Category: History

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Their Country

As a great sports talk show guy has been heard to say, it’s not my style to criticize. So I’m not going to get exercised by the Chevy truck ad campaign that’s airing during this year’s baseball playoffs. I’m not going to get upset by the campaign’s appropriation of iconic images from our recent history–Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Nixon’s White House departure, a Vietnam combat scene and a Vietnam peace march, a Woodstock clip, New York firefighters, the shafts of light memorializing the World Trade Center, NewOrleans after the flood (which begins a sequence suggesting Chevy trucks have had a big part in helping New Orleans put itself back together). I’m not going to drone on about the irony in John Mellencamp, whose song “Our Country” is the ads’ soundtrack, praising G.M. as a company that looks out for working folk with the company in the midst of putting tens of thousands of people out of their jobs. I won’t so much as mention that Mellencamp is performing the song before Game 2 of the World Series, in effect giving G.M. a free ad for its trucks.

(I might do all those things, but others have beat me to it, including someone who put up a somewhat predictably but still sharp parody on YouTube.)

What I will do is suggest a few clips Chevy might want to add to its paean to itself; or better yet, use them to do a whole new ad.

–GM workers fighting cops and company goons as they sought to organize their plants in the 1930s.

–Street scenes from Flint and other towns GM and other automakers have abandoned. I’m sure Michael Moore would share some of his footage.

–Some film of the Corvair; maybe spliced together with some images of Ralph Nader when he outed the car as “unsafe at any speed.”

–Maybe shots from a GM board meeting where the auto geniuses plot their winning market response to Toyota, Nissan, Honda et al. You could have clips from the ’70s and the ’90s.

–Some beauty shots of the Chevy Suburban and the Hummer. Even better if they’re shown at a gas station. Mix in a satellite view of Hurricane Katrina and some pictures of that Antarctic ice shelf collapsing and maybe some grainy street video of people looking real hot in an urban setting.

–Footage of the aftermath of some of the thousands of fires in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s involving GM pickups with defective fuel tank designs. It would be extra realistic and downhome to see some amateur video of a funeral or two of the 1,800 people or so who died in the crashes.

Not sure what music would work best for this. “This Land is Your Land” is always a happy, snappy pick-me-up. And maybe close the ad with a statement from the company. Something simple, like “We’re sorry.”

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Vietnam, Iraq

I joined the Organization of American Historians earlier this year, mostly to get access to its online journal archives; besides, you don’t have to be a real historian to be a member. One of the unanticipated perks is the quarterly Journal of American History. The September issue has a sort of roundtable discussion–it was conducted in email–among a group of scholars who have focused on the history of the Vietnam War. The subject is legacies of the war, and among the questions the journal posed to the historians was this: “Why or why not is Vietnam an appropriate historical analogy for thinking about current U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq?”

[The question is in the news, too. The commander-in-chief was asked the other day whether there was some parallel between the Tet Offensive of 1968 and the current bloodbath in Iraq. He allowed there was, then quickly added that since we’ve succeeded in turning Iraq into what it was not before we invaded–a 365-day-a-year, hands-on, post-graduate level training camp for ambitious terrorists–there is no way–no way!–we’ll leave before “the job” is done.]

Back to the historians. They all have much to say about Vietnam/Iraq parallels. But the one who sums them up best (and most dispassionately) is Christian Appy of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He says:

“There is a danger that any effort to compare current events with historical antecedents will badly distort both past and present. I agree that Iraq and Vietnam are vastly different … but surely there are commonalities, at least in a general sense, in the way U.S. officials justified their policies in the two countries, and these analogies can serve public debate. After all … one important connection is that U.S. policy makers then, as now, believed detailed local knowledge was largely irrelevant except in narrowly tactical terms (that is, where are the “bad guys”?) because Washington clung to the hope (in spite of massive contrary evidence) that U.S. technology and military firepower could hold the line long enough for modernization (or nation building) to draw each country into a stable global system amenable to U.S. economic and political power.

“At the risk of gross oversimplification, I’d like to list a few linkages. Then as now, the president claims:

—We face a global threat (Communism/terrorism).

—The enemy we fight is part of that global threat.

—We fight far away from home so we won’t have to fight in our own streets.

—We want nothing for ourselves, only self-determination for them.

—We are doing everything possible to limit the loss of civilian lives.

—We are making great progress, but the media isn’t reporting it.

—Ultimately, the war must be won by them with less and less U.S. “help.”

