Category: History

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Today, 130 Years Ago

June 25, 1876:

“Crazy Horse did not behave as usual. Ordinarily he was composed, even when battle was imminent, but it is said that this morning he rode back and forth, hurried into his lodge, and quickly reappeared with his medicine bag. After moistening one hand he dipped it in maroon pigment and printed a hand on each side of his pony’s hips. On both sides of the neck he drew an arrow and a bloody scalp. All of which suggests intuitive knowledge of things to come, or else he had been talking with Oglala scouts who told him what to expect. Most Indians, however, seem to have felt secure in the belief that only a great fool would attack. …

“Rain in the Face had been invited to a feast. The guests were eating when they heard bluecoat guns, which did not sound like their own. Rain habitually carried a stone-headed war club, even to parties, but he rushed back to his lodge for a gun, his bow, and a quiver of arrows. Then … he and his friends saw troops on the eastern ridge. While riding against these troops they discovered a young woman — Tashenamini, Moving Robe — riding with them. Her brother had been killed … and now she was holding her brother’s war staff above her head. Rain declared that she looked as pretty as a bird. ‘Behold, there is among us a young woman!’ he called out, because this would make everybody brave. ‘Let no young man hide behind her garment.’

“Custer’s soldiers were almost surrounded by the time Rain got there. They had dismounted, he said, but climbed back on their horses, dismounted again, and split into several companies. They were shooting very fast. After a while some of them began riding toward Reno’s troops, but Indians followed them like blackbirds following a hawk.”

–“Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell (1984)

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In Which We Gather by the River

A story in four parts.

I. Non-Confluence

Taking up where we left off last August, my dad and I — this time with my brother Chris — drove out to southwestern Will County on Monday to see if we could see the place where the Des Plaines and Kankakee rivers meet to form the Illinois River. Why? Well, the reason to care about the rivers is that in the mid-19th century they, along with the Illinois and Michigan Canal, represented the link between Lake Michigan, the Great Lakes, and the entire eastern United States and the Mississippi, the Gulf, and the country to the west. On top of that academic-sounding justification, there’s the relative obscurity of it. Who else is driving around the Chicago area looking for this spot? (Some good Web background on the I&M Canal, by the way: from the Chicago Historical Society (including pictures of canal sites in present-day Chicago settings); the Chicago Public Library (part of its “Down the Drain” site on the city’s sewer system); the National Park Service, and Illinois Department of Natural Resources.)

When we visited the area last summer, we hit the towpath along the canal a little too far to the west for it to be a reasonable walk, given my dad’s cantankerous knees. This time, we drove into a county park (McKinley Woods; among other things, the brief history posted at the park  says it was a POW camp during World War II) and started walking east on the towpath. The canal runs to the north of the path, and the rivers to the south.  About a mile from the McKinley Woods parking lot, after passing a little marina on the opposite bank, we came to a what appeared (to me) to be a spit of land that marked the separation of the Des Plaines and Kankakee rivers. Pictures were duly snapped and huzzahs sounded, and we walked back to the parking lot.

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It was only in the course of writing this, though, that I discovered to what an extent I had betrayed the legacy of  Louis Joliet, the 17th century French-Canadian explorer who traveled up the Illinois River to the Des Plaines and then on to the Chicago River and Lake Michigan and quickly realized the feasibility of a canal connecting the lake to the Illinois and Mississippi. The “confluence” I located was in fact just an island in the Des Plaines River. The real merger point was west of the lot where we parked, not east.

I guess we have an excuse to go back and look for the spot a third time. (Pictures, from left: Dad on the Illinois and Michigan Canal towpath; a glimpse of the false confluence; the I&M Canal, with the river bluffs in the distance.)

II. Country Cemetery

From the non-confluence of the rivers, we got on Interstate 55 south, headed for Lexington, about 70 miles away. Our destination was the cemetery in Pleasant Hill, a hamlet two or three miles outside town. My old high school English teacher, G.E. Smith, died in April and was buried there alongside his mother and stepfather. I visited Pleasant Hill once, around 1971 or ’72, when G.E. went down to check up on his family’s old home, which by then amounted to a falling-down house and a cellar with a roof on it. He was attached to the place, but it wasn’t until later that he seemed to act on the interest, writing a column in Lexington’s weekly paper about Pleasant Hill history and then becoming a serious genealogist and trying to gather all the strands of the family that had wound up out there on the prairie.

