All of the familiar icons of American Halloween were present in this early 20th Century card. Note — After trick or treating, adult reveling, and movie slasher/horror showings were are all curtailed by the Coronavirus pandemic last year,  Halloween has come roaring back with pent up enthusiasm. Halloween traces its origin to the Celtic harvest festival Samhain.  It was one of the four festivals that fell between the Solstices and Equinoxes and which celebrated the natural turning of the seasons.  Samhain was particularly important because it was the gate in time to the death and starvation season of winter, as well a time to celebrate the recent harvest.  This association with the death of winter also extended to the spirit world, ...

The National Organization for Women's familiar logo had its origins when Betty Freidan doodled the initials NOW on a napkin in a meeting in her hotel room. On October 29, 1966 thirty charter members gathered in Washington , D.C. to formally launch a new Civil Rights organization dedicated to improving the status of women in all areas of society.   In no time at all National Organization for Women (NOW) was shaking things up and spearheading a new waveof feminist activism. The steam seemed to have gone out of the women’s movement after decades of struggle finally was rewarded with the adoption of The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1920.   Without a clear, unifying focusorganizations withered or went off in different direc...

Sgt. Bill Mauldin on the job in Italy covering the war from the front lines for Stars and Stripes .  He looked younger than his 22 years. When I was a boy I was obsessed with the great event of my parents’ lifetime—World War II.  It was hard not to be.  Almost every house I ever visited had at least one framed photo of a handsome young man in uniform proudly displayed.  Sometimes more.  Husbands, brothers, fathers.  Most came home.  Some didn’t The survivors of those photos were still mostly youngish men in the prime of their lives—my father and the fathers of almost all my friends.  They were serious, hard working men.  They were very busy doing things, sometimes big things.  To a man those I knew best, my father and u...

This week marked the third anniversary of the mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018.  I was asked to do the Chalice Lighting at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenrythe next day.    The topic for the morning was sanctuary.  I threw away what I had carefully prepared.  I was planning on reading this new poem instead which was totally inadequate to the situation but due to a scheduling mix up, I didn’t read it that day.  Instead, I read it for the first time a year later at the Tree of Life Coffee Houseat the church.  The poem also referenced other ugly, hateful episodes the same week.

Sanctuary in a Very Bad Week

Headlines: 

Trump Attempts to Erase Transgender Identity

Two Blacks Killed at Walmart by Angry Racist

14 Bombs Sent to Targets Denounced by Trump

11 Dead at Tree of Life Synagogue Mass Murder

 

Sacred shelter—A haven offered or sought, 

   a holy obligation and a desperate resort.

The Church once offered it to those fleeing

   the wrath of a king or war lord.

Today we are called to offer it to

   immigrants and refugees,

      the homeless and unwanted,

            the despised of color, gender, faith,

               abused women and families,

                  all the wretched.

 

Know this—Sanctuary can fail.

   Ask Thomas Becket, Ann Frank,

      the four little Girls of Birmingham,

            the frozen bum,

               the murdered wife,

                  the deported asylum seeker,

         the immigrant children in cages,

            the dead Jews of Tree of Life.

 

But failure does not cancel hope or duty.

   time to step up,

      to take our chances,

            to become a People of Sanctuary.

 

—Patrick Murfin

  

A few years ago, I noticed that Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath shared a birthday, October 27—1914 in Wales for him, 1932 in Boston for her.  They had little in common except that they wrote poetry—although poetry very different in form, theme, style, and substance—and died young each in a kind of pitiful squalor.  Each had crossed the ocean and died in the other’s country, a nice cosmic balance.

That year—2012—their common birthday also coincided with a new moon and where I was, at least, a howling storm of darkness. 

 

Sylvia Plath in a similar venue battling her invisible demons. 

You know me.  I am a sucker for cosmic coincidence.  So, I scribbled a poem for the occasion.

Writing poetry about poets, both infinitely more gifted than I, is an act of terminal hubris for which I shall be justly punished.  But here it is anyway.

 

 

How Black the Night

October 26, 2011—New Moon, Dylan Thomas and Sylvia Plath

 

Even the New Moon hides behind the howling clouds.

 

Happy Birthday Dylan—

Why did you not

            rage, rage against the dying of the light

            in that pool of your own black vomit

            at the Chelsea?

 

Happy Birthday Sylvia—

The same year, you dewy goddess,

            you emptied the medicine vials

            and crawled under your mother’s porch.

 

Not ships passing in the night,

                    but traversing the same black ocean

                    away from home

                    to something else.

 

Did you find what you were looking for

                    in worship and whiskey,

                    in broken love and madness?

 

As Dylan moldered under Laugharne,

                    Lady Lazarus, you wrote.

                   Dying

   Is an art, like everything else.

   I do it exceptionally well.

 

But laying your head in an oven

             is no art

             and posthumous poems

             no resurrection.

 

How black the night, dead poets,

                    how black the night?

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

 

Way back when dirt was new and I was an exceptionally earnest high school student, we learned that before there was William Shakespearethere was Geoffrey Chaucer, period.  In those distant days students were generally assigned at least a chunk of The Canterbury Tales to read and try and decipher.  We were told it was English, but it was Greek to most of us.  I remember that after some hours of labor, I got a hazy idea of what he was writing about.

English literature prior to the 20th Century apart from a medicinal dose of the Bard, a dollop of Dickens, and a few lines from a dreamy Romantic poethas long been banished from most high school curricula.  You might not even encounter Chaucer today in many introductory survey level English Lit. courses in College.  Certainly, you would have to be an English major and toiling in the 200-300 level courses before you really encounter him.

Perhaps things are better for Geoffrey in England. One hopes so.

 

An English inn similar to the one Chaucer wrote about in The Canterbury Tales and the Inne of the Shrews in Greenwich where he died.

I bring this up because October 25 mark the anniversary of Chaucer’s passing in 1400.  He was then the resident of the Inne of the Shrews in Greenwich.  After a lifetime as a mostly successful courtier, he had been out of favor and broke, but was recently restored to Royal favor.  But he may have been murdered by those who did not take kindly to his portrayal of the clergy, or so some stories have it.  None-the-less, he was respectable enough to be buried in an unimportant corner of Westminster Abby.  In later years other literary men asked to be interred near him in what eventually became the revered Poet’s Corner.

Chaucer's crypt in Westminster Abby was located in a dim, obscure corner of the church but became the nucleolus of the celebrated Poets' Corner, the final resting place of the British literary elite.

Today his fans celebrate his life on his death day because no one knows exactly when he was born.  It was about 1342 or ’43 in London.  He came from a Normanfamily whose name originally meant shoemaker.  But the family fortunes had risen.  His father was a successful wine merchant and minor courtier—deputy to the King’s Butler.  Nothing is known of his education except that it was quite good.  By the time young Geoffrey was ready to enter the service of the noble and highborn himself at about age 13 he could already read and write Latin, French, and Italian.

That career started with an appointment to the household of Elizabeth, Countess of Ulster and Prince Lionelin 1357.  Two years later he was a soldierin France fighting for King Edward IIIin the 100 Years War.  He was evidently a good and valuable soldier because after being capturedby the French he was paroled under the terms of the Treaty of Brétignyin 1360.  The King himself and other courtiers contributed to raising the substantial ransom of £16.  It was during his presumably not too-uncomfortable imprisonment that Chaucer completed, according to some sources his first literary work, Romaunt of the Rose, a translation from the French into the Anglo-Norman language of the court.

Around 1337 Chaucer apparently married very well indeed.  His wife, or at least the mother of his two sons, was Philippa Roe, the sister of the future wife of John of Gaunt, third surviving son of Edward III.  Due to this happy circumstance, he enjoyed the support and patronage of the Prince as long as he lived.

In 1369 he would re-work that earlier Romaunt of the Rose into vernacular English, what we now know as Middle English in The Book of the Duchess, dedicated to his sister-in-law after her death.

Such connection earned him more important and lucrative appointments.  From 1338-78 he traveled extensively in Europe on several diplomatic and commercial assignments.  He was said to have met the Italian Poet Petrarch on one such trip.  He was also exposed to Dante’s Divine Comedy, which was written in vernacular Italianrather than Latin.  This was supposedly an inspiration for Chaucer to work in vernacular English but as we have seen, he was already working in that language.

Back in England he was awarded the very lucrative post of Comptroller of the Customs and Subside of Wools, Skins, and Tanned Hides for the Port of London, just the kind of position where money could not help but fill the purse of a poor, but honest public servant.  He survived a charge of rape by Cecile Champaigne and was able to get her to withdraw her suit after a hefty private settlement. 

 

                        Chaucer's fortunes waxed and waned with those of his patron, John of Gaunt the Earl of Lancaster. 

He could survive scandal, but not the shifting sands of politics.  With John of Gaunt out of favor, so was he.  He lost his post and free housing.  But he moved to Kent, got a minor sinecure as Postmaster, and eventually was elected to Parliament.  Away from London and the demands of court Chaucer devoted himself more and more to literature.  He composed Troilus and Criseyde, a long poem based on a Trojan romance by the Italian poet Boccaccio. 

When his wife died and with John out of favor, Chaucer was sued for debt.  Several friends and acquaintances were executed.  But in 1389 John returned to power and influence over his nephew Richard II, who in turn favored the poet with a new appointment as Clerk of the King’s Works responsible for the upkeepand repair governmental buildings in and around London.  He was the beneficiary of Royal gifts and pensions in the 1390’s.

It was during this period that he did most of his work on his magnum opus, The Canterbury Tales.  The loose collection was said to have been inspired in some ways by Dante’s journeys through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.  But Chaucer’s tales were grounded in the real, even mundane world. 

 

From an illuminated manuscript of the tales.  The figure on horse back is thought to be Chaucer himself.

A group of 30 pilgrims gather for a journey to the grave and shrine of Thomas à Becket in an Inn much like the one in which Chaucer himself resided.  It was a remarkably diverse group cutting across the rigid class lines of England at the time.  Included in the group and telling their stories at the behest of the inn keeperwere a knight, a monk, a prioress, a plowman, a miller, a merchant, a clerk, and an oft-widowed wife from Bath.  The stories, some of them borrowed from earlier tales and sources, were often humorous and sometimes bawdy.

Chaucer never lived to complete the work.  Perhaps because he was interrupted by another episode of political intrigue. 

After Chaucer’s patron John died, Richard II disinherited his son, Henry ofBolingbrook.  Henry returned from exile in France in 1399 to supposedly re-claim his lands and titles.  He quickly gathered a large army against the king.  He deposedRichard and seized the crown.  Chaucer was reportedly in Henry’s service at the time, ever loyal to the line of John of Gaunt.  As Henry IV the new king rewarded such loyal service with a generous increase in his annuity. 

But he never received either lands or title and remained until he died the next year, as he had lived, a commoner with uncommon connections to Royalty.

For those who may have forgotten—and for those who have never seen it, here is a sample of Chaucer’s most famous work:

The Pilgrims.

Here begins the Book of the Tales of Canterbury

 

Whan that aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

Tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the ram his halve cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(so priketh hem nature in hir corages);

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,

To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;

And specially from every shires ende

Of engelond to caunterbury they wende,

The hooly blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

           

Bifil that in that seson on a day,

In southwerk at the tabard as I lay

Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage

To caunterbury with ful devout corage,

At nyght was come into that hostelrye

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye,

Of sondry folk, by aventure yfalle

In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,

That toward caunterbury wolden ryde.

The chambres and the stables weren wyde,

And wel we weren esed atte beste.

 And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,

So hadde I spoken with hem everichon

 That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,

And made forward erly for to ryse,

To take oure wey ther as I yow devyse.

           

But nathelees, whil I have tyme and space,

 Er that I ferther in this tale pace,

Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun

To telle yow al the condicioun

Of ech of hem, so as it semed me,

And whiche they weren, and of what degree,

And eek in what array that they were inne;

And at a knyght than wol I first bigynne.

 

—Geoffrey Chaucer 

Annie Edson Taylor, her barrel, and Niagara Falls. America fell in love with stunts and daredevils almost from the beginning.  The first American celebrity, after all was not an actor or musician, but Sam Patch, a young Yankee who leaped—twice—into roaring base of Niagara Falls from a high platform in 1829, only to die trying a similar stunt at the Falls of the Genesee River a few weeks later.  In 1859 the French acrobat Jean Francois Gravelet, better known as the Great Blondin crossed the gorge above the Falls on a tightrope in a series of increasingly spectacular performances incorporating numerous tricks.  Over the next three decades several others would duplicate the feat—or die trying. Sam Patch became America's first celeb...

The Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road in McHenry, Illinois has appointed a new interim Music Director to aid the congregation in providing quality musical programing while it continues to conduct Sunday morning services via Zoom due to the continued of the Coronavirus pandemic.  Although the congregation hopes to return to in-person services as soon as it is safe and possible, that is weeks or months away.

Dr. Jie Yi is currently the Music Directorof the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Huntington, New Yorkand will continue in that position as well. 

Jie holds a Doctor of Music Arts degreein conducting from Manhattan School of Music. He is the authorof Chinese for Singers, the first comprehensive guide for Western singers to use in singing Chinese texts. Jie conducted Messe de Minuit by Charpentier, Musikalische Exequien by Schütz, and Missa O quam gloriosum by Victoria at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in 2018 and 2019. He also conducted Handel’s coronation anthem Let Thy Hand Be Strengthened at Riverside Church in 2018. In 2015, he made his Carnegie Hall debut, conducting Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Cantata. He was Chorus Masterand Assistant Conductor at the Shanghai Opera from 2008 to 2013.

Jie is a recipient of the Asian Culture Council Fellowship (2011) and the U.S. China Cultural Institute Fellowship for Young Conductors (2006). As pianist and vocal coach, he performed at La Lingua della Lirica Festival in Italy(2015–16) and performed Bellini’s opera I Capuletti e i Montecchiat Manhattan School of Music (2013).

Jie will be able to work remotely from Huntington because he is especially adept at the technical aspectsof creating videos blending the voices of many individual singers recording their parts from their homes. He has already begun work with members of the Tree of Life Choir and together they expect to create music for services two times a month and prepare a Christmas/Yule/Solstice/Winter holiday music service in December.  He will work closely in planning services with Tree of Life’s Interim Minister, the Rev. Jenn Gracen.

The congregation’s choir is one of the most highly regarded in McHenry County and is known for its wide repertoireincluding not only hymns and other traditional worship music but also jazz, pop, folk, Broadway, international music, and classical. They toured internationally to Romania (Transylvania) in 2016 and have performed in both McHenry County choral music programs and with regional Unitarian Universalist choirs.  The ensemble includes several outstanding soloists as well.

Former Tree of Life Music Director Tom Steffens led the Choir in the annual Christmas/Winter Holiday concert in 2015.  This year Dr. Jie Li and the Choir will prepare Zoom program.

Tree of Life is also still conducting a searchfor a permanent Music Director who will be able to lead the choir and coordinate other music as the congregation returns to live, in-person worship.

Tree of Life Sunday services are currently held via Zoom at 10:45 am.  Visit the congregation at https://treeoflifeuu.org/ for links to the services. 

Yesterday Facebook's memory dredge hauled up a status report from way back in 2010.  I had completely forgottenabout it but after years of ever increasing American polarization and its attendant personal trauma I found it more relevant than ever.  It was also found versemaking a poem simply by breaking up the lines exactly as originally written.  I have discovered of few of the over they years.  At least they are shortand sweet and don’t drone on forever.

William Carey's sketch of the Old Poet reading.

An Encounter

Discovered in a Facebook status from

October 21, 2010

 

Pleasantries with a wave and nod acquaintance of some years. 

Don’t know each other’s last names.

You know—weather, sports, a bit of family trivia.

A passing word betrays an affiliation. 

The eyes narrow, the jaw sets just so. 

In an instant the other, the enemy, the sub-human. 

Whose eyes, whose jaw?

 

—Patrick Murfin

  

Today is International Day of the Nacho, so declared under somewhat murky circumstances and murkier authority for this date in 1975 after the tragic death of the delicacy’s inventor, Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya at the age of 81.  This celebration is not to be confusedwith a strictly U.S. National Nacho Day observed annually on November 6 promoted by the cheese industry. I know.  It comes as a stunning surprise to gourmetsand foodies that nachos are not steeped in traditional Mexican cuisine. A menu from El Moderno in the 1950's. The story goes that Anaya was laboring as the maître d’hôtel —although I am relatively certain that no one ever called the front house managerby that title—at El Moderno Café in Piedras Negras, Coahuil...

It was the most brutal and flagrant on-field racist attack in NCAA college football history.  The irrefutable evidence was splashed on front pages across the country.  The leading contender for the 1951 Heisman Trophy was severely injured and knocked out of a game causing his undefeated team to lose its only game of the season.  Yet no action was taken against the player who assaulted Johnny Bright, the coach who ordered the hit and drilled the assault in practice, or the administrationwhich apparently approved, defended, and covered up the attack.  In fact, for decade after decade the University denied any wrongdoing and refused to apologize to the wounded player or the team they cheated.  It was not until September 28, 2005 that an Oklahoma State University President acknowledged wrongdoing in a letter to the President Drake University.  The apology came almost 54 years after the assault and 22 years after the victim’s death.

