In RFK’s Face: Breaking Bad with Bobby How to Steal an Election, 1880’s-Style
December 2016 HistoryNet.com
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42 2 AMERICAN HISTORY
December 2016
FEATURES
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24 The Death of An American In 1945, the Allies liberated POWs Japan had enslaved in northern China. Only one, U.S. Marine William Lynch, remains unaccounted for. By Yang Jing
34 America’s Atlas Besides looking every inch the leader, George Washington had the aptitude and attitude essential to founding a nation. By Peter R. Henriques
42 Tough Talk In 1963, Bobby Kennedy asked black leaders to be honest with him. RFK didn’t like what he heard, but in time he came to understand. By Larry Tye
48 Voter Fraud in the Real World These days the topic is a huge concern. Have a look at underhanded electioneering circa 1880. By Barbara Finlay
56 The Other Immigration Isle On Angel Island, new arrivals from China jousted with American officialdom over who would get in—and who would be sent packing. By Judy Yung
DEPARTMENTS 6 Mosaic 10 Letters 12 Interview Ron Kovic
14 Encounter Simone de Beauvoir and Nelson Algren
18 Déjà Vu Whigging Out
20 Game On When Wyatt Earp turned referee
56 ON THE COVER: Captured by the Japanese, U.S. Marine William Lynch died at their hands in northern China. His fate may be unknown, but his story (p. 24) is compelling.
22 Cameo John Sappington, scourge of malaria
66 Reviews 72 An American Place
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Henson Studio invokes the Little Tramp’s memory
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After winning four gold medals at the 1936 Olympics, track icon Owens returned home to a presidential snub and a life battling Jim Crow.
JFK and Vietnam Conversations taped in September 1963 show Kennedy’s advisors unable to agree on policy and warning him about getting “bogged down.”
Backbiting at Home In 1863, Northern Peace Democrats, dubbed “Copperheads” by the press, stoked dissent against Abraham Lincoln’s war of reunification.
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Jesse Owens’s Return
A Date Which Will Live in Infamy...
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by Sarah Richardson
Home Sweet Dusty Home The drought-stricken Dust Bowl left a deep imprint in American memory, as in the migrant farm families Dorothea Lange and Arthur Rothstein photographed and the Joads’ journey that John Steinbeck imagined in The Grapes of Wrath. But records for 20 of the era’s most afflicted counties in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas tell a different story. By combing census records and other databases, Jason Long of Wheaton College and Henry Siu of the University of Vancouver found that the region’s population did fall 20 percent during Dust Bowl days—however, that shrinkage came not from increased departures in the 1930s, but from a dramatic drop in arrivals compared with the previous decade. Most surprising, farmers were least likely to leave. The majority of those who did relocate remained within the four states rather than departing, Joad-style, for California.
6 AMERICAN HISTORY
In the early 1770s, American colonials led the world in income per capita. Among residents of the 13 colonies, the richest 1 percent had 8.5 percent of all income. In New England the middle 40 percent of the population had 52.5 percent of the total. Overall, colonials enjoyed about 50 percent more purchasing power than Britons. These data are among provocative new findings by Peter Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson. The researchers take a long view of income inequality in their book, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700 (Princeton University Press, 2016). Absence of data had stymied study of economic inequality. Lindert and Williamson scoured pockets of obscure scholarship on income from labor and property, ranging from probate records to census data. From 1774 until 1800, average income per capita fell 20 percent, due to wartime fatalities, Tory merchants’ departure, and disruption of commerce. With the turmoil came gains in income equality. After 1800, inequality grew despite post-Civil War evening out in the South. Between 1910 and 1970, the gap shrank: in 1910 the top 1 percent had up to 22 percent of income, but by 1970 only 9 percent, as wars and crashes curbed wealth and encouraged tighter economic regulation. Since 1970, inequality has climbed, and the top 1 percent now gets 20 percent of income. The authors cite three reasons: decline in quality and quantity of education, more rewards and power for financiers, and tax cuts boosting capacity to inherit wealth—all, in their view, potentially reversible political choices.
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That Endless Income Gap
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Audubon’s Invented Conservation Credentials
our pastures about our homes. But this cannot last; even now there is a perceptible difference in the size of the herds, and before many years the Buffalo, like the Great Auk, will have disappeared; surely this should not be permitted.” Patterson argues that Audubon’s granddaughter, Maria Rebecca Audubon, not only composed this passage, known as the “Great Auk speech,” but also altered the naturalist’s journals to present him as a prescient conservationist. Over the years, fire has claimed many of Audubon’s journals— including volumes Maria herself burned. To reach his conclusion, Patterson reviewed all materials she used to create the 1897 edition of Naturalist and illustrator John Audubon and His Journals. Overall James Audubon gets praise as a con- Patterson finds Audubon celebrating the astonishing abundance of servation pioneer—a reputation based on a hoax, says Daniel Patter- bison and reveling in the pleasures son, professor of English at Central of the hunter. Michigan University. The Great Auk speech, according In a new edition of The Missouri to Patterson, is a window not only River Journals of John James Auduinto Maria’s desire to burnish her bon, Patterson traces Audubon’s ancestor’s legacy but also into the conservationist credentials to com- late 1800s, when scientists had conments about the bison in the artist’s firmed the extinction of the Great 1843 Missouri River journal: “…Daily Auk and concern was high that the we see so many that we hardly bison and other North American notice them more than the cattle in species were about to go extinct.
Looking at Liminal Spaces An American commonplace that gained, lost, and lately has regained popularity, the porch encourages neighborly interaction and builds community. An October 20-21 event in Taylor, Mississippi, will inaugurate what organizers plan to be a recurring conference exploring the porch’s origins and significance. In addition to lectures, conference-go-
ers will tour porches in nearby Oxford and enjoy a concert and play staged on porches. Speakers will include architects, social scientists, and Michael Dolan, editor of American History magazine and author of The American Porch (2004). Campbell McCool, builder of a porch-oriented residential development in Taylor, is sponsoring the conference. About five miles from Oxford, Taylor once had as few as 92 residents, but an influx of artists and retirees has tripled the population and encouraged the town’s renewal. For details, visit theconferenceonthefrontporch.com.
DECEMBER
2016 7
Fallout from Fallout
An infamous Tuskegee Institute syphilis study that enrolled hundreds of African-American sharecroppers in Alabama—and let infected subjects go uninformed and untreated for decades when care was available—harmed the health of black men not even enrolled in the project, according to Stanford professor Marcella Alsan and Marianne Wanamaker of the University of Tennessee. Researchers withheld care from infected subjects even after penicillin became available in 1947. The project ended in 1972 when Associated Press reporter Jean Heller revealed the study’s existence. An out-of-court settlement paid $10 million to victims and families and underwrote lifetime medical care and burial expenses. Probing records gathered before and after 1972, investigators focused on the health of black men aged 45-74 who were comparable to the Tuskegee study profile—poor and uneducated—and noted subjects’ geographic proximity to the Tuskegee study locale. After accounting for additional factors such as education, income, sex, and race, researchers inferred that the Tuskegee study’s deception and scandal deterred older black men from seeking medical care, shortening their lives, on average, by up to 1.4 years.
Strait Dealing As early as 1300, Inuit inhabiting what is now Cape Espenberg on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula were trading with a network that stretched to Siberia and beyond. According to the Journal of Archaeological Science, two of six metal artifacts found on Cape Espenberg originated in Eurasia. A bead and fragment of belt buckle resemble artifacts found in northern China, researchers say, supporting oral histories and other archaeological evidence pointing to trade between Asia and North America before any European-generated contact. At its narrowest, the Bering Strait measures 51 miles.
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Tuskegee Study’s Shadow Lingers
Between 1946 and 1958 the United States used the Marshall Islands, a string of Pacific atolls, to test 67 nuclear weapons. The resulting fallout rendered many atolls uninhabitable, crowding residents onto two islands. Columbia University researchers who studied six islands report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that some islands still emit radiation double the level deemed safe for humans. However, New York City’s Central Park emits more radiation than several affected islands, thanks to emanations from granite in bedrock that crops up throughout the park.
Slaves Also Built the Capitol
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: ARCHITECT OF THE CAPITOL; THE WASHINGTON POST/VIA GETTY IMAGES; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS
Slaves built the White House, as First Lady Michele Obama noted during the Democratic National Convention. The U.S. Capitol is a similar paradox. Of 600 artisans who constructed the building, some 400 were slaves. One, Philip Reid, resolved a challenge to topping off the Capitol. In 1857, American artist Thomas Crawford, working in London, had sent a plaster model of the Statue of Freedom that he had created to stand atop the Capitol dome. Soon after, Crawford died. In 1860, the time came to disassemble Crawford’s model and cast it, element by element, in bronze—but no one could figure out how to take it apart. By suspending the model, Reid used gravity to reveal the joints. Crawford’s design embodied tensions of the day. He first sketched the figure wearing a liberty cap, a Revolutionary-era emblem resembling headgear freed slaves in ancient Rome wore to indicate their status. But Secretary of War Jefferson Davis objected, saying a people who were already free had no need to wear the garb of former slaves. Crawford substituted a Roman-type helmet encircled with stars and topped with a feathery plume. Workers installed the figure atop the Capitol in December 1863, nearly a year after publication of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
Top Bid: Super Sale In June 1938, Action Comics #1 introduced Superman. In August 2016, a copy sold for $956,000—nearly $250,000 above expectations—at Heritage Auctions. The item last sold for $26,000 in the 1990s. The team of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster based the Man of Steel on the character John Carter of Mars, created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Shuster drew the premier cover.
Lafayette Square, Solstice Space
On the shortest or longest days of the year, a visitor at the center of Lafayette Square, north of the White House, will see the rectangular park's corners align with the rising and setting sun, says biophysicist Amelia Carolina Sparavigna. Sparavigna has discovered kindred alignments at Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, India’s Taj Mahal, and in the Washington, D.C., map. The scholar, associated with Politecnico di Torino, a university of architecture and engineering in Turin, Italy, published her findings at philica.com. No one knows why Andrew Jackson Downing, who laid out Lafayette Square—the nation’s first public park—intertwined his design with the solar calendar. Downing, who grew up working in his family’s plant nursery, wrote the first American treatise on landscape design in 1841. Recruited to landscape the National Mall, he had completed only a portion of it when he died in a steamboat explosion near Yonkers, New York, in 1852. A commemorative urn near the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, D.C., bears his quote: "Plant spacious parks in your cities, and loose their gates as wide as the morning, to the whole people."
DECEMBER
2016 9
Unflagging Devotion
Henriques
Finlay
Tye
Yang
Yung
Barbara Finlay (Voter Fraud in the Real World, p. 48) is professor emerita in sociology at Texas A&M University, on whose faculty she served for 26 years. She is the author of five books and numerous articles on social history and issues of inequality. She lives on the family ranch in Central Texas. Peter R. Henriques (America’s Atlas, p. 34) is professor of history emeritus at George Mason University, where his specialty was Virginia’s Founding Fathers, especially George Washington. His books about Washington include Realistic Visionary: A Portrait of George Washington. His current project is America’s Atlas: The Leadership of George Washington and Other Essays. Larry Tye (Tough Talk, p. 44), formerly a reporter at the Boston Globe, runs a Boston-based training program for health journalists. He is the author of seven books, including the one excerpted here: Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon.