—Immediate withdrawal would be an intolerable blow to U.S. credibility and would only embolden our enemy and produce a bloodbath.

—Antiwar activism must be allowed but demoralizes our troops and encourages our enemy.

“Then, as now, the president does not say:

—The enemy in Vietnam/Iraq actually does not pose a threat to U.S. security, but we’re fighting anyway.

—We do indeed have geopolitical and economic interests in the region and will never tolerate a Communist/radical Islamist government.

—We are using weapons and tactics that don’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.

—We will stretch and break the law to spy on and sabotage antiwar critics.

—We won’t ask the nation as a whole to make a major sacrifice but will continue to send the working class to do most of the fighting.

—The progress we report is contradicted by our own sources.

—Troop morale is going downhill.

—Most of the people over there don’t want us in their country.”

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Today’s Time Waster

[By way of Marie:]

Blufr: I can see this getting old very fast, but it’s a semi-addictive social trivia site. I say “social” because apparently visitors submit the true/false statements that you’re asked to vote “way” or “no way” on (some of the questions are pretty lame, I admit. Mine, of course, was brilliant: Of the four assassinated U.S. presidents, only Abraham Lincoln died in Washington, D.C.” Way? Or Now way? The answer at the “read more” link below).

I said I can see this getting old. But ‘m embarrassed to say how long I spent on this and how many questions I clicked on. Ridiculous.

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Your Civics IQ

The Intercollegiate Studies Institute cooked up a 60-question quiz it says proves U.S. college students are a bunch of dolts and ignoramuses when it comes to knowing basic American history and civics. You can’t take the full quiz, apparently, but there’s a five-question sample version online. Go take it. Then report back: How did you do? (Grading scale is as follows:

5 of 5 correct: You’re Ben Franklin, coolest, smartest American ever and inventor of the $100 bill.

4 of 5: You’re James Madison, main man of the Constitution who let the Brits burn the White House.

3 of 5: You’re Al Gore: Way smart, inventor of Internet and “Love Story” model, but haunted by failure.

2 of 5: You’re Warren G. Harding, and your biggest accomplishment is dying in office.

1 of 5: You’re George W. Bush, and you have never liked quizzes.

0 of 5: You’re just you, and we love you for it.

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‘Fire When You Are Ready’

The esteemed Writer’s Almanac mentioned Saturday that August 26 was the 86th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote throughout the United States (according to a Smithsonian Institution essay, 11 states had already enacted full or partial women’s suffrage before the federal amendment was passed). The Writer’s Almanac threw in a few details about the event — the secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby, signed the ratification proclamation, that he did it at home and virtually in private in order to stay clear of a feud between factions of the women’s suffrage movement. I hadn’t read any of that before and found it interesting. Although he apparently didn’t want any truck with the activist women, he was apparently quite expansive with reporters on the day of the signing. The Writer’s Almanac quotes him as saying, “I turn to the women of America and say: ‘You may now fire when you are ready. You have been enfranchised.’ ”

If that sounds familiar, it’s no accident: ‘Fire when ready’ is a near-verbatim lift from Commodore Dewey’s instructions to one of his officers at the 1898 battle of Manila Bay. In 1920, those words must have had a lot more immediacy than they do now, so maybe Colby spoke assuming everyone who read those words would understand just what he meant. I don’t quite get it, though: Ladies, you may fire when you are ready. Upon whom are they supposed to train their guns? Colby and his like?

I went looking for a more complete version of the quote, and found it in another blog: the complete text of the New York Times story that appears to serve as much of the source of the Writer’s Almanac account. Here’s Colby’s Dewey quote as the Times gave it:

” ‘You remember,’ he continued, ‘the simple way in which the late Admiral Dewey went about the opening of his battle at Manila Bay, how he waited until morning to enter Manila Bay, went up on deck, wiped the egg stains of breakfast from his moustache, observed the disposition of the enemy’s ships and of his own, which had crossed the mines during the night, and then taking out a cigar, turned to one of his Captains and said,”‘When you are ready, you may fire, Gridley.” So I turn to the women of America and say: ‘You may now fire when you are ready. You have been enfranchised.’ ”

Reading the whole quote, it’s clear that Colby was rather taken by the parallel between himself and Dewey. The women? They were incidental to the part he was playing. In fact, the article makes Colby sound like someone who was still working on a fully stocked and, thanks to the 18th Amendment, completely illegal liquor cabinet.

