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Astonishment by Cristina Peri Rossi—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

                                Cristina Peri Rossi.

I have to thank my Facebook friend poet Jerry Pendergast for sharing this poem the other day.  It speaks to me in so many ways as a person trying with varying degrees of success to bridge transgenerational gaps and share dreams even without the sexual attractions it describes.

Cristina Peri Rossi is a  novelist, poet, translator, and author of short stories  born in Montevideo, Uruguay but was exiledin 1972 when a fascistcivic-militaryregime was terrorizing dissidentsand leftists. She moved to Spain, where she became a citizen in 1975. And lives in Barcelona where Catalan nationalists are often at odds with the government in Madrid and which has a lively arts scene. where she continues to write fiction and work as a journalist and political commentator.

Considered a leading light of the post-1960s period of the Latin-American novel, she has written more than 37 works. She broadcast on for the public station Catalunya Radio but was fired from this position in October 2007 and accused the station of “linguistic persecution”, claiming she was fired for speaking Spanishinstead of Catalan. She was later re-instatedto her post after an outcry.

She is well known for her defense of civil liberties and freedom of expression. She long supported gay marriage and welcomed Spain’s decisionto recognize it.

Rossi mature in Spain.

In an El Mundo article in March 2006, she spoke out against the rise of religious extremism in Europe, and specifically the violence that followed the Danish Cartoons Affair which some Muslims believed mocked the Prophet . In the article she supported to the Together Facing the New Totalitarianism Manifesto, which was published in the left-leaning and secularist French weekly Charlie Hebdo in March 2006.

Rossi's controvercial collection of erotic poems published in 1971.

Rossi’s work of highly experimental fictionand an impressive body of poetry have embraced feminism and challenged gender roles and identification for both men and women.  The lesbian eroticism of Evohé:Poemas Eroticos published in 1971 caused a scandal when first released.  She has since become an icon of LGBTQ literaturein both Latin America and Europe.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Light Pocket Poetry series helped introduce Rossi to American readers.

Astonishment

each me – you say, from your avid twenty-one years

believing still that one can teach something

and I, who passed sixty

look at you with love

that is, with farawayness,

(all love is love of differences

the empty space between two bodies

the empty space between two minds

the horrible presentiment of not dying in twos)

I teach you, gently, some quote from Goethe

(Stay instant! You are so beautiful!)

or from Kafka (once there was, there was once

a mermaid that did not sing)

while the night slowly slides into dawn

through this window

that you love so much

because its nocturnal lights

conceal the true city

and actually we could be in any place

these lights could be those of New York,

Broadway Avenue, those of Berlin, Konstanzerstrasse,

those of Buenos Aires, calle Corrientes

and I withhold from you the only thing that I truly know:

poet is one who feels that life is not natural

that it is astonishment

discovery revelation

that it is not normal to be alive

it is not natural to be twenty-one years of age

nor be more than sixty

it is not normal to have walked at three in the morning

along the old bridge of Córdoba, Spain, under the yellow

light of its streetlamps

-three in the morning-

not in Oliva nor in Seville

natural is the astonishment

natural is the surprise

natural is to live as if just arrived

to the world

the alleys of Córdoba and its arches

to the plazas of Paris

the humidity of Barcelona

the doll museum

in the old wagon standing

on the dead train tracks of Berlin

natural is to die

without having walked hand in hand

through the portals of an unknown city

nor to have felt the perfume of the white jasmines in bloom

at three in the morning

Greenwich meridian

natural is that s/he who has walked hand in hand

through the portals of an unknown city

won’t write about it

would bury it in the casket of forgetfulness

Life blooms everywhere

blood relative

inebriated

exaggerated Bacchante

on nights of turbid passions

but there was a fountain that clucked

languidly

and it was difficult not to feel that life can be beautiful

sometimes

like a pause

like a truce

that death grants to joy.

 

--Cristina Peri Rossi

Translated by Diana Decker © 2012

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A Renaissance in Harlem—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin


From time to time there are magical, fertile placescommunitiesthat for one reason or another fairly burst with new energy and creativity producing artists of all sorts, each seeming to gain strength and speed by the successof their neighbors and associates.  Boston/Cambridge/Concord in the 1840s and ‘50s was one.  Expatriate Paris between the Wars was surely another.

New York City’s Harlem from the years around World War I until the Depression all but wiped out a vigorous Black middle class was such a place and time. 

By the mid-19th Century the old Dutch village on northern Manhattan had been developed as an upper class suburb of the City with mansions lining spacious boulevards.  By the turn of the 20th Century the gentlefolkhad fled the encroaching tenement neighborhoods of European immigrants.  In 1910 an entire large block along 135th Street and Fifth Avenue was purchased by a group of Black investors and a church.  It became the seed of a rapidly growing Black community.

In its earliest years it was solidly middle class attracting the cream of an educated elite, professionals, business people, and skilled workers.  When World War I cut off the continuing supply of cheap labor from Europe and war production created unheard of opportunities, tens of thousands of Southern Blacks, chaffing under the deteriorating conditions of the Jim Crow Era, flooded into the neighborhood, as did very culturally distinct immigrants from the Caribbean. 

Some trace the beginning to what would be called the Harlem Renaissance to the 1917 premier of Three Plays for a Negro Theatre by poet Ridgely Torrence.  By 1919 poet Claude McKay was boldly staking out a new militancyin his sonnet If We Must Die.  The ideas of  W.E.B. Du Bois in the NAACP’s journal The Crisis and by Hubert Harrison’s Liberty League in The Voice helped put a political and philosophic stamp on the community.  Marcus Garvey’s nationalist ideas and the Black Churches all contributed.

Archibald John Motley, Jr.  Blues 1929.

And then there was jazz, a new music so powerfulthat the very street throbbed and which many black intellectuals took up as a shaken fist at Euro-centric culture.

The Harlem Renaissance produced artists of all types—novelists, playwrights, musicians, performers of all types, painters, and sculptors.  But above all, it produced poets.  The most famous was Langston Hughes.  But today I want to feature some of the other voicesthat still speak powerfully today.

Although the Depression hit Harlem hard and ruined many of the middle class Blacks  who helped sustain the scene, some elements persisted through the 1930s including the jazz clubs, especially those like the Cotton Club which catered to Uptown white swells coming to hear the biggest names in music.  This group of artists photographed in 1934 gathered at Adjust Savage's studio at 306 west 141st in Charles Alston's studio. Here artists from Jacob Lawrence to Morgan and Marvin Smith studied with each other in what became known as the "306" group. Many were able to support themselves as WPA artists.  

Let’s start with Claude McKay, whose defiant poem helped launch the era.  Like several other prominent figures, McKay was an immigrant from the Caribbean; coming from his native Jamaica in 1912 to study at Booker T. Washington famed Tuskegee Institute. He was immediately repelled by the virulent racism he encountered in the Deep South, unlike anything he had encountered at home.  He also rebelled at Washington’s rigid semi-military discipline and his willingness to be—or seem—subservient to the White establishment.  He moved on to study at Kansas State University where he encountered Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk.  Like Du Boise McKay became a Marxist.  He abandoned his studies of agronomyand after a short period as a railroad dining car waiter, arrived in New York determined to pursue a literary career.  In 1919 he joined Max Eastman’s The Liberator where he quickly rose to be joint editor.  The race riots sweeping the country that summer inspired his defiant, seminal poem.

                                Claude McKay.

If We Must Die


If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursèd lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

 

—Claude  McKay

 

Countee Cullen.

Countee Cullen came from a very different background than McKay, illustrating the wide diversity in the community.  Orphanedat 16 he was adopted into the home of Harlem’s most important clergyman, the Reverend Frederick A. Cullen, of Salem Methodist Episcopal Church.  He took the name of his foster father and enjoyed being at the epicenter of Harlem life.  At the same time he was sent to prestigious White schools were he excelled as a scholar and was quickly recognized as a poet.  In 1923 he graduated from New York University and had been accepted to graduate school at Harvard.  He had already published several poems in important magazines and was lauded by white critics as a voice for his race.  That year he published The Ballad of a Black Girl, the first important collection of what would become known as the Harlem Renaissance.  It was widely hailed in his own community as well as praised by the literary establishment.  Cullen secured his place in Harlem when he married, to public jubilation, Du Bois’s daughter, uniting the two most influential families in the community. 

Cullen believed that no authentic Black poetic voice had ever been able to establish itself.  He consciously modeled his work on the English Romantic of a hundred years earlier, especially John Keats.  He rejected modernism and literary trends like imagism and free verse.  When his subsequent collections drifted away from the depiction of Black life, he fell out of favor with Black readers and ended his long career co-writing plays, including the musical St. Louis Woman which made Pearl Bailey a star when it finally premiered on Broadway in 1947, months after Cullen’s death.

 

A Brown Girl Dead

 

With two white roses on her breasts,

   White candles at head and feet,   

Dark Madonna of the grave she rests;

   Lord Death has found her sweet.

 

Her mother pawned her wedding ring   

   To lay her out in white;

She’d be so proud she’d dance and sing   

   To see herself tonight.

 

—Countee Cullen

 

                    James Weldon Johnson.

James Weldon Johnson has been called the elder statesman of the Harlem Renaissance.  More than a generation older than the others, he was born in 1871 in Jacksonville, Florida.  His mother encouraged him to study European literature and music.  After graduating from Atlanta University, he returned to his home town as the principal of a segregated high school.  He was also active in his church choir and began composing hymns.  In 1900 he wrote Lift Every Voice and Sing which became famous as the “Negro National Anthem” after being widely performed by Fisk University’s legendary gospel chorus.  The next year he joined his brother Rosamond in New York City to launch a successful joint career as a songwriting team for the theater.  Based on this experience he published his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, about a musician who turns his back on his racial roots and identity for success in the white world.  

By 1920 he was an organizer for the NAACP and a leading figure in the Harlem community.  Not only did he publish his own poetry, but he became a hugely influential editorand compiler of black verse for anthologies like The Book of American Negro Poetry in 1922.  He continued to write, returning to themes of his rural southern roots, until he died in 1938.  His work had helped revive interest in African-American folk traditions.


The Creation

 

And God stepped out on space,
And He looked around and said,
“I’m lonely—a
I’ll make me a world.

 

And far as the eye of God could see
Darkness covered everything,
Blacker than a hundred midnights
Down in a cypress swamp.

 

Then God smiled,
And the light broke,
And the darkness rolled up on one side,
And the light stood shining on the other,
And God said, “That’s good!”

 

Then God reached out and took the light in His hands,
And God rolled the light around in His hands
Until He made the sun;
And He set that sun a-blazing in the heavens.
And the light that was left from making the sun
God gathered it up in a shining ball
And flung it against the darkness,
Spangling the night with the moon and stars.
Then down between
The darkness and the light
He hurled the world;
And God said, “That’s good!”

 

Then God himself stepped down --
And the sun was on His right hand,
And the moon was on His left;
The stars were clustered about His head,
And the earth was under His feet.
And God walked, and where He trod
His footsteps hollowed the valleys out
And bulged the mountains up.

 

Then He stopped and looked and saw
That the earth was hot and barren.
So God stepped over to the edge of the world
And He spat out the seven seas;
He batted His eyes, and the lightnings flashed;
He clapped His hands, and the thunders rolled;
And the waters above the earth came down,
The cooling waters came down.

 

Then the green grass sprouted,
And the little red flowers blossomed,
The pine tree pointed his finger to the sky,
And the oak spread out his arms,
The lakes cuddled down in the hollows of the ground,
And the rivers ran down to the sea;
And God smiled again,
And the rainbow appeared,
And curled itself around His shoulder.

 

Then God raised His arm and He waved His hand
Over the sea and over the land,
And He said, “Bring forth! Bring forth!”
And quicker than God could drop His hand.
Fishes and fowls
And beasts and birds
Swam the rivers and the seas,
Roamed the forests and the woods,
And split the air with their wings.
And God said,  “That’s good!”

 

Then God walked around,
And God looked around
On all that He had made.
He looked at His sun,
And He looked at His moon,
And He looked at His little stars;
He looked on His world
With all its living things,
And God said, “I’m lonely still.”

 

Then God sat down
On the side of a hill where He could think;
By a deep, wide river He sat down;
With His head in His hands,
God thought and thought,
Till He thought, “I’ll make me a man!”

 

Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled Him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand;
This Great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till He shaped it in His own image;

 

Then into it He blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen. Amen,

 

James Weldon Johnson

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Compassion for Campers April Distribution Wraps Up Winter Program

By: Patrick Murfin

Gear including stoves, tarps, mats, tents, personal care items, and non-perishable food on display at the March Compassion For Campers distribution at Warp Corps in Woodstock.

Compassion for Campers, the program that provides supplies and gear for the McHenry County homeless who have no steady shelter, will hold its last monthly distribution at Warp Corps, 114 North Benton Street in Woodstockon Tuesday April 20 from 3:30 to 5 pmClient access to Warp Corps will be from the rear entrance on Jackson Street.


Beginning in May Compassion for Campers will shift to a new warm weather schedule.  “The weekly lunches which the program used to hostwill return in a way adapted to the continuing restrictions of the Coronavirusemergency,” according to program coordinator Patrick Murfin.  “We will be unable to serve hot mealsbut will offer meals catered by local restaurants or box and bag lunches from local churches and volunteer groups.”

The lunches will be distributed in Woodstock along with camping supplies at a locationand on a schedule soon to be announced.

Groups that would like to provide a lunch should contact summer program coordinator Sue Rekenthaler at tomatos@mc.net

Compassion for Campers is grateful to the Faith Leaders of McHenry County, volunteers from Ridgefield-Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church, and Warp Corps for their invaluable support.

Contribute to the program by sending a checkmade out to Tree of Life UU Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road, McHenry, IL 60050 with Compassion for Campers on the memo line. The donations are placed in a dedicated fund and not usedfor any other purpose.  Tree of Life also donates all of the administrative expenses of the program.

 

 

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Chicano Lit Renaissance Pioneer Tino Villanueva Continues to Inspire—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

 

Tino Villanueva.

After all of these years Chicano Poet Tino Villanuevahas something to say to us. One of the founding fathers of Mexican-American cultural scene of the 1960s and 70s he not only wrote powerful, personal poetry about identityand struggle, he mentored many others and guided careers as a teacher and an editor/publisher.

Villanueva was born in 1941 to a San Marcos, Texas to a family of migrant workers. He was drafted into the Army and served for two years as a supply clerk in the Panama Canal Zone where he became immersedin Hispanic literature, reading Rubén Darío and José Martí. Back in the States he attended Southwest Texas State University on the GI Bill a MA at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and a PhD at Boston University.

The Spanish edition of Scene from the Movie GIANT.

Writing in both Spanish and English, often sliding effortlessly between the two languages, Villanueva wrote poems exploring themesof memory, longing, and history. He is the author of several poetry collections, including Hay Otra Voz: Poems (1972):  Scene from the Movie GIANT (1993); and So Spoke Penelope  (2013). He translated Luis J. Rodríguez’s La Llaman América (1998), and his own poems have been translated into Italian, French, German, Portuguese, Greek, and Korean.

The founder of Imagine Publishers, Inc., Villanueva has edited Imagine: International Chicano Poetry Journal and the anthology Chicanos: Antología Histórica y Literaria(1980).Villanueva received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from Texas State University, San Marcos and has taught at Wellesley College and Boston University.

Villanueva’s more recent work has shifted to finding new meaning in tales from Greek mythology. He has also exhibited his paintings. Now in retirement in Boston a selection of his papersis held at the Wittliff Collectionsat Texas State University.

You, If No One Elseis one of those poems that found new life amid the activism stirred by the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change, gun violence, and the defense of democracy when it was under siege by Trumpism.  All of those movements have quoted or made memes of this poem.


You, If No One Else

 

Listen, you

who transformed your anguish

into healthy awareness,

put your voice

where your memory is.

You who swallowed

the afternoon dust,

defend everything you understand

with words.

You, if no one else,

will condemn with your tongue

the erosion each disappointment brings.

You, who saw the images

of disgust growing,

will understand how time

devours the destitute;

you, who gave yourself

your own commandments,

know better than anyone

why you turned your back

on your town’s toughest limits.

Don’t hush,

Don’t throw away

the most persistent truth,

as our hard-headed brethren

sometimes do.

Remember well

what your life was like: cloudiness,

and slick mud

after a drizzle;

flimsy windows the wind

kept rattling

in winter, and that

unheated slab dwelling

where coldness crawled

up in your clothes.

Tell how you were able to come

to this point, to unbar

History’s doors

to see your early years

your people, the others.

Name the way

Rebellion’s calm spirit has served you,

and how you came

to unlearn the lessons

of that teacher,

your land’s omnipotent defiler.

 

—Tino Villanueva

 

Rock Hudson as the family patriarch in the Giant confronts a racist diner owner who has insulted his son's Chicana wife and brown baby in the climatic sene from the sprawling epic.  It was a deeply personal experience for Villanueva.

Fight Scene Beginning was a breakthrough verse for Villanueva and appeared in Scene from the Movie GIANTa collection which was published in English and Spanish versions.  The English edition won the American Book Award in 1994.

 

Fight Scene Beginning

Bick Benedict, that is, Rock Hudson in the

Time-clock of the movie, stands up and moves,

Deliberate, toward encounter. He has come out

Of the anxious blur of the backdrop, like

 

Coming out of the unreal into the world of

What’s true, down to earth and distinct; has

Stepped up to Sarge, the younger of the two,

 

And would sure appreciate it if he: “Were a

Little more polite to these people.” Sarge,

Who has something to defend, balks; asks

(In a long-shot) if: “that there papoose down

 

There, his name Benedict too?,” by which he

Means one-year old Jordy in the background

Booth hidden in the bosom of mother love of

 

Juana, who listens, trying not to listen. Rock

Hudson, his hair already the color of slate,

Who could not foresee this challenge, arms

Akimbo (turning around), contemplates the stable

 

And straight line of years gone by, says: “Yeah,

Come to think of it, it is.” And so acknowledges,

In his heart, his grandson, half-Anglo, half-

 

Brown. Sarge repents from words, but no

Part of his real self succumbs: “All right—

Forget I asked you. Now you just go back

Over there and sit down and we ain't gonna

 

Have no trouble. But this bunch here is

Gonna eat somewhere’s else.” Never shall I

Forget, never how quickly his hand threw my

 

Breathing off—how quickly he plopped the

Hat heavily askew once more on the old

Man’s head, seized two fistsful of shirt and

Coat and lifted his slight body like nothing,

 

A no-thing, who could have been any of us,

Weightless nobodies bronzed by real-time far

Off somewhere, not here, but in another

 

Country, yet here, where Rock Hudson’s face

Deepens; where in one motion, swift as a

Miracle, he catches Sarge off guard, grabs

His arm somehow, tumbles him back against

 

The counter and draws fire from Sarge to

Begin the fight up and down the wide screen

Of memory, ablaze in Warner-color light.

 

—Tino Villanueva

 

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Bullet Points by Jericho Brown-—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Jericho Brown.

A poem from Jericho Brown’s 2020Pulitzer Prize winning book The Traditionwent viral earlier this year as police violence against People of Color continues unabated despite years of Black Lives Matter protests.  It has even more relevance in the current moment as the trial of Derek Chauvin  for the Murder of George Floyd winds down in Minneapolis, new protests erupt over the impossibly accidental shooting of  Daunte Wright in the neighboring suburb of Brooklyn Center, and outrage pours into the streets of Chicago after the murder of a Brown childAdam Toledo, in Little Village.

In the most recent police outrage 13 year old Adam Toledo was shot dead in a Chicago alley.  Body camera video of the incident released yesterday showed him complying to a shouted order to turn around and raise his hands before being shot in the chest.  Clearly he did not menace the officer with a gun in his hand in a "confrontation" as earlier Chicago PD reports stated.  Add that to Jericho's list below--he did not kill himself while surrendering.  

He was born Nelson Demery III. on April 14, 1976 and was raised in Shreveport, Louisiana.  Brown later changed his name and graduated from Dillard University in the fall of and went on to earn  Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of New Orleans and a Ph.D. from the University of Houston.  He went on to a distinguished academiccareer at  University of Houston from 2002 to 2007 as avisiting professor at San Diego State University's MFA program in 2009, and an assistant professor ofEnglish at the University of San Diego.

He has been much honored as a rising poet.  In 2011, Brown received the  National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. His verse has appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, The Nation, New England Review, The New Republic, Oxford American, The New Yorker, Enkare Review, and The Best American Poetry. He serves as an Assistant Editor at Callaloo.

His first book, Please published in 2008 won the American Book Award.  His second, The New Testament, from 2014 won the 2015 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.  The Tradition earned even higher accolades.


Brown is a 45 year old Black poet who also happens to be Gay and lives with HIV/AIDES, a check list of things that put him at heightened risk of violent victimization.

Bullet Points

I will not shoot myself

In the head, and I will not shoot myself

In the back, and I will not hang myself

With a trashbag, and if I do, 

I promise you, I will not do it

In a police car while handcuffed

Or in the jail cell of a town

I only know the name of

Because I have to drive through it

To get home. Yes, I may be at risk,

But I promise you, I trust the maggots

Who live beneath the floorboards

Of my house to do what they must

To any carcass more than I trust

An officer of the law of the land

To shut my eyes like a man

Of God might, or to cover me with a sheet

So clean my mother could have used it

To tuck me in. When I kill me, I will

Do it the same way most Americans do, 

I promise you: cigarette smoke

Or a piece of meat on which I choke

Or so broke I freeze 

In one of these winters we keep

Calling worst. I promise if you hear

Of me dead anywhere near

A cop, then that cop killed me. He took 

Me from us and left my body, which is, 

No matter what we've been taught, 

Greater than the settlement

A city can pay a mother to stop crying,

And more beautiful than the new bullet

Fished from the folds of my brain.

 

        —Jericho Brown 

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Three Illinois Poets and Abraham Lincoln-—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin


One of many popular death bed pictures of Lincoln showing an impossible assemblage in the tiny back bedroom where he was laid at an angle in a too-small bed.  In reality Secretary of State Seward, shown prominently front and center with his hand on foot of the bedstead, was grievously injured by another member of the assassination plot and was unable to attend.  Secretary of War Stanton, who quickly took charge of things, soon sent “that hysterical woman”, Mary Todd Lincoln, away.  Son Tad was never allowed at his father’s bedside.  Vice President Andrew Johnson, who survived a botched attempt on his life, was not even called to the room.  Stanton, Robert Todd Lincoln, and three doctors were among those in the room when Lincoln breathed his last.  Stanton may, or may not, have said, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

Three of my favoriteAmerican poets were all from Illinois and were roughly contemporary.  It is more than simple parochialism—Illinoisans do not have the breast beating pride of place of Virginians or Texans or the sometimes snooty Pilgrim pride of Bay Staters.  Indeed, Illinois folk are often embarrassed to admit that they come from a state best known nationally for political corruption and convict governors. No, it’s because the three poets—Sandburg, Lindsay, and Masters—brought fresh ideasand forms to poetry which had long been the seen as the exclusive provenance of the Eastern Elite  and which was choked on convention and the long, inescapable shadow of Romanticism.  They saw things through iconoclastic eyes, wrote in simple, straight-from-the-shoulder verse liberated from ten dollar words and classic allusions.  Each was, in his own way, a Poet of the People.  Yet each had a unique style and particular concerns.  They did not represent a school or movement.  They were simply themselves.

Naturally each was drawn in particularly personal ways to the topic of Lincoln who was not only close to them geographically but was personally known by people close to each of them. 

                                        Carl Sandburg.

Of course no writer is more identified with Abraham Lincoln than Carl Sandburg whose magnificent multi-volume biographies are the most beautiful and moving, if not the most academically useful, of all of the many accounts of his life.  This poem was written in 1925 but not published in Sandburg’s life time.  He—or more likely his editors felt that the blunt description of Lincoln’s death and the preparation of his body for the famous long train ride back to Springfield was still too traumatizing for tender readers of verse.  I find it sobering and powerful and then lifted by a kind of defiance to an unjust world.  Very Sandburg.

Journey and Oath

 

When Abraham Lincoln received a bullet in the head and was taken to the Peterson house across the street,
He passed on and was swathed in emulsions and prepared for a journey to New York, Niagara, across Ohio, Indiana, back to Illinois-

As he lay looking life-like yet not saying a word,
Lay portentous and silent under a glass cover,
Lay with oracular lips still as a winter leaf,
Lay deaf to the drums of regiments coming and going,
Lay blind to the weaving causes of work or war or peace,
Lay as an inextinguishable symbol of toil, thought, sacrifice-

There was an oath in the heart of this man and that:
By God, I’ll go as a Man;
When my time comes I’ll be ready.
I shall keep the faith that nothing
is impossible with man, that one
or two illusions are good as money.

By God, I’ll be true to Man
As against hog, louse, fox, snake, wolf,
As against these and their counterparts
in the breast of Man.
By God, I’ll fight for Man
As against famine, flood, storm,
As against crop gambling, job gambling,
As against bootlickers on the left hand,
As against bloodsuckers on the right hand,
As against the cannibalism of the exploitation
of man by man,
As against insecurity of the sanctities of human life.

—Carl Sandburg

Vachael Lindsay, the man of Springfield, photographed in the yard of his family home.

Vachel Lindsay was born in Lincoln’s adopted home townof Springfield and raised in a big old house the next block over from the Governor’s mansion.  Unlike some poets who rebel against their roots and try to distance themselves from what they may consider their mundane or plebian roots, Lindsay loved—nay adored—his hometown.  He reveled in its lore, it tree shaded streets, its people great and common, White and Black.  He knew well Lincoln’s haunts on the Square across from the old sandstone Capital, the frame house far simpler than his own, the Depot from which he departed alive for the last time and to which he returned amid pomp in an ornate box.  He knew the old men, bent, broken, bearded, and gray who as lads had marched smartly away to fight in Mr. Lincoln’s War.  And, of course, he knew the grand mausoleum the city and its citizens had built for him, fit for a pharaoh of old the local said, on hill at the cemeteryon the edge of town.

It was no wonder that when Lindsay thought of Springfield, he thought of Lincoln —and thought of him as a specter risen from his tomb, especially as he wrote during the fresh carnage of a World War.

 

Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight

(In Springfield, Illinois)

It is portentous, and a thing of state

That here at midnight, in our little town

A mourning figure walks, and will not rest,

Near the old court-house pacing up and down.

 

Or by his homestead, or in shadowed yards

He lingers where his children used to play,

Or through the market, on the well-worn stones

He stalks until the dawn-stars burn away.

 

A bronzed, lank man! His suit of ancient black,

A famous high top-hat and plain worn shawl

Make him the quaint great figure that men love,

The prairie-lawyer, master of us all.

 

He cannot sleep upon his hillside now.

He is among us:—as in times before!

And we who toss and lie awake for long

Breathe deep, and start, to see him pass the door. 

 

His head is bowed. He thinks on men and kings.

Yea, when the sick world cries, how can he sleep?

Too many peasants fight, they know not why,

Too many homesteads in black terror weep.

 

The sins of all the war-lords burn his heart.

He sees the dreadnaughts scouring every main.

He carries on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now

The bitterness, the folly and the pain.

 

He cannot rest until a spirit-dawn

Shall come;—the shining hope of Europe free;

The league of sober folk, the Workers’ Earth,

Bringing long peace to Cornland, Alp and Sea.

 

It breaks his heart that kings must murder still,

That all his hours of travail here for men

Seem yet in vain.   And who will bring white peace

That he may sleep upon his hill again.

 

—Vachel Lindsay

 

                        Edgar Lee Masters in middle age.

The odd man out here is Edgar Lee Masters, the classic freethinker and iconoclast who had once been Clarence Darrow’s law partner and was best known as the author of one of the single best volumes of American poetry ever, The Spoon River Anthology.  As far as I know Masters never wrote a poem with Lincoln as the central subject.  The closest he came was in references made by some of the denizens of the Spoon River graveyard who tell their stories in the two volumes he wrote about the mythical downstate community muddled on his own home town.  The best known of these was Anne Rutledge.

Anne Rutledge

 

Out of me unworthy and unknown

The vibrations of deathless music;

“With malice toward none, with charity for all.”

Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

And the beneficent face of a nation

Shining with justice and truth.

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

Wedded to him, not through union,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O Republic,

From the dust of my bosom!

 

—Edgar Lee Masters

 

This is surprising.  After all Masters was half a generation older then Sandburg and Lindsay.  And he grew up in Petersburg—his Spoon River—in Menard County quite near Lincoln’s New Salem.  His beloved grandfather Squire David Masters served with Lincoln in the Blackhawk War, owned a farm within half a day’s walk from New Salem, and at least once hired the young lawyer when he was just starting out.  His father, Hardin Mastershad once been a law partner of Lincoln’s last partner and biographer William Herndon.  He knew many who had known Lincoln and told stories about his country wit.  He was surrounded by the near cult-like worship of Lincoln that thrived in Illinois in the post-Civil War years.

Yet in 1931 Masters published the most scathing biography of Lincoln yet written by a Northerner.  Lincoln: The Man was so venomous that it outdid the movement led by un-reconstructed Confederates like Lyon G. Tyler and Mildred Lewis Rutherford in their books of the previous decade to cast Lincoln as the black hearted villain of the Civil War who had loosed unnecessary devastation on the nation and crushed a freedom loving, agrarian society.  Sandburg, who had been friendly with Masters when he first came to Chicago, wrote sadly on the flyleaf of his copy of the book, that it was a “long sustained Copperhead hymnof hate reversing the views of a Masters I knew well 10 and 15 years before he wrote these sickly venomous pages.”  A New York Times reviewer compared the book to the “Indiana Knights of the Golden Circle”—the Ku Klux Klan that had thrived in that state in the ‘20’s.

Masters hope to destroy the cult that had grown up around Lincoln with his scathing biography.  Instead he destroyed his own reputation.

How could this be?  Masters was, after all, the friend and associate of Darrow and a famous liberal.  He was an admirer of Eugene V. Debsand Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld, an admirer of the great liberal Freethinker statesman Robert Ingersoll, a friend of labor, and the ardent opponent of oligarchic monopolistsand their Trusts.

It turns out that although personally friendly to young Lincoln, Masters’s Grandfather was, like many of the settlers of Downstate Illinois, an ardent Democrat casting himself as an agrarian republican in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson and the enemy of Lincoln’s Whigs and new Republicans as the inheritors of Alexander Hamilton’s elite and moneyed Federalists, the champion of national state power over the states, high tariffs, and the hated monopolistic Bank.  Squire Davis actively campaigned against Lincoln in his race for State Legislature and later as a member of the legislature himself in 1855 did not vote for Lincoln in the election for U. S. Senator.  He was a devoted support of Lincoln’s long-time rival Stephen A. Douglas, the Little Giant.

Masters grew up idolizing Douglas as the clear inheritor of Jefferson’s mantle and a brilliant man with a clear eyed, practical way to save the Union when fanatics North and South were losing their minds.  In his view the heroic Douglas was betrayedby faithless Democrats and overwhelmed with the money and power of northern merchantsand industrialists backing Lincoln.  Then after a stinging loss Douglas sacrificed himself trying to save the Union that Lincoln and the Republicans imperiled dyingof strain and overwork just months later.  Douglas was, in Masters’s eyes, a martyr.

He watched with resentment as Lincoln's cult grew and his lion seemed neglected and dishonored.  In 1922 all of this came out in his novel Children of the Market Placewhich was narrated by an Englishman who migrates to Illinois in 1833.  He comes to admire Douglas, but was unaware of the scruffy upstart Lincoln until attended one of the Lincoln Douglas Debates at Altonafter returning from a trip home to England.  He finds Douglas’s arguments irrefutable and Lincoln’s silly and fanatical.  At first repelled by the bumpkin with the high thin voice, in the course of the argument he begins to appreciate Lincoln’s eloquence.  But for him it is all mere theater and lawyerly histrionics.  Still later the narrator will hear Lincoln at Gettysburg and admit that he has a “great soul” but a foolish mind.  At the end of the novel during the labor turbulence of the 1890s, the old man sits at Douglas’s tomb and weeps for what was lost.

In this view Lincoln was somewhat sympathetic, a misguided man with a good heart and natural gifts but the moral and intellectual inferior of a real giant.

In less than a decade Masters’s view of Lincoln would sour even more.  The intervening years were filled with personal and national disappointmentsfor him.  After the heady triumph of The Spoon River Anthology, each successive volume of his poetry sold fewer copies and the critics grew harsher while rivals like Sandburg and Lindsay prospered.  His novels were failures and his plays closed as fast as they opened.  Not only was he past his glory, he was dismissed as dated and passé.

Meanwhile in his view Lincoln’s Republicans had become the private political machine of the Trusts and malefactors of great wealth.  They had made possible Prohibition which unleashed unheard of violent crime and corruption.  And then the bankers and speculators had driven the country to the Crash and Great Depression for which the common people—farmers and workers paid the price.  And it all, in his mind started with Lincoln and the defeat of the last Jeffersonian knight.  It was a very bitter man who wrote the new supposedly idol toppling biography.

Of course outside of Confederatedie-hards and the coterie of historians and cultural manipulators—think Birth of a Nation and Gone With the Wind—busy trying to snatch victory from defeat by recasting the narrative of the central event in American history and its aftermath, the book was roundly condemned in the northern and liberal circles that Masters cared for the most.  His reputation, what was left of it, was essentially destroyed.  He lived on until 1950 and wrote several more books, including a biography of Lindsay.  There would even be occasional honors, but he had permanently lost his place in the cultural sun.

For his part, Sandburg’s  Abraham Lincoln: The War Years  published in 1939, a follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize winning two volume biography of the young man Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, did much to undo any damage wrecked by Masters.  Since then hundreds of books have been written about the complex and somewhat mysterious Lincoln who has been called “the most written about public figure since Jesus.”

Hagiographies have gone out of style, but most writers find much to admire in the public and private man.  In recent years a half dozen major biographies have appeared along with specialized analysis of parts of the Lincoln legacy like Doris Kerns Goodwin’s A Team of Rivals which Barack Obama famously studied before naming Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State.  Novelists from Gore Vidal on the left to William Safire on the right to Jerome Charyn in the realm of the soul have plumbed his depths.

Of course the rise of the New Righthas been a battle between those who try to paint themselves as the true inheritors of Lincoln and his party with the Southerners who have infiltrated and taken over the Republican Party making it over into the mirror image of the Jim Crow Democrats.  In the north, libertarian neo-Confederates, alleged intellectuals at places like the Heartland Institute have resurrected Masters’s criticism pretty much intact and have launched a new attack on Lincoln’s reputation.

My bet is their puny efforts will be no more successful in the long run.

As for me, I will always love and revisit Spoon River, but when it comes to Lincoln, I will stand with Sandburg and Lindsay.

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Poetry Returns to Woodstock Tonight at Warp Corps

By: Patrick Murfin

Before the Coronavirus pandemic changed everything, McHenry County in Chicago’s far northwest boonies was the home of a perhaps surprising serious outbreak of poetry.  Several venues held regular readings or programs that included verse.  A long running series at the Raue Center had just concluded but monthly programs at McHenry’s hip coffee house the Hidden Pearl more than took up that slack.  The Atrocious Poets group hosted programs at the Old McHenry County Court House in Woodstock as well as offering developmental programs for local poets.  Stage Left by the Woodstock Opera House featured poetry and spoken word at monthly events curatedby story teller Jim May and musician Cassandra Vohs-Demann.  Poets turned up at the estimable local independent bookseller Between the Lynes.  Poetry was always included at Coffee House Open Mics at Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregations and a student coffee houses at McHenry County College,

Tree of Life was just about to host a major event, Poets in Resistance II which had to be cancelledjust three days before it was scheduledwhen the state went into lockdownlast March.

Since then crickets and home bound poets with plenty of time to work and themes and angst to explore with no outlet for their words.  Until now!


Kenneth Balmes and Patrick Murfin are cracking the door with a program at Warp Corps, 114 North Benton Street in Woodstock this evening, April 14 from 7 to 9 pm.  Poets are encouraged to bring those pent-up versesto share for the Open Mic.  Hopefully this will be the first in a new regular series.

Kenneth Balmes will co-host the Open Mic with Patrick Murfin.

Covid-19 precautions will be observedMasks are required and seating will be spacedfor social distance.  In keeping with current guidelines for indoor events, attendance will be limited to 20.

The reading is free and open to the public.  Coffee and water will be available.  Guests can bring other non-alcoholic beverages of their own.

 

 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Michael McClure a Poet at the Birth of Beat-—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Michael McClure reading in 1957, two years after his debut at Gallery Six in San Francisco. 

Michael McClure was there—an attendant the birth when the squalling slippery babe nearly fell to the floor before ardent arms saved it.  Which is to say that he was one of the five young, obscure poets who read in the smoky confines of San Francisco’s Gallery Six on October 7, 1955. That was the famed event where Kenneth Rexroth, a Bay Area bohemian bard of an earlier generation, introduced largely unheralded young poets Allen Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, as well as McClure.  Famously it is where Ginsberg first read Howl.  A drunk Jack Kerouac refused to read his own work but cheered the other poets on, shouting “Yeah! Go! Go!” during their performances. It was a memorable moment and was almost instantly mythologized as the “Birth of the Beat.”

McClure went on to be a continued counter-cultural presence in the Rock & Roll era hobnobbing and collaborating with the likes of Bob Dylan, the Doors, and others.

McClure with Bob Dylan and Ginsberg in the late '60s.

McClure, poet, playwright, novelist, and documentary filmmaker was born in Marysville, Kansas on October 20, 1932 and raised there and in Seattle. He was educated at the University of Wichita, the University of Arizona, and San Francisco State College—where he studied with poet Robert Duncan.

He was the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Persian Pony (2017), Mephistos and Other Poems (2016), Of Indigo and Saffron(2011), Mysteriosos and Other Poems(2010), Rebel Lions (1991), and The New Book/A Book of Torture(1961).  

                                    One of McClure's many books of verse.

“McClure’s poetry combined spontaneity, typographical experimentation, Buddhist practice, and body language in performance to merge the ecstatic and the corporeal,” according to his Poetry Foundation bio.  Publishers Weekly noted of his work, “McClure infuses ecstatic direct address and colloquial diction with an exquisite sensibility, one that reveals the world in its ordinary complex gorgeousness.”  He frequently performed his poetry with musical collaborators, including composer Terry Riley, and recorded several CDs with Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek.

He wrote more than 20 plays and musicals, several television documentaries, and the song Mercedes Benz, which was made famous by Janis Joplin. His 1965 play The Beard, which depicted an imagined sexual encounterbetween Jean Harlow and Billy the Kid, gained notoriety when it was unsuccessfully brought to trial on charges of obscenity.  Kerouac based the character Pat McLear on him in his autobiographical novel Big Sur.

McClure's honors included a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation, a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred Jarry Award, a Rockefeller grant for playwriting, and an Obie Award for Best Play.

McClure was even honored on a postage stamp.

McClure taught poetry at California College of the Arts for over 40 years. He lived in Oakland with his wife, the sculptor Amy Evans McClure, before his death on May 4, 2020 in 2020 at age 87.

McClure burst on the scene reading this poem at the Gallery Six event.

For the Death of 100 Whales

In April, 1954, Time magazine described seventy-nine bored American G.I.s stationed at a NATO base in Iceland murdering a pod of one hundred killer whales. In a single morning the soldiers, armed with rifles, machine guns, and boats, rounded up and then shot the whales to death.

 

Hung midsea

Like a boat mid-air

The liners boiled their pastures:

The liners of flesh,

The Arctic steamers

 

Brains the size of a teacup

Mouths the size of a door

 

The sleek wolves

Mowers and reapers of sea kine.

THE GIANT TADPOLES

(Meat their algae)

Leapt

Like sheep or children.

Shot from the sea’s bore.

 

Turned and twisted

(Goya!!)

Flung blood and sperm.

Incense.

Gnashed at their tails and brothers

Cursed Christ of mammals,

Snapped at the sun,

Ran for the Sea’s floor.

 

Goya! Goya!

 

—Michael McClure

 

McClure mature.  He would have enjoyed the rhyme. 

The Chamber, dedicated to Kerouac, was included in McClure’s Of Indigo and Saffron: New and Selected Poems published in 2011.

 

The Chamber

for Jack Kerouac

 

IN LIGHT ROOM IN DARK HELL IN UMBER IN CHROME,

     I sit feeling the swell of the cloud made about by movement

 

                 of arm leg and tongue. In reflections of gold

           light. Tints and flashes of gold and amber spearing

                     and glinting. Blur glass…blue Glass,

 

             black telephone. Matchflame of violet and flesh

                 seen in the clear bright light. It is not night

 

                and night too. In Hell, there are stars outside.

            And long sounds of cars. Brown shadows on walls

                                       in the light

                           of the room. I sit or stand

 

                 wanting the huge reality of touch and love.

            In the turned room. Remember the long-ago dream

 

   of stuffed animals (owl, fox) in a dark shop. Wanting

             only the purity of clean colors and new shapes

                                     and feelings.

                 I WOULD CRY FOR THEM USELESSLY

 

                   I have ten years left to worship my youth

                      Billy the Kid, Rimbaud, Jean Harlow

  IN DARK HELL IN LIGHT ROOM IN UMBER AND CHROME I

                                                                                            feel the swell of

smoke the drain and flow of motion of exhaustion, the long sounds of cars

                                                                                                     the brown shadows

on the wall. I sit or stand. Caught in the net of glints from corner table to

                                                                                                                       dull plane

from knob to floor, angles of flat light, daggers of beams. Staring at love’s face.

      The telephone in cataleptic light. Marchflames of blue and red seen in the

                                                                                                                            clear grain.

I see myself—ourselves—in Hell without radiance. Reflections that we are.

 

              The long cars make sounds and brown shadows over the wall.

 

                               I am real as you are real whom I speak to.

                   I raise my head, see over the edge of my nose. Look up

 

                    and see that nothing is changed. There is no flash

                            to my eyes. No change to the room.

 

    Vita Nuova—No! The dead, dead world.

                     The strain of desire is only a heroic gesture.

                       An agony to be so in pain without release

 

                             when love is a word or kiss.

 

—Michael McClure

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

I Can Relate to That Poems for the Old Man—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

These two poems are personalSort of.  They were not written to or about me and the poets presumably are totally unaware of my existence on the planet.  But each provided an ah-ha moment of personal recognition for me as a person of advancing age in increasing decrepitude.

Sydney Lea.

Sydney Lea is a poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and professor, and was the Poet Laureate of Vermont from 2011 to ‘15.  His most recent book is The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, a graphic mock-epic poemin collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka—how utterly Vermont to have a Cartoonist Laureate.   His thirteenth collection of poetry, Here was published 2019.  He founded New England Review in 1977 and edited it till 1989. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazinesincluding The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and Virginia Quarterly Review.  Lea has taught for the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth College, and at Yale University, Wesleyan University, Vermont College, Middlebury College, Franklin University Switzerland, and the National Hungarian University.

A cabin and the Montana night sky.

Reckoning struck me first because it opens in the state of my birth under the vast starry sky of the West that was such a part of my childhood and then because it shifts to the lights of a big city—Gotham for him, the Windy City for me.  I have no son, but daughters, I hear their voices—the bored indifference to those same Montana mountains and eagerness to find a mall—any mall—in the small towns among the pine smells.  The childrenof those two eldest daughters are grown now and one has a laughing toddler of his own.  My third and youngest lives with us now with her baby daughter.  I wonder if Matilda will walk by the hand with me to find the elf doorin a rotting tree in a remnant wood or a flop-eared rabbit in a cage.  I, too, feel some sort of transgenerational connection.

Reckoning

Let us not take it for granted that life exists more fully in what is commonly thought big than in what is commonly thought small.

         —Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader

 

Once, on the steps of a cabin in wild Montana,

just before dawn I stood stunned

by that delirium of stars.

I’ve looked from a friend’s apartment in New York

at nine o’clock in the evening,

likewise astounded by countless windows.

Light everywhere. Light everywhere. And dark.

 

Coleridge opined that the sublime

can make us feel like nothing.

I’m sure I’d have known as much without him.

The older I become the less I aim

at epic self-expression.

It’s best, I think, as I didn’t always,

to keep my counsel in face of sights and themes

 

that lie beyond my ken, right where they’ve lain

lifelong, though once ambition

obscured all that. But I check myself:

I’m no more nothing, in fact, than anybody.

My memory feels boundless,

and if it fetches no sublime,

still moments may be fashioned into stories.

 

As randomly as I might choose a star

or a single light from some high-rise,

I summon a time—or it summons me—

when I and my son, then just three years old,

walked through a patch of woods

to spy on a hidden beaver pond.

I longed for this adventure to unfold

 

exactly as it did. The wind came right,

and just enough of day

remained for both of us to see

three beavers swimming, a mere five feet from where

we crouched in pond-side reeds.

Clear as judgment in my mind,

the rasp of roost-bound crows, thick August air,

 

that tannic orange of the cruising rodents’ teeth.

My son appeared transported

as we left the place by early starlight.

“How was it?” asked his mother back at home.

“Oh, Mom! You should have seen!

There were some bugs in the water! They all were swimming!

All of them were swimming around and around!”

 

In my twenties then, I didn’t know

how not to feel let down.

I know some things today, that is,

that compensate for slackened aspiration.

That child is forty-seven,

his children much older than he was then.

I study my boy. I’m lost in speculation:

 

I resembled him, I hope, in intending kindness.

In my case, though, vague zeal

distracted my heart and mind and soul.

He’s taking his daughter to ski this afternoon.

They’ll command an epic view,

yet it may be only the shape of a mogul

or cloud that, come the evening, she’ll retain.

 

And my son? He has perhaps already traveled

like me to where all types of light are local.

 

Sydney Lea

                        Camisha L. Jones.

The next poem was shared just yesterday on Facebook by my best friend from high school, Jonathan Ben Gordon, now a retired Cantor. 

Camisha L. Jones is the author of the chapbook Flare published by Finishing Line Press in 2017. She received of a 2017 Spoken Word Immersion Fellowship from the Loft Literary Center.  She currently serves as the managing director at Split This Rock, a national nonprofit that cultivates, teaches, and celebrates poetry that bears witness to injustice and provokes social change.  According to the Deaf Poets Society blog Jones “lives with fibromyalgia, Ménière's Disease, and an adamant commitment to keep her writing lifefrom scorching on the back burner.”  She lives in Herndon, Virginia.

"Sorry, I can't hear you."

At first glance it would seem that I would not have much in common with a young deaf Black poet.  Certainly I am not deaf but I am hard of hearing due to prolonged exposure to industrial noise and ear-bleeding rock and roll as a young man.  Before I finally got hearing aids I had plenty of those I’m-sorry-I-can’t-hear-you moments, especially when clerking overnight at a gas station/convenience store  to exasperated customers whose lottery and cigarette requests I could not quite make out.  Equally annoyedwas my wife who got tired of repeating herself over and over.  Things are mostly better now if I “have my ears in.”  But why the hell do they whisper on all of my favorite TV dramas?  And last week I must have said “huh?” a dozen times to my fellow activists at a Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County action.  And don’t get me started on garbled phone calls

Disclosure

I’m sorry, could you repeat that. I’m hard of hearing.

To the cashier

To the receptionist

To the insistent man asking directions on the street

I’m sorry, I’m hard of hearing. Could you repeat that?

At the business meeting

In the writing workshop

On the phone to make a doctor’s appointment

I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-so-sorry-I’m-hard-for-the-hearing

Repeat.

           Repeat.

Hello, my name is Sorry

To full rooms of strangers

I’m hard to hear

I vomit apologies everywhere

They fly on bat wings

towards whatever sound beckons

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I am so, so sorry

           and repeating

                       and not hearing

Dear (again)

I regret to inform you

I       am

here

 

Camisha L. Jones

 


 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Elegies for My Brother, Murfin Verse—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Tim's Senior high school photo doubled as an 8x10 glossy to promote himself as a teenage party DJ. 

The other day it was siblings day on Facebook and I shared old photos of my Twin Brother Timothy who died on Valentine’s Day in 2004, 17 years ago now.  We had a complicated relationship. 

His short obit in the Chicago Tribune read:

Timothy Peter Murfin, 54, formerly of Chicago, IL and Portland, OR, died in Cincinnati, OH on Feb. 14. Born in Twin Bridges, MT on March 17, 1949 to Willard M. Murfin and Ruby Irene, nee Mills, Murfin, who have both preceded him in death. Survived by children Ira Samuel Murfin of Chicago and Shani Colleen Menz-Murfin of New York City; brother Patrick Murfin (Kathy) of Crystal Lake, IL; stepmother Rae Murfin of Alberton, MT; former spouse Arlene (Packer) Brennan (Michael) of Chicago; former longtime companions Luanne Menz of Georgia and Normandie Nunez of Portland, OR; and three nieces. Memorial service is pending in Chicago.

I was working alone at Briargate Schoolin Cary, Illinois where I was head building custodian.  It was a Saturday, but a basketball program used the gymfrom 8 am to 9 pm.  I had to be there and was little resentful of not spending Valentine’s Day with my wife.  I was shampooing hall carpetswhich were encrusted by tracked mudand salt from a winter’s worth of boots.  About 7 pm I got a call on my cell phone, a new-to-me gizmo that seldom went off.  It was from Kathy with the news that my brother was dead.

It was a shock, but oddly not totally unexpected in that he had abused his body with alcohol and a virtual pharmacopeia of self-prescribed medication for many years.  I was stunned, but went through the motions until the last kid and the last chatty parent was finally locked out of the building.

Two or three days later I was in a cardriven by Ira S. Murfin,  Peter’s—he preferred to be called Peter, the Biblical name he had adopted upon entering a religious order years before—son.  My middle daughter Heather Larsen was with us.  We were driving through the night to Cincinnati to make final arrangements and collect whatever was in his “estate”—the few personal belongings he had hauled with him to Ohio after his virtual exile from Oregon.  An odd conversation we had in that car—maybe more of a rambling monologue by me, would become the gist of the opening words of a memorial poem.  More about that later.

At our baptism at a Methodist Church in Montana in 1949.  Mom Ruby has Tim, Dad W.M Murfin has me.  Tim's font bath took.  Mine evidently did not.

The two of us were adopted at birth by W.M. and Ruby Irene Murfin.  Despite being twins, we were not identical.  In fact in many ways we could not have been more different.  Tim was dark haired and so good looking as a child that women stopped my mother on the street to compliment her.  I was larger, blond, and from the beginning oafish.  In school I was simultaneously a loud know-it-all showing off all of the hours of reading I did while still managing to fail at math and spelling.  I had no friends and was a magnet for bullies.

Tim was not a star student or an athlete.  None-the-less exuded a kind of charisma.  Other kids swirled around him, naturally following his interests.  From always being Roy Rogers in the neighborhood cowboy games, to being the 12-year-old leader of Cheyenne’s sidewalk surfers, to being the first guy in town with a Beatle haircutand Nehru jacket he was popular and naturally had the prettiest girlfriends.

In Cheyenne for Frontier Days.  Tim, left, was always Roy Rogers and the hero, I was Hopalong Cassidy, cousin Linda, far right, was was Belle Star when she visited us.

When we moved to Skokie and Niles West High School he and his willowy girlfriend were elected to Prom court.  He planned to be a radio disc jockey and got himself gigs hosting sock hops and basement parties with his portable record player and boxes of 45s.

I was into newspaper, theater, and increasingly radical politics.  Tim got interested in religion and was soon a leader in Young Life, a denizen of church basement coffee houses, and talking about becoming a minister.  Always, a gaggle of kids followed him.

I went away to college at Shimer.  Tim stayed home, mostly to keep his adoring posse together.  He attended Kendal College, a two year school in Evanston.  I came home a long haired, dope smoking hippy and draft dodger.  It turns out he had discovered marijuana too and the use of hallucinogens as spiritual practice.

After I left Shimer and moved to Chicago, I lived with him a couple of times.  Each time he had a full house of roommates and acolytes.  I was the improvident brother he found space for in an unheated room off of an Old Town kitchen or the unfinished basement of a Rogers Park townhouse.  By then he had grown a patriarchal beard and seemed to be gathering his own hippy cult, which would literally gather at his feet as he smoked a fat one and waxed beatifically on arcane mysteries.

Tim married Arlene, a very nice young woman who worshiped him.  She followedhim into an outfit called the Holy Order of Mans, which practiced some sort of mystical catholicism with a small c.  He took the name Peter—the Rock of the Church.  Together they were sent on mission to California.  A few years late Arlene returned to Chicago with their toddler son Ira.

Peter drifted out of the Order and pursued various spiritual paths with complete earnestness.  He lived in Portland and had a day job at an early big box hardware store.  But he yearned to be a saint.  He found folks who thought he might be.  Got into another relationship, had a daughter, Shani and lost that family to boutsof depression and heavy drinking and self-medication.

He cleaned himself up in AA and characteristically became a star.  Soon he was speaking all over Oregon and northern California and re-inventinghimself as a spiritually based addiction councilor.  He was making big plans and chasing various gurusand guides looking more for tips on how to become one of them than for enlightenment.  Or so it seemed to me from my great distance in Chicago when he would phone with plans.

Eventually he became a substance abuse specialistwith the county department of probation.  He entered another relationship with an adoring older woman with a teen age daughter.  But the depression never went away and he fell off the wagon in secret repeatedly.  Each episodebecame more intense.  It became harder to hide.

In all of those years I saw Peter only three times.  We came to Missouri where he was asked as an ordained priest by my fatherto conduct my mother’s funeral.  He did so with grace, although his relationship with my father was strained.  It would become an obsession which he would pour out to me in drunken middle-of-the-night telephone calls.

My brother, then known as Peter visited Chicago from Portland in 1983 shortly after the birth of my daughter Maureen.  This was taken on an evening outing to Buckingham Fountain.  Peter was in front with our oldest daughter Carolynne and the baby.  My niece Laurie is leaning on him.  His son Ira and ex-wife Arlene Brennan and Kathy and me in the back row.  Middle daughter Heather must have snapped the picture.  

In the summer of 1983 just after Kathy and my daughter Maureen was born, Peter stayed with us for a week.  It was also his first visit with his ex-wife and son.  He showed up trim, tanned, and handsome.  His black beard was neatly trimmed, his hair barberedto a fare-thee-well, his clothes West Coast casual sharp.  I was still a scraggly post-hippy in thrift shop clothes and a cowboy hat.  I had the family reputation, well earned, as a heavy drinker.  I did nothing to hide it. Peter was supposedly sober.  But Kathy walked in on him pulling from the fifth of whiskey he had hidden in is bag.  It turned out he was killing a bottle a day or more but never actually seemed drunk.

The last time I saw him alive was after we had moved to Crystal Lake.  He was back for another visit to Ira and spent most of his time in Chicago, but came up for a couple of days with us.  By this time he was in rougher shape.  He ambled over to St. Thomas Church across the street where Kathy was an active parishioner and RE volunteer, to ask the Priest for permission to say a private mass at their altar.  He explained that he was also “an ordained Priest in the Higher Order of Melchizedek” and required to say mass daily.  He was upset that he was turned down, saying that some priest pal in Portland had let him use his church.  He made Kathy and the girls uncomfortable.

Back in Portland his life slowly unraveled.  The relapses became more frequent, the depression blacker.  He wrecked cars, lost his job.  Normandie stood by him as long as she could, and supportedhim in the later years.  But in the end he wrecked that, too.  He exiledhimself to a closet of a room in Eugene where some former acolytes tried to help him.  He burned through that, too.

He was virtually homeless and on the run from the law for failure to pay fines for his traffic accidents.  David Sellers, an old friend who he had met hangingout at WLS radio studios while he was in high school and who had lived with us in that Old Town apartment, offered him a bed in suburban Cincinnati.  He was reportedly trying to get himself together and was apparently sober.  He had settled into regular Catholic worship, but he still received tons of mail from all of the cults and gurus he had associated himself with.  Although he couldn’t find work, he finally got qualified for Social Security Disability.  Just after accomplishing that he came home one day, sat down on his bed and died of a massive heart attack.

To our amazement, drugs were not directly involved, except that long abuse had generally wrecked his health.

Ira, Heather, and I arranged to have him crematedand gathered the boxes of his life timewhich were crammed in the closet and under the bed of his room.  Tons of mystical books, art work, beads, crystals, candles, vestments, journals in his meticulous calligraphy.  We packed the urn and the stuff and returned to Chicago.  The stuff mostly went into storage, Ira and I each keeping a few items.

We arranged for a Catholic funeral massat an old Polish parish just west of the Loop.  The Mass was said by, a Milwaukee priest and the brotherof Arlene’s second husband Michael Brennan.  It was solemn and holy and in a lovely old chapel.  Peter would have approved.  After the Mass folks got up to testify about him in one way or another.  When my turn came I read a suite of six elegies that I had been working on for weeks.  This is what I read:

Elegies for My Brother

Timothy Peter Murfin

March 17, 1949-February 14, 2004

 

I.

Hurtling down an Interstate on any black night,

say the route angling south southeast from Gary

for Indianapolis then slung around the racetrack

to Cincinnati, Queen City of the West,

you realize in an instant that this great gray marvel

was not constructed for the likes of us,

mere civilians on inconsequential errands

encapsulated in puny steel,

that it was wrought for Commerce,

for that endless caravan of behemoths

jeweled in red and yellow charging indefatigably

for endless rendezvous with profit,

and that our vagrant desires to come home or to escape,

to begin a new life or repeat by rote an established tedium,

to make love or to break tender hearts,

or on this one night in this one box loose amid that stream,

to unite the living with the dead,

seize an unworthy opportunity to tag along for the ride.

 

II.

Roy Rogers is dead.

The King of the Cowboys with his nickel plated, pearl handled revolvers

resplendent in pearl snap shirt and neckerchief

with a cockeyed and confident grin,

the hero of every summer morning adventure

with Dale Evans at his side

and Hopalong Cassidy on loan from the two reeler next door,

has fallen from Trigger,

Bullet noses his lifeless sprawl in the dust.

[Here sing Happy Trails to You]

 

Happy trails to you, until we meet again.

Happy trails to you, keep smiling’ on ‘till then.

Who cares about the clouds when we’re together?

Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.

Happy trails to you, till we meet again.

 

Happy trails to you, ‘till we meet again.

 

III.

Youth bestows its virtues capriciously,

a dollop of beauty here, audacious valor there,

sweet innocence and brash confidence

doled out as if rationed by a miser,

many seeming to be passed over

and left with only churlish resentment,

bad skin and worse judgment.

But he stood beneath the fountain,

let its waters bathe him in every gift

a dark handsomeness,

a dj’s soothing voice,

charm,

charisma,

so that he dazzled his way through life,

gathering around him tight circles

not just of friends, but followers

who dreamed his dreams.

The hippy guru of Sheridan Road,

they gathered as acolytes at his feet

as he sat with Old Testament patriarchal beard,

eyes blazing one moment,

the beatific smile of yoga saint the next,

in hallucinogenic communion.

And I, no account wastrel with dim prospects,

swung on the icy path of an asteroid

orbiting far, far from that blazing Sol.

 

IV.

One year, just before Christmas,

he wrote from somewhere on the West Coast.

This year, could I send him a blank book,

bound in leather, hand stitched,

virgin velum pages waiting for his pen?

I want, he wrote, to be a Saint

and no mere tablet or collegiate spiral notebook

would be worthy of the great and inspirational words

which he would meticulously enter

in that fine calligraphic print he assumed.

It struck me, even in my heathen ignorance,

that saints had no ambition but simply were.

But I hunted through the stationers until I found the perfect journal,

inscribing on its fly leaf my own haughty judgment—

See Ecclesiastes, Chapter 1, Verse 2

 

Vanity of vanities saith the Preacher,

All is vanity.

 

V.

He took his religion like he took the whiskey

that he stashed,

straight from the bottle,

no ice, no diluting soda.

He demanded the real thing,

raw and powerful,

burning the throat on the way down

but leaving a warm belly glow.

He may have wandered here and there

amid crystals and pyramids,

astrologers and New Age frou-frou,

but settled only where the mysteries

were deep and hard.

 

For him no dallying among the ladies of

Saturday morning yoga and meditation,

no time for the plain/simple Buddhism

of the agnostic heart so embraced by

disappointed Western rationalists,

but the stern, demanding Tibetan school

with spinning prayer wheels,

real gods and real demons,

The Book of the Dead.

 

And no Vatican II Catholicism for him,

no priests in sweaters named Father Phil,

no guitar masses and suburban congregations in Ban Lon,

no cheap and easy grace,

only the penitent's worn out knees,

the endless rosaries endlessly repeated,

icons,

medals,

Holy Water,

the prophetic apparitions of Mary,

the stigmata of Padre Pio

in which, if he could,

he would dip his handkerchief

to press to his lips to kiss.

 

VI.

Something inside of him was broken.

He knew it and spent a questing life

trying to find it,

trying to fix it.

 

Was it some trauma of childhood,

inflicted by the fragile, damaged woman who raised us

or the god-like but distant father?

 

He often thought so, obsessed over each moment

of remembered agony and rejection,

taking the hard knocks of ordinary childhood

and building an edifice of unremitting pain,

unable to forget what he had constructed,

unable to forgive.

 

Or, now that Freud has been cast aside as Fraud,

was it just some accident of biochemistry,

a roll of the dice that elected him

by alchemy of genetic chance

to have neurons that misfire just so?

 

As a former Friend of Bill W

did he have to assume responsibility

and seize control of the disease himself,

or did the pickling years of hidden bottles,

the various stews of pharmaceuticals prescribed

and self-prescribed

finally overcome that mind?

Was it all three?

Does it matter?

 

He was broken and tried to repair himself as best he could

and in the process leaned how to balm the wounds

of other troubled souls,

but like the Physician, could not heal himself.

 

—Patrick Murfin

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Considering Cathedrals on a Sunday Morning—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Chartres Cathedral in France, completed in 1222.  Classic Gothic architecture and renown stained glass windows. 

Although the statisticians tell us we do it in ever dwindling numbers, many of us are still off to church this Sunday morning—or would be except for Coronavirus precautions observed in many places and to various degrees.  I have not stepped foot in my own church, the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, Illinois since mid-March of last year.  But I haven’t missed a Zoom service in all of that time until today when I ironically have my second vaccine shotscheduled.  A lot of other folks have Zoomed it as well.  In fact our log-in attendance has actually been greater than our usual in-person services.  Perhaps the pandemic will permanently change how many of us worshipand how tightly tethered we will remain to our brick and mortar temples.  

Even before the emergency there was an ongoing theological debate about whether the church is the building or the congregation.  Let’s split the difference and say it’s both.

Many Protestants, especially those in the Calvinist tradition, preferred simple austerity in church architecture in which to contemplate God like this  Colonial New England Meeting House.

The buildings in which we gatherand worship tell us a lot about the folks therein and perhaps their expectationsand hopes.  Should the building be a hymn and monument to God, or should it be a humble house for the faithfulChristianity has tugged us both ways. 

Here are three takes on that.

Building Aix la Chapelle Grandes from the Chroniques-de-France

The 20th Century Welch poet John Ormond considered the masons and laborers who spent their whole lives building temples that their grandchildren might not see completed.

The Cathedral Builders

 

They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God,
with winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven,
inhabited the sky with hammers,
defied gravity,
deified stone,
took up God’s house to meet him,
and came down to their suppers
and small beer,
every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,
quarrelled and cuffed the children,
lied, spat, sang, were happy, or unhappy,
and every day took to the ladders again,
impeded the rights of way of another summer’s swallows,
grew greyer, shakier,
became less inclined to fix a neighbour’s roof of a fine evening,
saw naves sprout arches, clerestories soar,
cursed the loud fancy glaziers for their luck,
somehow escaped the plague,
got rheumatism,
decided it was time to give it up,
to leave the spire to others,
stood in the crowd, well back from the vestments at the consecration,
envied the fat bishop his warm boots,
cocked a squint eye aloft,
and said, “I bloody did that.”

 

—John Ormond

 


The American poet E. E. Cummings was the son of noted and scholarly Unitarian minister.  In his youth he rebelled against his father and his religion.  Late in life he reconsidered and re-connected with Unitarianism.  It was during that period he wrote this.

 

I am a little church (no great cathedral)

 

i am a little church (no great cathedral)

far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities

-i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest

i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

 

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower

my prayers are prayers of earth's own clumsily striving

(finding and losing and laughing and crying) children

whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

 

around me surges a miracle of unceasing

birth and glory and death and resurrection:

over my sleeping self float flaming symbols

of hope and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

 

i am a little church (far from the frantic

world with its rapture and anguish) at peace with nature

-i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;

i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

 

winter by spring, i lift my diminutive spire to

merciful Him Whose only now is forever:

standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence

(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

 

—e. e. cummings

 


And finally, one from the Old Man,  the title poem in fact of my 2004 Skinner House collection.  This is the original version, slightly longer than it appeared in the book

 

We Build Temples in the Heart

 

We have seen the great cathedrals,

stone laid upon stone,

carved and cared for

by centuries of certain hands,

seen the slender minarets

soar from dusty streets

to raise the cry of faith

to the One and Only God,

seen the placid pagodas

where gilded Buddhas squat

amid the temple bells and incense.

 

We have seen the tumbled temples

half buried in the sands,

choked with verdant tangles,

sunk in corralled seas,

old truths toppled and forgotten,

even seen the wattled huts,

the sweat lodge hogans,

the wheeled yurts,

the Ice Age caverns

where unwritten worship

raised its knowing voices.

 

But here, we build temples in our hearts

side by side we come,

as we gather—

 

Here the swollen belly

and aching breasts

of a well-thumbed paleo-goddess,

there the spinning prayer wheels

of lost Tibetan lamaseries;

mix the mortar of the scattered dust

of the Holy of Holies

with the sacred water

of the Ganges;

lay Moorish alabaster

on the blocks of Angkor Wat

and rough-hewn Stonehenge slabs;

plumb Doric columns

for strength of reason,

square with stern Protestant planks;

illuminate with Chartres’

jeweled windows

and the brilliant lamps of science.

 

Yes here, we build temples in our hearts,

side by side we come,

scavenging the ages for wisdom,

cobbling together as best we may,

the fruit of a thousand altars,

leveling with doubt,

framing with skepticism,

measuring by logic,

sinking firm foundations in the earth

as we reach for the heavens.

 

Here, we build temples in our hearts,

side by side we come,

a temple for each heart,

a village of temples,

none shading another,

connected by well-worn paths,

built alike on sacred ground.

 

—Patrick Murfin

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Amanda Gorman Stakes Claim for Young Black Women Poets—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

A young Black Poet on the cover of Vogue?  Something extraordinary is clearly going on.

This week the Vogue unveiled it cover and a fashion spread by photographer Annie Leibovitz featuring young poet Amanda Gorman.  It was just the latest media coup for the 23 year old Phenom  who was profiledby Lin-Manuel Miranda for Time magazine’s 100 Next list and who rose to unprecedented public acclaim for her poem The Hill We Climb at Joe Biden’s inauguration.  Although that may have been her introduction to many Americans she already had many noteworthy accomplishmentsunder her chic belt.  Michael Cirelli, executive director of Urban Word NYC said in some awe  her “bio goes out of date every two weeks.”

The media savvy poet knows that in some circles her appearance as a fashionistawill be attacked as “selling out” her professed themes of Black pride and empowerment, feminism, and social justice.  Gorman could not care less.  She had been interested in fashion and design since her early teen years, self-curated the outfits she wore at readings as she climbed to fame, and had signed a modeling contract well before the inauguration,  As for selling, out Gorman clearly is not in it just for the money.  Shortly after the inauguration she said that she had already turned down $17 million in contract offers and endorsement deals.