Thanks for your Pledge of Allegiance article (“Under God,” October 2016). When I began school in 1940, I recited “. . . to the flag . . .” then extended my arm, hand upward, toward the flag. After we went to war with Germany, wise-ass boys—never girls—took great delight in turning their palms down and wrists up, imitating the “Heil Hitler” salute. I wanted to beat those boys up in the worst way. I used to wonder if this was happening only in my classroom, but of course, it was happening in classrooms all over America. George Land Camp Meeker, California When the flag is passing, active-duty military personnel and veterans not in uniform are authorized to render a hand salute. “Putting Pirates in their Place” (October 2016) failed to explain how “Leatherneck” became slang for a U.S. Marine. In the 18th century, British and American marines wore neck guards made of leather. Originally a slur flung by sailors, “leatherneck” came to be a term of affection. Bruce Pharis USN (Retired) Rockwood, Tennessee
What a Difference a Date Makes Election Day (“Landslide,” August 2016) is the Tuesday following the first Monday in November, and can fall on or between November 2 and November 8. When November 1 is a Tuesday, as is the case in 2016, the day before is October 30—the last Monday in that month, not the first Monday in November. Therefore the federal election occurs on Tuesday, November 8, the second Tuesday of that month. Dick Engelhardt Fair Lawn, New Jersey
American Facets Yang Jing (The Death of an American, p. 24), a native of Shenyang, China, is associate professor at Shenyang University, where he heads the Mukden Allied POW Camp Studies Program. He also chairs the U.S. Military Trials of Japanese War Criminals in China Research Program funded by the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science of China. He has written and translated numerous books on the Mukden POW Camp.
I found the articles on Don Knotts and Raymond Spillenger (August 2016) interesting. American history has many facets. Reading different articles helps broaden one’s perspective and might even introduce a reader to some aspect of American history that they would like to explore further. Howard R. Tippin Stockton, California
Judy Yung (America’s Other Immigration Isle, p. 56) is professor emerita of American studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and co-author of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island and Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America.
CORRECTION: The National Cathedral will remove two panes showing the Confederate flag, not windows showing generals Lee and Jackson (“Reminders of Rebellion,” October 2016). The stained-glass banner shown is a battle flag used mostly by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War.
10 AMERICAN HISTORY
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Never Again In 1979, Kovic protested a move to revive the draft.
Ron Kovic in 2009 “I don’t want my life to be about loss.”
12 AMERICAN HISTORY
BY MICHAEL DOLAN
In January 1968, U.S. Marine Ron Kovic was fighting near My Loc, Republic of Vietnam, when an enemy bullet paralyzed him from the chest down. He became one of the war’s best-known opponents. In 1976, the Massapequa, New York, resident published a searing memoir, Born on the Fourth of July. A 1989 film adaptation earned Kovic a Golden Globe for scriptwriting. An advocate for peace and veterans’ causes, he has brought out a 40th-anniversary edition of his memoir and a new book, Hurricane Street, about a hunger strike he and fellow veterans staged in 1974 to protest Veterans Administration lapses. Kovic, 70, lives in Redondo Beach, California.
How do you look upon your opposition to the war now? I have no regrets. I’ve been living with what war does physically and emotionally since I was 21 years old. It has made me want to stop another young man or young woman from having to go through what I went through. We need to ask, If those were my children, would I be willing to commit them to conflict? Because the effects of war last a lifetime. The cost continues long after the battle. Many guys I knew from the action I write about in Hurricane Street are dead, and the rate of suicide among veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan is very high. I have tried in my books to show that combat doesn’t happen the way John Wayne movies or Rambo movies portray it. I remember my first tour of duty in Vietnam. I was a member of a reconnaissance platoon, doing a long-range patrol.
PHOTO BY DOUGLAS CHEVALIER/THE WASHINGTON POST VIA GETTY IMAGES; ©CHRIS LEE/ZUMA PRESS/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
STILL ROLLING
It’s been 50 years since the Vietnam War began. What are your thoughts? I’m thankful. I never thought I’d make it to 30. When I got back home to Massapequa, I’d experience terrible anxiety attacks. I’d stick a finger down my throat, trying to puke up that fear. The nightmares are pretty much gone. I’ve had a good woman for nine years. I sleep halfway well, and when I get out of bed and don’t have a bladder infection, that’s a good day. I did have to switch to a power wheelchair, but that’s working out. I was my battalion’s pushup champion; I guess I’m still trying to be that, trying to let people know I can still write, still contribute. I can’t believe I’m still here. But the anniversary is also a sad time. If there were a Vietnam War wall in Vietnam, how long would it have to be? How many mothers in Vietnam lost sons 40 or 50 years ago and are still mourning? When I was trying to get Born on the Fourth of July published, no one wanted to hear about the war. Fortunately, there were Vietnam veteran writers like James Webb and John del Vecchio and others like C.D.B. Bryan, and later Oliver Stone with Platoon, and many more. In the ’70s, life for me was an emotional challenge; now it’s more a physical challenge. Other people look at my circumstance and see tragedy; I see good coming from my loss.
These were 18-man teams, the elite of the Marine Corps. We were in a Huey over Chu Lai, heading into the landing zone, and I was humming the Marine Hymn. I imagined myself being in a movie like Sands of Iwo Jima or Destination Burma or Sergeant York. That’s what I thought war was; that’s what I had grown up on. What was it like to return home from that first tour? Resistance to the war offended me. I thought, Here we are, risking our lives the way our fathers did in World War II, and these people are saying that we’re in the wrong. I was wondering if there was going to be a revolution. It made me so mad that I wanted to go back to Vietnam. I volunteered 11 times before they finally let me go. And when I did, in January 1968, I was wounded, which sent me into some dark places. I wrote Born on the Fourth of July as my last will and testament. What would 70-year-old you say to 18-year-old you? I’d do everything I could to keep that boy and his friends home. I would respect those who went, but I’d do everything in my power to keep them home. What would you say today to 38-year-old you? I’d tell him how proud I am of him for opposing the war. I’d remind him it’s possible to love America and at the same time to criticize America. I’d tell him that he needs to forgive himself, the way I needed to forgive myself, because I took life out of this world. I pulled the trigger.
©AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
What have you learned? That our young men and women are precious. That we need to be more compassionate. Time has left me more willing to listen. War can destroy you, but it also can make you philosophical. I don’t want my life to be about loss. What would you say to today’s young veterans who are coming to terms with brutal injuries? I would tell them, “Never, ever give up. You never know how things are going to play out.” Had I given up—and plenty of times I wanted to—I would never have realized that there is another side to my life. You have to fight this thing through in case a day comes when you can say to yourself, thank goodness I didn’t give in. I was wounded on January 20, 1968. That was a really difficult date for me—until 1990. On January 20, 1990, I accepted a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay for the script to Born on the Fourth of July. A day of dread eventually turned into a day of triumph.
of that general diploma. But after I came home, I enrolled at Hofstra University. The campus was so green, the students were so innocent. It was such a relief. What’s with the VA? The Department has to reorganize to serve veterans. I was one of the VA’s fiercest critics, but now I look forward to outpatient care there. There has been a cultural change at the Long Beach veterans hospital; I see the possibility of that occurring elsewhere. A passage in Hurricane Street describes the pleasures of the Patriot Café there; it’s comforting to be among my brothers. Could you back any war? I went to jail 11 times protesting the Vietnam War, and I opposed the Iraq and Afghan wars. It’s very difficult for me to conceive of a war I’d support. I am living with the emotional and physical consequences of war, and I don’t think that we try hard enough to avoid conflict. How did Marine buddies react to your politicization? I wasn’t in touch with buddies from Vietnam afterward, but a friend who was a holder of the Silver Star was very upset with me for speaking out at the Republican convention in 1972. Neighbors told their children to keep away from me. People called me a communist, a traitor. But I wasn’t politicized by the left or the right as much as I was politicized by the battlefield and by the intensive care unit—by the war itself, not by ideology. I was no pacifist, you know. I volunteered for Vietnam twice. What if you had not been wounded? I think I still would have opposed the war. My Catholic moral upbringing would have caught up with me. But I wouldn’t have been a leader or had the same passion. And I always respected my fellow soldiers, and I hoped that they would understand. + Doppelgänger In the 1989 film Born on the Fourth of July, Tom Cruise convincingly evoked Kovic.
What was the high point of your homecoming? I wasn’t much of a student. To graduate from high school, I had to go to summer school. I was so ashamed
DECEMBER
2016 13
MADE IN CHICAGO
BY PETER CARLSON
NELSON ALGREN WOOS SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR When the phone rang, novelist Nelson Algren was cooking dinner in his two-room, $10-a-month slum apartment in Chicago. He picked up the receiver and heard a woman speaking in a foreign accent. “You have the wrong number,” he said and hung up. Simone de Beauvoir checked the number and redialed. Again the man answered and she tried to explain herself. “Wrong number!” the man barked, then hung up. What should I do? Beauvoir wondered. Back in France, she was a famous writer, author of three novels and essays that had helped define Existentialism, the school of philosophy that she and her lover, playwright Jean-Paul Sartre, had popularized. In Paris, their circle included the expatriate African-American writer Richard Wright, a pal of Algren’s who made his Chicago friend sound interesting to Beauvoir. Now, in February of 1947, Beauvoir was touring America for the first time, sightseeing and delivering lectures. In New York, a writer had given her Algren’s phone number. A Chicago factory worker’s son, Algren had spent the Depression hoboing around, selling goods door-to-door, pumping gas, and working as a carnival barker, until he stole a typewriter in Texas and landed in jail for four months. During the war, he’d fought in Europe. By 1947, he’d published two novels and dozens of short stories, most of them gritty, grim, funny tales of misfits, losers, and petty criminals.
14 AMERICAN HISTORY
Beauvoir wanted to meet Algren, and she didn’t know anybody else in Chicago. From her room at the Palmer House, she rang the hotel operator and asked her to dial Algren’s number. “Please be patient and stay on the line,” the operator told Algren when he answered. He agreed and Beauvoir explained who she was and mentioned Richard Wright. “Where are you?” Algren asked, his voice friendlier. “I’ll come down.” They met in the Palmer House lobby and repaired to the bar. Algren, 37, was tall, thin, handsome, and witty. Beauvoir, 39, was petite, energetic, and curious, with eyes that were, Algren later wrote, “lit by a light-blue intelligence.” He bought her a drink, told her about his days fighting in France, and asked what she wanted to see. She deferred to him: Chicago was his town. He told her that he wrote about Chicago’s lowlife and offered to show her his world. She was game. On West Madison Street, Chicago’s skid row, Algren led his guest into a seedy bar. The place was full of “bums, drunks, old ruined beauties,” Beauvoir wrote in her diary, and Algren seemed to know them all. A black jazz band started up. A sign read “Absolutely No Dancing,” but the barflies danced anyway. “A drunk asleep at a table wakes up and grabs the arm of a fat crone dressed in rags,” Beauvoir wrote in her diary. “They dance with a joyous abandon that verges on madness and ecstasy.” Beauvoir watched, then turned to Algren. “It is beautiful,” she said. Algren found her comment very French. “With us, beautiful and ugly, grotesque and tragic, and also good and evil—each has its place,” he explained. “Americans don’t like to think that these extremes can mingle.” He did not add, though he could have, that those extremes frequently mingled in his writing, creating his unique mixture of
PHOTO BY WILLIAM J. ROEGE/THE NEW YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY/GETTY IMAGES; ISTOCK (4); ©PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Billets-Doux When a one-night stand became a long affair, Simone de Beauvoir wrote often to “husband” Nelson Algren.