The Times account also straightfacedly reports Colby’s praise for his boss, Woodrow Wilson, as one of the great supporters of women’s suffrage: “There never was a man more deeply or profoundly convinced of the justice of the suffrage cause than Woodrow Wilson. And there never was a party leader who held his party with more stern, austere and unbending insistence to the performance of a duty dictated by high principle.”

Interesting, then, to read the Smithsonian article’s account of the president and the suffragists: that when women met with him just after he took office in 1913 and asked him to support action on an amendment, “Wilson replied–none too brilliantly–that the suffrage issue had never before been called to his attention and that he did not know where he stood.” For years afterward, Wilson refused to lift a finger to move the amendment forward and eventually ordered the arrest of militant suffragists picketing the White House (the Smithsonian piece says the president was especially sensitive to banners that quoted his own rhetoric. Alice Paul, the founder of the National Woman’s Party, was arrested carrying a sign that said, “THE TIME HAS COME TO CONQUER OR SUBMIT. FOR US THERE CAN BE BUT ONE CHOICE. WE HAVE MADE IT” — a statement Wilson made in reference to Germany in World War I.

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Graphic History

911Cover

Slate is running an online version of “The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation.” Ever since I came across Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” — one of the best and most chilling Holocast narratives I’ve ever seen — I’ve been a big fan of the graphic novel format as a method for relating history (another, much quirkier example: “The Fatal Bullet,” a retelling of the James A. Garfield assassination). I don’t think such treatments are replacements for deeper reading, but they can make complex historical subjects more accessible to a wide audience.

In the case of the new 9/11 comic book, you won’t learn anything new if you paid attention to the original report and other accounts. But seeing the events in pictorial form has a way of bringing them freshly to mind. Whether a lot of people want to have that day put in front of them is another matter; I tend to think the day is worth contemplating and contemplating again. (The Washington Post, which I believe owns Slate, ran a story on the book last month. Among other things, the piece mentions that the authors’ previous credits include un-revolutionary stand-bys like “Richie Rich” and “Caspar” — you know, the friendly ghost).

Knivesboxcutters

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Belatedly, an Anniversary

Hard to believe that, yet again, I’ve let the anniversary of the Chatsworth Wreck pass with no mention. For newcomers, the wreck took place about midnight on August 10, 1887, when an excursion train to Niagara Falls plunged off a small trestle over a culvert two and a half miles east of Chatsworth, Illinois. If you’re not from the town or one nearby, or if you’re great-great-grandparents weren’t on the train, or if they didn’t just miss it, you’ve never heard of the event. But about 85 people died in the wreck, one of the deadliest train accidents in history to that point (though, thinking about it, already dwarfed by other transportation disasters, like the sinking of the steamboat Sultana on the Mississippi immediately after the Civil War).

In the past, Chatsworth marked the anniversary with gatherings of survivors and rescuers, the latter sometimes exhibiting souvenirs taken from the train. Once, about 35 or 40 years ago, a Chicago psychic named Irene Hughes was invited to the wreck site for a midnight gathering at which she tried to channel images of the event. Apparently not one to disappoint, she sat on a chair in the middle of the now little-used Toledo, Peoria & Western tracks and offered a few random images — for instance, a train crew running for help and the suffocating sensation of a victim trapped in the wreckage. She swore she hadn’t researched the event beforehand.

Next year: The disaster’s 120th anniversary. Wonder whether Chatsworth has anything special planned.

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Song of the Day

“La Marseillaise”:

“Arise you children of the motherland,

The day of glory has arrived!

Against us tyranny

Has raised its bloodied banner,

Do you hear, in the fields

The howling of these fearsome soldiers?

They are coming into your midst

To slit the throats of your sons and consorts!

To arms, citizens!

Form your battalions!

Let us march, let us march!

May impure blood

Soak our fields’ furrows!”

(French and English lyrics — all seven verses’ worth — here.)

The U.S. Navy Band plays it here. And the French Embassy to the United States relates the song’s story — minus the detail that the composer/lyricist, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, was a moderate who supported the French monarchy and was thrown into prison after he penned the anthem — here.

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Tale of Two Felons

There’s a word for this — when you encounter an unfamiliar word or concept someplace, then suddenly see it again, as if it’s quite common. The case in point concerns the word felon.