The Pleasant Hill cemetery goes back to the first half of the 19th century. The area’s first white settlers, who arrived in 1820, are buried there. The little town used to have two churches, but those are long gone. The cemetery grounds are unfenced and merge into the bordering corn and soybean fields. G.E.’s grave is on an east-facing slope; his freshly cut brown-red granite stone announces his middle name, Edward, a matter that he liked to keep to himself. It describes him as “teacher, counselor, writer,” and includes a quote from him: “My highest goal was always and still remains simply this: To be able to look back upon my life, from any point along the way, and be able to say that this little corner of the world that my life touched has been made better, not worse, because I touched it.”

When we arrived, in early afternoon, it was clear and very warm and the caretaker, Ron Eckhart, was watering new sod on G.E.’s grave from a tank on his red pickup. He’s been the caretaker for 26 years — “That’s a lot of grass cut,” was how he put it — and long before that, his dad was pastor at both of the Pleasant Hill churches. Eventually Ron moved off to another part of the cemetery, and so did we. Up the hill from G.E.’s spot is the oldest section of the cemetery, filled with  people from the days before the Illinois Central bypassed Pleasant Hill and doomed it to perpetual hamlet-hood. With only the graves to go by, you would guess life was hard. There’s the usual large complement of children who died in their first year or two; but there are also seemed to be a lot of adults who didn’t make it out of their 30s. Maybe life was just hard everywhere when these people were trying to make farms and towns. For one example, take a look at the life of another Prairie Stater, Abraham Lincoln: His sweetheart was carried off by a fever at age 20. Just one of his four children survived to adulthood.

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Looking around the little cemetery, it looked like G.E., who was aged 81 years, three months and a day when he died, is one of its oldest residents.

III. Wrecked

We drove through Lexington to start the drive back toward Chicago. On the way out to Pleasant Hill, Chris had pointed out the placards on every telephone poll downtown bearing the names of local soldiers serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Chris counted 19 names. The town has about 2,000 residents, so roughly 1 percent of the population is serving. We fueled up at the Freedom gas station — just $2.899 a gallon — then headed north on old U.S. 66 to Chenoa. I wanted to take U.S. 24 east to Interstate 57 both because I knew there was a Dairy Queen along the way (in Fairbury) — my dad’s favorite road-trip stop — and because I remembered a little piece of local history along the way: the Chatsworth Wreck.

Back in the mid-70s, I stopped to read a historical marker just outside Chatsworth, one of the series of farm towns strung along U.S. 24. It reads:

THE CHATSWORTH WRECK

MIDNIGHT, AUGUST 10-11, 1887

One-half mile north on the Toledo, Peoria & Western Railroad occurred one of the worst wrecks in American rail history. An excursion train – two engines and approximately twenty wooden coaches – from Peoria to Niagara Falls, struck a burning culvert . Of the 500 passengers about 85 perished and scores were injured.

We stopped at the DQ in Fairbury, then continued on through Chatsworth to the wreck marker, which is about two and a half miles east of town, nearly on the Livingston-Ford county line. One thing that’s a little unclear when you’re at the roadside, though, is exactly where the disaster occurred. The TP&W tracks — the railroad still goes by that name — are a half mile north of the highway. I wanted to see if we could find the site of the notorious “burning culvert” — actually, a small wooden trestle. I imagined there could be a memorial or marker at the spot where the train left the tracks.

We parked at an electrical substation near the railroad’s marked but unguarded level crossing. My sense, based on the marker’s placement west of the section road that runs up the county line was that the wreck site was west of the road, too. Chris and I walked along the single track until we got to a culvert maybe a quarter-mile west of the road. It’s not deep — in fact, it’s a narrow ditch that crosses under the track through an 8- or 10-foot-diameter steel pipe. The site is unprepossessing, just like every foot of track east or west of it to the horizon, and there was nothing to suggest we were at the scene of a sensational event.

After we walked back to the car and started east again on 24, Chris and I spotted another culvert — this one an actual trestle — just east of the county line. We turned around and hiked out to it, too. It’s a much more satisfying place for a calamity: The tracks cross a bridge that’s about 75 feet long and a good 20 feet above a sluggish little creek. We agreed that between the two possible sites, this seemed the more likely.