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Sartre Broken? Existential power couple Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre stayed together through many affairs.
16 AMERICAN HISTORY
tragedy and comedy. “I’m going to show you something even better,” Algren said, escorting Beauvoir to a combination bar and flophouse. Drunks could buy a beer, then stagger upstairs to sleep in a big, empty room lined with mats. Algren introduced Beauvoir to Lorraine Kimion, who ran the place. “Everything I know about modern French literature is thanks to her,” he told Beauvoir. “She is very up-to-date.” Beauvoir thought he was kidding. “How is Malraux doing on his latest novel?” Kimion asked Beauvoir. “Is there a second volume? And Sartre? Has he finished Les Chemins de la Liberte? Is Existentialism still in vogue?” A flophouse bartender who read Malraux and Sartre? “I’m stupefied,” Beauvoir wrote in her diary. Late that night, Algren took Beauvoir to his apartment, and they made love. “I think he initially wanted to comfort me,” she later said, “but then it became passion.” The next day, their exploration continued. “I showed her the electric chair, the psychiatric wards, neighborhood bars where I told her everybody sitting around was a sinister character,” Algren later recalled. “She looked around a while and then told me, ‘I think you are the only sinister thing around here.’ Then I took her to a midnight mission. I thought it was time to save her soul.” The next day, Beauvoir resumed her
©GLASSHOUSE IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; RDA/GETTY IMAGES
Literary Lover Nelson Algren inspired the male protagonist in Beauvoir’s The Mandarins. He disliked the novel.
journey, traveling to California, Nevada, Texas, and New Orleans. When she returned to New York, she invited Algren to join her. He did, moving into her room at the Brevoort Hotel in Greenwich Village. They went to a few literary parties but spent most of their time in bed. Before Beauvoir flew home, Algren slipped a ring on her finger. It wasn’t a wedding band, but she did write letters in which she addressed him as “my beloved husband.” And he wrote back: “I did not think I could ever miss anyone so badly.” The affair continued, on and off, for more than a decade. He visited her in Paris, she visited him in Chicago, and they traveled together in Mexico and North Africa. In 1947, Beauvoir showed Algren an essay she’d written about women. He urged her to expand her thoughts into a book. She did, and The Second Sex became a feminist classic. In 1949, Algren published a novel about a Chicago junkie, The Man With the Golden Arm, which won the National Book Award. In 1955, Otto Preminger directed a movie version starring Frank Sinatra and Kim Novak. Algren and Beauvoir exchanged torrid love letters but never lived together. Devoted to their work, they were not willing to move away from the cities that inspired their writing. In 1954, Beauvoir wrote an autobiographical novel, The Mandarins, featuring a moody American writer much like Algren. She dedicated the book to him, but he disliked the way she portrayed him, and mocked her in essays, asking: “Will she ever stop talking?” It’s dangerous to fall in love with a novelist. As the decades passed, Algren’s career faded while Beauvoir and Sartre, her companion and collaborator, evolved into literary celebrities. “She and Sartre became the Gracie Allen and George Burns of international left-wingism,” novelist Clancy Sigal joked in his review of a book of Beauvoir’s love letters to Algren. Algren died in 1981, largely forgotten by American readers. Beauvoir died five years later, famous worldwide. She was buried next to Sartre in a Paris cemetery, wearing the ring that the interesting fellow in Chicago had given her 39 years earlier. +
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Andy’s Enemies Democrat Andrew Jackson, top left, with epic Whig foes Daniel Webster, center, and Henry Clay. Above, an 1852 Whig campaign banner.
18 AMERICAN HISTORY
Donald Trump’s campaign has transformed the Republican Party, as its beaten establishment knows: the Grand Old Party’s last two presidents, Bushes 41 and 43, and most recent nominee, Mitt Romney, have refused to endorse Trump. Could a GOP loss in November destroy the party? South Carolina Senator Lindsay Graham, before backing the billionaire, said, “I have never been more worried about the Republican Party breaking apart.” Rolling Stone correspondent Matt Taibbi was more blunt: Republicans, he wrote, are “doomed to go the way of the Whigs.” For 20 years, the Whigs were half of our two-party system, electing two presidents and numerous congressmen and governors and enjoying the support of almost half the voters. What killed the Whigs? Could particide happen again? America’s close-enough victory in the War of 1812 melted political divisions into the
BY RICHARD BROOKHISER
Era of Good Feeling—until 1824, when James Monroe, the last founder president, retired, setting off a scramble for the White House. Eventual winner Andrew Jackson became the leader and catalyst of the new Democratic Party. With gloves-off populist style, he stood for the common man, opposed a national bank, and favored states’ rights. A war hero and duelist, Jackson the president fought with his Cabinet, ignored Supreme Court decisions he didn’t like, and threatened to send federal troops when South Carolina pushed states’ rights further than he liked. Rivals began thinking of him as a would-be king, with themselves the patriotic opposition. In 1834, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay reached into English history for the anti-royalist label “Whig.” A new party was born, and named. The new Whigs attracted businessmen. Clay praised factory owners as “enterprising, self-made men, who have acquired whatever wealth they possess by patient and diligent labor.” Given a religious spin, these traits fit well into the Second Great Awakening, the revival that swept Protestant congregations in the 1830s; evangelicals became a Whig
©CLASSICSTOCK/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; ©ARTOKOLORO QUINT LOX LIMITED/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Whigged Out
©EVERETT COLLECTION HISTORICAL/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
constituency. Whiggery tended to be strongest in New England and among New Englanders relocating to the Midwest, though the party also did well in Southern cities. This forced Whigs to straddle questions concerning slavery, but in the 1830s and ’40s these were not yet front and center. Populism, with its rough-and-tumble, irked Whigs, who were law-abiding and buttoned-up. The party supported voter registration laws to combat Democratic skill at ballot-box stuffing and deplored mob violence. In his first important speech, as a young Whig, Abraham Lincoln condemned lynchings in Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois. Whigs and Democrats differed in substance as well. Democrats believed in laissez-faire economics. Whigs wanted a federal road- and canal-building program to link resources and markets and tariffs to encourage domestic production. Democrats thought the Second Bank of the United States the tool of an economic elite; Jackson killed that institution, refusing in 1836 to renew its charter. Whigs valued the bank’s power over credit as a way to keep local banks honest and hoped to revive it. Democrats loved the little guy, if he was white. Whigs, at least in the north, were mildly pro-black, a stance that black voters rewarded where they were allowed to vote. Democrats were Anglophobes—Jackson had killed a lot of Brits at New Orleans. When in power, the Whigs negotiated a settlement with Britain of the U.S.-Canada border. Before electronic media, entertainment was oral—sermons, plays, speeches. America’s greatest orators were two Whig titans of the Senate, Clay and Daniel Webster. When either spoke, it was showtime. Clay addressed audiences “very much as an ardent lover speaks to his sweetheart,” wrote a rapt spectator. “His voice was full, rich, clear, sweet, musical, and as inspiring as a trumpet.” Webster was almost frighteningly overpowering. England’s Thomas Carlyle wrote of his “dull black eyes under the precipice of brows like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown.” Both were ever scheming, unsuccessfully, to become president. In a debut presidential outing in 1836, the Whigs ran four regional candidates—Webster in Massachusetts, Willie Person Mangum in South Carolina, Hugh White in the rest of the South, and everywhere else William Henry
Harrison—hoping to throw the contest to the House of Representatives. This elaborate plan failed when Jackson’s heir, Martin Van Buren, won a clean majority. The Panic of 1837, triggered by the Democrats’ war on the bank, crippled Van Buren and paved the way for a smashing victory in 1840 for Harrison, whose running mate, John Tyler, was a states’ rights Southerner on the ticket for regional balance. After only a month in the White House, poor Harrison died of pneumonia, elevating Tyler. The election of 1844 was a nail-biter: Whig Clay narrowly lost New York, and the Electoral College, to Democrat James Polk. The Whigs rebounded in 1848 under Zachary Taylor, a hero of the Mexican War. But Taylor too died in office. In 1852, the party put up another general, Winfield Scott; Democrat Franklin Pierce decisively beat him. Winning two of five presidential elections is not a bad record, but that box score conceals serious problems. The first arose in April 1841 with Harrison’s death. Harrison, who had Whig majorities in both houses of Congress, had planned to charter a new Bank of the United States. But at every turn, inheritor Tyler blocked the party that had gotten him into the White House. There would be no Bank of the United States until the Federal Reserve in the 20th century. The second problem was the Mexican War. Whigs preferred developing the American economy to carving into Mexico; they also feared that annexing Texas and the Southwest would stir a crisis over extending slavery. That is exactly what happened. Clay’s last great senatorial act, supported Continued on page 71
Riders Up An 1836 cartoon has Harrison in first; Van Buren, being ridden by Jackson, second; Hugh White in third; and Webster fourth. Van Buren won.
POPULISM and ITS ROUGH-&TUMBLE IRKED the WHIGS, WHO had a yen for law and order.
DECEMBER
2016 19
BY ALLEN BARRA
O.K. Guy In his sheriffing days, Earp and and his brothers tried to clean up Tombstone.
20 AMERICAN HISTORY
Wyatt Earp is an American legend several times over. Today, his name summons images of TV and movie scenes in which a lawman shoots it out with gunslingers. But before he was a quick-draw artist, Earp was a boxer, and therein lies a tangled tale. When Earp stepped into the boxing ring at Mechanics’ Pavilion in San Francisco on December 2, 1896, he was mostly known, if at all, for participating in an October 26, 1881, confrontation known as the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Fifteen years later, after stepping out of that ring, he had a new claim to fame: a part in the biggest controversy in boxing to that time, with many accusing him of fixing a fight. Born in Illinois, Earp had wandered the West working the usual miscellany of jobs:
©PRIVATE COLLECTION/PETER NEWARK AMERICAN PICTURES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
BRAVE, COURAGEOUS …AND CROOKED?