A couple weeks ago, on the occasion of the anniversary of George Armstrong Custer taking his command into eternity, I opened “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan Connell’s free-form history of the general and his most famous battle. In the book’s early pages is a discussion of Lonesome Charley Reynolds, reputed to be “Custer’s favorite white scout” and one of those who died at the Little Big Horn. At one point (p. 20 of my 1984 edition) Connell says:

“Charley had a seriously infected, suppurating thumb — described in contemporary journals as a ‘felon’ — which troubled him so much that one of the regimental surgeons, Dr. Henry Porter, advised him to stay behind. Nevertheless, he was determined to go, and because Dr. Porter could not cure his thumb Charley approached Custer’s orderly, John Burkman, who concocted a poultice of wet hardtack. On the morning of June 25 he still wore this bulky poultice, but when Burkman saw his body it was gone, which meant that he probably peeled it off when the shooting started.”

I read the book long ago and read this passage, but the unusual term for Lonesome Charley’s infected thumb didn’t stick with me. At some point — my guess: the late 19th century, the time of the most recent citations in the Oxford English Dictionary and earlier — this use of felon was common; a Google search demonstrates it’s still current medical parlance (and if you’re really interested in the subject of pus-producing fingertip infections, check out whitlows and paronychia).

Anyway.

In mid-June, I took a daylong drive in Central Illinois with my brother Chris and my dad, during which we visited the site of the now mostly forgotten Chatsworth train wreck of 1887. Even earlier, I had come across an online mention of a locally produced history of the wreck, which involved an excursion train headed from Peoria to Niagara Falls. After coming back to California, I found a

'The Train That Never Arrived' coversingle copy of the 1970 book — “The Train That Never Arrived,” by Helen Louise Plaster Stoutemyer, former Chatsworth schoolteacher and part-time newspaper columnist. I ordered the book and got it a week or so ago. As books go, it’s slight: 68 pages that occasionally read like someone transcribing a shoebox full of notes. But it’s a labor of love meant to convey a small town’s experience in the only moment that ever brought it any attention.

Ms. Stoutemyer relates the account of Chatsworth businessman L.J. Haberkorn. Reading between the lines, you get the feeling Haberkorn never let the town forget what an important role he played in responding to the wreck. Fifty years after the fact, he was still spinning disaster yarns and arguing about whether he was the one who first rang the village fire bell to summon rescuers. In any case, “The Train That Never Arrived” says, the hero was not supposed to be home in bed when the wreck occurred:

“Mr. Haberkorn operated a restaurant and hotel in 1887 on thhe corner where Culkin’s Hardware Store is located today. The Haberkorns had planned to take the excursion, but were prevented from doing so because Mrs. Haberkorn had a felon on her finger which was giving her considerable pain and caused them to cancel the trip at the last moment.”

I like the parallel: Lonesome Charley went with Custer despite his felon and died. The Haberkorns stayed home to nurse the missus and her felon and lived.

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July Fourth (II)

A New York Times tradition: Publishing an image of the original printed version of Declaration of Independence, complete with John Hancock and others’ signatures. Always inspiring to read when you need to have your civic idealism refreshed, though yesterday I didn’t read the declaration but found myself thinking about the non-PCness of one phrase: “merciless Indian savages” (from this passage: The king “has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”).

Later, or earlier — I can’t remember which — Kate pointed out the San Francisco Chronicle’s lead editorial for the day: “Patriots, awaken.” I don’t expect much these days from the mostly tired and uninspired Chron, but its little Fourth of July essay was very good. In part:

“…Perhaps it is the lingering shock effects of Sept. 11, 2001, or maybe it is the complacency of a half-century of growing affluence, but too many Americans seem all too willing to ignore Benjamin Franklin’s admonition about the danger of sacrificing essential liberties for temporary security. The Bush administration has been adroit at invoking the war on terrorism to justify policies that should be setting off alarms in this democracy.

“At what point will Americans draw the line at these intrusions on civil liberties and usurpations of power by the White House? Revelations that the National Security Agency eavesdropped on phone calls and e-mails without getting the required warrants didn’t do it. The disclosure that the government has compiled a vast database of Americans’ phone records didn’t do it. The hundreds of examples of President Bush’s unprecedented expansion of the number and scope of “signing statements” in which he gave himself the option to ignore parts of laws he objected to — such as torture — didn’t do it.

“Just last week, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Bush administration’s system for military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay that openly defied congressional law and international rules on the treatment of prisoners of war. So, what was the reaction in Congress? Regrettably, but not surprisingly in this era, there were immediate moves to give the president such authorization. ”