Gorman, influenced by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, and Audre Lorde more than the hip-hop poetry slam poets of her own generation, still has become the tip of a spear of young female Black bards who are making poetry an important and influential art form again after decades of being over shadowed by other literary forms and relegated to the margins of the culture.  Others in this new wave include international refugee poet Emi Mahamoud just a few years older than Gorman and several women who rose to attention as voices of the Black Lives Matter Movement.  If Gorman seems less radical than some and less strident, it is only by degrees and is the logical product of her unique biography.

Gorman was born in Los Angeles on March 7, 1988 and was raised by Joan Wicks, a single mother, a 6th-grade English teacher in Watts, She had two siblings including her twin sister, Gabrielle, who is now an activistand filmmaker She has described her young self as a “weird child” who enjoyed readingand writing and was encouraged by her mother.  She was brought up and remains a Black Catholic which has deeply influenced her social justice passion.

She an auditory processing disorder and is hypersensitive to sound and also had a speech impediment during childhood.  Gorman had speech therapy during her childhood.   Gorman told The Harvard Gazette in 2018:

 I always saw it as a strength because since I was experiencing these obstacles in terms of my auditory and vocal skills, I became really good at reading and writing. I realized that at a young age when I was reciting the Marianne Deborah Williamson quote that “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure” to my mom.

She also practiced singing Lin-Manuel Miranda’s song  Aaron Burr, Sir from  Hamilton because “it is jam-packed with R's. And I said, 'if I can keep up with Leslie in this track, then I am on my way to being able to say this R in a poem.”

Gorman attended New Roads, a private school in Santa Monica, and as senior, she received a Milken Family Foundation college scholarship. She studied sociology at Harvard graduating cum laude in 2020as a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

She was still in high school when she began reading her poetry in school and at community events.  She became a youth delegate to the United Nations in 2013 and was inspired and empowered to hear an address by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai.  The next year she was selected as the first youth poet laureate of Los Angeles. She published her first poetry book The One for Whom Food Is Not Enough in 2015. 

In 2017 she was named the first National Youth Poet Laureate and read her poem In This Place (An American Lyric) for her performance at the Library of Congress.  Shortly after she signed a contract to develop a children’s book which became Change Sings: A Children's Anthem which was released after her inaugural appearance.

Gorman's picture book for children.

While still at Harvard amid rising recognition she pointed out that her interests went beyond literary.  She wanted to be an agent for change and several times noted that she planned to run for President of the United States in 2036.  No one should discount her.  After hearing her inaugural poem Hillary Clinton  Tweeted her support.

In 2019, Gorman was chosen as one of The Root magazine’s “Young Futurists”, an annual list of “the 25 best and brightest young African-Americans who excel in the fields of social justice and activism, arts and culture, enterprise and corporate innovation, science and technology, and green innovation.” In 2020, Gorman presented Earthrise, an Earth Day poem focused on the climate crisis.  That May  she appeared in an episode of the web seriesSome Good News hosted by John Krasinski, where she virtually met Oprah Winfrey and issued a virtual commencement speech to those who could not attend graduation ceremoniesdue to the Coronavirus pandemic.


Amanda Gorman in spectacular canary yellow with her high hair bound in scarlet wowed the nation with her poem and performance at Joe Biden's and Kamala Harris's inauguration.

After her inauguration performance The Hill We Climb was issued a slender stand-alone book and a collection of the same title is slated for release this fall and has already appeared on Best Seller lists in pre-publication sales.

She was quickly tapped to compose and perform an original poem, titled Chorus of the Captains for  Super Bowl LV’s pregame ceremonial coin tossfeaturing honorary captains who were essential workersJames Martin, a U.S. Marine veteran; Trimaine Davis, an educator; and Suzie Dorner, an ICU nurse manager.  It certainly was something most football fans had never experienced and there was some blow back by white fans.  Gorman was glad to break down the silos of culture which prevent people from communicating meaningfully with each other.

But even triumphs like this can’t prevent the daily insults African-Americans have to face.  In March  Gorman said she was racially profiled by a security guard near her New York City apartment home, and Tweeted afterwards, “He left, no apology. This is the reality of black girls: One day you’re called an icon, the next day, a threat.”  She later Tweeted, “In a sense, he was right. I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be. A threat and proud.”

What’s next for Gorman?  Who know except that it will likely  be unexpected, surprising, and entirely true to special vision.

Gorman reading In This Place (An American Lyric) As the first National Youth Poet Laureate

Her inaugural poem has been so widely shared that today we will feature that 2017 Youth Poet Laureate verse.

In This Place (An American Lyric)

There’s a poem in this place—

in the footfalls in the halls

in the quiet beat of the seats.

It is here, at the curtain of day,

where America writes a lyric

you must whisper to say.

 

There’s a poem in this place—

in the heavy grace,

the lined face of this noble building,

collections burned and reborn twice.

 

There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square

where protest chants

tear through the air

like sheets of rain,

where love of the many

swallows hatred of the few.

 

There’s a poem in Charlottesville

where tiki torches string a ring of flame

tight round the wrist of night

where men so white they gleam blue—

seem like statues

where men heap that long wax burning

ever higher

where Heather Heyer

blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.

 

There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant

of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising

its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago—

a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,

strutting upward and aglow.

 

There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas

where streets swell into a nexus

of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,

where courage is now so common

that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.

 

There’s a poem in Los Angeles

yawning wide as the Pacific tide

where a single mother swelters

in a windowless classroom, teaching

black and brown students in Watts

to spell out their thoughts

so her daughter might write

this poem for you.            

 

There's a lyric in California

where thousands of students march for blocks,

undocumented and unafraid;

where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom

in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.

She knows hope is like a stubborn

ship gripping a dock,

a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer

or knock down a dream.

 

How could this not be her city

su nación

our country

our America,

our American lyric to write—

a poem by the people, the poor,

the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,

the native, the immigrant,

the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,

the undocumented and undeterred,

the woman, the man, the nonbinary,

the white, the trans,

the ally to all of the above

and more?

 

Tyrants fear the poet.

Now that we know it

we can’t blow it.

We owe it

to show it

not slow it

although it

hurts to sew it

when the world

skirts below it.      

 

Hope—

we must bestow it

like a wick in the poet

so it can grow, lit,

bringing with it

stories to rewrite—

the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated

a history written that need not be repeated

a nation composed but not yet completed.

 

There’s a poem in this place—

a poem in America

a poet in every American

who rewrites this nation, who tells

a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth

to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—

a poet in every American

who sees that our poem penned

doesn’t mean our poem’s end.

 

There’s a place where this poem dwells—

it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell

where we write an American lyric

we are just beginning to tell.

 

—Amanda Gorman

 


Just a year ago Gorman addressed the pandemic engulfing the world.

 

The Miracle of Morning

 

I thought I’d awaken to a world in mourning.

Heavy clouds crowding, a society storming.

But there’s something different on this golden morning.

Something magical in the sunlight, wide and warming.

 

I see a dad with a stroller taking a jog.

Across the street, a bright-eyed girl chases her dog.

A grandma on a porch fingers her rosaries.

She grins as her young neighbor brings her groceries.

 

While we might feel small, separate, and all alone,

Our people have never been more closely tethered.

The question isn’t if we can weather this unknown,

But how we will weather this unknown together.

 

So on this meaningful morn, we mourn and we mend.

Like light, we can’t be broken, even when we bend.

 

As one, we will defeat both despair and disease.

We stand with healthcare heroes and all employees;

With families, libraries, waiters, schools, artists;

Businesses, restaurants, and hospitals hit hardest.

 

We ignite not in the light, but in lack thereof,

For it is in loss that we truly learn to love.

In this chaos, we will discover clarity.

In suffering, we must find solidarity.

 

For it’s our grief that gives us our gratitude,

Shows us how to find hope, if we ever lose it.

So ensure that this ache wasn’t endured in vain:

Do not ignore the pain. Give it purpose. Use it.

 

Read children’s books, dance alone to DJ music.

Know that this distance will make our hearts grow fonder.

From these waves of woes our world will emerge stronger.

 

We’ll observe how the burdens braved by humankind

Are also the moments that make us humans kind;

Let each morning find us courageous, brought closer;

Heeding the light before the fight is over.

When this ends, we’ll smile sweetly, finally seeing

In testing times, we became the best of beings.

 

—Amanda Gorman

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

And the Cannons Ceased to Roar—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Grant and Lee at Appomattox.  Grant was carelessly, but customarily, dressed in the blouse of a private soldier with his rank straps sewn to his shoulders, his boots scuffed and muddy.  Lee was resplendent in his best dress uniform with golden sash and gleaming boots.  They recalled they had met as comrades in another war. 

156 years ago today, April 9, 1865, Robert E. Lee offered up his sword  in surrenderof the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S Grant, Commanding General of the United States Army.  Grant gallantly refused to accept it and in fact let all officers of the Confederate force retain their side arms and personal mounts.  In the popular imagination, this act was the end of the Civil War.

In fact, it just represented the collapse of the major army facing the Union’s main forces, the Armies of the Potomac and the James.  Although the Confederate Government and President Jefferson Davis were on the lam, they hadn’t surrendered.  One by one the other armies capitulated, the last in far-away Texas where the last soldiers fruitlessly fell on May 15.

In the mid-19th Century poetrywas still the most popular literary form in America.  Everybody read it.  And it seems everyone literate enough to scratch out his or her name, tried their hand at it.  The events leading up to, during, and after the war were all documentedin the popular press, both North and South as much by poetry as by battlefield dispatches.  Probably tens of thousands were published in newspapers and gazettes both small and large.   The vast majority, of course, were dreadful—mostly breast beating and cheering for each respective side or later maudlin in grieving for loss.  But some by poets famous, obscure, and anonymous paint a vivid picture of the bloody turning point of American history.

 

                            Herman Melville in 1861.

Herman Melvillewas a struggling, nay failing, literary man in 1866 when he issued a collection of poems about the war, most of which had appeared in the press.  Like almost everything else he had written, Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War sold poorly and was snubbed by most critics.  Melville was forced to take a patronage job as a Port of New York Customs Inspector to support his family.  But the verses was far above average and taken together trace the course of the conflict.  He starts before Fort Sumter with the execution of John Brown, a hero to him as for many of his New England Unitarian and Abolitionist friends.

The Portent

 

Hanging from the beam,

      Slowly swaying (such the law),

Gaunt the shadow on your green,

      Shenandoah!

The cut is on the crown

      (Lo, John Brown),

And the stabs shall heal no more.

 

Hidden in the cap

      Is the anguish none can draw;

So your future veils its face,

      Shenandoah!

But the streaming beard is shown

      (Weird John Brown),

The meteor of the war.

 

——Herman Melville

 

As imagined by John Greenleaf Whittier--Barbara Frietche and her flag.

At war’s onset John Greenleaf Whittier had to make a terrible choice.  Known far and wide as the Quaker Poet he had to choose between his pacifist faith and his ardent abolitionism.  Abolitionism won out.  For the balance of the war he would worship with the Unitarians and lend his voice to the Union.  Early in the war he took reports of an act of heroism by an elderly lady in Maryland and created a poem that became a Union rallying cryand was required recitation materialfor generations of school children.  Like most tales, this one had a grain of fact wound up in legend.  In fact 90-year-old Barbara Frietche, who had been a personal friend of Francis Scott Key, did have a flag hung from her Fredrick, Maryland home and it was peppered by shots from angry Rebels.  But the old lady was sick in bed that day and had told her maid to bring the flag in for safe keeping.  The maid, also tasked with hiding the silver and other family valuables, forgot.  Troops under Lee did pass within a block of her home and seeing the flag peppered it with fire.  Fritche never came to the window and even if she had could probably not be heard.  But it was a great yarn for getting Yankee blood to boil. 

 

Barbara Frietche

 

Up from the meadows rich with corn,

Clear in the cool September morn,

 

The clustered spires of Frederick stand

Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

 

Round about them orchards sweep,

Apple- and peach-tree fruited deep,

 

Fair as a garden of the Lord

To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,

 

On that pleasant morn of the early fall

When Lee marched over the mountain wall,—

 

Over the mountains winding down,

Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

 

Forty flags with their silver stars,

Forty flags with their crimson bars,

 

Flapped in the morning wind: the sun

Of noon looked down, and saw not one.

 

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,

Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

 

Bravest of all in Frederick town,

She took up the flag the men hauled down;

 

In her attic window the staff she set,

To show that one heart was loyal yet.

 

Up the street came the rebel tread,

Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

 

Under his slouched hat left and right

He glanced: the old flag met his sight.

 

“Halt!”— the dust-brown ranks stood fast.

“Fire!”— out blazed the rifle-blast.

 

It shivered the window, pane and sash;

It rent the banner with seam and gash.

 

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff

Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf;

 

She leaned far out on the window-sill,

And shook it forth with a royal will.

 

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

 

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,

Over the face of the leader came;

 

The nobler nature within him stirred

To life at that woman’s deed and word:

 

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head

Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

 

All day long through Frederick street

Sounded the tread of marching feet:

 

All day long that free flag tost

Over the heads of the rebel host.

 

Ever its torn folds rose and fell

On the loyal winds that loved it well;

 

And through the hill-gaps sunset light

Shone over it with a warm good-night.

           

Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er,

And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.

 

Honor to her! and let a tear

Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.

 

Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave

Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

 

Peace and order and beauty draw

Round thy symbol of light and law;

 

And ever the stars above look down

On thy stars below in Frederick town.

 

—John Greenleaf Whittier

 

                            A Union picket on night guard by N.C. Wyeth.

A surprising amount of Civil War poetry was soldier written.  No army in the history of the world to date was as literate as the boys in blue.  If the Confederates lagged in that department, they still had plenty of young men ready to take pencil stub to scrap of paper and send it home or to the home town paper.  Some of these poems are among the most poignant of the war.  This one captures the long periods between great battles when boredom and chance encounters were the order of the day.  And like other such poems, this one was eventually set to music and published to be sung around parlor pianos.


The Picket Guard

 

All quiet along the Potomac “they say,”
“Except now and then a stray Picket”
Is shot as he walks on his beat to and fro,
By a rifleman hid in the thicket.
‘Tis nothing—a private or two, now and then,
Will not count in the news of the battle;
Not an officer lost, only one of the men,
Moaning out all alone the death rattle.

All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
Where the soldiers lie peacefully dreaming;
Their tents in the rays of the clear autumn moon,
O'er the light of the watch fire are gleaming.
A tremulous sigh, as the gentle night-wind
Through the forest leaves softly is creeping;
While stars up above, with their glittering eyes
Keep guard, for the army is sleeping.

There’s only the sound of the lone sentry’s tread,
As he tramps from the rock to the fountain,
And thinks of the two in the low trundle bed,
Far away in the cot on the mountain.
His musket falls slack, his face dark and grim,
Grows gentle with memories tender,
As he mutters a prayer for the children asleep—
For their mother—may Heaven defend her.

The moon seems to shine just as brightly as then,
That night when the love yet unspoken,
Leaped up to his lips, when low-murmured vows
Were pledged to be ever unbroken.
Then drawing his sleeve roughly over his eyes,
He dashes off tears that are welling,
And gathers his gun closer up to its place,
As if to keep down the heart swelling.

He passes the fountain, the blasted pine tree,
The footstep is lagging and weary;
Yet onward he goes, through the broad belt of light.
Toward the shade of the forest so dreary.
Hark! was it the night-wind that rustled the leaves?
Was it moonlight so wondrously flashing?
It looks like a rifle—“Ha! Mary, good bye,”
And the life blood is ebbing and plashing.

All quiet along the Potomac to-night,
No sound save the rush of the river;
While soft falls the dew on the face of the dead,
The Picket’s off duty forever.

 

—Anonymous song lyric

Probably soldier written..

 Johnson’s New Catalogue of Songs

 

Civil War dead photographed by Alexander Gardner.

As the war dragged on the senseless horror of it overwhelmed the early romantic nonsense.  George Henry Boker was a very successful Philadelphia businessman who dabbled with some success as a poet and playwright.  The war converted the one-time Democrat into a staunch Republican and Unionist who lent his pen to the Federal cause.  As ardent as he was, by war’s end he was worn down by ceaseless tragedy.

Untitled Poem

 

Blood, blood! The lines of every printed sheet
     Through their dark arteries reek with running gore;
     At hearth, at board, before the household door,
     'T is the sole subject with which neighbors meet.
Girls at the feast, and children in the street,
     Prattle of horrors; flash their little store
     Of simple jests against the cannon's roar,
     As if mere slaughter kept existence sweet.
O, heaven, I quail at the familiar way
     This fool, the world, disports his jingling cap;
     Murdering or dying with one grin agap!
Our very Love comes draggled from the fray,
     Smiling at victory, scowling at mishap,
     With gory Death companioned and at play.

—George Henry Boker

from Poems of the War (1864)

Of course the end of the war was a bitter pill for those who fought so long on the losing side.  Many simply could not believe it.  For years the out manned, out gunned, and out produced Confederates had whipped the Union or fought them to a standstill.  But that standstill sealed their doom.  In the end the inevitable tidal wave engulfed them.  This soldier poem captures that moment.  Sadly, in a few years, such sentiments, and the memories of all those early gloriesbecame enshrined in the holy Lost Cause and fueled the backlash that resulted in the Jim Crow laws, the disenfranchisement of Freedmen, and almost virtual return to slavery for many Southern Blacks.

Appomattox poem

 

 I stand here on this dusty road,
My rifle by my side.
They say we must surrender
And yet I’m filled with pride.
In knowing deep within my heart,
I gave my Southland all,
Like every man who took up arms
And answered Freedoms’ call.
I’ve worn the gray most proudly
And loved our banners dear.
To give them up and walk away,
The thought brings me to tears.
The worst for our brave men.
At least we’ll all be going home,
To be with Kith and Kin.

Throughout the years that follow,
This tragic fateful day,
We’ll be proud of our fair flag
And how we wore the gray.

—Anonymous

Probably Confederate soldier written

 

Since Herman Melville started all of this off, we will let him have the last word on behalf of the victorious Yanks.

The Surrender At Appomattox

 

(April, 1865.)

As billows upon billows roll,
On victory victory breaks;
Ere yet seven days from Richmond’s fall
And crowning triumph wakes
The loud joy-gun, whose thunders run
By sea-shore, streams, and lakes.
The hope and great event agree
In the sword that Grant received from Lee.

The warring eagles fold the wing,
But not in Caesar’s sway;
Not Rome o’ercome by Roman arms we sing,
As on Pharsalia's day,
But Treason thrown, though a giant grown,
And Freedom’s larger play.
All human tribes glad token see
In the close of the wars of Grant and Lee.

 

—Herman Melville

 

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Brontë and Dickinson Don’t Go to Church—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

The only universally acknowledged photograph of Emily Dickinson take about 1847 when she was 16 or 17 years old.

In the semi-cloister of her family’s Amherst, Massachusetts home Emily Dickinson read and admired the work of Emily Brontë, the most famous of the three English literary sisters and author of Wuthering Heights.  Brontë died in 1848 at age 30.  That was just about the time that the only universally acknowledge photo of Dickinson was taken as teen age girl.  Likely she had already read Wuthering Heights and perhaps the collection of poetry that the three sisters published together.  If not, she soon would, and find a kindred spirit.  Brontë was rooted firmly in English Romanticism.  Dickinson breathed the air of its American cousin, Transcendentalism.  Both eschewed orthodox Christianity and embraced an alternate, personal spirituality that still speaksto us today.

                        Emily Brontë. 

No Coward Soul is Mine

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men’s hearts: unutterably vain;

Worthless as withered weeds,

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

 

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thine infinity;

So surely anchored on

The steadfast rock of immortality.

 

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years,

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.

 

Though earth and man were gone,

And suns and universes ceased to be,

And Thou wert left alone,

Every existence would exist in Thee.

 

There is not room for Death,

Nor atom that his might could render void:

Thou—Thou art Being and Breath,

And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

 

—Emily Brontë

 


Some keep the Sabbath going to church

 

Some keep the Sabbath going to church —

I keep it, staying at Home —

With a Bobolink for a Chorister —

And an Orchard, for a Dome —

 

Some keep the Sabbath in Surplice —

I just wear my Wings —

And instead of tolling the Bell, for Church,

Our little Sexton — sings.

 

God preaches, a noted Clergyman —

And the sermon is never long,

So instead of getting to Heaven, at last —

I’m going, all along.

 

--Emily Dickinson

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Poetry on the Side—Ernest Hemingway—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Ernest Hemingway at his trusty Underwood #5 portable hunt-and-peck typing in the great outdoors with a pile of already completed pages on his make-shift desk.  Just as he imagined himself--the writer as hero. 

PBS ran Ken Burns’s new four hour documentary about Ernest Hemingway the last two evenings.  I have to admit that as much as I admire Burns’s work, I haven’t seen it yet.  I have recorded it but will have to wait for chunks of time when my wife Kathy doesn’t want the TV set.  She would never sit down that long for an examination of figure who she has never read but thinks of as a misogynistic, macho creep

And that has been Hemingway’s problem. Once consideredthe most important American novelist of the 20th Century—and there was plenty of competition for that honorwidely read and the recipientof the Nobel Prize for Literature.  He has fallen deeply out of favor in more recent decades.  That has been due as much as anything to his carefully constructed public image as a rugged he-man adventurer, a lover of war and blood sports, a two-fisted drinker, and a man who carelessly used women.

His forthright, Spartan, and straight forward style once considered a revolutionary liberation from ornate prose and sentimentalism is now viewed by modern critics as too anchored in time and place, too bland, and worst of all lacking introspection.  Feminists set him up to be an idol of patriarchy to be brought crashing down.

There is truth to all of that, of course.  But it also is not always supported by either his life or work.  Seen by modern conservatives as a model of masculinity and a lover of guns and glory, he was a life-longleftist and often wracked by the depression and self-doubtthat lead him ultimately to swallow a shotgun blast.  He admired and loved strong women and his female characters were well developedand usually the moral superior to the flawed men who loved them.  For every drop if heroism in his male protagonists there was plenty of ambiguity and angst.

Hemingway, no matter what we think of him, is so identifiedas a novelist, short story writer, reporter, and essayist that it may come as a shock that he also wrote poetry.  He wrote verse his entire life but most frequently in his younger years spanning his Nick Adams in the woods days, World War I, and jazz age Paris.  88 of those poems were included in Hemingway’s first privately printed book along with short stories.  Those poems were well served by the same economy of style and clarity as his prose.  They have stood up very well.

Along With Youthcomes from those days when Hemingway was escaping the “broad lawns and narrow minds” of his native Oak Park, Illinois by tramping around the woodsand streams of Michigan fishing, hunting, and trapping.

Along With Youth

A porcupine skin,

Stiff with bad tanning,

It must have ended somewhere.

Stuffed horned owl

Pompous

Yellow eyed;

Chuck-wills-widow on a biassed twig

Sooted with dust.

Piles of old magazines,

Drawers of boy’s letters

And the line of love

They must have ended somewhere.

Yesterday’s Tribune is gone

Along with youth

And the canoe that went to pieces on the beach

The year of the big storm

When the hotel burned down

At Seney, Michigan.

 

—Ernest Hemingway

 

Hemingway in an Italian military hospital in his Red Cross ambulance corps uniform with Agnes von Kurowsky, the lovely nurse eight years his senior he fell madly in love with.

Champs d’Honneur was written after the Great War where Hemmingway served as an ambulance driver in Italy and was gravely wounded.  Not much glorifying war here,

Champs d’Honneur

Soldiers never do die well;

         Crosses mark the places—

Wooden crosses where they fell,

         Stuck above their faces.

Soldiers pitch and cough and twitch—

         All the world roars red and black;

Soldiers smother in a ditch,

         Choking through the whole attack.

 

—Ernest Hemingway

 

“All Armies are the Same” is another bitter anti-war verse.

 

“All Armies are the Same”

 

All armies are the same

Publicity is fame

Artillery makes the same old noise

Valor is an attribute of boys

Old soldiers all have tired eyes

All soldiers hear the same old lies

Dead bodies always have drawn flies

 

—Ernest Hemingway


                                    Hemingway outside his Paris apartment about the time he wrote these short poems.

The Age Demanded was written in post-warParis.  The iron pants in the verse referred to the braces he had to wear on his legs in his long recovery from his war wounds.

The Age Demanded

 

The age demanded that we sing

And cut away our tongue.

 

The age demanded that we flow

And hammered in the bung.

 

The age demanded that we dance

And jammed us into iron pants.

 

And in the end the age was handed

The sort of shit that it demanded.

 

—Ernest Hemingway

 

 

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Two Takes on Dust—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin


As common as dust, my Grandma Mona used to say by which she meant as ubiquitous as sun rises and death.  Despite the most diligent attempts to defeat it, it settles everywherebecause it floats invisibly, save in a ray of sunshine through a window. We inhale it with every breath we take.  In my less-than-cleaned study it lies thick on every surface that is not touched daily.  But other than in that Bible verse cited at funerals and Woody Guthrie ballads precious little attention has been paidto this commonplace fact of life by writers and poets.

Here are two who noticed.

                Danusha Laméris

Danusha Laméris was born in 1971 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House Press) in 2014which was selected as the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize, and Bonfire Opera (University of Pittsburgh Press, in 2020. She teaches poetry independentlyand lives in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains in coastal California.

Dust

It covers everything, fine powder,

the earth’s gold breath falling softly

on the dark wood dresser, blue ceramic bowls,

picture frames on the wall. It wafts up

from canyons, carried on the wind,

on the wings of birds, in the rough fur of animals

as they rise from the ground. Sometimes it’s copper,

sometimes dark as ink. In great storms,

it even crosses the sea. Once

when my grandmother was a girl,

a strong gale lifted red dust from Africa

and took it thousands of miles away

to the Caribbean where people swept it

from their doorsteps, kept it in small jars,

reminder of that other home.

Gandhi said, “The seeker after truth

should be humbler than the dust.”

Wherever we go, it follows.

I take a damp cloth, swipe the windowsills,

the lamp’s taut shade, run a finger

over the dining room table.

And still, it returns, settling in the gaps

between the floorboards, gilding the edges

of unread books. What could be more loyal,

more lonely, and unsung?

—Danusha Laméris

From Bonfire Opera by Danusha Laméris, © 2020.

What goes up, must come down.  Dust enveloped Manhattan after the Twin Towers collapsed on 9/11.

The Old Man has frequently inflicted his verse on the reader of this blog.  This poem is one of several he wrote over the years marking the anniversaries of the 9/11 attacks.  This one appeared nearly 20 years ago.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust

September 9, 2011, Crystal Lake, Illinois

 

The ash and dust, they say,

            rose as high as the skirts

            of the ionosphere.

Prevailing winds pushed it

            across oceans and around the world.

 

Most has sifted by now to the earth.

Some orbits still,

motes descending

            now and again.

 

My study is a cluttered mess.

Dust lays on any unattended

horizontal surface,

makes webs in corners,

balls in computer wire rats nests,

devils under bookshelves.

 

That speck, that one there,

            the one by the stapler,

            just might be what’s left

            of the Dominican cleaner

            who left her children

            with their Abuela

            and went to work

            in the sky

            only to be vaporized.

 

Hola, señora.

It is an honor to meet you.

 

Patrick Murfin


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Verse for George Floyd as Cop Trial Goes On—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Protests continue daily in Minneapolis during the trial of Derek Chauvlin for the murder of George Floyd.  Despite massive security and media-stoked fears of a rampage demonstrations have been angry, determined, but peaceful.  There is even guarded hope that at long last a racist cop will be held accountable.

The second week of the trial of George Floyd’s murder resumes today in Minneapolis.  Things are not going well for former cop Derek Chauvin who decided to take a knee on Blackness.  The trial has been aired live on cable and excerpts have dominated news casts and social media posts.  Video from every possible angle has been played and replayed.  As the warnings attest the scene is relentlessly disturbing.  Witnesses have wept again and again on the stand.  Paramedics described their own distress at trying to get Chauvin to remove his knees so that they could at least try to resuscitate the already dead man.  Police superiors have testified that  Chauvin recklessly violated department policy on restraint.  Today the Chief of Police is slated to testify to the same thing.

Meanwhile the Defense is trying to portray Floyd as a dangerous drug abuser whose death was not due to suffocation but to an overdose and underlying cardiac issues.  To hear them tell it Chauvin’s knee was in the vicinity purely by chance.  They like to replay footage of the big, heavily muscled Black man initially struggling against be placed in a car.  They hope that at least one juror will be frightened and cause a hung jury.  It’s their only hope.  They have no chance of winning an acquittal.

At this point huge numbersof Americans are also virtual jurors.  Let me put this plainly—at this point anyone who believes that Chauvin is somehow innocent is a prima facie racist.  Peddle outraged denials elsewhere.

Poets, of course, have been commenting on George Floyd’s murder and the broken system it exposed from the beginning here are just three examples I picked from hundreds.

Tori Derricotte.

Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan on April 12, 1941.  Her family life was marked by death, abuse, pain, and racism.  Her Roman Catholic schooling and light skin, often made he feel alienated and guilty. She received her B.A. from Wayne State University and an M.A. in English Literature from New York University.  She is a professor of writing at the University of Pittsburgh and won a 2012 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation, a summer workshop for African-American poets.  Derricotte’s books of poetry include The Empress of the Death House (1978), a collection that draws on her early experiences at her grandparents’ funeral home in Detroit; Natural Birth (1983), Captivity (1989), Tender(1997), winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize, and The Undertaker’s Daughter (2011).

Why I Don’t Write About George Floyd

Because there is too much to say
Because I have nothing to say
Because I don’t know what to say
Because everything has been said
Because it hurts too much to say
What can I say what can I say
Something is stuck in my throat
Something is stuck like an apple
Something is stuck like a knife
Something is stuffed like a foot
Something is stuffed like a body

 

—Toi Derricotte

Olive Senior.

Olive Senior has been sharing poems on Twitterthroughout the Coronavirus pandemic in a series called Pandemic Poetry. You can check those out at @oliveseniorB for Breathe was first published as part of Pandemic Poems.

Senior is a Jamaican-Canadian writerand the author of 18 books of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, and children's literature. She is a winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, and her collection Over the Roofs of the Worldwas shortlisted for the 2005 Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. In 2019, Senior delivered the prestigious Margaret Laurence Lecture. Her latest book is the children’s picture book Boonoonoonous Hair, which was illustrated by Laura James.

B for Breathe

It takes one’s breath away: a man dying during a pandemic that

takes away one’s breath, no ventilator but one brave spectator,

recording 

 

his last breath, his need please

 

somebody

 

taking the knee on the neck from men who from birth breathed in

tainted air, imbibed a foul history, burning crosses

 

still smouldering

 

i can’t breathe

 

like the hot breath of anger consuming the cities

that inhaled this before

this white heat this

burning sensation in the throats of

the numerous ones held down and 

 

mama

mama

i can’t

 

Come on, George Floyd, breathe in the timeless rhythm of Mother

Earth waiting for you, for all her lost children, for justice

 

I’m through

I’m through

 

—Olive Senior


Jonathon Peterson a/k/a  JP da Poet

Jonathon Peterson is an Alabama spoken word artist and poetry slam performer who was profiled in the Montgomery Advertiser for this poem when the murder of George Floyd seemed like the straw that broke the camel’s back.  He writes and performs under the name JP da Poet.  As the father of a son the accumulated pain of injustice after injustice is more acute.

If Black Lives Mattered

Before I wrote this poem, I sat with my pen in my hand for eight minutes and 46 seconds,

Then second guessed myself like maybe I got the time wrong cause this just seems too long for a man to have a knee on his neck,

I checked time again on impulse, pulse racing, chasing a logical explanation for the asphyxiation of another Black man at the hands of the men in blue who swore to protect and serve.

I heard him sayin’ he can’t breathe.

To me, logically that meant air wasn't properly reaching his lungs, he hung on as long as he could,

But when the weight of the world's wicked ways weighs on your throat you would choke, too.

The situation is so sad, rest in peace George Floyd.

And it seems it happens too often.

They offed 10 in the last two months.

An aunt, Atatiana Jefferson, we learned her name after shot in her home playin’ video games in front of her nephew who had to watch his loved one killed by someone he thought were the good guys.

I try to imagine how an EMT asleep in her home shot after shocked a no-knock warrant warranted police to force entry in her home in the middle of the night,

I fight to find the logic in justification of the situation. Breonna Taylor, gone to soon.

It’s messed up we live in a society where in so many cases like Kalief Browder were treated guilty until proven innocent.

With no evidence even evident somehow we’re still prime suspect.

The system is backwards and broken,

And I’m not joking or jivin’ when I say simply for ridin’ with an improper signal can give off a signal for a cop,

To hold you for an hourlong traffic stop.

Enough is enough when I saw my sister body-slammed in handcuffs,

And yes, I can attest with Sandra Bland's family,

That that was such an unnecessary tragedy.

But you see,

But you see, when in broad daylight for a broken taillight a brother named Walter Scott can be shot in the back on video with evidence planted. 

Should finally show what we perceived as straight is actually slanted,

And as crooked as some of these politicians.

And through repetition time and time again,

We’re losing our Black men to the pen not for the offense,

But at the hands of a great conviction rate.

Prosecutor turns persecutor,

If you don't have enough money for bond then you are merely a pawn in this game when we are the weakest pieces.

 

You see Black lives mattering started tiptoeing on that fine line around the time they introduced court fines and minimum sentencing guidelines.

And how is it that the time we get is always what we deserve?

But the same predicament, different pigment, gets them off with time served is just not fair.

But you see fairness,

Fairness took its last breath asking for reprieve using the words “I can't breathe,” by George Floyd or Eric Garner,

Another brother whose only crime was selling short Newports, no weapon.

Mike Brown gunned down.

Trayvon Martin and Tamir Rice,

Whatever they did, they were still some kids who deserve to live,

If Black lives mattered,

Then why are our hearts being shattered as our ashes are being scattered into the winds of injustice.

I want you to take a second and close your eye,

For real do it close your eyes.

Now imagine you've been confined to a 8-by-5 for the last 30 years of your life.

Now take a deep breath.

What if I told you your sentence was death for a crime you did not do.

 

Look up the story, it's really true.

Right here in Alabama, Anthony Ray Hinton could have been anyone of you.

And that’s as real as the man’s missed appeals for not copping to a plea deal,

If Black lives mattered.

If Black lives mattered then Laquan McDonald wouldn’t have received one less bullet in his body than he got the number of candles on his last birthday cake.

And as we lay in the wake of the Flint water tragedy,

These modern-day catastrophes from Freddie Gray back to the Jena 6,

It literally makes me sick to even know I have to pen this.

But let me ask you a question, 

If Black lives matter then please tell me why our hearts are still being shattered as our ashes are still being scattered into the winds of injustice?

 

JP da Poet


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Alternative Eyes on Easter—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin
An Orthodox icon of the myrrh-bearing women--up to eight of them in the Greek tradition and the Three Marys of the Catholics--are shown Jesus's empty tomb by an angel.  Thus the central miracle of the Resurrection was revealed. I think I have bewailed before the difficulty in finding good Easter poetry beyond a handful of familiar pieces.  The problem isn’t a shortage of verse—there is an avalanche of the stuff out there—it is a dearth of quality.  Much does not rise above clumsy greeting card sentiment, a lot is silly stufffor kids either all bunnies and eggs or fitful attempts to introduce five year olds to the mysteriesof resurrection.  Worst of all are poems encrusted with a theology that makes me choke and want to spit it ...
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Billy Collins on Living in the Now—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin
In pop culture spirituality living in the now is always sun-drenched and ecstatic.  Not all my moments can live up to this expectation.  But I may be to shallow for the deeper implications. For at least the last couple of decades the most common spiritual advice must have been some variant on the need to live in the now.  Forget the past, the wisdom goes—you can’t change or do anything about it and you certainly can’t go back to it.  Likewise, don’t dwell on the future—no matter your dreams, no matter how carefully you have planned, there is no way to insureyour hopes or on the other hand avoid your greatest dread.  Be content  to be present in the moment you are living now the only time in which your actions or inactions...
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Jerry Pendergast on Gil Scott Heron—National Poetry Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Jerry Pendergast

Jerry Pendergast is a Chicago poet and activist who frequently shares his work on the Chicago Revolutionary Poets Brigade Facebook group.  He was a regular at such city venues as the  Guild Annex and Green Mill Tavern and looks forward to returning to the stage.  His work is often infused with music, especially jazz.  He also draws inspiration from the struggles of working people and the oppressed.

                            Gil Scott Heron.

In this poem Pendergast evokes the spirit of Gil Scott Heron, the legendary musician and poet who has sometimes been called the God Father of Hip Hop verse.  For more about Heron and his most famous song/poem The Revolution Will Not Be Televised check out the lyrics from his 1971 album of the same name.

The cover of Gil Scott Heron's seminal 1970 album The Revolution Will Not be Televised 

The Heron Remembered

 

1

You called out “What's the word?”

We shouted back “Johannesburg”

Hips, shoulders feet picked up the rhythm

No floor director

called out the correct steps

Can this be played on the dance hour?

Your voice

The fingers that joined you

on the piano

the guitar

were schooled in the blues

But can we call it that?

Sax rising

Piano holding the ground

Your voice stretching

the lower register

Can we call it Jazz?

You chanted

“The Revolution will not be televised”

above percussion

On SPIRITS

You bade us

“Keep the Nerve”

“Don’t let the Spirit Die”

“Don’t Give Up”

 

2

Can the voice

soaring with the sax

fly from Watts to Harlem?

Reach a mid pitch Groove in Roxbury

Ocean currents

Carry them

To Bog side?

Can Northerlies

Blow them South

To Alabama, Arizona

Can they join the street marchers, dancers

in Honduras?

 

3

The Heron remembered

narrated the history

of the music

the struggles

But sometimes

instruments were electric

Can we call it Folk?

If the lyrics

the rhythms

are long remembered

Can we call any of his songs

Classics?

If the songs

spoken word

his life

give strength

to anyone fighting

long term occupations

addiction,

mass eviction

poisoned elements,

Or for the right to save seeds

Can we call them

Spirituals?

 

Gil Scott Heron born on April first but he was no damn fool.

 

—Jerry Pendergast 

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Our National Poetry Month Series for 2021 Kicks off With Leslé Honoré

By: Patrick Murfin

It’s National Poetry Month Again!  If you have been visiting here for a while, you know what that means—it’s our 10th annual round-up of daily doses of verse!  If you are new, here’s the scoop.  Every day all month I will feature poets and their poems.  I aim to be as broad and inclusiveas possible to style, subject, period, gender, race, and neglected voices

I don’t want just a parade of the usual dead white men, but a lot of them did write some damn fine poetry, so they have their place here too.  As always, selections follow my own tastes and whims.  Yours may be different.  But I am open toeager for—suggestions, especially for contemporary writers.  I do not subscribe to dozens of little magazines or prowl the internet for poetry posts.  I often only stumble on new and unknown poets and I am sure I miss some great stuff.  Please feel free to turn me on to some—or be bold and submit your own

Here is a challenge—Poets, send me your responses to the Coronavirus pandemic be it personal, political, or polemical.  Everybody, send me pieces that catch your eye.  I don’t and can’t promise to use everything.  E-mail me at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net.

Blaxican poet Leslé Honoré now based in Chicago has been making a splash with her timely and topical verse.

Leslé Honoré describes herself as a “Blaxican Poet, artivist, and author.” Her book Fist & Fire is a collection of powerful, unflinchingpoems that confront issues of social justice through the lens of real human lives and voices, and dive into the flames of love within the context of a relationship.  Her poetry and life empowers youth to find their voices through the arts, and to inspire people to stand in the gaps that social, economic, and racial inequities create.

Born and raised in Gardena, California, she remains deeply rooted in the heritage and culture of her father, a native of New Orleans and mother who was born in Sinaloa, Culiacan, Mexico, and immigrated to the US when she was 15. 


Honoré’s first book Fist & Fire:  Poems that Inspire action and ignite passion stirred a lot of interest.

Poetry was always how Honoré expressed herself, discovering her writer’s voice in childhood.  She further honed her work at Xavier University of Louisiana where she studied English Literature and Spanish. She was a featured speaker at the inaugural Tedx Grand Boulevard in 2020. She has spoken and read her work at Obama Foundation convenings and events, the 2020 Watermark Innovation Conference, Elevated Chicago Symposium, the City of Chicago’s 19th Amendment Commemoration, Latino Progresando’s 2020 MEXtalks,  the University of Illinois Chicago’s Speaking Anarcha’s Name, the Mercantile Library in Cincinnati,  and at events including the Silver Room Block Party and National Period Day. She has been featured in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and on WBEZ (NPR), The Kendall Moore Show on WVON, and all major Chicago TV news outlets.  She also hosts a web-based series, Bestie Shine, with her friend, artist David Anthony Geary.

Leslé lives in Chicago with her three children Sage, Solomon, and Scarlett. Her forthcoming book, Letters and Lagniappe, will be released this year. You can follow Leslé on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  Visit her web page for much more information.

Honoré has frequently been featured on broadcast media and is a regular presence on social media.

Honoré’s poem for Women’s History Month is the perfect segue from that observance to National Poetry Month.

This is for the women

With 9 to 5s

And 7 to 3s

First shifts

And graveyard

With full times

And part times

Who have more month left

Than money

But still make rent

With passports

With no stamps

With vision boards

Of destinations

They are saving to see

With dreams they tuck away

And pull out late at night

Or early in the morning

While the babies are still sleep

Turn it over in their hands

And then shelve it again for safe keeping

This is for the women

Without titles without pensions

With some college

And a lot of loans

With late night classrooms

Online studies

Who won’t give up

Who run the world

On grit and perseverance

This is for the women

Who are anything but

Ordinary

But the world sees as regular

This is for the magicians

Who weave spells of hope

For their children

While putting their hopes on pause

This is for the over the counter

Beauty Queens

With Wet and Wild Lips

And Walgreens legs

And Suave smelling hair

For the women who look in the mirror

To see some one familiar

Because they rarely see reflections

Any where else

For the hustlers

Who with tired feet

And tired backs

And spirits whispering

Keep moving

We are almost there

For the women who know

Liberation isn’t found in the clothes they wear

The shoes on their feet

But the dignity in their souls

This is a song for you

Resourceful

And resilient

Moving mountains for your family

I see you

Stunning and Strong

I see you

Brilliant and beautiful

while putting their hopes on pause

With passports

With no stamps

This is for the women

With 9 to 5s

And 7 to 3s

First shifts

And graveyard

With full times

And part times

Who have more month left

Than money

But still make rent

With vision boards

Of destinations

They are saving to see

With dreams they tuck away

And pull out late at night

Or early in the morning

While the babies are still sleep

Turn it over in their hands

And then shelve it again for safe keeping

This is for the women

Without titles without pensions

With some college

And a lot of loans

With late night classrooms

Online studies

Who won’t give up

Who run the world

On grit and perseverance

This is for the women

Who are anything but

Ordinary

But the world sees as regular

This is for the magicians

Who weave spells of hope

For their children

While putting their hopes on pause

This is for the over the counter

Beauty Queens

With Wet and Wild Lips

And Walgreens legs

And Suave smelling hair

For the women who look in the mirror

To see some one familiar

Because they rarely see reflections

Any where else

For the hustlers

Who with tired feet

And tired backs

And spirits whispering

Keep moving

We are almost there

For the women who know

Liberation isn’t found in the clothes they wear

The shoes on their feet

But the dignity in their souls

This is a song for you

Resourceful

And resilient

Moving mountains for your family

I see you

Stunning and Strong

I see you

Brilliant and beautiful

I see you

Making a life

Out of thin air

Today is for you

An ordinary day

Unmarked on the calendar

No decorations at target

No songs to commemorate

Just an ordinary day

Full of promise

Full of possibilities

Full of hope

Full of magic

Just like you

You who pushes on

You who doesn’t give up

You who bends but doesn’t break

You

This is for you

You with the stars in your hair

Sun on your lips

Moonlit cheeks

This is for you

You are anything but regular

You are the

UNIVERSE

 

—Leslé Honoré

 

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Abigail’s Letter to John Laid Down Early Demands for the Ladies

By: Patrick Murfin
Abigail Adams kept up a frequent and detailed correspondence with her husband John while he was in Philadelphia attending the Continental Congress. Note --a fitting wrap up to Women's History Month. On this date in 1776 as the Revolutionary War was still young and Boston was besieged by George Washington Abigail Adams sent a letter to her husband John who was in Philadelphia as a Delegate to the Continental Congress from their home in Braintree, Massachusetts.  The success of the war against the most powerful empire in the world was far from assured and the Declaration of Independence, of which John was a prime mover, was yet months away.  But amidst the turmoil Mrs. Adams admonishedher husband not to neglect, as male governors had don...
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Buying the Ice Box from the Tsar for Pocket Change and Lint

By: Patrick Murfin

The Negotiators--Left to right: Robert S. Chew, Secretary of State William H. Seward, William Hunter, Russian chargé d'affaires Bodisco, Russian Ambassador Baron de Stoeckl, Senator Charles Sumner. 

Secretary of State William H. Seward, a hold-over from the Lincoln Administration in the Cabinet of weak and unpopular President Andrew Johnson, concluded secret negotiations with envoys from Tsar Alexander II of Russia on March 30, 1867.  With a flourish of a pen he acquired Russian America, a huge territoryencompassing 586,412 square miles occupying the northwest of North America.

Of course the interests and claims of the indigenous peoples who had already been enslaved and abused by the Russians and who didn’t recognize the land as the Tsar’s to sell were not considered at all.

Approved by Congress, not without controversy but in good time, the Treasury Department dutifully paid for the deal in full with a single check for $7 million, the equivalent of just a little over two cents an acrevirtual pocket change.

From a narrow strip of landalong the Pacific Coast it opened up into trackless forest, rugged mountains, tundra, perpetually snowand ice covered lands on the Arctic Sea.  Except along the coast and a string of fur trading posts the new land was vastly under populatedwith only about 2,500 Russians and creoles, and 8,000 native peoples under the direct government of the Russian fur company, and an estimated 50,000 Inuit, Aleut, and other native tribes in the vast ungoverned areas.  A once lucrative tradein sea otter, harbor seal, and other furs was petering out due to excessive harvesting.  The territory had no other known resources except for timber too remote to get to markets.

Russian America in 1867.

The Russians had staked a claim to the whole Pacific Coast as far south as Spanish held Yerba Buena—later San Francisco—based on the explorations of Vitus Bering and his successors beginning in 1741.  A lucrative fur trade was established and in 1799 the Russian-America Companywas given exclusive rights and charged with governing. 

By the early 19th Century much of the area along the coast was being contested by claims by the British and Americans.  The British relied on activity by their Hudson’s Bay Company around Vancouver Island and the Americans on the explorations of Lewis and Clark and activity by John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company.  The rivalry first centered on what became called Oregon.  The Russian agreed to a treaty with the Americans in the 1840’s that ceded their costal claims south of Vancouver.

The British, however, were a more troubling rival.  Not only had the Russians been at war with them in the Crimea from 1853-56, they were emerging as a global threat the Tsarist empire.  After gold was discovered along the Thompson River in 1858, the British established the Crown Colony of British Columbia to reinforce their claims on the mainland north of the recently settled borderwith American-held Oregon abutting the already established Crown Colony of Vancouver (1849) on the island.  These territories began to fillwith gold seekers and settlers, were soon fairly strongly garrisoned with troops and the natural harbors made a perfect base for the mighty Royal Navy.

In St. Petersburg, the Russian government determined that its North American possessions were indefensible in the event of new hostilities with Britain.  Feelers went out to both the British and Americans about a possible sale.  The British turned the offer down, probably believing that they would sooner or later come into possession anyway. Serious negotiations with the United States never got underway after the Civil War broke out.

The end of the war in the in U.S coincided with a huge loan from the Rothschilds to the Tsar to pay off the debts of the Crimean War coming due.  Short on cash and fearing default, the Tsar dispatched a high level team to Washington to negotiate a deal that would pay off the loan, or most of it, and checkmate British ambitions in the Northern Pacific.


The Treasury Department check for $7 million  in specie used to pay for Alaska and stamped "Paid/" 

The shrewd Steward recognized that he had the Russians over the barrel.  He needed to buy the territory for a sum that would notrequire any borrowing on the US’s part and which could easily be paid in a lump sum out of Treasury reserves.  The Russians were forced to settle for $7 million, far less than they had hoped.

The history books would have usbelieve that the whole nation mockedSeward’s Folly as a wasteful, bad investment.  But it was actually only a noisy minority in the press who made the biggest stink.  Most Americans, if they paid attention at all, where more than happy to grab more landand pinch British Columbia in on both sides.  Many believed that the purchase would lead to the eventual acquisition of the British colonies on the coast.  The treaty sailed through a Senate dominated by a Republican super majority, many of the Senators loyalto Seward, if not his erstwhile Democratic boss.

A typical cartoon mocking the sale shows Seward and President Andrew Johnson hauling away ice while a laughing Russian officer makes off with a $7 bag of gold.

But the protesting press was loudand creative.  Alaska was denounced as a frozen wilderness not worth accepting even as a gift.  One unknowingly prescient editorialist said that the government would never recoup its investment unless gold was unexpectedly discovered at some distant time.

Of course gold was discovered, but not until 1898 when the Alaskan Gold Rush erupted.  By that time other Alaskan resources, particularly its fisheries, were also beginning to pay off.

But all of that was far in the future when Russian America became the U. S. Department of Alaska under the military governance of General Jefferson C. Davis—no, not the former Confederate President, the former Union officer.  A ceremony in the muddy streets of Sitka on October 16, 1867 outside of the log Government House hauled down the Russian Double Eagle flag—after three soldiers had to be sent shinnying up the flag pole to cut it loose from a snag—and raised the Stars and Stripes .  A handful of American troops and ships in the harborrattled off a ragged salute.


General Jefferson C. Davis, seated, takes control of Alaska in Sitka from Russian officials.  Note the portrait of the Tsar being taken down.  It is doubtful that a portrait of President Andrew Johnson who was on shaky ground with Congress and would soon face impeachment was hung in its place.

The Russian residents and Creoles were supposed to be given three years to take American citizenship or return to their homeland.  But General Davis ordered most Sitka residents evicted from their homes to make way for Americans and general lawlessness soon overtookthe district.  Most Russians packed up their belongings and headed home on the first overcrowded ships available. 

Alaska finally became the 49th U.S, state on January 3, 1960.

In the end the massive natural resources of Alaska including not only gold, but copper and other metals, fisheries, timber, and at last oil and natural gas, made Steward’s investmentone of the shrewdest in history.  It also became a strategic check to the Japanesein World War II and the Soviets in the Cold War.  Ask Sarah Palin who said she could see Russia from her house

 


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A Familiar Dutchman and Sweden’s Claim to an American Colony

By: Patrick Murfin

Peter Minuit, Former Governor of New Amsterdam, famous for purchasing Manhattan Island from the natives, led the Swedish colonization project after being ousted by his Dutch bosses.  

Ok, quickly now, students, go to a map and show me the location of the colony of New Sweden.  What?  You say you’ve never heard of such a thing?  Well on March 29, 1638 two ships carrying Swedish and FinnishFinland was at the time part of Swedenimmigrants sailed up Delaware River and landed near modern day Wilmington.  They claimed the river and its drainage for the New Sweden Company. 

In command was a veteran of North American colonization, Peter Minuit.  Minuit is familiar to school children as the Dutch Governor of New Netherland who supposedly swindled Native Americans out of the island of Manhattan for $24 in beads and trinkets.  Like most such arch-typical tales, the story was only half right.  Minuit did purchase the island—and near-by Staten Island—for about 60 Guilders—a significant sum in those days—in trade goods including steel ax heads, needles, hoes, drilling awls pots, and trade wampum.  A historiandescribed it as a significant “high-end technology transfer, handing over equipment of enormous usefulness.”  Both parties to the deal were happy and neither felt cheated. 

Minuit served as governor from 1626 to 1631 when he was suspended by the Dutch West Indies Company because the fur trade with Native Americans, which was supposed to finance the colony, was less remunerative than anticipated and because Minuit was suspected of skimming for his personal purse. 

Queen Christiana was the early teenage daughter of Gustavus Adolphus when Stuyvesant sailed up the Delaware River.  She was called the most learned woman in Europe but created a scandal by refusing to marry or produce an heir and by famously cross dressing.  When she abandoned Sweden's Lutheran state church and converted to Catholicism she abdicated her throne at age 28 in 1654.  She was memorably portrayed by Greta Garbo in a famous 1933 MGM biopic that wrote in a love story with a Spanish Catholic diplomat as a cover for the real Queen's lesbianism.

Outraged Minuit turned to the Swedes, who were going about the business of entering the competition for New World riches.  They were glad to have him.  Sweden, at the time, was at its height of its influence as a world power.  It ruled over much of Scandinavia including Finland, and most of Norway, portions of Russia, all of modern Estonia, Latvia, and most of Lithuania, parts of Poland, Germany, and Denmark.  The Baltic Sea was a virtual Swedish lake.  The Swedes felt more than ready to join the mercantile powers in America.  

Minuit established Fort Christina, in honor of Sweden’s twelve year old Queen.  But as Minuit well knew, the drainage of the Delaware River was claimed by the Dutch.  After establishing his colony, Minuit decided to return to Sweden for more colonists and make a dash down to the Caribbean to pick up a load of tobacco to make the trip profitable.  Unfortunately, he was killed in a hurricane off of St. Christopher. 

A museum model of Fort Christina 

Over the next dozen years 12 groups of settlers totaling more than 600 reached New Sweden and established settlements on both sides of the river.  The settlers were mostly small farmers.  They introduced a form of shelter never seen before in the new world—the log cabin—which would become the standard pioneer abode for the next two hundred years. 

A tapestry hanging in the American Swedish Museum in Philadelphia depicts the Swede's most enduring cultural legacy in the New World--the log cabin.

They had excellent relations with the local tribes and lived comfortably with the near-by Dutch until a new governor arrived in 1654 and seized the Dutch post of Fort Casamir, modern day New Castle.  The notoriously bellicose Dutch governor in New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, dispatched five armed shipsand 317 professional soldiers to retake the post.  They then proceeded up the river and forced the surrenderof Ft. Christina.  That ended Swedish sovereignty over the area. 

The wrath of peg-legged Dutch governor Peter Stuyvesant upon learning that the Swedes had captured Fort Casamir was depicted in this painting.

But the Dutch made no attempt to expel the existing settlers.  In fact they granted them extraordinary rights to retain their lands, practice their Lutheran religion, and govern themselves as a quasi-independent “Swedish Nation.”

But the Dutch themselves were not long to retain their American possessions.  After a series of wars, they were gone for good by 1674 and New Netherland became New York. 

In 1681 William Penn was granted his charter for Pennsylvania, which included the “Three Lower Counties” which make up today’s Delaware.  The Swedes, with no reinforcements coming from the mother country for decades, were quickly subsumed by the British.

Hundreds of years later an Irish American from Pennsylvania would settle in Delaware and put the small often ignored state back on the map of American consciousness.  But damned few of Joe Biden’s Senate constituentswere decedents of those old Swede settlers.   

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Zoroaster’s Clouded Birthday and Origin

By: Patrick Murfin

A contemporary Zoroastrian print depicting the sect's founder, prophet, and avatar.

March 26 was Khordad Sal celebrated as the birthday of Zoroaster also known as the Greater Noruz and which is marked six days after Noruz, the vernal equinox. 

All founders of great religions need a feast day to be celebrated by their followers.  Most often the feast is identified with the birthday, death date, transformation to godhood, or ascension to immortality.  In the case of Zoroaster, the founder of an ancient proto-monotheistic religion which blossomed in Persia (Iran) and became the state religion of vast empires, the feast is a traditional birthday.  But not only is his real birthday not known, scholars have trouble identifying the era in which he lived by margins of hundreds of years.  At least modern ones do better than the Greek historian of philosophy Diogenes and the Roman Plutarch who misdatedhim by several millennia at around 6,000 BCE.

The Fravashi are spirit angels whose traditional depictions  are often considered a major symbol of Zoroasterism.  History Channel pseudo science bunk peddlers would have you that they are representations of aliens in their space craft.

The problem with dating Zoroaster is largely a problem of jibing linguistic development with known historical events.  All stories agree that Zoroaster was a priest of an already ancient and long established polytheistic religion who developed new ideas elevating the deity Ahura Mazda of wisdom, truth, and pure goodness to the status of Supreme Being and Creator, while demoting various other deities to Fravashi, roughly analogous to angels or spirit saints and demons under a Satan-likeAngra Mainy who introduces the destructive mentality of the lie into the world.   Works of Holy Scriptures are attributed to him—Gathas, Yasna, Vendidad, Visperad, Yashts—which are included in an overarching Scripturethat includes ritual practices, prayers, and fragments of other texts not attributed to him. 

The problem is that the oldest of his texts are in an early form of an Aryan tongue known as Avestan of which the texts are the only surviving documentation.  That would seem to date these writings, 17 poems of the Gathas, to sometime before 2,000 BCE.  But later writings, including supposed autobiographical accounts of his life were written in Persian dialects from around 600 BCE.    The great age of the Gathas is what convinced the Greeks and Romans that Zororaster’s origins were very early.

Scholars now date the historic Zoroaster to somewhere in a 200 to 300 year range centering on 600 BCE.  That would indicate that he adapted as his own far more ancient teachings and popularized them.

Then there is the problem of just where the hell Zoroaster was from.  A lot of claimants for this honor.  The earliest texts identify him as coming from Airyanem Vaejah meaning roughly the Expanse of the Aryans a/k/a the Iranians.  It may reference a fast flowing river and valley, perhaps in the southern central Asian plateau or in the north of modern Afghanistan.  These same texts fail to mention any of the well-known tribes of western Iran—the Medes, Persians, and Parthians.

Like Buddhism and Christianity a miracle birth story developed around Zoroaster/Zarathustra as illustrated in this children's book.  

Later texts, however, place him in western Iran and identify his priestly cast was the Magi of the Medes and Persians.  Modern scholars tend to dismiss the possibility of him being from western Iran and argue between themselves over points of origin from central and eastern Iran, Afghanistan, Baluchistan in western modern Pakistan, Bactria on the plateau north of the Hindu-Kush Mountains, Turkmenistan, and the vast steppes west of the Volga.  Put your money down and take your pick.

Although Zoroaster’s original autobiographical writings were thought destroyed in when Alexander the Great’s Army captured Persepolis, capital of the Achaemenid Empire centered in Persia and burned the royal library there.  Or not.  Some scholars dismiss this and say that the original texts, if they existed were lost long before.  At any rate later summaries of the lost texts provide a fairly detailed biography.

Zoroaster was born into a Bronze Age Aryan culture in a priestly line, the Spitamids.  His father and mother were identified by namePoroschasp and Dughdova.  He followed the family trade but was increasingly dissatisfied with ritual practices that included animal sacrifice and the corrupt use of religion by a governing caste of princelings and soldiers to oppress the mass of common people.  He took a wife, Huvovi and together they had three sons and three daughters.

At age 30 Zoroaster was illuminated by Ahura Mazda and began preaching his revised worship of the elevated deity and his philosophy of a struggle between the forces of pure truth and goodness and those of lies and evil.  He eliminated animal sacrifice, simplified ritual, and argued against excessive religious taxes diverted to the caste of worldly rulers.  He developed a system which, for its time and place, was relatively light on miracles and magic and developed an advanced ethical philosophy.

Huvovi and his children were his first converts and his sons became his priests.  At least one daughter was said to have made astrategic marriage to a local ruler that helped spread adoption of the new religion.  Zoroaster faced many obstacles in his preaching, including the fierce opposition of traditional priests and of the nobility who felt undermined.  He was shunned and outcast in his own mother’s hometown.  Yet eventually truth and goodness—ašatriumphed over druj—the lie and much of Zoroaster’s homeland, wherever it was, was brought to the faith.

Zoroaster preaches to legendary Vishtaspa--Hystaspes to the Greeks--a king and/or Mag sage who became one of his earliest supporters and a major figure in scripture. 

No mention was made of how the Master died, but later traditions have him murdered at his altar in Balkh located in Afghanistan during a Holy War between Turans—an Iranian tribe—and the Persian Empire in 583 BCE.  This tale undoubtedly owes more to politico/religiousstruggles for legitimacy within the Persian Empire and its successors than any historical truth.

We do know that by reign of Cyrus the Great, about 560-530 BCE, Zoroastrianism was wide-spread in his newly unified Persian Achaemenid Empire, although not yet a state religion. Through their enemies the Persians, the Greeks learned about Zoroaster and his teachings, which later became influential in their emerging philosophy though the work of Plato and others.  Likewise the empire brought it to the Jews who were also influenced, especially by Zoroastrian dualitywhich shows up in the concepts of the struggle between light and darkness of the Essenes as evidenced in the Dead Sea Scrolls.  Through both the Greeks and the Jews it influenced Christianity and later Islam, which conquered the Zoroastrianheartland.

Zoroaster influenced Greek philosophers as well religions like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,  In his famous painting The School of Athens Renaissance master Raphael depicted Zoroaster--the bearded figure holding the crystal globe--among the sages in the agora.

The name Zoroaster is, in fact, the Greek form of the name which has become generally used in the West.  In Persian the name is Zarathustra, which Friedrich Nietzsche adopted for his philosophical novel, Also sprach ZarathustraThus Spoke Zarathustra—in which he put his own thoughts on the death of God and the Übermensch into the old prophet’s mouth.

Darius the Great of the Persian Achaemenid Empire was a personal devotee of Zoroaster and after his death Zoroasterism became the State religion of the empire.

When Darius I came to the Achaemenid throne in 522 BCE he was known to be a personal devotee of Ahura Mazda, but at the time that did not necessarily mean he was a Zoroastrian.  He could still have recognized the ancient pantheon but simply dedicated himself to that divinity.  On the other hand, he may have been.  Not long after Darius died, after extending the empire from Egypt and the Levant to Trace and Macedonia in the Balkans—after failing to conquer Sparta, Athens, and the Greeks—east into India, Zoroastrianism became the state religion, although other cults were generally permitted

The Achaemenids fell to Alexander, but when his heirs could not maintain his eastern empire, the Parthians arose and established an Empire from eastern Asia Minor down through both sides of the Persian Gulf and east through Afghanistan.  This empire lasted from 247 BCE to 224 AD when it disintegrated after a long series of wars with the Roman Empire and the rise of the Sasanians.  This empire would also make Zoroastrianism a state religion alongside the ancient gods of the Babylonians.

The Zoroastrians had a last, long run as an imperial religion with the Sasanian Empire, which was the chief rival of the Byzantines to the east, between 224 and 651 when it finally fell to the Islamic invasion.

The Islamic Caliphate not only absorbed the entire Sasanian Empire, it quickly expanded to cover roughly the same territory as the old Achaemenid Empire and then some. 

Despite the conquest, under the Umayyad Caliphate there was little pressureput upon the local populations to abandon their traditional religions so long as they were monotheistic, their activities did not disrupt or insult Islam, and adherents paid a taxjizya which was leveled on non-Muslims living in the realm.  Over time, however, the tax grew repressive and barriers to advancement in the Caliphate encouraged many, especially among the elite and in the major cities, to convert.  After the beginning of the Crusades there was a general backlash against all religious minorities and more oppressive steps were taken, including local rioting and massacres were allowed to transpire by authorities.

During the Caliphate the Zoroastrians had adopted a stance of non-prostilazation to convince their overloads that unlike Christians they would not try to covert Muslims.  Only those born into the religion wereaccepted as members.  In the long run, as pressure continued on their populations, this custom, along with a traditionally low birth rate, and continued abandonment of the faith for Islam, contributed to a steady decline in numbers over the ages until only a tiny minority remainedin the old Iranian and Afghan strongholds.

After a period of particularly brutal repression many adherents fled to India where they established communities on the southern west coast beginning in the 9th Century.  That community today represents the largest concentration of Zoroastrians in the world.  Known locally as the Parsis, less than 70,000 were counted in the 2001 Indian census, mostly concentrated around Mumbai

Modern Zoroastrian priests perform the Afrinagar ceremony.  They wear masks so that their sputum will not accidentally corrupt the pure flame of sacred fire in it's chalice-like cauldron. 

Their long isolation from theirancestral roots has resulted in customs that are sometimes at variance with traditional Zoroastrianism and mirrorthe Hindu communities in which they dwell.  This includes a modification of the ban on accepting those not born into the religion by accepting the children of marriages to non-Zoroastrians.  That has not, however, prevented a general population decline, hastened by emigration to the United States and Canada where there are now small communities.

Pressure in the traditional heartland has only worse. The Shi’a in Iran and the Taliban Sunni in Afghanistan, as well as Islamists in the southern Caucuses have been equally zealous in their persecutions making many refugees who have to disguise their identitiesHard numbers in these circumstances are hard to come by.  Less than 200,000 are thought to be scattered over a broad region overlapping several borders.

Today, probably fewer than one million Zoroastrians are left world-wide to celebrate their Master’s birthday.

 


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Murfin Verse on the Hope and Heartbreak of Passover

By: Patrick Murfin

The Passover Seder and its symbolic foods like matzo--unlevened bread--recount the Exodus from bondage in Egypt to the Promised Land of the Jews.

Tonight at sundown Passover or Pesach began when Jews around the world gather around  ritual tables to remember and give thanks for the events that lead to the ultimate freedom of the Hebrew people and a Promise Land of their own.  That came at a terrible price for their oppressors—a pain that they thank God for inflicting.  It is an uplifting night, a hopeful night, but also a terrible one.

The story of Passover and the Exodus from Egypt is a saga of freedom that not only gave comfort and hope to Jews through centuries of persecution but inspired others who were enslaved and oppressed.  Blacks held in bondage in America in particular used images from the tale in their coded worship and song in which the Promise Land was freedom itself.  In his the speech on the eve of hisassassination Martin Luther King evoked Moses when he declared:

I’ve been to the mountaintop…Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

Lambs blood on the lintel--a sign to God's avenging angels to pass over the homes of Jews as the first born sons of Egypt are slain.

The traditions of the Passover feast are outlined in the Hebrew scripturemaking them among the most ancient of continually observed religious celebrations in the world.  On the first night families gather for a Seder meal, the ingredients of which are prescribedand highly symbolic in re-telling the story.  A service is read from the Haggadah and is in the form of questions asked by the eldest son of the father. 

The form of the Seder meal shared today, however, dates to the early years of the Diaspora after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, not in the early years of the First Century BCE when Jewish religious life still centered on the Temple and the priests attending it.  But some sort of family meal before or after Temple rites was shared.

The Last Supper was depicted as a Seder meal early in Christian iconography.

Christians believe that the Last Super was a Seder meal, linking the two observances.  In recent years some Christians have taken to celebrating Seder meals to connect to the Jewish roots of their faith.  This is a development that is embraced as a bridge to cultural understanding by some, and as an abomination by traditional Jews.  Many Reform and Conservative congregations in the U.S. invite non-Jews to attend special Seder meals.  I once got to open the door for Elijah.

This year the first full day of Passover coincides with Palm Sunday which Christians celebrate as the entrance of Jesus to Jerusalem to prepare to celebrate the holy ritual.