constable, buffalo hunter, whoremonger, miner, saloon bouncer, sheriff—and boxing referee. In youth a skilled pugilist, he realized that refereeing was a safer and more predictable trade. In 1868, rail splitters and buffalo shooters in Wyoming so regarded his ring calls they asked him to officiate and hold purses and betting money, no small accolade. Earp veered into sheriffing and the gunfight in the Arizona Territory town of Tombstone. The rumpus, involving his brothers Virgil and Morgan, propelled Earp out of law enforcement. For 12 years, Wyatt and wife, Josephine, a looker he’d met in Tombstone, traveled the region prospecting and managing saloons. In 1894, the couple settled in her native San Francisco. The City by the Bay nominally outlawed boxing, but it was also home to heavyweight champ James Corbett, and despite the ban matches still took place. Gentleman Jim’s retirement in 1895 made San Francisco a natural setting for a battle royal to crown a new champ. The contest pitted stocky Irishman “Sailor Tom” Sharkey against Australian blacksmith “Ruby Bob” Fitzsimmons. The promoters of the National Athletic Club billed the event as a heavyweight championship match, and California had no state athletic commission to say differently, so there it was. Fitzsimmons weighed 170; all that’s known of Sharkey is his height: about 5’9”. Tickets, priced as high as $10, sold like hotcakes. City ban or no city ban, the boys of the SFPD were happy to provide crowd control. But where to find a referee? Sharkey’s camp nixed several candidates. On fight day, the promoters asked Earp. He accepted. Sharkey’s people acceded, but Fitzsimmons’s manager balked, perhaps because the Sharkeyites said yes. Or maybe the sticking point was Earp’s inexperience with the new Marquess of Queensberry rules. Under the older London Prize Ring rules, which Earp had enforced as a referee, wrestling, eye gouging, biting, and hair pulling were standard. Men fought bare knuckled; rounds ended with a knockdown or a man taking a knee. Fights could go 90 rounds. The ring was marked on the
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ground. When a fighter got up, he was to step on the ring boundary—“toe the mark”—to show he was ready to resume the fight. Fights under the 1867 Marquess of Queensberry rules, which would apply to Sharkey and Fitzsimmons, took place in roped-off rings. Boxers wore gloves and could not punch below the belt or at the back of the head. Rounds lasted three minutes, the number varying by locale. Knocked down, a man had 10 seconds by referee’s count to rise or the bell sounded him out. A referee had authority to end a fight if he saw rules being violated. Earp offered to step aside, but the National Athletic Club, which had 10,000 paid customers, stuck by him. When he entered the ring, a police captain noticed he was packing. Earp handed over his equalizer, prompting a journalist to write, “It became necessary to disarm the referee.” Taller and quicker, Fitzsimmons dominated Sharkey from the bell, but the smaller man held on. In the eighth round, Fitzsimmons uncorked his “solar plexus punch,” an uppercut that knocked the wind out of opponents and caught the crowd, Earp, and especially Sharkey, by surprise. Coiled on the canvas clutching his gut, the devastated boxer screamed foul. Earp hurried to examine him; minutes passed, and onlookers saw Earp suddenly climb through the ropes and head to an exit. Word spread that Earp had called the fight for Sharkey. The crowd erupted. Most onlookers had never seen a foul called in a boxing match; fights generally had taken place under the loose London rules. When Sharkey refused to let a National Athletic Club doctor examine him, scandal broke. Fitzsimmons claimed he was robbed; Earp said he’d called it as he’d seen it. Fitzsimmons and his manager took Sharkey and the promoter to court. After two weeks, the judge declared that San Francisco outlawed prizefighting, so this was “not the sort of case for a court to consider.” This nondecision decision did nothing to dispel the clamor of accusations that the Sharkey camp and Earp were in league. Wyatt Earp never again refereed, at least under Queensberry rules, but he didn’t scorn boxing. Within the year, he and Bat Masterson, his pal and fellow
peace officer from Dodge City days, were hiring on as special policemen at the Fitzsimmons-Corbett fight in Reno, Nevada. They must have liked the work. The early 20th century’s most popular heavyweight champ, Jack Dempsey, recalled seeing the pair collecting weapons from spectators at his 1919 bout with Jess Willard at Toledo, Ohio. Fitzsimmons and Sharkey fought two times more, Fitzsimmons winning both bouts. The fighters became friends and were known to joke about the foul-call controversy, but until Earp’s death he was best known for what many fight fans considered the worst call in boxing. Earp died in 1929. In 1931 Stuart Lake completed the mostly fictionalized “autobiography,” Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal. A highly suspect tale of Earp’s life as a lawman, it became a best-seller. But Earp went to his grave better known for a decision in a fight now forgotten than for the shootout that made him a household name today. +
Pugilistic Poses “Ruby Bob” Fitzsimmons, left, packed a knockout body blow. “Sailor Tom” Sharkey fought gamely till the last punch. Below, Earp’s reputation took as hard a hit as Sharkey did.
DECEMBER
2016 21
MISSOURI MEDICINE MAN BY SARAH RICHARDSON
Country doctor countered malaria with drug once thought dubious
Marketing Fever John Sappington helped acquaint Americans with the use of quinine to treat malaria.
22 AMERICAN HISTORY
“The angel of disease and death, ascending from his oozy bed, along the marshy margins of the bottom grounds…floats in his aerial chariot, and in seasons favorable to his progress, spreads mortal desolations as he flies.” Place: Ohio. Date: 1820. Disease: intermittent fevers, the ague, the chills—19th-century terms for the parasitic infection today called malaria. No threat now in the United States, the ailment was then mysterious, widespread, and often fatal. To combat the scourge, John Sappington, a country doctor in Arrow Rock, Missouri,
bucked medical convention to concoct and prescribe pills containing quinine. His salesmen peddled the product far and wide, helping to prove the treatment worked by sporadically dosing themselves and never falling ill. If not for Sappington’s popular Anti-Fever Pills, settlers might never have pushed so successfully into the Midwest, validating President Thomas Jefferson’s 1803 gamble on the Louisiana Purchase. John Sappington, born in 1776, grew up in Tennessee and apprenticed with his physician father, becoming a doctor himself. He headed to Philadelphia for more training but did not complete the course, turned off by bloodletting and other common methods. In 1819, having heard his friend Thomas Hart Benton, an attorney and aspiring politician, talk up opportunities in the Missouri Territory, Sappington, 43, settled in Arrow Rock, a stop on the fur-trade route between St. Louis and Santa Fe. Among his many successful enterprises was a medical practice that would become a platform for challenging healthcare orthodoxy. Prolonged chills and fevers often signal the onset of malaria. At the time nobody knew a parasite caused the ague or that mosquito bites transmitted the blood-borne infection. Now we know that malaria is an Old World disease carried to the New World by European colonists and African slaves. In North America, the parasite thrived among mosquitoes in swampy waters like those in the coastal Carolinas, the Mississippi River Valley bottomlands, and the valleys of the Ohio and Missouri Rivers. In the South, malaria was so widespread that its effects may have fostered the image of the lazybones Southerner, but cases also occurred as far north as Michigan, where doggerel warned: “Don’t go to Michigan, the land of ills/the word means ague, fever and chills.” In Europe, physicians caring for aristocrats had long treated the syndrome with a remedy from the Andes, where Jesuit missionaries had seen Incas use the bark of an evergreen, the cinchona, to treat shivering. In powder form, the bark saw sparing use in America, usually only after a fever had broken. In 1823, Sappington experimented with the controversial substance. Reading an old pamphlet touting the wonders of “Peruvian bark” prompted him to try it on himself. None of
MISSOURI STATE PARKS, ARROW ROCK STATE HISTORIC SITE, PHOTO BY E.G. SCHEMPF
i
FROM TOP: U.S. GOVERNMENT PUBLIC DOMAIN; HERITAGE AUCTIONS, DALLAS; MISSOURI STATE PARKS, ARROW ROCK STATE HISTORIC SITE
the adverse effects were major, and he started using the bark to treat fever patients at the onset of symptoms. Soon commercial production of a concentrated form of the bark—known as quinine from the Quechua quina—made possible precise dosages. By 1832, Sappington was having his slaves mass-produce in pill form a blend of one grain of quinine, ¼ grain of myrrh, and ¾ grain of licorice, with sassafras added to mask quinine’s bitter flavor; parallel tweaking by British colonials in the tropics led to the gin and tonic. Sappington did not hype his pills’ quinine content because the ingredient was thought to be costly and risky, and medical opinion viewed bloodletting and purging as the best tools against disease. In the course of two decades, Sappington established a sales network so successful that rivals commonly counterfeited his pills. In 1844, he published The Theory and Treatment of Fevers, which revealed the formula for his famous pills as well as offering patients’ testimonials. Unmasking quinine as the main ingredient, Sappington wrote, would be the most effective way of destigmatizing the drug. His treatise was the first medical book to be published west of the Mississippi. He gave away all copies. Sappington and his anti-malaria campaign have nearly faded from memory, but a few details flesh out the man. He carried bluegrass seeds that he scattered over bald patches of land. He so dreaded the thought of burial that he ordered a lead-clad coffin, which the physician kept under his bed and filled with apples—except when Sappington occasionally climbed in to check the fit. By the time he died in 1856, at 80, quinine was accepted as a powerful anti-malarial weapon. His coffin still stands aboveground in Arrow Rock at the family cemetery, having withstood damage done by Confederate soldiers scavenging lead for bullets. Civil war was pivotal to malaria’s spread in North America. Troop movements involving parasite-riddled regions of the Chesapeake Bay and the Mississippi Valley dispersed the organism. During 1861-65, about a million
cases of malaria were tallied, and quinine became a fixture in the American military’s drug armamentarium. The disease again threatened American soldiers in World War II due to shortages of quinine, hastening development of substitutes. A DDT spray campaign curbed exposure to mosquitoes among soldiers training in the southern United States and its tropical possessions. By 1946, deaths from the disease had dropped from 60 per 1,000 in 1920 to 2 per 1,000. In 1965, only two deaths were reported in the entire country. Malaria in the United States was no more. Virtually all domestic cases today involve infections acquired abroad. +
American plague A map charting malaria fatalities in 1870* shows fever rampant even though pills containing quinine had become a widely accepted treatment for the mysterious ailment. *Darkest red areas show where malaria accounted for roughly 1 death in 7.
DECEMBER
2016 23
24 AMERICAN HISTORY
MIKE PARK/FLICKR; INSET PHOTO: YANG JING RESEARCH ARCHIVE
Death Row At Lushun Prison, shown as it now stands, onlookers in 1945 saw among hundreds of Asian prisoners a lone Westerner.
The Death of an American When Corregidor fell, Sergeant William Lynch’s tortured journey was only beginning By Yang Jing
I
n 1945, near East Mountain outside Lushun, in Northeast China, stood a prison run by the Japanese army. Across the regions of China that the Japanese seized in the 1930s, the occupiers held thousands of Allied prisoners of war. But only spies, saboteurs, dissidents, and others considered threats to the Japanese overlords went to Lushun Prison, where incarceration was a death sentence. Lushun held hundreds of Chinese and Korean men—and a lone Caucasian. Around Lushun, at the tip of the Liaodong Peninsula that
juts like a thick finger into the Yellow Sea, white faces were not uncommon. The Russians had controlled Lushun, which they called Port Arthur, until 1905, when the Japanese, having defeated the tsar’s navy, captured the city after a five-month siege. But the Westerner at Lushun in 1945 was obviously not Russian. He stood tall, about 5’ 10’, with a ruddy complexion and long nose that did not look Slavic to locals like guard Fang Zongqi, then 18, and Liu Daojing, then 16, who did odd jobs around the prison. The youths each quickly learned that the tall stranger was an American and put the foreigner out of their minds. That August, after Japan surrendered, Fang studied engineering. DECEMBER
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Mom’s Memento Marie Lynch kept this hand-tinted portrait of son Bill for years.
One Way Out Incarceration at Lushun was a death sentence.
Prisoner 607 POW camp IDs shrank lives to a few mean details.