Johnny Bright was born to a working class African American family on June 11, 1930 in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He was raised with three brothers and a sister by a single mother.  At the city’s Central High School, he was an excellent student and lettered in football, basketball, and track and field, leading his football team to a city title in 1945, and helped the basketball team to two state tournament Final Four appearances.  He also played local league softball and was a successful amateur boxer.

Bright was one of the most heavily recruited high school athletesin the nation when he graduated in 1947.  He accepted a scholarship at Big Ten powerhouse Michigan State University (MSU.)  It was not a good fit.  As a freshman he was unhappy with the direction of the football program and disappointed that coaches seemed to actively discourage “wasting time” on academics instead of concentrating on football. 

Bright dropped out of MSU and accepted a track and field scholarship at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa a smaller but prestigiousuniversity.  Bright’s scholarship allowed him to try out for the football and basketball squads, but because he was a transfer he was redshirted for football in his freshman year.  During his college career he letteredin all three sports.

Drake competed in the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC), then considered a second tier college conference.  Within the conference Drake was a traditional powerhouse.  Once he became eligible for varsity play in his sophomore year, Bright quickly helped the program step up to a whole new level.  In 1949, his sophomore year he rushedfor 975 yards and threw for another 975 to lead the nation in total offense.   The Drake Bulldogs finished their season at 6–2–1.  In Bright’s junior year as a halfback/quarterback he rushed for 1,232 yards and passed for 1,168 yards, setting an NCAA record of 2,400 yards total offense and again led the team to a 6–2–1 record.

Early in his freshman year Bright became the first Black player to compete against MVC rival Oklahoma A&M at Lewis Field in Stillwater.  A&M, which would later become Oklahoma State University, had just, extremely reluctantly, become officially integrated that year.   Bright, then unknown, had competed without incident or controversy and led his team to a victory over the Aggies.  In his sophomore year Drake hosted the contest between the two teams and once again Bright had romped over the Oklahoma team.

In his senior year Johnny Bright was leading all college players in total yardage and both passing and rushing as a half back/quarter back for Drake University and was the odds on favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.

Before the beginning of the 1951 season and Bright’s senior year, he had become a genuine national star.  He was rated by sports writers as the hands down favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.  As his team began to roll up victory after victory, Bright became an open target at A&M.  The student newspaper, The Daily O’Collegian, and the Stillwater News Press, reported that Bright was a marked man, and several A&M students were openly bragging that Bright “would not be around at the end of the game.”  A&M Coach Jennings B. Whitworth, an Arkansas native, exhorted his team repeatedly during practices to “get that Nigger!”  He ran special drills featuring his toughest defenseman, tackle Wilbanks Smith practicing how to do just that.

On the day of the game, Bright led a 5-0 team and was the nation’s leading collegiate scorer.  But in the first ten minutes of the A&M game bright was knocked unconscious three times by Smith.  The third time, after Bright had handed the ball off to Drake fullback Gene Macomber, and well behind the play, Smith smashed into his face with his elbow, breaking Bright’s jaw.  Despite the pain, Bright was able to stay in the game long enough to complete a 61-yard touchdown pass to Drake halfback Jim Pilkington a few plays later.  But he was unable to play after the first quarter.  For the first time in his college career Bright had less than 100 yards total offense.  Without their star player, the Bulldogs fell to the Aggies 27-10.

No penalty was called on Smith for the flagrantly late hit.  After the brouhaha over the attack reached national proportions the MVC refused to take any action.  A&M President Oliver Willham denied anything happened even after evidence of the incident was published nationwide.  Drake withdrew from the Conference in protest.

The evidence that caught the nation’s attention was a series of photographs taken byDes Moines Register cameramen John Robinson and Don Ultang.  They had picked up on rumors sweeping the stadium that day that Bright would be targeted.  They set up their cameras specifically to follow him in play.  In six shots they captured the whole sequence of the play from Bright’s hand-off to Smith’s elbow smashing into his face which ran on the front page of the next day’s paper.  The photos were so dramatic that they also ended up on the cover of Life magazine.  Robinson and Ultang won the Pulitzer Prize for their effort.

The Register followed up with an in-depth investigation by reporter Bob Spiegel who interviewed many spectators at the game who confirmed the threats circulating and quoting comments from a A&M player on the bench which confirmed that the attack had been planned and drilled.

The NCAA investigated the incident but took no action against Smith or A&M, much to Drake’s outrage.  They did tweak rules about late hits and illegal blocking and established a new rule requiring ball handling players wear helmets with face guards.

                                                    In a press photo Bright showed his jaw wired shut.

After the game Bright’s jaw was wired shut.  He most likely also suffered a concussion, although those kinds of head injuries were not well understood at the time.  He was only able to see limited action in the team’s remaining three games, but he earned 70 percent of the yards Drake gained and scored 70 percent of the Bulldogs’ points over the whole season anyway.  The limited action in the last games probably costBright the Heisman.  He finished fifth in voting anyway.

Bright was taken fifth in the NFL Draft, picked by the Philadelphia Eagles.  Bright would have been the first Black on the team.  He was concernedthat he would not be well receivedby the many Southerners on the team.  He was not eager, he told people later, to be “football’s Jackie Robinson.” 

Instead after playing in the post-season East-West Shrine Game and the Hula Bowl, Bright unexpectedly accepted an offer from the Calgary Stampeders of the Western Interprovincial Football Union, the precursor to the West Division of the Canadian Football League, leading the Stampeders and the WIFU in rushing with 815 yards his rookie season.  In his third season in Canada, Bright was traded to the Edmonton Eskimos.  He would go on to win three Gray’s Cup Championships with the team, be elected CFL’s Most Outstanding Player in 1959, and establish numerous offensive records in a 13 year long pro career.  When he retired in 1964 he was the League’s all-time leading rusher with, had five consecutive 1,000 yard seasons, and led the CFL in rushing four times.  He is a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame, the Missouri Valley Conference Hall of Fame, the Edmonton Eskimos Wall of Honour, the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame, and the Des Moines Register Iowa Sports Hall of Fame.

After college Bright declined to be the "football Jackie Robinson" in the NFL and instead  played in Canada where he became the Canadian Football League's record setting Most Outstanding Player and a Canadian Football Hall of Fame honoree.

But the football honors were only part of the remarkable legacy of Johnny Bright.

Like most Canadian football players of the era, Bright held down a full time off-season job.  Using his Drake Bachelor of Science degree, Bright became an Edmonton school teacher.  Over the years he turned down several offers from the NFL because it would have meant giving up teaching.  Bright eventually became principal of D.S. Mackenzie and Hillcrest Junior High Schools in Edmonton.  In profound gratitude for the opportunities Canada provided him, Bright became a citizen in 1962.

Bright was frequently asked about what had become known as the Johnny Bright Incident.  He expressed surprisingly little bitterness toward Wilbanks Smith.  While acknowledging that there was “no way it couldn’t have been racially motivated…What I like about the whole deal now, and what I’m smug enough to say, is that getting a broken jaw has somehow made college athletics better. It made the NCAA take a hard look and clean up some things that were bad.”

Bright died of a massive heart attackon December 14, 1983 at the age of only 53, at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, while undergoing surgery to correct a knee injury suffered during his football career. He was survived by his wife and four children.

Bright's other legacy as an outstanding and beloved teacher and principal was honored by this Edmonton school.

In 2006, the football field at Drake Stadium, in Des Moines was named in Bright’s honor.  Four years later his second career was recognized with the opening of Johnny Bright School, a kindergarten through grade 9 facility in Edmonton.

And what of the villains?  There seems to be some kind of karma and rough justice in the case of Coach Whitworth.  He left Oklahoma A&M after four years as head coach in 1954 with a losing 22–27–1 record. Then he went on to coach his alma mater, the University of Alabama from 1955 to 1957 where he posted miserable a 4–24–2 record that included a 14-game losing streak from 1955 to 1956.  He was firedand replaced by the legendary Bear Bryant.  Whitworth could only get an assistant job at Georgia, where he worked for one year.  He died in 1960 at the age of 52.

Wilbanks Smith was said to have had a successful career in engineering and to have been devoted tocommunity service.  He was said to have taken “personal responsibility for the incident” mainly to deflect criticism of his coach, team, and the University but he never expressed any regretat injuring Bright or made any attempt to contact him or make amends. 

With typical grace, Bright shrugged it off, saying he felt “null and void” about Smith, but adding “The thing has been a great influence on my life. My total philosophy of life now is that, whatever a person’s bias and limitation, they deserve respect. Everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs.”

  

                                        Peter Max became famous for his bright colorful psychedelic posters in the 1960s. If you are a certain age and you put on some vintage vinyl and close your eyes to visualize the Sixtiesit is highly likely that an image that will pop into your head like an acid flashback is a Peter Max poster with all of its vivid colors, bold lines, celestial imagery, and general wistfulness.  Even if you know better, you can’t help yourself.  No artist of the era—not even the relentlessly self-promoting Andy Warhol—was more ubiquitous and iconic. Yet despite enormous technical mastery and inventiveness, Max is an artist many love to hate—even when they can’t get his images out o...

A typical Colonial shoe shop--a Master, journeymen, or possibly an apprentice.  Every shoe or boot made by hand with minimal tools and a small investment in leather.  Cobblers required much less capital and equipment than many other trades making it easier for craftsmen to set up shop.  According to some sources the first labor unions in the English Colonies of North America were organized in Boston on this date in 1648.  Close but no cigar.  In fact, it is wrong on at least a couple of different counts.   First, it was not the date that shoemakers and coopers first organized.  That had happened earlier.  It was the first time any organizations of craftsmenwere legally recognized with an official Charter to allow them to operate...

The body of one of 12 FDNY firefighters killed is removed through the 23rd street drugstore entrance of the deadly fire.  Fifty-five years ago, on October 17, 1966 members of New York Fire Department (FDNY) responded to a roaring blaze in the Flatiron District.   Twelve of them didn’t get out alive.   In the annals of the Department the 23rd Street Fire was the deadliest day until the World Trade Center Towers collapsed on September 11, 2001. The   fire was first reportedat 9:36 pm at the American Art Galleries in a four-story brownstoneat 7 East 22nd Street.   When the firefighters first pulled up the intensity of the smoke and heat made it impossible to enter through the 22nd Street side of the building.   Instead, they attacke...

For those of us who grew up in North America, the Monarch was the most recognizable of all butterflies.  Large and brilliantly marked with a rich orange/gold and black pattern they could be seen by the millions twice a year in their migrations between Canada and a single Mexican forest region.  Their metamorphosis from a milkweed munching caterpillarspinning their cocoons to emergenceas a regal flyer was a staple of grade school science curricula.  But all of that is under a dire threat as populations collapse with the rapid alterations in their critical Mexican nesting grounds due to global climate change and threat to their essential milkweed due to dramatic climate change all along their long migration routes. 

 

Nearly ten years ago a report on the Canadian Broadcasting System (CBC) explained:

 

Monarch butterflies appear headed for a perhaps unprecedented population crash, according to scientists and monarch watchers who have been keeping tabs on the species in their main summer home in Eastern and Central North America.

There had been hope that on their journey north from their overwintering zone in Mexico, the insect’s numbers would build through the generations, but there’s no indication that happened. Only a small number of monarchs did make it to Canada this summer to propagate the generation that has now begun its southern migration to Mexico, and early indications are that the past year's record lows will be followed by even lower numbers this fall. Elizabeth Howard, the director and founder of Journey North, a citizen-scientist effort that tracks the migrations of monarchs and other species, says one indicator for the robustness of the monarchs is the number of roosts they form in late August and September, something Journey North monitors throughout the migration periods. “During migration, monarchs form overnight roosts in places like Point Pelee or Long Point [in southern Ontario], where the monarchs are congregating before crossing the Great Lakes, places where people generally see huge overnight clusters of monarchs gathering.” Howard told CBC News that at this time in 2011, Journey North had already received 55 reports of roosts, followed by just 25 in 2012. This year, only 17 reports of roosts came in. “This is really a proxy for peak migration because this is where people see really large numbers of monarchs and we’re just not getting the reports, it’s looking pretty bad,” she says.

The monarch butterflies that are now flying south are the fourth generation of those that left the few hectares in central Mexico where millions of monarchs spend the winter.

Several years ago, while I was working as a school custodian in Cary, Illinois, the visit of a lone Monarch on its southward migration, a pioneer, inspired a poemthat was included in my 2004 Skinner House Books collection We Build Temples in the Heart and was also anthologized by Edward Searl in his compilation In Praise of Animals A Treasury of Poems, Quotations, and Readings.

Some of the science is fuzzy—a single insect does not make the whole epic journey, it takes four generations—but the sense of awe and wonder remains. 

And to think we may be the last generation to experience it…

Migrations

 

Later they will come,

            the legions of Canada

            on the edge of cutting cold,

            backs scraping stratus slate,

            arrayed in military majesty,

            dressed in ranks and counting cadence,

            squadron after squadron, an air armada,

            single minded in their migratory mission.

 

But now,

            when September sun lingers and

            lengthened shadows hint ferocity to come,

            the first glints of gold and black flit

            with seaming aimlessness,

            pushed here and there by the faintest zephyr,

            the pioneers of a nation,

            descended from Alberta prairies

            and Minnesota Lakes.

 

One will linger

            briefly on my shoulder

            if I am blessed, then be off again.

 

Then, if she is lucky

            she will pause to rest with

            the millions along the bend of the Rio Grande

            before finding a winter’s respite of death

            amid deep Mexican forests.

 

And it will turn again next spring—

egg to larva,

            larva to silken slumber

                        pupa to Monarch

                                    Monarch to migration.

 

            Oh ye proud Canada,

                        mute your boastful blare—

the mighty bow before true courage.

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

The evolution of Lincoln's beard.  The clean shaven Lincoln of the campaign was, as Grace Bedell observed, gaunt and homely.  His first photo with whiskers taken weeks after the election, and the full Lincoln we have come to know as he neared inauguration.

All right everybody let’s all gather ‘roundand sing a rousing happy birthdayto Abe Lincoln’s Beard.  On October 15, 1860 an 11 year old girl wrote the famous letter that got Lincoln to put away his razor making this the anniversary of the most famous whiskers since Jesus.

Grace Bedell as an attractive young woman in the early 1870's.  The story of her letter to a homely candidate had already entered Lincoln lore and made her famous.

Grace Bedell was the daughter of a supporter from Westfield, a western New York village on the shores of Lake Erie now best known as the home of the Welch’s Grape empire.  Grace wasn’t too impressed by a picture of the candidate that her father brought home.  She wrote:

Dear Sir

My father has just home from the fair and brought home your picture and Mr. Hamlin’s. I am a little girl only 11 years old, but want you should be President of the United States very much so I hope you won’t think me very bold to write to such a great man as you are. Have you any little girls about as large as I am if so give them my love and tell her to write to me if you cannot answer this letter. I have got 4 brother's and part of them will vote for you any way and if you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husband’s to vote for you and then you would be President. My father is going to vote for you and if I was a man I would vote for you too but I will try to get every one to vote for you that I can I think that rail fence around your picture makes it look very pretty I have got a little baby sister she is nine weeks old and is just as cunning as can be. When you direct your letter direct to Grace Bedell Westfield Chatauque County New York

I must not write any more answer this letter right off Good bye

Grace Bedell

When the presidential candidate received the letter he was in a quandary.  In the whole history of the Republic there had never been a President with a beard.  Martin Van Buren and his impressive muttonchops had come close, but then he had been run out of Washington after one term for being a dandy and a fop.  And if there is one thing a self-proclaimed Man of the Peoplecannot afford to be it is a fop.  And he had to remember that it was the very first log cabin candidate, William Henry Harrison—who had not really been born in a log cabin at all—that sent the Red Fox of Kinderhook packing back to Albany.

On the other hand, facial hair was becoming all the rage back East, and not just the sign of an ignorant backwoodsmanwho couldn’t afford arazor. 

But if he grew one, what sort should it be?  A stylish Imperial like Louis Napoleon and his old client the President of the Illinois Central Railroad George McClellan? Neck whiskers like Horace Greeley?  The full patriarchal bush a la John Brown? No, none of those would do.  And Lincoln wasn’t even sure he could raise a decent beard at all.  Still, the girl had a point.  He wrote her back:

My dear little Miss

Your very agreeable letter of the 15th is received—I regret the necessity of saying I have no daughters—I have three sons—one seventeen, one nine, and one seven years of age—They, with their mother, constitute my whole family—As to the whiskers, having never worn any, do you not think people would call it a piece of silly affection if I were to begin it now?

Your very sincere well wisher

A. Lincoln

Despite the non-committal nature of the letter, Lincoln decided to give growing whiskers a try.  By the time he left Springfield for his train trip to Washington, he was sprouting a semi-respectable stubble.

The train made a whistle stop in Westfield.  As was his custom the President-elect stepped to the rear platform to address the crowd.  He asked if Grace Bedell was present and called her forward.  He gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek and told the crowd that she was the inspiration for his new look.

Lincoln and his beard were photographed many times over the next few years.  He settled on a middle-ground kind of beard—a strip of hair that hugged his jaw and chin but still required the attention of a razor to his upper lip, cheeks, and neck.  It aged with him.  Sometimes it was a little longer, sometimes he let the fuzz on his cheeks fill in.  At least once he shaved a little between his sideburns and chin. 

Grace was right, by the way.  He did look better with it. 

