such assignments and was stressed by his separation from his family.  Despite a brief adventure of bringing supplies and rations to an isolated outpost in danger of starvation during a typhoon, he suffered a nervous breakdown and he received nine months sick leave, which he spent at home but returned to active duty at the first opportunity.

From 1909 to 1912 Butler served in Nicaragua enforcing U.S. policy. With a 104-degree fever he led his battalion to the relief of a rebel-besieged city, Granada. In December 1909 he commanded the 3d Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment on the Isthmus of Panama. On August 11, 1912, he was temporarily detached to command an expeditionary battalion for the Battle of Masaya on September 19, 1912, and the bombardment, assault and capture of Coyotepe Hill, Nicaragua, in October 1912.

Butler and his family were living in Panama in January 1914 when he was ordered to report as the Marine officer of a battleship squadron massing off the coast of Mexico, near Veracruz, to monitor a revolutionary movement.  He was sent on in mufti on a spy mission to Mexico City under the identity of a Mr. Johnson, a minor official of the Inter-Oceanic Railway.  He searched for weapons caches of Mexican Army, determined the size of units and states of readiness, updated maps and verified the railroad lines for use in a planned US invasion.  The invasion was scrapped by the Tampico Affair when a detachment of sailors ashore to buy gasoline were captured by forces of Gen. Victoriano Huerta. 

When President Woodrow Wilson discovered that an arms shipment was about to arrive in Mexico, he sent a contingent of Marines and sailors to Veracruz to intercept it on April 21, 1914. For his actions on April 22, Butler was awarded his first Medal of Honor

After the occupation of Veracruz, an unusually high number of the Medal were awarded—one member of the Army, nine Marines and 46 naval personnel.  Many felt that large number of awards diminished its prestige.   During World War I Butler attempted to returnhis medal, explaining he had done nothing to deserve it. The medal was returned to him with orders to wear it as well.

In 1915 Haitian President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was killed by a mob. In response, the USS Connecticut was dispatched to Haiti with Butler in command of the Marines contingent on board. On October 24, 1915, an estimated 400 Cacos—peasant rebels—ambushed Butler's patrol of 44 mounted Marines when they approached Fort Dipitie. Surrounded by Cacos, the Marines maintained their perimeter throughout the night. The next morning they charged the larger enemy force by breaking out in three directions. In early November Butler and a force of 700 Marines and sailors returned to the mountains to clear the area. At their temporary headquarters base at Le Trou they fought off an attack by about 100 Cacos.  After the Americans took several other forts and ramparts during the following days, only Fort Rivière, an old French-built stronghold atop Montagne Noire, was left.

For the operation Butler was given three companies of Marines and some sailors from the USS Connecticut, about 100 men. They encircled the fort and gradually closed in on it. Butler reached the fort from the southern side and found a small openingin the wall. The Marines entered through the opening and engaged the Cacos in hand-to-hand combat. Butler and the Marines took the rebel stronghold on November 17, an action for which he received his second Medal of Honor, as well as the Haitian Medal of Honor.  Once the Medal was approved and presentedin 1917, Butler achieved the distinction of being the only of two Marines to receive the Medal of Honor twice for separate actions.

He was detailed to establish and command the new collaborationist force, the Gendarmerie d’Haïti, paramilitary police force that continued to shore up the U.S. supported Hattian dictatorship through 1926.

Much to his disappointment Butler was not assigned to a combat command on the Western Front in World War I despite repeated appeals and the endorsement of many if not most of the officers he had served with.  But he already had made enemies of some of his Marine superiors for his outspoken views and supposed “unreliability” i.e. a habit of challenging what he felt were wrong-headed orders.  Instead he was promoted to brigadier general and posted to command Camp Pontanezen at Brest, France, a debarkation depotthat funneled troops of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to the battlefields.  He found sanitary and living conditions in the camp were abominable.  Tents were pitched on oozing mud and sanitation was neglected.  He raided the wharf at Brest for duckboards no longer needed for the trenches and “carted the first one himself up that four-mile hillto the camp, and thus provided something in the way of protection for the men to sleep on.” Gen. John J. Pershingauthorized a duckboard shoulder patchfor the units. For his exemplary servicehe was awarded both the Army Distinguished and Navy Service Distinguished Service Medals and the French Order of the Black Star.  He also won the undying affection of the thousands of Doughboys and Lethernecks that passed through the camp.