Back in 2012 the Passover and Easter coincided. It was also a Blue Moon, the second full moon of the month, symbolic of how relatively rare that coincidence is.

On that same night I hosted a benefit evening of song and poetry with bluesman Andy Cohen at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry (now Tree of Life UU Congregation,  Naturally, I committed poetry for the occasion.   I have edited the poem and replaced a verse from the original.

A modern family Passover Seder by Adelle John.

Brief Haggadahfor Passover/Good Friday

For Social Gospel in Words and Music

April 6, 2012

 

The child always asks…

            What makes this night different

            from all other nights?

 

You have to think hard.

 

Somewhere children are always

being massacred for some

accident of birth

            or for mere convenience sake.

 

Somewhere slaves are plotting their escape

            and Pharaohs hitch their war chariots

            to pursue them. 

 

Somewhere the fearful faithful

            kneel at the feet of a dying master,

            a maybe Messiah

            who frightened an Empire.

 

What makes this night different?

            Nothing, son, except that

            you asked the right question.

            Now, what are we going

            to do about it?

 

—Patrick Murfin

The Plague of Locusts was just one of the punishing catastrophes visited on the Egyptians in Exodus.  The disasters we face today are even more chilling.

In 2016 the first night of Passover fell on Earth Day. At a time when the realities and projections for global ecological catastrophe have never been greater moved me to wonder—What if?

Passover/Earth Day

April 23, 2016

 

What if there were no Passover?

            What if no sacrificial blood

            smeared on the lintel

            offered any protection?

 

What if there were no Us and Them?

            What if the Pharaoh’s son

            and our sons fell alike

            from the same dark curse?

 

What if the Dark Angels were not Yahweh’s?

            What if they were our creation,

            evoked by our carelessness

            and fed by our greed?

 

What if there were nowhere to flee?

            What if no haven or Promise Land

            lay waiting even after wandering

            because we have laid waste to it too?

 

What if there were no Milk and Honey?

            What if our goats all starved,

            we killed the bees

            and parched the earth bare?

 

What if there were no Seder tables to lay?

            What if there were no progeny

            to ask what makes this night different,

            no generations ever again?

 

What if this is no mere nightmare?

 

—Patrick Murfin           

But Passover has always had a dark side, almost forgotten, glossed over, or muttered under the breath—the fate of all of those Egyptian children.  It is easy to do, especially if you envision only thesons of Pharaoh and his court—a just punishment for a king who had ordered the slaughter of Jewish babes when he got wind of a rumorthat a liberator would be born among them.  But death was visited not just on the elite, but upon all Egypt and families of every class and caste.  And that sounds, to modern ears, a bit harsh.

At Seder meals Jews acknowledge this in singing Dayenu:

Verse 3:

            If He had destroyed their idols,        

            and had not smitten their first-born   

            — Dayenu, it would have sufficed!              

Verse 4:

            If He had smitten their first-born,                 

and had not given us their wealth                  

— Dayenu, it would have sufficed!

All of this got me wondering…do the lives of one set of innocents have to be theprice for the freedom and safety of another people?  Are the babes and children of Dresden, Hiroshima, or some dusty village on the Afghan frontier God’s just collateral damage for our noble freedom?  Do Palestinian dead buy a just safety for a people nearly exterminated by others?

Uncomfortable questions, and undoubtedly ones some would wish un-asked.

Seven years ago Passover coincided not with a Blue Moon, but with a Blood Moon, a rare total eclipse under just the right atmospheric conditions that make the Moon darkened by the Earth’s umbra seem to turn red.

 

The death of the Egyptian first born struck all classes and castes. 


Blood Moon/Egyptian Passover

April 15/2014

 

Was there a Blood Moon

that terrible night

long, long ago?

 

Khonsu, Disk of the Moon

            was eaten,

            turning the color

            of old blood.

The wails of the women

            leapt from house to house,

            hovel to tent,

            it is said even to

            the palaces themselves.

The curses of the men

            bearing the limp bodies

            of their sons

            into the dark air

            damning the Moon

                        the Jews,

                                    Pharaoh himself.

 

What quarrel between bondsmen,

            the mighty and their Priests

            belongs to them, not us.

We are the farmers,

            fishers of the River      

                        and the seas,

            the shepherds, the weavers,

            the folk who cast pots,

            the brewers of beer,

            the molders of simple brick

                        from mud and dung,

            the house slaves

                        and wet nurses,

            the prostitutes…

What care we for those palaces,

            those temples,

                        those monuments,

those damnable tombs,

                        or the slaves who build them!

 

No Jews dug our wells,

            laid course of simple brick

            for our homes,

            piled a single stone on stone

            on our graves

            to save our dead

            from the jackals.

 

Yet they called down on us

            the frogs,

            spoiled our grain

            with locust,

            stoned our kids and lambs

            to death by hail,

            our flesh that erupted

            in festering boils.

 

And now our very sons!

 

What harm did they do you,

            you Jews?

 

If your  damn God

            is so powerful

            why did you not call him

            to just wipe out Pharaoh,

                        the Priests,

                                    the Generals in their chariots,

                                                and all their minions

            who have had their sandals

            on our necks

            since time began?

 

Such a God would be

worth worshiping!

Your freedom—and ours—

would be one!

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

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A Lioness Roared—Ida B. Wells and a War on Lynching

By: Patrick Murfin

                            Ida B. Wells, undaunted.
 

The word to describe Ida B. Wellswas fierce.  The word more commonly used, formidable, is entirely inadequate for a life of defiance and struggle that began in slavery during the Civil War and ended just before the New Deal.  Along the way she was the associate or opponent—sometimes both the with the same person—of Fredrick Douglas, Susan B. Anthony, Francis Willard, Jane Adams, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B Dubois, Alice Paul, and Marcus Garvey.  She exposed the lynch mobs running rampantin the Jim Crow South,  helped found the NAACP and half a dozen other important organizations, pioneered the Great Migration from the rural South to Chicago and other Northern industrial cities and demanded equal voting rights for women and African-Americans.  When she died it was as if a visceral force of nature had suddenly vanished.

Wells was born in slavery as the Civil War was rapidly marching toward the end of servitude on July 16, 1862 on a plantation in Holly Springs, Mississippi.  Her parents were among a sort of slave elite, spared the drudgery of the fieldsand by in large the lash.  Her father, James Wells, was a master carpenter and her mother, Elizabeth “Lizzie” Warrenton Wells, was a prized cook.  Both were literate and began to teachtheir daughter as soon as she was big enough to hold a book.

After emancipation, James Wells became a known Race Man, a vocal leaderamong his people and ambitious for himself, his family, and his race.  He managed to attend Shaw University, now Rust College, in Holly Springs for a while.  He was a leading member of the local chapter of the Loyalty League, a kind of Republican Party auxiliary in support of Reconstruction and opposed to the Ku Klux Klan.  He spoke for Republican candidates and his home was a center for political action, but he never himself ran for office.

If the family’s politics were firmly Republican, mother Lizzie made sure that young Ida was brought up in the firm Christian principles of the Baptist faith.

From the beginning she showed a fierce independence and a quick temper at perceived injustices.  Her parents enrolled her at Shaw, but after a few months was expelled for a sharp exchange with the college president.  She was sent to visit her grandmotherto cool down while her father tried to mend fences.

Ida’s nurturing and stimulating homewas shattered in 1878 while on that visit.  She got word that her parents and an infant brother were all struck down in a devastating yellow fever epidemic that swept the South.

Orphaned at 16, she resisted efforts to parcel out five other younger siblings to relatives.  She determined to keep the family together.  Ida took a job teaching in segregated schools, working at a distance from home and coming back on weekendsand holidays while her paternal grandmother cared for the children.  From the beginning she was outraged that as a Black teacher, her salarywas $30 a month, less than half the pay of whites. 

After a few years to improve her lot, she moved with most of her siblings to Memphis, Tennessee, the bustling economic capitol of the Mississippi Delta, and the home to a largeand sophisticated Black community.  By 1883 she was employed by the Shelby County School District in nearby Woodstock.  During the summers she studied at Fisk University across the state in Nashvilleand she also frequent visited family in Mississippi.

So Ida was a veteran train rider.  She knew the conditions of segregation in the cars well that had taken quick root after the Supreme Court had struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 the previous year.  That act had banned discrimination on public accommodations in interstate commerce—railroads. 

On May 4, 1884 Wells was ordered out of her seat by a conductor to make room for a white passenger.  She refused to be relocated to the smoking parlor and had to be dragged from the train by two or three men.  Almost 50 years before Rosa Parks, Ida would not submit so passively to arrest.

Cartoonist Kate Beaton depicted Ida B. Wells's defining moment on a train in her Hark! A Vagrant.

Back in Memphis she hired a prominent Black attorney to sue the railroad and wrote about her experience and cause in the Black church newspaper The Living Way. Despite her attorney being bribed by the railroad to sabotage her case, Wells won a $500 judgment.  The state Supreme Court later overturned the verdict and ordered her to pay steep court costs.

But the event made her a hero in the Black community and launched her on a secondary career as ajournalist and crusader.  In addition to The Living Way, she was hired to contribute articles to the Evening Star.  She was an outspoken commenter on race issues while continuing to teach.

In 1889 Rev. R. Nightingale of the Beale Street Baptist Church invited Wells to become co-owner and editor of his anti-segregationist newspaper, Free Speech and Headlight.  With the end of Reconstruction and the dawning of the Jim Crow era violence against Blacks to “put them back in their place” was escalating.  Wells made a specialty of documenting outrages.

In March of 1892 the three proprietors of the thriving People’s Grocery Store in Memphis, which was seen as competitionand an affront to white businesses, were attacked by a mob and dragged from their store.  A crowd from the community gathered to defend the men and three of the white attackers were shot.  Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, all personal friends of Wells, were arrested and jailed.  A mobbroke into the jail and murdered the men.

Wells had been out of town at the time of the attack.  But she rushed home and began writing furiously.  Finally, she concluded that if the leading business people in the Black community were not safe from lynching nobody was.  Sadlyand reluctantly she advised her readers:

There is, therefore, only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.

Receiving daily death threats Wells armed herself with a pistol.

Three months after her friends were lynched a mob attacked and burned the offices of Free Speech and Headlight.

                                            Well's classic lynching expose made her famous

She took up the cause of exposing and fighting lynch law with a vengeance and unmatched passion.  Speaking to women’s clubs around the country about her documented research on how widespread it had become, Wells raised enough money to publish a pamphlet,  Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases. Later she documented the atrocities in detail in an even more shocking book, The Red Record, which made her a celebrity. 

Ida also breached the taboo topic of sex, repudiating the popular myth that many lynching were to protect pure white womanhood from predatory Black males.  She document that most interracial sexual liaisons were not only voluntary, but were initiated by whites, women as well as men. 

Sooner rather than later she had to take her own advice.  In 1893 she relocated to Chicago, the tip of the spear of the Great Migration which would fill northern cities with southern Blacks.  She continued to speak out on lynching and contributed to black newspapers. 

But she did not confine herself to the issue of lynching.  She had been drawn to Chicago by the World Columbian Exposition.  She was soon collaborating with Fredrick Douglas in urging a Black boycott of the Fair in protest to discrimination in hiring construction workers and more skilled workers—Blacks were only hired for the most menial tasks and as waitersand porters.  She contributed to the pamphlet, Reasons Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition.  More than 20,000 copies were circulated to fair visitors.

Wells launched an extensive speaking tour which took her to many northern cities and to visits to Englandto promote her anti-lynching campaign.  She was greeted as a hero in London.  She also metand was impressed by the leading English Suffragettes.  While in town she became embroiled in a bitter public newspaper exchange with another visiting American reformer, Francis Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union who asserted that Blacks were not ready for or deserving of equality until they gave up drinking, which she said was epidemic. Wells, herself a teetotaler, refuted the charges in none tootemperate language.

In 1895 Wells married the editor of Chicago’s first major Black newspaper, Chicago Conservator, Ferdinand L. Barnett.  Barnett was also a lawyer and former Assistant States Attorney.  They had met shortly before her departure from Memphis when Barnett served as her pro bono attorney in a libel case.  She became step mother to his two children and the devoted couplehad four more.  She continued her public career but frankly sometimes had difficulty balancing home and other commitments.

                                    Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett with her children in 1909.

Well’s interest in women’s issues was almost as strong as her devotion to her race.  She felt the two causes were not only complimentary, butinseparable.  In 1896, Wells founded the National Association of Colored Women, and also founded the National Afro-American Council. She also formed the Women’s Era Club, the first civic organization for Black women which was later renamed for its founder.

The latter organization brought her into close collaboration with Jane Adamsand they jointly campaigned against the segregation of Chicago Public Schools and on other reforms. 

Her frequent lectures on behalf of universal suffrage attracted the attention and admirationof the aging founder of the movement, Susan B. Anthony.  When Wells had to dial back some of her commitments for a while after the birth of her second child, Anthony publicly lamented the loss.

In 1909 she was one of the prominent leadersto join with W.E.B Dubois, Mary White Ovington and others to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).  However her name was left out of publicity about the founding and she was one of the few principle founders not to get a prominent office in the new organization.  Dubois claimed that Wells asked not to be listed, and later corrected the founding story.  Few people, least of all Wells herself who was not one to hide her light under a bushel, believed the story.  There was frankly a kind of rivalry between two of the best known and most militant Black leaders both of whom had risen to prominence as journalists and muckrakers.  Despite the snub, Wells remained active in the organization and for his part Dubois published her articles in The Crisis.

The always outspoken Wells was not afraid of controversy within the Black community and movement.  She was an early and outspoken critic of Booker T. Washington, the figure often held up by the white establishment as the modest model of Black leadership for demanding few concessions from whites and advocating self-improvement through education. 

She also drew the wrath of many black leaders by praisingMarcus Garvey for his message of economic self-sufficiency for Blacks and was one of the few to publicly defend him when he was accused of mail fraud in a Federal indictment in 1919.  Despite the criticisms, her embrace of Pan-Africanism and particularly the Back to Africa aspects of Garvey’s movement was limited.  She preferred to live and fight in the United States.  And after Garvey flirted with an alliancewith the Ku Klux Klan in the early ‘20s so that “each race could flourish,” she could not stomach further association with anyone who could ally with lynchers.

Ida Wells-Barnett did not mellow with age.  She remained opinionated, defiant, and radical.  Black leaders who hoped to curry favor with white politicians and business executive distanced themselves from her.

But positions like these limited her influence among Black leaders who hoped to mollify white suspicions.  It could crop up even in organizations that she founded.   She was once denied a speaking role at a convention of the National Association of Colored Women because delegates feared her radicalism would result in bad press.

Wells threw her support to Alice Paul’s militant faction of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and with her friend Jane Adams interceded with the conservative national leadership of the organization to approve the giant Women’s Suffrage Parade in Washington , D.C. on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inaugural in 1913.  She marched with a contingent of Black women.

By the 1920s Wells was semi-retired from public life, having given up public lectures and most organizational duties.  She could still be counted on to fire off a fiery article or editorial when an issue moved her.  She mostly dedicated herself to her husband and family and to meticulous researchfor an autobiography she was writing.

Once in a while she responded like an old fire horse to an alarm.  In 1930, disgusted that neither major party had any program to relieve the great distress in the Black community caused by the Great Depression, she ran as an independent for a seat in the Illinois General Assembly.  She was one of the first Black women in the country to run for election at that level.  Of course she lost.

When she died she was still working on her autobiography, Crusade for Justice.  A first edition had been published in 1928, but she was working on a greatly revised and expanded version, backed by meticulous research when she died. As one writer put it “the book ends in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of aword.”

Wells was widely mourned, especially in Chicago.

Mid-rise buildings in the Chicago Housing Authority's Ida B. Wells Homes shortly after they opened just before World War II.  From a promising beginning they deteriorated into a crime and drug infested ghetto by the turn of the 21st Century and were razed.

She was memorialized most obviously in the massive Ida B. Wells Homes, a wall of high-rise public housing along with mid-risesand row houses built by the WPA in 1939-41 for the Chicago Housing Authority.  Always intended for Blacks from the slums of the South Side, the Homes deteriorated into a gang violence ridden symbol of urban failure and were razed in stages between 2002 and 2011.  Most of the residents never new a thing about the woman the buildings were named for.

                                    Wells was honored in 1989 with this Black Heritage USPS stamp.

Wells’s fame has been surprisingly limited for one so deeply involved in so many social issues over such a long and critical time.  She mostly gets a footnote mention in histories for her anti-lynching crusades.  The academic guardians of American history, at least as it is presented to impressionable high school and college students, favor far more moderate voices than that of Ida B. Wells.

Perhaps they are still a little afraid of her after all this time.  Certainly not surprising in a country where a third of the voting age population regards Kamala Harris as a raging radical and America hater.

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The Cup Cake Downfall of Dr. Koch, the Consumption Bug, and Popular Culture

By: Patrick Murfin

                        Dr. Robert Koch at work in his laboratory.

Consumption, as it was then widely known, was a pervasive and enduring near world-wide epidemicthat had no identifiable beginningor foreseeable end.  It brought slow, sure death to millions.  Mostpervasive among the urban poor crowded together in fetid slums and the lowest levels of the rural peasantry whose large, multi-generational families often lived together in crowded hovels.

But consumption was no respecter of class privilege.  Those who read biographies of notablesfrom the 17th to early 20th Centuries as well as literature from the same period are struck by the frequent references to the White Plague and its devastating effects.  Take, for instance, just the highly educated and largely affluent literary elite of Boston and the New England Renaissance.  Ralph Waldo Emerson saw a beloved brother, his child bride Ellen Louisa, and other friends and relatives succumb to the disease.  Theodore Parker was just one of several other leading figures of the Transcendentalist movement who died of it.  It was suspected to run in families—we would call it hereditary today—largely because devoted family members would tenderly nurse stricken kin giving them the long, close exposure we now know is necessary to transmit the disease.

In the 1938 weeper Three Comrades Margaret Sullivan dies beautifully, with self-sacrificing heroism of consumption in a mountain sanitarium leaving behind her grieving husband Robert Taylor, and his surviving World War I comrade Franchot Tone who also worshiped her.  Tragic death by consumption was a frequent theme of novels, plays, and film for generations.

The very memory of the disease haunted people even after it was on its way to being controlled.  Every movie goer knew that a cough in the first reel was certain foreshadowing of a tragic death bed scene in the last.

Consumption was commonly assumed to rise spontaneously, be caused by miasmas or foul air—and thus to be treatable by exposure to clean, fresh airin sanitariums away from the city—or, as noted, be hereditary.

On March 24, 1884 Dr. Robert Heinrich Herman Koch, Germany’s most distinguished physician and the Father of Microbiology published a paper sweeping away all of those suppositions and rendering them mere superstitions and as outdated in medicine as bleeding.  Consumption, or as he called it tuberculosis, was caused by a bacterium which he had isolated and named Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Dr. Koch, of course, could not offer a cure for the dread disease, but by proving that it was a communicable infectious disease he laid the groundwork for eventual effective public health preventative measures and eventually treatment.  Infection rates began to decline in Europe and North Americaafter World War I.  But it wasn’t until the development of the antibiotic streptomycin in 1948 that an effective treatment of the active illness was achieved.  That was followed by other effective antibiotics.

The development of a Tubercular skin test led to the discovery that many more people carry the infection in a latent, but communicable form.  Only 10-15% of those with latent infection get the active disease, generally when the immune system has been weakened by other illness, injury, and infection, or due to chronic malnutrition. 

By the turn of the 21st Century rates of active tuberculosis infections in the advanced industrialized nations had plummeted to near zero.  Most new reported cases involved immigrants and visitors.  Even high rates of infection in the Third World were coming down, albeit slowly.  Then in 2007 international rates began a sharp increase, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and much of Asia.   Increases are blamed on the rapid development of anti-biotic resistant strains, tuberculosis as a secondary infection in those with HIV/AIDS, over whelmed and underfunded public health services in desperately poorand often politically unstable countries.  Drug resistance has even caused rates to begin to creep up inEurope and the U.S.

Internationally there were in 2012 8.6 million active chronic cases were, 8.8 million new cases diagnosed, and 1.20–1.45 million deaths, most of these occurring in developing countries.  Of these about 350 thousand occurred in those also infected with HIV.  That means that tuberculosis today is far more deadly than the widely reported panic infections of recent years until the Coronaviris struck down 2.7 million over the last 18 months.

Deadly Tuberculosis bacteria first isolated and identified by Dr, Kosh using the techniques and protocols that he invented and which are still the standard for microbiological research.

But back to Dr. Koch.  His breakthrough discovery, for which he was honored with the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1905, was the result of years of work in microbiology and the development of his famous Four Postulatesfour conditions, all of which must be met, that prove any disease is directly caused by an identifiable microbe.

Robert Koch was born in Clausthal, Hanover, Germany to a middle class family on December 11, 1843.  A very bright child, he reportedly taught himself to read from his parent’s books and magazines before he entered school in 1848.  At gymnasium—the equivalent of high school but with higher academic standards than in America—he excelled in math and science.  Koch entered the University of Göttingen at age 19 where he studied natural science for two years before switching to medicine.

Even as an undergraduate Koch’s proclivity for research and laboratory workdrew notice.  He was asked to assist Jacob Henle, a noted anatomist who had published a pioneering theory of contagion in 1840, to participate in his research project on uterine nerve structure.  The next year he was conducting independent researchinto succinic acid secretion at the Physiological Institute culminating in his lauded dissertation. Koch graduated medical school in January 1866 with the highest honors and a bright future ahead of him.

In the summer of 1867 Koch married Emma Adolfine Josephine Fraatzand they had a daughter, Gertrude, the following year.  In 1870 he was called away from his established medical practice and family to serve as a surgeon in the Franco-Prussian War.

Dr. Koch examining a sheep for anthrax.

After the war Koch turned his attention to research in various plagues which he was convinced were communicable diseases.  His first break through came with anthrax, the deadly disease that annually did major economic damage by infecting herds of cattle and other domestic ruminants.  He identified the cause, the bacteria Bacillus anthracis.  He also discovered that spores of the bacteria could remain dormantfor long periods of time and become activated under optimal circumstances.  Koch used microscopy, including dyeing his samples for examination on a slide, and identifying agar as an ideal culture medium in which to grow specimens for examination.  These became the standard techniques for microbiological research to follow.

Even more important was his development of the Four Postulates based on his experience with anthrax.  The postulates are

1)      The organism must always be present, in every case of the disease.

2)      The organism must be isolated from a host containing the disease and grown in a pure culture.

3)      Samples of the organism taken from pure culture must cause the same disease when inoculated into a healthy, susceptible animal in the laboratory.

4)      The organism must be isolated from the inoculated animal and must be identified as the same original organism first isolated from the originally diseased host.

Even using more advanced equipment and techniques than Koch had available, modern epidemiologists employ these same criteria and methods.

Dr. Koch about the time he gained fame for his breakthrough identification of the anthrax pathogen, 

The isolation of Bacillus anthraciswas the first time in history a specific microbe had been identified as the cause of a disease and thus gave strong support to the still controversial germ theory and was a nail in the coffin of outdated ideas like spontaneous generation.

Koch was widely acclaimed for his discovery and it led to his appointment as a professor of medicine and an administrator at Berlin University.

He next turned his attention to a disease that regularly erupted, especially in semi-tropical and tropical regions in devastating epidemics—Cholera.  Koch collected samples and did field research during epidemics in Egypt and India.  He isolated and identified Vibrio cholera.  It turned out that in 1854 Italian anatomist Fillipo Pacini had isolated the same bug but had not widely published his findings nor definitively identified it as the cause of Cholera.

On the strength of these achievements Koch was recruited as an advisor to the Imperial Department of Health in the newly consolidated German Empire.  It was during this time that he performed his research on tuberculosis and published his result in 1882.  It was the apex of a brilliant career.  Not only would he be awarded the Nobel Prize for this discovery but also the Prussian Order of Merit in 1906.  In 1908 with support of a gift of 500,000 gold Marks from American philanthropist Andrew Carnegie the Robert Koch Medal and Award was established to be awarded annually to the scientist who does the most to advance research and discovery in microbiology.  The criteria of the judges is said to be, “What would Robert Koch be working on if he was alive today?”

Dr. Koch created a scandal when he divorced his wife of 25 years to marry his much younger mistress, actress Emma Hedwig Freiberg.

In 1893 he ended his 25 year marriage to Emma after becoming involved with a beautiful and much younger actress, Hedwig Freiberg who he had been seeing as early as 1889.  Indeed his scandalous involvement with her may have led to a not entirely voluntary retirement from Berlin University in 1890.  Koch married Hedwig after his divorce.

Had it not been for the scandal Koch might have been as celebratedin America as his contemporary, the Frenchman Louis Pasteur. Certainly their accomplishments and advancement of modern medicine were at least comparable.  But the deep Puritanical strain of Americans would never allow that level of adoration for an open and unapologetic adulterer.

In the 1930 film classic The Blue Angel, nightclub singer Lola Lola--Marlena Dietrich--was the cause of the downfall and ruin of a distinguished professor--Emile Jannings--said to be modeled on Dr, Koch.

Their story is said to have inspired the 1930 German film Der blaue Engelshot simultaneously in an English version, The Blue Angel—and released by Paramount in the U.S.  The movie featured the fall of a distinguished professor played by Emile Jannings when he becomes infatuated by night club singer Marlene Dietrich in the memorable rolethat made her an international star.  The movie was based on Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat published in 1905 when Koch’s scandal was still in people’s minds. 

Ironically Jannings would go on to portray Koch is a German 1939 bio-pic.  The Nazi-era film was a propaganda piece celebrating the achievements of good Aryan science.

Luckily Koch’s fallwas not as complete or lethal as the professor in the book and movie.  He accepted his major awardswith Hedwig at his side.  She remained there until he died on May 22, 1910 as the health spa of Baden-Baden of a heart attack at 66 years of age.  He had been in declining health for years.

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

New Mass Murders Rip Scab from Old Wounds—Murfin Verse

By: Patrick Murfin

An all-too familiar sight--people comfort each other outside of a Boulder, Colorado supermarket where 10 died on Monday. 
 

Pundits are already finding the silver lining in the Coronavirus year—the lock down and school closings gave us a respite from the kind of mass gun murders that had become numbingly routine in the previous decade.  Of course that didn’t take into account the rise in urban street crime shoot ‘em ups that have drenched many of our citiesin Black and Brown blood.  That is something somehow entirely differenteven to many white and Anglo anti-gun violence crusaders.  Be that as it may, the pause in those other mass shootings has abruptly ended as vaccinations have spread, infections, and deaths gone down and states and municipalities have rushed to open up and return to something that seems normal.  Part of normal includes what is spit out of the ends at the barrels of assault weapons.

Easy to obtain from suburban gun shops, private sales, and out-of-state purchases, automatic weapons and combat ammo seized by Chicago police in 2019 fuel the steep rise in deadly street crime in the city.

In one week we have seen the Georgia attacks on women, Asians, and massage parlors that left eight dead and the Boulder, Colorado supermarket attack that has claimed ten.  In the first case the assailant was a young white man who was “having a bad day” and targeted those who apparently tempted his sexual purity.  Local and even Federal authorities seem to have a hard time charging the shooter with a hate crime although victim communities—Asians and women—clearly understand it to be. 

In Colorado the shooter was an apparently Muslim man.  One suspects that authorities will have less trouble labeling him a hate crime offender and plainly calling the incident what it clearly is—an act of terrorism.

In both cases the offenders—we won’t bother with the nicety of calling them “alleged”—were captured alive unlike many un-armed Blacks in routine traffic stops or mental health crisis.  And in both cases there are very loose restrictions on gun ownership and in the case of Colorado allows open-carry.  In fact just days earlier a state court overturned an assault weapon ban that had been enacted in the wake of other Centennial State atrocities. 

In the aftermath of both shooting, the same old pattern of responses have rolled out—public outrage and demands for immediate action, moves by Democrats including President Joe Biden and members of the House and Senate vowing to enact legislation this time, and the gun lobby and their bought-and-paid-forCongressional mouth pieces telling us how they mourn the victims but that the rest of us have to calm down and not act in haste.  The gun nuts are confident that once again outrage will fade after a few weeks and we can all return to the normal of deadly weapons for all who want them in the name, of course, of freedom.

I'm in my 70s now but this sign that I carried in a marc in Woodstock after the Parkland mass murder is sadly relevant again. As a nation we never seem to learn...I'm carrying it again in my heart today for Boulder.

Over the years I have written poetryoften, far too often, after explosionsof gun violence, mass murder, and domestic terrorism in this country.  It feels like there is hardly anything else to say—no new insights, outrage, or grief.  The parade of atrocities seems never ending, as does our by now ritualized and inadequate responses.  But however familiar they become, we cannot allow ourselves to be numbed by them.  We cannot lay aside our outrage and our anger not only against the individual perpetrators, but those who encourage, abet, and arm them. We must resist the culturethat fosters violence and hate and take positive action—far more than ever before—to stop it.

Almost two years ago after yet another outrage—the El Paso Walmart attack—I trotted out just some—not all—of the verse I composed after previous events.  Gun violence has all too frequently been my poetic topic over the years.  You will be forgiven if you can’t even remember some of the incidents—there have been far too many of them and the blur over time.

The victims at Umpqua Community College--now barely a footnote.

Ritual Bloodletting, Breast Beating, and Blaming

October 1, 2015

In the Wake of Umpqua Community College Killings

 

Grief stricken families, victims, and survivors

            are the bullies

            the launchers of vast, dark conspiracies

            and the gun worshipers and fantasy world heroes

            the mewling, pitiful victims.

 

Step right over the victims.

            Don’t slip on the blood.

            Remember what is Holy and Sacred.

 

…Or we will kill you.

 

—Patrick Murfin


Not John Brown.

 

He Who Shall Not Be Named Here

November 27, 2015

After Colorado Springs

 

No!  He is not Old John Brown

            come round again

            no matter the wild eyes

            and wilder beard.

 

The unborn will not rise up

            and arm themselves,

            to wreck vengeance on

            the women who carry them

            and anyone who ever

            had a kind word or thought

            for them.

 

God is not on his side

            just as He/She/It

            is not on the side

            righteous trigger happy cops

            tempted by the backs

            of Black young people.

 

Just as Allah is not on the side

            of fanatics in Syria, Iraq, and Paris.

 

He will never savor martyrdom,

            ride to his own hanging

            on his casket,

            only the long, lonely oblivion

            of maximum prison hole.

 

Despite his yearnings

            a nation will not march to war

            with his name ringing in song

            on hundred thousand lips.

 

With luck, rivers of blood

            and mountains of corpses,

            families turned against families,

            the land laid waste,

            will not be his legacy.

 

With luck.

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

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


What Doesn’t Stay In Vegas

October 3, 2017

 

What happens in Vegas doesn’t stay there.

 

It oozes under the front door

of that little house in Tennessee

leaving a nasty stain in the carpet

that will last generations.

 

It drips from the empty desk

            in the high school office

            where the phone rings unattended

            next to a famed family photo

            and a jar of M & Ms.

 

It is tangled in the nets

            of that Alaska trawler

            spilling on the deck

            and splattering those rubber boots.

 

It has to be wiped from the table

            of that Disneyland café

            by some other harried waitress

            before it spoils some child’s

            special day

            or gets on Snow White’s costume.

 

It pools by the council’s table

            in a San Diego courtroom

            the empty chair

            unable to represent

            the mother of three.

 

It cannot be washed from

            the filthy hands

            of every politico

            who took gun pushers’ cash

            and kissed the ass of every

            fetishist wanking himself off

            to violence porn and hero fantasies.

 

—Patrick Murfin



An actual Valentine Day target sold at gun stores,  Target audience?  Incels and misogynists? 

 

Three Holes in the Valentine Heart

Chicago 1929

 

Toddlin’ Town rat-a-tat-tat,

            just Jazz Age juice and justice,

            Tommy guns talkin’

            fedoras flying,

            mugs massacred,

            wanna-be eye doc,

            grease monkey

            garage gore gone.

 

“Only Capone kills like that.”

 

Cool beans!

            Gangsters!

 

Northern Illinois University 2008

 

Gunman on campus!

            Good-guy grad student

            gone goofy

            lecture hall lesson

            in shot gun blasts

            and Glock gotchas.

 

Campus cops closing in,

            one last round

            under the chin,

            oblivion.

 

Twenty-three down,

            sixteen shot,

            five dead and,

            oh yeah, the perp.

 

Is that all?

            Piker!  Ain’t no Virginia Tech!

            hardly worth the weeping and wailing

            all those vigils and candlelight!

 

And the NRA says all those pussy students

            who didn’t pack their own heat

            should have OK corralled it.

 

Nothing to see here,

            move along.

 

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School 2018

 

Crazy Cruz kid had issues,

            gas mask, smoke grenades,

            and a handy AK-47

            extra magazines just in case.

 

Shoot, pull fire alarm.

            spray death, kick in doors,

            spray death, repeat.

            Efficient.

 

Thoughts and prayers

            out the wazoo today.

            Blame tomorrow.

            Not me, not us.

            Unpreventable.

 

Look….a squirrel

            or Stormy Danniels’ cleavage,

            any damn thing…

 

—Patrick Murfin

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Free the Peep is a Family Friendly Event to End the ICE Contract in McHenry County

By: Patrick Murfin


The Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County will host a family friendly Easter themed event in Harvard, the city with McHenry County’slargest Latinx community, this Saturday, March 27 from 2-3:30 pmat Harmilda the Cow Plaza by 77 N. Ayers Street downtown.  Free the Peep/Libera los Peeps will be a bi-lingual event.

Peeps are the familiar marshmallow candies associated with children’s Easter baskets.  At the event they will also stand for immigrant detaineesheld in Federal custody at McHenry County Jail.  Easter represents a season of rebirth and hopeDetainees hope that they might be reborn to freedom and hope and reunited with their families.

Free the Peep is a family oriented activity for children with secret codes and messages. There will be candy involved. Covid-19 measures will be taken and the candy is being handled appropriately before and during the event. Participants are also asked to wear masks and keep a safe distance.

Free the Peep will be held at Harmilda the Cow Plaza in downtown Harvard.

Speakers will address the impact of fear of ICE and detention on families and the community and describe the campaign of the Coalition to Cancel to persuade the County Board to end the month-to-month contract for the facility.  The community will be offered ways to contact with their County Board members and other public officials urging them to act on a proposal that has been stalled in the Finance Committee for months.

The Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County, which represents 27 immigrant advocacy groups, social justice groups, organizations, non-profits, and congregations throughout Illinois, seeks justice for all undocumented immigrantsby demanding County Board members cancel the month-to-month contract it has maintained for over a decade. We continue to urge the Board to release the numbers, as the agreement has been operating without clear financial knowledge of costs and revenue for years. Our community understands that having an ICE detention center terrorizes those who live under its shadow of fear and oppression.

The Coalition’s demands for justice are not only local, they are supported by regional and national organizations, as immigrants are detained and transferred throughout our nation. The Woodstock ICE detention center houses immigrants from the surrounding suburbs as well as from out of state, making us part of the national fight.


The Harvard event is one of a series of programs that will take the struggle to every corner of McHenry County.

Visit the Facebook Event for more information and to register attendance. 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Ponce Palm Sunday Massacre—Puerto Rico’s Darkest Day

By: Patrick Murfin

On Palm Sunday 1939 Puerto Rican Nationalist Cadets line up in their spiffy uniforms for a protest march in the city of Ponce.  Ahead is a small detachment of police.  They may have been unaware of units behind them and on side streets as they stepped off.

It started with a lovely Palm Sunday morning for a strollthrough Ponce, Puerto Rico.  It ended with 19 dead and over 200 badly injured when the Insular Police acting on the direct and explicit orders of the Governor, General Blanton C. Winship opened fire on a peaceful parade led by Cadets of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.  The police surrounded the marchers and fired from all sides using machine guns, Thompson sub-machine guns, rifles, pistols, and tear gas grenades.  They fired not only on marchers, but directly into the bystanders who were watching the parade.  After the initial fusillade, firing continued for 15 minutes as police chased down survivors, executing some of the wounded as they lay on the ground, beating others.

Puerto Ricans would ever after remember March 21, 1937 as the Ponce Massacre.

General Nelson A. Miles, the veteran Indian fighter, led a nearly bloodless invasion of Puerto Rico during the Spanish American War.  Because of the press stirredup hoo-ha in support of Cuban Revolutionaries, that island had to be granted independence after the war, albeit with heavy strings attached.  Not so the other fruit plucked from feeble Spainthe Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico.  Those the United States had every intention to keep as part of a new, un-declaredempire.

In the Philippines the Army quickly turned on its erstwhile allies in a local independence movement and crushed a rebellion by them and then fought an extended guerilla campaign against Islamic Moro rebels on the southern islands.

In Puerto Rico, there was no armed opposition.  But there was resentment as the first American Governor, Charles Herbert Allen, looted the island’s treasury, funneled money to American contractors, railroad operators, and sugar planters while refusing to build roads, schools, or infrastructure for the people.  American interests gobbled up agricultural land for sugar plantations, and the population sank deeper into poverty and deprivationthan they ever had under Spanish rule.

After looting the territory and setting up a network of plantations, Allen resigned to return to the U.S. where he became fabulously wealthy as the founder of largest sugar-refining company in the world, the American Sugar Refining Company, now known as Domino Sugar.

By 1914 the nearly powerless Puerto Rican House of Delegates voted unanimously for independence from the United States.  Their action was ignored. But in 1917 the U.S. Congress acted unilaterally to make Puerto Ricans U.S. citizens.  Islanders noted that the first “benefit” of citizenship was the imposition of draft boards to funnel troops to World War I.

Nationalists first began organizing in 1917 in protest to the citizenship move.  The earliest meetings were held in Ponce forming the Asociación Nacionalista de Ponce (Ponce Nationalist Association) and founding the newspaper El Nacionalista.  Other nationalist or pro-independence groups sprang up elsewhere on the island.  By 1924 these merged into the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.

Pedro Albizu Campost, leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party.

The Party’s early years were marked by dissention, schism, and other difficulties. By 1930 Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos, a militant leader, emerged as party President.

The Great Depression hit Puerto Rico even harder than the continental United StatesUnemployment soared, but little New Deal relief reached the population and what aid did come was often skimmed by corrupt American administrators and local politiciansStrikes rattled the sugar industry.  The Nationalist Party, however, was not able to translate popular discontent to electoral victories.  It remained a minority party in the House of Delegates.  Campos suspected the honesty of elections.

Campos organized the Cadets, a youth branch somewhat similar to scouts, and the Hijas de la Libertad (Daughters of Freedom), the women’s branch, both of which played leading rolls in increasing street demonstrations.

By 1934 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, responding to complaints by plantation owners and the sugar interests, was alarmed by what they described as near social anarchy.  He appointed a new Governor with vague instructions to get things under control.  His choice, General Winship could not have been more disastrous.

                        Governor Blanton C. Winship ordered the attack.

Winship was a Georgia native born in 1869 when the memories of the Civil Warwere still raw.  He was practicing law when the Spanish American War broke out and immediately enlisted in a Georgia Volunteer regiment.  He liked his taste of military life and joined the Regular Army serving in the Judge Advocate General’s Corpsas a lawyer.  But the sound of trumpets lured him from his law books.  He served on active field duty with General John J. Pershing in the campaign against Poncho Villa in Mexico and then in France with the American Expeditionary Force (AEF).  There he commanded troops under fire and was awarded the Distinguished Service Crossand the Silver Star.

In peace time he served as Calvin Coolidge’s military aid and then capped off his career as Judge Advocate General from 1931 to his retirement in 1933.

Despite what must have looked like an impressive resume, Winship was a poor choice for the delicate assignment handed him on several counts.  He was by nature a martinet and autocrat.  He had, for a lawyer, contempt for civilian leadership.  And as a Southernerhe disdained the brown skinned, Catholicpeople he was sent to govern.  He considered them little better than savages and incapable of self-government.

Winship arrived in Puerto Rico with Colonel Francis Riggs to act as his chief of police, a tip off to the repressionto come.  Riggs had already been an advisor to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza.  He went about organizing the Insular Police, a militia under the Governor’s direct command and control as a heavily armed paramilitary force.  He armed them with new weapons including sub machine guns and both .30 caliber and .50 caliber machine guns in addition to Army issue 1903 Springfield rifles and Colt .45 automatic pistols.  Then they were turned loose to harass strikers and street demonstrators.

Things rapidly came to a head in 1935 when Insular Police shot and killed four Nationalist Party students and a bystander at the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras.  Reports were that some of the victims were executed by shots to the head at close range.  The incident became known as the Río Piedras Massacre.

For Campos, it was the last straw.  He declared that his party would no longer compete in “U.S. controlled elections” and called for armed struggle to expel the Americans.

In retaliation for the killings on February 23, 1936 two members of the Cadets, Hiram Rosado and Elías Beauchamp, assassinated Col. Riggs in San Juan as he returned home from church.  Both were quickly apprehended and executed without trial at police headquarters.

Gov. Winship ordered the leadership of the Nationalist Party rounded up.  Campos and several others were charged with sedition and conspiracy to overthrow thegovernment.  They were taken to Boston, the Federal District Court with jurisdiction over Puerto Rico and tried before a jury empaneled on the island.  The trial ended in a hung jury as little evidence was presented linking Campos and the others to the assassination.  A second jury, consisting only of Anglo residents of Puerto Rico, convicted all but one defendant and sentencedthe rest to ten years in prison.

Back on the island, Winship ordered the suppression of any protests to the sentences. 

Despite this the Cadets who planned the Palm Sunday March in 1937 had reason to be hopeful of a peaceful protest.  Ponce was generally friendly to the Nationalists.  They requested, and were quickly granted a parade permit by Mayor José Tormos Diego.  The request was considered a courtesy since a 1927 court decision had ruled that streets and plazas were open and free to political and social gatherings

When Winship heard that the permit had been issued, he exploded.  He called in his new Chief of Police, Colonel Enrique de Orbeta, and gave him orders to proceed at once to Ponce with a strong force to prevent any demonstration, “by all means necessary.”  Oberta considered those orders a carte blanch to use overwhelming lethal force.  Oberta arrived in town with heavily armed police units drawn from around the island.  He would not trust local officers with this duty.

The Cadets and their followers, as well as a crown of bystanders, assembled with no knowledge that their permit had been rescinded.  The police chief of the municipality, Juan Diaz, was positioned in front of the assembling marchers with 14 men, another local chief and a sergeant led nine men with Thompson sub machine guns at the rear.  Chief of Police Antonio Bernardi, heading 11 policemen armed with machine guns, stood on the east and another group of 12 police, armed with rifles, was placed to the west.  Scores of additional police, perhaps totally 200, were in reserve.

Cadet leader Tomás López de Victoria could see the line of police ahead of him.  It is unclear if he was aware of the more heavily armed police to his flanks and rear.  At the appointed hour he determined to step off following the singing of the patriotic song La Borinqueña following the flag bearer.  They had hardly taken a step when police open fire with a murderous volley.  The flag bearer was killed instantly.  Seventeen year old Carmen Fernández took up the banner and was shot and gravely injured.

Police turned their fire on bystanders stitching the facades of the buildings with bullet holes from Thompson sub-machine guns and rifle fire.  

Police continued to pour fire into the crowd from all sides as people scrambled for their lives.  They also turned automatic fire directly into the bystanders along the building walls of the street, riddling the facades with bullet holes and leaving victims in heaps in front of them.  After the sustained vollies, firing became sporadic as police chased down those trying to flee or executed some of the scores of wounded littering the ground in the confined area.  It took nearly a quarter of an hour before the last shot was fired.

150 uninjured or lightly injured demonstrators and bystanders were arrested, but ultimately released on bail.

In the wild cross fire it was no surprise that two police were killed and several injured.  These deaths and injuries would be used in Winship’s report to his superiors at the Department of the Interior to claim that they were victims of shots fired by marchers precipitating the gunfight.  This story was quickly picked up by the American press which painted the Governor as a hero for suppressing a “bloody insurrection.

Colonel Enrique de Orbeta in white and Insular Police survey the aftermath of the massacre with a dead Nationalist at their feet.  Note the automatic weapons of the police.

But that story began to unravel almost immediately.  No weapons were found on or near any of the victims.  All had been unarmed.  Many had been shot in the back.  Survivors and witnesses from nearby buildings who were not involved quickly discounted the official version.

The local District Attorney opened an investigation into the killings but came under intense direct pressurefrom Winship who ordered the prosecutor’s office to charge more Nationalists and Cadets and issued a direct order that no police officer be charged.   The prosecutor resigned in protest

An official Puerto Rican government investigationwas launched, but naturally under the control of Winship made no conclusions.

Relatives and survivors of the massacre posed in front of the bullet ridden headquarters of the Nationalist Party.  Just standing for this picture was a dangerous act of defiance.  

Puerto Rican Senator Luis Muñoz Marin, a leading political figure and Nationalist opponent, went to Ponce to personally investigate the shootings.  There he was shown unpublished photographs taken by journalist Carlos Torres Morales of El Imparcill from the window of a building overlooking the scene which clearly showed police firing directly into the crowds of by standers.  These two photographs had not been seen by either of the two previous investigations.

Those photos helped convince the United States Commission on Civil Rights to launch its own investigation spearheaded by Arthur Garfield Hayes of the American Civil Liberties Union assisted by a panel of distinguished Puerto Ricans.  The Hayes commission concluded the police had behaved as a mob and committed a massacre. 

The report created an uproar in Congress which began its own investigation.  There were cries for the police on the scene, Chief Orbeta, and Winship to be indicted.  But Winship also had friends in Congress.  Before any charges could be brought against him, new legislation was passed exempting government officials from prosecution for crimes committed in the line of their official duties.

In the end neither Winship nor any police were ever charged.

In July 1938 Gov. Winship, second from right, survived bullets fired at the reviewing stand of a military parade in Ponce to commemorate the 40th anniversary of of the American landing on the island in the Spanish American War.

On July 25, 1938 Winship decided to mark the 40th anniversary of the American landings in Puerto Rico not, as was customary, with low key observations in the capital of San Juan, but in Ponce to show that he had smashed the Nationalists and now “owned the town.”  Shots were fired at the reviewing stand from which he was watching the parade.  The governor survived the assassination attempt but in the wild shoot out that followed two people, including a police officer, were killed and 36 others wounded.

The following year, responding to complaints of dictatorial rule from islanders and increasing pressure from Congress, President Roosevelt summarily removed Winship from his post.

It was not, however, the end of his career.  When World War II broke out Winship returned to active duty in the Army and was placed in charge of prosecution of suspected Nazi saboteurs on the Home Front.  In 1944 at the age of 72 and the oldest active duty soldier in the Army, he retired as a Major General.

Rex Tugwell, one of FDR’s right hand men in the New Deal, was appointed as Governor in an attempt to restore good relations between the people and the U.S.  Tugwell issued several pardons to long time nationalist leaders.  In cooperation with Luis Muñoz Marin, who had founded a new, pro-US political party, the Partido Popular Democratico (Popular Democratic Party of Puerto Rico), he pursued a policy of reform and during World War II instituted many New Deal-like social programs and infrastructure improvements.

Marin and his PPD became the dominant political party in Puerto Rico.

The Nationalists did not fare so well.  They really had been crippled by Winship’s repression and by the rising popularity of Marin’s party.  After the war, however, Nationalists, still committed to Campos’s call for armed struggle for independence, stepped up their activity.  In 1948 as Senate leader Marin ushered in the draconian Law 53 or Ley de la Mordaza (gag law.)  Under this law it became a crime “to own or display a Puerto Rican flag anywhere, even in one’s own home; to speak against the U.S. government; to speak in favor of Puerto Rican independence; to print, publish, sell or exhibit any material intended to paralyze or destroy the insular government; or to organize any society, group or assembly of people with a similar destructive intent.”  Those accused of violations could be sentenced to ten years in prison, a fine of $10,000, or both.

Marin and his party would use this law ruthlessly not only against armed Nationalist militants, but sympathizers, dissidents of any kind, and even those who did not vote for the PPD.

Meanwhile Marin had wrung from Congress a law allowing the direct election of the next governor by the people.  Marin knew that he would be elected.  And he was.  He officially took office on January 2, 1949 and served sixteen years—four terms as Governor.

In 1950 Nationalists at Campo’s order initiated an armed uprisingbeginning with an attack on the Governor’s Palace on October 30.  Attacks occurred across the island, but Marin quickly suppressed the uprising.  Campos and the Nationalist leadership were soon rounded up, but under Law 53 so were thousands who were peripherally sympathetic.

Would-be Truman assassin Oscar Collazo lies dead at the steps to Blair House in Washington in 1950.

As part of the uprising On November 1, 1950, Griselio Torresola and Óscar Collazo unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman, who was staying at the Blair House in Washington, D.C.

In 1952 Puerto Rican voters overwhelmingly approved a new status the Estado Libre Associado (Free State Association), commonly called Commonwealth Status, with a high degree of self-rule while remaining in association with the U.S. and the people retaining U.S. citizenship.

In 1954 four nationalists opened fire on Congress while in session, wounding six, one critically.  It was one of the last major hurrahs of the old Nationalist party.  The party split in 1955 with a majority faction rejecting armed struggle.  Most pro-independence advocates now belong to other groups, not the mere shadow of the Nationalist Party.

For his part Campos spent most of the rest of his life in prison, his health deteriorating.  He may have been among the Puerto Rican prison hospital inmateswho were subjected to massive overdoses of radiation in a secret research project in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s. On November 15, 1964, on the brink of death, Campos was pardoned by Governor Marin.  He died on April 21, 1965 in San Juan. Hundreds of thousands attended his funeral.

Ideological followers of Campos continued activity and were blamed for a rash of pipe bombingsin Chicago and elsewhere into the 1970’s.

Today, support for independence has dwindled.  Recent elections have brought to power a party that, in theory at least, supports statehood.  In a 2012 referendum voters rejected the continuance of commonwealth status overwhelmingly and a majority favored statehood.  Legislation was signed by President Obama in 2014 for a final, binding referendum on a future status.  The was held during the November 3, 2020 general elections; the ballot asked one question: “Should Puerto Rico be admitted immediately into the Union as a State?” The results showed that 52 percent of Puerto Rico voters answered yes.

Plans have been complicated by Puerto Rico’s debt crisis which threatened to bankrupt the island unless some sort of aid and permission for debt restructuring passed a hostile Republican led Congress.  And then a devastating earthquake and Hurricanes that ravaged the island.  Donald Trump famously held up approved emergency aid for the island in retributionfor criticism of him by San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz.  Years after the disasters President Joe Biden has ordered the long delayed aid paid.

In the US the Republican Party was long an advocate for Puerto Rican statehood.  But the realization that statehood would probably result in the election of two Senators and several Representatives who would caucus and vote with the Democrats has cooled their ardor.  Statehood is once again on the table in Congress where Democrats could use to more Senate votes to shore up their narrow majority.  Many expect action on it this year along with statehood for the District of Columbia.  Senate Republicans are now unanimously opposed to statehood and some have even suggested that independence which would stripAmerican citizenship from Puerto Ricans would be preferable.  They would also like to prevent continued migrationto the mainland from the island.  

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Immigrant Detainees in McHenry County Jail Exposes Conditions

By: Patrick Murfin

The Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County has obtained a letterfrom two immigrant detainees in McHenry County Jail.  The letter, sent in mid-March, describes harsh conditions in the Federal detention facility and shocking charges that both inmates and the public have been deceivedabout Covid-19 infections, prevention, and treatments.

The inmates, whose identities are not being revealed to protect them from possible retribution by Jail authorities, managed to get the letter out to allies and supporters of the prisoners with an appeal that it be made public to the press and public officials.

 

The letter from two immigrant detainees in McHenry County Jail.       

The Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County, which represents 27 immigrant advocacy groups, social justice groups, organizations, non-profits, and congregations throughout Illinois, seeks justice for all undocumented Immigrantsby demanding County Board members cancel the month-to-month contract it has maintained for over a decade. We continue to urge the Board to release the numbers, as the agreement has been operating without clear financial knowledge of costs and revenue for years. Our community understands that having an ICE detention center terrorizes those who live under its shadow of fear and oppression.

The letter writers complained of “concentration camp” like conditions currently including isolation in Coronavirus lock down 47 hours over two days,  poor food—two servings of bread and ham daily—inability to access commissary accounts for additional food and hygiene products, and baring communications with lawyers.  Jail visitationsby the Interfaith Community for Detained Immigrants (ICDI) have been curtailedfor a year depriving the detainees of spiritual support and assistance.

Most alarming, the detainees outline systematic deception to the inmates and public about health conditions in the Jail and Covid-19 infection rates.  Their letter states:

Now about the infections.  The first day an official let us know that in the McHenry County Jail there are 40 infected persons and we are afraid the virus will spread through the jail.

The nurses check the temperatures of some of the inmates but not others and this worries us.  We don’t know the reason some are checked and others aren’t.  Now they are checking us with the most economical Covid-19 test.  And thanks be to God we tested negative.  But in spite of this we are afraid of contracting the virus.

Two days ago in the McHenry County Jail notice, they said that there are only 21 sick persons, but that is a lie because here we know that there are 40 sick people and we know it from the officials that work here in our block.

And you are able to prove this because in the Feb. 2nd Sun Times newspaper there was an article on page 14 that says that there are 6 infected people, but there are 12 total.  I saw them when the 12 people were in quarantine because I am the worker and I distribute food to them.  The county is lying and not telling the truth.

The detainees hope that the media will investigate and demand answers about the allegations and that public officials will take action.

The detainees hope that supporters like these who gathered for a vigil at the Jail in 2018 will contact law makers, public officials, and McHenry County Board members to end the contract leasing space as the Federal detention facility.

The Coalition is sharing the letter today with Illinois Congress persons Lauren Underwood, Sean Casten, Raja Krishnamoorth, Jan Schakowsky, and Chuy Garcia as well as Senators Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, Governor J. B Pritzker, local state representatives and senators, and members of the McHenry County Board.  

 

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St. Joseph Table Where All Who Are Hungry are Guests Curtailed by Coronavirus.

By: Patrick Murfin

The Feast of St. Joseph, or the Festa Di San Giuseppe in Italy where it is a very big deal, is celebrated in honor of Joseph the Carpenter, husband to Mary and human father of Jesus.

Note:  Much sadder than closing saloons to St. Patrick’s Day puke parties, is the curtailment of St. Joseph’s Day Table feasts, the wonderful tradition of sharing food with all who are hungry, for the second year in a row.  In some areas Catholic churches are able to offer the traditional feasts or find other ways to share, but many are unable to do so again.  Perhaps this year those who are young, healthy, and mobile can carry the tradition to the doors of those in need.

This is how many meals from St. Joseph's Table will be shared this year--packaged for home delivery to those isolated by the Coronavirus emergency.  You don't have to be Catholic to share food and bring joy and comfort.

St. Joseph’s Day is celebrated annually on March 19.  Joseph, the husband of Mary—does that make him Jesus’s stepfather?—is the Patron Saint of Poland, of carpenters, workers of all kinds, and of assorted other things.  In many Latincountries it is also the occasion to celebrate fathers.

Joseph is particularly revered in Sicily where he is credited with bringing an end to a drought and famine in the Middle Ages.  Devotion to him spread through southern Italy and was brought to the United Statesby emigrants.  Sicilians, who arrived in New Orleans in the late 19th Century promoted wide spread celebrations in that city.  On the East Coast, particularly in Providence, Rhode Island, there are sometimes major parades featuring the wearing o’ the redSt. Joseph’s color—as more than a subtle tweak of the Irish, who attracted a lot of attention with their little festival two days earlier.  These parades actually were shows ofpolitical clout as the Italians muscled the Irish out of control of city governments

St. Joseph's Day is not just for Italians and Poles.  Here is an ethnic Czeck parade in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

Politics aside, the main feature of the celebration is St. Joseph’s Table, a feast set out in thanks for the miracle of saving Sicily.  Usually laid out buffet style and decorated with the good Saint’s statue, lily blossoms, and votive candlesFood includes elaborate meatless offerings—it is Lent after all—including stuffed artichokes, pasta and fish, as well as breads, cookies, pastries, cakes and other delicaciesFava beans, the food St. Joseph provided to relieve the famine, are prominentlyfeatured

A St. Joseph's Day Table laid  out in front of a side alter at a Catholic church.

What makes the St. Joseph Table different from other feasts is that it is supposed to belaid out for the poor, homeless, andoppressedNone are turned away.  You don’t have to go to mass or even be Catholic.  You can smell like Richard’s Wild Irish Rose and stale piss, be covered in tattoos with nails piercing your face.  Who knows?  You can even be Gay or have had an abortionCome. Eat.  Share with us.

What a great holiday!  

 

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When Rank and File Postal Workers Whipped Bosses, Union Leaders, and Richard Nixon

By: Patrick Murfin

A wildcat strike by New York City postal workers quickly spread in 1970 bring mail service to a halt in much of the country.

The day after St. Patrick’s Day in New York City was often little more than an intense, city-wide hangover.  But on March 18, 1970 residents of the Big Apple awoke to more than just a headache.  Thousands of local Postal workers were on the picket line in defiance of both Federal Law which prohibited strikes by government employees and their own union leadership.  Within days business in the commercial and financial center of the nation ground to a halt in those pre-electronic communications days and the strike spread to more than 30 cities with 200,000 off the job.  It was a big deal.  A very big deal.

But chances are unless you were one of the strikers or a member of their families, you have forgotten or never heard of one of the biggest—and ultimately most successfullabor battles of the Post-War era.  Maybe that’s because of all the other turmoil in the country that year.  With the Vietnam War dragging on, protestswere growing bigger and attracting more than just students and hippies. Major cities were tinderboxes, exploding regularly in Black riots that seemed more and more like insurrections.  Even middleclass womenwives, mothers, and secretaries—were taking to the streets and shaking their fists.  Draconian drug laws fueled an underground economy, gang warfare that was more wide spread and pervasive than between rival bootleggers with Tommy guns, and ordinary street crime.

So the Postal workers had a beef?  Big deal, seemed the attitude in Washington.  Take a number and wait your turn. And the Posties did have a beef, a very big beef.

It hadn’t always been that way.  In the old days Post Office jobs at all levels had been political plumbs and handed out according to the rough justice of the spoils system.  Every time the Presidency flipped to a different party, there was a general house cleaning, and fresh armies of patronage workers.  Civil Service in the early 20th Century had ended that for all but local postmasters and other muckety-mucks.  During the Depression working for the Post Office meant not only unheard of job security, but came with an array of benefitspaid holidays and vacations, health insurance, and pensions—that industrial workers in the private sector could only win by wearing out shoe leather and risking busted heads on the picket line.  During the deep Post-World War II recession the Post Office offered preferential hiring to veterans, and many leaped at the chance for secure employment.  In fact the large cohort of former veterans in New York would provide the core leadershipand rank-and-file muscle for the strike.

Despite the security and the benefits, Post Office pay had been drifting down in comparison to the civilian workforce throughout the boom years of the ‘50’s and ‘60’s.  Workers had not had a pay raise since 1967 and that raise had failed to keep up with inflation.  Entry level worker were now laboring at wages below the poverty line if they were supporting families, as most of them were.  In addition, conditions in crowded urban postal facilities were poor and dangerousMoralewas low and anger growing.

The situation was even more frustrating because the law not only forbad strike action, it banned any kind of collective bargaining.  National unions of postal workers, mainly the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) representing clerks and mail handlers, and the National Association of Letter Carriers (NALC) could do little but lobby the administration and Congress for better pay and conditions.  The inherit weakness of such a position had made that leadership both timid and cautious.  But rank and file anger was festering, and becoming an issue.

In 1968 the Kappel Commission, established by Congress to review the current state of the Postal Service, had recommended that postal workers be given the same rights as private sector workers to collective bargaining. When recommendation was rejected by Congress, union leaders could not be stirred beyond issuing disappointed press releases.

Black workers brought the spirit and disciplined non-violence of the Civil Rights Movement to the Postal Strike of 1970.

It was too much for the rank-and-file, especially in New York.  Not only did Postal Workers there have ties to the traditionally militant unions of the city and included many members with Socialist, Communist, and radical backgrounds, but a huge infusion of Black workers over the previous decade brought with them the spirit of the civil rights movement, familiarity with direct action and non-violent protest, and cultural and political connections to the Black empowerment movement.  

Agitation for strike action began among rank-and-file militants after newly elected President Richard M. Nixon proposed only a flat 4.1% wage increase in his 1969 budget.  The proposal was angrily shouted down at New York union meetings and pleasure for a strike grew.  NALC President James Rademacher scurried to the White House with word that he might not be able to control his members. Rademacher and Nixon reached an agreementin December 1969 that tied a 1970 5.4% raise to the creation of an independent postal authority and collective bargaining.   When a Congressional committee finally moved on the agreement in early March local leaders at New York’s NALC local Branch 36 were hooted from the platform.

                                  Vincent Sombrotto, Rank-and-file leader of the strike.

Rank-and-File leader Vincent Sombrotto and others demanded an immediate strike vote.  Union leaders refused calling such a vote illegal and against the union’s own constitution.  Over a series of acrimonious meetings union leadership was able to delay a vote until March 17 as the city was celebrating St. Patrick’s Day.  The strike was overwhelmingly approved and pickets went up after the stroke of midnight.

The next day emergency meeting called by the rank and file at other New York locals of both the NALC and APWU forced their own votes and joined the strike.  Over the next few days it would be repeated in city after city.  In Chicago more than 3000 members literally chased their leadership out of the hall and down the street.

Instinctively defiant, Nixon went on national TV to order employees back to work immediately, threatening mass dismissals if they did not.  He vowed that the government would never negotiate under duress.  The speech only aroused the ire and determination of the strikers and helped spread it even faster and further.

The national media, including the influential weekly news magazines helped whip up hysteria about the walk-out.

By the end of the week better than 200,000 were out in most urban population centers and the strike was even spreading to conservative small citiesand townsNewspapersbecame semi-hysterical as business paralysis set in and the stock market plunged on low volumebecause trades could not be executed without mail orders and confirmations.   Scare stories of violence, all false, circulated.  Picket lines were noisy, but disciplined and models of non-violence.

After a week the administration went to court to seek an emergency injunction, which was quickly granted, against the strike and threatened individual strikers with jail for contempt of court if they did not comply.  That only backfired, not only steeling the resolve of the strikers, but bringing declarations from other Federal employees that they would join the strike if the injunction was enforce.

On March 23 a desperate Nixon again took to the airways.  He announced the proclamation of a National Emergency—just a step short of martial law—which authorized the use of Federal troops to move the mail.  He followed up the speech with Operation Graphic Hand which mobilize 24,000 members of the Regular Army, National Guard, Army Reserve, Air National Guard and Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps Reserve of which 18,500 were deployed to 17 New York City Post Offices.  Tens of thousands of others were put on alert for possible deployment to other cities.

Workers were outraged and fearful that the introduction of troops would lead to the violent suppression of the strike in the tradition of the Pullman Strike in which the Army moved the mail at the point of bayonet and machine gun.  Strikers allowed the military to move into the Post Offices without opposition.

Federal troops brought in to move the mails were untrained and overwhelmed.  They could do little to unjam the system. 

Once inside, however, the untrained troops had no idea what to do.  The mail was still snarled.

The desperate administration now entered secret negotiations with union leaders after vowing never to do so.   With no third TV appearance and as little fanfare as possible, Nixon capitulated to virtually all of the strikers’ demands on March 25.  He agreed to recommend an 8% wage increase and the right of collective bargaining, albeit without the right to strike.  Amnesty for the strikers was guaranteed.

Workers went peacefully back to work after an eventful, but peaceful 2 week strike.

Richard Nixon, Post Master General Roy Blount and national union leaders in a photo op before trying to hammer out a wage agreement to end the strike.

Congress enacted the terms of the agreement in the budget and in the Postal Reorganization Act of 1970 which went into effect on July 1, 1971 and transformed the Post Office Department into the U.S. Postal Service, an independent establishment of the executive branch to be operated like a private corporation.  Rank-and-file militants rightly feared that this hybrid creation would come back to bite them in the ass and become a path to privatization.

To prepare themselves for collective bargaining that summer the NALC and four smaller postal unions merged with APWU.  The new union, retaining the American Postal Workers name, was, like its components, an affiliated member of the AFL-CIO and at the time of its creation, the largest union of postal workers in the world.

        The logo of the APWU after postal unions merged under its banner.

Rank-and-File strike leader Vincent Sombrotto would go on to oust the old conservative leadership of the APWU in the mid-70’s and be elected as President on a militant ticket.

One last note.  Remember that declaration of National Emergency?  Guess what.  It has never been revoked and continues to give U.S. Presidents virtually unlimited power to seize property, organize the means of production, and institute martial law.  It was cited as the authority of some of the government’s most controversial domestic security actions after the 9/11 attacks and before the passage of the Patriot Act.  It remains an active tool at the disposal of this and any future President.

  

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Pandemic Hits Catholic Feast Day and American Puke Party St. Patrick’s Day

By: Patrick Murfin

Greeting card publishers quickly cashed in on Irish American sentimentality for the Auld Sod--a sentimentality that often erased the grim realities of the Potato Famine which sent so many landless peasants to American shores.

Note:  For those of you unaware, this is my natal anniversary.  I turn 72 today.  Meanwhile to the Irish and wannabe Irish, enjoy the day.  Have fun, but try not to live down to some unfortunate stereotypes.   And for Christ’s sake don’t drink the damn green beer, an abomination and insult to the soul!  Have a dram of Jameson’s with a Guinness back for me!

But for the second year in a row a lot of the revelry will be toned down due to the Coronavirus pandemic.  Last year the US just went into lock-down and observances even in St. Pat’s Day mad Chicago, Boston, and New York were all scrubbed.  This year most cities have saloons at least partially open, but parades and big events have canceled again.  In Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot threatened bars with heavy fines if they did not strictly adhere to occupancy rules, masking, and social distancing.  But after swearing that she would not dye the Chicago River green this year, she went ahead and did it anyway as a surprise.  But the crowds that would usually line the Riverwalk to watch weren’t there.

Of course the urge to party was still too much for many.  In wide-open states like Texas and Florida you would never know there is a world-wide plague.  And in both states Spring Break students found another excuse to drink.  Out here in McHenry County two supposedly safe and controlled events last weekend in Woodstock and the city of McHenry, where they also dye the Fox River, quickly got out of hand with masking and distancing mostly ignored.  A local observer noted that both events were likely super spreader.  We will see if there is a spike of new cases over the next few years.

Even before the pandemic, I have avoided St. Patrick’s Day revels for years because it has become an amateur night surpassing even New Year’s Eve for commode hugging drunkenness.

Now on to a semi-regular blog post on the history of the celebration!

"Everybody's Irish!"  is the new equal opportunity slogan of American St. Patrick's Day promoted by breweries, bars, and bottle peddlers of all sorts.  The message seems to be working.

Acknowledging the elephant in the room—today is the Feast of St. Patrick, originally a low-key religious celebration in the Auld Sod.  In the U.S. it’s St. Patrick’s Day, which is, as they say, a whole other kettle of fish.  For better or worse this quasi-holidayis an Irish American phenomenon.  Let’s trace the metamorphosis from religiosity, to ethnic muscle flexing, to Irish nationalism, to partisan political display, to equal opportunity public drinking festival.