 

Fall nights are getting cooler and rain is on the way.  Compassion for Campers, the programthat provides camping gear and equipment to the homeless, will have what is needed by those who are sleeping outdoors including warm clothing at the Community Empower Shower event this Friday, October 15 at Willow Crystal Lake, 100 S. Main Street from 10 amto 2 pm.  The following distribution will be held there on Friday, November 5 during the same hours.

Compassion for Campers also has gear available at Warp Corps, Benton Streetin Woodstock, for daily walk-up availability. 

Community Empower Shower provides wide-ranging services for the homeless and those who are facing housing crisis and are held on the first and third Fridays of each month.  

This week and on every third Friday Algonquin Township if providing shuttle bus service to the event from the Fox River Grove Metra Station at 9:30 am and the Crystal Lake Jewel/Osco at 9:45. The shuttle will leave Willow Crystal Lake for the pick-up spots a 1:30 pm.

This week showers will be offered inside the building.

Organizers have included even more groups, agencies, and services for the homeless population.  The Empowerment Shower is a collaborative effort of many organizations and agencies including the Crystal Lake Food Bank, Consumer Credit Counseling, Family Health Partnership Clinic, Home of the Sparrow, Live 4 LALI, McHenry County Housing Authority, Pioneer Center, Prairie State Legal Services, Salvation Army, St. Vincent DePaul Society, Veterans Path to Hope, Willow Crystal Lake, and Warp Corps.

Services offered at no cost include:

 

Showers

Laundry Facilities

Camping Supplies including Tent, Stove, Sleeping Bags

    Toiletries/Personal Care items

Clothing

Onsite Meal

Food

Haircuts

Transportation

Assistance obtaining IDs, birth certificates, Social Security cards

Assistance with SSI/SSDI (Disability)

Assistance with Medical coverage, SNAP, TANF

Medical Access—Doctor care, Covid-19 vaccine

Debt Management Services/Advocacy

Shelter and Housing Referrals and Linkages

Domestic Violence support

Veteran’s Services

Substance Use/Harm Reduction Tools and Support

Mental Health, Spiritual, and Social Support Referrals

 

Compassion for Campers founder and super volunteer Sue Rekenthaler with some of the camping gear offered--sleeping pads, stoves and fuel, rain ponchos, and tents.  Much more is available for free.

Contributions to support Compassion for Campers are urgently needed to continue to purchase supplies for both of the locations sending a check made out to the 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 the administrative expenses of the program so 100% of all donations go directlyto client assistance.

For more information contact Compassion for Campers coordinator Patrick Murfin at 815 814-5645 or email pmurfin@sbcglobal.net.

 

Architect James Hoban's elevation sketch of the President's Palace after revisions to the original plan were ordered by George Washington.

On October 13, 1792 the cornerstone of the President’s Palace was laid in the virtual wilderness of the Federal District designated as the future Capitol of the infant United States.  President George Washington was in the temporarycapitol of Philadelphia and did not dignify the occasion, as he had when the cornerstone of the Capitol Building was laid by presidingin his Apron for a full Masonic ceremony.  Indeed there was no ceremony at all.

With the cornerstone in place the workforce of mostly slaves hired from their Virginia masters, Black freemen from the Georgetown area, and a handful of immigrant artisans began digging the foundations.  FewAmerican citizens with full rights were ever employed on the project which took eight years to complete at a cost of $232,372—$ 2.8 million in 2007 dollars.  To save money, common brick was used to line the exterior walls which were then faced by sandstone blocks.  The stone masonry was largely the work of Scottish craftsmen employed by the architect, Irishman James Hoban.

                Irishman James Hoban, architect.

Although some interior workand details remained unfinished, the house was deemed habitable when the Capitol was transferred to Washington City.  President John Adams and his dismayed wife Abigail officially moved in on November 1, 1800, just days before the election that would send him packing the next year and leave the building to his archrival, Thomas Jefferson.

Jefferson, an amateur architect of some accomplishment, may have had mixed feeling about the building himself.  He had anonymously submitted one of nine designs competing for final selection for the building.  He was disappointed when Washington selected Hoban’s design.

Of course, that competition would not have been possible without the delicate political maneuvering that located the future capitol city on the banks of the Potomac instead of the bustling commercial centers of New Yorkor Philadelphia.

 It was also a tribute to the enormous prestige and influence of the first President.  The authority to establish a federal capital was provided in Article I,Section Eight of the Constitution, which designated a “District (not exceeding ten miles square) as may, by cession of particular states, and the acceptance of Congress, become the seat of the government of the United States.”

In what later became known as the Compromise of1790, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Jefferson with the benign approval of Washington, came to an agreement that the federal government would assume war debtcarried by the states, on the condition that the new national capital would be in the South.  The precise location, personally selectedby Washington, was designated in the Residence Act on July 19, 1790.

Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French engineer who laid out the city plan for Washington, envisioned a grand European style palace on the opposite end of a grand boulevard from the Capitol.  Republican virtue demanded a much simpler residence.

Washington commissioned French military engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant to lay out the future city.  He envisioned the spokes-of-a-wheel plan with broad ceremonial avenues and the Capitol Building and President’s house on opposite ends of one such grand boulevard. 

At the site selected by the President, L’Enfant sketched in the footprint of a truly grand palace on the European scale for the President.  His building would have been five times larger than the one that was eventually built.  Those plans quickly proved to be impractical—both too expensiveand too difficult to acquire the necessary amount of building stone.  It was also politically unacceptable to those who demanded that the new government be housed in edifices of sensible republican simplicity.

As Secretary of State, Jefferson advertised the architectural competition which he entered anonymously.  The final selection was to be made by the official commission overseeing construction of public buildings in the new capital, but in fact it was Washington who personally selected the design submitted by Hoban.

Hoban was one of the few—some say the only—trained architects in the county.  He had emigrated from Ireland after the Revolution and first established a practice in Philadelphia.  But after moving to North Carolina, he began to get commissions for important public buildings, like the Charleston County Courthouse which Washington saw and admired on his presidential tourof the Southern states.  He personally invited Hoban to submit a design to the contest.

Leinster House, now seat of the government of the Republic of Ireland in Dublin was an inspiration for Hoban's design.

For inspiration, Hoban drew on the Georgian country houses of the Anglo-Irish aristocracyand particularly on Leinster House, the Dublin seat of the Duke of Leinster and destined to become the home of the Irish Parliament in the 20th Century.  Despite winning the competition, Washington demanded substantial changes from his architect.  He ordered the elevation changed from three to two floors, but that the dimensions of the building be expanded by 30% and include a large ceremonial space for balls and public receptions—the commodious East Room. Hoban’s surviving drawings reflect these changes—the originals submitted for the competition having been lost.

Upon completion the porous sandstone was sealed with a whitewash consisting of a mixture of lime, rice glue, casein, and lead.  This belies the popular story that the building was only painted white to cover the scorch and smoke damage from the burning of Washington by the British during the War of 1812.  Informal references to the building as the White House have been found as early as 1811.  It is possible that the original whitewash was fading or dirtiedby the time the British put a torch to the building.  At any rate, the fresh white paintapplied during the restoration undoubtedly contributed to the informal use of the name.

A painting of the President's House in 1814 before it was burned by the British in the War of 1812.  Note its already white color and its relative isolation in the still rustic village of Washington.

Jefferson rejected the name Presidential Palace preferred by Adams as too aristocratic.  Under his administration it was commonly simply called the President’s House and for the next century the house was officially named the Executive Mansion.  Theodore Roosevelt changed the official designation to the White House in 1901.

The building has undergone many modifications over the years, starting with the colonnades that Jefferson had constructed out from each side of the house to screen the stables, greenhouses, and domestic outbuildings—including slave quarters—from view from Pennsylvania Avenue.  The southportico was constructed in 1824 during the James Monroeadministration and the north porticowas built six years later.  Both followed plans originally drawn by Hoban. 

The earliest known photo of the Executive Mansion, a daguerreotype taken in 1847. 

In 1881 Chester Arthur ordered a significant remodel of the building’s interior.  Theodore Roosevelt added the West Wing, which his successor William Howard Taft expanded, and the Oval Office was added.  Herbert Hoover added a second floor to the West Wing following a fire there and added extensive basement office space for an expanding staff. Franklin Roosevelt moved the Oval Office to its present location by the Rose Garden.  Harry Truman added the still controversial balcony to the South Portico.

                           Work during the almost total reconstruction of the White House during the Truman administration.

During Truman’s administration the building was found in danger of collapse from neglect.  The President moved to near-by Blair House for two years as the interior was gutted and reconstructed.  In 1961 First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy began her interior restoration of the building to its French Empireinspired appearance during the later Madison and Monroe years.

The White House now routinely undergoes modifications with the coming of each administration.  President Barack Obama ordered the instillation of solar panelsto replace those put up by Jimmy Carterand taken down by Ronald Regan.  His wife Michelle built extensive vegetable gardenson the grounds which had not been used for agricultural purposes since sheep were kept browsing the lawn.  Of course, among the former Resident first fits of spite and revenge was to remove the solar panels and obliterate the gardens.  He also trashed up the interior with his beloved gaudy gold bling wherever he could, and Melania famously maimed the Rose Garden.

Joe Biden has so far been too busy undoing the Cheeto’s disastrous policies and trying to get his ambitious agenda through Congress to spend much time re-doing the official offices and dwellings beyond hangingand displaying art and making the private residence rooms more modestand comfortable.

The official logo of the White House features the North Portico which faces Lafayette  Square. 

There is continual work expanding or improving the vast underground complex that now extends below much of the White House lawn and houses offices, communications centers,and, reportedly, a hardened bunkercapable of withstanding a nuclear attack. 

But the core of the building remains as Hoban and Washington imagined it more than two hundred years ago. 

For those of us of a certain vintage, the image of the evil dictator of Communist Russia, an ugly little man who resembled a pig, pounding his shoe on a table at the United Nations confirmed our worst fearsthat the possibility of a nuclear World War III was in the hands of a crude mad man.  And that’s exactly what we were supposed to think.

According to most of the almanacs I consult regularly in preparation of these blog posts, it was October 12 1960 when Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party and Premier of the Soviet Unionthrew that famous temper tantrum.

But it turns out that it may have been September 23 or 29, or October 13 during the Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly in New York.  It may have come in protest to a speech by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan or remarks by Philippine delegate Lorenzo Sumulong.  He was visibly upset by statements of both men.

He may have banged his shoe at the podium…or at his seat in the Soviet delegation…or perhaps not at all.

And the old man was not really a dictator, as in the single,unquestioned authority of the nation in the way of Hitler, Stalin, or Third World generalissimos.

How could we have gotten it so wrong?

The trouble is, there is no documentation of the event in the official records of the United Nations.  In the daily press it was not mentioned in reports on any of the possible dates.  No footage could be found in the archives of NBC and CBC, both of which covered the General Assembly regularly and often broadcast important speeches live.  Nor has any authentic photograph of the episode been found—more on that later. 

Fuzzy accounts of the event have been pieced together from memories and memoirs, many of which don’t agree.

The meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in the fall of 1960 gripped world attention, dominated U.S. news, and attracted top international leaders.  In addition to Khrushchev's temper tantrums the session is remembered for the appearance of Cuba's Fidel Castro and a retinue in fatigue uniforms.

In retrospect, it is astonishingthat the leader of one of the most powerful nations on Earth came to the major city of his chief rival to sit for hours daily over a span of weeks for the meeting of the Security Council.  And he wasn’t the only one—Macmillan was only one of the topWestern leaders who did the same, as did a parade of presidents, prime ministers, kings, and despots from lesser nations.  If Dwight Eisenhower elected only to attend briefly to make his annual speechand to consult with world leaders in private meetings, the United States was represented at the top level by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as well as the Cabinet level Ambassador to the world body.  It shows how important the UN was viewed in those distant days.

Most historians now discount the possibility that the shoe came off in September.  He did take to the podium, pounding his fists, in angry denunciation of Macmillan’s speech that day.  Later an AP photo of that diatribe would be altered by someone, and a shoe inserted into Khrushchev’s fist.  It was released and widely circulated by the mediawithin weeks of the alleged event and not questioned at the time.  Who made the alteration and how did get to the media?  No one seems to know, but it has all the earmarks of a classic intelligence service disinformation operation.

The consensusnow is that it was Sumulong’s speech on October 12 that was the trigger—if the event happened at all.  The Philippine delegate rose in support of an anti-colonial resolution that had the supportof the Soviets and their allies.  The delegate spoke as a representative of a nation with a colonial past which had achieved its independence.  Of course, the Philippines, while independent, were known as a staunch ally of their former colonial master, the United States.  Although the resolution was tailored to the remaining colonial holdings of the Westernpowers, Sumulong strayed from the topic at hand to offer a slap at the Soviet Union:

 …It is our view that the declaration proposed by the Soviet Union should cover the inalienable right to independence not only of the peoples and territories which yet remain under the rule of Western colonial Powers, but also of the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights and which have been swallowed up, so to speak, by the Soviet Union.

An enraged Khrushchev was recognizedon a point of order and rushed the podium. He shoved the Philippine diplomat aside and launched an extended diatribe calling Sumulong a “jerk, a stooge, and a lackey…a toady of American imperialism” and demanding that he be ruled out of order.  Assembly President Frederick Boland of Ireland did caution the Sumulong to “avoid wandering out into an argument which is certain to provoke further interventions.”  But Sumulong was permitted to continue his speechand Khrushchev returned to his seat in the Soviet delegation.

At least one person remembersthe Soviet premier as using his shoe at the rostrum in this confrontation.

Khrushchev, Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, and others in the Soviet delegation pound their fists at their desks in protest.

But most agree that it happened after he sat back down.  As the Filipino continued to speak, Khrushchev pounded both fists angrily on his desk, joined obediently by other members of the Soviet delegation and Eastern Bloc nations.  In fact, he pounded so hard that his watchstopped or flew off his wrist—not speaking well of qualityof Soviet consumer goods.  According to a memoir by Khrushchev’s daughter Nina, confirmedby interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev who sat next to him, he looked down and saw his shoe, which he had removed for some reason earlier and spontaneously picked it up and began pounding the table.  He never, as some reports had it, removed the shoe from his foot, a virtual impossibility in the cramped spaceof the desk and given his girth.

The only evidence of a shoe--it rests on the desk in front of Khrushchev as the delegation listens quietly and evidently with some amusement.

Decorum at the session soon broke down and it was gaveled to adjournment by President Boland, who was being abused and booed from the Soviet bloc seats.

However, other accounts do not remember or mention the shoe at all.

To make matters even more confusing in his own memoirs Khrushchev remembered a shoe pounding incident but placed it in an entirely different context—a protest to remarks by a diplomat from Franco’s Spain.  A later published edition, however, contained a footnote saying that the incident was misremembered.

An English translation of Khrushchev's memoirs in which he gave a garbled and erroneous account of the shoe banning.

That United Nations trip is also remembered for Khrushchev’s own addressto the world body in which he famously said of the United States, “We will bury you.”  That was played in the U.S. press as a threatof nuclear annihilation.  In fact, translators and linguists are unanimous that he had a different, less threatening meaning.  He was quoting a well-known Russian proverb that means “we will survive you and see you in your grave.”  It was a prediction of the triumph of Communism over capitalism as inevitable, but not a threat of war.

No matter what happened, Americans were soon convinced that Khrushchev was an arch-villain and dictator.  In fact, although he had consolidated considerable power in the Party, Khrushchev was never able to rule alone.  He was answerable to the Presidium of the Party and to the larger Polit Bureau, each of which included powerful rivals who limited his freedom ofaction.

Moreover, in the Soviet sense, Khrushchev was a liberal and reformer.  He had presided over de-Stalinization of the Party.  He had also loosened economic regulations, liberalized the still restricted freedom of writers and intellectualsto express themselves, and broke with the most aggressive military ambitions of hard liners.  Western intelligence agencies undoubtedly knew all of this.

In fact, four years later Khrushchev was deposed by the hardliners led by Leonid Brezhnev.

But to keep up public supportfor continued high defense spending and the proclaimed policy of aggressive containment of Communism, it was necessary to paint the Soviet leaders in the same stark terms as the U.S.’s late enemies in World War II.

All of this should be kept well in mind as one after another leaders of smalland weak nations are portrayed to the American people as, inevitably, Hitlers.

Today is celebrated as Indigenous People’s Day in most of the Americas and in other parts of the world.  I first blogged the still spreading and growing recognition that has its official origins in the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007.  But in the United States Native Americans have been staging actions, protests, and alternative events to a Federal Holiday on the Second Monday in October for decades.

That’s right, your calendar probably marked today as Columbus Dayin recognition of Cristoforo Colombo/Cristóbal Colón/Christopher Columbus.  I’ve blogged about him, too, and his alleged discovery—alleged because he didn’t know where he was going, “found” what was never lost, claimed what wasn’t his to take, and didn’t even know where the hell he was.  When just about everyone else in Europe had figured out that he never reached the East Indies or Asia he continued to lie about it.

None-the-less the mercenary mariner was rewarded with fancy titles—Admiral of the Ocean Sea for one—and made Viceroyover half the damned world.  And he screwed that up by being so brutal that he virtually wiped out the once numerous Carib peoples who inhabited the islands under his immediate effective sway.  He also bullied and oppressed potential rivals—would be Conquistadors of even richer realms on the mainland, many of whom had better connections at Court than a Genoan hireling.  He was stripped of his titles,wealth confiscated, and shipped to Spain in disgrace and chains.