The Allies liberated the region’s POWs and documented the fates of prisoners who had died there. But that proved impossible for U.S. Marine Staff Sergeant William J. Lynch. In 1946, American authorities declared Bill Lynch dead and notified his mother in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Bill Lynch was like many young fellows in Dorchester in the 1930s: Irish-American, big family, hard times. The Lynch children—Daniel, Bill, Eleanor, and Raymond—attended Sunday school at St. Ann’s, one of the factory town’s many Catholic parishes. Their father, Daniel, had grown up in Dorchester at 57 Victory Road, where their grandparents still lived. When Dan Lynch died in November 1932, his folks offered his widow, Marie, a cold-water flat at the back of their place. Marie accepted and took a night job as a nurse, assigning Eleanor to care for her brothers. Bill Lynch grew to be a good-looking guy. He had blue eyes, brown hair, and a ruddy complexion. He was good with his hands. At Mechanic Arts High, a public school, he learned to weld. He dropped out in 1935 and joined the 26th Signal Company of the Massachusetts National Guard. A May 1936 honorable discharge describes his character as “excellent.” In January 1937, Bill Lynch enlisted in the Marine Corps and trained as a quartermaster. Marines prized postings to China, and prized no China posting more than Shanghai, where since 1927 the 4th Marines had been protecting American interests. A Shanghai Marine could live like a mandarin. Officers could, and did, keep polo ponies, and even NCOs could afford servants and swank apartments. Except when Mao Zedong’s Communists tangled with Chiang Kaishek’s Nationalists, Shanghai was fairly placid. For years, the 4th Marine duty day ended at 1 p.m. That changed in 1931, when Japanese troops took over Manchuria, ostensibly to quell unrest but really to seize the heavily industrial northern region. The victors renamed the province Manchukuo, installed a puppet government, and made the area, particularly around the city of Mukden, a center for war materiél production, forcing locals to work in factories like those of Manchurian Machine Tool Company, which produced fighter plane parts. In late November 1937, Japanese forces captured Shanghai and began harassing that city’s foreign residents. Japanese gendarmes and U.S. Marines clashed.
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Riding a Pony Bill between older brother Dan and sister Eleanor, in a family snapshot.
Tensions escalated. In July 1939, after a three-month sea voyage, Bill Lynch landed at Shanghai to join the Service Company of the 4th Marines. That September, Hitler invaded Poland. On November 27, 1941, the United States advised military commands worldwide to expect Japanese aggression “within the next few days.” On November 28, the 4th Marines sailed for Manila, 1,150 miles south. They had barely unpacked when Japan hit Pearl Harbor and invaded the Philippines, driving American and Filipino troops south to the Bataan Peninsula and then Corregidor Island. In April 1942, the main U.S.-Filipino force on Bataan surrendered and, despite fierce resistance by the 4th Marines, Corregidor fell May 8. The Japanese, who had not ratified the 1929 Geneva Convention on treatment of prisoners of war, despised everything about surrender. “To live as a prisoner of war is to live without honor,” declared Prime Minister Hideki Tojo. “In Japan,” he told his POW camp commanders, “we have our own ideology concerning prisoners of war which should naturally make their treatment more or less different from that in Europe and America.” The Japanese regarded POWs as slaves. On August 22, 1942, Vice Minister of War Kyoji Tominaga wrote to Kasahara Yukio, chief of staff of the Kwantung Army, telling him the government wanted to expand Manchurian Machine Tool’s Mukden operation by using POWs. “We are ready to intern about 1,500 POWs from the South Seas,” Kasahara wrote in September. “We expect you to transfer POWs as soon as possible.” Japanese troops in the Philippines were holding thousands of Americans, including Bill Lynch. His captors moved Lynch from Corregidor to Bilibid Prison in Manila, then to Camp 3 at Cabanatuan, where the sorting started. At Camp 3, “the Jap Officer began making rounds through camp jotting down prisoners’ numbers, asking questions, checking the health of the best-looking prospects for some work detail,” U.S. Army Private T. Walter Middleton, a Californian, later recalled. Bill Lynch’s skills—his POW identification card labels him a “welding operator”—marked him for slavery in Manchukuo. The Japanese shipped POWs aboard “hell ships” that often carried Japanese troops and supplies as well. Prisoner of war transports were not marked as such, putting Allied POWs at risk of attacks by their countrymen. On October 6, 1942, Bill Lynch was one of 2,000 POWs crammed in the forward hold as the transport Tottori Maru departed Manila. “We were touching someone on every side and couldn’t move,” fellow POW Middleton wrote in a memoir. “My short pants were stiff and sticking to me all around my bottom with dried dung. I sat in puddles of other men’s urine and mine.” The POWs spent the voyage, during which an American sub fired two torpedoes at the ship but missed, in that stinking hold. Thirty days and 1,500 miles later, at DECEMBER
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others to the factory. The slave laborers’ first assignment, to their disgust and amazement, was to fashion concrete bases for brand-new American-made machinery. At every chance, POWs sabotaged gear. “Bolts were unscrewed; knobs, handles and flywheels disappeared,” wrote Merrill. “The prisoners finished the foundations and secured the machinery but it was totally useless.” The prisoners nicknamed their workplace, MKK; its name in Japanese was Manchu Kikai Kosaku Kabushiki Kaisha. In January 1943, Bill’s younger sister Eleanor married Harold Armour, a Navy man, at St. Ann’s. In March, a letter from the Marines arrived at 57 Victory Road confirming that Bill was a POW, serial number 256599. This was a relief to his mother, who had feared the Bataan Death March had claimed her son. His location could not be ascertained, the letter said, but Marie could write to Bill in care of the Japanese Red Cross, Tokyo, Japan. Inquiries about his welfare were to go to the War Department. In a May 11, 1943, telegram signed by Marine Corps Commandant Lieutenant General Thomas Holcomb, Marie was told: “Your son Sergeant William Lynch was performing his duty to his country in the Manila Bay area when that station capitulated. He will be carried on the records of the Marine Corps as missing pending further information. No report of his death has been received and he may be a prisoner of war. It may be several months before definite official information can be expected concerning his status.” Bill Lynch was not a model prisoner. Once, for talking back at MKK, he drew 15 days’ confinement. Escape was futile. Half a world from home, obviously out of place, prisoners knew that the men left behind would suffer and that recapture meant torment or worse. Even so, after dark on Monday, June 21, 1943, three Americans cut the wire at Hoten and made for Soviet-controlled Mongolia, 560 miles north. Hiding by day and hiking by night, the trio spent 11 days at large. Searchers caught them at the edge of the Gobi Desert. “They were brought back to the camp, and paraded to the other prisoners,” wrote Merrill. “The Japanese officer stuck his thumb high in the air. The message was that the Americans stand out like sore thumbs in any Oriental groups. You cannot escape without being caught.” The Japanese executed all three. To squeeze more work out of prisoners, their captors built a camp half a mile from MKK—another mark of Japanese scorn for the Geneva Convention, which banned siting POW camps within two miles of factories and other military targets. The compound, behind a 7-foot brick wall topped by high-voltage barbed wire, squeezed into its acre-plus guardhouses, three POW barracks, a barracks for
Bill Lynch was not a model prisoner. Once, for talking back at MKK, he drew 15 days’ confinement.
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AMERICAN DEFENDERS OF BATAAN AND CORREGIDOR MEMORIAL SOCIETY (3)
Pusan, Korea, most men disembarked. The Tottori Maru turned east to Japan, its remaining human cargo bound for home island POW camps whose inmates worked at mines and factories. Guards in Pusan stripped their charges, washed them down with fire hoses, and issued thin uniforms. After five weeks, during which two or three men died every day, guards shoved the survivors— Britons, Australians, New Zealanders, Dutchmen, and Americans including Bill Lynch—aboard boxcars to roll north 550 miles to Manchukuo. When Lynch reached Manchukuo November 11, daytime temperatures were averaging 14°; at night the mercury could fall to -22°. The Japanese installed the prisoners at Hoten, an abandoned Chinese army camp near Mukden. “The barracks were buried half underground and were covered with a foot of dirt and sod,” Middleton wrote. “Walls were double and insulated with sawdust.” Two barbed-wire fences ringed the 11-acre compound, crowded with primitive barracks, kitchens, and other buildings. Between the fences was the Zero Zone. A POW entering the Zero Zone was signing his death warrant. Beriberi, malaria, pneumonia, and dysentery rampaged among the POWs. Medicine was scarce. So was food. “It was not uncommon to find a dead mouse in the cooked gruel,” Army Private Smith Merrill of Algonac, Michigan, wrote later. “When this happened, a prisoner would shout out, ‘Hey, I found some meat in mine!’” Men bunked in numerical order. Bill Lynch, Prisoner 607, slept a few pallets from Prisoner 610, fellow 4th Marine Roy Weaver of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. When Prisoners 608 and 609 died, Bill and Roy closed the gap. No news from the outside ever reached Hoten. Decrepit Russian-made stoves “heated” the barracks—if the occupants could scrounge wood to feed them. That winter, at least 176 men died, their corpses stacked until spring, when POWs had to thaw the ground to bury comrades. “Digging graves for so many dead was a dreadful ordeal,” Army Private Oliver Allen of Tyler, Texas, said later. “We would get scrap lumber, each one of us with a load in our arms, and then go to the cemetery where we built a large bonfire on the spot where we were to dig. When the fire burned out, we would get busy and dig there while it was still thawed, before it froze again.” Guards beat prisoners at will. “Every time the Japs were short on temper was an indication that they were not faring well in the war. It was an excellent barometer as to the progress of war,” Army Private Joseph Petak of New York City recalled later. “It was a painful way to find out because they were prone to use rifle butts and cuts from swords and bayonets.” Manchurian Machine Tool Company, five miles south of Hoten, was shorthanded, so guards marched Bill and the
Escape was futile. prisoners knew that men left behind would suffer and that recapture meant torment or worse. Even so, after dark on Monday, June 21, 1943, three Americans cut the wire at Hoten. They made for Sovietcontrolled Mongolia, 560 miles north.
Nowhere to Hide A watch tower loomed over the main Mukden prison camp.
Criminally Low Overhead At factories like Manchurian Machine Tool Company, the Japanese routinely enslaved Bill Lynch and other POWs.
Hoten Hilton Besides dying from beatings by guards, POWs at Hoten perished from cold, disease, and hunger. DECEMBER
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Marshal General Form No. 112, a flimsy airmail sheet that folded to become its own envelope. With a pencil Marie Lynch checked the box indicating Bill’s nationality below the label reading “Prisoner of War Post” in Japanese, German, and French. “DEAR BILL,” Mrs. Lynch printed in the requisite block capital letters. “HOW ARE YOU WE ARE ALL FINE. EALEANOR [sic] IS BACK HOME. UNCLE GEORGE IS VERY SICK. WHY DON’T YOU WRITE. WRITE SOON. LOVE FROM ALL MA.” The letter, postmarked April 16 in New York City and cleared by U.S. Censor 11951, came back stamped “RETURN TO SENDER UNDELIVERABLE AS ADDRESSED.” By the time Japan surrendered, more than 17 percent of the POWs at camps in Mukden had died, a relatively low percentage attributed to the fact that the main facility, a model camp, was visited by higher-level officials. Death rates were much higher among Asian prisoners and Allied POWs sent to factories as slave laborers. Survivors, including U.S. General Jonathan Wainwright, captured in the Philippines, and British General Arthur Percival, taken at Singapore, were liberated by Allied troops who tried to account for every man. Japanese records and camp staff testimony indicated that after Lynch’s trial he had likely been moved to Lushun Prison. In September 1945, a joint U.S. Army–Marine Corps search party traveled 240 miles down the Liaodong Peninsula to Dalian, a seaport in Liaoning Province near Lushun. Bill Lynch’s trail led there, then dwindled to nothing. In a May 24, 1946, letter to Mrs. Lynch, the Marine Corps wrote that efforts to locate Bill, including a search of all Japanese camps and records, had turned up no trace. Bill was presumed dead. “The conclusion is inescapable that he lost his life in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in Manchukuo,” a lieutenant colonel wrote. “I realize that there is nothing I can say to comfort you, but I hope you will find consolation and pride in the fact that your son did his part in helping to bring this war to a successful conclusion, and that the knowledge of his patriotism and unselfish contribution toward a better world in the future will sustain you in your grief.” The Marines sent Bill’s medals: a Purple Heart, the Army Distinguished Unit Badge with oak leaf cluster, the China Service Medal, the American Defense Service Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal, and the Philippine Defense Ribbon—each with a bronze star—and the Victory Medal. On June 18, 1946, the First Naval District in Boston declared Bill Lynch dead. He was the only prisoner of war among about 2,000 at Mukden unaccounted for.
