Category: History

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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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Rambunctious, Rumbustious, Rumbustical

One spends a semi-absurd amount to subscribe to a resource like the Oxford English Dictionary — more precisely, subscribes to the OED, because there is no resource like it — because one wants answers, if not certitude. For instance, when the word “rambunctious” happens into your mind. Wait a minute. Where did it come from? Surely it’s an invented word from Edward Lear or Lewis Carroll.

The OED produces a fine definition: “Of a person: … exuberant; boisterous, unruly; flamboyant; of an animal: wild, high-spirited.” The earliest citation it offers is from 1830, from a publication called the Boston Transcript: “If they are ‘rumbunctious’ at the prospect, they will be ‘riprorious’ when they get a taste, for a ‘copious acquaintance’ with Vinegar.”

But as to how the word came to be, only this: “Origin unknown.” A pointer is offered to another entry, rumbustious (“boisterous, turbulent, unruly, uproarious”; a related form is rumbustical; the words are probably alterations of robustious). Robustious in turn is merely a combination of “robust” with the adjective ending “-ious” (robust is from the Latin word robur, for strength).

So there: No Lear or Carroll or any other sole practitioner shows up in the story.

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The Conscientious Objector

Blackfive, one of the military blogs I follow to try to understand that perspective on the war in Iraq, mentions today the passing of Desmond Doss, 87, who won theMedal of Honor for his World War II service in the Pacific. What was unique about Desmond Doss and his recognition for bravery: He was a noncombatant, having enlisted in the Army as what he called a “conscientious cooperator” because of his pacifist beliefs. He served as a medic.

Before Doss ever saw a battlefield, he had to overcome the hostility of his officers and fellow recruits. He was a Seventh-Day Adventist, and refused to train on Saturdays. He declined to carry weapons. He was a vegetarian. Accounts of his service note that he was ridiculed and harassed by other soldiers; the brass, meantime, tried to throw him out of the Army as unfit for service, a move he resisted.

Eventually, Doss’s unit shipped out to the Pacific and wound up fighting on Guam, in the Philippines, and finally, in April and May 1945, on Okinawa. His Medal of Honor citation tells the story:

DOSS, DESMOND T.

“Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Medical Detachment, 307th Infantry, 77th Infantry Division. Place and date: Near Urasoe Mura, Okinawa, Ryukyu Islands, 29 April-21 May 1945. Entered service at: Lynchburg, Va. Birth: Lynchburg, Va. G.O. No.: 97, 1 November 1945. Citation: He was a company aid man when the 1st Battalion assaulted a jagged escarpment 400 feet high As our troops gained the summit, a heavy concentration of artillery, mortar and machinegun fire crashed into them, inflicting approximately 75 casualties and driving the others back. Pfc. Doss refused to seek cover and remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying them 1 by 1 to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands. On 2 May, he exposed himself to heavy rifle and mortar fire in rescuing a wounded man 200 yards forward of the lines on the same escarpment; and 2 days later he treated 4 men who had been cut down while assaulting a strongly defended cave, advancing through a shower of grenades to within 8 yards of enemy forces in a cave’s mouth, where he dressed his comrades’ wounds before making 4 separate trips under fire to evacuate them to safety. On 5 May, he unhesitatingly braved enemy shelling and small arms fire to assist an artillery officer. He applied bandages, moved his patient to a spot that offered protection from small arms fire and, while artillery and mortar shells fell close by, painstakingly administered plasma. Later that day, when an American was severely wounded by fire from a cave, Pfc. Doss crawled to him where he had fallen 25 feet from the enemy position, rendered aid, and carried him 100 yards to safety while continually exposed to enemy fire. …”

There’s more, actually, about his own wounding. Doss’s tale is told in a book (“Unlikeliest Hero,” 1967) and a documentary (“The Conscientious Objector,” 2004). The Seventh-Day Adventists have reported a theatrical film based on his story is in production.

The religious component to the tale is not to be downplayed. This guy had a lifelong conviction that taking life, of any kind, was wrong; it was a belief intertwinted with his view of the Ten Commandments and his living relationship with his god. One of the stories about Doss on Okinawa has him calling his unit together and praying before the assault on a cliff; his unit was said to have suffered no casualties in the ensuing attack — and the believers hold that fact out as proof of a god extending a hand of protection over those devoutly seeking aid. Of course, I’ve got no problem believing Doss was devout, that his faith was sincere and suffused his whole being; on the other hand I have a little problem conceiving of a god who extends a hand of protection in the midst of a rain of violence, chaos, cruelty and death in which many, many other prayers go unanswered; unless, of course, the god is Zeus, Poseidson, Apollo, or Athena.

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Down the Path to Democracy

By way of Volokh and the Chicago Tribune:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Abdul Rahman told his family he was a Christian. He told the neighbors, bringing shame upon his home. But then he told the police, and he could no longer be ignored.

