Category: History

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Louisiana 1927

NPR just played Aaron Neville’s beautiful cover of the Randy Newman song (lyrics as they appear on the original (1974) cover of Newman’s album “Good Old Boys,” which Kate pulled out of her stack of old records while we debated whether the words I found online were correct. Oh, for the record: She was right.):

“What has happened down here is the winds have changed

Clouds roll in from the north and it starts to rain

Rained real hard and it rained for a real long time

Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

“The river rose all day

The river rose all night

Some people got lost in the flood

Some people got away alright

The river has busted through clear down to Plaquemines

Six feet of water in the streets of Evangeline

“Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

“President Coolidge come down in a railroad train

With a little fat man with a note-pad in his hand

The President say, ‘Little fat man isn’t it a shame what the river has done

to this poor cracker’s land’

“Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

Louisiana, Louisiana

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away

They’re tryin’ to wash us away”

(I note that Neville says “farmer’s” instead of “cracker’s.”)

A couple days ago, CNN published a little somewhat drippy backgrounder on the song and the events it’s based on. The occasion for NPR playing “Louisiana” was an interview with John Barry, author of “Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America.” The Wikipedia has the bare-bones facts about the disaster, which was a big topic during the 1993 flood.

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Random Reading

A product of random reading:

On September 4, 1886, the Chicago Tribune critiqued a pamphlet on a now-forgotten political scandal by a now-forgotten writer: ""The pamphlet on the Paine Bribery Case and the United States Senate, by Albert H. Walker, is plainly the effusion of a crank."

Mr. Walker was an attorney, author of a textbook on patents, who apparently took himself very seriously. The Tribune’s choice of words prompted him to sue for libel. Walker filed a declaration in federal court in Chicago that said the Tribune had published the remark "to cause it to be suspected and believed that plaintiff was a man of crude, ill digested, ill considered, and wild ideas and aims, and to be supposed to be without skill, tact, adequate information, or common sense." Furthermore:

"… to publicly characterize the plaintiff as a "crank," and thus to publicly impute to him sundry qualities, aims, and methods highly inconsistent with usefulness and success as a lawyer and author, … plaintiff has been greatly prejudiced in his credit and reputation, and caused to be considered an unreliable and injudicious person, and destitute of those qualities on which the earnings of a lawyer or a serious author depend; and has been greatly vexed and mortified, and has been deprived of divers great earnings which would otherwise have accrued to him in his professional duties, and divers great royalties which otherwise would have been paid to him on sales of his books."

Walker also noted that since President James Garfield’s assassination in 1881 at the hands of Charles J. Guiteau — widely described as a crank — "the word … has obtained a definite meaning in this country, and is understood to mean a crack-brained and murderously inclined person, and is so used by the public press."

The court wasn’t moved by Walker’s entreaty to help him recover his reputation. It granted the Trib’s motion to dismiss Walker’s claims, resorting to Ogilvie’s Imperial Dictionary to support its finding that "the word would seem to have no necessarily defamatory sense." In fact, the court’s opinion (Walker v. Tribune, 1887) suggested Walker get a thicker skin: " It is no libel upon a man who has entered the field of authorship to underrate his talents."

Despite the trauma of being called a crank by no less an august organ than the Trib, Walker managed to make a living afterward. His patent textbook went through at least four editions. He lectured on patents at Cornell. And he wrote one of the first books on the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, still circulating today.

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1945 Again

The little I’ve known about the atomic bombings and Japan’s surrender goes like this: We dropped a bomb on Hiroshima on August 6. Then when that didn’t immediately produce the desired result, we dropped another one on Nagasaki — a secondary target since there was bad weather over the primary — on August 9. That was all the Japanese could take, and they surrendered August 15. I’ve never thought much about what happened in the days between the second bombing and the surrender, and always figured the U.S. government stood by as Japan came to its inevitable decision.