Bill Lynch lost patience. On the rainy evening of Wednesday, May 17, 1944, guards counted him at roll call. Around midnight a bed check revealed that “Lynch, William, Prisoner 607”had vanished.
Marie Lynch never gave up hope. In her bedroom at 57 Victory Road she kept photos of her Marine, Bill, and her soldiers, Daniel and Raymond. On Saturday, April 14, 1945, she sat with a copy of War Department Provost 30 AMERICAN HISTORY
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Japanese troops, and a headquarters. The Manchurian Leather Factory, a tannery that processed material for boots, was the first Mukden war plant to have on-premises slaves: Bill Lynch and 150 other men relocated from MKK. They lived inside a 10-foot wood-and-barbed-wire fence. Tanning determines leather’s toughness. Hides from Manchurian Leather were supposed to be dense and durable, but POW crews diluted or contaminated the chemicals, making the material useless. “Sometimes we’d write graffiti on the leather,” Army Private Hearshel Boushey of Camano Island, Washington, recalled. Bill Lynch lost patience. On the rainy evening of Wednesday, May 17, 1944, guards counted him at roll call. Around midnight a bed check revealed that “Lynch, William, Prisoner 607” had vanished. The duty officer phoned the commander. An emergency roll call triggered an alert to the military police. Within 30 minutes, searchers were circulating, especially at Huanggutun Train Station, three miles away. Bill eluded his pursuers, and by 11 the next morning had traveled more than 12 miles southwest. Near Masanjiazi, a villager spotted the Westerner, told police, and with neighbors detained him. Word spread quickly. “I later learned from my neighbor villagers that a white American was wounded in the leg by gunshot and captured in the vicinity of Masanjiazi,” recalled Tan Yuzhen, then a 15-year-old apprentice well digger. Bill had fled on impulse, camp personnel reported. After roll call, he had feigned sleep, then changed into summer fatigues. Around 11 p.m., he went to the latrine, where he scaled the fence. He used scrap lumber to traverse the wire encircling the factory. His feat earned the other POWs a scolding, and his seven-man squad spent a week in the guardhouse standing at attention from 5 a.m. till 11 p.m., with minimal rations. Roy Weaver last saw Bill Lynch at the main camp in Mukden. “He was brought back on a stretcher, and was carried off,” Weaver said later. “However, at every roll call from that time on he was carried on the rolls as being in a military prison.” Camp authorities put Lynch on trial and on June 6, 1944, convicted and sentenced him to seven years’ hard labor. No one at the tannery saw him again. That December, B-29s raiding Mukden bombed the camp, killing 19 POWs and wounding dozens.
Returned to Sender A letter Marie mailed to Hoten could not be delivered.
Free at Last Joyful Allied survivors depart the Mukden POW camp..
Sailing Stateside Starved, battered prisoners came home aboard the USS Block Island.
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Words of Soothing Along with official word that Bill had been declared dead, his mother got a letter from a chaplain.
Bleak House Prisoners held at Lushun occupied grim, bare cubicles. 32 AMERICAN HISTORY
Deterrent Current ElectriďŹ ed wire at the main Mukden camp kept most POWs from going over the wall.
CLOCKWISE, FROM TOP LEFT: YANG JING RESEARCH ARCHIVE (2); MIKE PARK/FLICKR
A Mrs. Morey, who lived in nearby Medford, Massachusetts, phoned Marie Lynch. Mrs. Morey was excited. Her soldier son Edward, listed for years as MIA, had been a POW at Mukden. “There are three local boys in camp with me. Two of them are Army and the other is a Marine,” Ed Morey wrote in a letter to his mother. “The Army boys are Moore from South Boston and Gerry from Dorchester. The Marine is Bill Lynch, from Victory Rd. Dorchester. What a guy he is! I’ll tell you all about him when I get home.” But nothing came of the Morey connection. Dan and Raymond Lynch mustered out. The Allies hanged Tojo. Dan became a psychologist. Ray worked in Boston. Eleanor and Harold Armour had four children. Marie Lynch contacted American occupation authorities in Japan. In October 1948, the Far East Command replied, “A careful search of the records of General Headquarters and the Japanese Government Prisoner of War Information Bureau reveals only the fact that your son was interned in the prisoner of war camp in Mukden, Manchuria.” The Communists became the masters of China. Manchuria became Northeast China. Mukden became Shenyang. In 1957, Dorchester named a square up the hill from 57 Victory Road, where Marie Lynch still lived and where the water in the back flat still ran cold, for Bill Lynch. At the dedication, Marie and daughter Eleanor sat dry-eyed. In time, the Lynch family gave up the house, and Marie
moved into an apartment that did have hot water. A stroke sent her into a nursing home. In 1969, the city demolished 57 Victory Road. Marie Lynch died in 1981. She was 93. Her boy Bill would have been 61. Liu Daojing and Fang Zonqi, who as youths had worked at Lushun Prison, grew to manhood. Liu farmed, Fang worked in a textile mill. During the Cultural Revolution, their servitude to the Japanese brought them much trouble, but they underwent political rehabilitation and retired in peace. In 1980, the city of Shenyang founded a university, whose faculty decided Mukden’s war years deserved attention. In 2007, the Mukden Allied POW Camp Studies Program reopened the case of Staff Sergeant William J. Lynch. Researchers studied oral histories and documents from Dalian residents. They read former POWs’ statements about Sergeant Lynch and Liu’s and Fang’s reports that at Lushun in 1945 they had seen a lone American among the incarcerated Asians. This and other testimony, such as Tan Yuzhen’s recollection of hearing about Bill Lynch’s recapture, led a team in 2010 to East Mountain, near where Lushun Prison was located. Halfway up the slope is a flat stretch apparently used as a burial ground. Chinese and American historians and forensic experts have worked there without definitive result. But hope remains that by using Lynch family members’ DNA, someone will positively identify the remains of Staff Sergeant William J. Lynch, the lost China Marine. +
Hometown History Survivor Roy Weaver, held with Lynch at Hoten, at his Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, home with author Yang Jing in 2007. Weaver died in 2010.
I learned the meaning of “POW” in the 1990s. I was working for the U.S. Consulate General in Shenyang, Northeast China, as chief executive assistant for political and economic affairs. A letter came from an American veteran of World War II who had been a prisoner
of war at Mukden, as Shenyang was called until 1949. He wanted to know what had become of that POW camp. My boss assigned me to answer that question. Municipal and provincial archives had no record of such a facility, but fieldwork led me to
an apartment block built where the POW barracks had stood. I relayed the information to our correspondent, but was disappointed that I could not find more. I undertook what became a 10-year project to catalog the history of sacrifice and torment at the Mukden camp. In 2003, I brought out Mukden Nirvana, the
first book published in China about events at Mukden camp. Local government established a memorial to the Mukden POWs. I did more case studies and collected oral histories from former prisoners and others who were associated with the camp. At Shenyang University, where I serve on the history faculty, the Mukden POW Camp Studies Program continues to research and enlarge the record on Allied servicemen imprisoned at Mukden and around the region. Crosschecking rosters of men held at
Mukden, I saw Staff Sergeant William J. Lynch listed as missing in action. According to the U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command, that label applies to 78,000 Americans who served in World War II. At first, a single life among so many lost may seem insignificant, but I realized how meaningful the story of the one man unaccounted for could be. So I set forth to learn as much as I could about Staff Sergeant William J. Lynch, USMC. —Yang Jing DECEMBER
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America’s Atlas We stand on the shoulders of a giant By Peter R. Henriques
s a student of George Washington for over 25 years, I find one of American history’s more puzzling aspects to be the existence of serious debate about who among American statesmen deserves the premier position. Although I do not think the matter debatable, I would argue for George Washington, who was truly our “Indispensable Man,” essential not only in winning America’s independence, but also in the successful drafting and ratification of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. He was the indispensable man keeping the country united and at peace during its vulnerable early years, guiding a disparate group of states toward nationhood. We forget how close the American experiment came to extinction and how critical Washington was to preventing that endeavor’s collapse. He was the Atlas of our Revolution, the man who made America possible. Without Washington, there would have been no Union for Abraham Lincoln to save, or for today’s Americans to joust and squabble over. His record is without parallel in our history. How did Washington become such a remarkable leader? Certainly not by chance, though great good fortune did figure in his personal evolution. Time and again, almost uncannily, he was the right man in the right place at the right time, not only in matters of statecraft but also on the battlefield, where he survived a significant number of close calls, unscathed as bullets whizzed around him. George Washington succeeded as a leader because he looked the part, he had the necessary personality and requisite character, and he was an unblinking realist, rich with talents. Washington was a superb physical specimen. Roughly 6’2”—today’s 6’5”—he was powerfully built, a figure of prodigious strength, yet with a graceful carriage and majestic walk. A superb athlete, he was widely acknowledged as Virginia’s best horseman. Countless contemporaries testified to his charisma. Washington, James Monroe said, possessed “a deportment so firm, so dignified, but yet so modest and composed I have never seen in any other person.” Another acquaintance recollected, “There was in his whole appearance an unusual dignity and gracefulness, which at once secured him profound respect, and cordial esteem. He seemed born to command his fellow men.” “No man could approach him but with respect,” Gouverneur Morris wrote. “None was great in his presence.” Henry Knox noted that an aide to British General William Howe appeared “awestruck” upon being presented to General Washington. Another man, who had been presented to the Kings of England and France, said neither monarch induced the feeling he experienced meeting Washington. French officer upon French officer spoke similarly after interchanges with the man they and many others called His Excellency. Benjamin Rush declared one “could distinguish him to be a general from among 10,000 people,” adding that there was not a European ruler who, alongside Washington, would not look like a servant.