Now, in a major test of Afghanistan’s fledgling court system, Rahman, 42, faces the death penalty for abandoning Islam for Christianity. Prosecutors say he should die. So do his family, his jailers, even the judge. Rahman has no lawyer. Jail officials refused to let anyone see Rahman on Monday, despite permission granted by the country’s justice minister.

The issue came up in the State Department’s daily briefing yesterday — a great opportunity for the administration that has decided to make its mark by spreading the light of freedom around the world to make a statement on the extreme intolerance and anti-democratic nature of our Afghan allies’ behavior. Here’s what spokesperson Sean McCormack had to say, in part:

“… We are watching this case closely and we urge the Afghani Government to conduct any legal proceedings in a transparent and a fair manner. Certainly we underscored — we have underscored many times and we underscored also to Foreign Minister Abdullah that we believe that tolerance and freedom of worship are important elements of any democracy. And certainly as Afghanistan continues down the pathway to democracy these are issues that they are going to have to deal with. These are not things that they have had to deal with in the past. Previously under the Taliban, anybody considered an apostate was subject to torture and death. Right now you have a legal proceeding that’s underway in Afghanistan and we urge that that legal proceeding take place in a transparent matter and we’re going to watch the case closely. ”

Down the path to democracy? At least he has the direction right. That summary reminds me of the old National Lampoon take on a high school U.S. history book (“The American Spectacle: 1492 to the Present”), with chapters titled (something like), “World War I: Pothole in the Road to World Peace.”

Reporters pressed McCormack to say why the administration isn’t simply calling for an end to the trial instead of merely insisting on judicial transparency; they even asked asked whether he would term the trial troubling. McCormack parried all questions with the response that this is a matter for the Afghans to work out under their constitution and that the administration has made its feelings known — in private — to the government. It’s just not the kind of restraint we’ve come to expect from a group that has dedicated itself to putting all the world’s ne’er-do-wells on notice.

[The update: Bush today says he is “deeply troubled” by the trial. And the Afghan government is having second thoughts about prosecuting Rahman. Not because its law is an expression of religious extremism, but because Rahman may be crazy. From the AP: “… Prosecutor Sarinwal Zamari said questions have been raised about [Rahman’s] mental fitness. ‘We think he could be mad. He is not a normal person. He doesn’t talk like a normal person.’ Moayuddin Baluch, a religious adviser to President Hamid Karzai, said Rahman would undergo a psychological examination. ‘Doctors must examine him,’ he said. ‘If he is mentally unfit, definitely Islam has no claim to punish him. He must be forgiven. The case must be dropped.’ “]

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Vice President Colbath, Part I

Consider for a moment — there’s no reason it must be this moment, but here it is anyway — the life of U.S. Vice President Jeremiah Jones Colbath. No — not a household name. In fact, if you look at a list of all the men who have served as No. 2, from John Adams to the current incumbent, you won’t find him. But he did serve.

When I was tapping out those president and vice president posts last month, I mentioned at one point being surprised at the number of vice presidents who had died in office. One of those was Henry Wilson, who was the second of Grant’s vice presidents. He suffered a stroke while in the Capitol in November 1875. Wilson was taken to the vice president’s suite, near the Senate floor, and died nearly two weeks later, on November 22.

The official biography includes a wonderful quote from one of Wilson’s eulogizers: “He was not learned, he was not eloquent, he was not logical in a high sense, he was not always consistent in his political actions, and yet he gained the confidence of the people, and he retained it to the end of his life.” The trust of the people, the Senate writeup suggests, came from his tireless habit of sounding out everyone he encountered about the issues of the day. “Confidence of the people” might be a little bit of a stretch, considering candidates for the U.S. Senate were elected by legislatures rather than popular vote until well into the 20th century. Reading about Wilson, you get the picture of someone who rose above the station that lack of learning, eloquence and logic “in a high sense” might have reserved for him — perhaps that of a modestly successful political hack. He had more than enough ambition, drive and smarts to play the game and become a master operator. A 1964 journal article on him was titled, “Henry Wilson: Unprincipled Know-Nothing,” a reference to Wilson’s abandonment of his stated anti-slavery stance in the early 1850s to secretly join the nativist, racist Know-Nothings in order to win support in an election.

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That started him on the path to prominence in Republican politics — he became a leader of the party’s radical wing during the Civil War and unsuccessfully campaigned for measures that would ensure racial equality after the war. When he died, the Senate was moved enough by his passing that it commissioned a bust eventually executed by Daniel Chester French, better known for sculpting the statue in the Lincoln Memorial, The Republic, a centerpiece of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. and the Concord Minuteman in Massachusetts. Among others.

[It’s late; to be continued.]