Up until the mid '60 St. Patrick's Day remained a religious festival in Ireland and the annual parade in Dublin, seen here in 1905, was mostly a religious procession, often led by the St. John's Total Abstinence and Benefit Society.  Today the parade is an American style extravaganza awash in Kelly Green, dancing leprechauns, shamrocks, and scantily clad girls.  General rowdiness is the rule of the day, largely due to the large annual pilgrimages to the Auld Sod by Irish Americans, now generations removed from the island.

It all began on March 17, 1762 with the veryfirst St. Patrick’s Day parade anywhere in the world.  Irish soldiers in a Britishregiment headquartered in New York City marched behind their musicians and drew cheers from the small local Irish minority, both Catholicand Protestant—mostly Protestant in those days.  It became if not an annual event, one which was observed most years.  When the Redcoats left the city at the end of the American Revolution various local Irish mutual aid societies like the Hibernians and the Friendly Sons of St. Patrickheld often competing events which, if they happened to intersect, sometimes devolved into brawls. 

After the United Irishman uprising of 1798 was crushed by the British imposing a harsh repression including the banning of the wearing o’ the Green, a new waveof Irish refugees flooded New York, Boston, and other Eastern cities.  They inoculated the annual St. Patrick’s Day observances with a new political significance and wearing green (instead of the traditional Irish colors of blueand gold) became a protest against British rule in the homelandand a call to action to overthrow that rule. 

The Potato Famine unleashed yet another wave of immigration bringing throngs of displaced peasants to the already growing slums of the city. Competing Irish aid societies finally decided to unite behind a single, massive demonstration in New York in 1848.  The theme of independence for Ireland was mixed with an act of aggressive defiance by the now largely Catholic masses against the nativists from Tammany Hall who controlled the city government, the Know Nothings, and street gangs who harassed and bullied them.

In trying to market to Irish Americans, not everyone got it right.  This tone deaf greeting card featured the pug-nosed Irish stereotypes featured in Know Nothing and anti-imigrant publications.  The figure on the left has a sash identifying him as a member of the Ancient Order of Hibernians.  The one on the right supposedly is from a competing organization that had frequently brawled with the AOH for supremacy on St. Patrick's Day.

In 1858 the Fenian Brotherhood was organized in the United States in support the Irish Republican Brotherhood(IRB), a secret oath society agitating for the establishment of a “democratic Irish republic.”  The St. Patrick’s Day parades in New York and other cities became powerful recruiting tools for the Fenians. Social events around the day annually raised thousands of dollars, much of it to support fantastic plots and buy arms.  On more than one occasion Fenian plots to attack Canadabrought the U.S. and Britain perilously close to war, which, of course was the objective. 

By the second half of the 19th Century New York's St. Patrick's Day parades had become elaborate celebrations of Irish nationalism and a display of raw political power in the city.

The failure of the Easter Rebellion in 1916 in which labor leader James Connolly, fresh from several years in America as an IWW organizer, and an Irish-Americanunit of Hibernian Rifles were both involved, led to a fresh round of frenzied support for independence back home.  The campaign of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which led to the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 and the Irish Civil War between the Free State government and republican rebelswere both largely financed by Irish Americans.  Even after the establishment of the Republic in 1937, Irish-Americans continued to fund rebel groups aimed at uniting Ulster to the rest of the island, including support for Sein Fein and the Provisional IRA in their armed struggle through The Troubles.  All of this was reflected in the parades and other celebrations of the day which had become dominated by Rebel songs.

St. Patrick’s Day celebrations also were important displays of Irish culture.  Traditional Irish music and dance was so suppressed at home that both nearly disappeared.  Irish-Americans like Chicago’s Police Chief Francis O’Neill collected and preserved the songs and began schoolsto teach it and traditional Irish step dancing.  Both were re-introduced into Irish culture as a result of these efforts and put on display in St. Patrick’s Day parades, banquets, and concerts.

Hizzonor da Mayor, Richard J. Daley steps off with his blackthorn stick and green fedora at the head of the 1963 Chicago St. Patrick's Day joined by officials of the sponsoring Plumbers union, the Irish Consul General, Cardinal Alber Meyer (second from left} and actor Pat O'Brien to the Mayor's left and a bevy of politicians in the second row jockeying for position.  Then Republican Cook County States Attorney James P. Thompson can be spotted just over Daley's shoulder.

The Irish also excelled at political organizationin this country.  Unlike other ethnic groups with large concentrations like the Germans, they were able to create viable political organizations with allianceswith other ethnic groups that allowed them to control many city governments for decades.  In Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley brought the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, previously a South Side neighborhood event, to the heart of the Loop and dyed the Chicago River green every year in a display of political power.  Politiciansof all ethnicities jockeyed to be as close as possible to Hizonor in the front ranks of the parade. 

By the late 20th Century St. Patrick’s Day had spread well beyond its ethnic roots.  Everyone is Irish on St. Paddy’s Day became a byword pushed by breweries, bars, and distilleries making the day one of the biggest party days of the year.  Green beer and vomiting teenagers have become new symbols of the holiday. 


And what about St. Patrick?  Well, what about him!

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Samoset Surprised the Pilgrims in More Ways Than One

By: Patrick Murfin
Samoset appears at Plymouth. It seemed like a warm day by comparison to the harsh winter that had killed 45 of the 102 of them. The settlers, by now a bedraggled bunch were out and about in their small compound on the sheltered side of a hook-shaped cape that jutted into the Atlantic Ocean.   They called the place, somewhat grandly, New Plymouth.   They were religious dissenters, and the sailors and tradesmen they employed. We call them the Pilgrims.   They called themselves the Company.   That day they were paying particular attention to the professional soldier among them.   Native tribes were moving in the vicinity and at least some seemed hostile.   The soldier, Miles Standish, was trying to organize a militia force.   Sometim...
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Looking back One Year—Coronavirus Hullabaloo and Poetry

By: Patrick Murfin
The villain  of the year, Note— It was just getting started a year ago today, but poets were already weighing in. OK.   I guess it’s time to address the elephant in the room—the Coronavirus pandemic.   Everyone else has.   In fact it is dominating the national consciousness unlike anything since the days immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. I won’t duplicate the common sense precautions and recommendations that flood our TV, newspapers, and social media.   You can get that anywhere.   Nor will I inundate you with a history of the global spread of the disease or mind numbing statisticsand prognostications. Those are grim enough and you are probably seeing infection spread maps in your dreams.   And I am not even go...
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Sunday Morning—If You Didn’t Reset Your Clock, You are Already Late

By: Patrick Murfin

Daylight Savings time begins.  The cock will crow an hour later.

If your forgot to re-set your clocks last night, you are probably already late for church or at least late retrieving the Sunday paper from the stoop.  It happens every year, no matter how many announcements are made on the TV news, radio, newspapers, and now by cute Facebook memes.  And some of the folks who did fiddle with their time pieces get it wrong—is it spring forward, fall back or the other way around?

It’s vexing.  And some think, foolish.  Take to oft quoted bit of folk wisdom usually ascribed to some Native American sageDaylight Savings Time is like cutting a strip off the bottom of the blanket and sewing it to the topand thinking you have a longer blanket.

Perhaps.  But maybe there is something to it.  People have been doing it, or something very like it, for a long time.

Roman water clocks operated on some version of water dripping from an inverted cone and filling a cistern.  In this ingenious device the pointing figure is on a float and as water rises in the cistern to gestures to wrings on the cone.  On many such clock the rings, or marks in the cistern itself, were numbered with winter and summer hours, leading archeologists to determine that something analogous to Daylight Savings Time was in use in the Empire for at least part of its existence.

Way back when togas were in fashion, those wily old Romans had water clocks inscribed with two sets of numerals—one for summer and one for winter.  And all of those years when there essentially were no clocks, peasants and farmers regulated their lives by the sun—beginning their days with its rise and ending their labors with its setting.  All pretty much the same idea as DST.

In the U.S. Benjamin Franklin usually gets the credit--or the blame--for Daylight Savings Time.  But no one acted on his proposal for about 150 years.

Benjamin Franklin, an early riser and frugal man, is sometimes credited with the idea.  He wanted to save money on candlesMinister to France in 1782 he found time to publish an essay, An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light.  He proposed adjusting hours to rise earlierin the warm months so that work could be illuminated through an open window, not by costly bee’s waxcandles.  But no one took him up on his utilitarian proposal.

A similar notion was floatedby New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson more than a century later in 1895.  In a paper presented to the Wellington Philosophical Society he proposed a two-hour shift forward in October and a two-hour shift back in March. There was some interest, but two hours probably seemed like a drastic, wrenching change.  Nobody picked up his idea.

William Willett tirelessly promoted Daylight Savings Time in Britain for 15 years.  But it took the Great Wat time and Imperial Germany acting first to get his country temporally on board as a war measure.  And by then he was dead anyhow.

In 1905 Englishman William Willett came up with a gentler approach.  He proposed moving the clocks 20 minutes forward each of four Sundays in April, and switching them back by the same amount on four Sundays in September.  This, he reasoned would allow for gradual adjustment, much the same as naturally rising and beginning work with the SunLiberal Member of ParliamentRobert Pearce introduced the firstDaylight Saving Bill to the House of Commons on February 12, 1908.  And there it languished, year after yeardespite constant lobbying and public appeals by Willett right up to his death in 1915.

As is so often the case, it took a war to accelerate innovationWorld War I, to be exact.  Imperial German instituted SommerzeitSummer Time—as a fuel conservation war measure on April 30, 1916.  Britain and France soon followed.  Russia did it in 1917.  And when the U.S. decided to go Over There, the Wilson administration adopted it in 1918.

It took an elaborate propaganda campaign to promote Day Light Savings time in the U.S during World War I.

The United States quickly abandoned Daylight Savings time after the war.  Farmers, who had once regulated their lives by the sun, now complained that the cows needed milking and the chickens demanded to be fed at set, familiar hours which were disruptedby the sudden hour changes.  But then farmers tend to be traditionalistsand despise any change.  But they were a powerful political force.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed, War Time on February 9, 1939.  It essentially was year-round Daylight Savings Time.  In Britain, where fuel was at a premium, Double Summer Time was applied which moved the clocks two hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)  during the summer and one hour ahead of GMT during the winter.  America abandoned its War Time in September of 1945.

After the War, many states, and sometime local jurisdictions, continued to use Daylight Savings Time in the warmer months.  Starting and ending dates variedand the result was a patch work mapof Daylight and Standard Time.  It was hell on railroads and airlines, who needed consistent schedules, inconvenient for the national broadcasting networks, and a pain in the ass a lot of folks who found their jobs and residences in different times.

A clamor grew to straighten the whole damn mess out.  But no compromise could be found between those who wanted to return to year-round Standard Time and those who wanted uniform Daylight Savings Time in warmer months.

Congress finally adopted the Uniform Time Act of 1966 providing that DST would begin on the last Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday of October. States could, however, still opt out by passing a local law.

We don't know what old Indian allegedly said it but versions of this have been floating around for decades mocking Daylight Savings Time.  Gotta admit whoever said it, he had a point.

And of course, some did.  It led to problemsIndiana, in thrall to it farmers stubbornly clung to Standard Time.  Most of the state was in the Eastern Zone.  But a corner of the state around Gary and Hammond in the northwest was in the Central Zone.  That meant when DST would go into effect in neighboring Illinois, the area became an island out of sync with both the rest of its state and with the Chicago metropolitan area with which it was economically tied.  Similar time islands were found elsewhere.

After the Energy Crisis brought about by the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973, Congress passed emergency legislation extendinguniform Daylight Savings time for 10 months in 1974.  After howls of protest that children were waiting for school busses in the dark, that was rolled back to 8 months a year later.  In ’76 DST reverted to beginning on the last Sunday in April.

But Congress was not done tinkering.  Energy conservation benefits of DST were evident.  In 1985 it pushed the start date back to the first Sunday in April.  The Energy Policy Act of 2005 extended DST by about one month starting on the second Sunday in March and ending on the first Sunday in November. That went into effect in 2007.

Daylight Savings Time still has its critics.

Today most of the US observes DST except for Hawaii and most of Arizona, and Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and Guam.

And, oh year folks from Gary no longer have to change their watchesevery time they drive across the Illinois border. 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Warp Corps Hosts Compassion for Campers on March 16

By: Patrick Murfin

A homeless camp destroyed by winter weather.  Although this photo was taken in the Pacific Northwest the displaced unhoused of McHenry County often found the same conditions after they returned from emergency hotel room stays during the cold weather and snow emergency last month.

Compassion for Campers, the program that provides supplies and gear for the McHenry County homeless who have no steady shelter, Will hold its monthly distribution at Warp Corps, 114 North Benton Street in Woodstock, which is both centrally located and has existing contacts and relations with the homeless community and the social service agencies that serve them, on Tuesday, March 16 from 3:30 to 5 pmClient access to Warp Corps will be from the rear entrance on Jackson Street.



Warp Corps will also have major gear on hand including tents, sleeping bags, mats, tarps, and stoves for walk-in access any day during the continuing season

“The weather has thankfully taken a much needed turn for the better,” said Compassion for Campers coordinator Patrick Murfin, “but many of our clients had their tents and gear destroyed by the heavy snows or lost while they were being housed on an emergency basis at local hotels during the worst of the cold crisis.  There are still inadequate available beds at local shelters.”

The staff and volunteers of Warp Corps in Woodstock do outstanding outreach to the homeless and other marginalized and endangered communities.  Case manager Carlos Salgado, far left, founder and leader Rob Mutart center, and Director of Case Management and Program Development Heather Nelson second from right.

At the Tuesday gear distribution at Warp Corps clients will be Covid-19 screenedwith a temperature check and standard screening questionsNo one failing the test will be turned away but we will ask what they need and supplies will be brought out to them.  All clients are required to be masked before entering the building and a mask will be provided to anyone who does not have one.  Clients will be admitted one at a time and no more will be allowed inside at any time than the location can safely accommodate with correct social distancing

The next monthly distribution will be held on Tuesday, April 13 at Warp Corps.  Plans are being made for outdoor distributions and perhaps mealsduring MayOctober.

Compassion for Campers is grateful to the Faith Leaders of McHenry County, volunteers from Ridgefield-Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church, and Warp Corps for their invaluable support.


To contributeto Compassion for Campers send a checkmade out to Tree of Life UU Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road, McHenry, IL 60050 with Compassion for Campers on the memo line. The donations are placed in a dedicated fund and not used for any other purpose.  Tree of Life also donates all of the administrative expenses of the program.  Currently the program is well supplied with most items and is not currently taking donations of clothing, used sleeping bags, and other items due to limited storageand transportation capacity. 

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One Year Later—New Murfin Verse

By: Patrick Murfin


One year ago yesterday the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the Coronavirus pandemic and suddenly, as if a light switch had been flicked everything changed.  We shut down and retreated to our homes, got used to mantras about masks, social distancing, and washing our hands for as long as it takes to singHappy Birthday.

I was getting ready for an event that I had been working on for months—Poets in Resistance II scheduled for Friday, March 13 at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry, Illinois.  A year ago today, I had to abruptly cancel the event and scramble to contact all of the poets and volunteers and let the public know.  Still, I expected we could reschedule in a couple of month or so.


My 71 birthday was coming up on St. Patrick’s Day and our whole extended clan was expected to gather to celebrate that and other March natal anniversaries the next weekend.  It will be this Easter, at best, when most of us have had our shots that we will be able to gather again and doteon the babies—great granddaughter Sienna and granddaughter Matilda born 9 months ago in the midst of the plague.

As Uncle Joe Biden was addressing the nation and I was waiting to begin yet another Zoom meeting, my mind wandered.  When I finally got to sleeplast night I had a dream which woke me and I scrambled to write it down before it evaporated like so many night visions.

An eastern tiger salamander emerging from under the leaves.

One Year Later

The Anniversary of the Corona Virus Pandemic

March 11, 2021

 

I dreamed that we were salamanders

            in the window well

            after a long drought

            and a horrid winter.

 

We buried ourselves

            in the mud and the mire

            below that thick layer

            of leaves blown down

            from the catalpa.

 

We are waiting for spring rains

            to fill the well

            and some early balmy days

            to warm the mud.

 

Then one fine day

            the children down the street

            will come, bend over,

            brush the leaves aside

            and squeal with delight.

 

They will run home for a sand pail

            or a mother’s pot

            to come and scoop us up

            in all of our wriggling,

            sliming mottled green and black.

 

And then will run home

            to show us off.

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

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French Syndicalism Was Sparked by Europe’s Deadliest Mine Disaster

By: Patrick Murfin

A disaster begins--a blast at at a coal seam face in the French Courrières mine in 1906.

Most people known that by its very nature mining, particularly underground coal mining was and remains the most dangerous industrial occupation.  Pit collapses have been documented from the earliest post-Neolithic when the discovery of the rock that burns made coal a valuable commodity for the hearth.  By the late 19th Century the Industrial Revolution had created an insatiable demand for the stuff not only for home heating, but to fuel the whirling wheels of heavy industry, stoke the huge and superheated furnaces necessary to createsteel, run the vast networks of railroads, and power the merchant fleets and Navies of world girdling empires

As the skies above the great citiesof the world became begrimed with belching soot, millions of men, children, and even women were needed to dig mines that grew ever deeper, vaster, and more complex.  The work was brutally physical, the hours long and often included long, unpaid descents from the surface to the coal face which could take an hour or more. 

Relatively small numbers of experienced and skilled miners from old pits in places like Wales and Italy were in demand around the world but could not provide near enough bodies.  Workers were recruited everywhere from the displaced peasantry, small farmers, and agricultural laborers.  In exigencyeven the lowest level of the urban poor whose health and strength were generally bad and who were distrusted as semi-feral criminals and insurrectionary radicals had to be recruited.

In Europe competition was great enough that wages in the collieries were well above those paid in most industriesto attract men to work that very often meant violent death or permanently disabling injury.  In the U.S. where mines were located mostly in isolated rural areas mine owners clawed back any extra paywith the system of company towns, stores, and pay in script.  Native born white minerswere pitted against immigrants recruited Europe and Blacks lured from the semi-slavery of share cropping.

Mine owners everywhere were determined to maximize profits not only by keeping wages as low as possible, but by ignoring or skirting safe practices.  Mine galleries were often insufficiently timbered, ventilation inadequate, and evacuation routes unbuilt or obstructed.  Miners were not issued new and saferhelmet lamps at company expense as they came on the market, but were required to buy their own leading many to continue to use dangerous open flame lamps.  The predictable outcome was a depressing parade of mine disasters around the world that killed scores or hundreds and left communities ghost towns of widows and orphans.  These disasters naturally outraged workers and led to the formation of unions and a condition of semi-permanent and openclass war in many coal mining regions.

But on March 6, 1906 the Courrières Mine Disaster in northern France which killed at least 1,099 miners including many children dwarfed all the rest.  By contrast the deadliest mine disaster in U.S. history, which is also the worst industrial accident of any kind, which occurred later the same year on December 3 at the Monongah Mine in West Virginia killed an estimated 367.  The French tragedy remained the worst in the world until April 26, 1942 when 1,549 miners died at the Benxihu Colliery accident in China.

The vast mine was operated by Compagnie des mines de houille de Courrières, founded in 1852 between the villages of Méricourt, Sallaumines, Billy-Montigny, and Noyelles-sous-Lens1 mile to the east of Lens, in the Pas-de-Calais département 140 miles north of Paris.  Each of those villages lost hundreds of dead in the explosion.

The mine was considered one of the most modern in Europe, and certainly one of the largest.  It was accessed by pitheads and interconnected by underground galleries on many levels totally more than 70 miles of tunnels.  Although the multiple access points and galleries were thought to expedite evacuationin case of a disaster, they helped spread the blast and fire from an initial explosion deep in thebowels of the mine, blowing upor damaging several pit heads and spreading deadly coal dust and gas far and wide.

                        Confusion and chaos as frantic rescue operations begin. 

At 6:30 in the morning of March 10 a large explosion rocked the mine.  Moments later the elevator cage at Shaft 3 was blown high into the air destroying pit head.  Wide-spread damage was done also at Shaft 4.  When the elevator at Shaft 2 was raised to the surface it contained only dead and dying.

The exact cause of the explosion has never been determined.  Some suspect it was ignited by badly executed face blasting.  Blasting on the previous shift at the suspected origination point of the accident had been insufficient to satisfactorily widen a gallery.  Some believe that foremen might have ordered excessive charges to speed up the work.  Many, however, believe it was likely set off by an open flame from a miner’s cap in gallery filled with coal dust from previous blasting.   Most miners still wore the open flame caps because they could not afford Davy safety lamps and the company refused to provide them.

General Inspector of Mines Delafond summed up the ultimate mystery of a cause in his official report thusly:

The primary cause of the catastrophe could not be determined with absolute certainty. This is what generally happens in catastrophes where all the witnesses to the accident are gone.

Rescue efforts began almost immediately but were hampered by a lack of man power, disorganization, and damage at the shaft heads.  Few of the 600 survivors of the explosion who began to emerge from the pits on the first day were fit to lend a hand or even advise rescuers where to find isolated pockets of survivors.  Many were seriously injured either burnedin the explosion and fire or overcomeby coal dust and gas.  There were many broken bones.  The physically unscathed were in a state of deep shock.

Miners from other shifts and neighboring villages pitched in along with townspeople, company officials, and local peasants.  But both heavy equipment and expertise were needed.  Both were in short supply.  France at the time had barely any trained mine rescue teams, lagging behind the British, Germans, and Italians in this regard.  It took two days for engineers from Paris and German rescue teams to reach the scene.

By that time anger was growing in the mining districts and the company was blamed for slowing rescue efforts to prevent damage to the galleries and fires at the coal faces that could burn for a long time and consume valuable seams.  This may or may not have been unfair.  There is some evidence on both sides.  The company claimed that rescuers were hampered by the extent of the damage and the complexity of the vast tunnel system.

Retrieving the bodies took days.

But there is no question that progress was painfully slow.  By April 1, three full weeks after the explosion, only 194 bodies had been brought to the surface. Small pockets of survivors were located.  Most famously, on March 30 thirteen were rescued who had survived on the lunches of the dead and by killingand eating a mine pony.  Their stories were widely reported in the press and they became such public heroes that the government eventually awarded the two eldest, men in their 50’s the Légion d’honneur, the other eleven including three younger than 18, the Médaille d’or du courage.  On April 4, one final man was pulled out alive.

The event received unprecedented press coverage.  The isolation of many mines from urban areas had prevented earlier accidents from receiving much coverage.  Prior to that various governments, royal, republican, and imperial had all severelycensored news of industrial calamities and the inevitable labor unrest that followed in their wake.  But there were five highly competitive newspapers in Lille, the regional capital less than 25 miles away.  Their coverage was picked up in Paris and national publications rushed correspondents to the scene.  Front pages were dominated for days with lurid illustrations created from sketches drawn by artists at the scene.  Photographs in the form of widely circulatedpost cards were available within days.

The first funerals of victims were held on March 14 during an unseasonable snow storm.  15,000 mourners turned out for the funeral march.

The first strikes protesting thelack of mine safety precautionsand the companies’ perceived lack-lusterrescue efforts began on March 14, the day after 15,000 people turned out for the first funerals during an unseasonablesnow storm.  Soon 61,000 miners across the district and spreading to other areas of France were out on strike.  The strikes intensified, became occasionally violent, and persisted for weeks.

On March 14, the very day the strikes began, by happenstance a new government led by the Radical-Socialist Party under Ferdinand Sarrien came to powerVeteran journalist and Radical politician Georges Clemenceauthe same man remembered by Americans as one of the Big Four at the Versailles Peace Conference after World War I and President Woodrow Wilson’s nemesis—became Minister of the Interior.  Clemenceau was a Radical only in the classic French sense—he belonged to a party rooted in anticlericalism.  Despite the support of the left wing of his party for the labor movement Clemenceau was a reactionary in regard to unions.

Angry protest strikes quickly spread through the region and beyond.  Miners, wives, and children marched from pit to pit in the snow behind makeshift red flags calling workers out.   Mining districts were quickly paralyzed.

He visited the area and made a show of trying to intercedein negotiations, making promises to union officials that they knew he had no intention of following through on.  Despite his pleas, the strike held firm.  Then, ironically on May 1May Day—Clemenceau intervened by flooding the region with troops who brutally suppressed the strike and arrested over 700 union leaders.

The French Section of the Workers’ International(SFIO) and a socialist party, led by Jean Jaurès supported the Radical-Socialist was aghast at the brutality of Clemenceau’s policy.  The socialist and labor press ripped him and called for the downfall of the government.  In a speech in the Chamber of Deputies in June after workers had been forced to return to the pits at bayonet point, Clemenceau publicly broke with the socialists, splitting the ruling coalition.  Shortly after Sarrien had to step down as Premier and Clemenceau in coalition with small right wing republican parties formed a new government.

Clemenceau shattered his party and the government over his suppression of mine protests.  He assembled a new coalition government with right wing, anti union republican parties.

The experience shook the Left.  The labor movement began a total reassessment of its position.  That reassessment came to a head at the 9th Congressof the Confédération générale du travail (CGT) the largest French trade-union, in October 1906.  The Charter of Amiens, passed overwhelmingly by the delegates in attendance, mandated the independence of labor unions from all political parties.  This vindicated the long-held views of French anarcho-syndicalists who became the dominant force in the CGT.  The Charter explicitly laid out dual aims for the movement—the “defense of immediate anddaily demands” on one hand and the “struggle for a global transformation of society in complete independence from political parties and from the state.” 

In this way the system of French Syndicalism, which persists to this day, broke with the German model in which the unions were expressions of the Social Democratic Party and the British model of trade unionism largely built on craft lines with limited aspirations for sweeping social change.  Eventually the British unions hoped to make the Labor Party their creation.

The Charter of Amiens enshrined French syndicalism as the reining principle of the labor movement--unions independent of political parties and the state aimed at both immediate improvement of workers' lives and a radical transformation of society in the long run.

The development of French Syndicalism paralleled and mirrored the development of radical industrial unionism in the United States, particularly the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and would provide intellectual and ideological fodder for Wobbly writers and organizers.  So-called American Syndicalism was not a child of the French model, but a cousin whose resemblance lay in similar experience and condition.  But each would develop their own forms, and especially structures.

Despite the differences the IWW has kept close fraternal relations with the French and other European syndicalists including the CNT in Spain and SAC in Sweden.

Syndicalism remains at the root of the French labor movement to this day, even with the development competing labor federations which emerged after World War II.  Allclaim heritage from and swear allegiance to the Charter of Amiens.

An early hand tinted French postcard of the monument erected in memorium of the  Disaster victims.                      

And that, more so than a surprisingly modest marker erected to the victims’ memory at Avion, is the real monument to all of those dead. 

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Special Guest Blog—The Great Lie: The Creation of Mary Astor

By: Patrick Murfin

Note—You can count on your fingers all of the time Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout has hosted a guest blogger over the years. But when my friend, Woodstock writer and researcher Kathleen Spaltro published her new biography of screen legend and writer Mary Astor, I had to ask her for a contribution.  Astor was one of the most interesting actresses of Hollywood’s Golden age with a career that spanned being the 17 year old love interest of John Barrymore on and off screen, through the women’s pictures and film noirs of the 30’s and 40’s, to memorable mother roles in films like Meet Me In Saint Louis  and Little WomenBut she was also a complicated woman with a tempestuous path who considered herself first and foremost a writer.  Let Kathleen tell you about it.

Mary Astor was an astonishingly beautiful teenager when she was cast opposite the handsome but much older John Barrymore in 1924's Beau Brummel.  She became his off screen lover and secret fiancé. 

Many lies have been told about Mary Astor. She never abandoned her parents to poverty. Her face was their fortune rather than her own. Nor did she rate on a private scorecard the sexual prowess of Hollywood leading men.

But two more dangerous and persistent lies have distorted the understanding of her life. One lie defines Astor as the survivor of sex scandals and suicide attempts who ended up living on charity in a retirement home for film folk. There is much more to her story than that miserable scenario. In fact, with grit and determination, she rebounded from middle-aged decline to invest her energies in a new career as an excellent memoirist and novelist.

The other most important lie—indeed, the great lie—robbed her of her core identity as Lucile Langhanke and imposed on her a movie stardom that she never wanted. This book tells how “Mary Astor” recovered who she really was and really wanted to be.

“Falsehood flies,” Jonathan Swift noted, “and the Truth comes limping after it.” However halting its pace, the truth about this gifted and highly intelligent person is much more interesting than any of the lies.

In her most iconic role Astor played the conniving temptress Ruth Wonderly/Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon opposite Humphry Bogart.

The details of her life story substantiate how Lucile Langhanke accepted and survived her forced rebirth as “Mary Astor” but then rejected this imposed identity and resurrected her former self as “Rusty.” Even though silenced and driven underground, her true self remained intact. She knew all along that she was “Lucile/Rusty,” not “Mary,” and she was never confused about that. This sharpness of perception reveals her high intelligence but also a hidden core of strength.

She discovered and drew upon that strength in later life when she reclaimed her identity as “Rusty.” Earlier, her many self-destructive behaviors, although unhealthy and unwise, displayed the will to resist the imposition of a false and unwanted self. This resistance was in itself healthy and strong although manifested by weak and unhealthy choices.

Her upbringing, as well as her becoming, at others’ insistence, a commodity, created what she bitterly called “the product called Mary Astor.” The betrayal of her “true self” is at the core of both her personal troubles and her ambivalent relationship with stardom. The imposition upon her of her identity and her acting vocation was her tragedy. For others, like Cary Grant, creating a “false self” was a deliberate and welcome escape from a troubled past. The identity “Mary Astor” instead trapped her in a gilded cage of unhappiness and self-loathing. Some of her self-destructiveness came out of having to disavow who she really was to placate others. Eventually, she rescued herself from this predicament and became the person whom others needed to placate.

A commonly believed but false public image remembers Mary Astor mostly as the sexually voracious actress at the center of a notorious sex scandal.  However, diary entries forged by an enemy and released to the press were the actual source of this persistent mischaracterization. My biography sets the episode in its place, recounts the story accurately and thoroughly, but seeks to leave it in its place—justly, as a non-defining episode in Astor’s life.  Instead of fulfilling salacious and deeply sexist expectations, I deliberately change the narrative. Instead of yet again focusing on a libel, I present Astor as a highly intelligent, creative, and gifted person who overcame longstanding abuse and exploitation and turned away from self-destruction.   Grasping a new self-concept in later life, she then pursued a career that reflected her true self.  This biography thus undermines readers’ probable expectations. 

Astor's frank memoir My Story published in 1959 was just the beginning of her career as a writer which included a second memoir focused on her film career and several well-regarded novels.

Out of respect for Mary Astor’s reclamation of her true self and of her desired vocation as a writer, I discuss her movie stardom and film career in the larger context of her entire life.  A writer by both nature and fate who had worked as an actress, rather than an actress whose late-life hobby was writing, Astor left her papers to an university archive but preserved in that archive nothing of her film career that did not relate to her primary interest, writing memoirs and novels.  Hence, while I depict her acting career in films, radio, television, and the theatre in great detail, I highlight only her best movie roles before I describe her achievements as an author as well.

Writing to her agent about her first memoir, Astor shared her hope that My Story would prove to be “an honest document of a woman who happened to be an actress.” This account in full of Astor’s life tries to portray a woman who happened to be an actress.

Adapted from the Author’s Foreword to The Great Lie: The Creation of Mary Astor by Kathleen Spaltro © Copyright 2021.  All Rights Reserved. 

The book is available on Amazon.com in Kindle, hardback, and paperback editions.  It will come out as an audiobook as well.  McHenry County readers can pick a copy up at Between the Lynes, the great independent bookstore on Woodstock Square.

 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Pondering UUs, Lent, Sacrifice with Vintage Murfin Verse

By: Patrick Murfin

These days the Unitarian Universalist Association cheerfully provides Lenten worship materials for congregations and for individual spiritual practice.  It was not always so.

Note—Yesterday I received an e-mail from Kem Tetlow, who evidently found an earlier version of the post below, asked “Wondered why you didn’t have Starbucks on the list?”  The answer was simple:  The poem was written about 2002 before Starbucks was as ubiquitous as it is now.  There are other tip offs to its age.  There were plenty of Volvos in UU parking lots back then.  Today not so much.  It would be a Focus or a Tesla now.

In 2002 practical, safe, and boring Volvos dotted UU parking lots.  Today there would be Teslas, Focus, or other small green friendly car often smothered in stickers and magnets like this but the messages would be things like "Coexist", "Support Whirled Peas", Rainbow flags, and old Bernie Sanders stickers.

We are well into Lent and I was reminded that there is at least a mild rashof interest in and even observance of the season of personal sacrifice and contemplation of the Holy among my fellow Unitarian Universalists.  It was not always so.

As heirs of the Radical Reformation and step siblings Unitarianism and Universalism as they evolved in the United States instinctively rejectedwhat they regarded as Popish trappings, liturgy, and anything that stood between humans and a direct relationship with God.  While both remained in the 19th Century avowedly Christian in the Protestant  tradition that meant eschewing the priesthood, Episcopal authority, the mass, saints, the liturgical calendar and holy days like Christmas or Ash Wednesday.

Springing from New England Puritanism, the Unitarians often practiced days of fasting, humiliation, and prayer in times of war or distress, they saw no reason for a special 40 day season.  After all, a good Puritan lived his or her entire life in a kind of perpetual Lent.

The Universalists preferred to joyfully celebrate the bottomless mercyof a loving God who sooner or later reconciled all souls to Him. The contemplation of this universal beneficence was enough to encourage mortal men and women to live virtuous lives to show themselves worthy of it.

Over time both traditions evolved under the influences of Transcendentalism, Free Thought, exposure to world religions via the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, and the explosion of Humanism following the First and Second World Wars.  Both tended to become less explicitly or orthodox Christian, although a wide variety of spiritual practice was found in both traditions.

Nothing could be more UU than a mug for coffee hour, often called Unitarian communion. This one expressed the feelings of many Humanists in the late 20th Century.

By the time the two united to become the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1960 a flintysort of agnostic Humanism was the dominant strain among Unitarians and flourished to some degree among Universalists.  The larger and more muscular Unitarians soon dominatedthe united faith and Humanism overshadowed theism in its various guises for the rest of the century.

Humanists denied any supernatural interventionin human affairs and stressed the need for men and women to take charge of their own salvation in a broken world to create a kind of heaven on earth.  That translated into activism in matters of war and peace, social justice, civil rights, women’s equality, LBGTQ inclusion, and the environment.

But it also meant a bristling hostility to conventional religion among many.  In some congregations a Minister could lose his/her pulpit for using the “G word,” or citing Biblical scripture.  The old joke was that Unitarians read ahead in their hymnals to make sure that they approved of the lyric.

By the early 21st Century, however there was a growing restiveness in the pews and a yearning for deeper spirituality largely due to riseof the women’s movement within the UUA which led to the adoption of 7th Principle, “respect for the web of existence of which we are a part.”  That gave rise to a kind of pantheism, neo-paganism, Buddhist practice, yoga, and various elements of New Age Spirituality.  Inevitably it also led to a re-examination of Christian tradition and teaching.

Elements of Lenten practice--not just for orthodox Christians any more.

As an aging generation of Humanist ministers retired, they were replaced by graduates of UU Theological Schools and other seminaries who were more receptiveto Christian theology and practice.  Today most UUs still identify mainly as Humanists, but are more tolerant of the theists among them and are more prepared to learn from the wisdom of religions including Christianity. 

Inevitably that has led some to examine traditions like Lent as personal spiritual practices.  Lenten themed prayers or meditations, sermons, and small group discussions are easily found on line.  While Lenten practice is far from widespread, it is no longer an aberration.

About 2002 as those changes were just getting underway, I was moved to write a poem for a service at the old Congregational Unitarian Congregation in Woodstock, Illinois–now the Tree of Life Congregation in McHenry.  It was included in my Skinner House Meditation Manual, We Build Temples in the Heart published two years later.  Since then it has occasionally popped up in services at other congregations.


Despite its length and structure I have often call this my Zen poem.

What Unitarian Universalists Should Give Up for Lent if They Observed It, Which They Don’t, Most of Them.

 

Pews without padding, Nature Conservancy calendars.

Volvos, polysyllabic verbosity,

herbal tea, austerity,

National Public Radio, unread books in fine bindings,

isms:

    Liberalism, Buddhism. Humanism,

    Marxism, Feminism, Taoism,

    Vegetarianism, Conservationism, Transcendentalism,

    Atheism, Consumerism, Sufism,

    for Christ’s sake, Libertarianism,

Joys and Concerns, pretension,

committee meetings, Habitat t-shirts,

potluck tuna casserole, black-and-white films with subtitles,

petitions, sermons, tofu and brown rice,

drums, theology,

season tickets to anything but baseball,

liturgical dance, poetry readings,

pride:

    Pilgrim pride

    pride of intellect

    pride of lineage

    pride of lions

    the pride that cometh before the fall

bistros, pledge drives,

advanced degrees, spirituality,

coffee hour, sensible shoes,

philosophy, choir rehearsal,

arrogance, animal sacrifice,

gender-neutral hymnals, learned clergy,

natural fibers, string quartets,

whiteness, turquoise jewelry,

recycling, self-congratulation,

acupuncture, bird-watching at dawn,

yoga, Common Cause,

God, doubt,

egotism, self-denigration,

yesterday, tomorrow.

 

—Patrick Murfin

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

The Labor and Socialist Roots of International Women’s Day Run Deep

By: Patrick Murfin


Today is International Women’s Day.  Rooted in the international push for women’s suffrage and in the labor/socialist movements, the first celebration was held in 1911 on March 19, a date selected to commemorate the 1848 uprisings when the King of Prussia was compelled to acknowledge the power of the people. 

The occasion and date were suggested by Clara Zetkin of the German Social Democratic Party at the second International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen in 1910.  Delegates from 17 countries representing trade unions, socialist parties, and working women’s clubs unanimously approved thecall.  News of the event, spread by the socialist press and word of mouth helped make the first observance successful in much of Europe with packed meetings, parades, and at least one tense standoff with police.

Just before World War I German Socialists celebrated International Women's Day in 1914.

In 1913, International Women’s Day was moved to its present date of March 8.  Despite the eruption of the First World War, which damaged many international relationships, Women’s Day grew year by year. 

In the wake of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, American unions, the Socialist Party, and later the Communist Party spread the celebration through the next two decades, but because of its radical association, the Suffrage movement and middle class women’s organizations shunned it. 

Union members, Socialist, Communists and female labor organizations led early American observances while middle class suffrage movements shied away.

It faded in this country until it was taken up by a new generation of feminists in ‘60’s, largely shorn of its original working class basis. 

In 1975 the United Nations officially began promoting and sponsoring International Women’s Day.  Each year the U.N. designates a theme for the celebration, although individual countries and groups are allowed, even encouraged, to develop their own themes based on their own experiences and challenges. 


The theme for 2021 is #ChooseToChallenge.  The International Women’s Day web site describes the theme this way:

A challenged world is an alert world. Individually, we’re all responsible for our own thoughts and actions—all day, every day.

We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality. We can all choose to seek out and celebrate women's achievements. Collectively, we can all help create an inclusive world.

From challenge comes change, so let's all choose to challenge.

Today, it is observed as a national holiday in many nations, although disguised as a version of Mothers’ Day in some conservative societies.  Among the hold outs in designating an official status are many Islamic nations like Iran where attempts to mark the Day with public demonstrations have been met by police attacks and the jailing of many leading women militants. 

Second wave American feminists resurrected interest in International Women's Day in the late '60's and celebrated when became a United Nations sponsored event in 1975.

And, of course, in the United States a deep fear and resentmentby conservatives of any International celebration, particularly one with Socialist roots and promoted by the United Nations, prevents any official participation, even when it was—or especially because it was—smiled upon and acknowledged by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

This year President Joe Biden is set to mark International Women’s Day by signing two executive orders creating a Gender Policy Council and reviewing Trump-era changes to Title IX, the Federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination in education


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Bloody Sunday on an Alabama Bridge Changed America

By: Patrick Murfin

They are calling this year’s commemoration The Selma Bridge Crossing Jubilee  which will mark the 56th anniversary of Bloody Sunday—the day on March 7, 1965, that Civil Rights marchers were brutally beatenby law enforcement officers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge.  This year icons of the March—Congressman John Lewis, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, the Rev. C.T. Vivian, and attorney Bruce Boynton who all died since last year’s 50th anniversary march will be honored.  But there will not be the customary mass march across the historic bridge.  Due to the Coronavirus everything this year will be virtual.    

This year’s commemoration comes as several states are seeking to roll back expanded early and mail-in voting access and efforts have been unsuccessful to restore a key section of the Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of discrimination to get Federal approval for any changes to voting procedures. President Joe Biden will speak to the annual Martin & Coretta King Unity Breakfast which will be held as a drive-in event in the parking lot of Wallace Community College Selma at 7:30 a.m. Central Standard time.  He will sign an executive order to make it easierfor eligible voters to register to vote and to improve access to voting as Congress works to enact legislation to prevent the kind of attacks on voting rights now on the verge of enactment in Georgia

The Breakfast and the virtual Bridge crossing this afternoon from 2 to 2:30 will be live-streamedto those registered at the Jubilee web site and will undoubtedly be posted to YouTube and other sites for later viewing.

Alabama State Police beat SNCC march leader John Lewis, on ground center, after charging voting rights marchers trying to cross Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma on the way to the state capitol in Montgomery in 1965.

March 7, 1965 was Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama.  On that day massed Alabama State Police attacked peaceful demonstrators attempting to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge on a march from Selma to the state capital at Montgomery to protest suppression of voting rights.

 Members of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had been conducting voter registration drivesin the area since 1963 and had encounteredescalating violence.  After the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,efforts stepped up.  On July 6 of that year SNCC leader John Lewisattempted to lead a march on the county court house to register voters.  He and other marchers were beaten and arrested.  A few days later a local judge handed down a sweeping injunction against more than two people assembling to even talk about voter registration. 

Two SCLC organizers arrived to join the voter registration effort.  Diane Nash like John Lewis was a veteran of the Nashville public accommodation sit-in campaign of 1960.  Her husband, Rev. James Bevel was also a seasoned non-violent activist.  Together they were two of the best the organization had.

SNCC leaders appealed to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).  SCLC leaders including the Rev. James Bevel, who had been conducting his own voter registration projects, and his wife, Diane Nash, a SNCC founder who had cut her teeth in the Nashville youth crusade sit-ins with Lewis, came to Selma to join the effort.  But the national organization, busy with other efforts, had not yet committed.

Finally, on January 2 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Selma bringing with him the national spotlight and officially launcheda new Selma Voting Rights Movement.  Marches on court houses resumed there and in surrounding counties

They body of Jimmie Lee Jackson, first martyr of the Selma campaign.  After leading a night march to the Perry County Court House in Marion, Jackson was shot trying to protect his mother and grandfather from a beating by police who charged into a cafe where they had taken refuge.  His death galvanized the campaign locally, but attracted little national press attention.

On February 18 a young man, a Baptist elder who had tried four times to register, Jimmie Lee Johnson was shot trying to defend his mother and grandfather from police clubs after a night march on the Perry County court house in Marion.  When Johnson died of his wounds days later, Bevel called for a protest march on the state capital from Selma on March 7.  

On the day of the march John Lewis, the Rev. Hosea Williams of the SCLC, and local leaders like Amelia Boynton led about 600 marchers.  When they attempted to cross the bridge, they were met by massed troopers and ordered to disperse.  Lewis attempted to speak to the commanding officer but was shoved to the groundand beaten.  Police charged the crowd with clubsand gasMounted officers attacked from the flanks.  Scenes of horrific violence were captured on film and soon broadcast on television helping to swing public sympathy to the marchers. 

King responded with a call torally in Selma for a second march.  Hundreds from around the country, including many clergy, responded to the call.  Lawyers appealed to Federal Judge Frank Minis Johnson, who was suspected to be sympathetic, to lift the local ban on marches.  The judge took the issue under advisement but issued a temporary restraining order against resuming the march until he could make hisruling

With thousands gathered, King felt he had to move but did not want to alienate the judge.  On March 9 he led about 7,000 to the bridge but then knelt in prayerand turned the crowd back, a move that was harshly criticized by SNCC leaders. 

Rev. James Reeb, a young Unitarian Universalist minister was with two other when he was beaten to death by Klansmen in Selma on the eve of a second march.  The death of a white minister did grab attention and President Lyndon Baines Johnson used it to advance the Voting Right Act of 1965.

That evening three Unitarian Universalist ministers, James Reeb, Clark Olsen, and Orloff Miller who had responded to King’s call were attacked and beaten outside a Selma cafe known to be a hangout for Klansmen.  Reeb died of his wounds on March 11 in Birmingham after the Selmahospital refused to treat him. 

On hearing of Reeb’s death the Board of the Unitarian Universalist Association meeting in Boston voted to adjournand re-convene in Selma.  UUA President Dana McLean Greeley and eventually half of the active ministers in the Association headed south.

The death of a white minister galvanized public opinion in a way that Jimmie Johnson’s had not.  A shaken President Lyndon Johnson submitted a Voting Rights Act to Congress on March 15 after failing to get Governor George Wallace to back off from attacks on demonstrators. 

A week after Reeb’s death Judge Johnson finally issued the long-anticipated rulingupholding the First Amendment rightsto assemble and protest

John Lewis, Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, Juanita Abernathy, Ralph Bunche, Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King, Frederick Reese and Hosea Williams lead the March through Montgomery to the Capitol.

On March 21 the final and successful marchon Montgomery set off with King, Lewis, Bevel, Williams leading the way with a bevy of national clergy. They were protectedby 2,000 Federal troops and U. S. Marshalls on the four-day march through hostile territory to the capital. 

After a triumphant rally on the capitol steps, Viola Liuzzo, a young Detroit mother and U.U. laywoman was driving a black marcher back to Selma, when she was shot by Ku Klux Klan members.  A federal informant was in the Klansmen’s car.  She was the final fatality in the Selma campaign. 

Tennessee born Viola Liuzzo, a white U.U. laywoman and mother from Detroit marched from Selma to Montgomery often barefoot as in this photo.  She was murdered driving a Black Marcher back to Selma after the final rally at the State Capital.  She was the third of four of the Martyrs of Selma who also included Episcopal seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels who was shotgunned to death on August 30 after spending a week in jail for a Lowndes County, demonstration, a part of the greater Selma campaign.

The Voting Rights Act passed Congress and was signed into law by the President on August 6.  Within year 7000 new Black voters were enrolled in Selma’s Dallas County

In 1966 Sheriff Jim Clark, who was responsiblefor much of the early violence in Selma, lost his bid for re-election.  John Lewis would go on to be elected to Congress.  The Edmund Pettus Bridge is now marked as part of the Selma to Montgomery Voting Rights Trail, a National Historic Trail.

The 50th Anniversary march included President Barack Obama and his family, Congressman John Lewis and other veterans of the original march and former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura.  Always outspoken, Diane Lewis boycotted the reunion march to protest Bush's inclusion.  

In the 50th Anniversary year of 2015, tens of thousands joined Congressman Lewis and other veterans of the original marches along with President Barack Obama, his family, and former President George W. Bush and his wife Laura in a symbolic and triumphant march across the Bridge.

The same year the film Selma directed by Ana DuVernayand starring David Oyelowo, Carmen Ejogo, Tom Wilkinson, and Oprah Winfrey opened to high praise, great reviews, and a slew of awards and nominations.

Ana DuVernay's acclaimed film Selma was an accurate depiction of the voting rights campaign and marches.  Unlike earlier popular movies about the Civil Rights campaigns, there was no white savior and the vision was unfiltered by white eyes.  The film also honored the work and sacrifice of ordinary folk as well as Martin Luther King and other marquee movement names.  

Last year Congressman Lewis, who was battling pancreatic cancer was joined by four Democratic presidential candidates—Senators Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg for the march.  In his comments Congressman Lewis said:

Fifty-five years ago, a few of our children attempted to march ... across this bridge. We were beaten, we were tear-gassed. I thought I was going to die on this bridge. But somehow and some way, God almighty helped me here…We must go out and vote like we never, ever voted before…

I’m not going to give up. I’m not going to give in. We’re going to continue to fight. We need your prayers now more than ever before.  We must use the vote as a nonviolent instrument or tool to redeem the soul of America…

To each and every one of you, especially you young people ... go out there, speak up, speak out. Get in the way. Get in good trouble. Necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.

 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Ring Lardner—Baseball Bard and Accidental Literary Man

By: Patrick Murfin

                                Ring Lardner, the quintessential sports writer at work.

Note:  Spring Training is in full swing already and the baseball starved heart beats faster.  While my beloved Cubs are looking for the pitching that can keep what’s left of the veteran core of a great team in contention for another year, our South Side rivals are talking about going all the way.  The fun of following baseball has always been wrapped up in those who told us about the games we would not be in the stands for and the radio and TV voices calling play by play and adding color.  Looking back old time sports writers for the highly competitive newspapers created much of the mythos and culture of America’s pastime.  None were more essential than Ring Larder.

The most surprising thing about Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, who was born on this date in 1885 in Niles, Michigan, is that he came from a family of considerable wealth and social standing.  If you read the stuff he churned out later in life as Ring Lardner, you would assume he was one of those scruffy up-from-the-bottom whiskey drinking newspaper men who with a minimum of education muscled their way out of industrial serfdom or barefoot rural poverty to become an ink stained wretch. 

He was the youngest of nine children of a distinguished family who held high hopes for him.  His name was chosen at the suggestion of his uncle, Rear Admiral James L. Lardner in honor on an Annapolis classmate, Rear Admiral Cadwalader Ringgold.  The boy, naturally, hated both the monikerand all of the expectations of achievement and glory that went with it.  He settled on going by Ring, which he admitted didn’t make any sense.  He struggled indifferently through high school, more interested in sports and carousing with friends than academics. 

His parents, having given up on the idea of him getting a top flight education at a service academy, an Ivy League college, or the University of Michigan, shipped him off to study engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology in Chicago, which they considered little better than a trade school.  Young Larder could not, or would not, even hack it there.  He dropped out before completing his first semester.

                                Lardner about the time he began to make a name for himself as northwest Indiana sports writer.

Lardner almost seems to have stumbled into journalism for want of anything better to do.  He began covering sports for the South Bend Tribune in Indiana shortly after his escape from academia and while still a teenager.  It turned out to be a good match from the beginning.  He had a casual, easy way with words and a knack for telling stories from a just off-center perspective that made him stand out from the beginning from others on the sports beat. 

On a personal level, the life of a sports writer had great appeal—he was by necessity out of the office and the constricting supervision of bosses for much of the day.  Moreover it was his job to hang out with athletes, attend games, and generally carouse and hobnob with the colorful characters who haunted ball parks, race tracks, and boxing arenas.  He loved hotel lobbies, drafty railroad coaches, and saloons—the camaraderie of men in straw boaters and loud suits chomping cigars, swilling whiskey, and telling lies.

It did not take long for Lardner’s talent to get noticed—or for him to take advantage of it.  He began a period of frequently changing jobs, each time hopping to better paying and more prestigious newspapers.  After six months at the Tribune, he skipped to its competitor the South Bend Times. By 1907 he was in the big town, Chicago where he worked in rapid succession for the lowly Inter-Ocean then moved up to William Randolph Hearst’s Chicago Examiner, and then to the prestigious Chicago Tribune.

By 1900 Lardner was in St. Louis where Taylor Spink of the nationally circulated Sporting News let the writer go beyond reporting on games—by this time he was writing almost exclusively about baseball—and gave him a humor column Pullman Pastimes based on the off the field conversations and high jinx of players.  Beginning to write in the semi-literate vernacular of the players, Lardner was finding his voice.  He continued to contribute to the Sporting News even after moving on to another big city daily, the Boston American.

Sometime in the midst of this game of musical desk chairs, Lardner wooed and won Ellis Abbott of Goshen, Indiana, a town not far from where he started his career in South Bend.  The couple would wed in 1911 and Ellis gave him four sons and stuck by him even as the normal heavy drinking of a newspaper man became more and more serious.

Perhaps a new wife and family were enough to end his vagabond ways,  In 1913 Lardner returned to Chicago and the Tribune where he took over the paper’s flagship sports column In the Wake of the after the death of its originator Hugh Keough.  He would remain with the paper and the column through 1919 and help make the column a nationwide success syndicated in over 100 newspapers.

It was during this period that Lardner became exceptionally close to the players on the Chicago White Sox, the dominant team of the American League.  He began to draw on some of the players for inspiration for a new series of short stories, six of which ran in the Saturday Evening Post.  The stories were framed as letters home to a pal by bush league player Jack Keefe who was barely literate about his life in baseball and his rise and travails as a member of the White Sox.  The letters were written not only in vernacular but riddled with spelling and grammar errors, just the way such a rube ballplayerwould write.  They were also funny as hell, as well as occasionally insightful and even touching.

George H. Doran Co., then the nation’s most prestigious publisher with authors like P. G. Wodehouse, Arnold J. Toynbee, Theodore Roosevelt, Arthur Conan Doyle, O. Henry, Virginia Woolf, Frank Harris, H.G. Wells, W. Somerset Maugham, Sinclair Lewis, and H.L. Mencken under contract, was convinced the Post stories could be made into an epistolary novel.  Lardner did not believe that they were anything special.  He regarded them as ephemera no more enduringthan a daily sports column.  In order to create a cohesive manuscript, Lardner had to beg the Post to return his original stories to him—he had not bothered to keep copies. 

The original George  H. Doran Co. edition of You Know Me Al later re-issued and re-packaged as serious literature by Scribner's.

When You Know Me Al was first published, it was not a huge immediate success, despite the continuing popularity of the Keefe stories in the Post.  But a lot of very serious writers from Virginia Woolf to a youthful Ernest Hemingway would take notice of the book and admire it for both its style and its human depth.  The opening of the first story famously set the table to hear the tale told in Keefe’s voice:

Friend Al: Just a line to let you know I am still on earth. My arm feels pretty good again and I guess maybe I will work in Detroit. Violet writes that she can’t hardly wait to see me. Looks like I got a regular girl now Al. We go up there the twenty-ninth and maybe I won’t be glad to see her. I hope she will be out to the game the day I pitch. I will pitch the way I want to next time and them Tigers won’t have such a picnic.

I suppose you seen what the Chicago reporters said about that game. I will punch a couple of their jaws when I see them.

Your pal, Jack

Despite the moderate success of the first printing of You Now Me Al, the character and the series remained popular for a long string of more stories in the Post and more collections which were steadily gaining loyal fans.  More than one compared his gifts of observation, satire, and the deft use of first person dialectto Mark Twain.

As both a sports writer and an almost-against-his-will literary figure, Lardner’s work contrasted with others who tried to bridge those worlds.  Coloradoraised Damon Runyon came of age as a newspaperman on the virtual frontier amid colorful sporting men—gamblers, touts, and pimps. When he came to New York City his mentor was an old friendfrom out West, the gunman and sometime lawman Bat Masterson, who taught him about fixing fights and horse races and introduced him to underworld gangs and gamblers who inhabited the edge of sports.  Grantland Rice, on the other hand, was a son of the Southern aristocracy and a college man.  His passions were for intercollegiate athletics, especially footballand the gentlemanly game of golf.  He saw athletics as a noble contest and athletes as classic heroes embodying the best in civilization.  He wrote elegantly, even floridly to lift up his flawless heroes.

Lardner was somewhere in the middle.  His game was baseball, a professional sport for decades already played mostly by young men from hardscrabble backgrounds who were in it as much to escape a life of drudgery as for glory.  He liked those men.  He felt, despite his own privileged background to be one of them.  He always knew there were fixers on the edge, but believed that, on the whole that the spitting, cussing, scratching, and brawling boys of the bench shared a certain code of the game that usually put them out of the reach of the worst connivers

Two things changed Lardner’s perspective.  The first was first hand exposure to the horrors of World War I.  Collier’s Magazine sent Lardner to France to cover the war.  He was not a front line correspondent, but he saw enough and talked to enough Doughboysyoung soldiers who often resembled his beloved ball players—to be wised up to some brutal truths.  Out of this experience Lardner mined a personal memoir, My Four Weeks in France.  But he also let Jack Keefe get drafted and shipped off to the trenches which was chronicled by the unfortunate pitcher in more letters to Al in Treat ‘em Rough.

Ring Lardner's role in exposing the  1919 Black Sox scandal was central to the film Eight Men Out.  Lardner was portrayed by a virtual doppelganger--screen writer and director John Sales.  Seen here with Studs Terkel as a Tribune sports writer and John Mahoney as Sox manager Kid Gleason.

The second thing was the Black Sox Scandal.  Lardner had been covering and traveling with the Chicago White Sox for years.  Many of White Sox figures, from shrewd and cheap old Charles Comiskeyand coach Kid Gleason, were used by name in You Know Me Al and others were only thinly disguised. 

Lardner became suspicious that something was afoot during the 1919 World Series Games against Cincinnati.   There was an inexplicable lack ofsharpness, particularly on crucial defensive plays and certain pitchers seemed to be offering up batting practice.  Some say that Kid Gleason, who had been elevated to manager that year, tipped Lardner off that the series was fixed.  Lardner covered the whole unraveling scandal, including the exile from baseball of players he had considered close friends.  He felt betrayed.  Ever after his baseball writing, while still rife with humor, took on a darker world view, almost an assumption that on some level the fix was always in.

Lardner was also broadening out from writing just baseball stories.  He began contributing other satirical tales to the Post and other magazines which were collected and published to acclaim including Gulible’s Travels in 1917, Own Your Own Home in 1919, The Young Immigrunts in 1920, and The Big Town in 1921.

 

You Know Me Al became a popular newspaper comic strip in the 1920's and  Lardner picked up extra income not only for the rights to his stories, but for penning the scripts.

Own Your Own Home represented a big change for Lardner.  After the Black Sox scandal, he left Chicago to relocate his family in the leafy and tony Hamptons on Long Island.  He dropped his daily column but kept up his popular weekly syndicated pieces which he could write from anywhere.  The move made possible by the very comfortable living his work was now providing him.

But it was motivated by a long cherished dream of writing plays to be produced on Broadway.  He had mounted an original play back home in Niles, Michigan while still a teenager.  Despite his success as a writer, Lardner found producers immune from the charms of his scripts, which were chockfull of nonsense and whimsy and included music and lyrics by the playwright.  Some of his sketches and songs were used in various productions of the Ziegfeld Follies including one baseball sketch featuring Will Rogers.  

At the White House on the way to a Senators game with President Warren G. Harding, another hard drinking former newspaper man.

In 1928 George M. Cohan produced his baseball comedy Elmer the Great starring Walter Huston, but it was unsuccessful.  But it was made into a 1933 Joe E. Brown film that was a hit.  Finally, in 1930 Lardner had a hit, June Moon written in collaboration with George S. Kauffman for which he also wrote the songs.

Although not successful on Broadway in a George M. Cohan production starring Walter Huston, Elmer the Great became a big hit in 1933 for Joe E. Brown, a physical comic who had played baseball.

During his residency in the Hamptons, Lardner spent many eveningsin New York City and with the introduction of Prohibition partied hard.  He enjoyed the Jazz Age.  Young F. Scott Fitzgerald came under his wing and guidance.  Lardner was asked to proof drafts of The Great Gatsby in which a character was based on him.  In his last novel Tender is the Night, Lardner was depicted as the drunken Abe North at a fatal party.

In the mid-Twenties Maxwell Perkins, Fitzgerald’s legendary editor at a Scribner’s became convinced that Lardner should be re-packaged as a writer from comic relief to a serious, if humorous short story writer.  Scribner’s obtained rights to Lardner’s earlier books, and re-issuedthem in a uniform series to highlight their importance.  That included a new edition of You Can Call Me Al which had inexplicably gone out of print.  

Now presented as literary fiction, it found new and appreciative audiences.  Perkins helped guide the story collections of the late Twenties that included many of Lardner’s most admired.  The wry title of the first of these collections How to Write Short Stories was suggested by Fitzgerald who knew that Lardner still harbored a lingering suspicion he was a fraud as far as a literary figure goes.  But stories like the gripping, tragic Haircut from his 1926 collection The Love Nest and Other Stories showed that Lardner was indeed the master of the short story, a literary form that flourished for a time in this country.

Lardner continued to write successfully.  In addition to his general interest short stories, he wrote a satirical autobiography The Return of Wonderman in 1927 returned to baseball in 1933 with Lose With a Smile. 

But years of heavy drinking and carousing were taking a toll on his health.  At home his wife tried to care for him and he did pay attentions to his four sons, all of whom he made sure had had the best educations—the kind he had purposefully escaped from—at prestigious Ivy League schools.

Drinking affected his heart and he suffered at least one heart attack.  He was sent to a sanitarium in Arizona to dry out and also recover from symptoms of Tuberculosis in 1931 and sought similar treatment in California two years later.  When it became apparent he did not have long to live, he returned to his home in the Hamptons where he died in his sleep surrounded by his wife and two of his sons on September 23, 1933 at the age of 48.

Lardner's four sons--John and Jim on top, Ring Jr. and David on the bottom--as young men. All went on to successful careers as journalist and writers but were stalked by tragedy. Jim died fighting with the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, David was killed as a World War II war correspondent,  and Oscar winning screen writer Ring Jr. spent a year in prison as one of the Hollywood 10 and was blacklisted for work in films for years.

His heritage as a newspaper man and writer, as well as someone with a deep sense of the injustices of the world, was carried on by his four sons.  The eldest John Lardner, born in 1912 became a correspondent for the International Herald Tribune in Paris before returning to the States to become a sports columnist for Newsweek and a World War II war correspondent.

James Lardner was also an accomplished journalist who gave it up to enlistin the International Brigades fighting fascists during the Spanish Civil War.  He was killed in Spain.

The most famous of the brothers, Ring Lardner, Jr. was a leading Hollywood screen writer whose work included Woman of the Year, a film that won him an Academy Award for Original Screenplay in 1942, Laura in 1944, Brotherhood of Man in 1946, and Forever Amber in 1947.  Later in ’47 he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee for supposed Communist connection but refused to name names.  He became one of the famous Hollywood 10 and spent a year in prison.  Blacklisted in Hollywood he moved to England where he worked under a variety of pseudonyms.  When the Blacklist was finally broken he worked on such classic films as The Cincinnati Kid and M*A*S*H, for which he won a second Oscar.  He died in New York City in 2000, the last surviving member of the Hollywood 10.

The youngest son, David Lardner worked for The New Yorker as a general reporter and war correspondent before he was killed by a landmine near Aachen, Germany in October 1944, less than one month after his arrival in Europe.

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Country Music’s Greatest Thrush—Patsy Cline

By: Patrick Murfin

Early in her career Patsy Cline worked in cowgirl outfits that her mother designed and hand made.

There may not be a Don McLean song to commemorate the occasion, but March 5, 1963 was surely another day the music died.  On that day a small plane carrying Patsy Cline and fellow Grand Ol’ Opry stars Cowboy Copas and Hankshaw Hawkins went down on the way home to Nashville from a Kansas City benefit.  The three stars and two others were killed in the crash in remote woods near Camden, Tennessee. 

Learning that the plane was missing in the area friends from Nashville joined in the frantic search.  The crash site was discovered by Roger Miller, one of the many young artists Cline had mentored. 

Roger Miller, overcome by grief, at the crash site he discovered.  Hankshaw Hawkins's guitar strap and a boot lie at his feet.

Born Virginia Patterson Hensley in Winchester, Virginia in 1932 to a sixteen year old seamstress and her blacksmith husband, she was performing in local talent shows and clubs by her mid teens.  During a short lived marriage to Gerald Cline in the early ‘50’s she began performing as Patsy Cline. 

Cline was soon being featured on a local Washington, DC TV program along another rising young country star, Jimmy Dean and signed a recording contract with Four Star Records.  She enjoyed middling success recording, at the label’s insistence, material not suited for her rich voice and emotional delivery.  Still, she was getting enough attention to be invited to occasionally appear on the Opry. 

In 1957 she competed on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, one of the most popular shows on television.  Godfrey insisted that she abandonthe cowgirl outfits her mother made for a sophisticated cocktail dress.  She sang her recently recorded Walkin’ After Midnight.  She won the competition handily.  The song was released as single and soared to the top of the country music and pop charts.  Cline regularly appeared on Godfrey’s radio show and became a featured performer on the Ozark Jubilee on ABC. 

                        Patsy on her 1957 wedding day to Charlie Dick.

Cline was touring regularly and was a fast rising star when she married Charlie Dick.  Despite rumors of abuse, she always called Dick the “Love of my life.”  Together they had two children, Randy and Julie who her mother helped raise while she was on tour.  After her death Dick dedicated much of the rest of his life to preserving Patsy’s memory.

With a new manager Cline was finally released from her restrictive Four Star contract and signed with Decca in 1960.  She enjoyed country and pop success with a string of hits that featured full orchestration and elaborate production values, the so-called Nashville Sound.  Her first Decca record I Fall to Pieces set the standard for the new sound and new success. 

By 1961 Cline became a member of the Opry and was soon one of its biggest stars.  She befriended and mentored many artists, especially women like Lorretta Lynn, Dottie West, and Barbara Mandrel.  But she could also hang out with male performers matching beers and dirty jokes.  Incredibly generous she often supported struggling performers, even brining them into her home.  Cline was the best loved woman in Nashville. 

Her high ride almost ended in a near fatal car crash in 1961 in which she was thrown through the car’s windshield.  Dottie West rushed to the scene and cradled her injured friend picking glass out of her hair.  Cline declined treatment in the hospital until the other driver was cared for.  That driver died, and the delay may have made Cline’s injuries worse.  She suffered a broken hip, several broken ribs, and a deep, long gash on her forehead. 

After her auto accident in 1961, Cline's appearance dramatically changed as she used wigs and heavy makeup to cover a serious scar on her forehead.

The rest of her life she had to hide the scar under wigs and heavy make-up.  Ever the trooper, she returned to touring while still on crutches. 

Her recording of young songwriter Willie Nelson’s Crazybecame the biggest hit of her career.  Cline became the first woman in country music to have her own show at Carnage Hall.  She also sang at the Hollywood Bowl and headlined her own show in Las Vegas. 

Patsy Cline was only 30 years old when she died.  As so often happens after the tragic early death of star she has since become a cultural icon.

Jessica Lang earned an Oscar not for Best Actress for her portrayal of Cline in Sweet Dreams.

Cline was featured in at least two notable feature films and two made-for-TV movies. In 1980 she was played by Beverly D’Angelo in the Loretta Lynn biopic Coal Miner’s Daughter.  Five years later she got her own biopic, Sweet Dreams staring Jessica Lang and Ed Harris as her husband Charlie Dick.  The film was criticized for put Cline’s career on the back burner instead focusing on the melodrama around her tempestuous marriage.  None-the-less Lang garnered and Academy Award Nomination for her star turn.

In 1995 Big Dreams and Broken Hearts: The Dottie West Story. a film about the life and career of Cline’s friend Dottie West played on CBS with Tere Myers as Patsy.  Yet another take on the relationship with Lynn, Patsy & Loretta was 2019 Lifetime with Broadway star Megan Hilty as Cline.  Directed by the Academy Award-winning screenwriter Callie Khouri the film was co-produced by Lynn’s daughter and Cline’s daughter, Julie Fudge.

Cline was also featured in Ken Burn’s epic PBS series Country Music.