Not much to celebrate there.

Yet despite the fact that Columbus never set foot in North America—the closest he got was wandering around portions of Central America after being abandoned by mutineers and quite typically lost—he somehow became an iconic folk figure and symbol of the New World to the English and overwhelming Protestant colonists hugging to the Atlantic shore far to the north of any of his voyages. 

Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian sailor with even less to justify it, swooped in and got his name attached to two continents just because he knew the right cartographer.  But Columbia was a popular alternative name for Western Hemisphere lands and some Patriots wanted to officially adopt it for their new country.  Think of the song, once almost an unofficial national anthem, Columbia the Gem of the Oceanand other evidence.  When Thomas Jefferson’s pal Joel Barlow, a diplomat and literary dabbler, wanted to create a national epic poem he churned out The Columbiad, a turgid contemplation of Columbus and the new world.

Around the 400th anniversary of the alleged discovery in 1892 interest in him was elevated by events around the world, but particularly at Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition.  American Catholics—a struggling and despised minority—looked to the notoriously pious Columbus who had slaughtered all of those natives in the guise of converting them to the One True Church to establish their bona fides as worthy Americans.  Thus, the Knights of Columbus became the Catholic answer to the WASP Masonic Lodges.

But it was urban Italians, among the last European immigrants to become White, in the big cities of the East Coast and Midwest who made Columbus Day and lavish annual parades and answer to the earlier immigrants—especially the Irish—in their struggle for a fat slice of the patronage and privilege pie of the Democratic Party machines.

In the early 1970's even before the United Nations declaration Native Americans from the American Indian Center in Uptown marched through the Chicago Loop to protest when their request to participate in the annual Columbus Day Parade was curtly turned down.  Protests, counter demonstrations, and marches grew year by year.

As protests against honoring a figure who represented centuries of land theft,colonial subjugation, genocide, and cultural annihilation has grown, support for the holiday has waned.  City after City and several States have officially dumped Columbus Day, and most have adopted some form on Indigenous Peoples Day in its stead.  Support had dwindled to indignant Italian civic organizations and the kind of cultural fuddy-duddies who cannot stomach change of any kind.

More recently, however, a sub-set of the Alt-Right and neo-fascist movements who claim to honor and preserve European culture and secure its dominance in American society, have begun to make war on the anti-Columbus Day warriors, especially attacking Native Americans and a “cultural elite of race traitors.”

This year President Joe Biden proclaimed the second Monday in October as Federal Indigenous Peoples Day.  That did not, however, erase Columbus Day which was created and recognized by Congress.  The two celebrations are like bitterly divorced spouses forced to continue to live together in the same house.

Anyway, all of that is more than I intended to write about Columbus.  By now you know the story.  So I celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day.  I hope you do too.

In honor of the occasion, I am revisiting a verse I wrote in 2016 just during the most important Native American resistance in decades—the campsto block the Dakota Access Pipeline which threatened to pollute the Missouri River and defile traditional Sioux lands.  May their long and valiant prayerful witness be inscribed in the sacred winter count and sung of around the campfires for all of the generationsthey were trying to protect.

Photo of a mural taken by my old college pal Bill Delaney at Art Alley Gallery in Rapid City, South Dakota.

Tonto Will Not Ride into Town for You

For The Camp of the Sacred Stone 9/30/2016

 

Tonto will not ride into town for you, Kemosabe,

            and be beat to pulp by the bad guys

            on your fool’s errand.

 

Pocahontas will not throw her nubile, naked body

            over your blonde locks

            to save you from her Daddy’s war club.

 

Squanto will not show you that neat trick

            with the fish heads and maize

            and will watch you starve on rocky shores.

 

Chingachgook will save his son and lineage

            and let you and your White women

            fall at Huron hands and be damned.

 

Sacajawea and her babe will not show you the way

            or introduce you to her people,

            and leave you lost and doomed in the Shining Mountains.

 

Sitting Bull will not wave and parade with your Wild West Show

            nor Geronimo pose for pictures for a dollar

            in fetid Florida far from home.

 

They are on strike form your folklore and fantasy,

            have gathered with the spirits of all the ancestors

            to dance on the holy ground, the rolling prairie

            where the buffalo were as plentiful

            as the worn smooth stones of the Mnišoše,

            the mighty river that flows forever.

 

They are called by all the nations from the four corners

            of the turtle back earth who have gathered here,

            friends and cousins, sworn enemies alike,

            united now like all of the ancestors

            to kill the Black Snake, save the sacred water,

            the soil where the bones of ancestors rest,

            and the endless sky where eagle, Thunderbird, and Raven turn.

 

Tonto has better things to do, Kemosabe…

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

Joseph Labadie with his flowing moustache and imperial goatee cut quite a dashing figure as a young man and after his adoption of big wide-brimmed hats in his later years looked like he might have toured with Buffalo Bill Cody and Ned Buntline.  But he was one of the late 19th and early 20th Century’s leading anarchists and the only one to have a long careerat the very center of the labor movement.

His background was strikingly different from most of the better known figures of the movement—the German Johann Most who introduced the European model featuring the idealizationof the propaganda of the deed or immigrants like most of the Haymarket Martyrs,Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, and Carlo Tresca.  He was also unique among home grown anarchist figures like Bostonian Benjamin Tucker and former Confederate trooper, Texas Radical Republican, and Chicago labor leader Albert Parsons and his bi-racial wife Lucy Parsons.

He was born as Charles Joseph Antoine Labadie on April 18, 1850 in Paw Paw, Michigan into a Frenchfamily who settled on both sides of the Detroit River when the land was claimed as New France.  Even at this late date the area was still frontier-like and as a boy spent much time fishing and hunting with the Potawatomi tribes in southern Michigan, where his father served as interpreter between Jesuit missionaries and the native tribes.  He deeply admired their culture, especially a sense of communalism. 

His only formal schooling was a few months in a parochial school.  But he was bright, inquisitive, and read everything he could lay his hands on.  He must have had some informal apprentice training because by his late teens he had become a tramp printer, literally packing a small press and type font cases on his back or in a pushcart as he made a circuitof small towns and farming villages.  The life on the road was an eye-opening experience in and of itself. 

After five years on the road, Labadie settled in Detroit where he became a typesetter at the Detroit Post and Tribune.  He joined Typographical Union Local No. 18, rapidly rose in its leadership and was one of its two delegates to the International Typographical Union convention in Detroit in 1878.

Labadie's dues card for the Detroit Typographical Union No. 18.  His vast collection of included every dues card he ever had.

He married a first cousin, Sophie Elizabeth Archambeau, in 1877. Together they had a happy marriage and raised three children Laura, Charlotte, and Laurance, who also became a prominent anarchist essayist.

Labor conditionsof the post—Civil War era of rapid industrialization were brutal and labor unrest was sweeping the country culminating in the Great Railway Strike of 1877.  Although Detroit was only on the fringes of that epic battle it inspired Labadie as it did his fellow typographer in Chicago, Albert Parsons.  Like Parsons he joined the early Socialist Labor Party, which included all sorts of radical tendencies and was soon a familiar sight handing out its tracts and pamphlets on the streets of Detroit.  He was gaining a reputation.

Like others of the era, he dabbled in several radical ventures while slowly evolving his unique political philosophy.  In 1878 he organized Detroit’s first assemblyof the Knights of Labor and ran unsuccessfully for mayor on the Greenback-Labor ticket.  In 1880 he served as the first President of the Detroit Trades Councilwhich united both Knights lodges and craft unions. He also founded the Michigan Federation of Labor.

His positions with the Detroit Trades Council and the Michigan Federation of Labor eventually made him a de facto ally of Samuel Gompers and the emerging American Federation of Labor (AFL) although the relationship was often strainedand tenuous.

Labadie also edited a succession of local labor papers and began contributing articles and columns to several other publications including the Detroit Times, Advance and Labor Leaf, Labor Review, The Socialist, and the Lansing Sentinel.  His long running opinion column Cranky Notions was carried widely and admired for its forthright style and humor.

                            Labadie became a supporter of individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker.

In 1883 Labadie announced that he was embracing the individual anarchism of Benjamin Tucker.  It was a somewhat odd and contradictory association that he never renounced even though his commitment to an organized labor movement was at oddswith Tucker.   But both renounced violence and owed much to the philosophy of the American Universalist anarcho-pacifist Aden Ballou, Russian Mikhail Bakunin, and presaged the work of Leo Tolstoy.

Nominally accepting identity as a socialist in the days before Marxism solidified as the dominant trend in the international labor movement, Tucker rejected any permanent or transitionalstate involvement and advocated for a free market solution.   Tucker wrote

The fact that one class of men are dependent for their living upon the sale of their labour, while another class of men are relieved of the necessity of labour by being legally privileged to sell something that is not labour...And to such a state of things I am as much opposed as any one. But the minute you remove privilege...every man will be a labourer exchanging with fellow-labourers...What Anarchistic-Socialism aims to abolish is usury... It wants to deprive capital of its reward.

Tucker also rejected organized labor unions and their intermediate reform demands like eight hour day and minimum wage laws.  He believed instead that strikes should be organized by free workers rather than by bureaucratic union officials and organizationsand that such spontaneous uprisings would lead to the collapse of the state.  Labadie was sympathetic in the abstract but as a practical leader he never abandoned the labor movement which he continued to serve the rest of his life.  In fact, no other anarchist ever had a longer or more fruitful association with organized labor that Labadie.

Both Tucker and Labadie were initially critical of the violence advocated by the German anarchists and the Haymarket defendants.  But both became active in international defense efforts because they did not believe they were the sole perpetrators of violence. Labadie broke with the Knights of Labor when Grandmaster Workman Terrance V. Powderlytheir national leader, repudiated the defendants completely.

Without the oppression of the state, Labadie believed, humans would choose to harmonize with “the great natural laws...without robbing [their] fellows through interest, profit, rent and taxes.” But sometimes at odds with Tucker, he supported localized public cooperation, and was an advocate for community control of water utilities, streets, and railroads.

By the turn of the 20th Century the great majority of the labor left of the anarchist movement rejected Tuckerism and became centered on anarcho-syndicalism which viewed labor unions as the natural building blocks of a society without state oppression.  Today Tucker is considered the inspiration for modern libertarianism.  Labadie’s association with him has taintedhis reputation on the left.

Some of the pamphlets and books that Labadie issued on his own press.

After the turn of the Century Labadie also began writing poetry and issuing both prose and verse publications that he handcrafted using his skills as a typographer.  In 1908 a zealous postal inspector refused to handle his mail because it bore stickers with anarchist quotations. After the ensuing uproar the Detroit Water Board where Labadie then worked as a clerk, fired him for expressing anarchist sentiments.  But by then he was a beloved figure in the city not only with the labor movement but with much of the public which admired him as the “Gentle Anarchist.” In both cases the officials were forced to back down in the face of mass public protests in support.

Labadie and Judson Grennell, labor editor of the Detroit News at a union convention in 1918.  The two had been friends and comrades since they both worked together in the same print shop in 1877.

Despite his considerable achievements is best remembered because he was something of a hoarder—he never threw any scrap of paper the passed through his hands or over his desk away.  That included all his personal manuscripts and coorespondence with figures like Tucker, Powderly, Albert and Lucy Parsons, Voltairine de Cleyre, Emma Goldman, Gompers, and Eugene V. Debs; clippings of articles; copies of pamphlets, leaflets, and handbills; posters; and photographs.  Significantly it also included recordsof all the organizations he was part of or related to including membership rolls, meeting minutes, by-laws and constitutions, ledgers and invoices,coorespondence, invitations to programs and social occations, and the badges and ribbons of membership and for attendance at meetings, conventions, and even funerals.  Taken together the collection that filled the attic of his home constituted the most complete and detailed archive of labor, socialist, anarchist activity of almost forty years, including the ephemora that rarely survives.

Labadie knew his collection would be a gold mine for historians.  Arround 1910 he began to look for a repository that would value, cataloge, and maintain it.  The libraries of Johns Hopkins Univeristy and Michigan State in East Lancing expressed interest.  The University of Wisconsin in Madison vigorously pursued it and made an attractive offer to purchase the collection which would have been a great boon to Labadie who was still a poor man and near the end of his working life.

But he was determined to place his collection at the University of Michigan in near-by Ann Arbor, close enough for him to make regular visits.  The U of M was more than coy.  It sent an inspector to Labadie’s home to determine the value of the collection.  He returned a negative reportthat scorned it as a useless “mass of stuff.”  The school demurred to several offers.  Finnally nine Detroit residents, including several businessmen donated $100 each to purchase of the collection, which was then donated to the university with requisite pomp.  The university did not have to directly pay the notorious anarchist. 

In 1912 twenty crates of material were moved from Labadie’s attic to Ann Arbor.  Labadie spent the remaining years of his life soliciting contributionsof additional material from his wide circle of friends and aquaintences across the labor and radical movements.  But the University did not seem to know what to do with the ever-increasing mass.  The material remained un-sorted and uncatalogued and was kept in  receiving boxesin a locked room of the library.  Any interested researcher was given a key to the room and left to his or her own devices to sort through the mass.  Undoubtably some material was removed by some of the researchers and lost.

Shortly before his death, Labadie sent another large consignment of material to the University.

He died on October 7, 1933, in Detroit at the age of 83.

Iris Inglis working in the Labadie Collection in 1929.

Wealthy Detroit activist Agnes Inglis began doing research in the Labadie Collection in the early 1920s.  Her inherent organizing instincts took over, and she stayed to sort out the materials and bring some order to the chaos. She stayed at the Labadie Collection for over 20 years as its unofficial curator. Inglis donated her time to the effort, working without a salary of any kind except for one brief period when she received a small stipend.

After Inglis died at age 81 on January 29, 1952 the administration did nothing to replace her and did not keep a promise to her to continue to collect contemporary radical and labor material.  The neglected collection was pillagedby researchers and collectors and Inglis’ careful catalogue system was disrupted and eventually lost.  Only her note cards on most items remained in disturbed card files.

In 1960 reference librarian Edward Weber was finally appointed as formal curator.  Weber also brought his own social/political interests to the job, which included the radical elements of sexual freedom, gay liberation, Freethought, and civil liberties. Because there was still no acquisitions budget, Weber relied on donations and sympathetic library workers, who adjusted accounts somehow and funneled subversive literature into the Collection. Weber was an outspoken criticof censorship and ignorance, as well as a prolific letter writer, and the extensive correspondence he generated throughout his 40-year tenure kept the Collection growing.

It was not until the mid-1970s that the Labadie Collection was finally given a book budget. Weber was, for the first time in the history of the Collection, able to make legitimate purchases.

In 1994 Julie Herrada was hired as the first Assistant Curator, and as the first trained archivist in the Labadie Collection. When Weber retired in 2000, Herrada took over as curator.

Viewing an exhibit of radical posters from 1968 at the Labadie Collection.

The Collection currently contains over 50,000 books, 8,000 serials titles (including nearly 800 current periodical subscriptions) records and tape recordingsof speeches, debates, songs, and oral histories, sheet music, buttons, posters, photographs, and comics. On the Labadie Collection’s websiteover 900 photographs can be viewed as well as the descriptions of over 100 archival collections, listings of some non-print materials, online exhibitions, and browse a directory of nearly 9,000 subject files.  

In short the Labadie Collection is the most comprehensive and still growing repository for radical American history.

That old hoarder would be proud.

On October 9, 1635 the General Court of Massachusetts ordered Roger Williams, who they considered an obnoxious religious and political crank, into exile from the colony.  Specifically, the 32 year old was convicted of both heresy and sedition for spreading, “diverse, new, and dangerous opinions.”

Williams was born in 1603 to a conventional Anglican family.  His father was a prosperous master tailor and merchant in Smithfield, London.  A bright, inquisitive, and pious boy, Williams had a personal religious conversion experience which began his long journey as a dissenter.  His father disapproved but allowed his wayward son to continue his education, including an apprenticeship with the great legal scholar and jurist Sir Edward Coke.  He attended Charterhouse, a prestigious public school before enrolling at Pembroke College, Cambridge from which he graduated in 1627.  He excelled at classical—Hebrew, Greek, and Latin—and modern—Dutch and French—languages.

While at Cambridge Williams became a Puritan—an advocate of purifying the Church of England by stripping away the remaining trappings of Catholicism including the Mass, use of Latin in liturgy, and idolatry in the form of statues of saints and icons.  He took Holy Orders as an Anglican priest, but his chances at advancement were blocked by the firmly High Church hierarchy.  He took a position as a private chaplain to Sir William Macham, a leading Puritan lord.  As such he was privy to plans to seed a Puritan colony in the New World.  Newly married, he passed on his opportunity to go in the first ships sent to found what would become Massachusettsin 1630.  But he was soon so disgusted with church leadership that he determined to join the migration.  He also privately abandoned any hope of reforming the corrupt church and became a Separatist.

Williams and his wife Mary set sail for New England in December on the Lydenand arrived in Boston in February 1731.  He found himself not only welcome but honored.  He was offered as a position as Teacher—sort of an associate pastor—of the Boston congregation.  He declined the position and openly declared himself as a Separatist.  He also insisted that civil magistratesshould have no authority over religious maters and that individuals were free to develop and express their own religious convictions.  These positions shocked and appalled the Puritan worthies who demanded complete conformity to their beliefs in matters both civil and religious.

