Category: History

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A Brief Tour of the Fireworks

In my other (paid, employed) life, I also sometimes blog. This morning, I was called upon to blog about which towns in the Bay Area are holding fireworks celebrations. I discovered that some other local media outlets had come up with good lists, so rather than invent the wheel with my limited time and resources, I simply linked to what had been done well elsewhere. Of course, that wasn’t enough for me, so I dressed up the post with a dash of Fourth of July fireworks history. Including part of this widely cited passage (note the mention of future celebrations) from a letter John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

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A Brief Tour of the Fireworks

In my other (paid, employed) life, I also sometimes blog. This morning, I was called upon to blog about which towns in the Bay Area are holding fireworks celebrations. I discovered that some other local media outlets had come up with good lists, so rather than invent the wheel with my limited time and resources, I simply linked to what had been done well elsewhere. Of course, that wasn’t enough for me, so I dressed up the post with a dash of Fourth of July fireworks history. Including part of this widely cited passage (note the mention of future celebrations) from a letter John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776:

The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more. You will think me transported with Enthusiasm but I am not. I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this Declaration, and support and defend these States. Yet through all the Gloom I can see the Rays of ravishing Light and Glory. I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Days Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We shall not.

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Your Illinois Governors: Felony Update (2011)

Update 12/7/2011: The judge has spoken: Blagojevich gets 14 years n prison.

With the news that Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has been convicted on 17 of 20 counts of corruption, it's time to freshen my list of recent Illinois governors whose legal trouble reached felony level. As I said back in 2003, when George Ryan, Blagojevich's predecessor, was indicted on federal corrupion charges, Prairie State governors have racked up quite a record over the past half-century:

William G. Stratton (in office 1953-61): Indicted (1964) for income-tax evasion (acquitted).
Otto Kerner (1961-68): Indicted (1971) and convicted (bribery and other charges).
Sam Shapiro (1968-69): Never charged with anything, but then he only had eight months in office.
Richard Ogilvie (1969-73): Clean, so far as we know. Probably why he only served one term.
Dan Walker (1973-77): Indicted (1987) in his post-politics career as an S&L thief. Pled guilty.
Jim Thompson (1977-91): His career was about indicting other people, for a change.
Jim Edgar (1991-99): No dirt so far.
George Ryan (1999-2003): Indicted (2003) and convicted on federal corruption charges.
Rod Blagojevich (2003-2009): Convicted for influence peddling, including an alleged conspiracy to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat. (For a glimpse at government at its very best, it's worth reading the press release from the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. It's a 12-page PDF. Among the highlights: "In a conversation … on November 11, the charges state, Blagojevich said he knew that the President-elect wanted Senate Candidate 1 for the open seat but "they’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation. [Expletive] them." The full 78-page complaint, in PDF form, is available here: United States of America v. Rod R. Blagojevich and John Harris.)

Score:
Nine governors. Five indicted. Four convicted. One acquitted.

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Give Me That Old Time Vituperation

We often hear that we live in an era of remarkably blunt, if not downright ugly, political rhetoric. To me, the “rhetoric” seems to consists of patently loony claims–that the president was born in Mecca, brandishing an AK-47 among a family of bloodthirsty jihadis, for instance–that gain currency through relentless repetition.

Anyway, I happened across this the other night. It’s an account in the late Marc Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert” featuring Hiram Johnson, a Progressive Era politician who, among other things, championed the state’s now-jaded ballot initiative system. Here’s Johnson, talking about “General” Harrison Gray Otis, a figure he apparently did not think much of:

“Hiram Johnson was addressing a crowd in a Los Angeles auditorium when someone in the audience, who knew that Johnson’s talent for invective surpassed even the General’s, yelled out, ‘What about Otis?’ Johnson, all prognathous scowl and murderous intent, took two steps forward and began extemporaneously. ‘In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy,’ he said in a low rumble. ‘We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in his senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that its disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent–that,’ Johnson concluded in a majestic bawl, ‘that is Harrison Gray Otis!’ “

(As my friend Steve notes elsewhere: “Imagine anyone these days using a phrase like “he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon.” A way to call a person a bastard.” And indeed, I had meant to look that term up. Here’s what the OED has to say about it (under “bar”):

6. Heraldry. An honourable ordinary, formed (like the fess) by two parallel lines drawn horizontally across the shield, and including not more than its fifth part. bar sinister: in popular, but erroneous phrase, the heraldic sign of illegitimacy….