Following the war, he became commanding generalof the Marine barracks at Quantico, Virginia transforming the wartime training camp into a permanent post and the showcase of the Corps.

In 1924 Butler received a unique new post.  At the request of newly elected Philadelphia Mayor W. Freeland Kendrick for the loan of a general officer to take command of the notoriously corrupt city police department President Calvin Coolidge selected Butler at the urging of his powerful Congressman father.  Coolidge authorized Butler to take the necessary leave from the Corps to serve as Philadelphia’s Director of Public Safety in charge Police and Fire Departments from January 1924 until December 1925.   He began his new job by assembling all 4,000 of the city police into the Metropolitan Opera House in shifts to introduce himself and inform them that things would change while he was in charge. Since he had not been given authority to fire corrupt police officers, he switched entire units from one part of the city to another to undermine local protection racketsand profiteering.  A reformed drinker turned ardent ProhibitionistButler organized raids on more than 900 speakeasies, ordering them padlocked and, in many cases, destroyed. More zealous than he was political, he ordered crackdowns on the social elite’s favorite hangouts, such as the Ritz-Carlton Hotel and the Union League Club, as well as working class watering holes.  In addition to raiding the speakeasies, he also attempted to eliminate other illegal activities including bootlegging, prostitution, and gambling.

He established policies and guidelines of administration and developed a new police uniform that resembled that of the Marine Corps.  Other changes included military-style checkpoints, bandit-chasing squads armed with sawed-off shotgunsand armored police cars. The press praised the significant reduction in crime but also reflected the public’s growing negative opinion of their authoritarian Public Safety Director. Many felt that he was being too aggressivein his tactics and resented the reductions in their civil rights, such as the stopping of citizens at the city checkpoints. Butler also frequently swore in his radio addresses.

The Mayor was preparing to allow Buttler’s appointment lapse at the end of the year and the officer himself was requesting new duty with the Corps.  But when the public became aware of the imminent departure 4,000 supportersassembled at the Academy of Music and negotiated a truce between him and the mayor to keep him in Philadelphia for a while longer, and the President authorized a one-year extension.

Butler devoted much of his second year to executing arrest warrants, cracking downon crooked police and enforcing prohibition. On January 1, 1926, his leave from the Marine Corps ended and the President declineda request for a second extension. Butler received orders to report to San Diego and prepared his family and his belongings for the new assignment. In light of his pending departure, he began to defy the mayor and other key city officials. On the eve of his departure, he wrote an article in the press stating his intention to stayand “finish the job”.  The mayor demanded his immediate resignation. After almost two years in office, Butler resigned under pressure.  He later wrote that “cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in.”

Butler was posted to a command at the importantSan Diego Marine base in 1927 and moved his family there.  Barely a year later he was sent to an old stomping ground as commander of a Marine Expeditionary Force—the China Marines—in Tientsin, China during the chaotic period of War Lord conflicts in Sun Yat Sen’s unstable republic which threatened American interests and the lives of merchants, missionaries, and diplomats.  In fact Butler avoided direct intervention and conflict when he could and developed relationships with various hostile faction leaders who were eager to avoid a repeat of an international intervention like that of the Boxer Rebellion.  He served with distinction for two years and returned home to be made the youngest major general in the Corps at age 48.