The church in Salem was then tending toward Separatism and invited Williams to become Teacher there.  Outraged leaders in Boston threatened the Salem church, which rescinded the invitation.  By August 1631 he had left Massachusetts for a friendly welcome among the Separatists of Plymouth.  Although not given an official position, he assisted the local minister and occasionally preached.  Governor William Bradshaw found his preaching, “entirely amicable” to the local church.

But Williams was never one to go long without examining his conscience and in holding the church to the exceedingly high standards he demanded.  He began to doubt that the Plymouth church was sufficiently separated from Anglicanism.  And his growing and admiring contact with native inhabitants led him to question the legitimacy of Royal Charters that granted land that the King did not own.  Instead, he maintained that land need be purchased from its rightful owners, the native tribes.  In December 1632 Williams wrote a lengthy tract on these subjects which he circulated to churches in both Plymouth and Massachusetts colonies.

By this time Bradford noted that Williams had fallen “into some strange opinions which caused some controversy between the church and him.”  In 1633 he had worn out his welcome and was back in Salem, which now seemed more inclined to support him.  Upon learning of his return, the Massachusetts General Court summoned him to Boston.  Williams apparently agreed to make some concessions and all known copies of his critical tract were burned.  Allowed to return to Salem, he became acting pastor when his sponsor, Rev. Samuel Skelton died.

Soon Williams had returned to his criticisms of both civil authority over religious matters and of the legitimacy of colonial charters.  He was called before the General Court again in March of 1635 and in April he so vigorously opposed a new oath of allegiance to the colonial government that it became impossible for the magistrates to enforce it.

Unable to rein in Williams, the General Court turned on the Town of Salem.  It refused a routine petition to annex adjacent land on the Marblehead Neck and took other actions against Salem’s interest.  In July the Court formally demanded that Williams be removed from the pulpit of the Salem Church.  The Salem Church asserted that the order was a violationof congregational polity and independence and circulated a protest letter to other churches.  The General Court ordered that the letter not be read in the other churches and refused to seat delegates from the town of Salem until the Church was in compliance.

As pressure grew on the Church, Williams demanded that it formally separate itself from the Standing Order.  His support within the Church then collapsed. Williams withdrew as minister and began meeting privately with a few followersin his home.

Without the protection of the Salem church or Town, the General Court went ahead with its seditionand heresy trial in October.  When the conviction was handed down, Williams was confined to his bed by illness.  He was given a reprieve from banishmentuntil spring on condition that he remain quiet.  Typically, Williams would not shut up.  The Sheriffwas sent to seize him in January 1636 but found Williams gone. 

Williams rest on his winter flight from Massachusetts in 1636 in a 19th Century illustration. 

Rather than be taken into custody and dumped, most likely, in hostile Indian country, Williams fled on foot through the deep mid-winter snows.  He marched 105 miles from Salem to find refuge at the head of Narragansett Bay, where he was welcomed by his friend Massasoit, sachem of the Wampanoags.  That spring he was joined by his most loyal followers from Salem and began to settle on land he purchased from the Wampangoags.  Learning that his claim was within the boundaries of the Plymouth Colony, however, Williams and his people crossed Seekonk River to territory beyond any charter and purchased land from Canonicus and Miantonomi, chief sachems of the Narragansetts.  Williams named his new settlement Providence.

Williams declared his settlement a haven for those of distressed ofconscience.  It was soon attracting dissidents and exiles from both Massachusetts and Plymouth colonies. The settlement was governed by a majority vote of the heads of households, and newcomers could be admitted to full citizenship by a majority vote.

The Landing of Roger Williams in 1636 painted in1857 by Alonzo Chappel depicts Williams crossing the Seekonk River to meet with Native peoples to purchase their land.

In August of 1637 electors drew up a town agreement, which limited the government to civil matters.  In 1640 another agreement declared their determination “still to hold forth liberty of conscience.” Williams had founded the first place in modern history where citizenship and religion were separated, and where there was religious liberty and separation of church and state.  In fact, Williams advocated what he called a “wall of separation” between church and state—a term Thomas Jefferson would borrow over a 140 years latter in his famous Letter to the Danville Baptists.

Meanwhile, a second wave of exiles arrived on the Narragansett Bay.  In 1837 the Massachusetts Court moved against the followers of Anne Hutchins.  Williams invited them to settle near him and arranged for them to purchase land on Aquidneck Island.  They named their settlement Portsmouth and the island Rhode Island.  Their elected leader, William Coddington quickly turned out to be a civil and religious tyrant and was ousted.  He formed a second town, Newport.  Eventually these two settlements reunited with separate local administrations.

Meanwhile the Pequot War had broken outand much of Massachusetts was in flames.  Leaders there were forced to do what they loathed most—turn to Roger Williams for help.  And help he did.  Not only did his extensive contacts among all of the tribes—he was making his living by this time trading with the natives for furs—provide vital intelligence, but he also persuaded his friends the Narragansetts not to join the uprising and to become alliesof the settlers.  The assistance of the Narragansetts became critical to the final victoryin that ugly war.

Williams, his colony and his native allies became regional powers. In the next three decades Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Plymouth exerted pressure to destroy both Rhode Island and the Narragansetts.  In 1643 those colonies joined in an alliance excluding the towns around Narragansett Bay and hostile to them—the United Colonies.  To prevent the alliance from overwhelming them, Williams went to England to secure a Charter of his own.  He arrived just as his breakthrough dictionary of Native American words was published and creating a sensation among the English intellectual elite.  Through their influence he was able to get his charter for Providence Plantations over the vehement objection of Massachusetts agents.

                       Roger Williams's banned book.

While in England, however, Williams could not refrain from stirring the pot.  In July of 1643 he published his most famous book, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, a scathing indictment of religious intolerance and plea for separation of church and state.  The book caused an uproar and cost him the support of many former friends.  The Public Hangman was ordered to confiscate and burn copies.  Luckily Williams was on board ship home with his charter in his pocket or he might have been arrested and even executed.

Back home it took Williams until 1643 to bring the two towns of Rhode Island—by then prosperous seaportswith larger populations than Providence—into a single government under his Charter.  Coddington, in fact, plotted to usurp Williams.  He sailed to England and in an astonishing bit of power politics returned in 1751with a document naming him governor for life over Rhode Island.  Providence and its allied town of Warwick sent Williams back to England to reverse the decision joined John Clarke representing Coddington’s numerous critics from Portsmouth and Newport.  Williams had to sell his trading post, the only source of income for his family, which now included six children, to pay for his crossing.  The two somehow succeeded in overturning Coddington’s patent.

Williams returned to America in 1654 and was immediately elected the President of the colony. He subsequently served in many offices in the town and colonial governments, and in his 70s he was elected captain of the militia in Providenceduring King Philip’s War in 1676.

Clark stayed in England and in 1664 obtained a new charter under the name Rhode Island that covered all of the towns on the mainland and on the island.  The colony remained a haven for all sorts of religious minorities—Baptists, Quakers, even Jews and Catholics.

Williams is usually described as a Baptist.  And indeed by 1638 had come to adopt the key Baptist tenant of believer’s baptismor credobaptism as opposed to the Puritan and Separatist practice of infant baptism.  He had been exposed to the writing of English General Baptistsbut arrived at the conclusion on his own.  He was baptized by Ezekiel Holliman in late 1638 and founded the First Baptist Church in America in Providence.  A few years later John Clarke formed a second church in Newport.  Following the traditions of their founders, Baptists in America became the leading advocates of church and state separation.

Yet the restless Williams did not himself remain a Baptist long, although he remained sympatheticto them.  He concluded that the corruption of the early church when it was co-opted by the Roman Empire under the Empower Constantine had broken the sacred covenant between God and the Church.  A new church, he now believed, could not be established without a special new divine commission.  He declared, “There is no regularly constituted church of Christ on earth, nor any person qualified to administer any church ordinances; nor can there be until new apostles are sent by the Great Head of the Church for whose coming I am seeking.”

Williams spent the rest of his days praying privately with friends awaiting that great day.  Despite his honors in the colony, he founded and his many achievements, Williams died in relative poverty and obscurity some time in early 1683.  He was buried in an unmarked grave on his property. 

Williams's WPA built grave site and monument.  You can be sure that this hater of idols and icons and the man who first advocated for "separation of Church and State" would not have approved.

Within 50 years his house had collapsed, and his grave was lost.  In 1860, Zachariah Allen sought to locate his remains but found only an apple tree root in the grave he believed to be that of Williams.  The root has been preserved as a relic by the Rhode Island Historical Society.  Dirt from the supposed grave was named “the Dust of Roger Williams” and preserved in an urn that was finally interred in a monument erected by the Works Project Administration (WPA) in Providence’s Prospect Terrace Park in 1937.  You can be sure that he would have protested. 

The Chicago and Peshtigo, Wisconsin fires of October 8, 1872 were just two of the deadly blazes that swept the upper Midwest that day.  Libraries in Illinois and Wisconsin hosted a virtual on-line discussion. Note — Back by popular demand, especially that of Ron Relic, and updated. You may have noticed that this is National Fire Protection Week.  The annual event is marked by news stories extolling the virtues of smoke alarms and family fire evacuation drills.  Your local fire station may host school field trips or an open house—maybe they will let you climb on an engine or even slide down apole.  Ask and you will be told that this week was selected because the Great Chicago Fire broke out on October 8, 1871. This is the  sesqui...

Note:  The exceptionally brutal murder of young Matthew Shepard 23 years ago triggered a national debate and a movement that led to the adoption of hate crime laws across the country.  Many considered it a game changer.  In subsequent years public acceptance of homosexuality and homosexuals steadily grew as did legal protections against discrimination and stunning victories including the legal recognition of same gender marriage rights.  Many thought that the bad old days of queer bashing for sport and the like were gone for good.  But as in so many other areas the Trump era was a Band-Aid that rips off a scab on a bleeding wound when removed.  Nationally as well as they can be tracked violent assaults and murders of Gay men, women...

PEN International is celebrating its centennial this year. On October 6, 1921 C. A. Dawson Scott, a now largely forgotten novelist asked some of her friends to join with her in launching a new organization.   Poets, Essayists and Novelists (PEN) was meant to promote international friendship and co-operationbetween writers.   In the wake of the horrors of the First World War, Scott and her friends hoped that writers could help tie the world together.   Her friends were a who’s who of British letters.   John Galsworthy was elected as PEN’s first president and the enthusiastic founders included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad. PEN International was the brain child of largely forgotten English novelist C. A. (Amy)...

There have been at least 38 editions of the working people’s hymnal popularly known as the Little Red Songbook since it appeared in 1909.  Here is the story of those remarkable little books.

The Wobblies, members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) were always a singing union and from the earliest strikesand job actions after the union’s founding in 1905 music was a part of meeting, rallies, marches, and picket lines.  Nowhere was this truer than in the Pacific Northwest where early organizing drives among lumber workers who were often called timber beasts because of their ragged appearance and often near starving conditions. 

Unable to effectively get to remote logging camps, IWW organizers relied on street meetings in cities like Spokane,Washington to protest the job shark hiring agencies that dispatched men to the camps collecting fees from the ax men and employers alike.  They found that songs helped attract crowds for the union’s soapbox orators. When Salvation Army Bands were often sent to drown out the meetings workers would sing the old hymns with new words.

The Spokane local issued a song card featuring four selections in 1906.  The sold for a penny, but most were probably handed out for free at the street meeting.  The card featured already familiar labor songs and one original— Harry “Haywire Mac” McClintock’s Hallelujah, I’m a Bum.  McClintock was a former Texas cowboy, harvest worker, and hobo who had become a lumber worker while also working as a musician in saloons.  The song was originally written in the 1890’s but was popular with all sorts of migratory workers.  McClintock also penned another popular Hobo song, The Big Rock Candy Mountain. 

A rare and battered copy of the Songbook's first edition published by the Spokane, Washington IWW local.

The song cards were so successful that the localdecided to assemble and sell a small songbook designed to easily fit into a shirt pocket.  It sold for 10¢, not an insignificant sum in those days when a dime could generally buy a meal at Skid Road diners, but not a prohibitive one.  The first edition did not have the now familiar red cover but did have red lettering.  The songbook hit the streets in January of 1909 and was an immediate success. The book’s official title was a mouthful—Songs of the Workers, on the Road, in the Jungles, and in the Shops – Songs to Fan the Flames of Discontent.  Subsequent editions shortened that to Songs of the Workers and/or Songs of the IWW to Fan the Flames of Discontent.  Three editions were printed in Spokane over the next three years and were bound in heavy red stock, giving it the enduring nickname, The Little Red Song Book.  But that title appeared on only two of the subsequent 38 official editions.

Each new songbook added new songs like the labor standards The Red Flag sung to the tune of O Tannenbaum, the global Socialist anthem The Internationale, and the easily adapted Civil War song Hold the Fort.

When the Spokane local was under siege during aftermath the 1909 Free Speech Fight, issuing and printing new editions shifted to Seattle.  It was in an early Seattle edition that Joe Hill’s song The Preacher and the Slave was published in 1911.  Mac McClintock claimed to be the first to sing it at a street meeting because Hill was too shy to perform publicly.  

Carlos Cortez's linocut poster tribute Wobbly bard and martyr Joe Hill.

Joel Hägglund a/k/a Joseph Hillstrom and Joe Hill was a young Swedish born itinerate worker who had been involved with the IWW for a few years.  Several of his songs were added to editions of the Songbook including The Tramp,Stung Right, Where the River Frazier Flows, There is Power in a Union, Mr. Block, and Casey Jones Union Scab all of which have become labor standards.  Hill was famously framed on a murder charge in Salt Lake City, Utah.  While being held he was inspired by young IWW orator Elizabeth Gurly Flynn who worked tirelessly on his defense committee and who had visited him in jail to write The Rebel Girl.

After Hill’s execution by firing squad on November 19, 1915 his poem Final Will was included in all subsequent editions of the Songbook.  At least two later versions of the book were officially named Joe Hill Memorial Edition, including one issued by the Cleveland Metal and Machinery Workers Industrial Union 440 in the early 1950’s.  By popular demand later editions have also included I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night by Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson which was popularized by Paul Robeson and Joan Baez, and Phil Ochs’ long ballad Joe Hill.

Other notable early additions to the Songbook included Dump the Bosses off Your Back by John Brill.  Industrial Worker editor and commercial artist Ralph Chaplin’s rousing Solidarity Forever was included in a 1916 edition and has become the leading labor anthem of all time.  Chaplin’s illustrationswere also used on the covers of several editions.  The powerful We Have Fed You All for a Thousand Years with words by an “Unknown Proletarian” and music by Rudolph Von Liebich appeared in 1919.

Somewhat surprisingly a song closely associated with the IWW’s 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike did not make it into the Songbook until 1984 although it appeared in the union magazine Industrial Pioneer in 1946.  James Oppenheimer’s Bread and Roses was first published as a poem in the American Magazine in December of 1911 shortly before the strike.  The mostly women mill workers adopted Bread and Roses as their strike slogan.  It wasn’t until the 1940’s that Carolyn Kohlsatt adapted the song to the melody most Wobblies still sing, although an alternative tune by Mimi Fariña in 1976 is gaining popularity.  In the 1970’s the song became a Women’s Liberation anthem as much as a labor one and it has even been included in the Unitarian Universalist hymnal Singing the Living Tradition.

Production of the Songbooks moved to IWW General Headquarters in Chicago and resumed after the great post-World War I Red Scare sent most Wobbly leaders, including Ralph Chaplin, to prison.  The ‘20’s saw the appearance of another notable contributor, Matt Valentine Huhta, who signed is contributions T-Bone Slim including The Popular Wobbly, Mysteries Of A Hobo’s Life, and The Lumberjack’s Prayer.

Editions of the Songbook have also included labor songs from other sources notably Woody Guthrie’s Union Maid with an updated final verse by Nancy Katz, The Banks are Made of Marble by Lee Rice and popularized by the Almanac Singers with more contemporary lyrics added, Which Side are You On by Florence Resse, and the old British rouser The Black Leg Miner as sung by Billy Brag.

The "double tall" 1995 36th edition featured music from around the world as well as old favorites an music for each song.

In 1995 the union issued an unusual “double tall” International Edition, one of only two editions to use the words Little Red Songbook on the cover.  In addition to most of the standard songs included more modern music and songs from around the world including songs in Spanish. It also included for the first and only time the full musical notationof each song.

Wobblies have continued to add new songs and adapted old ones, especially with more gender inclusive language.  Bruce “Utah” Phillips was the union’s popular balladeer, philosopher, storyteller, and inveterate agitator who died much loved and mourned in 2008.  His contributions to the book included Larimer Street, Starlight on the Rails, and All Used Up.  He also introduced the music from the Songbook to whole new generations. 

Bruce "Utah" Phillips introduced the IWW and its songs to  new generations.

Other newer contributors include Anne Feeney,Scabs and Whatever Happened to the Eight Hour Day; Kathleen Taylor, The LIP Song and Soul Stealers; Goddard Graves, Go I Will Send Thee; Leslie Fish, Babylon Updated and Freedom Road; Carlos Cortez, Outa Work Blues; Darryl Cheney, Where Are We Gonna Work When the Trees Are Gone and Who Bombed Judi Bari; and Tom Morello,Union Song.