On the stage the 1985 off-Broadway two person play Always...Patsy Cline based on the friendship and correspondence of the star with a Houston fan has become a staple of regional and dinner theater productions.  A 1991 production, A Closer Walk with Patsy Clineis a more straight forward account of Clines career featuring many of her most famous songs.  It is also regularly staged.

                            Cline was the first woman solo artist to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1971.

To this day no one sings a song with emotional intensity of the girl from Winchester.

 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Beating Rodney King Previewed Black Lives Matter 30 Years Ago

By: Patrick Murfin

Rodney King after the beating and on the ground in a screen shot from the Holiday video tape.

Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of Black motorist Rodney King getting his ass good and whipped by a swarm of Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers on March 3. 1991.  The incident was unremarkable and routine.  It would have completely escaped notice except for one thing—a neighbor, George Holiday, shot the attack on his home video camcorder and two days later gave the tape to television station KTLA.  When they broadcast an edited versionof the tape all hell broke loose.  Outrage over the officers’ perceived brutality spread rapidly as did a backlash in support of the police.  Four of the officers involved were indicted and tried.  When a California jury failed to convict any of the men, the worst urban rioting in twenty years broke out on April 29, 1992 resulting in 53 deaths and more than 2,000 injurieslasting until May 4.   Rioting spread to San Francisco, Las Vegas, and as far away as Atlanta.

That video camera changed everything and ushered in a new era in which police behavior was apt to be captured irrefutably by bystanders.  That has only intensified with rapidly evolving technology which quickly made the bulky shoulder held camcorder used by Holiday obsolete replacing it with a rapid succession of ever-more compact, cheap, and widely available technology including digital video which made small, hand held cameras widely available and eventually ubiquitous cell phone camera capacity that has made almost everyone a potential citizen journalist.

A video camcorder like this captured the beating and ushered in a new era of citizen journalism and monitoring police behavior.

At the center of this pivotal moment was Rodney King, a 25 year old Black man.  He was not exactly a poster boy of innocent victimhood.  He had a checkered past, including run-ins with the law.  His criminal record was relatively minor but at the time of the incident he was on parole for robbery, which would be a factor in his disastrously muddled thinking that night.  He was the father of three daughters—one with his girlfriend as a teenager, and one with each of his two ex-wives.  He was not an exemplary family man.  He had a taste for liquor and an occasional joint although he seemed to have avoided more serious narcotics.  King worked off and on and was a cab driver at the time.  He liked hanging with his friends, which is what he was doing that night.

When most Los Angeles Whites looked at King, they saw the quintessential Black thug—a hulking criminal who defied police, continued to resistthrough escalating attempts to subdue him, likely hyped up on drugs, and a real threat to the safety of officers who got what he deserved.  What Blacks saw was a hard knocks young man not much different than themselves or those that they knew and loved who was viciously attacked by members of an occupying army in their communities.

                        TV shows like Adam 12 helped give the LAPD a squeaky clean image.

Now a quick look at the LAPD.  It was then widely considered an elite urban force known for tight discipline and procedures and an aggressive patrol style.  While cops in other big cities like New York and Chicago were often slovenly and overweight LA patrolmen were expected to be trim and in shape.  In Chicago and NYC cops still wore powder blue uniform shirts that often seemed sloppy.  In LA they were clad in tailored and menacing black.  Eastern cops still sported porn star moustaches.  In the City of Angels they wore mirrored aviator sunglasses.  The public perception of the LAPD had been shaped by decades of almost worshipful portrayals on TV from Dragnet to Adam 12 to TJ Hooker.  On the big screen detectives played by the likes of Clint Eastwood might go heroically rogue, but uniformed patrolmen were generally straight arrows.  The Rodney King affair would be the beginning of a long and continuing deterioration of the Department’s reputation, especially in the Black and other minority communities.  That deterioration would be fed in no small measure by more citizen video exposés

Before a quick review of that fateful night, a word on the nature of the violent confrontation.  Unlike many beatings captured on subsequent videos, this one was not simply a case of uncontrolled rageby the police, although the pumping adrenaline after a long high speed car chase undoubtedly was a factor.  Nor was it a case of rogue cops.  On the whole, everything that happened that night was approved LAPD procedure.  Not only that, but moments after the car King was driving was finally stopped, a sergeant was on the scene and took active command.  Almost everything that happened subsequently was in response to his direct orders.  That, combined with King’s continuing struggle to stand is in large part why the mostly White jury either acquitted or failed to reach a verdict.  It raises the question of whether the LAPD vaunted aggressive patrol techniques and policies themselves were unnecessarily brutal and if they were applied with particular harshness against Black and minorities.

That night King and his buddies Bryant Allenand Freddie Helms were at another friend’s LA house watching basketball and drinking.  Around 12:30 am on the morning of March 3 two California Highway Patrol officers Tim and Melanie Singer, a married couple, observed King’s 1987 Hyundai Excel speeding and erratically changing lanes on the Foothill Freeway (Interstate 210) in the San Fernando Valley.  When they attempted to stop the car, King sped off starting one of California’s notorious high speed freeway chases.  Soon dozens of LAPD squads were involved and a helicopter flew over to monitor the route.  After exiting the Freeway, the chase continued on residential surface streets.  8 miles after it started LAPD squad cars boxed in King’s car at the corner of Foothill Boulevard and Osborne Street.

Five LAPD officers were the first to join the Singers on the scene.  Tim Singer approached the car and ordered the occupants to come out and lay on the ground.  Allen and Helms evidently complied, although perhaps not fast enough.  Both were roughly handled.  Allen was kicked, taunted, and threatened.  Helms was kicked so hard in the head that the baseball cap he was wearing was soaked in the blood of his scalp wound.  King refused to come out from behind the wheel at first.  When he did come out he reportedly acted bizarrely giggling, waving and pointing at the police helicopter overhead, and patting the ground.  When he seemed to grab his buttocks Melanie Singer drew her side arm and started to approach him to make the arrest.

It was then that LAPD Sergeant Stacey Koontold Singer to holster her weapon and back off.  The police were taking jurisdiction and he was assuming command.  LAPD procedure was to approach apparently unarmed subjects in a swarm with weapons holstered to prevent the suspect from seizing a weapon and turning it on officers.  He ordered officers Laurence Powell, Timothy Wind, Theodore Briseno, and Rolando Solano to close in on King. 

King struggled to resist and threw two officers off his back.  He repeatedly tried to stand.  The officers later testified that they thought he was unnaturally strong and might be under the influence of Angel Dust—PCPs.  He was not.  The drug did not show up in his later blood tests, although a breathalyzer test administered in the hospital fivehours later indicated he was probably nearly twice the legal level of alcohol during the confrontation.  Koon deployed a relatively new tool—a Taser zapping King twice with little effect.  It was just after Koon’s second Tase that Holiday began videotaping the incident from his apartment. 

Rodney King's head and face injuries were still clearly evident a few days after the attack in this picture taken for his lawyer.

King struggled once again to his feet and seemed to lunge at officer Powel who drew his baton and began beating him.  The few seconds of King’s alleged “attack of Powel was edited out of the tape when it was first broadcast on KTLA.  Powel continued to beat King after he collapsed on the ground striking him several times before Officer Brisnero stepped in to stop him.  Sgt. Koon reinforced the order with a curt “That’s enough!”  But King rose again to his knees.  Now Koon ordered Powel and Officer Wind to resume the baton attack with power strokes—the full weight of the body behind blows designed to do as much crippling damage as possible.  Koon ordered the men to go after his joints—knees, ankles, wrists—to disable King.  Brisnero also joined in.  A flurry of at least 33 blows and six kicks connected, which became the heart of the Holiday video when it aired.  When the beating stopped eight officers again swarmed King finally getting him in handcuffs restraining his arms and legs.  He was draggedon his stomach to the side of the road to await an ambulance to take him to the hospital.

At Pacifica Hospital King was found to have suffered 11 skull fractureswith possible permanent brain damage, afacial fracture, broken teeth, broken ankle, and internal injuries and bleeding.  Hospital staff later testified hearing police officers brag about how many times that had hit King and how hard.  The severity of the injuries required a long hospitalization and recovery.  King was never chargedwith any crimes in connection with the incident—likely because of the press uproar after the video became public and because testimony at a trial might affect the civil suit for damages that King’s lawyers soon filed or the eventual criminal cases against the police.

Mug shots of the unhappy cops indicted by the District Attorney for beating Rodney King.


King eventually won a judgment of $3.8 million and $1.7 million in attorney’s fees from the City of Los Angeles

Meanwhile on March 14, 1991 the District Attorney obtained fast Grand Jury indictments against Koon, Powell, Briseno, and Wind and against Koon for as supervisor for “willfully permitting and failing to take action to stop the unlawful assault.”  In August, before the case could come to trial the California Court of Appeals removedthe original judge in the case after he was overheard assuring the prosecutor “you can trust me” and granted a defense request for a change of venue to nearly lily white Simi Valley in Ventura County. 

The jury there consisting of ten Whites, one Latino, and one Asian acquitted three of the officers, but could not agree on one of the charges against Powell.  Rioting broke out in Los Angeles soon after the verdicts were announced. 

Tom Bradley, LA’s Black Mayor expressed outrage at the verdict—“The jury's verdict will not blind us to what we saw on that videotape. The men who beat Rodney King do not deserve to wear the uniform of the LAPD.”  Even Republican President George H.W. Bush said, “Viewed from outside the trial, it was hard to understand how the verdict could possibly square with the video. Those civil rights leaders with whom I met were stunned. And so was I and so was Barbara and so were my kids.”  Such expressions of sympathy from the high and the mighty were not enough to quell the rage in the streetsNeither was the simple, plaintive appealof Rodney King himself—“Can we all get along?”

Reginald Denny bleeding from a severe head wound after being dragged from his truck during the LA Riots.  Ironically Denny was liberal and had expressed his sympathy for King and support of protests after the acquittal verdict.

The events of the four day riot are too complexto go over here except to note that another video tape of a beating became a symbol of the violence.  A news helicopter caught white truck driver Reginald Denny at the wrong place at the wrong time at the corner of Florence and Normandie Avenues.  He was dragged from his truck and beaten by a mob and suffered severe head injuries when his skull was smashed with a concrete block.  His life was saved when two near-by Black residents, Curtis Yarbrough and Bobby Green Jr. who saw the attack unfold live on TV rushed to the scene and drove Denny to a hospital.  Another man took his truck back to his workplace.  Denny’s injuries were serious and he spent years in recovery. 

It took the combined force of the California National Guard, and Army and Marine Corps troops called up from nearby bases to finally bring the riots to an end on May 4 leaving broad swaths of the city in smoldering ruins.

Federal authoritiesstepped in and indicted the same defendants on charges of depriving King of his civil rights under color of law.  In March of 1993 Koon and Powell were convicted and sentenced to 32 month in prison.  Ward and Brisnero were acquitted.  Despite appeals, the two officers served their sentences with time off for good behavior.

As for King, despite winning that big settlement, his bouts with substance abuse and run-ins with the law were not over.  He was arrested several times for traffic offenses including DUIs and was charged with trying to rundown his then wife.  He spent short sentences in jail and several stints in rehab.  His longest run at sobriety came after he joined the cast of the cable reality TV show Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Dru Pinsky in 2008 and the next year appeared in a spin-off, Sober House.  He lost a good chunk of his settlement money investing in a hip-hop record label that failed.  In 2010 he became engaged to Cynthia Kelly, who had served on the jury of his civil case.

On June 12, 1992 Kelly found him unresponsiveat the bottom of his pool.  He could not be revived.  King died at the age of only 47.  An autopsy reported accidental drowning when the alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, and traces of PCP in his system caused cardiac arrhythmia.   

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Washington Women’s Suffrage Procession of 1913 Boded New Militancy

By: Patrick Murfin

The stunning program cover for the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession in Washington.

The giant Women’s March on Washington and sister marches across the country that greeted Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 and the they-said-it-couldn’t-be-done even larger marches a year later were seismic events that brought a broad, united, new intersessional feminism to the forefront of American social and political life after years on the defense as hard-fought gains once thought secure were under attack at every level.

Mass demonstrations no matter how large, critics maintained, had lost their power as the media lost interest in them and the public became bored.  Huge anti-war demonstrations that broke all records for participation were barely covered by the press and had no discernable effect on curtailing a vastly unpopular war in Congress or in the Bush administration and only moderately moved the needle during the Obama years when painfully slow withdrawals of boots on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan were matched by a brutal escalation of bombing and drone attacks not only in those two countries but across the region.

The Women's March on Washington was a rough welcome to Trump and a game changer for the feminist movement.

Instead, the media became fixated with a shiny new object—the tiny but colorful Tea Party movement.  Events drawing a few dozen in silly hats waving Don’t Tread on Me flags, and toting misspelled homemade signs received lead coverage night after night on network and cable TV news. Part of it was the sheer novelty of a right wing “grassroots” movement.  Traditional conservatives were at first dismissive and doubtful, but a hand-full of deep pocket millionaires saw potential pumped unlimited money into the movement, created faux grassroots national organizations to “lead it,” and soon used it to capture the Republican Party for their oligarchical aims.  Within what seemed like a blink of an eye they were in control of dozens of state governments, Congress, and the Presidency and seemed capable of completely remaking America with no effective opposition.

But there were signs of restiveness and resistance—the Occupy Movement that spread like wildfire, the up-from-the-streets youth led Black Lives Matter movement, the May Day Immigration Rights marches and the rise of the Dreamers, the new Civil Rights movement represented by Moral Mondays.  But it was the Women’s Marches, perhaps because they included so many middle class white women, that finally recaptured the media and nation’s attention. 

To its credit the Women’s March movement has, not always smoothly, taken pains to broaden its leadershipand representation and to stand for an intersessional struggle that includes not just traditional feminist objectives like preserving abortion rights, removing obstacles to social and professional advancement, the Equal Rights Movement, and election of women, but support for Women of Color, immigrants and refugees, Muslims and other minority religions, the LBGTQ communities, Native Americans, the disabled, the labor movement, and environmentalists.  It has not been a perfect process and serious divisions remain over issues like electoral politics, particularly endorsement of Democrats, and levels of street militancy, but it has been a game changer.

One 108 years ago today, another march of women in Washington, in some ways quite different, marked a radical turning point in the long struggle for women’s suffrage and became a spiritual ancestor of today’s movements.

Alice Paul was inspired by the militant campaigns of the British Suffragettes led by Emmeline Pankhurst seen under arrest in the right foreground and her daughter Christabel in custody behind her.

Alice Paul and Lucy Burns were uppity women.  Worse they were angry, uppity women.  They were more youthful than the dowagers whose decades’ long drive for women’s suffrage had been noble, but fruitless.  Paul had been in England and was impressed with how Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline, leaders of a new militantsuffrage movement which was making a sensation by using direct action tactics such as publicly heckling politicians, window smashing, and rock throwing raising the profile of the cause there.

When Paul returned to the United States in 1910 she joined the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and soon advanced to a leadership role.  Although the national organization was committedto a state-by-state strategy as its top priority, Paul was made Chair of the Congressional Committee with the responsibility of lobbying for Federal actionCarrie Chapman Catt, formidable leader of the NAWSA, did not have much faith in Paul or her project, but was probably glad to have the gadfly out her hair in New York where she was carefully planning an elaborate political effort to win state approval of the Vote by referendum.

By 1912 Paul and Burns had set up shop in the Capitol as the as a semi-autonomous affiliate of the NAWSA called the Congressional Union. 

Carrie Chapman Catt of New York was the formidable head of the National American Women's Suffrage Association.  She would split with Alice Paul over strategy and style and the two were sometimes bitter rivals.  Their two pronged suffrage campaign, moderate and radical, actually complimented each other and help rapidly move to the goal.  But when the 19th Amendment was ratified, it was the moderate Catt, not the bur-under-the-saddle Paul who was invited to the Wilson White House.

In the Presidential election that year, Catt had broken ranks with many older suffragists who were traditionallyRepublican, and endorsed Woodrow Wilson, a distinguished academic and supposedly one of a new breed of progressive Democrats, in the hopes that he would swing his partybehind suffrage.

Paul, however, did not want to wait for a painfully slow lobbing process to nudge the new Chief Executive in the right direction.  She declared her intention to “hold his feet to the fire” from the very beginning with a huge Suffrage demonstration on the eve of his inaugural.

Don’t imagine a modern march on Washington with mobs of somewhat disorganized marchers in pink pussy caps carrying banners, signs, and puppets in a mass throngon the Capitol’s wide avenues.  Paul’s Woman Suffrage Procession was plannedout with military precision, the thousands of women marchers were arrayed in designated units, marching abreast.  Most units wore white, the symbol of purity and adopted color of the suffrage movement.   The procession would be led by equestrians and floats with women as various allegorical figures broke up the ranks of marchers.  An elaborate program was printed for onlookers and a proper parade permit had been obtained from local authorities.

Wilson arrived by train from his New Jersey home on Monday, March 3, 1913, the day before his inauguration.  As the first Democrat since Grover Cleveland to break the grip of Republican dominance and as a man of known Southern roots and sympathies, he likely expected a whoopsie-do reception in the culturally Southern city.  Instead only a handful of dignitaries, politicians, and the press were at hand.  Everybody else in town seems to have been lining Pennsylvania Avenue.

Inez Milholland on her white steed was a dramatic and compelling lead to the Woman Suffrage Processional.

No wonder, for Paul had put on a dazzling show led by the beautiful blonde lawyer and activist Inez Milholland astride a white horse in flowing Greek robes.  Behind her, Paul and her friends, also on horseback, led 8,000 marchers, almost all women, and on parade. 

An estimated half a million viewers crowded the route including cheering supporters, the idly curious, a lot of very, very angry men.

The procession was quickly attacked by mobs of men along the route, throwing rocks and battering participantswith clubs and fists as the police stoodby without interveningRetaining as much courage and dignity as they could muster, the marchers continued on their route while running a virtual gauntlet.  Before the rear of the march reached its destinationsome hastily mobilized troops from Fort Myer arrived to provide some protection.  Over 800 marchers, almost all women, were injured in the attacks.

Mobs of men swarm and menace an ambulance trying to transport injured marchers as police stood by.  It took Army troops to restore order and allow the parade to finish.  Despite the violence, maybe because of it, Paul knew the Procession was a triumph.

Reaction to the parade and the attacks threatened to overwhelm news of the Presidential inauguration the next day, much to the annoyance of Wilson.  And to the delight of Paul who regarded the operation as successful in every way. She was sure that public outrage would lead to greater support of the cause.

A subsequent investigation held the police derelict in their dutyfor failing to protect the lawful demonstration and the District of Columbia Police Chief was fired.

In New York Catt was less than thrilled and feared the bold confrontation would alienate male supporters critical for her state-by-state campaign.  None-the-less Catt staged her own giant parade down Fifth Avenue in May as the kick off for her ballot initiative plan.  A fifth the marchers in her parade were men.

                                                Alice Paul and her Federal strategy was big news in the New York Times.

The breach over militancyand confrontation between Catt and Paul became irreparable in 1914 and Paul’s group severed ties with the national organization.  Two years later they reorganized as the National Women’s Party (NWP.) 

They continued to press Wilson for action with daily picketing at the White House.  When the picketing continued even after the country entered the Great War in Europe, Wilson had Paul and dozens of her associates and supporters arrested, jailed, and force fed during hunger strikes.  When word got out about the abuse, Wilson was embarrassed yet again. Exasperated, Wilson finally declared his support of a Federal Constitutional Amendment for women’s suffrage as a “war measure” and in recognition of the contribution of women to the effort.  He made no mention of Paul or the NWP, but no one doubted that their stubborn militancy had forced his hand.

Both houses of Congress passed the 19th Amendment in 1919.  Then the battle moved to ratification by state legislatures and the state-by-state struggle advocated by Catt was back on.  The NAWSA and NWP played a kind of “good cop/bad cop” tag team on state legislatures with Catt’s group wooing them with compliments and charm, and Paul threatening disruption and defiance

Alice Paul raises a grape juice toast to the banner that she and members of the National Women's Party sewed by hand to hang on their Washington, D.C. headquarters building in celebration of the ratification of the 19th Amendment just over 7 years after the Suffrage Procession--a remarkably swift victory.

It proceeded, all things considered, with astonishing speed. On August 19, 1920 Tennessee passed the Amendment by one vote in the legislature, securing the necessary support to become a part of the Constitution.  When the Secretary of State certified the adoption on August 26, Paul and her cohorts proudly unfolded a banner on the NWP headquarters building in Washington and toasted the event—with grape juice, of course.

  

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Ripped From Yesteryear Headline Anointing of His Fraudulency Suddenly Was Viral Again

By: Patrick Murfin

The right wing echo chamber was abuzz comparing their claims of a stolen election with the 1876 contest was decided by an Electoral Commission.  More mainstream outlets like Salon also considered the case.

Getting nostalgic for those final weeks of the last Resident as one by one his ludicrous attempts to over-turn the Presidential election results were shot down by the courts?  His last desperate attempt focused on January 6, the day that a joint session of Congress was scheduled to certify the Electoral College results and officially declare a winner.  You will recallhow that turned out, insurrection and all.

The Cheeto hung his hopes on the slender thread that Vice President Mike Pence would simply refuse to certify the votes on the basis of the unproven claims of fraud in vote counting.  In this fantasy scenario Congress would then appoint a supposedly bi-partisan commission to investigatethe claims.  The supposed precedent for the Commission was one created but never used to decide the 1876 contest between Democrat Samuel Tilden, who had won the nationwide popular vote by a substantial margin, and Republican Rutherford B. Hays

The Commission, stacked against the Democrats, handed the Electoral votes of four states to Hays declaring him the winner.  Democrats mulled protesting the decision in the streets creating a Constitutional crisis but instead agreed to a brokered compromise allowing the Republican to be sworn into office in exchange for ending the occupation of former Confederate statesby the Army which was protecting the rights of Freedmen in the South.

Let’s take a look back at stories about f*cked up U.S. Presidential elections.   We are in the early stages of a lulu.  There have been plenty of screwy elections, none moreembarrassing than when the winnerof the popular vote somehow doesn’t end up with his feet up on a desk in the White House.  It has happened more often than you probably suspect.  Five times in fact.  Six for those who believe Richard J. Daley stole more votes for John F. Kennedy in Chicago than Republican bosses stole downstate.

In 1824 John Quincy Adams lost the popular vote to Andrew Jackson by a slim 44,804 votes nationwide but won when the election was thrown into the House of Representatives and a third candidate, Henry Clay swung his votes to Adams.  Then Adams then appointed Clay Secretary of State.  This pissed off Jackson who raged against a corrupt bargain and went on to create the modern Democratic Party to whip the New Englander’s ass in the next election.

In 1888 Benjamin Harrison deprived Grover Cleveland of a second consecutive term despite losing by 95,713 votes.  Four years later the Democrat was back in office, the only man ever to serve two non-consecutive terms.

George W. Bush waltzed into office thanks to those Florida hanging chads, and a stupefying corrupt decision of the Supreme Court.

Then in 2016 a former reality show host with an inflated reputation as billionaire business genius lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton but was able to claim an Electoral College landslide due to the unfair quirks of that system of electing chief executives.  But until then the most famous minority president was Rutherford B. Hayes.

In the Presidential  election of 1876 Democrat Samuel Tilden, right, won the popular vote but Republican Rutherford B, Hayes wound up in the White House anyway.

On March 2, 1877 Hayes became the first person selected for the Presidency by a Bi-Partisan Commission. 

Hayes won the Republican nomination only after the leading candidate James G. Blaine failed in six ballots to win the majority of delegates at the party convention.  A bland non-entity picked because “he offended no one,” Hayes went into the election an underdog to Democrat Samuel Tilden. 

And indeed Tilden carried the popular vote by a not insignificant 250,000 vote lead out of 8.5 million ballots cast.  Other presidents were elected by more slender margins.  But in the Electoral College, Tilden came up just one vote shy with the results from four states—Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon still contested. 

If the Electoral votes of the three states from the old Confederacy were counted for the Democrats, Tilden would be an easy victor.  Fearing civil unrest if the election was determined by the Republican controlled House of Representatives, Congress decided to appoint the Bi-Partisan Commission to decide the contested electoral votes. 

Despite loosing the popular vote, Hays won the Electoral College by a scant one vote after a controversial Bi-Partisan Commission awarded the disputed votes of South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Oregon to the Republican.

The commission was to be composed of 7 Republican, 7 Democrats and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the supposedly independent David Davis in whom both parties had confidence.  But before the Commission could act, Davis resigned his seat on the Court and on the Commission to take a Senate seat from Illinois.  Another Justice, a Republican, replaced him on the Commission.  The Commission then voted along party lines 8-7 to award all of the disputed electoral votes to Hayes. 

Senator James Garfield and Southern Democrats, however, worked out an agreement to prevent trouble.  Hayes would withdraw the last Federal troopsfrom the South, end Reconstruction, and appoint at least one Southerner to his Cabinet. By prematurely ending protection for black voters and office holders in the South, this bargain ushered in the era of Jim Crow, rigid segregation, and disenfranchisementof freed Blacks.

The deal embittered Democrats, especially Northerners who got nothing out of it and the evolving big city, working class machine voters who understandably called the new president His Fraudulency.

Staunchly Republican Harper's Weekly portrayed the outcome this way.

Although the onset of open class war with the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and continuing fierce Indian warfare in the West provided plenty of national excitement, Hayes’s single term reign in Washington marked by inaction of the hottest political issue of the day—Civil Service Reform and turning a blind eye to rising White terrorism in the South.  He is best remembered now as the first of the long beard Presidents and because his devout teetotaling wife, Lemonade Lucy gave stupefyingly dull dry dinners and receptions. 

Garfield got the Republican nomination next time around.  We all know how well that turned out.

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Meditation on Saving Terror Targets—New Murfin Verse

By: Patrick Murfin

Martha and Waitstill Sharp wave as they prepared to depart from New York to Europe in 1939.  They scarcely knew what they were in for.

Yesterday at our Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation Sunday morning Zoom service the Reverend Jenn Gracen preached on the lessons of love to be learned from the story of a Unitarian minister and his wife who left a comfortable life to go to Europe as it was teetering on the edge of World War to rescue refugees.  The story of Rev. Waitstill Sharp and his wife Martha is fairly well known among U.U.’s but may be unfamiliar to you unless you saw the PBS film by Artemis Joukowsky and Ken Burns in 2016.

Defying the Nazi's: The Sharps War was featured on PBS in 2016.

I have written previously about the couple and the film.  For a summary of the Sharp’s lives and mission see this Blog post.

But Rev. Jenn’s sermon and my recent work with The Coalition to End the ICE Contract in McHenry County moved me to once again commit poetry.

Martha Sharp, far right, and twenty seven children she shepherded from France to New York in 1940.  Most would otherwise not have survived the war.

Meditation on Saving Terror Targets

Inspired by Rev. Waitstill and Martha Sharp

and Rev. Jenn Gracen Sermon

February 28, 2021

 

Those very nice New Englanders heeded a call

            ignored by many

            and left children and comfort

            for Prague on the edge of doom.

Before they quite knew what had happened

            they were doing un-Unitarian things—

            lying to authorities, forging documents,

            laundering money, consorting with outcasts,

            playing cloak and dagger on dark rainy streets.

He did most of the paper work and keeping accounts,

            spending money, working the phone

            and playing shell games with the Gestapo.

The demure Mrs. was the secret agent

            making rendezvous, shaking tails,

            using code names and passing notes

            in invisible ink.

At the very last possible moment

            she, using documents faked and fudged by him

            got thirty-seven marked men on a train

            out of Prague on a train that

            had to cross Germany

            to get to France

            batting her pretty, innocent eyelashes

            at Nazi agents.

Back in America by the skin of their teeth

            they played with the children

            who hardly knew them

            and then were sent back to Europe at war.


They made her way to Vichy France

            and she came out with twenty-seven Jewish girls,

            leading them on foot across the Pyrenees

            neutral but hostile Spain

            and eventually to New York

            on an ocean liner that narrowly avoided

            being sunk by a U-boat.

 

That’s the tale we’ve been told.

            We wonder if we could have done it.

            we wonder if we even should—

            their own children, after all,

            were scarred

            and their marriage shattered.

 

There is still plenty of horror in the world

            yet who is dashing off to Kurdistan

            to defy Syrians and Turks,

            to bloody Yemen where our drones rain death,

            or to a dozen other would-be holocausts

            in the making.

 

What if we didn’t even need to leave the county,

            our own warm beds,

            the bosoms of our families?

 

What if we sheltered the undocumented

            and despised,

            confronted ICE raids,

            freed children from cages,

            brick by brick             

and bar by bar

            tore down that

            concentration camp

            just down the street?

 

What if….

 

—Patrick Murfin 

Demonstrators surrounded this ICE immigrant detention center.  We have our very own in the McHenry County Jail.


☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Ella Fitzgerald First Lady of Song—Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

In 1972 Ella Fitzgerald sang Mac the Knife with trumpeter Al Hirt at Super Bowl VI in New Orleans as part of a tribute to Louis Armstrong.  Broadway star Carol Channing also performed.  They became the first celebrity artists to perform at the Super Bowl and Ella was the first Black woman.  

Ella Fitzgerald is regarded by many as the greatest female singer of the 20th Century and there is plenty of competition.  Her career spanned decades from a novelty song specialist as a teenager to the undisputed First Lady of Song.  She sang with big bands, invented scat singing, moved seamlessly to jazz improvisation in the bebop era, and reinterpreted the canon of the Great American Songbook introducing generations to popular music as an art form and preserving classics that otherwise might have faded from memory.

Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia, but moved to Yonkers, New York with her mother and Portuguese-born step father in the early 20’s.  After her mother was killed in an auto accident when she was 15 she left her step fathers home quickly and moved to live with an aunt in Harlem.  Most biographers believe she had been physicallyor sexually abused

Despite being an excellent student in Yonkers, Fitzgerald began skipping school and hanging with a rough street crowd.  She was soon acting as a lookout for a bordello and ran numbers for a Mafia run game, a common job in Harlem.  Arrested, she was placed in the Colored Orphan Asylum in the Bronxand then at the New York Training School for Girls in upstate Hudson.  She may have again been abused there and escaped four times and was sometimes homeless back in Harlem.

A virtual street urchin with all of the predatory dangers that involves, Fitzgerald began busking on the streets dancing and imitating the jazz recordsshe heard of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and The Boswell Sisters.  Her first break came on November 4, 1934 when she unexpectedly won one of the earliest of the Apollo Theater Amateur Nights.  She got the $25 prize—which must have seemed like a fortune—but not the promised week-long booking at the theater because of her threadbare appearance.

Young Ella with the diminutive Chick Webb at the drums in one of their famous Savoy Ballroom sets.

But the following January she did sing for a week with the Tiny Bradshaw band at the Harlem Opera House.  Then she was picked up by drummer Chick Webb’s big band despite his reservationsabout her “scarecrow appearance.”  She became a favorite with the band in its famous appearances at the Savoy Ballroom which were broadcast on radio.  She recorded several sides with the band and was highly regarded by her fellow musicians.

Fitzgerald already had a mid-level hit with (If You Can’t Sing It) You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini) when a ditty she co-wrote, A-Tisket, A-Tasket became a smash and introduced her for the first time to wide White audiences. That was something of a mixed blessing—all they wanted to hear from the “little girl” were novelty songs.  Eventually it got her in movies with cameo appearances like in Abbot and Costello’s Ride ‘em Cowboy in 1942.

lla singing A-Tisket, A-Tasket from the back of the bus in the Abbot and Costello flick Ride 'em Cowboy.

But Ella was working, touring, recording, and most importantly no longer hungry or tattered.  When Webb died in 1938 Fitzgerald took over the band, which was re-named Ella’s Famous Orchestra—almost unheard of for a girl singer and recognition of her serious musical chops.  With and without Webb Ella and that band laid down almost 150 sides before the band dissolved in 1942 when many members went into the service.  Ella easily established a solo career recording at Decca and gaining critical attention with her regular appearances with the prestigious Jazz at the Philharmonic concerts.

With the demiseof big band swing after World War II Fitzgerald adapted seamlessly to the new bebop sound.  Working frequently with Dizzy Gillespie she was credited with inventing scat singing—nonsense syllables improvised around the melody.  It was her way of doing as a vocalist the riffs the other musicians were inventing on the spot.  “I just wanted to do what I heard the horns playing,” she said.

Ella in  1947 with then husband Ray Brown, left, and Dizzie Gillespie, right--the Queen of Scat and Bebop.

In 1955 with Bop fading in popularity, Fitzgerald shifted gears again when she signed with Verve Records produced by Jazz at the Philharmonic impresario Norman Ganz.  Beginning with Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Song Book together they produced a string of landmark albums featuring what came to be known as The Great American Songbook.  Those highly regarded albums which have never gone out of issue are regarded by many as defining the canon of 20th Century popular song.

Ella and Marilyn Monroe were close friends.  The movie star was a longtime fan and the two also shared a bond of coming from abusive, troubled childhood.  Monroe gave Ella's career a big boost in 1955 by convincing the owner of the posh Sunset Strip Mocambo Club to book her by promising to show up stage side every night with celebrity guests.  Although the story is often told that the club would not book her because of her race, the real reason was that the owner did not think the overweight singer had sex appeal and glamourous enough for the gig.  It did prove a break out for her from singing in small jazz clubs to the country's top night clubs.

From the ’50 up to the early ‘90’s Fitzgerald toured widely in the U.S., Europe, and Asia performing solo concerts and collaborations with most of the leading bands and her singing peers as well as appearances with symphony orchestras.  She also made many television appearances as guest star or in her own specials.  She continued to record, including two Christmas albums that rate with those of Bing Crosby, Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and Johnny Mathis as indispensable holiday classics.

In her later years Fitzgerald was plagued by health issues—obesity, diabetes, and repertory failure—which only slowed her down a littleWhen diabetes cost her amputation of both legs below the knee in 1993 and impaired her eyesight, she continued to perform from a seat on stage.

                                    Ella was commemorated in a 2007 USPS  Black Heritage stamp.

She died in her Beverly Hills home attended by her adopted son Ray Brown Jr. and granddaughter Alice on June 15, 1996 at the age of 79.

 



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Jan Ernst Matzeliger the Mulatto Immigrant Who Shod the Nation— Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

                            Jan Ernst Matzeliger. the immigrant mulatto  who didn't seem to fit in anywhere.

On May 19, 1885 Jan Ernst Matzeliger’s revolutionaryShoe Lasting Machine was introduced into production at a Lynn, Massachusetts factory.  Within a few years American production of factory-made shoes exploded and costs per pair to consumers dropped more than 50%.  Lynn became the center of a major industry

Matzeliger’s road to being an inventor was anything but ordinary.  He was born in 1852 in Paramaribo, Dutch Guiana (now Surinam) in South America of a Dutch engineer and a local Black womanMatzeliger inherited his father’s talent for mechanical equipment, working with him at his machine shop from the age of 10 and mastering the repairand maintenance of complicated machinery

But despite his talents, his future was clouded.  As a creole or mulatto he could not be sent to Hollandfor a professional education and he was not well accepted either among thewhite colonial elite or the mostly African and Indian local population. 

At the age of 20 he signed on a merchant vessel and spent two years as a seamanbefore deciding to settle in Philadelphia.  Knowing only rudimentary English, he had a hard time finding work until connecting to the local Black population through church.  They helped him find work repairing equipment of various kinds before he got a steady job in a small shoe maker’s shop

Local shops like the one in which he worked still made most of the shoes worn by Americans.  The introduction of heavy sewing machines and cutting equipment had increased the speed at which shoemakers could produce their wares since the peg and awl days of hand construction, but building finished shoes was still a laborious, hand operation.  Matzeliger took to his new trade, but recognized that tools could be improved. 

In 1877 he moved to Lynn, where nearly 50% of the nation’s shoes were being produced in local factories.  The Civil War had stimulated the need for hundreds of thousands of pairs of shoes and boots to be manufactured quickly to meet the needs of the Army.  Using the same mechanical equipment that Matzeliger found in the local Philadelphia shop, companies were able to produce more by installing many cutting and sewing machines. 

But shaping the tops and attaching them to the bottoms could not be mechanized and was done by highly skilled hand lasters who stretchedand shaped leather over wood or stone molds called lastsand attached them to the soles.  Even the most skilled artisan could produce no more than 50 pair of shoes in a ten hour day.  The lasters were organized into a craft union which was able to demand high wages

After trying for months, Matzeliger was finally able to get work in one of the local factories and began studying how the master lasters manipulated the leather and began sketching ideas.  He knew that he had to educate himself in English to read and master technical information, so he attended night school after his ten hour shifts.  He lived a lonely, isolated life as one of the few people of color in Lynn shunned by his fellow workers.  He lived in a cramped roomand found his only comfort in the fellowship of the local Congregational Church, the only one in town that accepted Black members

Slowly, Matzeliger began to find solutions to the complicated puzzle and began to make models of a new machine from whatever meager materialshe had at hand—scrap wood, wire, a cigar box, bits of metalhe laboriously hand shaped.  By the early 1880’s he knew he was onto something, but needed money to get the materials build a full scale working model

Word of his tinkeringgot out, despite his efforts at secrecy and he was pressured, if not threatened, by the skilled hand lasters to abandon his project.  But it was also attracting interested potential buyers.  He was offered first $50,000 and eventually $1.5 million for the rights to his as yet unpatented machine

Knowing its true value he would not sell.  He held out until he got the money to finish his model in exchange for a two-thirds share in the machine. 

Mechanical drawings for Metzliger's shoe lasting machine and another improvement to shoe production, a tack distributor.

After completing his third model in 1883 he applied for a patent.  Patent Office officials in Washingtonat first refused to believe that a machine could actually do all of the complicated actions of a laster as many failed patents attested.  They sent an inspector to witness the machine in action.  Astonishingly, it worked as advertised and Matzeliger’s patent was granted

His perfectedmachine held a shoe on a last, gripped and pulled the leather down around the heel, set and drove in the nails, and then discharged the completed shoe. It could produce up to 700 pair of shoes a day. 

An operator using Matzeliger's lasting machine on a busy factory floor.  Completed shoes to his left.

After the 1885 introduction into production, demand for Matzeliger’s machines soared.  In 1889 the Consolidated Lasting Machine Company was formed with Matzeliger a substantial minority owner.  His future seemed bright.  He continued to work on other improvements for shoe production and submitted five more patent applications. 

But before reaping the benefits of his inventions, still living alone in a single room, Matzeliger diedof tuberculosis the same year.  He left his models and his stock in the new company to the congregation that took him in, the First Congregational Church in Lynn.

The First Congregational Church in Lynn, Massachusetts where Matzeliger finally found welcome and refuge was the beneficiary of his patents and ownership share in the company that produced his machines after his early death.  It was a legacy so valuable that it still benefits the congregation.

Lynn and near-by communities thrived for generations as the center of the American shoe industry until the 1970s when changing fashions to rubber-soled athletic style shoes and competitionfrom foreign manufactures decimated the industry.  By the early 21st Century the American shoe industry made possible by Matzeliger was defunct

The 1919 United States Postal Service stamp honoring Matzeliger and his machine.

Matzeliger himself slipped into obscurity until “rediscovered” by Black history researchersHe was honored on a postage stamp on September 15, 1991.

  

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Fisk From Freedman’s School to Premier Black University— Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

The historic Fisk University gate and sign. 

Within months of the end of the Civil War the leaders of the northern American Missionary Association (AMA) which was affiliated with the Congregational churches including John Ogden, Reverend Erastus Milo Cravath, field secretary; and Reverend Edward Parmelee Smith, founded the Fisk Free Colored School, for the education of freedmen in Nashville, Tennessee. It was one of several schools and colleges that the AMA which was led by ardent abolitionists helped found.

Classes opened on January 9, 1866 with about 200 students.  As word spread the enrollment quickly jumped to more than 900, a testament to the thirst for knowledge among recently freed slaves and the all-male studentsranged in age from 16 to more than 70 years old.

The school was named for General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen's Bureau and an early benefactor.

The school was named in honor of General Clinton B. Fisk of the Tennessee Freedmen’s Bureau, who made unused barracksavailable to the school, as well as establishing the first free schools for white and black children in Tennessee. Later he endowed Fisk with a $30,000 which gave the school a firm early financial base that was wanting in other newly created Freedmen’s schools.

In response to a Reconstruction Era Tennessee state law to support public schools—a deeply radical idea in the South, was incorporated as a Normal School for the college training of teachers in August 1867.  The college was co-educational and James Dallas Burrus, John Houston Burrus, Virginia E. Walker, and America W. Robinson were the first four students to enroll.  Broughton and the two Burruses were the first African Americans to graduate from a liberal arts college south of the Mason–Dixon Line and all went on to distinguished careers.

The AMA’s Rev. Erastus Milo Cravath organized the College Department and the Mozart Society, the first musical organization in Tennessee.

Rising enrollment added to the needs of the university. In 1870 Adam Knight Spence became principalof the Fisk Normal School. To raise money and meet the needs of the growing student body and ambitious building planshis wife Catherine Mackie Spence traveled throughout the United States to set up mission Sunday schoolsin support of Fisk students, organizing endowments through the AMA.

The original Fisk University Jubilee Singers toured the North and Britain to support the school and its construction program. 

A student choir was organized that became known as the Fisk Jubilee Singers.  In 1871 the Singers began to tour the North in support of the school and then sailed for England in 1872 where they performed for Queen Victoria.  The successful tours, the first of many, raised more than $50,000, enough to construct the school’s first permanent building Jubilee Hall, which was completed in 1876 and is now designated a National Historic Landmark.  Through the rest of the 19th Century the school continued building program that resulted in a modern campus.

Jubilee Hall, Fisk's first permant building and now a National Historic Landmark,

Early in the 20th Century Black teachers were finally added to the Faculty including the Burrus brothers from the first graduating class.

From 1915 to 1925 Fayette Avery McKenzie,a Progressive Era sociologist and expert in and an advocate for Native Americans, served as President of Fisk.  He was notably successful in developing Fisk as the premier Black university in the United States, securing academic recognition as a standard college by the Carnegie Foundation, Columbia University, and the University of Chicago, raising a $1 million endowment fund to ensure quality faculty.  Despite laying a firm foundation for Fisk’s accreditation and future success McKenzie’s on campus authoritarian management alienated students and much of the faculty resulting in protests that led to his forced resignation.

In 1930, Fisk was the first African-American institution to gain accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). Accreditations for specialized programs soon followed.

                        Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Fisk's first Black President.

But it was not until 1947 that Fisk had a Black PresidentCharles Spurgeon Johnson, an acclaimed sociologist and scholar who had also been the editor of Opportunitymagazine, a noted periodical of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1952 Fisk became the first predominantly Black college to earn a Phi Beta Kappa charter and honored its first student members on April 4, 1953.

In 1960 students from Fisk and from including John Lewis, Dianne Nash, James Bevel, and C.T. Vivian organized the Nashville Sit-ins at the lunch counters of major dime stores and department stores downtown.  It was the largest and most sustainedsuch non-violent civil disobedience campaign yet in the South which after a long, sustained effort led to the city becoming the first Southern city to de-segregate public accommodations.  Lewis went on to be Chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  He and the others became key figures in the Southern Civil Rights Movement, most notably in the Selma campaign for voting rights.

Civil Rights pioneer Dianne Nash, third from left, and other Fisk Students in one of the 1960 Nashville lunch counter sit-ins.

Despite Fisk’s notable achievements in academics and as training ground for Black leadership, the school has struggled financially in the 21st Centuryas opportunities for talented Afro-American students opened up at all of the country’s elite and prestigious universities and as liberal arts colleges in general fell out of favor to career-focused educational programs.

From 2004 to 2013, Fisk was directed by its 14th president, Hazel O’Leary, former Secretary of Energy under President Bill Clinton and just the second woman to serve lead the university. Under her leadership Fisk successfully raised $4 million during the 2007-2008 fiscal ending nine years of budget deficits and qualified for a Mellon Foundation challenge grant.

Fisk University graduates in 2008.

Despite this respite the wolf was soon at the door again and a succession of short term presidents failed to stem the tide.  Trustees have warned that the school may be in danger of closing.  With only 700 students, a significant decline from peak attendance, the school has managed to maintain academic standards and is still included in lists of both top historically Black schools, and liberal arts colleges.

But in 2017 SACS the university’s regional accreditor placed it on probation citing failings related to financial responsibility, control of research funds, and federal and state responsibilities.

In June of 2020 the University announced that it was renaming its Institute for Social Justice in honor of one of its most distinguished graduates, late Congressman John Lewis.

Among the many distinguished graduates of Fisk are Lil Hardin Armstrong, pianist, composer, and wife of Louis Armstrong; former Washington, DC mayor Marion Barry; William Dawson powerful Chicago South Side Congressman from 1943 to 1970; Repetitive Charles Diggs of Michigan 1955-1980; W. E. B. Du Bois, leading Black intellectual and co-founder of the National Association for Colored People (NAACP); historian John Hope Franklin; poet Nikki Giovanni; Julius Lester, children’s author, musician, photographer, and professor; Congressman and senior Civil Rights figure John Lewis; Dianne Nash;  Hazel O’Leary; Ida B. Wells, civil rights leader and writer known for her anti-lynching campaigns and her Women’s Suffrage advocacy; and best-selling novelist Frank Yerby.  

 

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Families and Snowmen to Rally in Crystal Lake to End the ICE Contract With McHenry County

By: Patrick Murfin

The weather prognosticators, mavens, and maybe even Woodstock Willie the groundhog say that this Saturday afternoon, February 27 temperatures will near 50° after several days above the freezing mark.  But don’t worry, we have had so much snow cover in Crystal Lake that there should still be plenty to build some snowmen and women for immigrant justice.

Community members representing 20 grassroots organizations will hold a demonstration in favor of canceling the contract between McHenry County and the U.S. Marshall's Service to imprison immigrant peopleon behalf of Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) at the County Jail. During the family friendly event, demonstrators will be building snowmen which will be holding signs about immigrant detention.  Participants will explain the issue and testify why they are committed to this cause.  Folksout and about in downtown Crystal Lake will be invited to join.

                                        The gazebo in Crystal Lake's Depot Park in warmer weather 

The event will be held at Depot Park, 88 East Woodstock Street at the head of downtown’s main drag, Williams Streetthis Saturday between 2 and 3 pm. and is sponsored by The Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County.

For the last several months some members of the McHenry County Board with the vocal support of local citizens and residents have been pressing for an end to the ICE contract with the Jail.  So far that proposal has not yet come to a vote.  The action in Crystal Lake will be just the latest in a series of events and vigils meant to raise public awareness of the issue.

“We have met with McHenry County officials, and heard their concern that if we do not house people detained by ICE, that they will be sent to some other less humane jail. We are here to tell them that every jail is inhumane. Each dollar McHenry County accepts from ICE undermines community trustwith local government, including the police, the schools, the courts, everything,” said Amanda Y. Garcia, a local attorney.

Although President Biden’s administrationjust released a plan that would offer a path to citizenship to millions of people, the Coalition members believe protecting the rights of immigrants at the local level is long overdue. “With the promise and hope of the new administration, we’ve been told to hold off. We’ve been told to wait and see what changes will be brought to immigration policy and reform; waiting isn’t an option anymore” said Sandra Davila, one of the community leaders and member of the Coalition. “We want our tax dollars to fund education, housing, nutrition, and health care programs, all of which create opportunities to growand thrive,” said Davila.

The detention of immigrants is the unjust practice of incarcerating individuals while they await a decision on their immigration status or potential deportation. A different approach is possible by allowing people navigatingtheir immigration cases an administrative procedure, to do so while still being active in their communities and not behind bars. The majority of people in detention have been living in the U.S. for many years and have not adjusted their status due to archaic laws, incredible backlogs, and an impossible maze of red tape.

Member organizations of the Coalition include:

 

Federación de Migrantes Unidos por Veracruz McHenry

Fundación Mazatecutli Chicago

Standing Up Against Racism - Woodstock

Tree of Life UU Congregation Social Justice Team

Elgin in Solidarity with Black Lives Matter

Elgin Coalition for Immigrant Rights

Fox Valley Citizens for Peace and Justice

Marengo Citizens for Equality

Progressive Podunks

Coalición de Migrantes Mexicanos

Chicago Manuel Revueltas

Federación Hidalguense en Illinois y Medio Oeste Chicago

Dupage Immigrant Solidarity

Schaumburg Area Progressives

Occupy Elgin

Aurora Rapid Response Team

Fox Valley DSA

Efecto Violeta Radio

Champaign Urbana Friends and Allies of Immigrants

Lake County Immigrant Advocacy

Center for Immigrant Progress

Illinois Workers in Action

McHenry County NOW

McHenry County Progressives

For more information on the Coalition and to keep abreast of developments in the campaign to end the ICE contract join and visit the Coalition to Cancel the ICE Contract in McHenry County Facebook Group .

 

 

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Nikki Giovanni A Poet in Rebellion— Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Nikki Giovanni--young, Black, and revolutionary.

Nikki Giovanni was born in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee in a close knit family.  She was inspiredby her grandmother, a natural story teller, to explore the use of words.  After growing up in a middle class Black suburb of Columbus, Ohio, she attended Fisk Universityin Nashville, one of the most prestigious of the historically Black colleges.

At Fisk not only did she find her voice as a poet and writer, but she was immersedin the Civil Rights Movement and the growing militancy of emerging Black Power.  She served as editor of the campus literary magazine, participated in the Fisk Writers Workshop, and helped re-buildthe Fisk chapter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  After graduationin turbulent 1968 Giovanni went on to graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University in New York.

While still an undergraduate Giovanni publishedher first collection of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk in 1967 in response to the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, and Robert Kennedy.  A year later she followed up with Black Judgment, an explorationand appreciation of Black militancy.  The two books catapulted her into the front ranks of a new generation of poets and one who had appeal to wider audiences.  A third volume, Re: Creationpublished in 1970 cemented her place as a leading young Black voice.  She was soon embarked on popular readings, often incorporating Black music.

Giovanni took a teaching position at Rutgers University and gave birth to her son Thomas.  She worked to help other Black writers find outlets through NikTom, Ltd., a publishing cooperative which published Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Carolyn Rodgers, and Mari Evans.

                                The birth of her son Thomas who she raised as a single mother had an enormous influence on Giovanni.

As Giovanni matured as a poet and woman her interests broadened.  She continued to write in clear, accessible language about her life and experiences, but later work was not as explicitly political as her early efforts.

She also began writing for children and young people beginning with Spin a Soft Black Song in 1971 and continuing through her Caldecott Medal winning Rosa in 2005.

Giovanni was teaching at Virginia Tech in 2007 when the tragic shooting occurred there.  She composed a memorial chant that was recited at the campus memorial service the next day.

She has written dozens of books, including two compilations, and non-fiction work.  Giovanni is among the most honored of contemporary poets having received the NAACP Image Award, the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters, the Rosa Parks Women of Courage Award, and over twenty honorary degrees from colleges and universities around the country.

Maya Angelou and Giovanni with Joanna Gabbin, organizers for a tribute to Toni Morrison in 2012.

Poem for a Lady Whose Voice I Like

 

so he said: you ain’t got no talent
if you didn’t have a face
you wouldn't be nobody

and she said: god created heaven and earth
and all that’s Black within them

so he said: you ain’t really no hot shit
they tell me plenty sisters
take care better business than you

and she said: on the third day he made chitterlings
and all good things to eat
and said: “that’s good.”

so he said: if the white folks hadn’t been under
yo skirt and been giving you the big play
you'd a had to come on uptown like everybody else

and she replied: then he took a big Black greasy rib
from adam and said we will call this woeman and her
name will be sapphire and she will divide into four parts
that simone may sing a song

and he said: you pretty full of yourself ain’t chu

so she replied: show me someone not full of herself
and I’ll show you a hungry person

 

—Nikki Giovanni

 

A Historical Footnote to Consider Only When All Else Fails

 

(For Barbara Crosby)
While it is true
(though only in a factual sense)
That in the wake of a
Her-I-can comes a
Shower
Surely I am not
The gravitating force
that keeps this house
full of panthers

Why, LBJ has made it
quite clear to me
He doesn’t give a
Good goddamn what I think
(else why would he continue to masterbate in public?)

Rhythm and Blues is not
The downfall of a great civilization
And I expect you to
Realize
That the Temptations
have no connection with
The CIA

We must move on to
the true issues of
Our time
like the mini-skirt
Rebellion
And perhaps take a
Closer look at
Flour power

It is for Us
to lead our people
out of the
Wein-Bars
into the streets
into the streets
(for safety reasons only)
Lord knows we don’t
Want to lose the
support
of our Jewish friends

So let us work
for our day of Presence
When Stokely is in
The Black House
And all will be right with
Our World

 

—Nikki Giovanni

 

 

Kidnap Poem

 

Ever been kidnapped
by a poet
if i were a poet
I’d kidnap you
put you in my phrases and meter
You to jones beach
or maybe coney island
or maybe just to my house
lyric you in lilacs
dash you in the rain
blend into the beach
to complement my see
Play the lyre for you
ode you with my love song
anything to win you
wrap you in the red Black green
show you off to mama
yeah if i were a poet I’d kid
nap you

—Nikki Giovanni

 

Choices

 

If i can’t do

what i want to do

then my job is to not

do what i don’t want

to do

It’s not the same thing

but it's the best i can

do

 

If i can’t have

what i want . . . then

my job is to want

what I’ve got

and be satisfied

that at least there

is something more to want

 

Since i can’t go

where i need

to go . . . then i must . . . go

where the signs point

through always understanding

parallel movement

isn’t lateral

 

When i can't express

what i really feel

i practice feeling

what i can express

and none of it is equal

I know

but that’s why mankind

alone among the animals

learns to cry

 

—Nikki Giovanni

 

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Lawrence Ferlinghetti—We Thought He Might Go on Forever Ferlinghetti

By: Patrick Murfin
Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. Note— Word came yesterday that Lawrence Ferlinghetti died on Monday in the apartment over City Lights Book Store where he lived for decades.  He was just a month shy of his 102 birthday.  Somehow it seemed to many of us that he might just go on forever like a Lord of the Rings wizard.  He was active in the management of the book store until just a few years ago and sometimes made it downstairs on a good day even later.  And he continued to write including cutting piece on Donald Trump that went viral.  His death was announced by the bookstore which recently was threatened with closing until donors flooded a GoFundMe campaign with donations to keep the beloved instituti...
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William Wells Brown Frederick Douglass’ Forgotten Rival— Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

                                    William Wells Brown in 1847 at the time of the publication of his first book of memoirs.

His life was as compelling as any character he ever created—up from illiterate slavery to international celebrity as a pioneering Black author and leading abolitionist.  In his day William Wells Brown was nearly as famed as Fredrick Douglassbut today is barely a footnote in American literary and social justice history.   This post aims help fix that.

Brown was born in 1814 or ’15 near Lexington, Kentucky in the racially complex circumstances common to slavery.  His motherElizabeth had both African and Native American ancestry and she was held in bondage by Dr. John Young.  She was repeatedly sexually exploited and gave birth to seven children each with different fathers.  His father was Dr. Young’s cousin George W. Higgins, a neighboring planter and a Mayflower descendent.  Higgins acknowledged the child and showed some care for him and his mother, at least to the extent of getting Young to promise not to sell either of them.

But Young, perhaps out of jealously, did sell both before the boy was 10 years old.  Both would be on the blockagain but managed to stay together.  They were held mostly in and around St. Louis where the boy was hired out as a deck hand on Mississippi steam boats through most of his teens.  He escaped the drudgery of field laborand got to see more of the world than most slaves.

In 1833 mother and son managed to escapetogether across the river into Illinois but they were soon recaptured and hauled back to St. Louis.  He was sold for the final time to Captain Enoch Price and was soon back on the river on his master’s the paddle wheeler.  A year later he jumped ship at Cincinnati on the Ohio River and was aided in his escape by a largely Quaker abolitionist network.  In gratitude he adopted the name of one of his chief benefactors, William Wells and the last name Brown.

Despite the anguish of being now separated from his mother, Brown set about making a new life.  He began with a program of self-improvement, quickly teaching himself to read and devouring newspapers, magazines, religious tracks, and any books he could find.  He also met and married Elizabeth Schooner and began a family that included two daughters who would survive into adulthood, Clarissa and Josephine.

                        Brown's Abolitionist connections led to a brief stint in Elijah P. Lovejoy's printing shop.

By 1836 Brown was literate enough and, more significantly, well enough connected in Abolitionist circles to go to work for Elijah P. Lovejoy in his Alton, Illinois printing shop where the noted anti-slavery zealot published the Alton Observer.  On November 7, 1837 a pro-slavery mob attacked a warehouse where Lovejoy was hiding a new printing press after two others had been smashed and thrown into the river.   The warehousewas set on fire and Lovejoy was murdered by the mob making him a significant early abolitionist martyr.

Brown left Lovejoy’s employment before the attack after he believed his identity had been discovered by the slave catchers active in the area.  He and his family fled north settling in Buffalo, New York.

Buffalo offered him both economic opportunitiesas a steamboat man on Lake Erie out of the busy port city.  It was also a center of the Up State New York vigorous abolitionist movement and a key link in the Underground Railway.  Between 1837 and 1849 Brown used the boats on which he worked, usually with the supportof the owners or captains, to help hundreds of fugitive slaves who escaped to Canada either by taking them directly to Canadian ports or to Detroit, Michigan from where they could easily cross the Detroit River to Windsor, Ontario and safety. 

In his memoirs Brown said that from May to December 1842 alone, he had helped 69 fugitives reach Canada.  The effectivenessof the Buffalo connection and the Underground Railway as a whole was underscored by a report published by the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada that more than 30,000 fugitives had reached safety there by 1852.

Brown was also taking an increasingly public role in the Abolitionist movement and as a pillar of the Black community in Buffalo, and then estimated to number about 800.  He joined and was active in both Negro and integrated Anti-Slavery Societies and became active in the Negro Convention Movement which helped build the first national network of Black organizations of all types.  He also founded a Negro Temperance Society based in Buffalo that reported a membership of more than 500.  That also was a second bridge to white activists as Abolitionism and Temperance were the mother issues to generations of social reformers of all stripes.

He became an increasingly noted orator and lecturer.  His lectures were unique in that he incorporatedmusic into the programs often singing to the accompaniment of a guitar or lap organ.  The songs were mostly adapted hymns and Abolitionist anthems by White composers and writers but included some with lyrics written by Backs, most likely including himself.

Brown became a staunch supporter and ally of William Lloyd Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) and declined to be involved with the Liberty Party formed in 1840 by abolitionists willing to work within electoral politics to support their goals.  Garrison and Brown opposed voting and working within the system.  The regarded the Constitution as a corrupt document enshrining slavery and democracy as a sham.  The short lived Liberty Party was a forerunner to the anti-slavery but not abolitionist Free Soil Party in 1848 and Republican Party in the 1850s.

                                                The title page of Brown's autobiography.

In 1847 Brown published his first book, The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself which became a Northern best seller and was second only to Frederick Douglass’s 1845 autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.

Brown was now nationally in the top ranksof Black Abolitionists.  But he was also now publicly exposed as a fugitive himself and once again in danger of being pursued by slave catchers.

During these busy years he became estranged from his wife.  His two young daughters remained with him.

Little wonder that in 1849 Brown leapt at the chance to be a delegate to the International Peace Congress in Paris.   He brought his young daughters with him on his Trans-Atlantic journey in hopes of securing them the formal education that he had been denied.  At the famous conference where its President Victor Hugo introduced the concept of a United States of Europe, Brown was invited to give a featured address on the anti-slavery movement.  During the conference he also had a noted confrontation with pro-slavery American delegates who tried to prevent both his being seated and his speaking role.

After the Congress, Brown based himself in Britain where he launched extensive speaking tours to gain support for the American Abolitionist movement.  When Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850 making it even more dangerous for him to return to America, Brown decided to remain in exile.  He was welcomed by the well-established British Anti-Slavery Societies which sponsored his lectures. 

Typical of his reception was this report in the Scotch Independent:

By dint of resolution, self-culture, and force of character, he has rendered himself a popular lecturer to a British audience, and vigorous expositor of the evils and atrocities of that system whose chains he has shaken off so triumphantly and forever. We may safely pronounce William Wells Brown a remarkable man, and a full refutation of the doctrine of the inferiority of the negro.

                                A Broadside advertising one of Brown's British speaking engagements.

While in England Brown took advantage of the well-stocked libraries of some of his Anti-Slavery Society sponsors as well as the ever reliable British Museum to read as widely as possible to make up for he considered the deficiencies of his education.  He also traveled widely across Europe both as a speaker and as a voraciously curious tourist taking time to absorb as much of the culture and history of each spot he visited was possible.

The result was his popular travelogue Three Years in Europe: or Places I Have Seen And People I Have Met published by the press of radical social reformer Charles Gilpin in 1852.  That was two years after Gilpin published a successful English edition of Brown’s slavery memoirs.  The book was the first volume of travel writing—an exceedingly popular19th Century genre—ever published by a Black writer.  As a result he was now a genuine international literary figure.  And he had a driving ambition to expand on that in entirely new directions.

Bursting with inspiration and energy he wrote furiously.  The result was a novel, Clotel, or, The President's Daughter: a Narrative of Slave Life in the United States.  It was a breathtakingly daring tale of two daughter sired by Thomas Jefferson on one of his slaves.  It was based rumors circulated since the post-Revolutionary War eraand well-founded suspicions as well as his own mother’s experience of sexual exploitation in bondage and the dark secret of the wide-spread miscegenation in plantation life.  Explosive stuff.

Thomas Jefferson's mullato daughter Clotel throws herself to her death in the  Potomac to  foil slave catchers in the climax of Brown's novel.  

When Brown was writing the details of Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemmings, the slave who was his dead wife’s half-sister were a closely guarded secret and certainly unknown to Brown except perhaps for reference to a Dusky Sally in John Quincy Adams’s anonymous ballad attacking Jefferson during the 1800 Presidential contest against his father.  But Brown’s fiction was not far off the mark.  We now know as a genetically proven fact that two of Hemming’s sons were fathered by Jefferson and later freed by him.

The topic was too hot for his previous publisher Gilpin to handle, but Partridge & Oakey issued it in London in 1854.  No American publisher dared print it until the Civil War.  The book is often considered the first novel by an African-Americanbut it loses the title of first Black novelpublished in the U.S. to Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig issued in 1859 because of the delay. 

In 1854 the Quaker abolitionist Richardson family of Newcastle Upon Tyne in Northern England purchased Brown’s freedom from his legal master making it safe for him and his family to return to the United States.  The family had previously done the same for Frederick Douglas.

Brown and his daughters set sail for America.  But much had changed while they were gone.  On a personal level Brown’s estranged wife and the girls’ mother had died in 1850 completely severing that tenuous tie to the past.  They really had no home to return to—Buffalo had been a useful base but there were no deep ties there. 

The political and social climate had changed as well.  The Compromise of 1850 over the organization of Territories wrung from Mexico and the admittance of new states to the Union had satisfied no oneand sectional differences grew sharper year by year fueled by the doctrine of  Popular Sovereignty that would lead to a bloody virtual civil war in Kansas between pro and anti-slavery settlers.  The old Whig Party, home to many Northern slavery opponents but also to anti-Jacksonian Southern  aristocrats and pro-slavery zealots had fallen apart and ceased to exist due to it irreconcilable contradictions.  A moderate anti-slavery expansion party, the Free Soilers had risen and almost immediately began its own steep decline.  Abolitionists were sharply divided among themselves over participating in electoral politics or a militant complete rejection of the United States consecrated in and founded upon slavery.  New social movements, including women’s equality and nascent labor movements raised questions of possible cooperation—and of possible conflict.

Brown decided to move to Boston, which served his ambitions well.  The Hub of the Universe was still the undisputed literary, cultural, and philosophic center of America.  It was also the center of militant abolitionism and an active hot bed of resistanceto the Fugitive Slave Act, which had been strengthenedunder the terms of the Compromise of 1850.  Brown soon returned to the lecture platform and the circuit of appearances before local Anti-slavery societies and conventions.  He had programs tailored to both white and Black audiences.  For white audiences like the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Salem, Massachusetts he emphasized the unvarnished brutality of day today existence under slavery. 

Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.

In front of Black audience he upheld dignity and emphasized historical accomplishments by noted Blacks.  He urged self-improvement, dignity, and temperance.  And while he appreciated White support, he told his Black audiences not to rely on it.  He urged community self-organization and not letting Whites speak for them which inevitably meant setting goals and limitations that protected White property and privilegeat the expense of Blacks.  It was a radical and thoroughly modern sounding program.

As the tensions of the 1850 grew sharper, Brown despaired of the possibility of Blacks being able to make a safe and free home in a county awash in racism and in terror of Black retaliation for generations of suffering.  He began to promote a scheme for Blacks to re-settle in Haiti, an established Black Republic that had won Independence from France in a bloody revolution and had almost completely wiped out or driven out the old White plantation aristocracy, merchants, traders, and government functionaries.  This effort differed from the early earlier scheme promoted by the American Colonization Society in the 1830’s which was led by Whites eager to rid America of Freed Blacks.  Colonists had been recruited and had founded a society modeled on American Democracy but which itself displaced and oppressed a larger native population that never accepted or welcomed them.

It is unclear if Brown himself was ready to go to Haiti or to take a leadership role in colony there that was given at best an uneasy welcome by the Haitian government.  Only a few American Blacks ever made it to the nation before the Civil War dramatically changed the landscape of possibilities.

After John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid which was financed by some of William Brown’s closest white allies in Boston, including the Rev. Theodore Parker, he had a crisis of conscience questioning the pacifism and commitment to non-violence that he long ago absorbed from his Quaker friends and supporters.  As war loomed, he reluctantly concluded that the nation could only be purged and redeemed by violence.

 

                Frederick Douglass, Brown's contemporary and rival.

Brown also continued his Temperance work and was increasingly also in vocal support of the movement for Women’s Equalitythat had emerged after the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848.  That put him on similar ground to Frederick Douglass, who had attended the Convention and remained a vocal ally of the movement.  The two men had met each other during the Black Convention Movement and their paths periodically crossed.  But they were never personally close and did notcollaborate.  Perhaps there was a touch of wary mutual jealousy as the two often seemed to be in an undeclared competition.  Sometimes the two feuded publicly over differences.

Meanwhile, Brown had not neglected his literary ambitions.  In 1855 he published The American Fugitive in Europe. Sketches of Places and People Abroad, a revised and expanded edition of his European travel memoir including several of the important speeches he had delivered and a short auto-biographical sketch.

He also completed two plays.  Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone completed in 1856 was never published or produced and is now lost.  But its tantalizing title hints at what a bold and in-your-face script it must have been.  Two years later he finished The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom, an autobiographical piece about his flight to freedom.  It was not produced on stage in his life time but was published in 1858 making it the first published play by an African-American author.  Brown would often read from the script, acting out all of the characters, in lieu of a traditional lecture.  The play was finally brought to the boardsmore than a century later in a staging at Emerson College in Boston in 1971.

Also in 1856 Brown’s now grown younger daughter Josephine Brown published Biography of an American Bondman, an updated account of his life, drawing heavily on material from her father's 1847 autobiography. She added details about abuses he suffered as a slave, as well as new material about his years in Europe.  Josephine would have her own pioneering literary career and would continue to work collaboratively with her father on his later efforts.