Back at home, I poked around online to see if I could find some account that sheds light on the wreck’s precise location. Chatsworth had a newspaper, the Plaindealer, in 1887, and much more recently, a retired teacher and local historian there, Helen Louise Plaster Stoutemyer, published a book on the disaster, “The Train that Never Arrived.” Eventually, I came across a Chatsworth native’s website that includes the Plaindealer’s first account of the tragedy. The story says the train left the tracks at “the first bridge west of the county line” — the first place Chris and I looked. In addition to offering the salient facts, the writer has a lot to say about the impression the wreck left:

“The sight was most terrible. … It was too horrible to admit of description.  The screams and moans of the wounded were heartrending, and the terror of the sight can not be imagined. … To add to the terror of the scene a heavy thunder and lightening storm came up, and , with heavy rain made such a scene as would appall the bravest hearts. … Even the strongest men were forced to tears as they heard and saw the anguish of the unhappy excursionists.  While many displayed strong courage, grit, and heroism, others were almost frantic, and those in attendence upon them were forced to hold them to prevent acts of insanity and self-destruction.”

If you like the newspaper’s rendition, then you’ll love the song: “The Chatsworth Wreck.”

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(Pictures: Left: The marker, east of Chatsworth on U.S. 24. Middle: Wreck candidate site A  (west of the railroad crossing 2.5 miles east of Chatworth; north end of culvert is just visible on far left). Right: Wreck
candidate site B — east of the crossing.)

IV. Wrecked Again

After investigating the site of the 1887 trackside carnage, we turned east again on U.S. 24. The highway crosses Interstate 57 at Gilman, then crosses Highway 1, which follows an old trapper’s trail from the Wabash River up to Chicago, at a town called Watseka. I was curious to see Watseka, which I’ve passed through exactly once: In the autumn of 1966, when Dad took us on a long-weekend trip down to the Smoky Mountains and back. I remember going through there late on a Thursday night that ended at a Holiday Inn just outside Indianapolis.

As we started to get close, I asked Dad and Chris whether they remembered the big disaster that had happened in Watseka around 1970. It didn’t ring a bell with them. I recounted the big blast and fire in town — apparently some kind of gas explosion — and an image I still vividly remembered. A fireball rising far above the old-fashioned town water tower.

A couple minutes later, a town came into view. There was a newish water tower rising up in the middle of town. I thought I was looking at Watseka, and said something like, “See, that must be the replacement for the old water tower.” Chris was driving, and noticed the town limit sign: Crescent City. He spotted a historical marker on the left side of the road. As we passed, he asked whether we should stop. Yes, let’s. We went back, and the marker turned out to be a small pavilion with some displays. In fact, a big blowup of the picture I had described — water tower, fireball — was the centerpiece in one of the displays. Somehow I had transferred the disaster — which occurred June 21, 1970 — to the next town over.

The cataclysm involved the same railroad that ran its train off the tracks in Chatsworth in 1887, the Toledo, Peoria & Western. Several liquified propane tank cars derailed in the center of Crescent City on Father’s Day morning. The town fire department responded and fought for an hour to prevent an explosion before the first car finally went off. At that point, according to a hand-written reminiscence that’s part of the memorial, “the boys retreated and let fate take its course.” Sixty-four people were hurt (mostly firefighters who suffered second- and third-degree burns), none killed; the center of Crescent City was obliterated. The president of the TP&W issued a statement accepting responsibility for the blast and apologizing for “the inconvenience.”

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Heroes and Hoopleheads

“Deadwood” begins its third season tonight, a cause for division in our household. I love the show, with all its profanity and violence; for the same reasons, Kate can’t tolerate it.

It has become commonplace to equate the show’s fine scriptwriting with the work of Shakespeare (just Google shakespeare deadwood and you’ll see what I mean). We create cliches because there’s some truth in them, and that one’s no exception. I’ve been tempted to stop episodes and transcribe characters’ speeches just for the language. There’s more to the show than the writing, though: It’s beautifully acted. It’s beautifully filmed. It’s violent and tense as hell.