But the death of his Congressman father shortly before hand removed an important protection from senior officers who mistrusted him.  With not much to do at home he became alarmed at the rise of fascism in Italy and bluntly repeated rumors that Benito Mussolini allegedly struck and killed a child with his speeding automobilein a hit-and-run accident. The Italian government protested and President Herbert Hoover, who strongly disliked Butler, forced Secretary of the Navy Charles Francis Adams III to court martial him. Butler became the first general officer to be placed under arrest since the Civil War. He apologized to Secretary Adams and the court-martial was canceled with only a reprimand.

That should have been a signal that his chances of further advancement or an important command were over.  But as senior General in the Corps, with his long combat record, and the endorsement of many of his peers in the officer corps, Butler hoped to be appointed Commandant of the Marine Corps when Maj. Gen. Wendell C. Neville died July 8, 1930.  In the end the position went to Maj. Gen. Bee Fuller, who had more years of commissioned service than Butler and was considered less controversial.  Disappointed and bitter Butler requested retirement and left active duty on October 1, 1931.

Butler took up a busy schedule of public lectures and appearances at conferences often expressing unorthodox opinions and sprinkling his addresses with colorful tales and salty language.  He became critical of the interventionist foreign policy that had so often sent him into combat in weak nations, warned of the rise of Fascism, and joined in the growing call for an early payment of a promised Bonus to World War I vets.  He donated much of his speaking income to hunger relief in Depression wracked Philadelphia.

Butler announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate in the Republican primary in Pennsylvania in March 1932 as an ally of progressive Republican Governor Gifford Pinchot and a Dry on proponent of Prohibition.  He was a vocal critic of his nemesis Herbert Hoover for his inaction in meeting the rising crisis of the Great Depression.  He defeatedin the April primary election with only 37.5% of the vote to incumbent Sen. James J. Davis’ 60%.   

After the Senate campaign Butler and his wife and son visited the Bonus Marchers’ camp just outside Washington on July 19, 1932.  They stayed overnight in the camp and he told them that they were fine soldiers and they had a right to lobby Congress just as much as any corporation.  He warned them of any violence that might endanger wide-spread sympathy but essentially endorsed the March.  Less than a week later on July 28 troops under the command of Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur and cavalryman Colonel George Patton attacked the marchers on the streets of Washington with tanks, mounted troops, and tear gas.  Then they raided the encampment on the Anacostia flats.  Several veterans and some of their wives and children were killed, and many badly injured.  In response Butler declared himself a “Hoover-for-Ex-President-Republican.”

After the November election Butler set off on another speaking tour with James E. Van Zandt to recruit members for the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW). He described their effort as ‘trying to educate the soldiers out of the sucker class.”  In his speeches he denounced the Economy Act of 1933, called on veterans to organize politically to win their benefits, and condemnedthe Roosevelt administration for its ties to big business.  In his speech You Got to Get Mad which was printed in the VFW magazine Foreign Service. He said, “I believe in...taking Wall St. by the throat and shaking it up.”  He believed the rival veterans' group the American Legion was controlled by banking interests. On December 8, 1933, he said: “I have never known one leader of the American Legion who had never sold them out—and I mean it.”

So Butler was an astonishing choice to be asked to front a Fascist Coup most of whose boots-on-the-ground would be recruited from the Legion.  MacArthur, the storied commander of the Rainbow Division in World War I, was better known and perhaps more amenableto the allure of authoritarianism.  It’s not known if he was ever approached, but if so turned down the opportunity but declined to report the attempt.  Or perhaps the capitalist cabal behind the plot thought that the attack on the Bonus Marchers had made him too unpopular among veterans to gain wide-spread support.

Perhaps they cynically believed that Butler would seize the opportunity for glory or that his personal grievances at having his career cut short by the government would make him ready for revenge.  They certainly hoped his popularity with many veterans would attract more support to the putsch and cloud the identity of the super-rich backers.  They badly miscalculated.  Not only did Butler turn down the offer, he went to Congress to expose what became known as the Business Plot.