On the personal front, on April 12, 1860, the 44-year-old Brown married again, to 25-year-old Anna Elizabeth Gray in Boston.  It was exactly one year before the artillery attack on Ft. Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina harbor marked the beginning of the Civil War.  The marriage would prove happy and productive despite the gathering war clouds and produce three more children, two more daughters and a son, William Wells Brown, Jr.

                                    William Wells Brown about the time of the Civil War.

With the coming of War Brown supported efforts to arm Black troops, both Freemen in the North and eventually the contraband escaped slaves who flocked across Union lines.  After the Emancipation Proclamation in January of 1863 President Abraham Lincoln officially authorized the raising of Colored Regiments as a critical war measure.  Brown, too old to fight himself, helped recruit Black troops.   He introduced his Boston abolitionist ally Francis George Shaw who was financing the cost of raising the 54th Massachusetts Infantry to Robert John Simmons, Bermudan of “more than ordinary abilities who had learned the science of war in the British Army.” Simmons became a First Sargent in the Regiment which was commanded by Francis’ Shaw’s 24-year old son, Col. Robert Gould Shaw.  Simmons did indeed turn out to be a fine soldier and natural leader.  He died of his wounds after the legendary assault on Fort Wagner at Charleston on July 18, 1863.  Col. Shaw and much of the Regiment were killed on the gallant but fruitless attack on the heavily defended bastion surrounded by dunes and earthworks.

Brown was increasingly interested in history and on what we might call today the sociology of the Southern planter society that supported slavery and of the lost achievements of Blacks.  With the assistance of his daughter Brown wrote and published The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievementsin 1863; The Negro in the American Rebellion, 1867, considered the first historical work about black soldiersin the American Revolutionary War; and The Rising Son, or The Antecedents and Achievements of the Colored Race, 1873; and another memoir, My Southern Home in 1880 which was his last work.

With his lecture platform income disrupted by the War, the ever energetic Brown reinvented himself once again.  He studied homeopathic medicine and opened his own practice in Boston’s working class South End.  For several years he commuted there daily from the home he shared with his wife in Cambridge where he enjoyed access to the library and research facilities at Harvard.

Finally slowing down, Brown retired to Chelsea, Massachusetts in 1882 and died on November 6, 1884, at about age 70.

The Historic maker honoring Brown near the site of his Buffalo, New York home.

Brown’s memory has long been overshadowed by his old rival Frederick Douglass.  His memory was somewhat boosted by the Black History movement in American Universities in the 1970’s where he was seen as both a literary pioneer and an early exponent of some of the themes that would be embodied in the Black Power Movement.  Here and there are markers, or honors in some of the places he lived. In Kentucky where he was elected to the state’s Writers’ Hall of Fame and where an elementary school has been named for him.  In Buffalo a historic marker has been placed near the site of his home and his portrait is included in the outdoor Freedom Wall painted by artist Edreys Wajed along with 27 other abolition and civil rights legends commissioned by the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and dedicated in 2017.

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An Octoroon, a Railway Ticket and Enshrining Separate but Equal— Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Homer Plessy was arrested for refusing to vacate his seat in a segregated rail car in Louisiana setting off a milestone court case the enshrined Jim Crow legislation as legal.

Most people who hear of the Supreme Court case of Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court ruled that separate but equal accommodations for African Americans were legal under the Constitution, assume that it arose from a school case.  That’s because Plessy v. Ferguson was the precedent upset in 1952 by the Brown v. Board of Education ruling striking down school segregation.  But the original case had more in common with Rosa Parks.

On June 8, 1892 Homer Plessy was arrested in New Orleans for refusing to vacate a segregated railroad car.  Plessy, a Creole of mixed Black and White heritage but having only 1/8 “Negro blood,” (an octoroon in the precise racial categorizations of the day) could probably have passed for White in any other place.  But in New Orleans, where graduations of heritage were observed in exquisite detail, he was either personally recognized by the conductoror was recognized by style of dress or speech.

 

This contemporary illustration of Plessy's confrontation with the conductor clearly misrepresented reality.  In fact Plessy could have "passed for White" almost anywhere else.

It was a planned act of civil disobedience by the Comité des Citoyens (Committee of Citizens) made up of the educated Free People of Color in New Orleans.  He was convicted in local courts, fined $25—a hefty sum in those days—and sentenced to 20 days in jail.  On appeal he did not even argue that the State of Louisiana had the no right to discriminate against Blacks, but that his preponderance of White blood should have been enough to use therestricted cars. 

John Howard Ferguson was the judge in the case who ruled that the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution did not prevent the state from enacting laws separating the races on rail road cars. Plessy’s appeal sought a writ of prohibition to bar the judge from imposing the sentence.  After losing the appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court as expected, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice John Marshal Harlan became known as the Great Dissenter for his fiery objection to the 7-1 Supreme Court decision that established the "separate but equal" rule.

Albion W. Tourgée, a former Radical Republican and founder of a pioneering Civil Rights organization, the National Citizens'’ Rights Association, and former U.S. Solicitor General Samuel F. Phillips representedPlessy ably before the Court.  But on May 18 in a stunning 7-1 decision the Court not only upheld Plessy’s sentence and conviction, but issued the infamous “separate but equal” ruling written by Justice Henry Billings Brown which not only protected existing discriminatory laws, but set off a stampede toenact segregation of all manner of facilities across not only the Old South, but in other parts of the nation as well.  A clearly shocked Justice John Harlan wrote in his dissenting opinion:

The present decision...will not only stimulate aggressions, more or less brutal and irritating, upon the admitted rights of colored citizens, but will encourage the belief that it is possible, by means of state enactments, to defeat the beneficent purposes which the people of the United States had in view when they adopted the recent [the 13th and 14th] amendments of the Constitution.


The pernicious doctrine of separate but equal was not totally overturned until the Brown V. Board of Education school desegregation case in 1954.  But it would take more than a decade and the enactment of landmark Civil Rights legislation to finally end the dual Jim Crow system.

A largely forgotten 1946 case Morgan v. Virginia finally overturned the Plessy precedent for interstate travel, but allowed restriction to remain on transportation thatremained within a state’s boundary.  It wasn’t until Brown v. the Board of Education that the whole principle of “separate but equal” was over turned. 

Plessy retreated into obscurityfollowing the case.  He sold insurance and died almost unnoticed in 1925 at the age of 61. 

 

 

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Malcolm X Died an Unexpected Martyr of Reconciliation— Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Malcolm X's body is taken to an ambulance by New York City Police after his assignation at the Audubon Ballroom.

On February 21, 1965 Malcolm X, the militant Muslim who scared the hell out of White Americansand had challenged Martin Luther Kingfor ideological leadership of the Black community, was cut down in a hail of gunfire by three assailants loyal to Elijah Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam.  He had just risen to speak to a crowd of about 400 at a meeting of The Organization of African American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City. 

His stories, as told in The Autobiography of Malcolm X, co-authored by Alex Haley and in Spike Lee’s bio flick starring Denzel Washington,has become iconic

He was born Malcolm Little in 1925 in Omaha, Nebraska to a local leader of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and a very light skinned mother.  The family was harassed for his father’s involvements, forced to move from Omaha, and threatened in their new home in Lansing, Michigan.  Malcolm’s father’s death after being run over by a street car may have been the result of an attack by the racist Michigan Black Legion. 

Malcolm Litte's mug shot.

Without his father, Malcolm drifted into crime and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for burglary and gun chargesin Massachusetts in 1946.  While serving time he fell under the influence of another inmate who encouraged him to improve himself through reading and who introduced him to the teaching of an ex-conElijah Muhammad.  After being released from prison in 1952 he met the leader of The Nation of Islam in Chicago, forsook his slave name, and became Malcolm X. 

Malcolm X quickly rose to be Elijah Muhammad's closest advisor and the most public face of the Nation of Islam fueling its rapid growth.

He rose rapidly in the organization and soon became Elijah Muhammad’s most trusted lieutenant and public spokesperson.  The Nation of Islam taught a brand of African American Nationalism and separation from the White Devils who oppressed them. 

Under Malcolm’s influence the Nation of Islam grew from 500 to more than 25,000 members.  He scored a great coup when he successfully recruited the Heavy Weight Champion of the World Cassius Clay and dubbed him Muhammad Ali. 

Malcolm X recruited Cassius Clay to the Nation of Islam.  As Muhammad Ali the boxer helped bring Black Muslims mainstream.

During the Civil Rights era he was harshly critical of Martin Luther King and other leaders for both seeking integration and for their nonviolent tactics.  After being publicly censured by Elijah Muhammad for saying that the assassination of John F. Kennedy amounted to “the chickens coming home to roost,” Malcolm brokewith the Nation of Islam. 

Malcolm X and Dr, Martin Luther King were viewed as rivals for Black leadership.  Each came to respect the other and even to play off of each other as a sort of good cop/bad cop team that helped enact the Voting Rights Act of 1965

He founded his own Islamic organization, the Muslim Mosque and the Organization of African-American Unity as a secular and political organization.  As he worked on his Autobiography with Haley, he began to advocate the “careful use of the ballot” as a means of African American advancement. 

Malcom was approached by orthodox Sunni Muslims and urged to study the Koran which led him to repudiate the many un-Islamic innovations of the Nation of Islam.  He did convertand undertook the required pilgrimageto Mecca.  While there he observed how believers of all races were respected, welcomed, and treated equally.  He came to believe the Islam could be the means by which racial reconciliation could take place. 

As an orthodox Sunni Muslim, Malcolm's Haj to Mecca dramatically changed his world view and teachings.

This new outlook, and the fact that Malcolm was both attracting his followers and overshadowing him in public, made him a marked man with Elijah Muhammad. 

Although top leadership in the Nation was never directly connectedto the assassination, three members were convicted in the shooting.

Alex Haley finished the Autobiography and it was published to wide acclaim later in the year.                                      

  

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Ma Rainey the Mother of the Blues— Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

The new film Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom stars Chadwick Boseman and Viola Davis.
 

The Coronavirus pandemic and the closure of most movie houses for the last 11 months completely disrupted the awards season.  One filmthat did create buzz and garnered honors was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottombased on August Wilson’s 1984 Pulitzer Prize winning play.  Produced by Denzel Washington, Todd Black, and Dany Wolf, the film stars Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman who diedduring post-production in August 2020, making Black Bottom his, the film is dedicated to his memory.

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom had a limited theatrical release in November before streaming on Netflix in December. The film was acclaimed by critics, who lauded the performances of Davis and Boseman. It was named as one of the Ten Best Films of 2020 by the American Film Institute; received nine NAACP Image Award nominations, including Outstanding Motion Picture; eight Critics’ Choice Movie Award nominations; three Screen Actors Guild Award nominations; and Davis and Boseman both received Golden Globe nominations.  

Just as Wilson’s play had done 37 years earlier, the picture revived interest in the bigger than life powerhouse who defiantly thumbed her nose not only at White culture and expectations, but at the conventional Black moral code as well. 

"Ma" Rainey with her late 20's Wild Cat Jazz band with Thomas Dorsey at the piano.

 “Ma” Rainey deserved her recognition as almost the literal Mother of the Blues.  Although she did win a narrow White audience in the 1920s, most of her career that stretchedfrom late 19th Century tent shows to the Southern Chitlin circuit of the 1930s was spent recording for and performing to Black audiences.  “Ma” Rainey had been retired from recording and touring since 1935 and had taken the money she earned from decades in show business to operate two local theaters in her home town of Columbus, Georgia when she died suddenly of a heart attack on December 22, 1939.  She was believed to be about 53 years old.  Her bold and brassy style of delivering the blues may have already gone out of style, but she had helped lay the groundwork for a new era of Black music.

Later in life Rainey would recall that she was born in Columbus on April 26, 1886.  Census records, however, do notconfirm this and indicate that she may have been born in September 1882 in Alabama.  Such confusion over birth dates and even places of origin were common in Black families at the time who were often illiterateand lived lives where events flowed more like a river than a succession of compartmentalized dates and years.  And there were numerous reasons to fudge birth dates one way or the other. 

At any rate Gertrude Malissa Nix Pridgett, the fistful of a names she was given, did grow up in Columbus and had at least two surviving brothers and a sister, Malissa, whose personal records were often confounded with Gerturde’s.  She had some rudimentary education, enough to read, write, and cypher and grew up in the First African Baptist Church where she first performed with the choir.  When she was about 12—assuming the 1886 birth date—she began performing in Black minstrel shows.

Minstrel shows were a highly stylized form of entertainment, and the most popular stage shows of the last half of the 19th Century.  The form was invented and developedby White performers in black face, doing songs, dances, jokes, and sketches either imitative of Black music or invented out of thin air. 

By the late years of the Century the form was as popular with Black audiences as white and Black troupesstarted touring.  These tent shows—unlike White troops—Blacks had no access to local theaters or opera houses—then re-interpretedfaux Black music for their people, often absorbing elements of real folk culture. 

It was an odd and slow process.  Young Gertrude Pridgett was not the only performer learning the ropes in Black Minstrelsy.  W. C. Handy, who claimed to have “invented the blues,” toured on the Black Minstrel Circuit and rose to be the band leader in a leading company.  So did Jelly Roll Morton, who would stake his own claim to being a founder of the blues.

Gertrude would recall that she first heard the blues around 1902.  She quickly incorporated it into her Minstrel act.  In 1904 she married fellow minstrel Will Rainey and the two launched their own act.  They were successful enough that they were able to start their own troupe, the Alabama Fun Makers Company.  Two years later in 1906 they folded their show into Pat Chappelle’s more successful much larger Rabbit’s Foot Company.  The couple was billed as Rainey and Rainey, “Black Face Song and Dance Comedians, Jubilee Singers, and Cake Walkers”.  Those referred to traditional minstrel forms and indicate that as yet the blues were only a minor part of their act.

These blurry images are the only ones known of Rainey and her husband when their act was billed as Rainey and Rainey Assassins of the Blues.

But it kept getting bigger.   By 1910 Mrs. Rainey was being advertised independently of her husband as “Mrs. Gertrude Rainey, our coon shouter,” a strong indication that most of her material was now Blues.  Management of the company changed hands in 1912 when Chappelle, a Black showman, died.  White entrepreneur F. S. Wolcotttook over the show.  He had the money to expand it—often sending out two companiesof more than 50 performers each including a 10 piece band under circus-like big tops.

By 1914 Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues were headlining the show.  That year in New Orleans Rainey first met Joe “King” Oliver, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet and Pops Foster who were incorporating blues forms into the creole sounds of traditional street brass bands and inventing jazz.  In turn their experimentations influenced the Raineys. 

This rare poster promoted the famed Rabbit Foot Minstrels, Rainey's long time touring home when it was under the white management  of F.S. Wolcott.  In now hangs in the Columbus, Georgia museum housed in her former home.

About the same time Rainey encountered a young, aspiring blues shouter, Bessie Smith.  Legend has it that Rainey kidnaped the rising star and held her captive to sing in the Rabbit’s Foot Company.  Although it is true that Rainey mentored the younger singer during her two year stay with the show, there is no indication that Smith was held against her will.

The blues was beginning to catch on around the World War I era when some White artists were adapting it for vaudeville acts and making some recordings.  It wasn’t until 1920, however, that sides were issued by veteran Black vaudevillian Mamie Smithwho scored a million copy sellerwith Crazy Blues.  It was considered the first commercial vocal recording of the blues by a Black artist.  That got the attention of other labels and there was a scramble to sign similar artists.  In 1923 Rainey’s former protégéeBessie Smith began her recording career for Columbia Records.

In December 1923, two months after Bessie Smith’s first release, Rainey laid down her first tracks for J. Mayo Williamsin Chicago for Paramount Records.  Among the eight songs recorded in that first session were Bad Luck Blues, Bo-Weevil Blues, and Moonshine Blues each were hits, released under the name “Ma” Rainey, a bow to her senior status among female blues shouters.  The label snatched her up to a long term contract and began to market her heavily as the Mother of the Blues, the Songbird of the South, Gold-Neck Woman of the Blues and the Paramount Wildcat.  Over the next five years the label would release over 100 Ma Rainey records and discovered that not only did she sell in the expected race records markets of the South, but in some northern cites to white audiences.

Ma Rainey's Paramount recordings were raw, frank, down, and dirty just the way her audience like it.


I despite her success with Paramount, it was in some ways an unfortunate match for her.  Unlike competitors in race records including Okeh, Blue Bird, and RCA Victor subsidiaries, the quality of Paramount’s recordings were inferior and muddied due to their production process and inferior shellac used on the discs. So although scores of Rainey’s performances were recorded, they never adequately captured her full power.

In 1924 Rainey made some records with her old friend Louis Armstrong who in those days frequently teamed up with other artists in a variety of genres.  Together they made Jelly Bean Blues, Countin’ the Blues and See See Rider, the latter a seminal song in blues history that has been enshrined in the Grammy Hall of Fame, and was included by the National Recording Preservation Board in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. 

The song’s origins date back to the first decade of the 20th Century and are about a semi-legendary bluesman named See See Rider, a former slave who sawed a homemade, single string fiddle.  After the Rainey/Armstrong version more than 100 recordings have been made, several classics of urban blues, rhythm & blues, and rock & roll later often under the title C.C. Rider.

Another highly influential song was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, her version of the ‘20’s dance craze based on earlier Rounder dances—referring to pimps and whores.  Rainey’s version virtually crackled with sexual tension and innuendo compared to the sanitized versionstaged by George White on Broadway in his Scandals.  Playwright August Wilson built his play around a fictionalized version of the recording session.

With the success of her records, Rainey was now a star in her own right.  She launched her own touring company under the auspices of the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA). She covered a circuit in the South and Midwestern United States.  It was an illustrious company.  Her first band leader was pianist Thomas Dorsey and his band was known as the Wild Cat Jazz Band.  Their first tour began in Chicago where they played before integrated audiences as they would in northern sections of the tour.  In the South, they played Black theaters, and occasionally in tents like in the old days.

Dorsey left the company temporarily in 1926 due to ill health and was replaced on piano by Lillian Hardaway Henderson whose husband was the combo’s cornetist, Fletcher Henderson.   Fletcher took over Dorsey’s duties as band leader, his first outing in that role.  Dorsey would re-unite with Rainey in 1928 for a series of Paramount recordings before they went their separate ways. Dorsey was billed as Georgia Tom Dorsey and Tampa Red played guitar on the sessions.  

Dorsey went on to virtually invent modern Black Gospelmusic as a composer, arranger, conductor, impresario, and music publisher.

By 1928 Rainey was successful enough to purchase her own touring coach with her name emblazoned on the side, a symbol of a hugely successful touring act.

Rainey flaunted convention sexual morality and identity in Prove It on Me.

By this time Rainey sometimes appeared in a suit and tie rather than a dress sparking rumors of lesbianism which she addressed in songs like Prove It on Me in which she sang: 

They said I do it, ain’t nobody caught me.

Sure got to prove it on me.

Went out last night with a crowd of my friends.

They must’ve been women,

‘cause I don’t like no men

… It’s true I wear a collar and a tie

... Talk to the gals just like any old man.

Modern feminist and gay cultural historians call the song an early preview of the anthems of the ‘70’s.

Although Rainey’s records continued to sell well, Paramount did not renew her contract when it expired.  Whether potential scandal about her sexuality played a part, or if the company was anticipating changes in the public’s tastehas long been debated.

For her part Rainey never pursued a new recording contract, preferring to concentrate on her tours, which she continued until 1935 when her increasing weight made the strain too much.  Her raw barrel house style had gone out of style replaced by a big band vocalist style on one hand represented by younger singers like Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and the primitive, guitar based Delta blues of Memphis Minnie and Robert Johnson on the other.  That’s when she headed home to Columbus.

August Wilson's play Ma Rainey's Black Bottom re-introduced her to popular culture.

She died in her hometown on December 22, 1939.

Rainey was nearly forgotten by all but hard core blues fans until Wilson’s play revived interest in her career.  The next year, 1983, she was elected to the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame.  In 1990 she was inducted as a roots influence into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  She was honored by a Postal Service commemorative stamp in 1994.


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The March for Jobs and Freedom Was Bigger than Dr. King— Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Dr. Martin Luther King's ringing I Have a Dream speech was the highlight and climax of the 1963 March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington and helped change America, but the March itself was bigger than any one man.

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

The March was the brain child of labor and Civil Rights leader A. Phillip Randolph.

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

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

Civil Rights Leaders and major speakers at the March for Jobs and Justice, standing left to right are Director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice Matthew Ahmann, Rabbi Joachim Prinz, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) leader John Lewis, Protestant minister Eugene Carson Blake, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) leader Floyd McKissick, and UAW President Walter Reuther; sitting are National Urban League Executive Director Whitney Young, chairman of the Demonstration Committee Cleveland Robinson, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters President A. Philip Randolph, Dr. Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader Roy Wilkins.

In addition Randolph sought support from the Labor movement, most significantly from Walter Reuther, President of the United Auto Workers (UAW).  The White dominated craft unions of the AFL, however, were notable for their absence. 

Bayard Rustinof the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and the organizer of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation, an early forerunner of the Freedom Rides that was meant to test a Supreme Court ruling that banned racial discrimination in interstate travel, was tapped to coordinate volunteers and logistics, recruit marchers from across the country, and attend to all of the otherdetails of the march while Randolph pulled together political, labor and religious support for the march. 

Veteran pacifist and Civil Rights leader Beyard Rustin of the Fellowship of Reconciliation was the Deputy Director of the March and in charge of most of the planning and logistics.  As an openly Gay man his public profile was kept low.  Retail workers labor leader Cleveland Robinson was named Chairman of the Administrative Committee.

Other than being a star speaker that day King was not heavily involved in the planning or management of the event. He even left the details of mobilizing SCLC supporters to his aides.

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

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

Charlton Heston, Harry Bellefonte, novelist James Baldwin, and Marlon Brando added star power to the March.

It was a Wednesday afternoon but the three major broadcast networks broke away from their usual programming of afternoon soap operas to cover the swelling crowd and speeches live. 

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

Peter Paul & Mary were among the notable entertainers who performed.  They led the crowd in Pete Seeger's anthem If I Had a Hammer. Seeger himself did not appear despite his close association with the Civil Rights Movement in he South because memories of his his former Communist Party membership and indictment for his First Amendment refusal to testify against others before the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The Catholic Archbishop of Washington, Patrick O’Boyle led the invocation.  Other religious leaders on the program included Dr. Eugene Blake on behalf of the Protestant National Council of Churches and two leading Rabbis. 

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

Despite their notable contributions to the Civil Rights Movement key figures like Rosa Parks, and Dianne Nash were excluded from the speaker's list.  In the end the only woman to address the crowd was singer and dancer Josephine Baker who had spent most of the previous 30 years as an expatriate in Paris.  She wore her World War II uniform as a decorated member of the French Resistance.

Slain NAACP organizer Medgar Evers’swife Myrlie was on the announced program to lead a Tribute to Negro Women, but did not appear.  In fact several prominent female figures in the Movement were either not invited or had their requests to be added to the program rejected by Randolph.  In the end the only woman to speak was jazz singer and dancer Josephine Baker who wore her World War II Free French uniformemblazoned with her medal of the Légion d’honneur. 

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

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

The hundreds of thousands of ordinary folks who showed up for the March for Jobs and Justice were just as important as any of the movement heavies and celebrities.

The nation, or much of, it was awestruck and impressed.  That speech, along with the continued televised violence against Blacks struggling for equal access to public accommodations and the vote, helped set the stage for the major Civil Rights legislation enacted in the next three years. 

 

 

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National Lynching Memorial Won’t Let America Forget—Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

A sculptural group representing the domestic slave trade is one of several installations leading to the Memorial Square at the top of the hill on the six acre National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice—already popularly called simply the Lynching Memorial—opened on April 26, 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama along with a companion Legacy Museum:  From Enslavement to MassIncarceration.  No mere historic marker, or modest statue, the Memorial is as massive and overwhelming as the crimes and victims it remembers.

Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments—one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. The names of the lynching victims are engraved on the columns. The memorial is more than a static monument. In park surrounding the memorial is a field of identical monuments, waiting to be claimedand installed in the counties theyrepresent. Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the countryhave confronted the truth of this terror and which have not.

800 six-foot monuments are inscribed with the known name of victims and suspended in the the Memorial Square, each one representing a county where a lynching took place.

Also on the grounds sculptures take visitors on a visceral tour of the Black experience in Americasubjugation by terrorand humiliation from the stark brutality of the Middle Passage, to the auction block, chattel slavery—leading to the central pavilion and then continues through the depredations of the Civil Rights era to the contemporary extension of the violence and oppression through police violence and the racially biased criminal justice system featuring the mass incarceration of Blacks.

Among the artists who contributed to the experience were Kwame Akoto-Bamfowhose sculpture on slavery confronts visitors when they first enter the memorial, Dana King dedicated work to the women who sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott, and a final work created by Hank Willis Thomas.  The journey also displays writing from Toni Morrison, words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and a reflection space in honor of Ida B. Wells, the Black journalist who exposed Jim Crow Era lynching and crusaded for justice.

The overwhelming Memorial Square was designed with assistance from Boston and Kigali, Rwanda based MASS Design Group, 

It is not the kind of monument a visitor cantake in at a glance, or that encourages selfies using it as a background prop.  Instead it is a totally immersive experience that some visitors have compared to the overwhelming emotional punch of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.

Just a few blocks away the complementary Legacy Museum opened the same day situated on a site in Montgomery where enslaved people were once warehoused, a block from one of the most prominent slave auction spaces in America, and steps away from an Alabama dock and rail station where tens of thousands of Black people were trafficked during the 19th century. 

The Legacy Museum, companion project to the Memorial.

The Legacy Museum employs unique technologyto dramatize the enslavement of African Americans, the evolution of racial terror lynching, legalized racial segregation and racial hierarchy in America. It relies on first-person accounts of the domestic slave trade and critically acclaimed research materials, it employs videography, exhibits on lynching and content on segregation, down to the contemporary issues from mass incarceration to police violence.

Visitors enter the museum and confront slave pen replicasand continue the richly illustrated journey from there. 

Sculptures including Titus Kaphar and Sanford Biggers and fine art pieces including works from Elizabeth Catlett, John Biggers, Yvonne Meo,  and Kay Brown enrich the experience Design and creative partners also included Local Projects, Tim Lewis and TALA, Molly Crabapple, Orchid Création, Stink Studios, Human Pictures, HBO, and Google.

Equal Justice Initiative founder and visionary leader Bryan Stevenson in front of EJI's Montgomery headquarters.

The two projects, each impressive enough to be a major cultural achievement on its own, owe their seamless connection of history to the realities of today to their sponsor, The Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) which is committed to ending mass incarceration and excessive punishment in the United States, to challenging racial and economic injustice, and to protecting basic human rightsfor the most vulnerable people in American society.

Founded in 1989 by Bryan Stevenson, a widely acclaimed public interest lawyer and the best-selling author of Just Mercy, EJI is a private nonprofit organization. Beyond the memorial and museum, it is dedicated to helping the poor, the incarcerated, and the condemned and provides legal assistance to innocent death row prisoners, confronts abuse of the incarcerated and the mentally ill, and aids children prosecuted as adults.

The museum will be an unparalleled resourcefor researchers housing the nation’s most comprehensive collection of data on lynching.  It also houses previously unseen archival information about the domestic slave trade brought to life through new technology.

Decades of hard work, research, design, fundraising, and gathering support from sometimes reluctant local and state officials who would rather “let sleeping dogs lay” went into the creation of the twin projects.

Perhaps not entirely by coincidence, in 2017 the State of Alabama passed a law protecting Confederate monuments like this one from being moved or even modified to reflect the realities of slavery.

Montgomery is a city dotted with Confederate memorials including just a mile from the Memorial the “First White House of the Confederacy” celebrating the life of “renowned American patriotJefferson Davis.  Not only was it a cradle and regional hub of the domestic slave trade, it was ground zero of the Jim Crow South and the virtual capital of lynch law.  Naturally, it was also at the heart of the Civil Rights Movement and resistance to it.  

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was the first major successful campaign of non-violent resistance movement which brought Martin Luther King to national prominence.  The Rosa Parks Museum is also near-by.  Montgomery was the goal of the voting rights marchers from Selma and eventually the site of a triumphant rally on the steps of the Capital.  But it was also where Governor George Wallace declared, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!”  and the Ku Klux Klan operated with impunity.

While Alabama and the other states of the old Confederacy had epidemic levels of lynching, Northerners should not feel smug.  Among those counties with victim’s names etched on them are places in Minnesota, for instance, where four carnival roustabouts were lynched in Duluth after a teenage girl out late with her boyfriend made up a story about being raped.  Also represented were victims strung up to lamp poles in Chicago during the 1919 Race Riot.

The normalization of sensational cruelty--coverage of a lynching by fire in Waco, Texas.

While most people associate lynching with the Strange Fruit that Billie Holiday sang about, hanging was not the only method.  As historian E.R. Bills documented in his book Black Holocaust:  The Paris Horror and the Legacy of Texas Terror, the Lone Star State made something of a tradition of burning victims alive in gruesome public executions, but similar “barbeques” where held elsewhere.  Emmet Till, the 14-year old Chicago boy was beaten unrecognizable, shot, tied to a 70lb cotton gin fan, and thrown in a river in a case that became a cause celebre.  Several Civil Rights workers and volunteers, most famously Andrew Goodman. Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney but including less celebrated victims, were kidnapped and executed by Ku Klux Klansmen and other night riding terrorists.  As recently as 1998 James Byrd was dragged to death behind a pick-up truck by White supremacists in Jasper, Texas.  No form of torture was too cruel for enraged racists.

Although the Memorial and Museum are dedicated to Black victims, it is important to recognize that other minorities and marginalized people have also been targeted.  Lynching as a tactic of terror, intimidation, and subjugation was useful against other groups.  In Texas and the Southwest Mexican-Americans and immigrants alike were targeted on a massive scale for decades.  Some were victims of extra-judicial mobs, but others were systematically hunted and slain by the famed Texas Rangers under a tissue thin cover of law.  In all parts of the country Native Americans have frequently been lynched and in fact more than one Indian war was set off when settlers murdered tribal members for alleged offences or simply because the could do so with impunity.  Chinese men were sometimes choked with their own hair queues during the Yellow Peril riots that swept the West in the late 19th Century.

                        The Chinese were just one other minority attacked by lynching.

Today some of the murders of gays, lesbians, and transgender individuals, as well as fatal attacks on immigrants and the homeless, have characteristics of lynching—not the acts of lone wolf bigots, but the concerted acts of groups or mobs. 

Finally, it is very important to place lynching in the continuum of oppression that is on-going.  The Black Lives Matter Movement has shown that murder under the color of law is not a relic of those old Texas Rangers, but a continuing plague in our cities just as mass incarceration is the new slavery.

Thanks to the National Memorial and Legacy Museum for reminding us.

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Mr. Cub’s Long and Happy Life—Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin


 

Note—Pitchers and catchers have already shown up for Major League Baseball spring training and crossing fingers and toes it looks like a full regular season schedule may be possible this year albeit with few fans in the seats.  My beloved Chicago Cubs lost Hall of Fame quality pitchers and a big long ball hitter.  Their core players Anthony Rizzo, Kris Bryant, Javier Báez, and Jason Heyward are aging and/or playing out their last year before free agency. Jake Arietta is returning but he is not the dominating pitcher of 2016.  Lots of journeymen and youngsters.  It will probably be a tough season.  But hope is a Cub fan’s middle name and in the second summer of the Coronavirus pandemic baseball is a welcome diversion.  Today we will celebrate the game and the Cubs with a profile of the North Sider’s greatest hero.

Ernie Banks was, bar none, the most beloved player in the long history of the Chicago National League franchise.  He was the only longtime Cub player not to draw contempt and scorn from hard core White Sox fans.  Beyond the playing field his gentle demeanor and graciousness to fans and the press endeared him to the whole city.  His status as an icon of a losing franchisealmost obscured his real accomplishments on the field.

But as an obituary in the New York Times, hardly a Second City boosting cheerleader, pointed out, Banks was, “the greatest power-hitting shortstopof the 20th century and an unconquerable optimist…”

Banks was born on January 31, 1931, in Dallas, Texas, the second oldest of 11 children of a warehouse workerand his wife.  His father, Eddie Banks had played semi-pro ball and encouraged his athletically inclined son to take an interest in the game.  Ernie was not much interested and at first had to be bribed to play catch with the old man.  Part of it was that he had few opportunities to play organized baseball.  There was no Little League for Texas Black boys in those days and Booker T. Washington High School did not have a team.  Instead he lettered in track, basketball, and football.  The closest he could come to baseball was playing softball in summer church leagues, and for a season with the semi-pro Amarillo Colts.

Ernie Banks, second from right, with the 1953 Kansas City Monarchs.

Still after graduating he somehow managed to catch the attention of the Kansas City Monarchs, the most prestigious franchise in the Negro American League.  Some accounts give credit to a scout who was friendly with his father, others to legendary player Cool Papa Bell.  Maybe it was both.  But in 1950 he was signed and playing for the Monarchs.

Bank’s fledgling baseball career was cut short when he was drafted into the Army in 1951.  He suffered a knee injury during basic training which would haunthim later in his career.  He was attached to the 45th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion at Fort Bliss where he was a sharp enough soldier to be made the unit’s flag bearer.  During his months at Bliss he was able to sub occasionally with the Harlem Globetrotters operation, usually appearing in the uniform of the perpetually loosing Washington Generals.  After that he was stationed in Germany.

Upon his discharge from active duty, Banks rejoined the Monarchs.  His time with the team was his university of baseball.  He learned and mastered quickly all of the fundamentals of the game.    In no time at all he was a star player.  So good that he was attracting attention from Major League scouts who finally ready to stock their teams with Black talent.  He finished the 1953 season batting for an impressive .347 average.  The Chicago Cubs snatched him up and he would wear the blue pinstripes for the final games of that season.

Despite the opportunity, Banks was loathe to leave the Monarchs which he considered his home.  He thought about asking the team not to sell his contract.   That is the kind of loyalty that in the end he transferred to the Cubs.

The Cubs, badly in need of talent, put Banks directly into the Big Leaguegame without any time in the minors.  His debut at Wrigley Field was on September 17, 1953 versus the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

                                    An autographed copy of Banks's rookie card.

Before the game Jackie Robinson crossed the field to welcome the Cubs’ first Black player and give him some support and encouragement.  Robinson had also played for the Monarchs and was Banks’s idol.  Banks later recalled that Robinson told him, “Ernie, I’m glad to see you’re up here so now just listen and learn.”  It was advice he took to heart, maybe too much so. “For years, I didn’t talk and learned a lot about people.” 

His reticence to speak up on racial tensions and issues on and off the field would later draw accusations of being an Uncle Tom from some.  But it was not in his nature to be confrontational and he tried hard to make friends with everybody.  Robinson believed his early reticence in responding to abuse on the field when he first broke baseball’s color line earned him the right to speak out and became Civil Rights movement spokesman.  Despite their differences over this Banks and Robinson remained close.

In his first full season with the Cubs as shortstophe paired up with the team’s second Black player Gene Baker at second baseto form a bang-bang double play combination.  The two also roomed together on the road.  Banks hit a respectable 19 home runs and had 71 runs batted in.  It was good enough to finish second in National League Rookie of the Year voting.

                        Banks turning a bang-bang double play at short stop.

Banks really took off as a dominant player in 1955, his second full season, after he switched to a lighter weight bat increasing his bat speed.  Thanks to strong wrists and a sharp eye for a fast ball, the tall, slender (6’1”, 180 lbs.) shortstop became a genuine power hitter and slugger.  That season he slammed 44 round trippers and drove in 117 runs.  He earned the first of 14 consecutive All Star Game appearances.  His home run total was a single-season record for shortstops and he set a thirty year record of five single-season grand slam home runs.

It was the beginning of a parade of phenomenally successful seasons in which he was a shining star on miserable teams.  In 1956 despite missing 19 games with an infection in one hand that took the edge off of his power Banks still hit 28 home runs, had 85 RBIs, and a .297 batting average. In 1957, he bounced back with 43 home runs, 102 RBIs, and a .285 batting average. 

Banks slamming one home at Wrigley Field.

Then there were the back to back Most Valuable Player (MVP) Awards—a first in National League history—in ’58 and ’59.  He hit over .300 each year, led the League in RBIs both years, and knocked 47 homers the first year and 45 the next.  In 1960 he led the League with 41 homers, earned a Gold Glove at short stop and for the sixth time in his seven year full season career led the league in most games played. 

Banks was not only the star, but a consistent work horse on terrible teams.  The Cubs currently have a reputation for a fanatical fan base and the ability to fill the seats of Wrigley Field no matter how miserable the teams on the field.  But it was not always so.  In the early ‘50’s years of bad teams had slashed attendance.  The North Side ball park frequently resembled a ghost town.  Banks gave fans something to plunk down money to see.  As Ernie got hot, the fans began to come back.  Not only that, he helped them bond with the team, especially with children for whom he always seemed to have time.  Banks was building a fan base for the team that would become multi-generational.

 Cubs owner P. K. Wrigley was meddlesome, eccentric, and most of all cheap.  Despite Bank’s value to the team, he was paid remarkably modestly.  He was paid only $27,000 for the ’58 season.  That did jump to $45,000 the next year and after that it rose by small increments annual so that by the time he retired in 1971 he was making $50,000.  While those were comfortable salaries in the days before big time agents and skyrocketing pay, they lagged far behind Banks’ peers in the top rungof baseball talent by as much as 50%. 

Yet the star slugger never publicly complained out of loyalty to the team and because he enjoyed an unusually close personal relationship with Wrigley.  The two often had lunch together and in the off season Wrigley entertained Banks and his wife at his California estate. 

As if to make up for the low pay he was handing out, the chewing gum heir advised Banks on investments and encouraged him to get involved in the business world.  Banks credited the advice for encouraging him to take classes in bank management and to enter in a variety of partnership deals in enterprises that included a car dealership.  Some of the investments worked out.  Some didn’t.  But Banks did make money.  And he discovered he was a personal asset to companies who wanted to polish their images and raise their public profiles.  If he never became the great executive he yearned to be, he did become a hugely successful public relations asset and company spokesperson.

In 1961 Wrigley made the oddest decision of his ownership.  Instead of hiring a new manager he put the team in the charge of his famous College of Coaches—management by a committee of 12 coaches who rotated between them who to be field skipperon game day.  The system worked just about as well as you would expect. 

That spring the constant shifting from left to right, a necessary at shortstop, aggravated Banks’ old Army knee injury.  The College decided to rest him at short and put him in left field, a position he was totally unfamiliar and uncomfortable with.  “Only a duck out of water could have shared my loneliness in left field,” he later said.  But with the help of center fielder Richie Ashburn he quickly adapted and made only one error in 23 games out in the cow pasture.

The College then moved him to first base, the position he would keep the rest of his career.  By May 1963 he was good enough at his new position to set a record for most put-outs in a game by a first baseman. 

But Bank’s power began to taper off, as did his speed on the base paths.  In ’62 he had been beaned by Moe Drabowsky and was carried off the field unconsciouswith a concussion.  He missed three days and bounced back with a three homer game.  But there were lingering effects. The following year he was weakened by the mumps, a very dangerous illness in adult men, and finished the season with 18 home runs, 64 RBIs, and a .227 batting average.  But when he hit, it was timely hitting and the team posted its first winning season since his arrival.

The next year, however the team was back in the toilet.  Banks was settling into homer production in the high 20’s and still good RBI numbers.  On September 2, 1965 Ernie thrilled fans by smacking his 400th career homer.

Things were not all peaches and cream between Banks and manager Leo Durocher who had a history of making racist statements, and who once wanted to bench him during a slump but said he couldn't because "There would be rioting in the streets."

The next year, 1965, Leo Durocher arrived from Los Angeles as solo manager with a mandate to turn the bottom dwelling, money hemorrhaging team around.  Things did not go well.  Banks was having the worst season of his career.  He hit only 15 homers and his slowing on the base paths caused him to misjudge leads.  The Cubs finished the season with a dismal 59-103 record.

Durocher, who spent his evenings night clubbing, let the press who covered his colorful escapades know that he was dissatisfied with Banks who he considered washed up.  In his memoirs Durocher complained that he wanted to bench Banks but could not because, “there would be rioting in the streets.”  Since his past was checkered with racist comments and altercations, there was speculation, particularly in the Black owned Daily Defender that Durocher’s animosity was racially motivated.

Banks denied it and soldiered on.  In his memoirs he wrote sympathetically of Durocher claiming he wished he had a manager like that early in his career and maintaining that he learned a lot from him. Despite the tense relations, Banks stayed at first base and his numbers came back up.  In 1967 Durocher even named him a player/coach.  He hit 23 home runs, and drove in 95 runs that year. The next year his home run numbers were back up to 32 and he was awarded the Lou Gehrig Memorial Award for playing ability and personal character.  And the Cubs were finally building a decent team around him.

The following year the famous ’69 Cubs made their legendary run for the National League pennant leading through much of August until a long losing streak and a hot New York Metsended their run.  It was the team with the most eventual Hall of Famers of any that never made it to post season play including Banks, his longtime best friend Billy Williams, pitchers Ferguson Jenkins and Ken Holtzman, and Third Baseman Ron Santo.  Banks chipped in 23 home runs, 106 RBIs, and a batting average of .253 to the effort.  It was also the last year of Ernie’s 14 year run as an All Star.

Banks hit his 500th round tripper before a home crowd at Wrigley on May 12, 1970.  But his career was winding down.  After the 1971 season he announced his retirement in December.  He remained on as a coach for three more seasons and then had turns as a scout and in the team front office.  Durocher was fired midway through the next season.

Banks’s life-time stats speak for themselves—512 home runs, 277 of them as a shortstop, a career record at the time of his retirement; 2,583 hits; 1,636 RBIs; and a .274 batting average.  In addition he held the Major League record for most games played without a postseason appearance—2,528.  His Cub records include games played; at-bats, 9,421; extra-base hits, 1,009; and total bases, 4,706.

In his post playing days Banks divided his time between the Cubs and his business affairs.  He became a partner at the first Black owned Ford Dealership in the U.S.  He worked in banking, insurance, and was an executiveat a moving company.  His investments paid off and he was worth an estimated $4 million when he retired.

But the Cubs were always closest to his heart.  In 1984 when the Tribune Company bought the team from the Wrigley family, Banks had a desk in the Front Office and a title as a Vice President for Corporate Sales.  The new management unceremoniously dumped him, which was the most disappointing, even heartbreaking moment in his life.  When fan reaction was uniform outrage, the company charged that Banks had missed some important Sales meetings and anonymously leaked comments to the press likening him to “your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving.”  That went over worse.  Within a couple of years the team kissed and made up.  Although Banks was never again given a front office job, he was employed as a team ambassador.

                                        Bank's Baseball Hall of Fame plaque.

After retirement honors just kept piling up.  In 1977 he was elected to the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.  In 1982 the Cubs retired his number 14, the first player so honored, and flew a flag with the number from the left field fowl poll.  It was five years before another player was so honored.  In 1999 he was named to the Major League Baseball All-Century Teamand the Society for American Baseball Research listed him 27th on a list of the 100 greatest baseball players.  In 2008 Banks became the first Cub player to be honored with a statue outside Wrigley Field.

In 2009 Banks was named a Library of Congress Living Legend, an award in recognition of those “who have made significant contributions to America’s diverse cultural, scientific and social heritage.” On August 8, 2014 President Barack Obama draped the Presidential Medal of Freedom around Banks’ neck in a ceremony that also honored former President Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey and 13 others.  Characteristically, Banks responded with a generous gesture that surprised and touched everyone.  He presented the President with a bat given to him by Jackie Robinson, Obama’s treasured boyhood hero.  Experts speculated that a bat of that provenance—Robinson, Banks, to Obama—instantly became probably the most valuable piece of baseball memorabilia in history.

Receiving the Medal of Freedom from Sox fan  Barack Obama.  In return Banks gave the President a signed bat that Jackie Robinson gave him..

All of these awards and honors paled against the love and affection felt for Mr. Cub by former teammates and fans alike.  When word of his death on January 23, 2015 spread, fans flocked to Wrigley Field which was blocked by chain link fence for reconstruction, leaving flowers, candles, baseball cards, and other tributesin heaps and piles against the fence.  The Cubs had Bank’s statue, which had been removed during construction for repainting and restoration, moved to Daily Plaza where more came to pay their respects.

The Old Man osing with Mr. Cub at Wrigley Field a few years ago.

The public funeral was at Chicago’s historic Fourth Presbyterian Church.   A memorial service was broadcast live on WGN-TV and a processional carried Ernie for the last time past Wrigley Field.

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Bethel AMC Black America’s Mother Church—Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Founder Richard Allen and his wife and the history of Mother Bethel AME Church are commemorated in this mural recently completed in the church building.

Note:  In honor of Ash Wednesday we are taking a look at the Mother Church for African Americans.

On March 28, 1796 the Bethel Methodist Episcopal Churchopened in Philadelphia.  It was the first American church organized by and for African Americans 

In 1787 Richard Allen and other free blacks were worshiping at the city’s St. George Church.  After angry parishioners literally dragged praying blacks from their knees, a small group withdrew determined to found their own congregationwhere they could worship safely and without interference.  

Allen had been born a slave to a wealthy Quaker family in 1716.  As a child he was sold with a brother to another Quaker, Stokely Sturgis.  He was well treated by the family and encouraged to read and write.  At the age of 17 he received permission to worship at the Methodist Episcopal Church.  Impressed that the young man’s work habits were not, as the prevailing opinion of the time would have it, ruinedby Christianity, Sturgis allowed Allen to invite the charismatic Methodist preacher Freeborn Garretson onto his property to preach to his slaves.  The masterwas so impressed, he converted to Methodism himself.  

Garretson, like many other Methodists, believed slavery was wrong and convinced Sturgis to allow Allen to buy his freedomWorking on his own time in addition to his service to the Quaker family, Allen saved up $2000 dollars in devalued Continental currency and bought his freedom.  

By 1783 the new freeman was touring Pennsylvania and neighboring Delawarecounties as an informal missionary preacher.  In 1784 Allen attended the Christmas Conference at which American Methodists formally separated themselves from the Anglican Church

Richard Allen's confidant and associate Absalom  Jones  became the country's first Black Episcopal priest, founder of the first Black Anglican parish and is now venerated by the church.     

He joined St. George’s in Philadelphia in1786 and was licensed to preach, and allowed to organize early morning prayer services for other free blacks.  As the group of worshipers grew, so did the discomfort among white members.  Black members were to be segregatedin a newly built balcony. Shortly after its completion, Allen, his regular confidant and supporter Absalom Jones, and other Blacks knelt to pray at Sunday services on the main floor as had been their custom when white members insisted that they vacate for the balcony and began physically dragging Jones to his feet.  After prayers Allen and Jones and their supporters left promising never to return. After the 1787 scuffle the free blacks determined to find a location for their own church.  

They raised money for a loton Sixth Street near Lombard the same year and purchased it in Allen’s name. Universalist Dr. Benjamin Rush, the founder of the first American abolitionist society, was among the first and most generous Donors.  Even President George Washington, probably at the urging of Rush, a friend and signer of the Declaration of Independence, made a contribution.  The property was the first real estate owned by blacks in the United States.   

A ramshackle former blacksmith shop was purchased and moved m to the lot that had been purchased.  Richard Allen himself did much if the work to remodel it into a meeting house.

A former blacksmith shop was purchased and hauled by oxen to the lot.  Members went to work repairing and improving the structure.  

The congregation however split about affiliation.  A group led by Jones preferred to join the Episcopal Church.  Allen steadfastly believed that the simplicityof Methodist worship was more suitable for blacks.  The parting was largely amicable.  Jones went on to become the country’s first black ordained Episcopal Priest and founded St. Thomas Parish.

Patriot, physician, founder of American psychiatry, Univiversalist, and philanthropist was an important White ally and benefactor to Richard Allen and Bethel Church. 

Both infant congregations began the slow process of raising funds for permanent church buildings.  The devastating Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793 suspended those efforts.  Both Allen and Jones worked heroicallyat the side of Dr. Rush nursing the critically ill and dying.  When an account of the emergency was published neglecting to mention either man or the services of their communities, they wrote a pamphlet which forced a revision in the account.  The pamphlet was the first thingcopyrighted by blacks in this country.

The converted blacksmith shop was consecrated as a church by sympathetic Methodist Bishop Francis Ausbury and named Bethel on March 28, 1796.  Although licensed to preach Allan was not ordained until 1799 when he was made a Deacon, becoming the first black man ordained as a Methodist in the United States.   

But even as the church grew to more than 450 members early in the 19th Century, most Sunday services were still conducted by white ministersfrom St. George’s.  Over time the relations between the two churches grew strained and St. George’s even tried to seize the keys and force the deed into the hands of the Methodist Episcopal Church name.  On at least one occasion angry parishionersjammed the church aisles to prevent a white minister from taking the pulpit.

In 1816 Allen and other Black Preachers from Pennsylvania Delaware, Maryland, and New Jersey met to form a new denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church.  Allen was elected Bishop. The sympathetic and supportive Bishop Ausbury returned for his consecration. 

The new denomination spread under Allen’s guidance and was for many years the largest black religious body.  Allen and his friend Jones continued to collaborate for the benefit to the black community, most famously banding together to protest the establishment of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1817.  Backed by many white liberals, the ACS sought to raise money to “repatriate” blacks to Africa, a place totally alien to the American born.

The fourth Bethel building on the original site was erected in 1889 and features a statue of  Richard Allen in a small park on the grounds.  Allen and his family rest in a crypt in the basement that is an object of pilgrimage.

Allen died on March 26, 1831 almost exactly 35 years to the day of the consecration of the blacksmith shop church.  By then Bethel was in a fine new building which could seat hundreds.  Allen was entombed there.  Over time, two more church buildings were erected at the same original site, but Allen’s tomb, including members of his family, remains on the property.

In Philadelphia Allen’s church is known as Mother Bethel.  The current handsome stone building was dedicated in 1889 and underwent a restoration in 1991.  You can see it for yourself.  The current address is 419 Richard Allen Ave.

  

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Remembering Big Easy Icon Fats Domino on Mardi Gras—Focus on Black History Month 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

The official banner for this year's pared back Mardi Gras.

It’s Carnival, celebrated around the world as a last hedonistic spasm before dour Lent begins tomorrow, Ash Wednesday.  In America Mardi Gras is traditionally celebrated in many cities including St. Petersburg, Mobile, and Galveston but is most deeply identified with New Orleans where it has been celebrated since the mid-18th Century and with parades and floats since 1830.  The revelry became more intense and spread out over the entire time between the end of lysergic Christmas season and lent with the most dazzling street revelry on the final night.  But after last year when Mardi Gras in the Big Easy became the first super spreader event of the Coronavirus pandemic, officials have shut down party with Puritan zeal.  The bars of the French Quarter have been closed for days, Bourbon Street and other entertainment strips have been blockaded, parades and masquerade balls have been canceled, a curfew is in place, and police will roam the streets to break up any defiant gatherings.  Music, always as much a part of the celebration as throwing beads and flashing breasts, will be by Zoom and YouTube.

Today is the perfect time to remember one of the greats of New Orleans music, Fats Domino.

Fats Domino and New Orleans were inseparable.  He was born there and nearly died in the disaster that almost obliterated the city that he knew.  That New Orleans was not the city of Jackson Square, the French Quarter, or even Bourbon Street,the city of tourists and romantic imagination.  His was the city under the levee, the crowded, poverty stricken, and intensely Black Lower Ninth Ward where he was born and spent most of his life.

Fats Domino as we remember him.

Fats Domino and New Orleans were inseparable.  He was born there and nearly died in the disaster that almost obliterated the city that he knew.  That New Orleans was not the city of Jackson Square, the French Quarter, or even Bourbon Street,the city of tourists and romantic imagination.  His was the city under the levee, the crowded, poverty stricken, and intensely Black Lower Ninth Ward where he was born and spent most of his life.

Antoine Domino Jr. was delivered in his parent’s home on February 25, 1928 by his midwife grandmother.  The family was a native Creole—a Black French dialectspeaking family recently arrived from rural Vacherie, Louisiana.  Most of their neighbors settling in the then relatively newly developed section of the city were likewise country folk and had a culture distinct from Blacks of longer residency in the city—the mix of former Freemen and liberated slaves who had given rise to the city’s legendary Jazz culture.

The rural Creoles brought their own musical traditions built around a stew of influences including Cajundance music, field chants, country blues, and Anglo-white hillbillymusic.  It was lively and melodic with a driving rhythm.  The extended Domino family was quite musical.  Antoine Sr. was a popular fiddle playerUncle Harrison Verrett was a jazz guitarist. 

New Orleans Lower 9th Ward Creole cottages and street scene in the 1950's.

Young Antoine picked up the parlor piano and by his teen years was pounding out a mean stride style and entertaining at community gatherings.  It was at just such an event in 1947, a big neighborhood barbeque, where bandleader Billy Diamond first heard him and offered him a job with his Solid Senders, the house band at the Hideaway Club.  During this extended gig Diamond hung the moniker Fats on his rotund young piano pounder, an obvious tip-of-the-hat to Fats Waller.

Domino was soon not just playing the piano but composing and singing his own songs, increasingly frontingDiamond’s band.  By the late ‘40’s he was on his own with a small combo.

In 1949 Domino was signed by producer Dave Bartholomew to Los Angeles based Imperial Records, a major label specializing in Rhythm & Blues, country, and Tex-Mex music.  Bartholomew built up a substantial stable of New Orleans artists for the label and became Domino’s personal producer and creative collaborator.  Together they assembled a tight band led by Fred Kemp and featuringa strong sax sound behind Domino’s piano.  It was a fresh, new sound.

Fats Domino and his sax-heavy band pioneered pre-guitar combo Rock and Roll.

In 1950 Domino’s The Fat Man became a No. 1 R&B hit spurred by sales of more than 10,000 copies in its first week in the Big Easy alone.  The song featured Domino singing over a strong back beatwith a stripped down stride piano style, a four piece sax section, and Fats scatting wha-wha in two chorusesSales of the song remained strong and by 1953 reached one million units.  Music historians consider The Fat Man one of the first true rock & roll songs.

In collaboration with Barholomew Domino had five gold records for Imperial before 1955, but remained unknown to most white audiences.  That changed with the release of Ain’t That a ShameIt was his first cross over to pop hit, but sales of his original versionwere hurt by Pat Boone’s hasty release of sanitizedand toned down cover.  Boone built his career ripping off Black artists like Domino, Little Richard, and Chuck Berry and was resented by all of them.

Fats Domino and his producer/collaborator Dave Bartholomew listen to a play back in the Imperial Records studio.

 Blueberry Hill in 1956 was a cover for the 1940 song by 1940 Vincent Rose, Al Lewis, and Larry Stock which had previously been recorded successfully by artists ranging from Glenn Miller to Gene Autry to Louis Armstrong.  But after Fats Domino, those were forgotten.  It sold more than 5 million copies in its first two years and shot to No. 2 on the Top 40 and remained No. 1 on the R&B list for 11 weeks.

That ushered in years of fabulous success.  By 1963 he had laid down 60 singles for Imperial, 40 of them hits on the R&B and Pop charts.  He appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and his musical performances were featured in two 1956 movies Shake, Rattle & Rock! for poverty row studio American Internationaland The Girl Can’t Help It with Jayne Mansfield, Tom Ewell, and Edmond O’Brien for 20th Century Foxwhich turned out to be one of the mostinfluential of all of the rock & roll movies of the mid ‘50s.  Domino also became one of the first rockers to have success with the release of an LP.

A lobby card for low budget independent American International Picturer's 1956 Shake, Rattle, and Rock!.  The film heavily featured Fats Domino and was a Drive-in movie hit which helped introduce White teens to the new Black music sound.

Most artists of humble background quickly left their old neighborhoods and built mansions on the right side of the tracks, country estates, or moved to posh digs in Los Angeles or New York.  Not Fats.  He had no desire to leave the Lower Ninth Ward.  He built a large, comfortable home there, surely the mostimpressive residence in the neighborhoodwhere he was surrounded by his extended family and friends.  There he and his wife Rosemary raised eight children.

Domino continued to score big into the early ‘60’s with songs like Walkin’ to New Orleans and My Girl Josephine.  But then in 1963 Imperial sold to outside interests.  He had been intensely loyal to the label and to his production partner Bartholomew and had frequently turned down lucrative offers to move to bigger labels.  But he was uncomfortable with the new management.  “I stuck with them for as long as I could,” he said, “but then they sold out.”

Domino signed a new deal with ABC-Paramount Records.  The experience was not a happy one.  He could not work with Barholomew because of the producer’s contractual obligations to Imperial.  The label insisted he record in Nashville with producer Felton Jarvis and a new arranger Bill Justis.  They wanted to modernize and brightenDomino’s sound.  They added countrypolitan choral backups and even strings to his driving, stripped down sound.  Audiences were no more thrilledwith the product than Domino was.  He recorded 11 singles for Paramount and only one, Red Sails in the Sunset made the pop charts.  After two years he left the label in 1956.

The Beatles and the British Invasion were changing the face of rock and roll and leaving behind its pioneers like Domino.  Fats recorded for other companiesMercury, Bartholomew’s small independent Broadmoor label, and Reprise.  The records, singles and albums, achieved niche market successes, but mainstream Pop success was mostly behind him

Fats Domino's last charted hit was a cover of the Beatle's Lacy Madonna which Paul McCartney had written as an homage to his stride piano style.

There was a spike in interest in his music by younger fans when The Beatles and other British acts cited his influence on their music.  Paul McCartney wrote Lacy Madonna in Domino’s style as a sort of tribute.  Fats must have recognized it, because in 1970 he covered it in a Reprise single, which was his last charted hit.

Through the ‘70’s Domino played the oldies circuit of state fairs, festival, and reunion reviews.  But he grew tired of the road and announced in 1980 that he would not leave New Orleans again.  The royalties from his many hits—more charted more records than any artist of the classic rock & roll era except Elvis Presley—were enough to support him comfortably in his home.  Besides, he said, he couldn’t get good food anywhere else.

Fat Domino's comfortable but modest Lower 9th Ward home in 1979.  He nearly died in it during Hurricane Catrina and lost almost all of his career memorabilia.  Photo by my old friend Michael Gaylord James

Domino was serious about his pledge.  He could not be lured away even when inductedinto the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame or an invitation to perform at the White House.  He did play around his home town including annual turns at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and some of those Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood bashes like the one at which he was first discovered.

In 1987 he was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.  And in 1998 he actually agreed to go to Washington to allow President Bill Clinton to drape a National Medal of the Arts around his neck.  In 2004 Rolling Stone rated Domino No. 25 on a list of the Top 100 Artists of all Time.

Despite the accolades, Domino lived happilyretirement.  Then tragedy struck. He was warned to evacuate his home before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August of 2005.  But his wife Rosemary was in poor health and he decided to try to ride out the storm in his sturdy home.  Unfortunately, the levee broke and the whole Lower Ninth Ward was devastatingly inundated.  Domino’s home was flooded and all of hisbelongings, including a lifetime of career memorabilia were destroyed.  For three days Fats and his family were listed as missing.  Many presumed them to be among the dead, perhaps to be discovered later as bodies bobbing in the water.  Someone scrawled “RIP Fats”on the shell of his home and photos were shown on national TV.

Luckily, a Coast Guard helicopter had plucked them to safety.  With most communications out, Fats had been unable to contact family members or business associates.  He was located among the refugeesand taken to Baton Rouge where an LSU quarterback took the family in where they slept for some days on the couch and floor.  The family resided in Harvey, Louisiana during the long process of restoring his home and office which began in January 2006 and took years to complete.

To prove he was alive and to raise money for New Orleans musicians wiped out by the storm who had fewer resources than he did, Domino released Alive and Kickin’, an album of material recorded in the ‘90’s in early 2006 to benefit Tipitina’s Foundation.  By 2007 the Foundation was operating out of a trailer next to Domino’s restored office.  Fat’s devoted much time and energy to the project.

Yet the staggering costs of restoration of his own home taxed even Domino’s resources.  He was also too ill to perform for some time, having to take a pass on his annual appearance at the Jazz festival in 2006.  National musicians rallied to raise money to help restore his home. 

He was visited by President George W. Bush who presented him with a replacement for his Medal of the Arts and his Gold Recordswere replaced by the RIAA and Imperial Records catalog owner Capitol Records.
















 Fats Domino in the favorite Fire'man's cap he wore to rare public appearances after Hurricane Katrina nearly destroyed his whom and almost cost him his own life.

Fats Domino became a symbol of the city he loved as it struggled.  On January 12, 2007, Domino was honored with OffBeat magazine’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the annual Best of the Beat Awards held at House of Blues in New Orleans. Mayor Ray Nagrin declared it Fats Domino Day.An all-star musical tributefollowed.

Later that year on May 17 Domino felt well enough to take the stagefor the first time since the storm and performed a rollicking set to a packed house at Tipitina’s, the legendary New Orleans music venue that inspired the foundation.

Since then Domino was been showered with more honors and support, but lived quietly with his family in Harvey, Louisiana across the river from New Orleans while he awaited reconstruction of his beloved home and community. But he never made it back to the Ninth Ward.  He died in Harvey on October 24, 2017.

 

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Compassion for Campers And Warp Corps Partner to Deliver Gear

By: Patrick Murfin

Conditions like these can be deadly for the homeless.  Compassion for Campers donated funds to Hope Takes Action, a ministry of The Society of St. Vincent de Paul for emergency hotel rooms during the cold and snow emergency and camping gear for those still outside is available at Warp Corps in Woodstock.  Photo by Rosanne Jesperen Rath.

Compassion for Campers, the program that provides supplies and gear for the McHenry County homeless who have no steady shelter, will hold its monthly distributionat Warp Corps, 114 North Benton Street in Woodstock, which is both centrally located and has existing contacts and relations with the homeless community and the social service agencies that serve them, on Tuesday February 16 from 3:30 to 5 pmClient access to Warp Corps will be from the rear entrance on Jackson Street.

Heather Nelson, Carlos Salgado, and Rob Mutert of Warp Corps at a Compassion for Campers distribution.

Warp Corps will also have major gear on hand including tents, sleeping bags, mats, tarps, and stoves for walk-in accessany day during the continuing winter cold and snow emergency.

“We also remind our unhoused friends that a program administered by Hope Takes Action, a ministry of The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, can provide emergency hotel rooms while temperatures remain below 20 degrees,” said Patrick Murfin, Compassion for Campers coordinator. “Call Hope Takes Action at 815 385-3251 or contact local police who have agreed to provide transportation to the hotels.”

At the Tuesday gear distribution at Warp Corps clients will be Covid-19 screenedwith a temperature check and standard screening questions.  No one failingthe test will be turned away but we will ask what they need and supplies will be brought out to them.  All clients are required to be masked before entering the building and a mask will be provided to anyone who does not have one.  Clients will be admitted one at a time and no more will be allowed inside at any time than the location can safely accommodate with correct social distancing


Compassion for Campers is grateful to the Faith Leaders of McHenry County, volunteers from Ridgefield-Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church, and Warp Corps for their invaluable support.

To contributeto these programs call Hope Takes Action at 815 385-3251 for information or give to Compassion for Campers by sending a check made out to Tree of Life UU Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road, McHenry, IL 60050 with Compassion for Campers on the memo line. The donations are placed in a dedicated fund and not used for any other purpose.  Tree of Life also donates all of the administrative expensesof the program.

  

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Looking Back at Barack for Presidents Day—Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

It has been painful to observe Presidents Day while the former resident of the White House defiled and besmirched the office.  Inauguration Day finally put an end to that nightmare, but not before an attempted insurrectionand additional national trauma. His post term impeachment prolonged the agony and ended with a fizzle.  The new guy, Joe Biden seems decent and capable without all of the storm und drang.  It is too early to assess Biden’s place in history, but he seems to be off to a fast start systematically dismantling the worst of his predecessor’s outrageson the American people, the world, and the environment.  But this year on Presidents Day it is easy to turn to Biden’s old boss, Barack Obama during this Black History Month.  

It was White backlash and dark money that propelled the former Cheeto-in-charge into office.  A barely competent egomaniac and sociopathreplaced a President known for his thoughtfulness, erudition, compassion, and competence. 

In his new Book Barack Obama reviews his first Presidential campaign and term in office.

Obama was not perfect.  I have been reading his latest best-selling memoir A Promised Land covering his first presidential campaign and first term.  He seems to recognize that his hopes for bipartisanship in reaching his policy goals were thwarted by Congressional Republicans, especially Mitch McConnell and that he spent far too long trying to deal with them.  Only late in his second term did he turn to use of executive orders and other tools to do an end run around the Senate blockade.

More disappointing was his wide-spread use of drone attacks often resulting in heavy civilian casualties in the elusive war on terror and far too many regional conflicts.  His motivation was to reducethe risks and exposure to American troops on the ground but he remained mired in neo-con aggression of George W. Bush.

Sill, looking back so many of us are nostalgic, and with good reason, for the Obama presidency.

Today we will turn the clock back to January of 2007 as Obama’s first Presidential campaign was just getting off of the ground.  This blog, Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout was then on Live Journal and had a pitifully small audience.  That didn’t stop an audacious endorsement of the then Senator from Illinois.  This is what I wrote way back then…

Yesterday, January 16th, Senator Barak Obama announced he was going to run for the Democratic Party nomination for the Presidency—almost.  In the elaborate dance made necessary by custom, the arcane labyrinth of Federal election law, and the urgency of fund raising, the Senator from Illinois firmly put his right foot on the ballroom floor.

In an e-mail to supporters the Senator announced the formation of an exploratory committee, the necessary first step which allows serious fund raising.  He promises to follow up with a formal announcement of his eagerly awaited candidacy on February 10th.

The announcement came a day after another acclaimedObama speech to the annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration at the Push/Rainbow Coalition in Chicago.  With modesty, humor, and dignity Obama laid out how he rising generation stood on the shoulders of Dr. King and other civil rights pioneers and martyrs.  He extolledtheir achievement, but left no doubt that the fulfillment of their vision remains the challenge of the.  It was a great speech.  But then we have come to expect great speeches from this man.

Obama is unique among all of the political figures I have known or observed in my life time.  Years before he rose to national prominencefollowing his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic National Convention, people who met the skinny young politician even for a few minutes went away muttering to themselves that they had shaken hands with a future president.  He had that kind of effect on people.

 

In 2003 Barack Obama was a little known Illinois State Senator when he threw his hat in a crowed ring to run fir the U.S. Senate. 

I know he did on me.  In a chance encounter in the dust outside the dispersing Democrat Day Rally at the Illinois State Fair in 2003 Diane Oltman-Ayers introduced me to an acquaintance, a young state senator from Chicago.  He was known to be joining the crowded field running for the upcoming Senate nominationin 2004.  He was quite alone and with no entourage.  At the time I was the lowly vice-chair of the then puny McHenry County Democratic Party, a figure of next to zero political influence.  Yet he engaged us in conversation for about twenty minutes displaying a keen recognition of the political challenges and realities ahead of him and a close and carefully reasoned grasp of complex issues all wrapped up in a warm and witty personality.

I came away quite frankly dazzled by the experience.  But with that power of shrewd political prognostication, for which I am so well noted, was saddened that such an outstanding and in a web site posting candidate had no chance for election because of his unfortunate name.  In the primary election that followed, I signed on early in support of radio hostand liberal activist Nancy Skinner’sdoomed candidacy.  I recognized I had placed the wrong bet by mid-campaign.  I felt compelled to honor my original commitment to Skinner, but on Election Day was elated by Obama’s victory.