Hell, even I made an appearance under the monikerThe Irish Cowboy with a rock & roll picket line song Roll the Hours Back and The Dark and Dreary Slum Where I Was Born, a take-off on Woody Guthrie’s Oklahoma Hills.

Rebel Voices was the realization of a long cherished dream to produce a "Little Red Record."

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

Almost all of the songs included in the first 36 editions of the Songbook are included in The Big Red Songbook published by Charles H. Kerr & Company.

In 2007 noted folklorist Archie Green published The Big Red Songbook which included 250 songs culled from the various editions of the IWW songbook.  In 2016 a new edition was co-edited by Green, labor historian David Roediger, Franklin Rosemount, and Salvatore Solerno with an introduction by Tom Morello, the Wobbly rocker of Rage Against the Machine andAudioslave, and a posthumous afterward by Utah Phillips.

 

About the size of a beach ball and carrying nothing but a rudimentary radio transmitter, the Soviet Union's Sputnik satellite threw Americans into a panic.

The morning of October 5, 1957 Americans woke up to news that shocked and frightenedthem. Late the previous evening—about 11:30 October 4 Eastern Standard Time—the Soviet Union successfully placed a man-made object into earth orbit.  Two objects, actually—a shiny metal ball about 23 inches in diameter with four whip antennae weighing just over 180 pounds, and the protective rocket nose cone from which it had separated when it reach orbital Space.

The ball, Sputnik 1 was essentially a simple radio transmitter encased in a polished aluminum-magnesium-titanium alloy heat shield made in two hemispheresbolted together and sealed with an O-ring.  Its four antennae broadcast simple repeated beeps alternatingly on two broadcast bandsthat could easily be monitored across the globe by HAM radio operators.  An hour after launch, after determining that it had completed one low earth elliptical orbit Soviet authorities had announced their achievement and released information on how radio transmissions could be monitoredand how the artificial moon might be observed from Earth.  Actually only the nose cone was large enough to reflect enough light to be seen from earth by the unaided eye.  The transmitting satellite, however, could be observed by telescope.

The New York Times headlines were more restrained than some American newspapers but noted ominously that the USSR got into orbit first with an object heavier than the planned US satellite and that its orbit took it over the States.

Sputnik was launched from a remote base near Tyuratam in the Kazakh SSR, the site for testing of R-7 two stage rockets.  In a final race against time, the launch facility had been completed only weeks before the successful launch.

The Soviets determined to proceedwith a project to launch an artificial satellite in January of 1956 after President Eisenhower announced plans to launch an American one during the much ballyhooed International Geophysical Year (IGY) scheduled to last 18 months from July 1, 1957, to December 31, 1958.  What they didn’t realize was that the American effort was lagging due to the unreliability of the primary launch vehicle, the Navy’s Vanguard rocket.

President Dwight Eisenhower boasted that the United States would put a satellite in orbit during the much ballyhooed International Geophysical Year sending the Soviets into a scramble to get into space first.

The project was divided into two parts—the development and construction of the satellite, and the development of a reliable and powerful two stage rocket which would, not coincidentally, be suitably adaptable for use in the creation of an Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capable of carrying and delivering a heavy nuclear war head. 

Work on the creation of an ambitious satellite was divided between five industrial/scientific ministries under the loose coordination of the USSR Academy of Sciences.  Original specifications for an object that would weigh between 2,000 and 3,000 pounds including a 700 lb. payload of scientific instruments and experiments.  It was to be able to transmit data to ground stations.  But when the various ministries delivered their parts, they did not fit together due to variationsin specifications.  Worse, the heavy package proved to be more than the troubled R-7 rockets could handle

From May 15 to July 12 three attempts to launch an R-7 failed.  A fourth attempt on August 21 was partially successful—the head successful separated achieved orbital space but had to be destroyed upon re-entering the atmosphere.  A fifth test had similar results.    While this meant that the R-7 was not yet ready for use as an ICBM, it was determined that it was capable of deploying a lightweight satellite.

A life size model of Object D--Sputnik--in the Moscow Space Museum shows its simple construction.

Given the problems with the two components, the launch date for Object Dwas pushed back to April 1958 by which time glitches in the satellite itself and the launch vehicle could be ironed out.

But Soviet officials worried that the delay would allow the U.S. to reach space first.  They ordered the hasty construction of a stripped bare satellite with greatly decreased weight.  The only real pay load was the radio transmitter, critical in proving to the world that the Soviet Union got there first.

The Council of Ministers approved a plan to develop the basic devise in February.  Two were ordered.  The first was delivered to the launch site in late September, just as the R-7 rocket was deemed reliable for launch.  Within days it was in orbit.  The second Sputnik was successfully launched in December after the spectacular explosion of America’s Vanguard 1 on the launch pad.

In Washington President Eisenhower took the news with his usual calm equability.  Intelligenceover-flights in high flying U-2 spy aircraft had provided photosof the launch complex and the Soviet defense establishment had even quietly announced the development—prematurely as it turned out—of an operational ICBM after the first semi-successful test of the R-7. 

In one critical way, he was relieved that the Soviets had got their satellite up first—it was a potential slice through a Gordian Knot of international law.  The Soviets were voraciously complaining that over-flight of American high altitude balloonsexploring the edge of space violated their air rights.  He wasn’t sure if the Russians had yet detected the U-2 flights at near the same altitude.  The U.S. wanted to argue that space was beyond air rights, that it was international and free to any nation.  Since Sputnik would fly over the US, Eisenhower was confident he could use that a president for the American position.

The President was also confident that the impending launch of Vanguard I would surpass the Soviet achievement.

Ike was shocked by the hysterical, almost panicky response from the press and public alike who were soon joined by swarms of Congressmen and Senators demanding to know how America had lost a Space Race it didn’t even realize we were in.

America of the 1950’s was awash in two things—paranoia about the Soviet Union and Godless Communism and a fascination with space travel that seemed nearly at hand.  America’s good Germans led by former Nazi V-2 developer Werner Von Braun were assumed to be better than the bad German scientists that the Soviets had dragged into Russia.  Von Braun was a ubiquitous television personality, collaborating with Walt Disney on elaborate animations of a future space station and trips to the Moon and beyond.

Science fiction filmsand the lurid covers of paperback novels and pulp magazines were filled with sleek space ships, all somehow resembling huge versions of Von Braun’s V-2.  The dawn of an American space age seemed inevitable and at hand.  If they thought at all about a Soviet space program it was with the assurance that their science and technology were primitive, years behind the US.

Now here were the Ruskies were, flying high over our very heads with who knows what intentions.  If they could put up a satellite, could they bombard the States with nukes from space, or zap us with death rays.

After the spectacular explosion of a Vanguard launch vehicle on it pad, President Eisenhower went on TV on December 10, 1957 to calm the American people and assure them that the US would rapidly catch up in the newly christened Space Race.

In response to the uproar Eisenhower went on TV to reassure the public that the US would soon be back in the game.  He ordered the launch of the Vanguard I moved up.  That launch failed on national television on December 6.

Meanwhile the Army Ballistic Missile Agency was ordered to hastily revive scrapped plans for a launch vehicle and stripped down satellite similar to Sputnik.  Explorer I a 38 lb. satellite was successfully launched on top of a Jupiter-C January 31, 1958—at least within the promised IGY window.

Sputnik 1 burned up upon re-entering the atmosphere on January 4 after completing 1400 orbits.  Its radio transmitter emitted those beeps for 22 days, long after the expected failure of the battery. 

 

Ordinarily the relocation of a factory from one town to another would hardly be the fodder for all but the most arcaneand specialized of almanac-like features.  But on this date in 1854 Aaron Lufkin Dennisonmoved his four year old watch making business to new facilities in Waltham, Massachusetts, setting the stage for a revolution in industrial production first known as the American System of Watch of Watch Manufacturing.  The principles of precision made interchangeable parts, use of specialty machine tools, and consistent calibration measured by highly accurate instruments were soon applied to other industries ushering in a new phase of the industrial revolution that created the machines that increasingly shaped daily life.

It was not an easy or smooth road.  Dennison would be beset by set backafter set back—failed early designsand processes, bankruptcies, board intrigues, faithless partners, and financial panics.  The new plant in Waltham would slip from his hands in bankruptcy in just three years, and he would be unceremoniously fired as machine shop superintendent in 1861.  He would go on to found a number of new businesses to see his dreams crushed time and time again.

Dennison's first factory building

Meanwhile the factory, known as the Boston Watch Company in 1855 would go through ownership changes and name changes, finally becoming known as the Waltham Watch Company in 1907 and famous for its railroad chronometers and quality pocket Watches.  The company’s direct descendent, the Waltham Aircraft Clock Corporation manufactures that specialty product in Alabama.  Firms that purchased marketing rights to the Waltham name along with some inventory and goodwill and since merged are now known as the Waltham Watch Co. (Delaware) and markets imported watches.  A former Swiss subsidiary is now known as Waltham International SA, and markets luxury Swiss made watches to Japan and other international markets.

Dennison was born on March 6, 1812 in Freeport, Maine.  His father was a shoemaker, the lowliest of the skilled trades who taught music on the side.  The family moved to Brunswick when he was a boy.  He got the minimal schooling of a boy of his class—reading, writing, and simple ciphering.  He may have supplemented this with reading from books borrowed from neighbors. 

He spent much of his childhood and youth at various jobs to help the family.  He carried hod for a bricklayer,cut wood, and was a herdsman.  By his teenage years he was accomplished enough at his lettersand arithmetic to clerk at a local store before joining his father in his cobbler’s shop.  Dennison displayed his first interest in improving production techniques by suggesting his father pre-cut pieces to make shoes by the batch rather than start-to-finish one at a time.

At age 18, rather than formally apprentice to his father, Dennison bound himself to James Cary, a local clock maker.  During his apprenticeship he apparently devised some sort of machine for cutting gear wheels.  The exact nature of the machine is unknown but was probably a modification of an existing wheel cutter that allowed him to press a few layers of metal at the same time, creating identical gears with each impression.  Again, the idea was to provide parts in batches for future assembly.  Cary so admired his apprentice’s skill and ingenuity that he offered Dennison a partnership at age 21.

But Dennison knew he had to learn more or be stuck in a provincial shop.  He headed to Boston to work for and study with the best American watch repairers.  He volunteered to work for three months at jeweler Currier & Trott without pay and then was hired by them.  By 1834 at age 22, he felt confident enough to open his own repair shop.  But he gave that up only two years later when he was offered the chance to work under Boston’s most sophisticated master watch maker, Tubal Howe of Jones, Low & Ball where he could learn the techniques of the best Swiss and British craftsmen. 

He stayed with Howe until 1839 when he left for New York City where he spent several months with a colony of Swiss watchmakers.  Returning to Boston he once again set up his own shop offering not only repair services but also selling watches, tools, and repair equipment.  During this period he perfected the Denton Combine Gage “upon which all the different parts of a watch could be accurately measured.”  This later became the Standard Gage of the industry and was just the first in the specialty instruments he devised.

Meanwhile Aaron established a second business with his younger brother Eliphalet Whorf Dennison, his former partner in his old Boston repair shop.  Together they went into a specialty business manufacturing paper boxes for jewelry stores.  The enterprise, filling an unmet niche, was a success.  But after a few years Aaron withdrew from the company to pursue his dream of manufacturing his own watches, leaving the firm in Eliphalet’s hands.  It continued to prosper as the Dennison Manufacturing Company and still exists today as Avery Dennison Corporation a manufacturer of pressure sensitive adhesive products which recently sold its well-known envelope, business stationary, and school supply lines which continue to be marketed under the name Avery.

Thing must have been looking pretty good for the 28 year old Aaron in 1840.  After years of dedicating himself single-mindedly to business he married Charlotte Ware Foster who was connected to the Ware family of distinguished Unitarian clergy.  Together they would have five children.

While continuing to operate his businesses, Dennison dreamed of going into watch manufacture.  He developed a plan over the 1840’s based on his old notion of producing parts in batches. 

He was specifically inspired by the success of the Federal Armory at Springfield, Massachusetts in manufacturing muskets for the Army using interchangeable parts.  This made rapid productionpossible in times of need, greatly reduced the cost of each firearm, and facilitated repair in the field using standardized parts.  Dennison was not the only entrepreneur impressed with the system.  Samuel Colt applied it to his pistols in the mid 1830’s and contributed the innovation of assembly line production—assembly of parts in succession with semi-skilled workmen each performing a specific task and sending the work to the next worker on the production bench for the next step.  Others were adapting Springfield and Colt innovations in other fields including Cyrus McCormack for his reapers.

But the manufacture of watches, some of the most complex machines of their time requiring scores of small parts that had to be produced with precision, required whole new demands compared to the few and large parts with relatively high tolerances of muskets, pistols, and farm equipment.  Dennison planned it out in his head.  By 1845 he had worked out a detailed planand constructed a scale model of a production facility.  All he need now was a backer.

Edward Howard turned out to be a faithless partner.

It took until 1849 to secure the support and partnership of Edward Howard of the manufacturing firm of Howard & Davis and Howard’s father in law Samuel Curtis.  While the partners erected a new factory next to the existing Howard & Davis building in Roxbury for the new firm of Dennison, Howard & Davis, Aaron went to London to buy what parts could not yet be manufactured in the States.  He also hired English journeyman watchmakers, and studied the critical process of gilding brass parts.  When he returned he completed the design and construction of specialized machines for his production process.

But there were major problems.  The new machines were not yet perfected, he had trouble duplicating the gilding process, and the first watches produced, an eight day watch with a single mainspring barrel, did not keep time accurately enough to be successfully marketed.  Dennison needed a more skillful machinist to perfect his ideas and in 1852 he found one in Charles Moseley.  He also brought on master watchmaker N. P. Stratton who designed a new 30-hour watch and perfected the gilding process while Mosely rebuilt the machines.  The resulting watch was marketed successfully.

The movement of an early Howard, Davis & Dennison Boston Watch Company pocket watch.

In fact sales were so strong that in 1855 the company moved to its expanded facilities in Waltham and adopted the new name of the Boston Watch Company.  Dennison oversaw production as the plant superintendent while Howard and a Board of Directors managed the business affairs.

Prospects looked as a good as the brisk sales of the new watch, which was superior to anything but jeweler crafted one-of-a-kind watches then available from an American manufacturer.  Then the devastating Panic of 1857—regarded as the first world-wide depression devastated sales and dried up the capital needed to ride out the storm.  The Boston Watch Company was forced into bankruptcy.

Most of the machinery and watch inventory, and some of the skilled workers, were taken back to Roxbury by Edward Howard, who established the Howard Watch Company. The buildings and large machinery were sold at auction to Royal E. Robbinswho restarted watch manufacture under the name of Tracy Baker & Company.  Dennison was retained in the reduced capacity of superintendent of the machine division.  His relationship to Robbins, however, was tense.  Robbins felt Dennison “meddled” in other divisions of the factory.  Dennison felt Robbins was losing track of his vision. 

In 1861, just as the Civil War was about to greatly increase the market for watches among officers who needed to be able to coordinate battlefield movements and the exploding demands of war timeindustrial production,  Robbins unceremoniously fired Dennison.

 

The American Watch Company works at Waltham in the 1870's.

In the post-war period, Tracy Baker & Co. would change hands again and become the American Waltham Watch Company and finally simply the Waltham Watch Company, for many years the largest American producer of time pieces. 

It took until 1864 for Dennison to find a backer for a new firm, A. O. Bigelow.  Together they formed the Tremont Watch Company.  This time the plan was a little different.  The Civil War had dramatically driven up wages for skilled workmen in the North.  Dennison figured out that the most famous and skilled watch makers in the world in Switzerland made significantly less than their American counterparts.  In an early example of offshore outsourcing, Swiss journeymen would manufacture to specification fine parts like escapementsand wheel trains while larger parts including barrel plates, cases, faces, etc. would be made in the States where the watches would be assembled. 

Dennison and his family went to Zurich to make the arrangements.  While he was gone, the Tremont board, without consulting him, decided to move the factory to Melrose to produce a cheaper model watch entirely in their factory.  The company was reorganized as the Melrose Watch Company. Dennison resigned in protest.  He was essentially stranded in Europe. He remained in Switzerland trying to set up a new arrangement with an American manufacturer without success.  As Dennison expected Melrose failed by 1870.

In 1871 relocated to England where he tried to manufacture watches from parts made in Zurich and plates from Tremont.  Using capital raised by this venture he helped organize the Anglo-American Watch Company in Birmingham in 1874.  He and his English partners bought up the parts stock and some of the machinery of Melrose, shipped it to England and began producing watches there for the first time on the American System of Watchmaking.   In 1874 the company changed its name to the English Watch Manufacturing Company.  It turned out the reputation of American production in England at this time was similar to the post-World War II reputation of goods Made in Japan harming sales.  Dennison left the company about the same time.

At long last Dennison found success manufacturing an innovative watch case in Birmingham, England.