It’s also conventional wisdom to think of “Deadwood” and the post-modern westerns dating back to “The Wild Bunch” as a new and better breed of drama: More frank about the blood and injustice and cynicism that older westerns soft-peddled. If you think so — and I incline to that way of thinking myself — check out A.O. Scott’s long, long piece in today’s New York Times on the DVD re-release of some of the John Wayne/John Ford westerns. He touches on how thoroughly Ford’s visual sense, especially in “The Searchers,” affected later filmmakers and films. But the heart of Scott’s essay has to do with Ford’s vision of the West and its settlement:

“The Indian wars of the post-Civil War era form a tragic backdrop in most of Ford’s post-World War II westerns, much as the earlier conflicts between settlers and natives did in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. That the Indians are defending their land, and enacting their own vengeance for earlier attacks, is widely acknowledged, even insisted upon. The real subject, though, is not how the West was conquered, but how — according to what codes, values and customs — it will be governed. The real battles are internal, and they turn on the character of the society being forged, in violence, by the settlers. Where, in this new society, will the frontier be drawn between vengeance and justice? Between loyalty to one’s kind and the more abstract obligations of human decency? Between the rule of law and the law of the jungle? Between virtue and power? Between — to paraphrase one of Ford’s best-known and most controversial formulations — truth and legend?

“Ford’s way of posing these questions seems more urgent — and more subtle — now than it may have at the time, precisely because his films are so overtly concerned with the kind of moral argument that is, or should be, at the center of American political discourse at a time of war and terrorism. He is concerned not as much with the conflict between good and evil as with contradictory notions of right, with the contradictory tensions that bedevil people who are, in the larger scheme, on the same side. When should we fight? How should we conduct ourselves when we must? In ‘Fort Apache,’ for example, the elaborate codes of military duty, without which the intricate and closely observed society of the isolated fort would fall apart, are exactly what lead it toward catastrophe. Wayne, as a savvy and moderate-tempered officer, has no choice but to obey his headstrong and vainglorious commander, played by Henry Fonda, who provokes an unnecessary and disastrous confrontation with the Apaches. In the end, Wayne, smiling mysteriously, tells a group of eager journalists that Fonda’s character was a brave and brilliant military tactician. It’s a lie, but apparently the public does not require — or can’t handle — the truth.

“In telling it, Wayne is writing himself out of history, which is also his fate in ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ (not, unfortunately, one of the discs in the Warner box). That film — which contains the famous line ‘When legend becomes fact, print the legend!’ —throws Wayne’s man of action and James Stewart’s man of principle into a wary, rivalrous alliance. Their common enemy is an almost cartoonish thug played by Lee Marvin, but the real conflict is between Stewart’s lawyer and Wayne’s mysterious gunman, one of whom will be remembered as the man who shot Liberty Valance.

“What we learn, in the course of the film’s long flashbacks, is that the triumph of civilization over barbarism is founded on a necessary lie, and that underneath its polished procedures and high-minded institutions is a buried legacy of bloodshed. The idea that virtue can exist without violence is as untenable, as unrealistic, as the belief — central to the revisionist tradition, and advanced with particular fervor in HBO’s ‘Deadwood’ — that human society is defined by gradations of brutality, raw power, cynicism and greed.

“If only things were that simple. But everywhere you look in Ford’s world — certainly in ‘Fort Apache,’ in ‘The Searchers,’ in ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ — you see truth shading into lie, righteousness into brutality, high honor into blind obedience. You also see, in the boisterous emoting of the secondary characters, the society that these confused ideals and complicated heroes exist to preserve: a place where people can dance (frequently), drink (constantly), flirt (occasionally) and act silly.

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Dump

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I don’t have the exact statistics at the ready, but something like 35 or 40 percent of San Francisco Bay has been filled since the region was settled in the 19th century. About 95 percent of the wetlands surrounding the bay have been diked, drained and developed. Berkeley’s most visible modern contribution to the great, undeclared bay transformation project is its old garbage dump, part of a complex of old fill projects that stretch more than a mile along the waterfront and extend more than three-quarters of a mile into the water from the old shoreline (which itself is at least one-third of a mile west of where the European interlopers found the water’s edge).