His unprecedented sweep to victory in the November election by an historic margin laid to rest any doubts.  The Convention speech came as no surprise to us in Illinois, it only served to introduce him to a larger stage.

The Freshman Senator’s rise was meteoric.  He was mentioned as a possible Presidential contender before his bags were fairly un-packed in Washington.  He was the object of sometimes idolizing press coverage.  Meanwhile he tried to keep his head down, lower expectations, and get on with the job of learning to be an effective senator.

But as the disastrous Residency of George W. Bush unraveled, Democrats from across the country turned increasingly to Obama.  As did many ordinary Americans of all races and regions, with whom he struck a responsive chord.  Talk of the Presidency could no longer be gainsaid.

Of course the higher Obama soared, he invited a chorus of skeptics.  Many painted him as a matinee idol, unprovenin the Senate or in crisis, a mere cipher whose true opinions and positions remained veiled.

But those who came to know him recognized that the senator was indeed the real deal.  He has a piercing intelligence coupled with a strong work ethicColleges in the State Senate and the U.S. Senate both soon came to recognize that he was thoroughly prepared on every subject and willing to work hard, including reaching across the aisle to ideological opponents, to work out practical solutions for thorny problems.

His noted oratorical skills, in an age when the political speech has largely been replaced as an art form by the 30 second sound bite, rests not only on the strength of his magnetic personality, but on the depth of capacity as a writer.  No American politician since Lincoln has been so literarily gifted.  It shows not just in his speeches, but in his two best-selling memoirs.

The right-wing posse of radio ranters, cable talking heads, and scriveners planted by important sounding think tanks, fear Obama as they fear no other Democrat.  They dream of running against the hated Hillary, but he sends shivers up their spines.  Yet they are reduced to drawing attention to his name and hinting that his father’s Islam makes him an un-trustworthy jihadist mole in American politics.  Or that a minor, but straightforward, real estate transaction with an Illinois political bag man tied to the Blagojevich administration, might tarnishhis image as an honest straight shooter.  But it is futile.  In the end they have to fall back on the unspoken hope that in their heart of hearts once inside the voting booth most white voters will be unable to pull a vote for a black man as President—the Harold Ford effect. But this time, they are wrong. Which is why for the first time Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout is proud to put all of its mighty influenceand resources at the disposal of Senator Obama.  We want to be among the first media outlets to unreservedly endorse Obama for President of the United States. 

Across the nation, Democratic operativesfor other candidates especially Hillary Clinton quake in their boots as they realize the awesome implications of this endorsement.

Either because or despite the Heretic, Rebel. a Thing to Flout, endorsement, things worked out for Obama.

But then again so will some of Obama’s staff people when they realize that their boy has been endorsed in a blog named Heretic, Rebel. a Thing to Flout, obviously the creation of some wild-eyed misfit somewhere.

Yet we press boldly forward and invite all of our dozens of faithful readersto join in our support of the Next President of the United States.

 

 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Slave, Servant, or Explorer? Tales of Three Pathfinders-—Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Do current books for children about explorers include contributions of Blacks?  Earlier books and school texts erased them.

History texts for American school children and high schoolers used to spend a lot of time on explorers.  It was part of a narrative that began with Columbusand saw the New World as something to be conquered and tamed for European use and occupationin which native peoples were seen only as obstacles to be brushed aside or exterminated.  Perhaps that version is obsolete now and some more thoughtful analysis is now taught.  Even so the participation of Africans, slaves, and servants in explorations is generally little more than a footnote.  But today we will note three cases spanning more than 400 years—Esteban the Moor; York, the body slave of Captain William Clark on the expedition of the Corps of Discovery; and Matthew Henson, at first the personal valetof Polar explorer Robert E. Peary.


Esteban a/k/a Estevanico (Little Stephen), or as Esteban de Dorantes was probably born in Moroccoaround 1500.  He was, of course, born a Muslim named Mustafa Azemmouri.  He was captured as a young man by Portuguese slavers and eventually sold to the Spanish nobleman Andrés Dorantes de Carranza about 1522.  Like many ambitious young Spaniards, especially younger sons who could not expect to inherit their father’s estate under the rule of primogenitor, Dorantes paid to join an expedition of Conquistadors hoping to find his fortune.  He traveled to Cuba with his slave.  In order to make the voyage Mustafa had to at least nominally become a Catholic, and was Baptized Esteban.

In 1528 master and slave joined the expedition of adelantado (governor) of La Florida, Pánfilo de Narváez.  Narváez landed in present-day St. Petersburg on the shores of Boca Ciega Bay. Narváez ordered that his ships and 100 men and 10 women sail north in search of a large harbor that his pilots assured them was nearby. He led 300 men, with 42 horses, north along the coast, intending to rejoin his ships at the large harbor but no such haven existed and Narváez never saw his ships again.

After marching 300 miles north, they built boats to sail westward along the Gulf Coast shoreline hoping to reach Pánuco and the Rio de las Palmas. A stormstruck them when they were near Galveston Island.  Only about 80 men survived the gale, and were washed ashore on the island. After 1529, three survivors from one boat, including Esteban, were enslaved by Coahuiltecannatives and three years later they were reunitedwith a survivor from a different boat, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.

The four men escaped captivity in 1534 and traveled west into Texas and Northern Mexico. They were the first Europeans and the first African to enter the American West. Having walked nearly 2,000 epic milessince their initial landing in Florida, they finally reached a Spanish settlement in Sinaloa and then travelled to Mexico City, 1,000 miles to the south.

Cabeza de Vaca describe their odyssey in his 1542 book, the Relación  the first ever published describing the peoples, wildlife, flora, and fauna of inland North America, and the first to describe the American bison.  Describing Esteban as a “Black Moor” de Vaca who described him as the one who went in advanceof the other three survivors, as he was the most able to communicate with the natives that they encountered.  In other words the already polylingual slave was able to quickly learn at least the rudiments of the languages and signing of the tribes they encountered. 

The four lived for some time with some of the natives and were said to be honored as medicine men, likely because the retained some fire arms and powder as well as bits and pieces of armor.  As medicine men they were treated with great respect and offered food, shelter, and gifts, and villages held celebrations in their honor. When they decided they wanted to leave, the host village would guide them to the next. The party traversed the continent as far as the Sonoran Desert to the region of Sonorain New Spain.

It was with those people that they heard storiesof fabulous cities far to the West that came to be called the Seven Cities of Gold or Cíbola.  When the survivors told their tale to Antonio de Mendoza, the Viceroy of New Spain, he asked the Spaniards to form an expedition to locate that wealth.  Understandably exhausted de Vaca and the others turned him down.  Perhaps in exchange for the ownership of Esteban, those three were given passage back to Spain on one of the regular treasure galleons making the trip.

No contemporary images of Esteban exist, but many have imagined him.

Mendoza paired Esteban with Friar Marcos de Nizawho set off on the search in the cities in 1539, a year before the much larger party under Francisco Vázquez de Coronado.  Esteban once again traveled ahead of the main party with a group of Sonoran Indians. He was instructed to communicate by sending back crosses to the main party, with the size of the cross equal to the wealth discovered. One day, a cross arrived that was as tall as a person, causing de Niza to step up his pace to join the scouts.

Esteban had apparently reached the A:shiwi, now known as Zuni, village of Hawikuh in present-day New Mexico.  Accounts of Esteban’s fate differ but most say that the Zuni killed him and a large number of his party.  De Niza quickly returned to New Spain.

Others, however claim that the Zuni faked his death as a cover to free him and that he lived happily among them for years.  After years of wandering, suffering, and travail we can hope that was so.

A statue of William Clark's slave and companion on the Lewis and Clark expedition York stands in  Belvedere/Riverfront Plaza in Louisville, Kentucky.  It was created by Ed Hamilton and dedicated in October 2003.

York was born in Virginia in 1770, the slave of John Clark III, the father of Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark and William Clark.  York, who was two or three years older than William, was given to the younger son as a boy as his personal body servant, companion; mentor in hunting, fishing, and woodcraft.  This was a common arrangementamong the planter class.  Such close relationships often fostered bonds of familiarity, affection, and within well-defined boundaries, something like friendship.  This seems to have been the case between William and York, but the white lad was sometimes apt to fits of rage and may have beaten his companion.  As they grew into men, York was ever at his master’s side.

York had a fiancée whom he rarely saw and lost contact with her after 1811 when she was sold to a Mississippi planter.  This was often reserved has harsh punishment but her owner may have sold her as a favor to Clark who did not want York entangled with a family.

When President Thomas Jefferson picked his personal secretary Meriwether Lewisand Clark, a mere second lieutenantat the time as co-captains of the Corps of Discovery charged with exploring the upper reaches of the newly-acquired Louisiana Purchase and possibly discover a long-dreamed of Northwest Passage by waterto the Pacific coast there was no question that York would accompany his master.

After a year of preparation Clark and York departed Camp Dubois (English: Camp Wood), near present-day Wood River, Illinois on May 14, 1804.  They traveled up the Mississippi River in their keelboat and two pirogues to St. Charles, Missouri where Lewis joined them six days later.  The Corps of Discovery consisted of 45 men including hand-picked volunteerArmy officers, non-commissioned officers, and privates as well as civilians and one slave.  York seems to have been officially enrolled in the Army as Clark’s servant.

His presence was resented by some of the party.  At least one man challenged York by saying “we don’t want no Niggers here!” and throwing sand in his face nearly blinding him in one eye.  He had to stoically endure the assault because he would have been hangedif he struck a white man.

But York quickly proved himself a valuable asset to his companions by swimming ashore—almost none of the other men could swim—to collect greensfor the dinner pot and shooting an elk as part of a hunting party.  In defiance of law and custom York was permittedto carry arms.  After confrontations with hostile Sioux on the Missouri River the Corps arrived in the more friendly territory of the Arikara who were fascinated with him having never seen a Black man before.  They natives called him Big Medicine and he playedwith the children and told them that tall tales that he had been a wild animal that was tamed by Captain Clark and that he thought children were very good to eat. He would show them how stronghe was and roar at them.  The adult adored him too and one and one even led him to his dwelling to allow him to enjoy his wife for the night.

York in a Mandan lodge was the object of curiosity for his black skin.  Captains Lewis and Clark and a chief are seated right.

After wintering with the Mandan, the party departed west early the next spring.  Now with them were two other outsiders who with York would do much to make the expedition successful.   French-Canadian voyager and trapper Toussaint Charbonneau signed on as a guideand translator.  Although the two Captains eventually came to distrust the Frenchman but he was essential as the Corps followed the Missouri and its tributaries west through modern Montana.

Charbonneau brought with him his teen age wifeand her infant son who we know as Sacajawea.  She had been captured from the distant Shoshone from the far side of the Shining Mountains by the Blackfoot from whom Charbonneau had purchased her.  Her status as wife, was thus not voluntary and her husband often abused her.  The young woman would save the expedition in one of its darkest hours when they met with they met the Shoshone including some of her kin.  The tribe provided horses so that they could proceed to navigable waters draining into the Pacific Ocean

The third outsider, York, proved himself increasingly useful to Clark, particularly when Lewis was laid up for extended periods of time suffering what we know recognize as severe depression caused by bi-polar disorder.    Clark named two geographic discoveries after him—York’s Eight Islands and York’s Dry Creek, When a poll was taken to decide where the group should stay over one winter, York’s vote was recorded as if he was an equal member,  That bitter winter was spent at well named Camp Disappointment.  York became the first Black man to reach the Pacific Ocean when he walked nineteen miles from the camp with Captain Clark.

After their return in 1806 all the men of the expedition were paid according to rank$5 to $30 per month and granted 320 acres for each enlisted man, exceptfor York.  In recognition of his service York asked Clark to free him.  Clark angrily refused and as punishment hired him out hard labor in Louisville, Kentucky.

Clark later told Washington Irving that he finally relented and manumitted York and gave him six horses and a large wagon to start a drayage business driving between Nashville and Richmond.  As a Freeman plied this trade but ultimately failed when most customers refused to hire a Black man.

In despair he concluded that Blacks could not make a living as free men.  He was reportedly trying to return to service with Clark who was living in retirement in St. Louis even though it meant he would have to return to bondage.  He reportedly died of cholera in 1832 on his way to rejoin his master.

But like Esteban, stories circulated years later that a Black man living among the Crow in 1934 who claimed to have served with the Corps of Discovery.

Matthew Henson, Polar explorer in his warm Inuit furs.

Our final explorer is Matthew Henson who at age 21 in 1887 was hired by U.S. Navy Civil Engineer Second Lieutenant Robert E. Peary as a personal valet.  But from the beginning the young Black man was much more than a servant who laid out his master’s clothes in the morning and polishedhis shoes.  He quickly became an all-around aide and eventually a virtual partner in polar explorations that spanned 23 years.  He was also the only one of our three adventurers who received significant public recognition in his life time.

Henson was born on August 8, 1866 on his parents farm east of the Potomac River in Charles County, Maryland, who had been free people of color before the Civil War. The family  was victimsof attacks by the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, who terrorized freedmen and former free people of color after the war. To escape from racial violence in southern Maryland, in 1867 the Henson family sold the farm and moved to Georgetown, then still an independent town adjacent to the national capital. 

After his father’s early death he was sent to Washington, D.C. to live with an uncle and had a few years of education a black public school.  At the age of ten the boy, previously at best an indifferent scholar attended a speech by Frederick Douglass who urge Black youth to vigorously pursue educational opportunities and battlefor racial prejudice.

But two years later a keen sense of adventure led him to quit school and sign on as a cabin boy on the merchant ship Katie Hines out of Baltimore and sailed traveling to ports in China, Japan, Africa, and the Russian Arctic seas.  The ship Captain Child was impressed by the quick witted lad and not only helped him polish his reading and writing skills but taught him a great deal about sailing and the basics of navigation.

After returning to Washington Henson got more schooling and worked a variety of jobs.  Clerking at the clothing store and outfitters B.H. Stinemetz and Sons was an unusual plum for a young Black.  When Lt. Peary stopped by the store to get a suitable pith helmet for his first trip to Nicaragua to supervise the surveyof a canal route he hired the salesman and took him on the trip.  On that tip Peary was much impressed by Henson’s seamanship and his heartiness in enduring the steaming tropical heat of Central Americaand the diseases that felled many expedition members.

Peary had already made one trip to the Arctic—an 1885 attempt to survey Greenland by dog sled to determine if it was an island or a part of a larger land mass.  Harsh conditions had forced that expedition to turn back but Peary learned much about northern survival skills. He was already thinking about more polar exploration and shared his dreams with Henson who eagerly agreed to accompany him.  While they prepared, Peary taught his servant much of what he learned and practiced his critical skills as a navigator.

In 1891 Henson accompanied Peary back to Greenland on board the seal hunting ship S.S. Kite on a trip backed by the American Geographic Society, Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, and the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences.  In July sailing in icy waters the ship’s iron tiller suddenly spun around and broke its keel breakingPeary’s leg.  The expedition established a camp at Red Cliff, at the mouth of MacCormick Fjord at the north west end of Inglefield Gulf.

During Peary’s six month recovery got to know the local Inuit people and mastered their language.  They called him Mahri-Pahluk and remembered him as the only non-Inuit who became skilled in driving the dog sledsand in training dog teams in the Inuit way.  After Peary recovered and pushed north he proved he was a skilled craftsman, often coming up with solutionsfor what the team needed in the harsh Arctic conditions and built build igloos out of snow instead of using heavy tents for mobile housing as they traveled. His and Peary’s teams covered thousands of miles in dog sleds and reached the Farthest North point of any Arctic yet and established that Greenland was indeed an island. 

Henson accompanied Peary on six more trips north and was acknowledged at his First Man and de-facto second in command before the 1908-09 drive to be the first to the North Pole.  It was the largest expedition yet and underwritten by the National Geographic Society and Explorers Club.  Peary used his system of setting up cached supplies along the way. When he and Henson boarded his ship Roosevelt, leaving Greenland on August 18, 1909, they were accompanied by

22 Inuit men, 17 Inuit women, 10 children, 246 dogs, 70 tons (64 metric tons) of whale meat from Labrador, the meat and blubber of 50 walruses, hunting equipment, and tons of coal. In February, Henson and Peary departed their anchored ship at Ellesmere Island’s Cape Sheridan, with the Inuit men and 130 dogs working to lay a trail and supplies along the route to the Pole.

Peary selected Henson and four Inuit as part of the team of six men who would make the final run to the Pole. Before the goal was reached, Peary could no longer continue on foot and rode in a dog sled. He sent Henson ahead as a scout.

In a newspaper interview, Henson later said:

I was in the lead that had overshot the mark a couple of miles. We went back then and I could see that my footprints were the first at the spot.

Matthew Henson, center, and four of his Inuit companions were photographed in front ot the presumed North geographic polt marked by a flag of the Explorer's Club.

Henson and his Inuit companions were photographed at the supposed pole.  Subsequent investigation citing navigational errors have cast doubt on the claim of being first to the Pole.  In fact they were several miles short of that goal.  But when their claim was publicized, Peary was proclaimed a hero and he in turn publicly recognized Henson in his reports to his sponsors

In 1912 Henson published a memoir of his arctic explorations, A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. In this, he describes himself as a “general assistant, skilled craftsperson, interpreter, and laborer.” He later collaborated with author Bradley Robinson on his 1947 biography, Dark Companion, which told more about his life.

At first although Peary received many honors Henson's contributions were largely ignored. Except within 1909 the Black community. Henson spent most of the next 30 years working on staff in the U.S. Customs House in New York, a political appointment by admirer Theodore Roosevelt.

He later gained renewed attention. In 1937 Henson was admitted as a member to the prestigious Explorers Club in New York City. In 1944 Congress awarded him and five other Peary aides duplicatesof the Peary Polar Expedition Medal, a silver medal given to Peary. Presidents Truman and Eisenhower both honored Henson before he died in 1955.

Henson was officially married twice.  He married Eva Flint in 1891, but their marriage did not survive their long periods of separation and they divorced in 1897.  He remarried Lucy Ross in New York City on September 7, 1907.  That marriage endured the strains of separation until Henson settled into his duties as a Customs official.  They had no children.

But Henson also had an Inuit family in the far North.  His native wife Akatingwah gave him his only child, a son named  Anauakaq, born in 1906.  Anauakaq’s children are Henson's only descendants.  After 1909, Henson never saw Akatingwah or his son again but remained in contact through mutual acquaintances and visitors to their village.

In 1986 Anauakaq and an Inuit son of Peary were discovered and brought to Washington as octogenarians where they met American relatives from both families and visited their fathers' graves. Anauakaq died a year later.  He and his wife Aviaq had five sons and a daughter, who have children of their own. While some still reside in Greenland, others have moved to Sweden or the United States.

Henson died on March 9, 1955 in the Bronx.  When he was reinterred in 1986 with his wife Lucy at Arlington National Cemetery members of his Inuit family were in attendance.   

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NAACP Founded on Lincoln’s Birthday—Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

NAACP founders included W.E.B. DuBois, top center; Oswald Villard, left of the seal; Ida B. Wells to the right; William English Walling, bottom left; Mary White Ovington, bottom center; and Henry Moskowitz, bottom right. 

Today is not only the birthday of the Great Emancipator, but also of the anniversary of the foundingof America’s oldest Civil Rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. The date, falling on the centennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth, was not coincidental.  It was largely a response to the 1908 race riots in Lincoln’s home town of Springfield, Illinois.

The early NAACP often explicitly linked the organization in publications like this pamphlet by Chicago social worker and activist Jane Adams.

In 1905 a group of Black intellectuals led by Harvard historian W.E.B DuBois met in Fort Erie, Ontario on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls—they could not meet in American hotels because were segregatedand most would not rent to Blacks—to discuss how to counter the alarming advance of Jim Crow laws across the old Confederacy and most boarder states.  They agreed that there was a need for a single national organization to speak for the interests of colored people.

The result was a loose organization called the Niagara Movement. It was beset by financial burdens, leadership squabbles, and difficulty in getting the press to pay attention to the complaints of mere Negros.

Black leaders and intellectuals had to meet in Canada to found the Niagara Movement, a fore-runner of the NAACP.  W,E,B. DuBois center in white hat.

DuBois realized that to be effective, he would have to recruit White liberals, with their personal wealthand access to the press.   In 1908 Mary White Ovington, the descendent of a family of abolitionists and prominent Unitarian lay woman and social activist,   Dr. Henry Moscowitz, Oswald Garrison Villard, William English Walling joined the movement. 

Ovington was the prime mover after the Springfield riots erupted when she realized the need for a stronger organization. Along with Walling, a muckraking journalist,and Moscowitz, a leader of the largely ethnic Jewish Society for Ethical Culture she issued a callto form a new organization.  They sent out a call to over 60 leading liberals. 

In response a call to a founding Convention was issued on Lincoln’s Birthday, 1909.  A formal founding convention was finally held in a New York settlement house in May.  DuBois chaired. 

The Black leadership of the Niagara Movement although appreciative of the White support, was leery of joining an organization so dominated by whites.  Many refused to attend the founding convention of the new organization.  But DuBois and Chicago anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Welles, and others threw their support fully behind the new group known as the National Negro Committee.

At the second convention of the Committee in May 1910, the name National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was selected to replace The Negro Committee.  DuBois was the only Black elected to the Executive Committee as Director of Publicity and Research. 

The first President was Moorfield Storey, a White Constitutional lawyer and for President of the American Bar Association.  He was a Democrat and classical liberal.   William English Walling, a Socialist and labor reformer who had investigated the Springfield Riots was named Chair of theExecutive Committee.  For balance the largely ceremonial job of Treasurer went to John E. Milholland, a so-called Lincoln Republican and leading Presbyterian layman.  Most of the duties ordinarily assigned to the Treasurer were given to a Disbursing Treasurer, Oswald Garrison Villard, a journalist who was a veteran of the anti-imperialist movement against the Spanish American and Philippine Wars.  Rounding out the original officers was Executive Secretary Frances Blascoe charged with day-to-day administration.

A headquarters was established in New York City and the NAACP received its charter in 1911 to:

…promote equality of rights and to eradicate caste or race prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for the children, employment according to their ability and complete equality before law.

The same year DuBois launched The Crisis as the official organof the NAACP.   Under his leadership it became the leading intellectual journalof Black life.

Under the editorship of Dubois, the NAACP magazine The Crisis became a civil rights intellectual flag ship.

Ovington remained active, especially as a fundraiser.  Other early active members included Jane Adams, Clarence Darrow, John Haynes Holmes, Mary McLeod Bethune, John Dewy, and William Dean Howells.  A great many early White activists were Jews including Jacob Schiff, and Rabbi Stephen Wise, Julius Rosenwald, Lillian Wald, Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch.

Among the organization’s early battles were campaigns against increasing voter restrictions in the South, vigorously opposing the segregation of the Federal Government under Democrat Woodrow Wilson, and launch a thirty-year-long anti-lynching campaign

The NAACP's anti-lynching campaign continued for decades as in this 1939 protest by Howard University students.

Through the years the NAACP often filed law suits to affirm civil rights.  The NAACP Legal Defense Fund raised the money to employ lawyers like Thurgood Marshall who won the famous Brown v. the Board of Education case outlawing public school segregation.

In the Fifties it supported, but also was sometimes at odds with, the boot-on-the-groundstyle of confrontation and protest promoted by Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

It took a long time for Black members to assert leadership in the integrated organization.  The first Black executive secretary was writer and diplomatJames Weldon Johnson in 1920, and Louis T. Wright, a surgeon, was named the first black chairman of its board of directors in 1934.  It did not elect a Black President until 1975.

Long-time NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins, bottom right next to Dr. King, joined other Civil Rights leaders for the March on Washington in 1963.  Pictured standing left to right Matthew Ahmann, Director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice; Rabbi Joachim Prinz; John Lewis, leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Protestant minister Eugene Carson Blake; Floyd McKissick, leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); and labor union leader Walter Reuther; sitting  Whitney Young, Executive Director of the National Urban League; Cleveland Robinson, Chairman of the Demonstration Committee; A. Philip Randolph, Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters leader who conceptualized the march; Dr. King, and Wilkins.  

Along with another integrated old line civil rights group, The Urban League this led to heavy criticism from Black Nationalist groups in the later 20th Century, many of whom, ironically looked to DuBois as their ideological inspiration.

In the 1990’s the NAACP has suffered embarrassing leadership turmoilwhich sapped its strength and led to funding crises.  Those issues were mostly resolved and the organization re-imagined its mission entering the current century.

Recently the venerable organization may be best known to the general publicfor its sponsorship of the annual NAACP Image Awards launched in 1967 and broadcast annually on national TV in 1974.

But in North Carolina the state branch of the NAACP under the Rev. William Barber II has emerged as a powerful voice in a new mass movement.  Led by Barber the organization assembled a broad coalition of forces including activistsfor voting rights, Women’s rightsand health, Gay rights and equality, labor, public education, and the environment plus religious groups including the state’s Unitarian Universalist congregations.  With the state government firmly in the hands of ultra-conservative Tea Partytypes hell bent on undoing 60 years of social justice progress, the coalition began their dramatic Moral Monday rallies at the state capital of Raleigh which included scores of arrests for civil disobedience and focused the attention of the nation on the Tar Heel State.

Moral Monday Marches lead by the Reverend William Barber II and the North Carolina NAACP helped re-invigorate the Civil Rights movement.

In February 2014 the movement and allies from around the country came together for the Mass Moral March touted with considerable justification “the Selma to Montgomery March of our generation.”  Crowd estimates, of course varied from low ball numbers peddled by authorities and their allies in the press of 10,000 to obviously exaggerated claims of ten times that number by some over enthusiastic participants.  Suffice it to say many tens of thousands thronged the streets, including more than 1,000 Unitarian Universalists led by then UUA President Peter Morales.

It was the beginning of the spread of Moral Mondays to other states.  Along with the Black Lives Matter movementand the catastrophic Trump era assaults on hard-won voting rights and economic justice it has re-energized Black protest and resistance.  Barber has gone on to found a new Poor People’s campaign modeled after Dr. King’s last project.

Moral Mondays not only revived the NAACP as a premier leadership group, but they provide inspirations to activists around the country.  Dr. Dubois would be proud.

 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Lucy Parsons and the March of the Unemployed Struck Terror to Plutocrats—Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin


Note:  Interest in the long life of labor agitator and anarchist Lucy Parsons has been rising for some time as the labor movement has begun re-embracing its radical roots and during the spontaneous mass actions around the country represented by the Occupy Movement a few years ago.  Despite her purposefully obscured racial identity, she has also inspired Black women of the Black Lives Matters movement.  A 2017 biography, Goddess of Anarchy: The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical by Jacqueline Jones has ramped that interest even higher.  The book, based on new research and discoveries, challenges the commonly accepted story of her origins with mixed Mexican, Native American, and mulatto Texas roots and identifies her as originally a Virginia born slave. 

Jacqueline Jones's biography broke new ground in identifying Lucy Parsons's origins.

There were hard times in Chicago on January 17, 1915.  Hell, there were hard times across the country.  The nation had never really recovered from the Panic of 1910, and then plunged again into a sharp recession that had been dragging on since 1913.  Business activity had fallen off a staggering 25%.  Unemployment was not yet measured accurately, but was rife especially in the great industrial cities like Chicago.  Hardest hit were the armies of casual laborers who in the best of times floated from temporary work to temporary work, the mass of unskilled and semi-skilled industrial workers, immigrants, and the flood of displaced farm and small-town workers who flooded the city looking for non-existent work. 

On top of the winter of 1914-15 was one of the harshest since the turn of the century. Tens of thousands of the raggedhomeless roamed the streets, their bodies found frozen in the soot-grimed snow.  Some found refuge in train stations and even police precincts and fire houses on the most brutal nights.  Soup kitchens could not keep up with demand.  In addition to the bums and hobos the city was accustomed to seeing even in good times, there were more and more women and children among the homeless as wave after wave of evictions hit the slum districts.  Newspapers wrung their hands—not so much at the plight of the poor, but at the impositions their suffering placed on respectable citizens.  Something had to be done and one woman, Lucy Parsons, knew damn well what to do.

Parsons was one formidable woman with decades of working class struggle behind her and a reputation that literally terrifiedthe powers that be.  Just a few years later the Chicago Police would report that the then septuagenarian was “more dangerous than a thousand rioters.”

IWW artist Carlos Cortez reflected the ethnic pride of many Mexican-Americans in Lucy Parson's claim of Hispanic origins in the 1986 Spanish Language lino-cut poster created for the centennial of the Haymarket Affair.

Her exact origins were obscureand made intentionally murkier by her own efforts.  Lucia Eldine Gonzalez—the birth name she claimed—was said to born somewhere in Texas around 1853, almost surely in slavery.  She was apparently of mixed ethnic and racial origins.  Surely, she was part Black and lived among Blacks.  In the immediate post-Civil War Era she was married to or lived with an ex-slave named Oliver Gathings.

Around 1870 she met Albert Parsons, a dashing former Confederate soldier who had become a passionate Reconstruction Republican.  He edited Republican newspapers in Texas, supported full suffrage for Freedmen, and railed against night riders like the emerging Ku Klux Klan.  He was under constant threat to his life, had been beaten, kidnapped, and shot in the leg in various incidents.   Lovely young Lucy became Parson’s fearless ally and then lover.  She abandonedGathings to be with him and their relationshiponly fueled anti-miscegenation rage. 

In 1872 the couple fled for their lives and settled in Chicago in 1873 where Parsons eventually found work as a typographer for the Chicago News.  Lucy worked as a seamstress and dressmaker.  They lived as man and wife although no marriage documents have ever been found.  Due to bitter social ostracism and criminal liability she denied Black heritage and explained her brown skin as the result of Mexican and Indian—Creek—lineage in addition to White ancestry.  This apparently fooled few people, either Black or White.  She was regularly denounced as a Mulatto in her lifetime.

Former Confederate soldier turned Texas Reconstruction Radical Republican turned Chicago anarchist labor leader Albert Parsons did cut a dashing figure and together they made a stunning couple as they moved together to the forefront of the workers' movement in the city.

Both of the Parsons rapidly rose to leadership in Chicago’s working class movements.  Albert was active in his craft union and the Central Labor Council.  Becoming increasingly radicalized both joined the infant Socialist Labor Party (SLP) in 1876.  He would run for City Council under it banner.

When the Great Railway Strike of 1877 swept into the city, Albert emerged as an important leader and spoke to crowds of 25,000 or more.  While not giving up previous affiliations, both joined the International Working People’s Association—the so-called Anarchist First International and became its most influential English language leaders in a movement dominated in the city by Germans.

Albert was black balled from work at his trade eventually becoming editor of the English language anarchist paper Alarm!  Lucy opened a dressmaking shop to support her husband and a young son but also became a leader in efforts to organize the needle trades and other women dominated occupations.

In 1886 the IWPA became the principle organizer in Chicago of the May 1st national Eight Hour Day Strike.  As many as 350,000 workers walked off their jobs in the first three days of May making Chicago the effective epicenter of the national movement.  There were also coincidently major on-going strikes, including one by thousands of workers at the McCormack Reaper Works.  Albert was one of the speakers to a rally of strikers there on May 3 when police opened fire on the crowd killing four workers and wounding scores.  At the same time Lucy was leading women garment workers on strike.

Both helped publicize and promote a protest rally at the Haymarket on the rainy evening of May 4, but neither was able to be at the event.  None-the-less when a bomb went off amid chargingpolice Albert was among the anarchists sought by police.  Alerted to the danger, Albert managed to escapeto Wisconsin where he hid out for several days.  Lucy was arrestedand closely questioned, but released.  Eventually Albert returned to the city to turn himself in to stand trial with six other anarchists for the riot.

Lucy visited Albert in jail dailywhere she took dictation of his memoirsand gathered profiles of all of the other defendants. These she published in pamphlets as part of her relentless campaign to support the accused.  She raised money for the defense, spoke at numerous rallies and meetings, and wrote articles and lettersthat made the trial an international cause celeb. 

Four Haymarket Martyrs including Albert Parsons went to the gallows at Cook County Jail while Lucy was held naked in cell to prevent her attendance.

Parsons and her children went to visit her husband one last time, but she was arrested, stripped naked, and thrown into a cell at Cook County Jail on November 11, 1887 as Albert was lead to the gallows singing her favorite ballad Annie Laurie in his clear tenor voice.  When it was over she was allowed to go home.  But she first vowed to the press to continue the fight.

Lucy lost her dress shop and was reduced to stark poverty after Albert’s death.  Supporters formed the Pioneer Aid and Support Society which raised money for the Monument at the Haymarket Martyr’s grave site at German Waldheim Cemetery and also provided Parsons with a meager $8 a month subsistence stipend. 

Parsons continued to work to preserve the memory of her husband and his co-defendants and to advance the causes of anarchism and a militant labor movement.  She sold the pamphlet biographies and later a handsomely mounted book, The Autobiography of Lucy Parsons which consolidated them all with steel engravings into one volume to support herself and her work.  She also made speeches and attempted to lecture.  But the relentless Chicago Police broke up her meetings and threatened hall owners who might rent to her for her lectures and repeatedly arrested her when she tried to sell her pamphlets and books on the street.

The harassment just made Parson’s more determined and made her a leading voice for free speech as well as for worker’s rights.  In 1893 the courts finally ruled that even anarchists had free speech rightsalthough police harassment of her continued.

Despite these travails, Parsons grew instature world-wide.  In 1888 she was invited to London to address the Socialist League of England on a program in which she shared the dais with the Russian anarchist Prince Peter Kropotkin.  During the same trip she was invited to become a contributor the leading French radical periodical, Les Temps Nouveaux.

The same year back in Chicago she became a harsh critic of labor leaders who threw their lot in with the Democratic Party in hopes of moderate reformsand “practicalconcessions.  Parsons believed that such half-measures not only cheated the working class, but delayed the systematic revolution that would abolish capitalism once and for all.

Previously a trade unionist Parsons looked at the open class warfare engendered by disputeslike the Homestead Steel Strike in Pennsylvania and in the silver mines of Coeur D’Alene, Idaho and concluded that they were harbingers of successful social revolution and that industrial unionism was the strongest organizational tool of the working class.  Parsons expounded these views in Freedom: A Revolutionary Anarchist-Communist Monthly which she foundedand co-edited.  She found her views confirmed in the Pullman Strike of 1894.

Her recognized leadership among American anarchists was challenged by a younger rival, Emma Goldman, after Goldman emerged from prison for her part in her lover Alexander Berkman’s attempted assassination of steel baron Andrew Carnegie’s partner and right-hand man Henry Clay Frick.  Goldman took to the lecture platform and often spoke to middle-class and upper-class liberal audiences for money, which Parsons considered a betrayal.  Worse, Goldman strayed from single minded attention to the class struggle to embrace many issues of personal freedom including free love. 

Although Parsons was resolutely feminist in advocating for the complete emancipation of women and their equality with men in work and social arrangements, she felt that free love was both a bourgeois indulgence and a threat to the family as the bulwark of strength for workers ofboth sexes.  The two bitterly sniped at each other in their writings and occasionally in public confrontations for years.

From the Official Proceedings of the Founding Convention of the IWW.  Lucy Parsons is listed as an aye vote to establish the union.  Like Mother Jones she attended the convention as an individual and not as a delegate of a union.  It is fascinating to speculate what those two labor agitators might have shared with each other.  And it may not have been the first time their paths crossed.  Both were plying the same trade--seamstress and dressmaker at the same time in Chicago and both had begun their associations with the labor movement--Mother Jones with the Knights of Labor and Parsons with the trade unionists.

In 1905 Parsons attended the Continental Congress of the Working Class which united socialists, anarchists, syndicalists and trade unionists in a new militant organization that almost perfectly mirrored Parsons’s views—the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).  She took out the second Red Card issued to a woman and joined the likes of radical industrial unionists William D. “Big Bill” Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners and William Trautman of the Brewery Workers, Daniel De Leon of the SLP (much changed since her early membership of that organization years before), and Eugene V. Debs former leader of the American Railway Union and founder of the Socialist Party (SP.)

Although first De Leon in a 1906 huff and much more quietly Debs some years later departed the IWW for its refusal to engage in electoral political action, that was just finewith Parsons who had no faith in either reformism or politics.  Although she never was employed by the union, she voluntarily worked for it and promoted its goals in public appearances and in a new periodical, The Liberator supported by and supporting of the union which made women’s equality issues a major focus.

During and after the string of panics and recessions that began in 1907, Parsons became particularly interested in the plight of the unemployed.  In San Francisco Parsons and IWW members assumed leadership of the Unemployment Committee which began staging mass meetings and marches to demand public works projects to put people to work.  When police threatened Parsons famously led one parade with hundreds of women.  Almost two years of agitation the unemployed of the city gained some concessions from the city.

Parsons had always been leery of reformist demands like public works programs, but came to see how the mass struggle for them emboldened the working class, gave it experience in self-organization, and could be a pathway to ultimate revolution.

Back in Chicago during the cruel winter of 1914, Parsons had a model and the experience to stage a similar campaign.  Just the announcement of the march set the city nabobs on edge.  After all, Parson’s had never minced her words.  The mighty Chicago Tribune quoted her as recommending during the terrible depression of 1882-85:

Let every dirty, lousy tramp arm himself with a revolver or a knife, and lay in wait on the steps of the palaces of the rich and stab or shoot the owners as they come out. Let us kill them without mercy, and let it be a war of extermination.

 

As handbills advertising the planned march spread around the poorest precincts of the city and announcements were printed in the active and multi-lingual radical press stirred up so much excitement that Ralph Chaplin, the editor of the IWW’s publication Solidarity, was moved to furnish an anthem for the march.  He already had some verses that he had penned while working with Mother Jones during the bitter 1912-’13 Kanawha County, West Virginia coal miner’s strike.  He polished them up and added a new, particularly incendiary verse:

 

    Is there aught we hold in common with the greedy parasite,

    Who would lash us into serfdom and would crush us with his might?

    Is there anything left to us but to organize and fight?

 

He set it to music and rushed copies to the printer to be sung by the marchers.  Solidarity Forever became not only the theme song for the IWW, but the great anthem of the whole labor movement, although more conservative unions would expunge that verse and modify others when they used it.

As many as 15,000 of the unemployed and their labor movement supportersmarched behind Lucy Parsons on January 17, 1915 demanding immediate relief.  Parsons, naturally, was arrested.

                       Lucy Parson's mug shot after her arrest for leading the 1915 march of the unemployed in Chicago.

The impressive success of that march encouraged more moderate members of the labor movement to act.  The IWW’s bitter conservative craft union rival the AFL, the Socialist Party, and Jane Adams Hull House organized a second massive demonstration on February 12. It was a one-two punch, the labor equivalent of bad cop/good cop.  The interventions of the relative moderates gave city officials an opening to announce immediate plansto decentralize emergency reliefincluding soup kitchens and shelters as well a beginning projects to hire the unemployed for everything from hand shoveling snow from city streets and pot hole repair to building sidewalksand paving previously muddy side streets.  None of which would have happened if Lucy Parsons hadn’t scared the crap out of them first.

Within three years Ralph Chaplin would be one of the 101 IWW leaders tried in Chicago for war-time subversion under the Espionage Act.  Like all the rest, and 64 others tried at Leavenworth, Kansas he was sentenced to prison and served four years of a twenty-year sentence.

Parson’s rival Emma Goldman was one of the aliens rounded up in the post-war Red Scare and was deported on the so-called Bolshevik Arc to the Soviet Union.

Parson’s turned her attention to defense work.  By 1924 she had drifted from the IWW because its General Defense Committee would not extend its support toCommunists.  She also began to believe that the classic anarchismthat she had long advanced had failed to ignite revolution but that the Soviet experience showed a new way.  It was not an overnight thing. 

In 1925 she began working with the National Committee of the International Labor Defense which was backedby the Communists and worked on behalf of unjustly accused African Americans such as the Scottsboro Boys and Angelo Herndon.

During yet another Depression the now 80-year-old returned to agitating for the unemployed and advocated the formation of unemployed unions.  She spoke regularly at Chicago’s Bughouse Square free speech forums where a kid named Studs Terkle listened with rapt attention to her still fiery speeches.  The Chicago Police still wasted no opportunity to harass her and friends had to always be ready to bail her out on petty charges.

Despite the estrangementfrom the official IWW and her increasing closeness to the Communists, she remained attached to the social circle around the IWW headquarters and local branch.  She attended socials and picnics, and attended educational meetings although she was no longer invited to speak.

Young Industrial Worker editor and organizer Fred W. Thompson, who also was a Socialist Party member, got to know her and admire her despite their political difference.  Fred, who was my friend and mentor in the IWW, spoke of herfondly and much later helped Carolyn Ashbaugh research her ground-breaking biography, Lucy Parsons: American Revolutionary and shepherded it to print by the old Socialist publisher Charles H. Kerr & Co.  Ashbaugh’s book was recently reissued by Haymarket Books.

                                    The recent Haymarket Books reissue of Carolyn Ashbaugh's  1977 biography.     

Although records have never been found, some historians believe that Parson’s finally officially joined the Communist Party in 1939 after years ofresisting putting herself under rigorous party discipline.  Others are not so sure.  When she died the Daily Worker’s extensive and laudatory obituary failed to claim her as a member.

Her death was particularly tragic andhorrifying.  She burned to death along with her mentally disabled adult son in a fire at her house in the Avondale neighborhood of Chicago’s Northwest Side on March 7, 1942 at the presumed age of 89.  She was by then nearly blind.

In a final indignity, her irreplaceable library of over 1,500 volumes of labor and anarchist books along with all of her personal papers and memorabilia of her long careerwhich had survived the fire with only minor damage, was seized by Chicago police and immediately destroyed.

This simple stone marks the ashes of Lucy Parsons near the Haymarket Memorial and the remains of her husband and other Haymarket Martyrs.  They are all surrounded by scores of anarchist, socialist, Communist, and labor activists including Lucy's rival Emma Goldman.

Lucy was laid to rest near her husband and the Haymarket Martyrs monument.  A few feet away the ashes of Emma Goldman rest beneath another stone and she is surrounded by generationsof unionists and radicals.  Others like Joe Hill have had all or part of their ashes scattered there.

The site of the house she died in now lies beneath the Kennedy Expressway.  Almost as if the city was still trying to expunge her from memory.  

 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Bill Pickett the Original Bulldogger—Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Bill Pickett bull-dogging a steer.

Somewhere in Texas on May 4, 1903 a young cowboy spent a hot afternoonwatching how ranch bull dogs could isolate and take down a longhorn steer who wandered away from the herd.  The dog would “worry” the steer and most would head back to the herd.  But the occasional obstinate one would keep trying to dodgethe dog.  That’s when the dog would close in, jump up, and bite downon the sensitive nose or lip of the steer then bring it down to the ground.  The dog would hold on until the steer stopped struggling.

The cowboy, Bill Pickett told the other hands, “If a dog can do that, so can I.” The next time he chased a stray on horseback instead of throwing his lariat around the hornsand jerking the steer off his feet, the standard cowboy way that often resulted in the animal breaking its neck, Pickett astonished his fellow workers by leaping of his running horse, grabbing the steer by the horns and biting down on its upper lip throwing it to the ground.  It was a recklessand dangerous maneuver and required daring, agility, and brute strength.  All of which Pickett had.

He was soon entertaining folks at the ranch rodeos held at the end of round-upswhen the hands from all the local ranches competed in various riding and roping games.  Pickett even invented a name for the stuntbull dogging—in honor of the dogs that inspired it, not because he took down actual bulls, which were largerand considerably meaner than the neutered steers raised for beef.

Black cowboys on the post-Civil War Texas range.

Picket was born on December 5, 1870 on a ranch in Travis County in south central Texas.  That’s the county surrounding the state capital at Austin.  He was one of 13 children of Thomas Jefferson Pickett, a former slave, and Mary “Janie” Gilbert, a woman of mixed Cherokee and White ancestry.  He was attended school up to the fifth grade, which made him better educated than most of his peers.  His mother had hopes that he would take up a trade.

Instead at about the age of 12, he went to cowboying.  His three brothers soon joined him.   By the time he invented his stunt he already had a reputation as the greatest working cowboy in Texas.

Pickett and his brothers were not as unique as you might think if you grew up on old movies westerns with noBlacks in sight.

The Texas cattle industry exploded after the Civil War when men came hometo find that four years of war and little market had produced hundreds of thousands of surplus longhorn cattle.  When the railroads crept into Kansas, it opened beef hungry Eastern markets to ranchers—if they could get their stock hundreds of miles north through rugged territory.  It was the birth of the cowboy as we know him today. 

But there was a labor shortage.  That attracted rootless men who were used to physical hardship and could spend months away from family.  The man-hungry ranchers took on all comers—plenty of experienced Mexican Vaqueros, who transmitted their skills and horse culture to newcomers, veterans of both armies including many former cavalrymen, immigrants fresh off the boats at New Orleans and Galveston, and many former slaves with no land or better prospectsExperts believe that close to a quarterof all Texas trail cowboys were Black.

By the 1890’s the mores of the Jim Crow South was taking its toll on the once rough-and-tumble racial egalitarianism of the range.  With the days of the great cattle drives largely passed as rail lines penetrated the heart of cattle country, the need for large crews for mass drives abated.  Most hands worked “a brand” at the home ranch all year except for the spring round-up.  Many Black cowboys found themselves unwanted in the close quarters of ranch bunk houses. 

But true top hands like Pickett and his brothers could still find work.

Turn of the Century action at Cheyenne Frontier Days where Pickett first attracted national attention in in 1904.

By the Turn of the Century, however, the boys decided there was more money to be made on the emerging circuit of country fairs and rodeos than tying themselves to the often boring drudgery of ranch life.  They formed the Pickett Brothers Bronco Busters and Rough Riders Association and began to tour from Texas up through the cowboy country of Wyoming.  Bill’s bulldogging act was the center of their show, but there was plenty of riding, roping, and general daring do.

Their fame spread, but occasionally they had to pass as Native Americans to participate in some shows and cowboy competitions.

Up north in Cheyenne they participated in some of the early Frontier Days events—the first truly modern rodeo combining elements of the cowboy round-up competitions with popular wild west shows for a largely tourist audience.

Bill Pickett on tour with the 101 Wild West Show.

In 1905 Picket joined the top touring western show of its day—the Oklahoma based 101 Wild West Shows.  That’s where Buffalo Bill Cody went when his own show went bankrupt.  Picket was a star act who toured the nation as part of a large company that also included a couple of other real cowboys soon to go on to wider fame—Will Rogers and Tom Mix.

In the early ‘20’s Pickett himself attracted the attention of movie makers.  He starred in two 5 reel features made by The Norman Film Manufacturing Companyof Norman, Oklahoma, The Bull-Dogger and The Crimson Skull.  The movies were mostly marketed to Black audiencesin segregated theaters.

                                        Bill Pickett--Black cowboy movie star, 1921.

During that same period, rodeo was emerging as an organized sport.  Bull Dogging became of the five standard events held most major competitions under relatively standardized rules.  The other events were bare back riding, saddle bronc riding, bull riding, and calf roping.  Some rodeos offered other events like steer roping—also known as steer bustingteam roping, chuck wagon and wild horse races, barrel racing for cowgirls, and calf or sheep riding for children.  In order to compete for coveted All-Around Cowboy prizes, a contestant had to compete and rack up points in at least three of the core events.

By the ‘20’s most competitors had abandoned the Pickett lip-bite.  But some cowboys in my day in the 1950’s still favored chewing the steer’s ear as they brought the animal down. 

As he neared 50 years of age Bill Pickett was pretty beat up by a life of jumping off of moving ponies and hurling himself at thrashing beasts four times his weight.  He retired from touring and competing, but not from cowboying.

This statue at the Fort Worth Stock Yards commemorates Bill Pickett who performed at the Southwestern Exposition and Stock Show there.

Pickett was killed when he was kicked in the head by an untamed bronco on April 2, 1932.  He was laid to rest in Kay County, Oklahoma near the monument to Ponica Chief White Eagle and the headquarters of the Miller Brother’s 101 Ranch.  In 1970 he was inducted into the National Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, part of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

Today, the rodeo event that he invented is no longer called bull dogging.  It is called Steer Wrestling.  It is still one of the most dangerous athletic events in the world.

    

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Phillis Wheatley Boston’s Slave Girl Poet—Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

This portrait is often identified as Phillis Wheatley.  I have my doubts. 

On September 1, 1773 Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral was published in London thanks to the patronage of Selina Hastings, the Countess of Huntington.  It created a considerable stir.   The authorwas one of the earliest female poets whose work was issued in England.  The Puritan goodwife Anne Bradstreet had been the first resident of the Colonies of either sex to be published when The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America was issued without her knowledge or consent back in 1650.  Less than a handful of women had appeared in print since.  Even more noteworthyPhillis Wheatleywas a 20 year old Boston slave who had recently visited Britain in company with her master who was eager to display her accomplishments.

All ready famous in New England, word spread across Europe.  In Paris Voltaire himself, the very embodimentof the Age of Reason, wrote that she, “became the most famous African on the face of the earth” and her work was proof that Blacks could write credible verse.  Continental Naval Hero John Paul Jones later sent her some of his own writing efforts to be considered by “Phillis the African favorite of the Nine (muses) and Apollo.”  He was just one of many Yankee notables to be astonished and impressed with her work.

Not bad for a lass who was born in West Africa in 1753 in what is now Gambia or Senegal, and sold by a local Chief to Arab slavers who put her and her mother on the auction block on the coast. Peter Gwin, master of the Phillis on the account of her owner Timothy Finch.  The girl was a sickly child about 7 years old when acquired by master tailor John Wheatley to be groomed as a body servant to his wife Susannah.

Whatever their original intentions, the quick witted, bright-eyed child soon became a family favorite and pet.  The Wheatleys were widely read and famously liberal.  They—and subsequently Phillis—attended the Old South Meeting House which became a hot bed of Patriot fervor and the launching pad for the Boston Tea Party.

Early on the Wheatley’s teen age daughter Mary began to tutor the child and was soon joined by her brother Nathaniel. 

 By the age of 12, Phillis was reading Greek and Latin classics and difficult passages from the Bible. At the age of 14, she wrote her first poem, To the University of Cambridge, in New England, a tribute to Harvard College which she couldnever dream of attending.   Her master and mistress were kind and her household duties no more onerous than those expected of their own children.   In fact they seemed to have regarded her as a virtual daughter and taken great pride in her precocious achievements.

For her part Phillis shared the interests and passions of the family—the style of liberal Christianity that was taking hold in Boston  and shedding the harsh edges of Calvinist Puritanism, the Enlightenment ideals embraced by educated elite of the city, and the Patriot cause.  All of it would become the subject matter of her poetry.

Wheatley circulated Phillis’s work among his acquaintances and Patriot cohortsand she frequently recited at her mistress’s teas and other social gatherings.  

The image from the front piece of her book is presumably the most reliable image of the young poet.

Phillis acquired a local fame in Boston, which proved to be a dangerous thing.  Many could not believe that a Black girl could write such accomplished poems and suspected skullduggery if not worse.  It had been more than 100 years since the Salem Witch trials and they had become an embarrassment but anti-witch laws remained in effect.  Janet Horne had been burned in Scotland as recently as 1727.  Plenty of people still believed in witchery and Boston had a long history of mob violence.  African natives suspected of maintaining occult pagan practicesfrom their tribal homes were especially vulnerable.    After all, hadn’t the Black slave Hecuba been at the very heart of the Salem accusations?    To some witchcraft was the only explanation for a Black teenager penning highly literate verse. 

The Wheatley family, prominent Patriots, had enemies of their own in rapidlypolarizing Boston.  If they could be proved to be foisting a fraud for nefarious purposes on the citizens, it could discredit the whole Patriot movement.

The potential scandal grew to such serious proportions that the Wheatley family agreed to allow Phillis to be examined by a panel of some of Boston’s most distinguished residents in 1772.  The panel was actually carefully balanced.  On one hand it included the city’s most liberal Minister, the crypto-unitarian Rev. Charles Chauncey; merchant, smuggler, and Patriot leader John Hancock and on the other Royal Governor Thomas Hutchinson, and his Lt. Governor Andrew Oliver.  A fifth member, Scottish born merchant John Erving could be considered a neutral party. 

After a close examination under which Phillis proved poised and erudite, proved that she could read and write with ease, and was able to intelligently converse on complicated theological issues, the panel issued a unanimous statement agreeing that she was the true author of the works attributed to her.   Armed with the endorsement, John Wheatley sought a Boston publisherfor Phillis’s work but no local printer would touch it.  Despite the testimony of the elite, the rough and tumble—and highly maniputableBoston mob of apprentices, port idlers, and street toughs had exploded at less provocation than a Black poetess.

Wheatley’s work was often directed to famous people.  As early as 1768, she wrote To the King’s Most Excellent Majesty, praising King George III for repealing the Stamp Act.  She was then only 15 years old.  Two years later she saluted the popular evangelist George Whitefield in a poem that was printed as a broadside and particularly praised.   Much of her work reflected Christian themes. 

But there were also often threads that seem to reflect her West African ancestral sun worship.  She frequently referenced the Sun, often couched in terms from classical antiquityAurora, Apollo, Phoebus, and Sol—particularly as personal inspiration.  She also used the common literary device of the Sun as a homonym for the SonChrist.   Later those pagan references were chastised in An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley by another enslaved poet, Juppiter Hammon.

What is missing from Wheatley’s work was much of the personal.  Nowhere are their girlish yearnings apart from religion.  There is no contemplation of the wonder of nature, except for the Sun and Moonand certainly no hint of love or romance.  Wheatley wanted to be seen as a woman of the mind not of the heart.

Even more striking is the absence of much mention of her condition of servitude.  She touched on in only twice, once seeming to look on it as a blessing for saving her from paganism. 

 

Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there's a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic dye.”

Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join t’ angelic train. 

Of course Wheatley’s personal experience in the bosom of a supportive and even loving family was far different than the norm.  Even there other slaves had to take up the menial chores that would have been expected of her while her master and mistress lavished a superior education on her and encouraged her to write.    But in another poem she made a reference to slavery as “a cruel fate” more as an observation of others than a statement of her own condition.  

In 1773 Phillis, always in delicate health, suffered from asthma that Boston physicians could not treat.  Apparently that was the main reason that John Wheatley sent his son Nathaniel to sail with her to London.  But he also sent her collected poems and the prestigious testimonial in hopes of securing a British publisher. 

Phillis Wheatley made quite a splash in London which was often enchanted by charming exotics.  She was granted an audience with the Lord Mayor of London and introduced in fashionable salons.  She also met Benjamin Franklin, then the Colonial Agent in London.  An audience with King George, who she had once honored in verse, was arranged, but she had to return to Boston with her master before the appointment could be kept.  She also corresponded with several distinguished personages.  In a letter to the Rev. Samsom Occom, a Mohegan from Connecticut who became a prominent Presbyterian minister, she praised his beliefs of how the slaves should be given their natural born rights in the Colonies.  She also corresponded with the philanthropist John Thornton who promoted her work in influential circles.

                                            The title page from Wheatley crowning achievement.

Those circles may have included the Countess of Huntington, whose personal chaplain had been George Whitefield.  Wheatley’s ode to the Evangelist had been used in an oration at his funeral and was widely circulated in England.  That is how the Countess came to underwrite Wheatley’s book without ever having met her.  She hoped the two could meet when the bookseller and publisher Archibald Bell issued her volume.

Alas, before the two could meet and before the Royal audience, Wheatley received word that her mistress had fallen seriously ill and had requested her to come home.  While she was at sea the book appeared in London to wide acclaim.  Copies would soon be sent to Boston.

The Wheatleys manumitted Phillis that October, not long after her book appeared in Boston book stalls.  Some scholars believe that for legal reasons the emancipation was not technically completed until John Wheatley’s death in 1778.  At any rate, Phillis continued to live with the family, supported by them, and given some pittance in wages.  She also had a modest independent income from the sale of her book.

Susannah Wheatley died in 1774, a stunning blow to Phillis.

Meanwhile the furor over the Stamp Act had energized and radicalized the Patriots.  After the Boston Tea Party in December 1774 Boston Harbor was closed to trade and the city was occupied by British troops.  Phillis was deeply supportive of the cause and wrote about it in verse, particularly Columbia which gained the admiring attention of none other than George Washington with whom she corresponded.  In 1775 while Washington was conducting his Siege of Bostonshe sent him her poem To His Excellency, George Washingtonto which he warmly responded. In March 1776 she was able to personally visit her hero at his headquarters at Cambridge.  The next month Thomas Paine published her patriotic verse in his Pennsylvania Gazette.

It was probably the high point of Wheatley’s life.  Things were about to go downhill in a hurry.

Both John Wheatley and his daughter Mary died in 1778 without apparently making provision for Phillis in his will.  Nathaniel was married.  Phillis was without a home and any immediate prospects.  She completed enough new work to submit a second volume of poetry but with the loss of her patrons could not afford to get it printed or to secure the advance subscription that could have made it possible.  Boston was still suffering from the loss of most of its trade due to the war and in a deep depression rendering many of her supporters unable to afford even the modest cost of a subscription.  Many of the poems intended for the book were subsequently published in newspapers or as broadsides, but they brought little, if any income.

About that time Wheatley a married a handsome, charismatic free Black named John Peters.  He was a noted dandy and very ambitious.  He operated a grocery, acted as a pettifogging lawyer to other Blacks, and had several other business schemes.  Some of Wheatley’s friends thought he was a braggart, blowhard, and schemer.  Whatever he was, he was not a good businessman or at least he could not succeed in economically depressed Boston.  Soon after Phillis lost a first child in infancy, the couple was so destitutethat they often went actually hungry. She lost a second child.

Phillis found work as a scullery maid in a boarding house, the kind of physical labor that she had never performed as a slave.  Then, while she was pregnant for the third time, her husband abandoned her.  On December 5, 1784 Phillis Wheatley Peters died after childbirth.  She was 31 years old or thereabouts.  The child survived her by only hours.

Most of her known poems were finally collected and issued in the 1830.

The Wheatley statue in Boston, part of a collective monument to Massachusetts women that also includes life size bronzes of Abigail Adams and Lucy Stone.

The poem in which Wheatley addressed slavery more directly than her famous apology for it was written to a noted English abolitionist.

To The Rt. Hon. William, Earl Of Dartmouth

Hail, happy day, when, smiling like the morn,

Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn:

The northern clime beneath her genial ray,

Dartmouth, congratulates thy blissful sway:

Elate with hope her race no longer mourns,

Each soul expands, each grateful bosom burns,

While in thine hand with pleasure we behold

The silken reins, and Freedom's charms unfold.

Long lost to realms beneath the northern skies

 

She shines supreme, while hated faction dies:

Soon as appear’d the Goddess long desir’d,

Sick at the view, she languish’d and expir’d;

Thus from the splendors of the morning light

The owl in sadness seeks the caves of night.

No more, America, in mournful strain

Of wrongs, and grievance unredress’d complain,

No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain,

Which wanton Tyranny with lawless hand

Had made, and with it meant t’ enslave the land.

 

Should you, my lord, while you peruse my song,

Wonder from whence my love of Freedom sprung,

Whence flow these wishes for the common good,

By feeling hearts alone best understood,

I, young in life, by seeming cruel fate

Was snatch’d from Afric’s fancy’d happy seat:

What pangs excruciating must molest,

What sorrows labour in my parent’s breast?

Steel’d was that soul and by no misery mov’d

That from a father seiz’d his babe belov’d:

Such, such my case. And can I then but pray

Others may never feel tyrannic sway?

 

For favours past, great Sir, our thanks are due,

And thee we ask thy favours to renew,

Since in thy pow’r, as in thy will before,

To sooth the griefs, which thou did’st once deplore.

May heav’nly grace the sacred sanction give

To all thy works, and thou for ever live

Not only on the wings of fleeting Fame,

Though praise immortal crowns the patriot's name,

But to conduct to heav’ns refulgent fane,

May fiery coursers sweep th’ ethereal plain,

And bear thee upwards to that blest abode,

Where, like the prophet, thou shalt find thy God.

 

—Phillis Wheatley

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The Very Large Life of Robert Smalls—Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Robert Smalls was just 23 years old when he stole the CSS Planter and delivered her, the crew, and his family to the Union.


At the risk of being crude, and perhaps irredeemably sexist, there are some acts so audacious that the English language seems inadequate to describe them without resort to certain old vulgarities.  The word I have in mind today is balls as in big fat hairy balls.  That is certainly what it took for Robert Smalls, then a 23 year old slave to calmly sail away in a Confederate side-wheel Steamer under the guns of at least one fortress and a Rebel flotilla to deliver the ship, cargo, crew, and passengersto the welcoming arms of the United States Navy.  This is what happened.

Smalls was a skilled pilot and a trusted slave of whose owner had every expectation of loyalty from a man raised above the drudgeryof servitude in the fields or on the docks.  Robert Smalls had worked himself up from a Hotel porter to a stevedore and finally a Wheelman in the Port of Charleston, South Carolina.  Various employers compensated Smalls’ master,Henry McKee of Beaufort, South Carolina for his services and supplied him with basic food, clothing, and housing near the docks for him and his wife—an enslaved hotel maid and their three children.  A Wheelman was the title given to Black pilots who were responsible for controlling ships as they navigated the dangerous waters of Charleston harbor.  The respected word pilot was reserved for white men doing the same job for some of the best wages paid any workers in the South.

On the morning of May 13, 1862 Smalls calmly boarded the CSS Planter, a mid-sized side-wheel steamer built and launched in Charleston just two years earlier for the costal trade.  She was currently in Service of the CSA Army Engineer Department under the command of Brigadier General Ripley as an armed dispatch boat and transport.  She was partially laden with a cargo of ammunition and explosives.  With him came an all-slave crew of seven.

Earlier under cover of darkness seven passengers, five women and three children—Small’s wife and children and the wives of other crew members—had boarded and were secured out of sight in the hold.

The Planter as a Confederate supply ship and converted to a gun boat commanded by Robert Smalls in U.S. Army service.

Smalls knew that the captain of the Planter, C. J. Relyeawould be ashore on business well away from the port area.  The ship was one of several Small regularly piloted through the waters of the harbor to open sea.  Gambling that he would attract no undue attention, Small hoisted the Confederate Stars and Bars flag,built a head of steam and had his crew cast away from the dock before 5 am that morning. 

He would have to sail passed several armed ships in the harbor and under the guns of a succession of shore batteries and fortresses guarding the South’s most important Atlantic blockade running port, including those of the mighty formerUnion bastion Fort Sumter whose bombardment a little more than a year earlier had started the war.  As he passed each ship and fort, Small blew his steam whistle in customary salute.  Since the Planter and its Black pilot were familiar sights, she aroused no suspicion.

When the ship broke out into open waterand was beyond the reach of Sumter’s big guns, Small hauled down the Rebel colors and hoisted a White flag.  Hoping against hope that the US Navy blockaders outside the harbor would recognize his intentions, he made straight for the USS Onward, an armed Clipper Ship prized for her speed in chasing down blockade runners.

Fortunately the Onward’s captain held his fire and with some astonishment accepted Smalls’ surrender of the Confederate ship.

The next day the Planter with Smalls in command was sent on to Flag Officer Samuel Francis Du Pont, the senior Captain in charge of the Charleston Blockade flotilla, at Port Royal, South Carolina.  In addition to the valuable cargo, Smalls also brought vital intelligence for Du Pont—news that the Rebels had abandoned defensive positions on the Stono River allowing U.S. forces to seize them without a bloody fight.

Smalls and members of his crew, including his brother, were celebrated in the North, especially in the Radical Republican press.

The news of the Smalls exploit electrified the Northwhich was starved for good news in a war that was, on the whole, going very badly.  Abolitionists and others who were campaigning, so far unsuccessfully, for the employment of Blacks and escaped slaves in the war in combat roles, were encouraged.  A special bill sailed through Congress and sent to the willing President on May 30, to award prize money equal to half the value of the ship to Smalls and his crew.  Of that, Smalls was personally due one third.  But the government undervalued the ship at $9,000—she was actually worth about $67,000—so that Small’s portion was only $1,500.  And neither Smalls or his crew were ever awarded prize money, as was customary, for the value of the cargo estimated to be worth over $10,000 at war-time prices.  Still for a former slave, the prize money represented an unheard of fortune.

Du Pont accepted the ship into the Navy as the USS Planter.  She was first put under the command of Acting Master Philemon Dickenson and when transferred to North Edisto under Acting Master Lloyd Phoenix.  Smalls was retained by the Navy as pilot, prized for his intimate knowledge of coastal waters and worked on several ships, including the Planter.  As part of the South Atlantic Blockade Squadron she saw action over the summer of 1862, including a joint expedition under Lieutenant Rhind with the USS Crusader in which troops were landed at Simmons Bluff on the Wadmelaw River, where they destroyed a Confederate encampment.

Despite her successful service, the Planter presentenced a significant problem for the Navy—she burned relatively hard to come-by wood for fuel instead of the abundant coal supplied by the fleet.  That fall she was transferred to the Army and sent for service near Fort Pulaski on the coast of Georgia.  Smalls and his old crew were assigned to the delivery and then were accepted into Army service.  He was appointed the regular pilot of the Planter,

 On December 1, 1863, the Planter was caught in a crossfire between Union and Confederate forces.  Captain Nickerson ordered Small to surrender.  He flatly refused recognizing that he and the crew would not be treated as prisoners of war but would be summarily executed. Smalls asserted command and piloted the ship out of range of the Confederate guns.  

This act might have been regarded as a mutiny and resulted in his death by hanging.  But Smalls luck had not run out.  His superiors recognized his bravery and the cowardice of Captain Nickerson.   He was appointed captain of the Planter, becoming the first black man to command a United States ship of war.  Smalls continued to serve as captain until the army sold Planter in 1866 after the end of the war.

The Planter continued in civilian service for another ten years.  Then on March 25, 1876 she ran aground and was damaged trying to save a disabled schooner.  The captain beached herto try to repair a staved-in hull.  But a gale blew up and dragged her back to seawhere she foundered.  After the crew abandoned ship, she sunk.  When informed of her loss, Smalls tearfully said that it was “like losing a member of my own family.”

Seven year ago the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that they had found the wreckage of the Planter in shallow water off the coast.

As for Smalls, if he had done nothing else in his life, he would be noteworthy.  But his wartime adventure and service were just Act I in a remarkable life.

After the war Smalls returned with his prize money and earnings from his service to his hometown of Beaufort where he bought his former master’s house.  He lived there with his wife, children and elderly mother until her death.  He later even took in his former master’s infirm widow.  He went into business with Richard Howell Gleaves operating a store for Freedmen.

Prosperous businessman, respected South Carolina Republican leader, and four times United States Congressman Robert Smalls.

Smalls became an early leader of the Republican Party in Reconstruction Era South Carolina.  He was a delegateat several Republican National Conventions and participated in the South Carolina Republican State Convention.  Smalls served as a member of theSouth Carolina House of Representatives from 1865 and 1870 and the state Senate between 1871 and 1874. He even served briefly as the Commander of the South Carolina Militia with the rank of Major General.

In 1874, Smalls was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served from 1875 to 1879. From 1882 to 1883 he represented the 5th Congressional District in the House and the 7th District and served from 1884 to 1887.  That was four terms in Congress, the last two after the withdrawal of Union troops from the South and the rise of Jim Crowe. 