Posted on

Give Me That Old Time Vituperation

We often hear that we live in an era of remarkably blunt, if not downright ugly, political rhetoric. To me, the “rhetoric” seems to consists of patently loony claims–that the president was born in Mecca, brandishing an AK-47 among a family of bloodthirsty jihadis, for instance–that gain currency through relentless repetition.

Anyway, I happened across this the other night. It’s an account in the late Marc Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert” featuring Hiram Johnson, a Progressive Era politician who, among other things, championed the state’s now-jaded ballot initiative system. Here’s Johnson, talking about “General” Harrison Gray Otis, a figure he apparently did not think much of:

“Hiram Johnson was addressing a crowd in a Los Angeles auditorium when someone in the audience, who knew that Johnson’s talent for invective surpassed even the General’s, yelled out, ‘What about Otis?’ Johnson, all prognathous scowl and murderous intent, took two steps forward and began extemporaneously. ‘In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy,’ he said in a low rumble. ‘We have had vile officials, we have had rotten newspapers. But we have had nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis. He sits there in his senile dementia with gangrene heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all the things that are decent, frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy. This man Otis is the one blot on the banner of southern California; he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon. My friends, he is the one thing that all Californians look at when, in looking at southern California, they see anything that its disgraceful, depraved, corrupt, crooked, and putrescent–that,’ Johnson concluded in a majestic bawl, ‘that is Harrison Gray Otis!’ “

(As my friend Steve notes elsewhere: “Imagine anyone these days using a phrase like “he is the bar sinister on your escutcheon.” A way to call a person a bastard.” And indeed, I had meant to look that term up. Here’s what the OED has to say about it (under “bar”):

6. Heraldry. An honourable ordinary, formed (like the fess) by two parallel lines drawn horizontally across the shield, and including not more than its fifth part. bar sinister: in popular, but erroneous phrase, the heraldic sign of illegitimacy….

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Custer Day

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“Last Stand Hill” at the Little Bighorn Battlefield, near Crow Agency, Montana. Today’s the 135th anniversary of the battle. The stones are said to mark the spots where individual U.S. soldiers were found after the battle; the locations were marked first with stakes as burial details hurriedly covered the bodies, then with more permanent wooden markers. Later, most of the remains were moved to a common grave marked by the monument beyond the fence in the left distance (the remains of most officers, including Custer, were transported back East for burial; Custer was interred at West Point). In 1890, 14 years after the battle, the temporary markers were replaced with the white marble stones seen here. The strongest impression I had of the site when I first visited in 1988 was the sparse scattering of white markers stretching across several miles of rolling terrain. You can easily imagine the story the stones tell: a rapidly moving, chaotic fight in which many soldiers fell alone, in pairs, in groups of three or four. This group, which included Custer and his brother, is by far the largest on the battlefield.

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Family History

I think it’s pretty common among families to think and talk about the unseen influences on our lives. I”m talking about the little shreds of detail, or sometimes rich, complex stories, about our parents and maybe their parents that we think might explain something about them and about us.

Concrete example: Growing up, I was very aware that both my parents lost their fathers at an early age. My dad’s father died when he was 10; my mom’s dad died when she was 11. I came to assume, through small details I picked up over the years, that these events were traumatic if not shattering events in their families’ lives and that in one way or other they shaped my life and the lives of my siblings and maybe even the lives of our kids.

I was thinking about the biggest incident we heard about growing up, one that I think I heard my mom refer to simply as “the dunes.”

In August 1939, my mom, at age 9, was the lone survivor of a five-member family group swept into Lake Michigan at Miller Beach, in the Indiana dunes. I wrote a little bit about that a few years ago. Her account of what happened was pretty graphic–especially regarding her memories of trying to save a brother who was within arm’s reach and what it was like to have almost drowned (she said that by the time she was rescued she had stopped struggling; she was revived on the beach).

Mom suffered from depression for most of her life. It’s reasonable to think that one of the triggers was this terrible incident in the dunes. But she suffered a couple other major tragedies, too. The early death of her father, as I’ve mentioned, and the loss of a child–a brother of mine, the youngest of the four of us who arrived roughly annually in the mid-1950s, who died just before his second birthday. I saw some of the effects of that last tragedy. I remember that eventually my mom started seeing a psychiatrist–a move that may have saved her life and in some measure changed my life, too.

Something that was tucked away in the back of my head about the psychiatrist: Some years after my mom began seeing him, he suffered his own tragedy in the lake. He was out on his boat with his wife one August evening when a storm came up. The boat capsized, and the doctor and his wife were thrown overboard and separated. He was rescued after seven or eight hours in the water. She drowned. I recall my mom talking about this and overheard her saying that he told her that he simply didn’t want to get out of the lake when he was found.