Dennison had a second business in Birmingham manufacturing watch cases, for which the main clients was, ironically, the Waltham Watch Company, the descendent of the firm he had created.  With the addition of a partner the firm became Dennison, Wiggly & Company in 1874.  Dennison remained in England managing this, at last, successful, firm until he died on January 8, 1895 at age 83.  His son Franklin became managing partner.  The name was changed to the Dennison Watch Case Company in 1905 and continued to provide its products to the industry until 1965.

Dennison died with neither the fame nor the enormous wealth of other significant American industrial innovators and businessmen.  The creator of the American System, which transformed manufacture and production in profound ways far beyond the watch industry, spent almost 40 years in a kind of exile. 

They're back and they are pissed off.  Who?  The women by the millions who launched the resistance the day after pitiful inauguration of the former Resident of the White House and his minions in Congress, state capitols, and local government in January 2017.  That led directly to women seeking election at every level, the Blue Wave election of 2020 that re-took the House of Representatives and launchedthe powerful new voice of the Squad, and in no small measure mobilizedthe voters who ousted the scum-bag-in-chief.  They also amplified the Me Too movement and inspired other resistance movements to take to the streetsin unprecedented numbers.

The day after the Cheeto's inauguration in 2017 the first Women's March jump started the Resistance that ultimately ousted the corrupt traitor from office.

Despite these successes, Federal courts were stacked against themand the Supreme Court now has a majority hostile to women, their bodily autonomy, and rights.  Enabled by gerrymandering, voter suppression schemes, deep pockets funding Astro turf organizations and candidates, and MAGA delusional madness, Red State governors and legislatures have launched relentless attacks on abortion rights and women’s rights to control their own bodies and lives.  The recent Texas law which the Supremes allowed to go into effect circumventedthe established right to abortions under the Roe v Wade decisionby placing a civil bounty of $1000 on anyone who aids an abortion in any way to be paid by the state for each successful civil suit brought against them.  More than a dozen states are ginning up copycat laws.

Since this graphic was created the number signed up for marches today has swelled to well over a million.

So this fall’s iteration of the Women’s March which will be held today in Washington, D.C. with more than 650 sister marches around the county will Rally for Abortion Justice.  It should be the largest single-day mobilization dedicated to abortion justice and reproductive freedom in history.

A call to march posted by one of the March’s chief sponsoring organizations Planned Parenthood stated:

On October 2, we’re marching in every single state ahead of the Supreme Court reconvening on October 4. Women’s March and more than 90 other organizations, including National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, Planned Parenthood, SHERO Mississippi, Mississippi in Action, Access Reproductive Care-Southeast, The Frontline, Working Families Party, SisterSong, [and the Unitarian Universalist Association]  are organizing a national call to mobilize and defend our reproductive rights.

Abortion has never been fully accessible, but we are at the risk of losing our reproductive freedom completely. The call to action is clear, and urgent. The relentless attacks from Texas to Mississippi are ramping up quickly. Anti-choice extremists have a deep desire to return to a time when there was more clear and effective domination and control over queer and trans folks, women, and people of color; they want to revive those old values and societal norms to the point of re-acceptance. The authoritarian agenda of reproductive control is fueled by misogyny and racism - and we must challenge it, together.

On October 2, we’re going to send the Supreme Court and lawmakers across the country a clear, unified message. The attack on our reproductive rights will not be tolerated.

We have this opportunity to invite all the people that know us and love us into this important movement and work united as we build something better for our families and communities. As a small powerful group tries to come for our human rights over and over again, we’ll never let go of our vision of reproductive justice; for unfettered abortion access and everything we need to support and grow our families to thrive and live healthy lives.

The Washington March will begin at noon at Freedom Plaza, 1455 Pennsylvania Ave NW and march to the steps of the United States Supreme Court.  In Chicago the March to Defend Abortion Access will begin at 11:30 at the Daley Center, 50 West Washington Street.

Closer to home for those of us in McHenry County the Rally for Rights will be held on Woodstock Square at 2:30 pm, rain or shine.  Participants are asked to mask up and come with suitable rain gear.  Members and friend of the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation in McHenry will be there.  Look for the TOL banner if you want to march with us.  The local March is organized by the Women’s March Woodstock,  McHenry County NOW, Democratic Women and other progressive organizations.

Don’t be surprised if today’s uprising is as effective at the first one, pink pussy hats or no.

It has been one of the honors of my life to be able to attendand support in Chicago and Woodstock as a male ally since the beginning.  After the second Women’s March in Chicago in January 2018 I dared write:

Today, I Am a Woman

After the Chicago Women’s March

January 20, 2018

 

Today, I am a woman—

            a put-a-bag-on-her-head-woman,

            a never hit on by Cosby, Weinstein, or Trump woman,

            a lumbering lummox of a lady,

            a barren womb non-breeder,

            a hairy-legged horror,

            a gawky, graceless girl,

            a disappointment all around.

 

But Sisters, today, I am a woman—

            if you will have me.

 

Tomorrow I will be just another prick.

 

—Patrick Murfin

 

Playing chicken with of government shutdown and economic catastrophe.  The United States narrowly averted a government shut down at the last minute yesterday.   If it seems like we have been there before you are not mistaken.   Going back to President Bill Clinton’s fights with Congressional Republicans in 1995 there have been 5 total or partial shutdowns laying off hundreds of thousands of Federal employees, closingvital services,   disruptingthe lives of millions, and costing billions of dollars.   In 2013 a total shutdown to spite President Barack Obama lasted 15 days.   In 2018-19 the former Resident of the United States helped engineerthe partial shut down of his own government lasting 35 days believing that voters would hol...

If asked about the origin of the United States Army, most folks, if they have a clue, would point to the American Revolution.  On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress created the Continental Army and the next day unanimously elected George Washington commanding general.  Volunteer units from several colonies already besieging Boston alongside militia units were mustered as the First Regiment of the Line.  Washington soon joined the troops, and the war was on as a seriously united effort.

All of that, of course, is true.  But almost as soon as the war ended the Continental Army was demobilized and essentially disbanded by order of General Washington on May 12, 1783 after Congress, now under the Articles of Confederation, rejected his appeal for a small standing army to be placed under the command of General Henry Knox.  Congress was deeply fearful that a standing army would lead inevitably to monarchy or dictatorship—and more than a few feared that the popular Washington might use it to have himself made king.

One hundred artillerymen and 500 infantry were kept on the payroll.  The artillery company was stationed at West Point, essentially security guards for the large arsenal there.  The infantrymen were scattered in small numbers at forts and outposts across the long western frontier and the border with British Canada.

Those infantrymen were totally unable to face the challenge of continuing warfare on the frontier by native tribes still allied with the British.  The plight of settlers west of the Alleghenies and south of the Ohio was soon desperate.

And this tiny Federal force was not even regularized, it operated out of necessitybut with no legal foundation.

In June of 1784 Congress formally rejected Washington’s scaled back plans for a 700 man army.  On May 12 they dischargedall the troops except for 25 caretakers at Fort Pitt and 55 at West Point.  On June 14 of that year Congress reluctantly agreed to raise a force of 700 men for one year’s duty on the frontier under the command of a Lt. Colonel.

Members of the Army's First Regiment on frontier post duty.

On September 29, 1784 the War Departmentformally issued the order creating what many considered just a temporary resurrection of the Continental Army.  Four companiesof infantry and two of artillery dubbed the First American Regiment came under the command of Colonel Josiah Harmar of Pennsylvania. 

The creation of the First Regiment is considered the true birthday of the Regular U.S. Army.

The idea that a tiny regular army supplemented with local militia and, if need be short term musters of volunteer regiments would be enough to keep a lid on the powder keg on the frontier was ludicrous.

Some of the bloodiest, most intense, and widest ranging Indian warfare inAmerican history continued for years on the frontier.  On November 4, 1791 a large force of volunteers, militia, and some regular companies under General Arthur St. Clare was routed and nearly massacred by native forces of the Western Confederation near Fort Recovery in Ohio.

The Legion of the United States during the campaign against the native Western Confederacy leading to the decisive Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

This disaster finally encouraged Congress to expand and reorganize the Army.  With the approval of new President Washington and his Secretary of War Knox, the Legion of the United States was created with General “Mad” Anthony Wayne in command.  It was organized into four sub legions, two of which were converted from the First and Second Regiments, and two more to be recruited and trained. 

After extensive training in 1792 and ’93 the Legion took to the field for operations against the Western Confederacy south of the Ohio.  The large, disciplined force, with the assistance of by now veteran militia, was successful in a campaign in Kentucky that drove most of the hostiles north of the river. 

Wayne and the Legion pursued the tribes into their home territory north of the river, burning several principal towns and finally decisively defeating them at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 4, 1794.

With the frontier seemingly secured, the Legion was disbanded in 1796 and the reduced Army was reorganized into regiments the following year.  Some historians take this as the real origin of the Regular Army, but since the First and Second regiments were reconstituted, most take the 1784 date.

Major General James Wilkinson, first Commanding General of the U.S. Army,  was a brave soldier in combat, but an inveterate schemer, Spanish secret agent, and plotter of various treasons.

The new Army was placed under the command of General James Wilkerson, an officer with a checkered reputation for rascality, but a splendid battle record in the Revolution and under Wayne at Fallen Timbers—despite the fact that as a double agent for the Spanish in New Orleans he may have leaked some of the Legions operational plans to British agents active with the Indians.

Later that year the Whiskey Rebellion broke out in Western Pennsylvania.  To suppress it Washington, at the urging of his closest advisor, Alexander Hamilton raised the largest army the new nation had ever put into the field, over 12,000 troops, mostly federalized militia including for the first time, draftees, and a handful of Legion troops.  He personally took to the field to command the force, which made quick, and largely bloodless, work of suppressing the rebellion.  But that confirmed the worst fears of old anti-federalists and Thomas Jefferson’s nascent Republican faction that a large army would be used to suppress the people in defense of a powerful elite.

President George Washington took command of the large army raised to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania is seen here reviewing the troops.  Alexander Hamilton to command in the field for the brief, largely bloodless campaign. 

After retirement Washington was recalled to command the Army in 1798 by President John Adams as a possible war with France loomed.  A large force was raised, mostly Volunteers with regular Army regiments.  Washington helped plan the formation and logistics but left operational command to his favorite Hamilton who expected to take the field in operational command.  Hamilton had grandiose dreams of martial glory, including the conquestof Louisiana. 

Washington died at home in Mt. Vernon still nominally in command on March 1, 1799.  The crisiswith France passed, much to Adams’s relief and to the disappointment of Hamilton.  The Volunteer Army was disbanded, and the Regular Army shrunken. 

Wilkerson was restored to command and embarked on more plots with the Spanish and later with disgraced Vice President Aaron Burr who planned a filibustering campaign to either capture Texas from the Spanish or perhaps create abreak away nation west of the Appalachians. At the last moment the Commanding general betrayed Burr, but that is another story.

The Regular Army remained undermannedand scattered in coastal defense fortifications and along the frontier.  It was totally unprepared for the War of 1812...yet another story.

The Old Guard of the 3rd Infantry Regiment still marches in the post-Revolutionary War of first U.S. Regular Army troops for special ceremonial occasions like this Presidential Inaugural parade.

The First Regiment was consolidated with four other regiments in the post War Of 1812 reorganization in 1815 as the 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is the oldest active Regiment in the Army.  Now known as the Old Guard it has mostly ceremonial duties around Washingtonincluding soldier funerals at Arlington National Cemetery, standing guard at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Presidential escort, and providing troops for review for visiting foreign dignitaries.  It is the only unit in the army to always march in parades with fixed bayonets in honor of its chargeat the Battle of Cerro Gordo in the Mexican War. Units from it fought in Vietnam and companies have been dispatched to support deployments in the Horn of Africa, Djibouti, and at Camp Taji, Iraq in recent years.

It is possible you may never have heard of Ian Tyson who turned 87 earlier this week.  But then you wouldn’t be a fan of classic ‘60’s folk music, gritty contemporary Cowboy tunes—note I didn’t say Country music—or most of all Canadian.  After all Tyson’s wistful ballad Four Strong Windswas voted the Greatest Canadian song and he comes from roughly the same cohort as such astonishingly gifted songwriters Oscar Brand, Leonard Cohn, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Neil Young. That’s some tough competition!

Tyson was born to British immigrant parents on September 25, 1933 in Victoria,British Columbia and raised in the idyllic small city of Duncan, BC on the southern end of Vancouver Island.  As a boy he was fascinated by the cowboyshe saw in the movies and idled his time drawing.  He was a fan of Wilf Carter a/k/a Montana Slim, the cowboy singer and yodeler who became Canada’s first country music star.  Never a ranch kid, he none-the-less became a rodeo rider and contestant in his teens and steadily climbed to bigger events.  He also pursued art in school.

Injuries—including serious ones—are part and parcel with the rough and tumble life of a rodeo rider.  While he was laid up with broken bones and studyingat the Vancouver School of Art, Tyson first picked up a guitar.  By his own admission he wasn’t very good.  He claimed to know just two chords—surely an exaggeration since most songs have at least 3—when he started playing occasionally at the Heidelberg Café, a rathskellercatering to students. 

Taken by the American rock-a-billy soundand particularly Buddy Holly and the Crickets he joined a band called the Sensational Stripes.  Within a few months thanks to Musician’s Union rule that concerts include Canadian acts, the band shared stagewith the Crickets, Gene Vincent, and Paul Anka in one of those packaged tours when it came to Vancouver.

When Tyson graduated from Art School in 1958 his heart told him to stay on the rodeo circuit, but his battered body was saying something else.  Never seriously considering a musical career, he ended up in Toronto after bumming down to California and across Canada hitch-hiking.  He took a straight gig as a commercial artist but within a few months was drawn to the dawning folk music scenein local clubs. That’s where he met Sylvia Fricker, a 19 year old escapee from a middle class home in Chatham, Ontario who dreamed of a singing career.

Sylvia was lovely, talented, and more serious about a career than the restless Tyson.  But her voice blended perfectly with his rich baritone.  By 1959 they were playing together at the Village Corner and other clubs as Ian & Sylvia.  The duo quickly matured as musicians, Tyson’s guitar playing got much better, they explored harmonies, and developed a wide repertoire.  First Tyson and then Fricker began writing original material.

In the early ‘60’s not only were they good—and popular—enough to give up their day jobs and become full time musicians.  They migratedto the epicenter of the exploding folk scene—New York’s Greenwich Village.

Ian & Sylvia--the Greenwich Village years.

The duo adapted quickly and well.  They were soon in the orbit of Dave Van Ronk, the Mayor of McDougal Street and a friend and mentor to many young musicians.  It was not long before they caught they ear and eye of Albert Grossman, the young agent who already managed Peter Paul & Mary.  Grossman quickly got them a record deal with Vanguard, the leading folk music label.  Their first album Ian & Sylvia contained mostly traditional British and Canadian folk songs, spirituals, and a taste of blues.  It was critically well received and a modest commercial success.  It was good enough to get them invited to participate in the legendary and seminal 1963 Newport Folk Festival.

It was their next album that was a creative breakthrough and a career maker.  In addition to their staple traditional ballads, the album included a version of Bob Dylan’s early song Tomorrow is Such a Long Time.  Grossman was then also managing Dylan and their paths frequently crossed in the Village.  Tyson, like everyone else was struck by Dylan’s genius.  But he was also put off by his arrogance and tendency to use and discard people in his meteoric rise.  Also on the album was a Tyson original.  The lonesome and yearning Four Strong Winds as written in a cramped apartment just off McDougal and captured Tyson’s own restlessness and affection for Canada and its vast spaces.  The song became a major Canadian hit and popular in the U.S. as well where it was covered by numerous artists. 

Ian & Sylvia became a major touring act in both countries as well as in the British Isles and Europe.  They also sealed their professional partnership by getting married in 1964.  For Tyson’s sake they established a home in rural southern Albertawhich became the base from which they launched frequent tours and worked on a succession of Albums on Vanguard and later on American commercial labels including MGM and Columbia.

                   Ian and Sylvia get married--1964.

Their marriage coincided with their third album, Northern Journey which featured Sylvia’s original tune You Were on My Mind which became a #3 Billboardhit in the U.S. when it was covered by the California power folk combo We Five.  Tyson also had a memorable original, a second signature song in fact.  Some Day Soon harkened back to his rodeo days but was unusualin being from the viewpoint of the girl who falls for the itinerant wild man.  It also had a swinging country music feel different than the duo’s ballads.

Judy Collins, who had already recorded other Tyson songs, added the song to her classic 1969 album Who Knows Where the Time Goes and released it as a hit single.  Collins, a girl from Denver, became so associated with the song that many thought it was autobiographical.  But the song had legs for other artists as well including Cheyenne’s singing rodeo cowboy Chris LeDoux in 1973 on an album that would recharge the cowboy genre, country music crooner Moe Brady in 1982, and country thrush Suzzy Boggus in 1991.

Ian & Sylvia’s follow up album recorded in ’64 and released early the next year was Early Morning Rain which boosted the career of fellow Canadian singer/song writer Gordon Lightfoot on its title track and with That’s What You Get for Loving Me.  The album also included songs from rising Canadian stars Steve Gillette and Tom Campbell.  It cemented their reputation as the anchors of Canadian folk music.

In 1965 they helped shake up the folk music scene at the Newport Festival when they showed up with an electric band in support of their newest album Play One More.  They joined The Byrds and the Lovin’ Spoonful as early creatorsof the folk/rock sound.  Bob Dylan’s former girlfriend Suze Rotolo in her memoirs credited Tyson with inspiring Dylan to go electric himself despite their prickly relationship.