He was targeted by Democrats for retribution and charged and indicted on phony corruption charges in the letting of a government printing contract.  It took a high level dealswapping Democrats charged with election fraud and intimidation to keep Smalls out of prison.

He was one of the last Southern Blacks to serve in Congress and his four terms made him the longest serving Black Congressman until Adam Clayton Powell.

Smalls in his elder years at a Republican Party event.

After leaving Congress he was appointed U.S. Collector of Customs in Beaufort, serving from 1889 to 1911 except for the four years of Democrat Grover Cleveland’s second term. 

Smalls died on February 23, 1915 at the age of 75 and was buried in his family plot in the churchyard of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in downtown Beaufort.

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Shirley Chisholm Knocking Down the Doors for Black Women ——Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Vice President Kamala Harris may now preside in the Senate and be able to cast crucial tie-breaking votes. Black women from veteran California Congresswoman Maxine Waters to influential relative newcomers like the Squad’sIlhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Cori Bush as well as Illinois’s own Lauren Underwood, all owe a debt of gratitude to a pioneer.

On November 5, 1968 a slender and bespectacled early childhood educatorbecame the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress.  It would not be the last of Shirley Chisholm’s political firsts.

Shirley Anita St. Hill was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 30, 1924 the oldest of four daughters to immigrant parents Charles St. Hill, a factory worker from Guyana, and Ruby Seale St. Hill, a seamstress from Barbados

When her mother struggled to raise her children while working, Shirley and two sisters were sent to live with their grandmother in Barbados in 1931.  They lived on her grandmother’s farm in the Vauxhall village in Christ Church where they attended a one room school.  She later wrote of the experience:

Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict, traditional, British-style schools of Barbados. If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason….Granny gave me strength, dignity, and love. I learned from an early age that I was somebody. I didn’t need the black revolution to tell me that.

The girls returned to New York in 1934 during the depths of the Depression. A star student in New York public schools, in 1940 Shirley was admitted to Girls’ High School in Bedford–Stuyvesant, a highly regarded, integrated school that attracted girls from throughout Brooklyn. From there she went on to Brooklyn College from which she graduated with honors in1946.  During college she was noted for her debating skills.  Her impressed instructors urged her to consider entering politics but she demurredsaying that she had a double handicapas both Black and female.  Instead she became a pre-school teacher.

During the post-war years Shirley met Jamaican immigrant Conrad O. Chisholm, a private detective, of all things and perfect for the film noir era.  The young couple celebrated a festive weddingattended by many in Brooklyn’s large Anglo-Caribbean community.

Shirley Chisholm as a young woman.

As Shirley Chisholm she continued to work while earning her MA in elementary educationfrom Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952.  Armed with the graduate degree she became the Director of the Friends Day Nursery in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and then the Hamilton-Madison Child Care Center in Manhattan. And from 1959 to 1964, she was an educational consultant for New York City Division of Day Care.   

As an authority on issues involving early education and child welfare with a growing reputation, Chisholm was drawn to politics where she hoped to advance those issues and raise the voice of both Blacks and women.  She started as a volunteer with the then still White male dominated Bedford-Stuyvesant Democratic Club when such local clubs were the street-level power centers for New York City Democratic Party.  In the face of racial and gender inequality, she also joined local chapters of the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, and the National Association of College Women.

Chisholm and precinct voting reports from her 1964 election to the New York State Assembly.

Her political acumen and wide contacts led Chisholm to run for the New York State Assembly in 1964.  She became just the second African American in the Legislature.  She was re-elected to two more terms serving until 1968.  She accomplished much in Albany including opposingan English language literacy test for voting because a person “functions better in his native language is no sign a person is illiterate.” She was a prime mover in getting unemployment benefits extended to domestic workers, and enacting the SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) which provided disadvantaged students the chance to enter college while receiving intensive remedial education.

She also worked tirelessly to expand Black voice and influence in government.  By early 1966 she was a leader in a push by the statewide Council of Elected Negro Democrats for Black representation on key committees in the Assembly. 

In 1968 Federal Court ordered redistrictingcreated the newly re-drawn 12th Congressional District centered on Bedford-Stuyvesant which was expected to give Brooklyn its first Black Representative.  After the previous white Representative chose to run in a more favorable District, Chisholm faced two other Black candidates in the April primaryState Senator William S. Thompson and labor union officer Dollie Robertson.  She ran with the campaign slogan Unbought and Unbossed,” an acknowledgementthat the fading remnants of the old Tammany machine which backed Thompson.  She won the nomination.

Her rising star was recognized when she was elected as the Democratic National Committeewoman from New York State and attended the notoriously raucous Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August, her first introduction to the national stage.

Despite this, political odds makers rated her as an underdog in the November General Election where she faced a much better known opponent, James Farmer, the Director of the militant civil rights organization the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and a vocal proponent of the rising Black Power movement.  Farmer ran on the Liberal Party ticket and had the support of the New York Republicans who still had the allegiance of many older Blacks who remembered it as the party of Lincoln.  But Chisholm crushed him in the election by a two to one margin thanks to her deep rootsin the community and the perceptionthat Farmer, a Southerner, was an interloper.

Chisholm celebrated her election to Congress with supporters in Brooklyn.

Congress did not exactly open its arms to the freshman member from New York.  She was assigned to the Agriculture Committee which she considered was an insult to her urban district.  But a close friend and supporter Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the Hassidic Lubavitcher Rebbe, suggested that she use to committee to expand food assistance to the poor.  She then partnered across the aisle with Republican Senator Robert Dole of Kansas to expand the Food Stamp program and later played a critical role in the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program.

That kind of political practicality came into play in her second term when she voted for Hale Boggs of Louisiana for Democratic House Majority Leaderover John Connors of Michigan. Despite affection for Connors, she could count votes and knew there was no way he could then be elected.  She supported Boggs over a symbolic protest.  The House leadership rewarded her with an appointment to the Education and Labor Committee where she felt she could best represent her constituents.

Chisholm was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971 and the same year, she was also a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Chisholm's presidential bid announcement rally at  the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York in January 1971.

Late in 1971 Chisholm decided to launch a long-shot campaign for the 1972 Democratic Presidential nomination as a strong opponent of the Vietnam War and critic of military spending as well as an unabashed supporter of women’s rights and for social justice.  At the Brooklyn announcement of her bid she called for a “bloodless revolution” at the Democratic Convention in Miami.  She told her supporters:

I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people and my presence before you symbolizes a new era in American political history.

She became the first Black to seek a major party nomination for President and the first woman to run as a Democrat.  The political establishment, including most of the male members of the Congressional Black Caucus, was hostile or indifferent.  The press regarded her as a merely symbolic candidate and largely ignored her campaign.  Without deep pocket donors her campaign was cash strapped from the beginning—she raised and spent only about $300,000 over the entire primary and caucus season and was only able to get on primary ballots in 14 states and could not even afford to visit many of them.  Yet she plunged ahead.

It was a complex and crowded field led by anti-war Senator George McGovernof South Dakota and by the Happy Warrior, former Vice President and 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey.  Alabama Governor and ardent segregationist George Wallace was running this time as a Democrat and was expected to sweep much of the South and pick off votes of disgruntled working class Whites in Rust Belt States.  Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Senator from Boing, was running as a pro-war moderate liberal and North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford hoped to woo moderate Southerners.

Chisholm set tongues wagging when she visited Wallace in his hospital room after he was shot in an assassination attempt in May.  She cited common humanity and noted that the African-American community had lost leaders to assassins.  None-the-less she was heavily criticized by many Black leaders.

It was only after Wallace was shot that Chisholm was given the same Secret Service protection as the other candidates despite at least three credible threats on her life.  Prior to that her husband was her personal bodyguard.

A poster from Chisholm's Presidential campaign recycled the slogan from her first Congressional campaign.

She was blocked from participating in televised primary debates, and after taking legal action, was permitted to make just one broadcast speech.

Chisholm won the largely meaningless New Jersey Primary Beauty Contest” but gained only two delegates because she did not field a full slate of Convention Delegates.  Overall, she won 28 delegates during the primaries process and garnered 430,703 votes, 2.7% of nearly 16 million cast and represented seventh place among the Democratic contenders.

At the Convention in July it was apparent that McGovern was the likely winner, but Humphrey still hoped to block his nomination.  He releasedhis Black delegates to vote for Chisholm if they wished.  Mississippihad two contesting delegationsRegulars who supported Wallace or Jackson, and “Loyalists” mostly leaning for McGovern.  The Loyalists won the credential fight but some McGovern supporters became angry at public statement of the candidate which seemed to back pedal on his pledge to withdraw from Vietnam.  She ended up with 12 of the state’s 25 votes.  Mostly Black uncommitted delegates from Louisiana cast 18.5 of its 44 votes for Chisholm.  In the end, Chisholm won 152 delegate votes and finished fourthin the rollcall balloting.

Still, her historic bid was not a failure.  She declared that she ran, “in spite of hopeless odds ... to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.”

It was not a Democratic year anyway.  McGovern stumbled to the worst Electoral College drubbing in history.  Of course Richard Nixon’s totally unnecessary spying on the Democratic National Committee and assorted dirty tricks soon took down his Presidency.

Chisholm returned to the House where she continued to pile up achievements.  She worked to improve opportunities for inner-city residents, was a vocal opponent of the Draft and supported spending increases for education, health care and other social services offset by reductions in military spending.  She also worked for the revocation of the Post-war Red Scare era McCarran Act of 1950 which authorized some of the worst domestic political repression in American history as well as the establishment of detainment camps that were originally intended for Communists and leftists but which the Nixon administration was considering using to detain Black militants, student radicals, and anti-war leaders.  During the Jimmy Carter administration, she advocate for equal treatment of Haitian refugees with anti-Castro Cubans.

In 1977 Chisholm was elected to the House Leadership as Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus, a position that had become reservedfor a woman. 

But the same year her long time marriage to Conrad Chisholm ended in divorce.  A year later she married Arthur Hardwick, Jr., a former New York State Assemblyman whom Chisholm had known when they both served in that body and who was then a Buffalo liquor store owner.

Chisholm’s drive to secure a minimum wage for domestic workers finally paid off, in part because of her long ago kindness to George Wallace.  Wallace had returned to the Governor’s Mansion in Montgomery still wracked with pain from his injuries and confined to a wheel chair.  He also pursued a new policy of racial reconciliation with the appointment of Blacks to key positions on his staff and in the administration.  Wallace used his considerable influence with several Southern members of Congress to convince them to support Chisholm’s bill.

Her husband was seriously injured in an auto accident and Chisholm was dismayed by the disarray of liberal politics in the early years of the Reagan Revolution.  She announced her retirement after her seventh term, leaving Congress after the 1982 election.

                   Chisholm in maturity.

She taught at Mount Holyoke College as the Purington Chair at the prestigious women’s college, a position previously held by W. H. Auden, Bertrand Russell, and Arna Bontemps. She remained active in politics and co-foundedthe National Political Congress of Black Women and African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom.  She supported Jesse Jackson’s two campaigns for the Democratic Presidential nomination.  She also spoke widely on college campuses.

Arthur Hardwick died in 1986 and her own health began to decline.  In 1991 she retired to Florida.  In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her to be Ambassador to Jamaica, but she declined due to poor health. The same year she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Chisholm died on January 1, 2005, in Ormond Beach, Florida after suffering several strokes.  She was buried in the Oakwood Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo next to her second husband.

                                        Chisholm's First Class Forever Stamp from the Postal Service's Black Heritage series.

Chisholm’s posthumous honors included being portrayed on a United States Postal Service Black Heritage First Class stamp in 2014 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo dedicated the Shirley Chisholm State Park, along 3.5 miles of the Jamaica Bay coastline.  In a unique monument is slated to be erectedin New York City’s Prospect Park, the first woman to be so honored by She Built NYC, a public-arts campaign that honors pioneering women by installing monuments that “celebrate their extraordinary contributions to the city and beyond.”

The Brooklyn Eagle previewed the innovative design for Chisholm's Prospect Park monument on its front page.

But Chisholm’s real legacy was the doors she opened.  Beneficiaries include Geraldine Ferrero, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many of the women elected in the 2018 Blue Wave election.

 

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Stepping Up—An Emergency Response to Cold Weather Crisis for McHenry County Homeless

By: Patrick Murfin

This man (Tom Steffens) and dog are not homeless themselves but their trudge illustrates the conditions many many of the McHenry Count homeless have to endure in the cold and snow emergency.  Photo by Beth Hoover. 

After a mad scramble on Thursday, February 4 the homelessin McHenry County had for the first time this winter emergency cold weather housing in local hotels available.  A County Board Finance Committee meeting that morning made clear that there was no emergency housing plan or any immediately available funding to start one.

District 3 McHenry County Board Kelli Wegener got the ball rolling on an emergency push to put the homeless up in hotels until temperatures once again reach the 20s,

That afternoon Democratic District 3 County Board Member Kelli Wegener, who is also the church administrator for the First Congregational Church of Crystal Lake, sprang into action along with her senior pastor Eric C Fistler.  They sent e-mails to the membersof the Faith Leaders of McHenry County, local congregations, and social service organizations asking for emergency funding to place the homeless in hotel rooms while the crisis lasted. 

Tree of Life UU Congregation administrator Judy Stetner received the appeal and called me in my role as coordinator for Compassion for Campers.  I was able to authorize the immediate release of $4,000leaving over $1,000 in our account for the purchase of new camping gear as needed.  A total of more than $9,000 was raised that night with more expected to come through in the next few days.

Hope Takes Action, a program of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul is administering the emergency hotel room program.

Hope Takes Action, ministry of The Society of St. Vincent de Paul, a lay, volunteer, Catholic non-profit stepped up to collect, administer, a distribute the funds.  By Friday homeless individuals were being identified and placed in Super 8 Hotelrooms in Crystal Lake and McHenry.  Local police departments, the County Sherriff’s office, and social service agencies were reaching out to the homeless to inform them of the availability.

The following announcement was widely circulated:

HOUSING the LOCAL HOMELESS during the FRIGID COLD:

Additional support to shelter the homeless has been set up in McHenry County.  If you or someone you know is homeless and living in places unfit for human habitation, please contact Hope Takes Action at 815 385-3251.

You can also call the police/sheriff's office and they will take the person to the shelter.

This emergency service will remain available until the temperatures increase to above 20 degrees for a high.

This morning Jeff Röt Hermel, veteran who has faced homelessness himself posted the following testimonialon Facebook:

Great start to a frozen day. I passed a guy walking in this bitter cold and I recognized him as a local homeless vet that I spoke to years ago. I was worried he had died because I haven’t seen him in a while. He and his camping buddy will now have a Super 8 room for the next couple of days thanks to a local charity and the Compassion for Campers program at Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist in McHenry Illinois. Ty fb for allowing that to come together also.

So a stopgap program is in place for now thanks to the energy and dedication of individuals and faith communities but a far greater needcontinues.

The sad fact was that when McHenry County was hit by a major snowstormearlier this week on top of deep layersleft by earlier storms and that was followed by Arctic temperatures which will stay in the teens and single digits for more than a week there were no emergency beds availableon a walk-in basis for our unhoused population and no plans for such service despite the perfectly predictable crisis.

The traditional rotating PADS sheltershosted by area churches have not been in operation since last Marchwhen the Coronavirus hit and there are no plans to resume that service even after restrictionsare limited.  Pioneer Center which operates a long-awaited permeant shelter has restricted admissions and limited beds due to Covid-19 protocols.   A handful of other agencies have had a limited number of beds, but none for emergency use.


Compassion for Campers stepped up to provide those with no reliable housingincluding campers, those living invehicles, couch surfers, and those who stay a few days in motel roomsuntil their Social Security, unemployment, or other benefit money runs out each month, with camping supplies, gear, warm clothing, and other essentials.  It has been a pitifully inadequate response to a chronic problem but was the best we could do. 

Unfortunately just as the weather emergency began, Compassion for Campers had to reduceits distributions from twice a month to monthly and centralized them at Warp Corps, 114 North Benton Street in Woodstock.  The storm hit on what would have been a scheduled event on February 2 in McHenry.  We had no way to notify our clients and open on that date in at Warp Corps.

Warp Corp folks and Compassion for Campers volunteers at a regular distribution at the Woodstock site.

Now for those who can’t or won’t access the hotel rooms in the short run, Compassion for Campers willstr be bringing their major camp supplies—tents, sleeping bags, pads, and stoves to Warp Corps on Tuesday February 9 to be available on a walk-up basis to those in need in addition to supplies and warm clothing Warp Corps already has on hand.  Many thanks to Rob Mutert, Heather Nelson, and Carlos Salgado for their continuing work with the unhoused.

Compassion for Campers will be bringing their full range of supplies to Warp Corps on Tuesdays February 16, March 16, and April 13 from 3:30 to 5 pm.

The current emergency should be a wake-up call to the county to establish a regular emergency plan and protocolincluding reliable funding.  Better yet more safe beds and accommodations for the homeless should become a top priority of the County government, the community, and concerned social service agencies and providers.  Many of those entities have been part of a Continuum of Care Committee for years now.  That group has to become even more focusedon finding some permeant solutionsto a chronic problem.

Meanwhile if you wish to contribute to these efforts on behalf of the homeless you can call Hope Takes Action at 815 385-3251 or contributions to Compassion for Campers Donations by sending a check made out to Tree of Life UU Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road, McHenry, IL 60050 with Compassion for Campers on the memo line. The donations are placed in a dedicated fundand not used for any other purpose.  Tree of Life also donates all of the administrative expenses of the program

 

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The Colored National Labor Union was the Step Child of the Labor Movement——Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

The founding convention of the Colored National Labor Union in Washington, D.C. in 1869 as depicted in Harper's Weekly.  Note the presence of women delegates.

Isaac Meyers did not want it this way.  Neither did William H. Sylvis.  Myers was a 34 year old Black marine caulker from Baltimore who had organized a union of Black caulkers in the Chesapeake ship yards and a cooperative association to market their services to ship builders and dry docks.  Sylvis was a White 40 year old Philadelphia iron molder who was the founder, visionary leading light, and President of the National Labor Union (NLU), Americanlabor’s first stab at a national federation uniting existing trade unions.  In the wake of the recently concluded Civil War and the end of slavery, both men dreamed of a united working class undivided by race.  Alas, that was not to be.

Sylvis and other Philadelphia unionists had called a founding convention for the NLU in New York City 1866.  He was taken ill and unable to attend that meeting, but the organization was launchedand over the next two years had some success in attracting local unions, municipal Central Labor bodies, and a handful of nationalor international trade unions.  When he NLU met in Baltimore for its convention in 1868 it was clear that Sylvis would be elected the organization’s president.


National Labor Union founder and visionary William Sylvis wanted to include Black unions but could not overcome the vigorous objections of delegates to the 1868 convention in Baltimore.


Sylvis had taken note of the work of Meyers and his Colored Caulkers Trade Union Society and invited him to address the convention held in his home town.  Meyer reported on the progress of his union and of the co-operative shipyard and railway, the Chesapeake Marine Railway and Dry Dock Company.  He also appealed for membership in the NLU on behalf of his union and a handful of other fledgling Back unions.  Sylvis, who also envisioned worker-owned cooperatives as a model to escape from exploitive wage slavery, endorsed the application.

Aside from Sylvis, Black unionists had some support.  Delegate A.C. Cameron told the assembly, “…interests of the labor cause demand that all workingmen be included within the ranks without regard to race or nationality…”

But it was not enough.  Many organizations in attendance had Whites only rulesembedded in their constitutions and bi-laws.  Others simply feared competition from Blacks who they assumed would either undercut wages or replace their members.  The convention voted overwhelmingly not to extend membership to Black organizations, although those few local bodies that accepted Black membership would be allowed to continue to do so.

                            Baltimore marine caulker Isaak Myers was the founder of the Colored National Labor Union.

Meyers was saddened, but likely not surprised.  He was also determined to find a way for Black unionists to unite nationally.  Acting quickly, Meyers and associates called for a founding convention of a new organization.  On January 5, 1869 214 Black mechanics, engineers, artisans, tradesmen and trades-women, and their supporters from 21 states assembled in Washington, D.C.  Notably absent were common laborers.  The new organization would mirror the NLU philosophically and structurally and be an organization of the skilled trades.

That structure was not the only thing the new organization had in common with its inspiration.  In its founding documents it called itself simply the National Labor Union—the identical name to Sylvis’s organization.  Perhaps this reflected a forlorn hopethat once established and up and running it might yet be allowed to merge.  To avoid confusion newspapers covering the founding meeting called the organization the Colored National Labor Union (CNLU).  The name stuck and quickly the organization was using that name as well.

Many issues came before the founding body.  One was a resolution calling on the Federal Government to stopimportation of contract coolie labor” to prevent it from becoming a “system of slavery.”  This was a slightly different take on Chinese exclusion passed by the NLU opposing, “the importation of a servile race, bound to fulfill contracts entered into on foreign soil.”

The wide-spread use of Chinese workers in the construction of the Southern Pacific Railroad and in large-scale mining operations had made eliminating the Yellow peril the number one issue of White unionists in California and the west.  There was a general fear that if it continued successfully it would spread east.

The CNLU, however, couched their resolution in far less racist terms than did the NLU and did not oppose free Chinese workers, unbound by servile contracts, and promised to include any who wished to join in CNLU unions.  In fact the CNLU constitution opened the organization to Whites and any ethnicity as well as to women. 

Delegate John Mercer Langston, a former employee of the Freedmen’s Bureau and President of the National Equal Rights Leaguelaid out the expansive and inclusive vision of the new organization:

We know the maxim, ‘in union there is strength.’ It has its significance in the affairs of labor no less than in politics. Hence our industrial movement, emancipating itself from every national and partial sentiment, broadens and deepens its foundations so as to rear thereon a superstructure capricious enough to accommodate at the altar of common interest the Irish, the negro and the German laborer; to which, so far from being excluded, the ‘poor white’ native of the South, struggling out of moral and pecuniary death into life ‘real and earnest’ the white mechanic and laborer of the North, so long ill-taught and advised that his true interest is gained by hatred and abuse of the laborer of African descent, as well as the Chinaman, whom designing persons, partially enslaving, would make, in the plantation service of the South, the rival and competitor of the former slave class of the country, having with us one and the same interest, are all invited, earnestly urged, to join us in our movement, and thus aid in the protection and conservation of their and our interests.

Among the CNLU’s other resolves were for the extension and expansion of the Freedmen’s Bureau’s Forty Acres and a mule policy to provide of farmland for the rural Southern poor, government aid for education, and new nondiscriminatory legislation that would help black workers access the labor market.  Items like this show that the organization hoped to go beyond action over job issues to be the voice of Black labor as part of a broader movementfor full emancipation and integration into society. 

Both the NLU and CNLU after initial success would find troubled watersahead.  Sylvis died unexpectedly on July 27, just six months after the CNLU’s founding.  Without his visionary leadership the NLU slowly foundered.

Efforts at job action by CNLU member unions were met by the united oppositionof not only employers but the press and government, which was quick to provide police power to break any strikes.  And all too often local White unions joined that opposition.  Unable to produce improved conditions on the job, membership began to dwindle, affiliate unions failed or disaffiliated when they could no longer afford to support a national body.

Fredrick Douglass, the most prominent Black leader in the United States, assumed the Presidency of the faltering CNLU but had no interest in administering a labor union federation.  The organization became an adjuct to his newspaper and a broader Black movement before fading away.

In 1872 Meyers was replaced as President by the veteran abolitionist and leading voice of Black aspirations, Frederick Douglass whose newspaper, the New National Era became the official organ of the union.  Douglas was an immensely talented and energetic man, but he had no experience as a trade unionist or much interest in the day-to-day administration of a labor federation.  The use of his paper helped boost its circulation.  The CNLU became just another platform for a broader Black agenda.  Within a couple of years it all but disappeared as a functioning union.

Both the NLU and CNLU were supplanted by the rising Knights of Labor, which aimed to organized skilled and unskilled labor together and which claimed, at least, to welcome members “without regard to race or color.”  Many of the NLU’s local unions and some of the surviving CNLU chapters switched affiliation to the Knights.  In practice local Knights assemblies often followed local custom in regard to Black membership.  But some strikes, including the St. Louis General Strike of 1877, a part of the broader Great Railway Strike, were notable for cooperation between Black and White unionists. 

As for Meyers, he worked as a detective at the Baltimore Post Office between 1872 and 1879 then operated a small Baltimore coal yard.  In 1883 he was rewarded for loyal service to the Republican Party with a political appointment as a Customs revenue officer for five years.   His public life continued as he organized and became President of the Maryland Colored State Industrial Fair Association, the Colored Business Men’s Association of Baltimore, the Colored Building and Loan Association, and the Aged Ministers Home of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.  He died Baltimore in 1891.

  

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Boston Massacre Looked a Lot Like Black Lives Matter Cases —Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Blood on the snow in Boston.

Some parts of the tale of the so-called Boston Massacre, an iconic moment in pre-Revolutionary Colonial history that used to be familiar to any school child echo in today’s world.  All of the ingredients—a rowdy protest boiling spontaneously up from streets where outrage over long-time grievances sparked into violence over a trivial incident and was met by either firm and appropriate action by responsible authorities or was a vicious and violent over reaction depending on the political bias of the observer.  And not only was the first victim a Black man who became a symbol of rebellion but his uniformed killerswere let off virtually scot free at a trial on the flimsiest and most arcane of grounds.  Sounds like the familiar arc of a police slaying of an unarmed youth, the kind of all-to-common occurrence that has fed the Black Lives Matter movement.

It was a miserable night in Boston in 1770.  What else would you expect on March 5 in the midst of the Little Ice Age which chilled Europe and the Eastern seaboard of North America for nearly two centuries?  A nasty wind whipped across the harbor, a few flakes of snow would sting exposed fresh.  Old snow and ice was pushed up against buildings turning gray with the soot from a few thousand hearth fires.

The uniform and equipment of a private Grenadier of the British 29th Regiment of Foot in 1768.  

A lone English soldier, Private Hugh White of the 29th Regiment of Foot had the bad luckto draw sentry duty outside of the Customs House on King’s Street that night.  The building was a symbol of unfair taxation without representation and oppression to the people of the city.  Customs collectors had been harassed for attempting to enforce the unpopular Townsend Duties and for seizing ships of leading merchants like John Hancock for smuggling, a mainstay of the local economy.  The building needed protection.

The bright red coat of an English private soldier, while colorful, was entirely unsuitable for the harsh New England winter.  Private White undoubtedly shivered in misery.  His life was made worse by the taunting by local toughs, mostly apprentices and day laborers loitering about.  One of them, a wig maker’s apprentice, Edward Garrickmocked a passing British officer, Captain-Lieutenant John Goldfinch, for not paying a bill due his master.  Goldfinch ignored the jeers and in fact had settled his account that very afternoon.  But White scolded Garrick for insulting an officer.  The two exchanged heated words.  White struck Garrick with the butt of his musket. A small crowd gathered and began pelting the soldier with snow and ice balls

19 year old bookseller Henry Knox made his bow in the history books by warning besiged Private White and later Captain Preston of the dangerous consequences of opening fire. In five years he would be General Washington's trusted commander of artillery and the man who hauled the heavy artiller from overland from Ft. Ticonderoga  setting the stage for the British evacuation of Boston.  He would later be Washington's Secretary of War.

When White leveled his musket against his taunters, Henry Knox, a corpulent 19 year old bookseller warned him not to shoot because, “if he fire, he must die.”  White refrained from shooting but the crowd on the street grew as church bells rang in alarm.  Someone thought to send to nearby barracks for reinforcements for the now besieged White who had retreated to the steps of the Custom House with the door at his back.

Things were about to go from bad to worse.

Four regiments of troops were sent to Boston in 1768, more than were ever stationed there when its very existence was threatened by possible invasion during the French and Indian Wars, after the Massachusetts House of Representatives petitioned the Crown for relief from the Townsend Duties and circulated letters of other colonial legislatures asking for supportin the protest.  The Collector of Customs for the Port of Boston officially asked for troops to protect him after some of his officers were manhandled and abused.

Four regiments were dispatched as a show of force.  That was about 4,000 men plus the wives and children of many of them, officers and enlisted alike, servants, and the inevitable hangers-on to any army.  The city of Boston boasted only 16,000 residents and a few thousand more resided in nearby villages.  Such a large force deployed among so few civilians, most of them hostile to their presence, led to inevitable friction.

Although two of the regiments had been withdrawn, soldiers of the remaining two were involved in a number of incidents over that winter.  In addition to hostility to the policy that dispatched them, minor personal disputes like the Captain’s late payment to a wig maker, irked the population.  So did the inevitable attention to the local girls by the soldiers, which was often returned by lasses enamored of a dashing uniform

A serious bone of contention was the employment of off-duty soldiers at the rope walk, Boston’s biggest industrial concern and a main employer of unskilled and casual labor.  The soldiers were working for less than locals and costing many of them jobs.  Wivesof several soldiers publicly scolded colonists.  That very afternoon one had promised that the troops would wet their bayonets on trouble makers.

Back at the Customs House, White was finally relievedby a corporal and six private soldiers under the personal command of Captain Thomas Preston, the officer of the watch who declined to trust a junior lieutenant with the sensitive assignment.  As they drew close to the Customs House where the angry crowd had grown to over a hundred, Knox again warned the Captain of the awful consequences if his men fired.  Preston reportedly told him, “I am aware of it.”

This 19th Century engraving features the death of Crispus Attucks.  It also seems to show Captain Preston ordering a disciplined volley.

Once at the Customs House Preston had his men load and prime their muskets and form a semi-circle in front of Private White and the door.  They faced a crowd now swollen by further reinforcements, many of them armed with cudgels and brick bats.  In the very front of the mob, just feet away from Captain Preston who took up a position in front of his men, was a dark skinned man named Crispus Attucks.

Not much is known about Attucks, not even whether he was a slave, an escaped slave, or a freeman.  He worked as a sailor on coastal traders and on the docks.  He was described as mulato but was known to haveboth African and Native American Wampanoagancestry.  Although there were not many Blacks in Boston, their presence was not that unusual.  They mixed casually and freely with the lowest classes of White Bostonians—the day laborers, indentured servants, and apprentice boys.

As Attucks and the crowd pressed forward, Preston had his men level their muskets but ordered them to hold their fire.  He ordered the mob to disperse.  They responded with taunts of “go ahead and fire.”  Preston said that the troops would not fire “except on his order” and made the point of standing in front of his men’s guns.

From out of the crowd someone hit Private Hugh Montgomery in the arm with a clump of ice or in other accounts he was struck by a cudgel.  Montgomery fell to the ground, although he may simply have lost his footing on the ice, and lost his musket.  He grabbed the gun and scrambled to his feet.  Enraged, he leveled his gun at the nearest man, Atticus and fired yelling “Damn you, fire!” to his fellow soldiers.

Attkus crumpled to the ground mortally wounded.  There was a pause of a few seconds and then a ragged, un-coordinated volley went off from the troops.  The only command Preston gave was a desperate order to cease fire.

Eleven men were hit by fire indicating that some may have been injured by the same round or that some soldiers had time tore-load and fire. In addition to Attkus rope maker Samuel Gray and mariner James Caldwel died on the cobblestones.  Seventeen year old ivory turner apprentice Samuel Maverickstanding near the rear of the crowd was struck by a ricocheting fragment and died a few hours later. Patrick Carr, an Irish immigrant died of his wounds two weeks later.

The crowd retreated to near-by streets but continued to grow.  Preston called out the entire regiment for protection and withdrew his squad to the barracks.

         Massachusetts born Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson tried to calm the angry mob that surrounded the State House.

An angry mob descended on the near-by State House which was ringed with troops for protection.  Massachusetts born Acting Governor Thomas Hutchinson tried to calm the crowd by addressing them from the relative safety of a balcony.  He promised a through and prompt investigation.  After a few hours the crowd drifted away.

Local malcontents, becoming known loosely as Patriots, were quick to use the slaughter to raise a hue and cry against the Townsend Duties and to the onerous virtual military occupation of their city.  Two virtually identical engravings purporting to accurately portray the shooting were rushed to publication.  The most famous, engraved by Paul Revere, the master silver andcoppersmith, iron foundry man, bell caster,  and master of all trades, after a drawingby Henry Pelham was published in the Boston Gazette and then re-issued in sometimes hand colored prints which made Revere and the printer a good deal of money.

A hand tinted copy of Paul Revere's famous broadside of the affair on King's Street.  The image was actually cribbed from an earlier version by Henry Pelham that appeared in the Boston Gazzette.

With public opinion inflamed, the two regiments in the city were withdrawn to Castle William on an island in the harbor.  Had they not been, “they would probably be destroyed by the people—should it be called rebellion, should it incur the loss of our charter, or be the consequence what it would,” according to Secretary of State Andrew Oliver.  By May General Thomas Gage, in command of all troops in the colonies, decided that the presence of the 29th Regiment was counterproductiveto good order, had the regiment removed from Massachusetts entirely.

Meanwhile at the end of March Captain Preston, the men in his rescue squad, Pvt. White and four civilian employees of the Customs House, who some had fired out the windows of the building were indicted for murder and manslaughter.

Gov. Hutchinson managed by hook or by crookto delay the start of the trial for nearly a year to let inflamed passions died down.  Patriots took that time to organize the publication of an account of the event, A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre, which although banned from circulation in the city, inflamed passions across the Colonies, and even earned sympathy when it was reprinted in London.

Patriot lawyer John Adams successfully took up the defense of Captain Preston, the accused soldiers, and civilian employees of the Customs House.

Despite the delay, it looked like it would be very difficult for Captain Preston and the soldiers to get a fair trial in Massachusetts.  All of the leading local lawyers had refused to take their cases.  John Adams, a leading Patriot, a man with boundless political ambition, and first cousin to rabble-rouser-in-chief Samuel Adams, agreed to take on the case, despite howls of protest from his political allies.

It was a great choice.  Assisted by his cousin Josiah Quincy, another Patriot, and Loyalist Robert Auchmutyhe quickly obtained a not guilty verdictin the first trial.  Captain Preston was shown by the testimony of multiple witnessesto have never ordered the troops to fire and to have tried to get them under control.  That was in October.

In November the cases of the enlisted soldiers proved dicer.   They had, after all, fired lethal rounds without orders.  Adam’s pled straight up self-defense.  He told the jury that the men were under attack by the mob, “a motley rabble of saucy boys, negroes, and molattoes, Irish teagues and outlandish jack tars.”  Appealing to the class prejudice of the land-owning pool of eligible jurors, Adams won acquittal on murder charges for all of the defendants, and only two were convicted of manslaughter.          

Privates Montgomery and Kilroy still faced thedeath penalty at the sentencing on December 14, they “prayed the benefit of clergy”, a remnant of Medieval law in which the essentially claimed exemption from punishment on the grounds that they were “clergy” who could read a Bible verse.       The two were branded on the thumb and released.

By the time the civilians were up for trial in December, enthusiasm for continuing the case against them, which was weak and based on the testimony of one servant easily proven to be false, was waning.

Whatever the outcome of the trials, the events of March 5 helped set the stage for the American Revolution.

By the way the term Boston Massacre was not applied to the bloody ruckus until long after the fact.  Like another iconic event,  the so-called Boston Tea Party it got its name during the brief national enthusiasm generated by the 50th  anniversaries of important Revolutionary and pre-revolutionaryevents.  And like the Tea Party it was soon imbued with a lot of romantic myth and nonsense.                          

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Four Cups of Coffee for Freedom—Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Day two at the Woolworth's Luncheonette in Greensboro, North Carolina James A. McNiel and Franklin McCain from the first day action were joined by fellow students William Smith and Clarence Henderson.  What were the thoughts of the young black man behind the counter?  About the same age as the students he may have needed the job to support his family.  Were the students jeopardizing that?  Did he view them as privileged and spoiled students?  Did he yearn to join them?

There was no charismatic leader that day, no eloquent preacher, no carefully planned campaign.  Just four young guys, freshmen no less, from an obscure public college for Negros, the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina.  One afternoon, February 1, 1960, they ambled over to downtown Greensboro where they causally plopped themselves down on four stools of a Woolworth's Luncheonette.  They ordered coffee.  Very politely.

In those days before chain fast food joints, the lunch counters at Woolworths, other dime stores, and drug stores were the top options for an inexpensive, quick meal while running errands in the still thriving downtowns of American towns and cities.  Woolworth's, like other chains, had a policy of “honoring local custom and law.”  In the South that meant they would not serve Blacks.  That in turn meant employees of down town business as well as customers of those stores who happened to be Black often had no place tograb a lunch or rest their feet.

It was an injustice.  Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, Jr. (later known as Jibreel Khazan), and David Richmonddecided to do something about it.  So they ordered coffee.  The waitresses at the counter informed them that they could not serve “Coloreds”.  They politely told her that they intended to stay until they were served. 

So they sat until closing, enduring the taunts and jeers of white customers.  When the store closed, they returned to the campus with the promise to return.

On the second day McNeil and McCain returned to the lunch counter with two other students.  This time a TV camera man was on hand to film their defiance.  Articles appeared in the local press.  Word was getting out.  Crowds of angry whites began to mill about the store.

On day three about sixty people from the college and community turned out in support of the rotating cast of young men in those four stools.  Word of the protest made national headlines and mention on the network evening news programs.  Woolworth's corporate headquartersissued a statement promising to continue to honor local custom.

More than 300 turned out on day four and the sit-in was extended to another lunch counter at a local Kressstore.

Lunch counter sit-ins spread across the South and continued for years.  On May 28, 1963 these Black and White Civil Rights volunteers were abused in Jackson, Mississippi.

By the end of the week black college students had spread the sit-ins to Woolworth stores in Winston-Salem, Durham, Raleigh, and Charlotte as well as towns in other states.  The Greensboro Four, as the original protestors came to be called, had sparked a largely spontaneous movement.

It was not that sit-ins were unknown.  The first in the South had been more than twenty years earlier in 1939 as a protest in the Alexandria, Virginia public library.  In the late 1940’s the Quaker Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) which was urging the adoption of Gandhian non-violent resistance, began to use the tactic sparingly.  In the early 1950’s volunteers from the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) who had been trained by the FOR’s Bertrand Russell and others used sit-in protests in Northern and borders state cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Baltimore.  But in the mid-‘50’s civil rights protest had moved to business boycotts, voter registration campaigns, and mass marches.  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and their allies at the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had spread this brand of protest successfully in high profile campaigns.

But something about the Sit-in protests struck a chord with both the public and with newly empowered activists.  The movement spread to cities throughout the South.  In Nashville FOR trained pacifist James Lawsonhad already trained a disciplined cadre of students in the tactics of passive resistance who spread out over the city and surrounding area with a well-coordinated campaign.

The Rev. James Lawson of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation trained with Bayard Rustin in Gandhian passive resistance and organized a highly disciplined campaign of sit-ins in Nashville.  Here he is being arrested.  

Meanwhile the original Greensboro students decided to declare a nationwide boycott of Woolworth's and were supported by volunteers from existing civil rights organizations including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP.)  Pickets showed up at stores across the country.

In far off Cheyenne, Wyoming I was 11 years old and encountered my first demonstrator of any kind—one lone guy in a sandwich board sign outside the downtown Woolworth's where I used to go for lunch every Saturday.  After a gruff beginning, “What are you staring at, kid,” I was informed about the boycott.  I had seen footage of the sit-ins on TV.  I was sympathetic.  It was the first picket line I refused to cross.

Maybe the loss of an 11 year old’s once-a-week lunch money, didn’t harm the company, but the boycott was cutting deeply into profits.  Woolworth's stores were Stone Age discount houses and were the preferred shopping places ofpoor Blacks across the south and in the big cities of the North.  Whites could afford the upscale downtown Department Stores.  Woolworths found its sales off as much as 30% in key cities.

The chain was also taking a beating in the court of public opinion, especially in the north.  Highly respected President Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed that he was, “deeply sympathetic with efforts of any group to enjoy the rights…of equality that they are guaranteed by the Constitution,” when asked directly about the sit-ins during a news conference.

In Nashville Lawton’s campaign paid off when they won city-wide desegregation of lunch counters in May.  In other towns local merchants capitulated as the boycotts and sit-ins ate into the bottom line.

In 1961 the Freedom Riders put the sit-ins on wheels and risk their lives. 

On July 25 the Greensboro Woolworth's threw in the towel.  That day they served their own Black employees for the first time.  The next day the lunch counter was officially opened to Backs not only in that town, but across the entire chain.

In the next few years the sit-in tactic was applied to all sorts of struggles for equal access to public accommodation.  The bloody Freedom Rides of 1961 put wheels on the sit-in.  The tactic helped bring about the public outcrythat led to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1963 which guaranteed equal access to public accommodationsin interstate commerce.

In the original building the Greensboro Woolworth's Luncheonette has been recreated in the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

Today the Greensboro Woolworth's building has been transformed into the International Civil Rights Center and Museum.

All in all, not a bad legacy for four college kids who wouldn’t take no for an answer.

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Focus on Black History 2021

By: Patrick Murfin

Black Americans made plenty of history over the past year.  In addition to their traditional role as victims of White supremacy and ingrained racism—think George Floyd and the litany of other victims of police violence and as the targets of a seemingly endless supply of Karens berating people for simply living their livesAfrican Americans have also seizedthe moment to profoundly change society.  Most powerful is the on-going Black Lives Matter Movement that took to the streets for months to confrontthe daily terror that People of Color face at the hands of authority and would not back down.  Not only did that movement spread to every corner of the country, it enlisted as allies people—especially young people—of every race and ethnicity.  A Norwegian Parliamentarian has just nominated the movement for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The Rev, William Barber and the new Poor People's campaign respresent a renewal of the Civil Rights movement and grass-roots organizing.

Other examples include the Rev. William Barber’s Moral Monday movement and the New Poor People’s Campaign representing a re-birth of the Civil Rights Movement.  Black folks ran for office at all levels in every part of the country and often triumpheddespite desperate opposition and voter suppressionKamala Harris’s election as Vice President may have been the most apparent manifestation but the sophisticatedand comprehensive voting rights campaign and the voter turn-out operation  by Stacey Abrams and a legion of others carried Georgia for the Biden-Harris ticket and elected two Senators in a deep red, Deep South State including Raphael Warnock the pastor of Martin Luther King’s old church and Jon Ossoff, a young Jewish film documentarian and journalist.  Together with Kamala Harris presiding in the chair they shifted controlof the Senate to the Democrats.  For her achievements Abrams, too, has been nominated for the Nobel Prize. 

Work by Stacy Abrams and many others in Georgia set the stage for both the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and achieving functional control of the United States Senate

The Biden administration has nominated Blacks to top rank positions including Lloyd Austin as Secretary of Defense, Marcia Fudge as Secretary of Housing and Urban Developmentand others to the Cabinet Rank positions of Environmental Protection Agency Director, Ambassador to the United Nations, and Chair of the Council of Joint Economic Advisors.  In addition many Black have been or are expected to be appointedto top sub-cabinet positions and have key positions on the White House staff. 

Closer to home for Illinoisans Lori Lightfoot became Mayor of Chicago last spring carrying 49 of 50 Wards.  She took office just in time to deal with the Coronavirus pandemic, Black Lives Matter Protests, and a serious crime wave.  Now she is wrestling with the militant Chicago Teacher’s Union over plans to returnto in-person learning.

Meanwhile in the Illinois legislature the Black Caucus got a landmark criminal justice reform act passed in the veto session.  The measure laid down a schedule to ending cash bail, requiring police body cameras for all law enforcement agencies, new procedures for certifying officers, and not requiring signatures of police misconduct complaints.  Howls of outrage are still being heard over these reforms.  And in the new General Assembly Representative Chris Welch replaced long-time Speaker of the House Mike Madigan.

Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett helped develope the Moderna vaccine for the Coronavirus and represents advancements by Black women in medicine and science.

On the Coronavirus front, Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett led a National Institute of Health vaccine development team that developed theModerna vaccine.  Covid-19 has disproportionately ravaged the Black community where many are employed in service occupations which cannot be done from home and which exposes them to the public and possible infections.  Many work in health care including Doctors, nurses, technicians, aide, and other staff.  Their heroicwork like that of first responders and other essential personnel has come at a heavy cost.    

Of course this just skims the surface of a tumultuous year.  And it does not even include notable achievements in the arts, media, sciences, religion, philanthropy, community service, and family dynamics.  Black history has been unfolding all around us.  And it always has.  For too long it was suppressed both to strip African-Americans of a sense of rootedness and self-worth and to protect White folks from feeling that they were not the only thing that counted.


That is what Black History Month was intended to address.  The roots of the annual observance stretch back to 1926 when Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History announced the second week of February to be Negro History Week.  Woodson, who died in 1950, spent the rest of his life promoting historical awareness in both academia and the community.  There was plenty of resistance in the first case and the revelation of an untapped hungerin the second.

In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and especially the Black Power movement of the 1970’s Black history finally began to take hold as a recognized academic discipline and as part of the curriculum in public and private schools.  The first Black History Month was celebrated at Kent State University in Ohio.  By 1976 President Gerald Ford recognized Black History Month, during the celebration of the United States Bicentennial.

Since then Black History month has spread and now usually adopts a theme each year. This year the theme is The Black Family:  Representation, Identity, and Diversity, most apt since those families are under enormous strain.

By the early 21st Century the media and many corporations seemed to have coopted the month in an attempt to pander to the Black community and inoculate themselves against charges of institutional racism.  Ubiquitous Black History Moments on television promoted hero worship of individual “pioneers” often without any context to a broader struggle or the experienceof ordinary Black people.  It has also drawn criticism for “ghettoizing” Black history and confining it to a silo without connection to American history as a whole.  Actor and director Morgan Freeman declared “I don’t want a Black history month. Black history is American history.”

Black History Month must always keep in mind the sacrifices of participation of the many in the Civil Rights movement like these women in the 1963 March for Jobs and Justice in Washington.  They made Dr. Martin Luther King's soaring rhetoric a reality.

I’m well aware of these pitfalls as a White writer, amateur historian, and hope-to-be ally.  Yet I think there is still much to be learned if Black History can be placed in its broadest context and include the struggles and sacrificesof the many as well as iconic figures.  That’s what Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout will try to do for the rest of the month.

We will be assembling a wide varietyof posts from many years on this blog, updating them as necessary and adding new ones.  Feel free to respond with criticism, questions, and suggestions.

 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Groundhog Day Again but Something Seems New When the Alarm Goes Off

By: Patrick Murfin

       Like it or not TV weather people will spend much of the day reporting on the unreliable predictions of rodents.

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.

Groundhog Day, the movie is celebrated as part of mural in Woodstock which now makes a big deal out of the local roadent reveal.

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. 

The Celtic/Irish goddess Brigid awakening and emerging in lore.

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.

Catholic St. Brigid, the old goddess of the same name and the off-center straw cross associated with both.

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.

This Christian Feast Day Candlemas, celebrated on February 2, has also been identified with Groundhog Day.

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.

The Roman festival of Lupercalia celebrating Faunus--the Latin version of the Greek god Pan--as well as the she-wolf who sucked Rome's legendary founders Romulus and Remus evolved into a wild orgy.  The Church may have cooped the celebration with Candlemas which also falls in the pre-Lenten Carnival season.

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.

19th Century cartoons like this helped spread Groundhog Day from the rural German communities in Pennsylvania.

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.

Groundhog Day will goes on again in Woodstock this year but with lots of snow, masks, social distancing, and reported sunshine.

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.


☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

John O’Hara’s Sour American Dream

By: Patrick Murfin

                       John O'Hara at the time of his first success as a novelist at the age of 29.

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.

O'Hara yearned to shake the dust of his Pottsville, Pennsylvania roots off of his boots and join the ranks of the elite denied him as a Catholic,  Bitterness over his failure to do so tainted his life.

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.

The dusk jacket for the first edition of appointment in Samarra.  Crosset & Dunlap was not considered a top-flight literary publisher like Scrivners, yet another disappointment for the author.  It is best known today as the publisher of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books.

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.

Heady days at the Stork Club in New York O'Hara, left, with Ernest Hemingway and club owner Sherman Billinsgley.

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.

O'Hara's novels seemed best suited for the lurid covers of drug store paperbacks.

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.

The poster for the original Broadway production of Pal Joey in 1940, a production that made Gene Kelly, Irish like O'Hara, a star.

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.

                                    Despite Gary Cooper's star power, the movie adaptation of Ten North Fredrick was not a success.

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 Jewishdo-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.

                                                O'Hara as critic--a crass curmudgeon masquerading in an Old School tie.

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. 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5148048131502110089.post-5852167720122563580

By: Patrick Murfin



 

Warp Corps folks at a Compassion for Campers distribution in Woodstock.

Compassion for Campers, the programthat provides supplies and gear for the McHenry County homeless who have no reliable shelter, has announceda revised schedule of  distributionsfor the remainder of the cold weather months.  The program is going to once a month service instead of every two weeks in February, March, and April.   

According to Compassion for Campers coordinator Patrick Murfin, “After discussions with our great volunteers and in recognition of the difficulties we have in reaching the homeless population we aim to serve, all distributions will be held at Warp Corps, 114 North Benton Street in Woodstock, which is both centrally located and has existing contacts and relations with the homeless community and the social service agencies that serve them.”  Client access to Warp Corps will be from the rear entrance on Jackson Street.



Distributions will be held on Tuesday afternoons from 3:30-5 pm on the following dates—February 16, March 16, and April 13. 

Clients will be Covid-19 screened with a temperature check and standard screening questions.  No one failing the test will be turned away but we will ask what they need and  supplies will be brought outto them.  All clients are required to be masked before entering the building and a mask will be provided to anyone who does not have one.  Clients will be admitted one at a time and no more will be allowed inside at any time than the location can safely accommodate with correct social distancing.  At the conclusion of the distribution all remaining supplies will be packed for storage and the host area will be cleaned and disinfected. 

Camping gear laid out at First Church in Crystal Lake on January 19.

The Compassion for Campers warm weather outdoor program will resume in May at church sites and will probably resume rotatingbetween Crystal Lake, Woodstock, and McHenry.  More information on that will be forthcoming.

Compassion for Campers is grateful to the Faith Leaders of McHenry County, volunteers from Ridgefield-Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church, and Warp Corps for their invaluable support.

Volunteers are still needed to help with the distribution, especially younger folksin good health.  Contact Patrick Murfin at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net or phone 815 814-5645 if you are available on Tuesday afternoons.  Donations can be made by sending a check made out to Tree of Life UU Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road, McHenry, IL 60050 with Compassion for Campers on the memo line. The donations are placed in a dedicated fundand not used for any other purpose.  Tree of Life also donates all of the administrative expenses of the program.

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Andrew Jackson First Used Troops to Quell a Strike

By: Patrick Murfin

For the last four years this portrait of President Andre Jackson hung in a place of honor in the Oval Office.  President Biden swiftly had it removed and replaced by Benjamin Franklin.

The recently departed in shame occupantof the White House hung a portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval OfficeOld 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.

Canal diggers called navvies  in the jargon of the early 19th Century did physically exhausting work for long hours in wretched weather,  Small wonder they rebelled.

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 weatherWages—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

U.S. Army Regulars turned out against the starving, ragged, and unorganized canal diggers were handsomely turned out in parade ground uniforms.

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 identifiedleaders” 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.

The route of the Chesapeake & Ohio.  The ditch was nearing Williamsport when the spontaneous strike broke out during harsh winter weather. 

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.

The Chesapeake & Ohio at Georgetown just outside of Washington in the post-Civil War era.  Trains using the iron bridge in the background were rapidly making the canal obsolete.

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. 

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Six Year Gone and a Centennial Birth Anniversary Pete Seeger Remains the Most Beloved American

By: Patrick Murfin

Over his long career Pete Seger signed thousands of notes and letters to fans, friends, family, aspiring musicians, activists, and folks who who had helped him in even the smallest of ways usually adding a cartoon of his long-neck banjo.  Those notes are some of the most treasured items many folks have.  

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. 

Peter Seeger (on father's lap) with his father and mother, Charles and Constance Seeger and brothers on a camping trip in 1921.

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 LedbetterLeadbelly—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

One iteration of the Almanac Singers perform in 1942--Woody Guthrie, Millard Lampell, Bess Haws, Seeger, Arthur Stern, and Sis Cuningham.

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.

Seeger married Toshie-Aline Ohra in 1943 while in the Army.  Besides true love the marriage was a political statement at a time when Japanese-Americans were languishing in internment camps                

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.”

The Weavers were one of the most popular recording artists in the late 1940s and early '50's.  Left to right Seeger, Lee Hayes, Ronne Gilbert, and Fred Hellerman.

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 McGheeSome years later PBS picked up the 39 shows for syndication on their affiliates and millions finally saw them.

Seeger featured many of his folk musician friends like Richard and Mimi Fariña on his public radio program Rainbow Quest.

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

Pete Seeger with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Rev. Ralph Abernathy and an unidentified teen a the Highlander Center where he adapted earlier versions into We Shall Overcome, the anthem of the Civil Rights Movement.

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.

Seeger on the sloop Clearwater sailing the Hudson River for the environment.

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 FameAcclaim 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.

Seeger with grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger and Bruce Springsteen at a concert at the Lincoln Memorial for Barack Obama's first inauguration.

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.

Seeger needed a walker, but he led a spontaneous march from his annual Clearwater benefit several blocks to the Occupy Wall Street encampment in 2012. 

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.

  

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Snow Flakes the Size of Watermelons Fell on Fort Keogh

By: Patrick Murfin

Enormous snow flakes fell on Ft. Keogh in Montana in 1887.


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.

It was a good thing troopers at Fort Keogh were issued warm, heavy buffalo robe coats and hats.  They needed them in January 1887 when the snow was significantly deeper than in this earlier 1880 photo.


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.

Charles M. Russell was a working Montana cow hand during the brutal winter of 1886-87.  He rose to fame on the basis of sketches and watercolors like this of the storm.  The Last of 5000 means the steer was a survivor of a vast herd killed by the storm--and it looks like his days are numbered.  Russell became one of the great Western artists, which was good because after the storm devastated ranching it was hard times for former cow pokes.

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.

 

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Piling Stones on the Prairie for Old Blue—A Murfin Memoir

By: Patrick Murfin

Old Blue's grave circa 1900.
 

My Mom, Ruby Irene Mills Murfin, was my Cub Scout Den Mother—eight or nine squirrelly, squirming boys in blue shirts and caps and yellow bandanas.  I was a Bearso that made me what, eight or nine years old?  That would make it about 1957 or’58.

Mom liked projects.  Big projects.  Projects that were not necessarily in her Den Mother’s manual.  Projects that helped us learn about the country around us, which happened to be the environs of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Once she had cut up a prized possession, an old mink coat that went out of style with Joan Crawford’s shoulder pads.  A furrier could have used the pelts for a fashionable stole or evening jacket, but she gave them to us.  We made Indian war shields trimmed in fur and lances dangling pelts like trophy scalps.  We all whooped it up, terrorized siblings and neighbor children, and massacred settlers to our hearts content for days.

We made all sorts of things from the pine cones she collected every summer on picnic trips along Happy Jack Road.

                            Ruby Murfin was going for glamor, not the Den Mother look in this photo.

But this day she heaved a peck basketfull of rocks she had collected from the bed of a fast, high country trout stream that my father fished the summer before.  They were smooth and oval or oblong and all rough edges long ago knocked off by some old glacier and millennia of rushing icy water.  They were about the size of a good big Idaho potato.  They had satisfying weight and heftin a boy’s hand.  Our minds naturally went to what we could heave them atand satisfactorily break because we were, after all, boys which meant we were as wild and vicious by nature as any pagan hoard.

But before we could commit mayhem, Den Mother Mom sat us in a circle and read to us from a picture bookOld Blue the Cow Pony by Sanford Tousey.  Blue was evidently a ranch horse of extraordinary talents.  Rounded up among the free and wild horses of the high plains he was an Appaloosa, a nimble, sure footed horse preferred by the Shoshoniand the far off Nez Percé.   He was tightly dappled.  From a light rump his coat shaded to blue-gray in the forequarters. Some folks called him a blue roan.

The front plate and title page of Stanford Tousey's Old Blue the Cow Pony

Once broken and tamed, he took to therigorous demands of working cattle—the intricate dance of cutting calves or steers from a herd for branding, running at full speed over broken ground as his rider threw his lariat, knowing just how to taut the rope so that the cowboy could leap from the saddle and throw the critter to the ground.  He had endurance for long days and nights of constant work and the speed to win the Sunday afternoon races at the home ranch.

Blue was also extremely loyal to his cowboy.  Together they rode through many seasons until the horse’s muzzle grew gray.  He was the stuff of cowboy folkloreyet he kept working.

A cowhand and his pony prepare to cut a steer from the herd.

Then one year—could it really have been 1886 the year of the Great Blizzard that buried the high plains from Colorado all the way up into Canada in several feet of white death?—Blue and his rider were caught in the high country near the Great Divide searching for strays when the storm hit.  As I recall the tale, if they could not make it to thesafety of the home ranch, they would surely die.

Through the raging storm with winds blowing icy pellets sideways, in the dreaded white out the man lost all sense of direction.  But Blue knew.  He kept plodding on breasting drifts up to his shoulders.  Two, maybe three days, the rider insensible and barely clinging to thesaddle.  When the storm finally broke they were in the midst of a featureless plain far from the Mountains. 


Fredrick Remington's Drifting Before the Storm captured the brutality of the Blizzar of '86 on men, horses, and cattle.

Finally they encountered riders from the home ranch not more than two or three miles away. When they reached Blue he gave up his burden to them, laid down and died.

They had to leave him where he lay.  The body quickly froze and was covered by drifting snow.

But as soon as it cleared that Spring the cowboys rode out with their shovels and buried Blue where he lay.  But now there was a new danger…the hungry coyotes that would find the shallow grave and dig it up.  So they began to haul stones from a distant stream to build a cairn over the grave to protect it the same as they would do for any fallen comrade.

A small pile a couple of feet high would have done the trick, but they wanted something more—a monument.  They built the pile high and fenced the plot with split rails.  And on a tall board stuck into the ground they painted, “Erected to the memory of Old Blue, the best old cow pony that ever pulled on a rope. By the cow punchers of the 7 X L Outfit Rest in Peace.”

When Mom finished telling the story to us she said, “That was a long, long time ago and some of the stones on Old Blue’s grave have fallen.  But we are going to help.  We are going to bring new stones!”

She let us each pick a stone and broke out the Tempera paints and brushes.  She had us each paint our rock and decorate it with the brands we had designed for ourselves the week before.  Mine was the P-standing-A-T, the capital letter A standing on the top of letters P and T with a leg on each.

At our next Den meeting Mom loaded us into my Dad’s Wyoming Travel Commission station wagon and drove out on the giant Warren Ranch.  We found the grave by a rutted dirt road not far from the Colorado line.  It was a raw and blustery day, the sky leaden, but the frozen ground clear of snow.  It must have been March.  The grave was there just like in the picture but the stones slipped along the ground on one side, the sign had faded, and the rail fencing long since replaced with wire.

One by one we each solemnly stepped forward and placed our stones on the pile.  Mom took some pictures with our old Kodak Brownie Box camera.  We may have said a prayer for Old Blue, or sung a song.  Or not.  We piled back into the station wagon and drove back to town in an odd silence, not a single boy trying to start a round of Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

It’s hard now to realize that almost as much time has passed since those Cub Scouts piled their stones as there was then from the time the ranch hands began the cairn 135 years ago.

And that’s the story.  Make of it what you will.  There may have been miracles involved.


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International Holocaust Remembrance Day Observed But Memories Dim

By: Patrick Murfin


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 dimmedPollsconstantly 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 atrocitiesHolocaust 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. 

Nazi paraphernalia and symbols were on display during the violent occupation of the U.S. Capitol by organized insurrectionists.  No one in the mob seemed a bit perturbed by this guy and his sweatshirt. 

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 stateTrump, 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.” 

The Hall of Names keeps the memories of individual Holocaust victims alive at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. 


Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day.  It will be observedcelebrated 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.

Some of the healthier inmates of Auschwitz after liberation by the Red Army.

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.

Emaciated survivors at Buchenwald, a major extermination camp liberated by American troops.

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 JerusalemOver 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.

Holocaust Remembrance was muddied last year a the World Holocaust Forum when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used the occasion to justify violent oppression of Palestinians and his apartheid regime, to attack all critics of his policy as anti-Semites, and to rouse support for an attack on Iran.

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.

  

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Mary Tyler Moore —Twice a TV Icon

By: Patrick Murfin

Mary Tyler Moore in her self-titled TV show.

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

Mary as the dancing elf Happy Hotpoint in Ozzie and Harriet commercials.

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

Mary as Laura Petrie with Dick Van Dyke in those practical but sexy capri pants and flats.

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 doorRichard 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.

Moore played a nun and Elvis Presley played a doctor with mixed feeling for each other in Change of Habit.

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.

Mary collecting Emmys with cast mates Ed Asner, Betty White, and Ted Knight.

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.

Mary tosses her cap in this Minneapolis bronze.

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.

Moore starred with Timothy Hutton in Robert Redford's Ordinary People, a dramatic tour de force.

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.

Mar Tyler Moore at a Broadway Barks event.

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 CityThe two also campaigned together to get the city animal control agencies and shelters adopt a no-kill policy.


☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

JFK Brought Live Pizzazz to Live TV Press Conferences

By: Patrick Murfin

President John F. Kennedy calling on a reporter in his first live TV press conference,  He won the room and the home audience, at that time mostly stay-at-home wives and mothers.

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 Newsmedia.  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.

Joe Biden's Press Secretary Jen Psaki began daily press briefings on his first full day in office. 

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.

Reporters jammed arout President Roosevelt's Desk during an off-the-record press conference.  Note the martini shaker on the President's desk--he often held these at the cocktail hour, good for the morning papers, not so good for afternoon dailies.

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. 

Even in the larger quarters of the Indian Treaty Room it was still a squeeze for the press.  Note the hand held film cameras recording the event and microphones placed around the room for questioners.  

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.

An angry Trump scolding an irritating reporter in one of his increcingly rare press conferences.  In this photo note the reporter using a cell phone to record--or perhaps even live--stream the session.  

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. 

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

A Know Nothing Chicago Mayor Provoked Beer Riots

By: Patrick Murfin

                        Dr. Levi Boone, Chicago's Know Nothing Mayor.

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.

The annex of Bridgeport to the City of Chicago suddenly added thousands of mostly Irish Catholic immigrants to the voting rolls setting off a Nativist panic that Levi Boon rode to the Mayor's office.

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.

Drunken Irishmen and Germans were depicted as stealing elections by Know Nothing/American Party supporters.

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 choicewhiskey.  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.

Boone's move to close working class taverns like this on Sundays led to the Logger Beer Riots.

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. 

Boone tried to protect the central business district from rioters by opening the swing bridges over the Chicago River like this one at Ashland shown later in the century.

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.

The Boone family plot at Rosehill Cemetery.  Levi's headstone far right.

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.

 

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Psst. They Made Nuclear Arms Illegal. Pass the Word

By: Patrick Murfin

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

This map shows the parties to the Treaty in green and the signatories in yellow as of the agreement becoming international law.

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 nationsIreland, 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 populationsanti-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.

Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was a series of protest camps established to protest nuclear weapons being placed at the Royal Air Force (RAF) base in Berkshire, England in 1981, a catalyst event for the international anti-nuke movement.  

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.

Ambassador. Elayne Whyte Gómez, Permanent Representative of Costa Rica to the United Nations Office in Geneva was President of the UN Conference sessions that drafted and adopted the Nuclear ban treaty.

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.

Global Parliamentarians, many of them in Western nations but not in governments, campaigned for the Treaty's adoption.

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.

A British demonstration at a Royal Navy base celebrated the Nuclear Weapons Ban Treaty.

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.


 

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The First American Novel Had Lust, Seduction, Incest, and Suicide

By: Patrick Murfin

The Power of Seduction: or, The Triumph of Nature, first edition with a sensational front piece. 


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?

Perez Morton, the real life weathy cad who ruined a woman, drove her to suicide, betrayed his wife, and walked away with no legal consequences.

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.

Sarah Wentworth (Althorp) Morton, the agrieved wife and sister to the disgraced and doomed mistress.

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 thingsendless 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 handsome Penguin Classics edition paired The Power of Sympathy with another early American novel and morality tail.  Despite the double dose of scandal and ruination almost nobody read the novel in any of several contemporary editions. 

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.  

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Barack Obama, Jimmy Carter, He Who Shall Not Be Named and Presidential Mercy

By: Patrick Murfin

Recipients of last minute pardons or sentence commutations from the former Resident indluded fascist mastermind Steve Bannon, below, and rappers Lil Wayne and Kodak Black, GOP fundraiser Elliott Broidy and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.

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.

Barack Obama was unusually active with clemency orders and pardons in his last days in office.

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.

On his first day in office President Jimmy Carter ordered a sweeping amnesty for Vietnam era draft resisters including those who had fled the country or gone underground.

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.  

More than half a million young men were either charged with draft evasion and resistance, or avoided or refused to serve in the Armed Forces but were never charged during the Vietnam War.

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. 

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Four Years Ago Today—Murfin Verse on a Very Different Inaugural

By: Patrick Murfin


 

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

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Lincoln’s Dangerous Path to Inauguration in a Time of Treason

By: Patrick Murfin
Lincoln's First Inaugural on the steps of the Capitol building with its unfinished dome. The big day that so many of us have been breathlessly awaiting, the inauguration of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, is finally at hand.  But it is hardly what we had hoped for.  More than 25,000 National Guard troops and thousands more from Federal law enforcement agencies, state, and local police are encamped in Washingtonand standing guard around the city after the insurrectionist siege of the Capitol building on January 6.  Bridges and highways into the city are closed, mile upon mile of fencing and barricades have been erected, most of the center of the city is on lock-down, the National Mall is closed and flags fill the spaces where huge crowdsw...
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Protesting an Inauguration—What a Difference Four Years Make

By: Patrick Murfin

The Women's March on Washington, January 21, 2020.

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.

The logo of the Women's March on Washington.

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.

Despite Trump's claim that his inauguration drew the biggest crowds in history--the first Big Lie of his administration--the Women's March dwarfed his pathetic turnout.

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.”

Women flying all the way from Alaska showed off their Pink Pussy hats on the flight.

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.

Marching with women of Tree of Life UU Congregation to the rallying point of the Chicago Women's March on January 21, 2017

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.

☐ ☆ ✇ WWUUD?

Compassion for Campers Has New Gear for the Unhoused in Crystal Lake

By: Patrick Murfin
First Church Crystal Lake will host Compassion for Campers distribution on January 19. With the support of The Faith Leaders of McHenry County, the host church, and Ridgefield-Crystal Lake Presbyterian Church volunteers Compassion for Campers, the program that provides supplies and gear for the McHenry County homeless who have no steady shelter, will hold a cold weather indoor distribution at First Church, 236 West Crystal Lake Avenuein Crystal Lake on Tuesday, January 19 from 3:30 to 5 pm.   “The distribution can be considered an extension of the National Day of Serviceassociated with the Martin Luther King Day holiday on Monday,”   according to Compassion for Campers coordinator Patrick Murfin.   “The unhoused who must spend a...
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Old Crank Explains Why the Martin Luther King Holiday Pisses Him Off

By: Patrick Murfin


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 DreamersFox 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 passivityLaw 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

Three years ago King's daughter Bernice called out reptilian fascist Steve Bannon attempt to hijack her father's legacy.

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.

New generations, new faces--same struggle.

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.


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