Of course, it didn’t happen that way. There was a war on, and it didn’t stop. Conventional bombing continued. We had a third atomic bomb ready to go. Richard Rhodes, in “The Making of the Atomic Bomb,” says that when the Japanese failed to move fast enough to surrender, President Truman ordered the Air Force to resume incendiary attacks on Japanese cities. The air commander in the Pacific, Gen. Hap Arnold:

“…still hoped to prove that his Air Force could win the war; he called for an all-out attack with every available B -29 and any other bombers in the Pacific theater and mustered more than a thousand aircraft. Twelve million pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs destroyed more than half of Kumagaya and a sixth of Isezaki, killing several thousand more Japanese, even as word of the Japanese surrender passed through Switzerland to Washington.”

I’d guess that one of the most unknown aspects of World War II for most Americans is the scale and destructiveness of the U.S. attacks on Japan’s cities, of which the raid August 14 was the last. A project called the National Security Archive just published a collection of documents on the development and use of the bomb. Among the papers are notes taken at an April 27,1945, meeting of the committee of military officers and Manhattan Project scientists assigned to come up with a list of targets for the bomb (Hiroshima was at the top of the list; from that day on, the city and everyone in it were under a death sentence). The notes include a plain-spoken description of the nature of the ongoing bombing campaign:

“It should be remembered that in our selection of any target, the 20th Air Force is operating primarily to laying waste all the main Japanese cities, and that they do not propose to save some important primary target for us if it interferes with the operation of the war from their point of view. Their existing procedure has been to bomb the hell out of Tokyo, bomb the aircraft, manufacturing and assembly plants, engine plants and in general paralyse the aircraft industry so as to eliminate opposition to the 20th Air Force operations. The 20th Air Force is systematically bombing out the following cities with the prime purpose in mind of not leaving one stone lying on another:

Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, Kyoto, Kobe, Yawata & Nagasaki.

“Colonel Fisher also advised that the 20th Air Force existing operational plans pointed toward dropping 100,000 tons of bombs on Japan per month by the end of 1945.”

I got to know one of the cities on that list, Nagoya, as an exchange student in the ’70s. Conscious as I was of the war and what it had done, despite the fact the city was all virtually new, it didn’t sink in what happened there. Later, I found a U.S. Air Force damage survey of the city, which I think had been home to close to 2 million people. The map showed a few small splotches of yellow — to denote undamaged areas — in a sea of gray. Ninety-five percent of the city had been destroyed.

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Evil Counsels

Tonight’s topic — what is it again? It’d be great to tee off on the National Abortion Rights Action League’s misguided and idiotic TV ad against John Roberts, Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court. Politics aside, if you can’t beat someone with the real record of their deeds and opinions, your fallback position really shouldn’t be to lie and distort and fabricate. Leave that to the pros on the other side.

But no, that’s not the topic. I could hold forth on Schwarzenegger, our very own blockhead Führer; he provides lots and lots of bile ‘n’ outrage material. And then there’s Bush: Every soldier’s mom’s best friend.

I have something more abstract on my mind. Here it is: Whitney v. California, decided by the Supreme Court in 1927. The case concerned a young woman from Oakland, convicted under a state law that outlawed “criminal syndicalism”; in practice, that meant the Communist Party and similar organizations were simply illegal, and having anything to do with them could be a felony. Miss Whitney, as the court’s opinion refers to her, was found guilty for doing no more than attending a party convention; that’s because the party in question advocated the overthrow of the capitalist system. The Supreme Court upheld her conviction on technical grounds; the majority opinion also held that the law was an acceptable exercise of state power to address a public danger and did not restrain the rights of free speech, assembly, and association.

Justice Louis Brandeis wrote a concurring opinion. He acknowledged in passing his acceptance of the technical grounds for upholding Whitney’s conviction. But his real purpose was to attack the law and the intolerance of free speech it reflected. It’s a ringing articulation of the importance of unrestrained debate in a democracy, and it’s widely celebrated as such. Check Google for “Whitney v. California,” and you’ll come up with about 9,000 hits. The U.S. State Department includes the case background and the Brandeis concurrence in its list of “basic readings on democracy.” I wonder how many people in Bush’s cabinet or the Congress have read it.