The dump was a great place. Noisy, smelly, full of garbage and construction debris, seagulls and big graders. I worked as a construction laborer for a while after I moved out here, and every once in a while was sent on a dump run to unload a pile of old shingles or lumber or fractured plaster and splintered lath. A cashier took your fee, then sent you on your way, out the potholed road to the mountain of discards. A worker out there directed you to the edge of a live pit, and you added your stuff to all the household garbage, old tires, unwanted furniture, lawn clippings and miscellaneous unidentifiable sweepings from all over the city. I would always feel a little exhilarated to see it all and to throw mine, whatever it was, in on top. The graders and other heavy equipment were constantly at work crushing the trash, packing it down, making room for more; once a pit was full, it would be covered with dirt and the garbage would go to a new one. The old pits would settle over time and be reopened to take on more refuse. This went on for years.

About two decades ago, the dump reached capacity. So much garbage had been packed in that at one point it had been squeezed out in the Bay under the dikes built to contain the fill. The city built a “transfer station,” a big open warehouse-like structure where all the trash would go to be sorted and re-transported, if it wasn’t recyclable or compostable. The old dump was covered with dirt, lots of dirt. Part of it was landscaped and turned into a manicured city park and named after Cesar Chavez, the late farmworkers’ labor leader. Most of the fill was planted with native flora and studded with pipes to vent the methane and other gases from the old buried trash. Roads and trails were built. Part of the semi-wild-looking area at the center of the old dump has been opened up as a park for off-leash canines.

So, at the end of this environmentally unfriendly epic (a story line shared with many great city parks, like Grant Park in Chicago), we’ve got a beautiful piece of waterfront property with staggering views across the bay and back toward the hills, filled with bike riders, hikers, dog-walkers, picnickers and kite-flyers. Our garbage? It’s headed someplace else, where it’s unlikely to grow into something similar.

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In Passing

Stanley Kunitz, the poet, died the other day. He was 100. I’m not sure I can hear so well above the general static of life and lesser news, but he seems to have passed with hardly a sound beyond standard obituary treatments. He was not a contestant on “Idol,” a singer on the wrong side of the law, a president of the United States, a ballplayer, a fallen corporate chieftain, the architect of a policy condoning torture, a movie actor or director, a NASCAR legend, a pioneer of the Motown sound, a pitchman, the winner of a million bucks, or a suspect in a sensational crime. Not that this is a lament for unsung poets. If some network put a prime-time poet drama or sitcom on the tube, I know where I’d be: Watching “24” and “Survivor” and reruns of “L&O.” I probably wouldn’t know or care much about the poet’s TV adventures. And the real-life poets? They’d still be unknown, mostly, their voices too soft to hear.

But what voices, what profound voices, full of rain, sun and sane consideration of our condition. I wasn’t aware of Kunitz until he was 95, when he published a new collections of poems. He got a flurry of attention in poet-friendly mass media: public radio and public television (for instance, “Fooling with Words,” with Bill Moyers). I believe that on one of his appearances, someone had him read a poem he’d written when Halley’s Comet crossed our sky for the second time in his lifetime:

“Halley’s Comet”

Miss Murphy in first grade

wrote its name in chalk

across the board and told us

it was roaring down the stormtracks

of the Milky Way at frightful speed

and if it wandered off its course

and smashed into the earth

there’d be no school tomorrow.

A red-bearded preacher from the hills

with a wild look in his eyes

stood in the public square

at the playground’s edge

proclaiming he was sent by God

to save every one of us,

even the little children.

“Repent, ye sinners!” he shouted,

waving his hand-lettered sign.

At supper I felt sad to think

that it was probably

the last meal I’d share

with my mother and my sisters;

but I felt excited too

and scarcely touched my plate.

So mother scolded me

and sent me early to my room.

The whole family’s asleep

except for me. They never heard me steal

into the stairwell hall and climb

the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father, on the roof

of the red brick building

at the foot of Green Street —

that’s where we live, you know, on the top floor.

I’m the boy in the white flannel gown

sprawled on this coarse gravel bed

searching the starry sky,

waiting for the world to end.