By now Ian & Sylvia were popular worldwide, but certifiable super stars in Canada. By 1967 they had a weekly TV program on the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) where they showcased the deep pool of Canadian talent, including Neil Young.  They also signed a second record deal with MGM Records.  For the next few years, they would alternate releases on their two labels with MGM steering them in a direction of a more mainstream country music sound.

In the late ‘60’s the couple relocated to Nashville where they recorded two albums, one for Vanguard and one for MGM.  The Vanguard effort Nashvillewas cut in February 1968, one month before The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeoand is widely considered the first collaboration of rock and Nashville session players and the first country/rock album.  Both albums included cuts taken from Dylan’s then unreleased Basement Tapes with The Band.

Ian and Sylvia, left, with members of The Great Speckled Bird.

In 1969 the duo assembled a band of all-starCanadian and Nashville side men and session musicians including Buddy Cageon pedal steel guitar, Amos Garrett, on guitar and backup vocals, Ken Kalmusky on bass, N.D. Smart on drums, David Briggs on piano for a big cross-Canada rock-and-roll rail tour, Festival Express.  Dubbed The Great Speckled Bird after the song that became the first vocal ever performed on the Grand Ol’ Opry when Roy Acuff stepped to the microphone, the band was a tight, swinging, dynamic combo.

Tyson’s good friend Todd Rundgren was also on the rail tour and was so impressed by the band that he helped it get a record deal with newly established Ampex label, a division of the company that dominated reel-to-reel tape recording.  Rundgren himself produced the recording sessions in Nashville.  Norbert Putnam sat in for Kalmusky for most sessions.  Ian or Sylvia wrote all but one of the of the album’s tracks and sang lead but were not identified separately from the band on the original label to emphasize it as a separate project from their duo.

Despite being widely anticipated in the industryand the music press the label was unable to get a distribution deal and collapsed before much more than a handful of copies shipped.   Thousands of records were locked in a warehouse and unavailable as they were caught up in litigation over the assets of the failed venture.  The few copies that did surface were well ecstatically reviewed.  The LP became a sought-after cult collection piece and bootlegged tape versions circulated.  Years later some of the albums were released with stickers added to identify Ian & Sylvia as the front artists.

Promoting the Ian Tyson Show on Canadian TV as Ian & Sylvia redefined themselves as country artists.

It was not the end of the band, however.  In 1970 they became the house band on Nashville North, a country music variety show on the CTV Network, the main corporately owned competitor to the CBC.  The next year the program was re-named The Ian Tyson Show and ran on the network until 1975. 

The omission of Sylvia’s name was significant.  By then the couple’s marriage was beginning to fray.  Although she appeared on the show as part of the band and had occasional solo numbers, her husband was out front as the star.  As the program ran she appeared less frequently.

Meanwhile, their recording careers had hit the commercial doldrums with changing popular tastes.  Although established as Canadian country music superstars, American audiences still thought of them, mostly as a folk act and U.S. country music radio thought of them as interloping folk-rockers.  With both their Vanguard and MGM contracts at an end they were picked up by industry giant Columbia Records whose Nashville operation was overseen by Chet Atkins.  Despite those advantages the label didn’t know what to do with them or how to market them.

Their first Columbia LP was called Ian & Sylvia, the same name as their original Vanguard album leading to confusion on whether it was a re-issue and at the same time failing to plant a flag as a country act.  Some of the songs were strong but bland mainstream country arrangements meant to be radio friendly.  In 1972 a follow up You Were On My Mind featured a later incarnation of the Great Speckled Bird and included electric updates of some of their early folk hits.  Neither record sold well and You Were on My Mind was their last original album together. 

The next year Tyson backed by members of the Great Speckled Bird released his first solo album, Ol’ Eon which was a mid-level Canadian hit.  Shortly after Ian & Sylvia broke up as an act and the couple amicably divorced in 1975, the same year as Tyson’s TV show ended.

Sylvia went on to a successful and varied career on her own.  Her 1975 debut solo album on Capital Records, Woman’s Worldout-performed Tyson’s debut in Canada.  She later established her own independent label Salt Records in the 80’s and became part of the all-female country folk group Quartette in the early ’90’s with other solo artists Cindy Church, Caitlin Hanford, and Colleen Peterson.  After Peterson’s death Gwen Swick replaced her in the group.  Sylvia also became an influential country music journalist, a founding board member of the Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings (FACTOR) which helps finance recordings of emerging Canadian artists, and a board member for the Juno Awards, the Canadian equivalent of the Grammies.  Along the way Sylvia was herself a 7 time Juno Award nominee, inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame as part of Ian & Sylvia in 1992, and added to the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame on her own in 2003 She was made a member of the prestigious Order of Canada in 1994.

After the break-up Ian Tyson first seemed to have a harder time adjusting.  His follow-up album to Ol’ Eon failed to chart.  He slowed down his touring and mostly retreated to his horse ranch near the tiny village of Longview, in southern Alberta, about 40 miles south of Calgaryin the Canadian Rockies foothills.  He was a cowboy for real once again.

In 1980 Tyson hooked up with Calgary based music promoter and manager Neil MacGonigill.  It was a turning point to a phenomenal second act to his musical career.  He decided to dedicate himself to resurrecting all but moribund tradition of cowboy music including the old herding ballads and yodeling songs of the 1930’s and ‘40’s but updated with original music on cowboy, Western, and rodeo themes beginning with his 1983 release, Old Corals and Sagebrush.

Tyson receiving his Platinum Record for his classic LP Cowboyography

Between 1987’s Cowboyography and 1996’s he had a string of 5 Canadian hit albums and dozens of charting singles.  Along with the Chris LeDoux and a handful of other musicians Western or Cowboy music was successfully resurrected as genre distinct from Country music.  Radio station formatting the style full or part time sprang up across Western Canada and the U.S.  Although it has strong regional appeal, there are now fans across both countries and in the British Isles.

Among the singles hits off these and subsequent albums are Cowboy Pride, Fifty Years Ago, Since the Rain, Springtime in Alberta, Nights in Laramie, and Alcohol in the Bloodstream.  Navajo Rugand Summer Wages were named two of the Top 100 Western Songs of All Time by the Western Writers of America.

In 2006 and ’07 it looked like Tyson’s career might be over due to extreme vocal cord damage.  result of a concert at the Havelock Country Jamboree followed a year later by a virus contracted during a flight to Denver.  A Calgary doctor who also saved Adele’s voice, operated on his vocal cords.  After months of rehabilitation, Tyson got his voice back—but not the rich, smooth baritone for which he was noted.

His new singing voice lost some of the lower register but added range ontop.  It also gave it a gravely quality.  Tyson says he prefers the new voice as a better rugged match for his Western themes.  In 2008 just a year after he thought it was gone, Tyson recorded his best reviewed album in years, Yellowhead to Yellowstone and Other Love Stories which garnered a 2009 Canadian Folk Music Awards nomination for Solo Artist of the Year.

Other honors he has picked up along the way are his membership in the Order of Canada in 1984, a 1989 induction to the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame, a 2003 Governor General’s Award for the Performing Arts, inclusion in the Alberta Order of Excellence in 2006, and the 2011 Charles M. Russell Heritage Award presented by the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana for his tribute song to the artist, The Gift.

Ian Tyson--still a cowboy

In 2010, Tyson issued his memoir The Long Trail: My Life in the Westco-written with Calgary journalist Jeremy Klaszus.  According to one review the book “alternates between autobiography and a broader study of [Tyson’s] relationship to the ‘West’—both as a fading reality and a cultural ideal.”

At 87 Tyson is still active, recording, and touring.  He is proud to describe himself as a cantankerous old man who won’t give up.  And he still looks great in a Stetson.

 

The wreck of the Fast Mail not only inspired the song, but this dramatic painting by regionalist master Thomas Hart Benton. There seems to be something about a train wreck that inspires a song.  Just about everybody knows Casey Jones .  Just two years after the disaster that inspired that tune, the Southern Railroad express known as the Fast Mail came barreling down a steep grade at a high rate of speed and overshot a tight radius turn right before a trestle sending the engineand train to a spectacular fiery crash at the bottom of a steep ravine. Within 24 hours a witness/rescuer at the scene had penned a ballad set to the melody of a popular fiddle tune, The Ship That Never Returned , the same tune used latter for Charley on the MTA.

OSS Lt. Col Peter Dewey as a captain.  The dashing and well connected young officer accidently became the first American casualty in Vietnam.   Lt. Col. Albert Dewey cut a dashing figure and had distinguished himself as Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative behind the lines inFrance when he was assigned a sensitive assignment to help repatriate Allied prisoners of war (POW) in Indochina in September of 1945.   He was considered perfectfor the job because he spoke flawless, perfect French and had the kind of idealistic democratic zeal common to the OSS—the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during World War II.   Within weeks, on September 26 he became the first American fatal casualty in Vietnam killed in a...

On September 25, 1890 Wilford Woodruff, President and Prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints came down to his office looking haggard.  He had not slept much the night before, he told his secretary.  He had been in consultation with Godand in the night God had given him a vision of the fate of the church and its people if the practice of polygamy did not end—the Temples would be sized and violated, the President and the Apostleswould be imprisoned, and the possessions of all the people confiscated.  With this revelation in hand, Woodruff went to the Apostles—a council of Twelve senior members—who approved a Manifesto renouncing plural marriage.  On October 1 the Manifesto was made known to the national press.  It was confirmed, at the insistence of the Federal Government at a Church General Conference on October 4.

Although Woodruff insisted he was acting only in accordance with instructions from God and not out of any worldly political considerations, it looked to much of the nation like the Mormonswere caving to decades of escalating pressure against them by the Federal government.

Plural marriage, the preferred Mormon term for polygamy, was not part original Mormon practice as reveled to the Prophet Joseph Smith.  It seems to have been introduced through proselytizing and the absorptionof a small polygamous sect in rural Maine.  In 1843 Smith received a private revelationapproving of plural marriage, at least for himself and the Apostles.  The justification was the need to “rise up the seed of a new priesthood”—rapidly grow the society.

Smith and the Church continued to publicly condemn polygamy and deny participation in it, but it became an open secret in the Illinois settlement of Nauvoo, where the first Temple was built.  Much of the public antipathy to the Mormons grew out of the suspicion that polygamy was sanctioned or practiced and it helped lead to Smith’s assassinationand the Mormon exodus from Nauvoo.

Polygamy was not publicly proclaimed until 1852, five years after the Mormons arrived in Utah, and eight years after Smith’s death. Smith’s successor Brigham Young, who had led his people halfway across the continent to their promised land, was an open polygamist.

John D. Lee, former right hand man to Brigham Young, sits next to his coffin at Mountain Meadow, the site of a massacre of an emigrant wagon train he was accused of leading, just prior to his execution by firing squad.  Lee's sacrifice was  the cost of ending the Federal Government's Mormon War in 1857, saved the church, and preserved polygamy.

The practice scandalized those back East and political pressure began to build to suppress the practice.  President James Buchannan dispatched the Army to Utah Territory in 1857, beginning the so-called Mormonor Utah War.  The church had over-played its hand in persecuting non-Mormons in the territory when a Mormon militia attacked and massacred an immigrant wagon trainfrom Missouri at remote Mountain Meadows because some of its leaders were thought to have participated in past persecution of them.  The Army eventually occupied Salt Lake City.  Brigham Young was stripped of his post as Territorial Governorand was replaced by an eastern Gentile. Young delivered up elder John D. Lee as the responsible person for the massacre and continued to run a parallel, shadow government.

The infant Republican Party made the suppression of polygamy an important part of its platform.  When Abraham Lincoln came to the Presidency, however, he needed the support of Young and Mormon power in Utah to keep open the overland route to California and as a bulwark against Confederate ambitions in New Mexico.   When the Republican Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act which outlawed polygamy in States and Territories in 1862, Lincoln privately assured Young that he would not attempt to enforce it if the Mormon’s continued support of the Union cause.  A temporary truce of sorts over the issue was in force.

Then in 1874 Congress passed the Poland Act which facilitated charging individuals with violations of the polygamy ban.  As a show of forceprominent Mormon leaders, including Brigham Young’s personal secretary, were arrested and prosecuted for plural marriage.  The Mormons reacted with defiance.  In the 1876 the doctrine authorizing plural marriage was officially publishedin a revised version of the Church’s Doctrine and Covenantsfor the first time. 

The Edmunds Act of 1882 made “cohabitating with more than one woman” a crime. Those who believed in polygamy could not try polygamists either as a judge or juror and polygamists and their spouses were banned from holding any office and territorial voting.   With most Utah’s residents thus excluded from voting anti-Mormonsfilled the Territorial legislature and took control of the educational system.

Mormon leaders in Federal Prison for polygamy during the period of the Great Raid.

By the mid-80’s authorities, led by Federal Marshalls, began what the Mormons call The Great Raid.  Communities across Utah and adjacent southern Idaho were visited, homes raidedat night, and children separated from their parents and questioned about their parents.  Hundreds, probably thousands of men and their families fled to Mexico or Canada.

The aim to actually destroy the church was made clearer in yet another piece of legislation, Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887.  The Territorial Militia, composed mostly of Mormons was abolished and ordered to disarm.  Fornication and adultery became Federal crimes meaning that polygamists could be charged with multiple offences.  Children born to polygamist fathers could not inherit from them.

Most ominously, the legislation disincorporated the Church, confiscated its properties, and even threatened seizure of its Temples without which believing Mormons could not uphold the requirements of the faith.  The Mormons were in disarray and despair.  In Utah alone there had been more than 2000 prosecutions for polygamy, adultery, and fornication.  Many men were convicted on multiple countsfor each year married to each wife and were essentially held in prison indefinitely.  Courts held the ban against cohabitation even extended to women in separate households if they were financially supported in any way, instantly impoverishing thousands of women.  Much of the church leadership was in hiding and many had active warrants out against them.  President and Prophet John Taylor died while in hiding.

Taylor’s successor Woodruff was desperately seeking a solution.  In 1887 and 1888 he had asked the Quorum of Apostles if the Church should abandon polygamy.  In both cases Woodruff was told that they could not bend to temporal law in violation of revealed truth. Only the revealed word of the Lord could end the practice.

A polygamous Mormon family circa 1890.

In 1890 the Supreme Court upheld the Edmunds-Tucker Act and legal action to seize church properties, including the Temples, was begun.  Additional legislation was introduced in Congress that would bar all Mormons from holding office or voting whether they practiced plural marriage or not.

It was in this context that God apparently finally spoke to the President.

Even though the Manifesto as approved by the General Convention allowed previously married men to keep their wives and families and skirted the issue of sanctions for violating the ban, it was enough to relieve pressure on the Mormons.  Raids and prosecutions fell off sharply and movement on the suit to seize church property was halted. 

In 1893 Church property was returned and in 1894, exactly four years after Woodruff’s chat with the All Mighty, Democratic President Grover Cleveland issued a general amnesty and the Church replied by the dissolving the Mormon dominated People’s Party.  Although Mormons generally tended to support Democrats because their persecution was spearheaded by the GOP, Church leaders split affiliation with the two parties to assure support for both for the final push to the long cherished dream of statehood.

In 1896 Utah was finally admitted to the Union and the Church issued another Manifesto, this one supporting the separation of Church and State.

But the controversy was not entirely over.  Senate Republicans blocked seating Senator elect Reed Smoot because polygamy had not been eradicated in Utah.  Indeed, some plural marriages continued to be sanctioned in Utah by some members of the Apostles.  New President Joseph F. Smith, a great-nephew of founder, issued a Second Manifesto on Polygamy which explicitly excommunicating those practicing polygamy.

To this day Church leaders flatly declare that no recognized members of the church, practice plural marriage.  Yet it persists, largely in remote and rural areas.  A tiny Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and other break-away groups have been organized and continue to endorse the practice.  Prosecutions are once again on the rise in Utah in the early 21st Century.

 

Women in polygamous marriages and their children after raids on a break-away Mormon sect in Texas generated considerable sympathy for the families.

Meanwhile some sympathy and tolerance for the practice has grown with reports of suffering caused families in remote areas by occasional continuing raids and arrests.  The best public relations coup of all, however, was the long run of Sister Wives on the cable channel TLC, a reality show that has painted one polygamous family in a mostly positive light. 

The long running TLC reality series portrays a polygamous family in a mostly favorable and wholesome light.

A general live-and-let-live attitude on sexual and family matters has largely culturally usurped traditional American Puritanism.  In a way, just as the most vocal opponents of marriage equality had warned, tolerance of same gender matrimony, has left the door ajar for other traditionally so-called deviant arrangements, including plural marriage.

Meanwhile the Mormons have carefully burnished apublic image of fostering an idealized, if paternalistic, nuclear family life featuring clean living, close relationships, and fervent support for traditional values.  On social issues, particularly abortion and marriage equality, they have sought to make common groundwith the Evangelical Religious Right, and conservative Catholics.

Can the Saints ever shake the stained heritage of polygamy?  Can they find safety and security from persecution as part of a broader Conservative movement?  Will the Evangelicals who, in their hearts-of-hearts regard Mormonism as a satanic cult long allow political expediency to override their urge to smash heretics and perceived others? Stand by for the results.