Thinking about all this just now, I went looking for signs of the doctor online. He’d be in his 80s now, or even older. I checked news archives, and the lake incident came up as the only hit for his name in the Chicago area. And here’s what prompted this post: The date of his accident? It was the anniversary of the 1939 dunes drowning. I wonder if my mom and the doctor ever talked about that coincidence.

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From the Road: More Undead History

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A few more pictures from the hundreds I almost compulsively shot over the past week. After I go back to work this afternoon, the pictures will turn into a long-term photo editing project that I'll never quite get to. The shot above is from the Haymarket martyrs' memorial in Forest Home Cemetery (originally Waldheim, and when you see all the Germans buried there, you know why) in Forest Park, on Chicago's western boundary.

If you grow up around Chicago, at some point you encounter Haymarket in a history lesson. It seems long ago and far away, and of course in one sense it is: The events surrounding Haymarket began unfolding in 1886. But as I observed last week at the Little Bighorn battlefield, our history is too new to be settled, or at least much of it is, and forces are still contending to define or even own some chapters. Haymarket is one of those episodes that's still the object of curiosity for many and for a few at least a living symbol of the struggle for workers' rights.

We headed out there on an outing with my dad on Sunday. We had visited about four and a half years ago, and I still remembered how to get to the cemetery and find the memorial without asking. Our rounds went like this: first the Dairy Queen on Irving Park Road, near Central Avenue; then Mount Olive Cemetery, where my dad's parents and many other family members are buried; then the house my dad grew up in, on Nashville Avenue, and the neighborhood school he attended, Joseph Lovett Elementary. At that point, he said he wanted to go out to Harlem Avenue. OK — I could do that. With no destination in mind, I suggested stopping by Forest Home.

haymarket060511f.jpg I'm still surprised to find that the monument, and the nearby grave of Emma Goldman, still draw visitors who leave flowers and other tributes (I found the same at Mother Jones's grave in Mount Olive, Illinois; and just last week, when we visited the Mount Moriah Cemetery in Deadwood, I saw that folks are leaving flowers and other small remembrances for Wild Bill Hickok and Martha Jane Burke (Calamity Jane) and Seth Bullock–all notable characters on a recent HBO series. People do feel attached to these figures from the past–though for now it's best not to digress into the quality of the attachment).

Of course, not all the latter-day feeling that modern visitors develop for the Haymarket memorial is necessarily very smart. On the back of the memorial, some clever lads–why do I think the perpetrators were male?–have gone to work with markers of some kind and added the legends in the photo above ("We are the birds of the coming storm" is a quote from August Spies, an anarchist who was among those hanged after the 1886 Haymarket bombing).

Why the impulse to do something so lame? Of course, that's been the question ever since teen-agers started chiseling smart-ass hieroglyphics into Egyptian tombs way back in the day. I suppose you could make the argument that it's better to be actively engaged with the history the monument represents–you know, jumping in and joining in the dialectic–than treating the space as sacred, sterile, and dead. Had the guys with the markers showed up while I was there, I think we'd haveour own lively dialectical exploration. (Click images for larger versions.)

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Road Blog: Butte to Spearfish

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The charm and allure of travel: visiting new places, seeing new things, meeting new people, and perhaps choosing not to eat at a chain or “American cuisine” restaurant when you’re in unfamiliar territory (that assumes of course that you’re motel stop for the night is within hailing distance of that non-chain eatery, but I digress).

Today we hit the road in Butte about half past 8 in the morning and got off the road–the same Interstate 90 on which we’d been pounding our way eastward all day–at about half past 8 in the evening. Our major stop during that 12 hours: the Little Bighorn battlefield, a little more than 60 road miles east and south of Billings. I’d been there before; Eamon and Sakura never had been, but were game.

Much has changed on the battlefield since I visited with my dad in 1988. We were motivated by both having read Evan Connell’s “Son of the Morning Star,” his discursive, wandering appraisal of Custer and the Little Bighorn–both in myth and reality, as far as anyone can get to the “reality” of Yellow Hair’s climactic moment. (The interpretive efforts at the site have become a lot more sophisticated over the past couple of decades, but today I still came across a signboard of recent vintage that said something like, “no one can know Custer’s motives” in the decisions he made before his attack and during the battle itself. One hundred thirty-five years later, and the “what ifs” abound.)