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‘Good Guy, Bad World’

Floyd Patterson died, and now that’s mostly a reminder of a time when there weren’t three or four or seven world championships in every boxing weight class; in other words, a time when boxing was a marquee American sport and the heavyweight championship had an aura of importance about it. I remember my mom’s enthusiasm for Patterson, listening to his fights with Ingemar Johansson on the radio, her excitement when Patterson won back the title Johansson had taken from him. The New York Times’s obit of Patterson talks about his “sensitivity”:

“He was a good guy in the bad world of boxing. He was sweet-tempered and reclusive. He spoke softly and never lost his boyhood shyness. Cus D’Amato, who trained him throughout his professional career, called Patterson ‘a kind of a stranger.’ Red Smith, the New York Times sports columnist, called him ‘the man of peace who loves to fight.’ ”

How “shy” and “sensitive” was Patterson? David Remnick’s beautifully written “King of the World” recounts many of the Patterson anecdotes you’re likely to read in the obituaries and more than a few that go beyond the usual euphemisms. When he beat Johansson to take back the title, he helped his stricken foe back to his corner. In another fight, Patterson knocked his opponent’s mouthpiece out. The dazed fighter lowered his gloves and proceeded to search for the missing gear; Patterson stopped and helped him before going on to knock the guy out. Part of Patterson’s odd legend is that he sometimes carried a fake beard with him to his fights in case he lost and wanted to depart the arena incognito; in fact, he used it after losing the championship to Sonny Liston at Comiskey Park in 1962.

But the Remnick passage that came to mind when I heard Patterson died is one that explores the depths of Patterson’s humiliation when he lost to Johansson:

“Patterson was a speed fighter, but against Johansson he never made his move. He froze, and Johansson, a burly Swede of modest talent, unloosed what his camp called, so annoyingly, his ‘toonder and lightning.’ After the first knockdown, Floyd got off the canvas and began walking dreamily toward his corner. Leaving the neutral corner, Johansson came in from Patterson’s blind side and struck him down again; the assault looked less like boxing than an angry drunk splitting open another man’s skull with a beer bottle. By around the fourth knockdown, as Patterson crawled around the canvas, staring through the ropes, his eyes locked on John Wayne, who was sitting at ringside, and, as he stared at the actor, Floyd felt embarrassed. Embarrassment was Patterson’s signature emotion, and never more so than now. The fight was not even over before he started to wonder if everything he had fought for — his title, his belonging to a world greater than the one he grew up in — if all that was now at risk. Had he ever deserved any recognition, any belonging in the first place? What would John Wayne think of him? The referee, Ruby Goldstein, stopped the fight after Patterson had gone down for the seventh time.”

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A Day Without an Immigrant

So, I’ve been noodling postlessly over what to say about the issue of the week, the whole immigration debate. Monday, there was the Day Without an Immigrant, as KTVU News anchor Leslie Griffith called it. And today, we have Cinco de Mayo, an important day for that immigrant we went without on Monday.

There was this, too: Last weekend, while licking my wounds from my audacious 206 miles of riding the Bay Area’s highest peaks — the Devil Mount Double — I got an email from a woman in Chicago who turns out to be a third cousin on my mom’s side of the family. Our common ancestors are John and Bridget Moran, my great-grandmother’s parents, who left Clare Island, County Mayo, Ireland, in 1887 and wound up in the Back of the Yards in Chicago. Thinking about them, thinking about all the other people who had to set out during the middle and late 19th century from Ireland and Norway to assemble the pieces of what I know as my family, made me think about how connected we are, nearly all of us, to the immigration question today.

One thing led to another after I received that genealogy email, and I wound up tracking down and looking at the 1900 census records that include the Morans and also the family of their daughter Anne and the man she married, Martin O’Malley. All were new arrivals with big families. The census records contain scant information on individuals, but just enough to give you a hint about their lives. Martin, in 1900 the father of eight living children, was listed as “labor at yards.” So were his two oldest sons, living at home in their late 20s.

Going up and down the rather haphazard roster of households on West 47th Street, where the census lists the O’Malleys, and on West 47th Place, where the Morans lived, and on all the other streets nearby, you see immigrant families, most from Ireland, packed into block after block of row houses on postage-stamp lots, their “occupation, trade or profession” listed as labor at yards, farm labor, “labor at pickle factory,” teamsters, butcher’s clerks, barbers, domestics, “commission men” (which I take to be “salesmen”), cattle butchers, hog butchers, sheep butchers, meat weighers, railroad clerks, railroad swtichmen, dressmakers, shoemakers, saloonkeepers, storekeepers, housekeepers, night watchmen, telephone operators and telephone girls, messengers and messenger boys.