The opinion might be hard to digest in an age where some consider even soundbites on serious subject a little too weighty for some audiences to handle, But, in the context of Supreme Court writing, Brandeis is succinct and crisp. In current parlance, the whole concurrence is a highlight reel. Just one passage:

“Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; that, without free speech and assembly, discussion would be futile; that, with them, discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine; that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government. They recognized the risks to which all human institutions are subject. But they knew that order cannot be secured merely through fear of punishment for its infraction; that it is hazardous to discourage thought, hope and imagination; that fear breeds repression; that repression breeds hate; that hate menaces stable government; that the path of safety lies in the opportunity to discuss freely supposed grievances and proposed remedies, and that the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”

I never intended to come back to John Roberts and that abortion-rights ad. But there it is: “The freedom to think as you will and speak as you think.” What that means today is blasting away at your foes without fine attention to details like how all the facts, if you have any, might fit together. There’s not enough respect for, or faith in, the other side of what Brandeis suggests: “The fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”

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The Third Bomb

I know I’ve been on the atomic bomb thing a little lately. Hear me out. Again.

I’m kind of surprised by what I don’t know about some aspects of the A-bomb attacks and their context. It’s part of popular lore that we had two atomic bombs in August 1945 — one named Little Boy, one named Fat Man — and that we dropped the former on Hiroshima and the latter on Nagasaki. For extra credit, you might know that the bombs were markedly different from each other. But how much more?

A few years ago, someone asked me whether there was a third bomb. Must have been. How soon did we have it? No idea.

Inspired partly by the recent atomic bomb blog and partly by a friend’s recommendation, I went out and picked up a used copy of Richard Rhodes’s “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” I turned to the end of the book, because the part of the story I was immediately interested in is back there.

So what about that third bomb? Rhodes writes:

“[Gen. Leslie] Groves had reported to [Gen. George Marshall] that morning [the day after the Nagasaki attack that he had gained four days in manufacture and expected to ship a second Fat Man plutonium core and initiator from New Mexico to Tinian [the island base from which the attacks were launched] on August 12 or 13. ‘Provided there are no unforeseen difficulties in manufacture, in transportation to the theatre or after arrival in the theatre,’ he concluded cautiously, ‘the bomb should be ready for delivery on the first suitable weather following 17 or 18 August.’ Marshall told Groves the President wanted no further atomic bombing except by his express order and Groves decided to hold up the shipment, a decision in which Marshall concurred.”

So a third bomb was nearly ready. There was some discussion, among Air Force brass, anyway, about dropping the next bomb on Tokyo. Then Japan surrendered on August 15.

The pace of building more bombs after that was slow, largely because the raw materials were in such short supply. According to Rhodes: The United States had seven operational bombs a year after the war ended; a year after that, 13. Then the pace began to pick up: By late 1949, its stockpile reached 200. By that time, the United States was no longer the only nuclear power — the Soviet Union detonated its first A-bomb on September 23, 1949.

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Anatomy of a Toot

As promised, photographic documentation of what’s called locally “a toot.”

But having spent two hours posting 11 pictures in that little photo album, I’m reminded why I don’t do it more often. I mean, it takes two hours. Part of the problem is the seeming inflexibility of the TypePad photo albums: The pictures appear on your working site in the reverse order you chose them; when you post them, they appear in reverse order again — or, to look at it another way, in the same order you orginally picked them. That always confuses me and I wind up writing absurdly prolix captions (also time consuming) that are supposed to have some sort of narrative order but come out rather jumbled. The current effort’s a case in point. Could be that later I’ll go back in and try to fix my fractured storytelling. But for now: Bed.