I believe that around the year we visited, 1988 remember, some Lakota or other Native American activists had caused a stir by daring to stage a parallel event and place their own memorial marker on the battle’s anniversary days, June 25 and 26. That was probably not the first time, but it was a prelude to something serious and enduring. I saw several red granite markers on the field–red, one assumes, in contrast to the white marble markers placed in 1890 to mark the locations of where members of Custer’s command had fallen–that noted the location where Lakota and Cheyenne fighters died “defending their homeland and their way of life (see photos below, and click for larger versions). And in an apparent answer to the red stones, several new white headstones have appeared noting the deaths of several of Custer’s Arikara scouts; these stones note the scouts died defending their way of life. (American history: It’s too new to be over.) Beyond the stone wars, there are other signs, too: Native American guides conducting tourists through the battle sites and a beautiful memorial to the tribes present at the battle on both sides and the losses they suffered there (bottom photo).

Anyway, we spent a couple of hours driving and strolling sections of the battlefield. I made my companions wait while I tried to record sound and take pictures and visit just one more thing over there I’ll be right back! When I finally returned to the car, I apologized and said I hope it didn’t seem to be a repeat of a long ago (1988, too) trip to the Antietam battlefield with Eamon and my brother John. Eamon was going on 9 and didn’t quite grasp what was so interesting in the landscape that every 90 seconds or so we had to pull over and start pointing and jabbering. His moment came when we made it to a famous bridge on the battlefield. Eamon climbed up on one of the sides and walked across Antietam Creek while I held my breath–it was a long way down.

After Little Bighorn, we got back on I-90 for the drive southeast into Wyoming (the route I hoped to take, U.S. 212, is closed about 50 miles east of the battlefield because of a big slide). We whirred past Sheridan and Gillette, the distant Devil’s Tower, and within sight of the Black Hills. We decided to call it quits in Spearfish instead of going on to Deadwood: cheaper motel (I got my room for fifty dollars cash paid to a Hungarian tourist. True story), earlier night.

Tomorrow, we’re looking to make Omaha. What’s between here and there?

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From top: On Interstate 90, looking back from Big Timber to the Absaroka Mountains. Three photo panel from left: a stone marking the death of a civilian member of Custer’s regiment on the Little Bighorn battlefield; a stone marking the death of a Sans Arc Sioux warrior at the southern end of the battlefield, and stones for three Arikara scouts who died fighting with Custer’s command. Bottom: Sculpture at Native American memorial at battlefield, on the northern slope of “Last Stand Hill.” Click for larger images.

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Memorial Day

By way of my friend Steve, this piece of World War II reporting from Ernie Pyle: “This One Is Captain Waskow.”

“I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Captain Waskow down. The moon was nearly full, and you could see far up the trail, and even part way across the valley. Soldiers made shadows as they walked.”

The dispatch was written in Italy in 1943,during the battle of San Pietro Infine. The filmmaker John Huston, who was somewhere between making “The Maltese Falcon” and “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” was there, too, shooting a documentary about the battle. The battle isn’t widely remembered, but I remember seeing the movie in a film class in the mid-70s. From that, and from reading some Ernie Pyle dispatches someone handed me in high school, what I remember was that U.S. troops had been given the job of dislodging German forces from a nearly impregnable strategic position on a mountain. That, and that a lot of men died.

Go read the Captain Waskow piece. You won’t forget it. It makes me reflect on whether any of the wars in our era–and for me, that stretches back to the beginning of the Vietnam War–has produced a voice like Ernie Pyle’s. Someone who served so authentically as the chronicler of soldiers’ lives and deaths for the public back home. I think some great writing has emerged from our later wars–thinking about books like those by Michael Herr (“Dispatches“) and Tim O’Brien (“Going After Cacciato” and all the rest). But I can’t think of the journalist creating a contemporaneous record of the war as it unfolded the way Pyle did.

I think maybe the difference is partly that the nature of our wars have been different–conflicts with either no clearly defined enemy awaiting us on the battlefield (“Global War on Terrorism,” anyone?) or those that were elective affairs (Vietnam, the Gulf War, “Operation Iraqi Freedom”). Maybe the difference is partly due to the fact most Americans living today have grown up in a nation that doesn’t require military service; we give the most strenuous lip service to the importance of sacrifice, but we don’t live it and the reality of it barely touches most of us. Maybe that accounts for a fundamental divide between our soldiers and the men and women sent to report on them (see “When the Bodies Don’t Want to Be Shown“). And maybe the difference is that media and communications have moved far beyond the reporter filing from the front “by wireless”; our news/entertainment outlets create an illusion of immediacy, not to mention lots of light and noise, that can drown out the written word.