These weren’t rich people. They weren’t middle-class people. They weren’t warmly welcomed or well-loved by people who had been in the country longer and could afford to live in better circumstances. They were foreigners throwing their back into the work of gaining a toehold and seeing what they could do once they’d gained a purchase on this new place.

And, yes, let me be sure to say that they were legal immigrants who followed the rules when they came into the country. Let’s say that,and in the next breath acknowledge how little that really means, because in truth U.S. laws on immigration have had little to do with maintaining a neat and orderly society and much to do with exercising whatever racial and economic fear happened to be prevalent at a given moment.

For immigrants from northern and western Europe, the hardest part of the trip, practically speaking, was making it and paying for it. For those who arrived before the 1880s, once you showed up in New York or Boston or wherever you landed, you were in. Your name would be recorded somewhere, sure, but it was not as if you had passed a test of personal or civic virtue to be admitted to the United States. Starting in the 1880s, we — we meaning Congress — started to get more particular about who would be let in and who wouldn’t. For immigrants from Europe — let’s translate and say white folks, even if they didn’t speak English — a head tax was imposed (50 cents an immigrant) and some conditions were placed on admission. Unwanted: criminals, the insane, the depraved, the diseased.

That was the kind face of the new immigrations laws. The laws’ more purposeful side applied not to the millions coming from Europe, but to those from China, Japan, the Philiippines, India and other non-Caucasian places. Simply speaking, after decades of letting Chinese and other Asians into the West (mostly) to mine and build railroads and drain swamps, Congress decided we had more than enough cheap labor on hand and we could afford to make it practically impossible for Asians to get into the country.

To jump ahead to where we are today, with the House already having voted to make it a felony to illegally cross the U.S. border or to offer any aid to someone in the country without the required paperwork: One’s tempted to ask, “So what’s new?” Whenever the country has tightened its immigration laws, two factors are always present: Some target group or groups whose race, language or culture is pointed to as alien by the well-assimilated and forgetful majority (what do you mean Grandma didn’t speak English?); and some concern over what the flood of hungry, energetic, and willing-to-work-for-anything newcomers are doing to the job market.

So today, we’re pretty much back to where we were when we decided we didn’t want any more Chinese or Japanese or so many Italians, Poles and Russians. We’re not in the middle of a big winning streak for rational, well-tempered, or generous action. But action’s going to be taken — we have tangible and intangible things that people everywhere seek, and they won’t stop coming to try to find them here. Our decision might be a little less painful to look back on if our discussion could start with the awareness that when our people got here, they all looked just like the immigrants we see around us now.

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Coming Attractions

Fascism1

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

–Sinclair Lewis, “It Cant Happen Here,” (1935)

Fascism-1

On the marquee of Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre, whose owners are given to displaying extracurricular messages. Kate spotted it during the past week, and we drove over after midnight this morning to take a picture.

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A Teacher (2)

A few years ago, another former teacher of mine, Mort Castle — also a longtime friend of G.E. Smith — helped G.E. pull together the hundreds of poems he had written since he was a boy in central Illinois and select some to be self-published in what turned out to be a pretty hefty volume called “Long Trails from Pleasant Hill.”

Longtrails
At various times, G.E. talked about his youthful ambition to be a writer. Most of the time he was dismissive of his own efforts, though occasionally he would talk about the factors that led him in other directions. For instance, that other writers had already said what he wanted to say, except better (published writers are the ones who realize this and keep going anyway). More significantly: His teaching absorbed so much of his time, intellectual energy and creative attention he didn’t really have the resources to follow his writing seriously. That was not an excuse: He poured all of himself into his classes and students, to the point where the demands he placed on himself brought him to and beyond the point of exhaustion. As Mort remembered in his little introduction to “Long Trails”:

“In 1968, I was Smith’s student teacher. I saw him in action, ‘grading papers,’ and it was not a quick-scrawl ‘Nice figure of speech’ here and ‘comma splice’ there. Not infrequently, a student who handed in a two-page paper received four pages of comment, comment not limited to correcting apostrophe goofs and refining expression, but personal commentary, a Smithian response to what was said and how it was said.”