In November 1934 Butler told a special House Committee headed byRepresentatives John W. McCormack of Massachusettsand Samuel Dickstein of New York that Gerald P. MacGuire, a bond salesman with Grayson M–P Murphy & Co told him that a group of businessmen, backed by a private army of 500,000 ex-soldiers and mercenaries, and he had been asked to lead it.  The nation’s most powerful bank J.P Morgan & Co was said to be a major backer.  Those implicated publicly dismissed the allegations as fantasyand that was echoed by much of the press which could either not believesuch a tale or were controlled by interests connected to the plot.

In its report to the House, the committee stated that, while:

“…no evidence was presented... to show a connection... with any fascist activity of any European country... [t]here was no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution...” and that “your committee was able to verify all the pertinent statements made by General Butler, with the exception of the direct statement about the creation of the organization. This, however, was corroborated in the correspondence of MacGuire with his principal, Robert Sterling Clark...”

Subsequently the Committee received further confirmation of Butler’s testimony and in their final report stated:

In the last few weeks of the committee’s official life it received evidence showing that certain persons had made an attempt to establish a fascist organization in this country... There is no question that these attempts were discussed, were planned, and might have been placed in execution when and if the financial backers deemed it expedient.

Even the once skeptical New York Times was finally convinced.  But despite everything no official action or prosecution was ever undertaken, undoubtedly due to the power of the plotters and the targeted Roosevelt administration’s desire to let sleeping dogs lie as it pressed on with the progressive programs of the New Deal.

As for Butler, he wasn’t yet finished.  He was a from 1935 to 1937 a spokesmanfor the American League Against War and Fascism.  In 1935, he wrote his famous exposé War Is a Racket, a condemnation of the profit motive behind warfare. His views on the subject were summarized in the November 1935 issue of the socialist magazine Common Sense:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer; a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents. 

Butler supported Socialist Party Presidential candidate Norman Thomas in the 1936 election and continued to speak out as Fascism and Nazism rose in Europe. 

On June 21, 1940, Butler died at Naval Hospital, Philadelphia of gastro-intestinal cancer at the age of just 58.  Toward the end of his life he harbored the unlikely hope that he might be recalled to active service if and when the USA entered the World War against Fascism.

Obviously the plot that Butler explored did not ever get put into action.  But similar shadowy business interests, especially billionaire Ayn Rand followers—think the Koch Brothers and others—have been quietly funding the rise of the militant ultra-right for years—overtlyletting their Super Pacs back Donald Trump and compliant Republicans in state legislatures, governors’ mansions, and Congress.  But there is mounting suspicion and some evidence that their money has also poured into astro-turf organizations, White supremacist organizations, and perhaps even armed militias.  Recent discoveries that key leaders received payments in Bit Coins shortly before the attack in Washington lends credence to the suspicion.

It is likely that the cabalist tendencies exposed by Butler never really went away.  They helped fan the flames of the Post-World War II Red Scare and the rise of McCarthyism and were behind the paranoid conspiracy theories peddled by the John Birch Society in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

There is certainly no reason to believe that they will melt away just because their first clumsy coup attempt failed.   They will be around, and dangerous for a long time to come.

From the Sidelines of a Coup

Time was long ago  that I imagined myself sometimes

            on the barricades of some great General Strike

            turning the world upside down

            gleefully building that new society

            on the ashes of the old.

It was easy then to be a romantic revolutionary

            to image portrayal on some heroic poste        

            splashed in red and black.

Yet in fact I only marched, chanted

            and dodged the occasional baton

            or teargas cloud, 

            I came and went unarmed,

After Fred Hampton was perforated on his bed

            and students bled at Kent Stat

            my peeps on the Chicago Seed

            put a mop-head freak raising

            an AK-47 over his head

            in psychedelic color on the front page.

But no one I knew went out to buy one

            or to drill in their Dad’s old GI gear

            in the woods.

Time went on and I never abandoned dreams

            of a fairer world

            but put aside any fantasy

            that it could be won by force of arms.