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Brief Road Blog

In Chico (just west of Paradise) after a quick un-air-conditioned ride up Interstate 5 in a red ’93 Honda Civic hatchback (aka “The Machine Messiah) to visit a Sacramento Valley monastery celebrating its 50th anniversary. Temperature: 106. Relative humidity: 9 percent. The backstory: The monastery figures in a long tale involving Leland Stanford (in a cameo), William Randolph Hearst, and a 12th century Spanish abbey. I’ll relate all — as many others have done — later. With dramatic photographic evidence.

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August 6

At the tail end of the day — actually, tale end would work just as well — a moment’s pause to acknowledge the Hiroshima anniversary.

On one of the bike club email lists I subscribe to, one mostly for Berkeley folks and our ilk, one member sent out a mildly worded note that he planned a ride out to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory today to reflect on “human intelligence and human stupidity.” Good for him. Then, to underline his feelings, I guess, he appended a simplistic screed copied and pasted from someplace on the Web that declared that the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the “two worst terror acts in human history.”

That set off a chain reaction of responses that fell into two familiar camps:

–It was essential to use the bomb to avoid the slaughter that would have attended a U.S. invasion of Japan’s home islands. And besides, war is hell. And here were similar or worse atrocities and mass deaths during the war, some due to Allied bombing.

–Japan was about to collapse. The argument about preventing mass casualties is a myth. The bombings were entirely avoidable and amount to mass murder, plain and simple.

At one point, I would have veered toward the second camp. And I still can’t accept there was no acceptable alternative to dropping the bomb on a virtually defenseless civilian target. That being said, it’s disappointing that the discussion is reduced to such absurd oversimplifications and dominated by the need for an uncomplicated answer.

Easy for us, most of whom have no direct experience of the magnitude of violence unleashed in modern warfare to try to justify or condemn the bombing. The reality was terrible, and terribly complex. Just one example: The immediate backdrop to the bombing was the battle of Okinawa. Three months. Two hundred fifty thousand killed; 100,000 civilians killed. There was good reason to dread the next step in an invasion of Japan.

As I said, I can’t buy that dropping the bomb was the only option. But what did the decision really come down to? Callous disregard for life? Desire to avoid sacrificing U.S. troops in a bloody invasion? Reckless use of a lethal and perhaps imperfectly understood technology? Lasting animosity for a nation that hit us with a sneak attack? Underlying racial and cultural hatred? Desire to show the Soviets what would be in store for them if they got out of hand? Impulse to do something, anything to finish off a fierce and much-feared enemy?

I choose all of the above.

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My Call to Stanley Kunitz

Yesterday, Stanley Kunitz was possibly the only 99-year-old former U.S. poet laureate with a listed phone number. That’s no longer true. He turned 100 today. I tried the number to see if it is really his. If someone had picked up, I was going to say “happy birthday” or “sorry, I must have dialed the wrong number” if my nerve failed me. But there was no answer. From the centenary stories I’ve seen, he spends his summers in Massashusetts.

Well, happy birthday, anyway. Honestly, I don’t know his work well and don’t think I’d ever read any of it before I heard him read a poem called “The Layers” when he was interviewed on the “NewsHour” a few years ago. What got my attention was how forceful this man of 95 sounded:

Q.: … You’ve said that a poem is present even before it’s written down.

Kunitz: Yes. I think a poem lies submerged in the depths of one’s being. It’s an amalgamation of images, often the key images out of a life. I think there are certain episodes in the life that really form a constellation, and that’s the germinal point of the poems. The poems, when they come with an incident from the immediate present, latch on to those images that are deep in one’s whole sensibility, and when that happens, everything starts firing at once.

Q.: And how have you kept in touch with that? How have you stayed so intellectually and physically vital all these years? You’ve been… you have a poem in this book that goes back to 1914. … How have you done that?

Kunitz: Because I haven’t dared to forget. I think it’s important for one’s survival to keep the richness of the life always there to be tapped. One doesn’t live in the moment, one lives in the whole history of your being, from the moment you became conscious.