Still, G.E. had the 800 or so poems, maybe in a picturesque heap that he thought of as organization, probably piled in the post-World War II semi-finished concrete-shell basement of his co-op apartment unit at 134 Dogwood in Park Forest. They probably would have stayed that way except for Mort and a change in G.E.’s own thinking about what his writing represented. “After I left college, I had no interest in publishing my poetry,” he wrote in his book’s preface. “It wasn’t until I began to think, as a genealogist, about how anything written by ancient relatives — even in signature — was (or could have been) so extraordinarily precious that I decided to consider publishing. I realized that I, too, someday, would likely be a long-ago ancient relative to someone who was pursuing my family history.”

So he and Mort brought out the book. I’d like to say that when it arrived here in Berkeley a few years back, I dove into it. But I didn’t. G.E. wrote a long inscription that thanked me, for among other things tracking down a copy of an obscure futurist novel that he had read while sailing from Europe to the Pacific as a Navy Seabee during World War II. I flipped through the book and stopped at a few of the poems. I probably found the project of reading more than a little overwhelming; and I’m sure I also had a tinge of envy and regret that I was holding yet another book by someone I knew while I myself had produced — what, exactly? (If I had ever said anything like that to G.E., he would have had something reassuring to say, then maybe started a conversation about why exactly I thought writing a book was important. Mort would have just said to sit down and start writing if I wanted to publish a book.)

G.E.’s funeral is tomorrow, down in the town where he went to and first taught in high school, Lexington. Afterward, I imagine there will be a long, long procession out to the tiny cemetery in his real hometown, Pleasant Hill, about three miles away. It will be by far the biggest event that would-be city, which started withering when the railroads bypassed it in the 1850s, has ever seen. G.E. and his grandfather and probably many others to whom he unearthed family ties have been cemetery caretakers there; we visited the spot together a couple of times a good 30 years ago; I think I was aware even then, when he was younger than I am now, that this was where G.E. hoped to come back to; not a patch of dirt in a swath of farm and prairie, but a place where his people were.

Feeling sad about the prospect of missing G.E.’s funeral, I picked up his book of poems. I thought, there’s got to be something in there where he talks about his own passing. I turned to the back of the book, to the section whimsically titled “Fear, Aging and Death.” And found this, dated 1990:

Grave Notes from the Underground

When I am dead,
who will enter this quiet sanctuary
and, speaking softly,
(Don’t shout!
I’m not deaf, you know.)
tell me the news I want to know?

Did the Cardinals win last night–
and who was the winning pitcher?

Did the bluebirds sing this spring
on the trail along Bluebird Lane?

Has the Big One ever struck
San Andreas or New Madrid faults?
(And am I safe in Pleasant Hill?)

Have politicos on Capitol Hill
yet understood the limits …
… and limitations … of capitalism?

Do my friends I loved so much
… just once in a while, perhaps …
call or visit each other?

From the knoll and the gnarl of Old Flat-top,
does anyone ever watch, as I once did,
the sunsets west of the sanctuary?
Or the April sunrise on the trail
as it enters Canary Clearing?

Does a cool breeze still stir the air
under the sinuous branches of Old Flat-top?

Do Browns and Boggs still gather
for reunions in July?
(Or do they go their separate ways,
ignorant of the roots that nourished them?)

Is warmth still there at one-three-four
on Dogwood Drive?
Is someone nurturing those
in need of nurturing?

Who came to say goodbye
as I lay freshly dead?

I know, I know.
I can’t reply.
Nothing has really changed.
I rarely had a chance,
when lifeblood-flowed and tongue was ripe,
to sneak a word in edge-wise.

Hey, take it easy there.
Your clomp’s so hard it’s apt to wake the dead.

More on G.E. Smith
Happy 80.5, G.E.
A Teacher
In Which We Gather by the River

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Rain, Rain

Heard on the street on my walk to work as clouds rolled in from the west and swallowed up our brief morning sunshine: “Rain, rain, g–d–n m—–f—–‘ rain.” Except my fellow stroller didn’t use the dashes.

Although I’m coming perilously close to a weather whine, our March rain has mounted into wetness of historic magnitude: We’ve had 23 days of measurable rain this month. If it rains today or tomorrow — and that’s almost certain — that will set a new record for most rainy days here in March. As my friend Pete pointed out the other day, forecasters say some large-scale global weather patterns have kept it wet here for weeks (and will for at least the next week, it looks like).

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