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“We must take the passions of men as nature has given them, A small knowledge of human nature will convince us that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle and that almost every man is more or less under its influence.”—GEORGE WASHINGTON
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Along with the look of leadership, Washington possessed a leader’s personality. He was profoundly ambitious, eager not only for honor but for history’s most elusive prize, fame across the ages. In Paul Longmore’s telling words, “Throughout his life, the ambition for distinction spun inside George Washington like a dynamo, generating the astounding energy with which he produced his greatest historical achievement—himself.” Washington hungered for secular immortality. In adversity and in disappointment, he persevered, developing the ability to prevail amid a host of troubles. Early in the French and Indian War, he risked arrest and having his brains blown out as he attempted to gather supplies crucial for the coming campaign. Through the Revolution, he amassed a record of defeats and near-defeats that he salvaged by deft responses. The Revolution’s financier, Robert Morris, said Washington “feeds and thrives on misfortune by finding resources to get the better of them,” whereas lesser leaders “sink under their weight, thinking it impossible to succeed.” Morris saw in Washington a “firmness of mind” and a “patience in suffering” that gave him an “infinite advantage over other men.” Washington’s ambition and determination had their match in his passions. We forget that he was a man of profound intensity. “Those who have seen him strongly moved will bear witness that his wrath was terrible,” Gouverneur Morris wrote. “They have seen boiling in his bosom, passion almost too mighty for man.” Those passions were clear to artist Gilbert Stuart. Studying Washington, Stuart said, he discovered a face “totally different from what I had observed in any other human being. The sockets of the eyes, for instance, were larger than what I had ever met before, and
the upper part of the nose broader…All his features were indicative of the strongest passions…Had he been born in the forests…he would have been the fiercest man among the savage tribes.” He exuded the dignity of a tribal sachem and possessed the courage of a ferocious warrior. His heart-stopping bravery leading the Continental Army worried, even unnerved, his aides but inspired his men as well as onlookers. In Jefferson’s words, Washington “seemed incapable of fear.” He practiced what today’s statesmen call Realpolitik. In Joe Ellis’s phrase, Washington was a “rock-ribbed realist.” Viewing humanity darkly, Washington operated from a visceral understanding of the world’s caprice. “What, gracious God, is man!” he wrote.“That there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct?” Repeatedly, he argued that since men as well as nations are driven by their interests—“The motives which predominate most in human affairs [are] self-love and self-interest,” he wrote—any form of government failing to account truly for human nature would itself fail. “We must take the passions of men as nature has given them,” he wrote. “A small knowledge of human nature will convince us that, with far the greatest part of mankind, interest is the governing principle and that almost every man is more or less under its influence.” While not discounting the power of patriotism, Washington argued, “a great and lasting war can never be supported on this principle alone. It must be aided by a prospect of interest or some reward.” He believed utterly in and often acted upon the imperative to marry ideals to interest with open eyes. “We must make the best of mankind as they are, since we cannot have them as we wish them to be.” Washington was able to “make the best of mankind as they are” because, as Richard Norton Smith observed, he was “awash in talents.” Foremost among his gifts were a keen intelligence, a phenomenal memory, remarkably astute judgment, and deep understanding of power and how to exercise it. Almost every
The Most Famous Face in American History Along with the look of leadership, Washington possessed a leader’s physique and personality. He was profoundly ambitious, eager not only for honor but for history’s most elusive prize, fame that persisted through the ages, which he achieved by passing through the temple of virtue. DECEMBER
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38 AMERICAN HISTORY CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: STANLEY MASSEY ARTHURS/VIRGINIA HISTORICAL SOCIETY/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES; JOHN TRUMBULL/MOUNT VERNON COLLECTION; GILBERT STUART/MOUNT VERNON COLLECTION
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“How strange it is that Men, engaged in the same Important Service, should be eternally bickering, instead of giving mutual aid!” —GEORGE WASHINGTON
Man of Action Washington knew how to get things done. His modesty and self-deprecation masked and still mask his skill as a politician and effectiveness as an executive.
Washington biographer recognizes his good heart, but most give short shrift to his good head, and it was the combination of those two that made possible Washington’s success as a general and later as a president. He was a master executive who knew how to get things done. Jefferson described his compatriot’s talents in this realm as “superior, I believe, of any man in the world.” In The Genius of George Washington, a little 1980 book worth reading, Edmund Morgan argues that Washington’s genius lay in his dual understanding of military and political power. Washington’s modesty and self-deprecation masked and still mask his skill as a politician and effectiveness as an executive. He was a better politician than a general, in many ways a political genius, as well as a keen judge of character and ability. Washington had few peers in his capacity to identify talent and in his willingness to engage “minds far abler than mine.” He was comfortable enough in his own skin to enlist young geniuses and to inspire them to great deeds. An elitist by temperament and upbringing, Washington believed that “to support a proper command” a leader had to maintain a certain separation, and he did so as a matter of course. However, his bearing combined with that reserve to form a persona that, leavened by native amiability, was extremely appealing. Abigail Adams described Washington as having “a dignity that forbids familiarity, mixed with an easy affability that creates love and reverence.”
Few men had a finer sense of what constitutes proper public conduct. Sharply self-critical, he knew his strengths and his weaknesses and strove constantly to enhance the former and correct or minimize the latter. Washington was not one to write reflectively, but that does not mean he led an unexamined life. Though he lacked great oratorical skill, he was capable of eloquence in act, if not always in language. A lifelong theatergoer, Washington had a magnificent sense of stagecraft and gesture that he consciously employed in such instances as when, appearing in 1775 at the Continental Congress, then on the verge of declaring war, he took care to wear his brand-new military uniform; when, after the battles at Trenton and Princeton, he urged soldiers to reenlist; when he rallied his men at the Battle of Monmouth; when, in a stunning moment at Newburgh, he unmanned mutinous officers with only reading glasses as a prop; when moving his officer corps to tears in their farewell encounter at Fraunces Tavern; when he emotionally returned his commission to Congress at Annapolis after successfully concluding the war; and when he insisted, following John Adams’s inauguration, that Jefferson precede him out of the hall, to emphasize that a former president was an ordinary citizen. These highly charged moments were not accidental. “Through the years not only did Washington perform at an amazing level in public and on the field, but he also meticulously studied his own performance and the public’s view of it,” author Phil Smucker observed. “If he was a consummate actor, he was also an accomplished director of the man in the mirror.” Washington did not pose for posing’s sake but used his skill at the “politics of self-presentation” to unify support for American independence and republican government. A leading Washington scholar argued for calling him “The Unifier,” a phrase succinctly capturing what Washington sought. A collaborator, he often put aside personal grievances to promote and achieve larger goals. “I have undergone more than most men are aware of, to harmonize so many discordant parts.” He eloquently urged others to do likewise. “How strange it is that Men, engaged in the same Important Service, should be eternally bickering, instead of DECEMBER
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giving mutual aid! Officers cannot act upon proper principles, who suffer trifles to interpose to create distrust and jealousy.” Or again, “How unfortunate, and how much is it to be regretted then, that whilst we are encompassed on all sides with avowed enemies and insidious friends, that internal dissensions should be harrowing and tearing at
our vitals. [Unless corrected] in my opinion the fairest prospect of happiness and prosperity that ever was presented to man will be lost—perhaps forever!” Washington’s words of praise for a French admiral reflect his own mindset: “A great mind knows how to make personal sacrifices to secure an important general good.”
EDWARD SAVAGE/NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART/ BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Home at Last George and Martha Washington with her children, John and Martha Custis. The portrait was made after the children had died.
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General Washington showed brilliant talent as a diplomat in resolving difficulties—and there were many— arising early in America’s alliance with France, such as the failure of the French fleet during the 1778 Newport expedition. The fleet’s sudden withdrawal, which left the Americans vulnerable and furious, triggered virulent Francophobia. Above all, Washington wanted to prevent resentment of France from undermining the new accord, which he saw as crucial to the rebel cause. So he cautioned his generals to be prudent and to avoid “injurious consequences,” even if prudence meant a white lie as to why the French left Newport. “It is our duty to make the best of our misfortunes and not to suffer [allow] passion to interfere with our interest and the public good,” he wrote in a letter to General William Heath. Ultimately, character is the decisive factor in assessing an individual. The ancient Greeks distilled that nebulous term into four virtues, all of which Washington had in abundance: Fortitude, the strength of mind melded to physical and moral courage that enables its possessor to persevere in adversity; temperance, the self-control to govern passions and appetites; prudence, practical wisdom and the ability to make the right choice in the moment; and justice, the capacity for fairness, honesty, lawfulness, and promise keeping. In 1786, Washington assured a friend, “I do not recollect that in the course of my life I ever forfeited my word, or broke a promise made to anyone.” To conduct oneself, especially in times of crisis, with integrity, is the fundamental litmus test of character. “It is difficulties that show what men are,” the Stoic Epictetus wrote. “No man is free who is not master of himself.” In his time, Washington learned and lived these truths. Washington was not only a great man; he was also a good man. He sought not mere notoriety but “honest fame.” Asked how to achieve that, Socrates replied, “Study to be what you wish to seem.” Washington pursued those studies with remarkable results. He became the man he strove to be—the embodiment of revolutionary virtue. How closely his behavior comported with his ideals! He desperately wanted to enter the temple of fame but only if he could do so by way of the temple of virtue. George Washington combined extraordinary charisma and leadership skills so as, in Abigail Adams’s words, to have the potential to be “a very dangerous” man. And yet, because Washington was, in her words, “one of the best intentioned men in the world,” he used his remarkable talents to lead in the “glorious cause” of expanding liberty and republican values—not only for his generation of but also for millions yet unborn. The gift and opportunity George Washington gave his beloved country were priceless. Only time would show how the country he fathered would use it. +
“I do not recollect that in the course of my life I ever forfeited my word, or broke a promise made to anyone.” —GEORGE WASHINGTON
In his Presidency Washington posed for this portrait in 1796 after his reelection as chief executive .
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Tough Talk Robert F. Kennedy asked black Americans for the truth. They told it. RFK didn’t like what he heard. By Larry Tye 42 AMERICAN HISTORY
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; INSET PHOTO: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Point Man for a New Frontier As his brother’s tribune on civil rights, Robert Kennedy—at left in his Justice Department office, above at a Washington, D.C., rally, waxed cautious on advancing the cause of black equality.
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James Baldwin he best clue to where particiHad 24 hours to pull together the pants at the gathering stood “secret” meeting. was where they sat. All 11 Negroes lined up on one side of the drawing room at 24 Central Park South in New York City, the five whites on the other. The divide was fitting for May 24, 1963, when demarcation of the races was written into law across the South and into practice in the rest of America. But the split was not auspicious. Novelist James Baldwin had pulled together the group—fellow artists, academics, and second-tier civil rights leaders, along with his lawyer, secretary, literary agent, his brother, and his brother’s girlfriend—at U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s request. The aim was to talk openly about why rage was building in northern ghettos and why mainstream civil rights leaders couldn’t or wouldn’t quell that rage. A second sign that the meeting was ill-fated was who had not been invited. Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t welcome, nor were the top people from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Urban League, because the attorney general wanted a no-holds-barred critique of their leadership. He also hoped to discuss what President John F. Kennedy’s administration should do, with Negroes who knew what the administration was already doing. A serious conversation without the serious players would have been hard enough, but Bobby made it even harder: What he really wanted was not candor, but gratitude. Baldwin did his best given those constraints and only one day’s notice. Bobby may not have been inclined to take the black participants seriously, yet each of them—whether matinee idol or crooner, dramatist or therapist—had earned their stripes as activists. Lena Horne After feeding his guests a light buffet and settling them in chairs or The Kennedys’ on footstools, Bobby opened the discussion on tame and self-serving efforts “did not notes. He listed all that he and his brother had accomplished in seem enough.” advancing Negro rights, explaining why their efforts were groundbreaking. He warned that the politics of race could get dicey with voters going to the polls in just 18 months and conservative white Democrats threatening to bolt. “We have a party in revolt and we have to be somewhat considerate about how to keep them onboard if the Democratic Party is going to prevail in the next elections,” said the attorney general. Kennedy had already implied that he was among friends by tossing his jacket onto the back of his chair, rolling up his shirtsleeves, and welcoming everyone into his father’s elegant apartment. Now he wanted these friends to explain why so many of their Negro brethren were being drawn to dangerous radicals like Malcolm X and his Black Muslims. The first reaction was polite and tepid. Bobby assumed his audience was naive about the rawboned world of politics; his audience took him to be too credulous on the rawer realities of the slums. “He had called the meeting in hopes of persuading us that he and his brother were doing all that could be done,” remembered Lena Lorraine Hansberry Horne, whose voice had earned her center stage at the Cotton Club “The only man that should be listened to is and whose left-leaning politics had gotten her blacklisted in Hollythat man over there.” wood. “The funny thing was that no one there disputed that. It was
T
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just that it did not seem enough...He said something about his family and the kinds of discrimination it had had to fight. He also said he thought a Negro would be president within 40 years. He seemed to feel that this would establish some sort of identification, some sort of rapport, between us. It did not...The emotions of Negroes are running so differently from those of white men these days that the comparison between a white man’s experience and a Negro’s just doesn’t work.” Kenneth Clark, black America’s preeminent psychologist, had done the research on how color barriers harmed black children that helped push the Supreme Court to outlaw segregated schools. Clark had come to the meeting prepared to lay out studies and statistics showing that corrosive racial divide, but he never got the chance. Jerome Smith, a 24-year-old Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) activist from New Orleans who had held back as long as he could, suddenly shattered the calm, his stammer underlining his anger. “Mr. Kennedy, I want you to understand I don’t care anything about you and your brother,” Smith began. “I don’t know what I’m doing here, listening to all this cocktail party patter.” The real threat to white America wasn’t the Black Muslims, Smith insisted—it was when he and other advocates of nonviolence lost hope. Smith’s record made his words resonate. As a Freedom Rider and CORE organizer, he had suffered as many savage beatings as any civil rights protester had, including one for which he was now getting medical care in New York. But his patience and his pacifism were wearing thin, he warned. If the police came at him with more guns, dogs, and hoses, he would answer with a weapon of his own. “When I pull a trigger, kiss it goodbye,” Smith said. Kennedy was shocked, but Smith wasn’t through. Not only would young blacks like him fight to protect their rights at home, he said, they would refuse to fight for American in Cuba, Vietnam, and any of the other places where 0the Kennedys saw threats. “Never! Never! Never!” Smith declared. “You will not fight for your country?” asked the attorney general, who had lost one brother and nearly a second at war. “How can you say that?” Smith replied that just being in the room with Kennedy made him nauseous. Others chimed in, demanding to know why the government couldn’t get tougher in taking on racist laws and ghetto blight. Lorraine Hansberry, author of the play A Raisin in the Sun, stood to say she
was sickened as well. “You’ve got a great many very, very accomplished people in this room, Mr. Attorney General, but the only man who should be listened to is that man over there,” Hansberry said, pointing to Smith. Three hours into the evening, the dialogue had become a brawl, with Smith setting the tone. “He didn’t sing or dance or act. Yet he became the focal point,” said Baldwin. “That boy, after all, in some sense, represented to everybody in that room our hope. Our honor. Our dignity. But, above all, our hope.” Kennedy had heard enough. The attorney general’s demeanor let everyone know the welcome mat had been taken up. His flushed face showed how incensed he was. As the guests were leaving, Harry Belafonte approached Kennedy. Bobby considered Belafonte a loyal friend. “Well, why didn’t you say something?” Kennedy asked the singer. “If I said something, it would affect my position with these people, and I have a chance to influence them,” Belafonte replied. “If I sided with you on these matters, then I would become suspect.” Before Belafonte could finish his thought, Kennedy turned away. “Enough,” the attorney general grumbled. Neither side got what it wanted. The blacks had grasped the chance to vent their rage—one reason they’d come on such short notice. They had also hoped to remake this well-meaning brother of a president into an ally, not for his incremental reforms but for breakthrough change. The blacks believed they had not only failed but that they had burned the bridge they had come to build. “We left convinced that we had made no dent or impact on Bobby,” said Clark. “It may very well have been that Bobby Kennedy was more antagonistic to our aspirations and goals than he was before, because the clash was
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE, FROM TOP: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES; ROBERT ABBOTT SENGSTACKE/GETTY IMAGES; DAVID ATTIE/GETTY IMAGES
The real threat to white America wasn’t the Black Muslims, Smith insisted—it was when he and other advocates of nonviolence lost hope.
From the book Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon by Larry Tye. Copyright @ 2016 by Larry Tye. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Jerome Smith In the New Orleans Greyhound station November 29, 1961, with fellow CORE activists including from left, Doris Castle, Jeanne Thompson, Patricia Smith, unidentified, Colleen Smith and Frank Nelson.
so violent...This was tragic.” Bobby came away with even less. He had let temper win out over compassion. He had asked for candor but had stopped hearing as soon as fingers pointed at him. What Smith and the others said should not have come as a surprise. Their remarks mirrored what Baldwin had written six months earlier in an acclaimed New Yorker article that Bobby had read. In the piece, Baldwin explained why it was not hard for him “to think of white people as devils,” but he offered hope: “We may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare.” Neither the attorney general nor his guests that night sensed that Robert Kennedy would soon be counted among that handful. A born fighter, Bobby first reacted to the meeting by jabbing back. “They don’t know what the laws are—they don’t know what the facts are—they don’t know what we’ve been doing or what we’re trying to do. You can’t talk to them the way you can talk to Martin Luther King or [NAACP executive secretary] Roy Wilkins,” he told historian Arthur Schlesinger, forgetting that his own frustration with King and Wilkins had made him ask Baldwin to gather other black voices. And there was more. “None of them lived in Harlem,” Kennedy told another interviewer. “I mean, they were wealthy Negroes.” Kennedy’s own wealth, of course, dwarfed his guests’, and fame didn’t exempt them from the humiliations every dark-skinned American faced. Worse still, to Bobby, three of that evening’s black guests “were married to white people,” which Kennedy said exacerbated their insecurities and encouraged them to talk tough. His conclusion: “I should not have gotten involved with that group.” Both sides had agreed not to talk to the press but neither could resist. The
he now acknowledged that not just America’s laws but America’s soul needed redemption. Eventually, RFK would emerge as the only white politician who could talk to Black Muslims and to black mothers.
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ROBERT ABBOTT SENGSTACKE/GETTY IMAGES
Harry Belafonte Refused to back RFK in tense meeting with black activists.
New York Times reported that the “secret” meeting had been a “flop.” Baldwin told the paper that the attorney general “didn’t get the point” when he and others had urged that JFK address the nation on Negro rights and otherwise step up his engagement. Robert Kennedy didn’t talk to that reporter, but he did speak to a friendlier writer at the Times: columnist James Reston, who in an op-ed essay positioned Kennedy precisely where Reston saw himself—caught between the rock of “militant white segregationists” like the Kennedy administration’s Democratic allies in the South and the hard place of “militant Negro integrationists” like those at the Baldwin meeting. Reston worried along with the attorney general “that ‘moderation’ or ‘gradualism’ or ‘token integration’ were now offensive words to the Negro, and that sympathy by a Negro leader for the administration’s moderate approach was regarded as the work of ‘collaborationists.’” Reston had it partly right. In its first two years, the administration had walked a calibrated and overly cautious middle path on civil rights. JFK had promised while running in 1960 to sign with “a stroke of a pen” an order banning discrimination in housing, but he took so long that protesters launched an “Ink for Jack” campaign, mailing the president hundreds of fountain pens. Jack and Bobby named too many racist judges, took too long to file a serious civil rights bill, and left the black voters who had pulled them to victory in 1960 looking for more forceful answers. While moderation might have been the smart approach for a White House hell-bent on reelection, it made less sense for the commander of the New Frontier’s riot squad. In Robert Kennedy’s earlier years, the disastrous meeting at Joseph Kennedy’s Manhattan pied-à-terre might have been the end of the story. But after he fumed for a couple of days, Smith’s tirade began to sink in for the former ambassador’s son. “I guess if I were in his shoes, if I had gone through what he’s gone through, I might feel differently about this country,” Bobby now told friends. This was not empty talk. The day of the Baldwin get-together, the attorney general had urged owners of national chain stores to voluntarily integrate their lunch counters below the Mason-Dixon Line. Days before, Kennedy had helped broker a settlement on desegregation and employment that partly defused violence in Birmingham, Alabama. Bobby Kennedy was stretching himself. He still brooded, but he was learning to channel his rage into outrage. Instead of deriding critics like Baldwin and Smith, which had been his first impulse after they attacked him, Kennedy found himself identifying with them. Seeing the effects of racism, he began searching for causes. In-
stincts like those had led him to spring Martin King and Junius Scales, leader of the Communist Party USA, from behind bars. Increasingly Kennedy’s words and actions on race would take on the very element of moral indignation that Lena Horne and Lorraine Hansberry had pleaded for. Bobby already knew that bigotry wasn’t conďŹ ned to the South, but he now acknowledged that not just America’s
laws but America’s soul needed redemption. Eventually, RFK would emerge as the only white politician who could talk to Black Muslims and to black mothers. Looking back, Kenneth Clark conceded he and his allies had underestimated the attorney general. “Our conclusion that we had made no dent at all was wrong,� Clark said. +
A Life of Struggle Jerome Smith, left in a 1961 mug shot after a being arrest for demonstrating, is still a community and youth activist in New Orleans.
WWW.THECOREPROJECT.ORG; SUSAN POAG/NOLA.COM/THE TIMES-PICAYUNE
When Truth Spoke to Power New Orleans native Jerome Smith can still connect with the anger he felt that evening 53 years ago when he tore into U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (See p. 42). “Kennedy was a cold-blooded politician. He had no real interest in the salvation of me or my people or anything else,â€? Smith said. “I told him he was addicted to power. He would do anything to keep it.â€? Growing up, Smith loved books, but at school in the TremĂŠ district, he only got to read used volumes. When, as a boy, he tried to enter a public library, a policeman punched him in the chest. On the St. Charles streetcar, he and other African-Americans had to sit behind screens so that white passengers wouldn’t have to look at them. On one standing-room [YPW PU :TP[O ^HU[LK [V NL[ VɈ OPZ MLL[ /L WP[JOLK H Z[YLL[JHY ZJYLLU [V [OL Ă…VVY HUK [VVR H MVYIPKKLU ZLH[ “This was not in the context of protest, I just wanted to sit down,â€? he said. “The white people and the conductor all went crazy—remember, this is before Rosa Parks.â€? When white passengers started coming for him, a black passenger grabbed him. “She slapped me up the side of my head and told the white folks she would take me home and beat me for disrespecting them,â€? Smith said. His rescuer took OPT VɈ [OL JHY ¸:OL O\NNLK TL HUK ZOL ^HZ JY`PUN (UK ZOL told me to never stop.â€? In 1960, Smith, 21, joined civil rights marches and sat in at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Arrested for trying to desegregate a McCrory’s lunch counter, he spent a month in the parish jail. He became an organizer for the Congress of Racial Equality. In May 1961, the Freedom Ride movement began challenging segregation of public transportation accommodations like bus station restaurants and waiting rooms. Smith signed up. That November, he and compatriots boarded a bus bound from New Orleans to McComb,
Mississippi. “When we entered the McComb bus station, all these white folks came pouring into the station shouting ‘Niggers!’ and ‘Kill ’em!’ They were beating us with brass knuckles HUK Ă„Z[Z HUK Z[PJRZ 0 ^HZ ILPUN V]LY^OLSTLK I` ZVTL MVSRZ and my friend George Raymond intervened. He pretty much saved my life. He enabled me to remove myself from a danger zone while he absorbed the beating.â€? In spring 1963, Smith was in New York City getting treatment for those injuries at Lenox Hill Hospital when he was asked to join other activists at an impromptu event being organized by writer James Baldwin. The group was to meet May 24 to discuss civil rights with Robert F. Kennedy. Smith accepted the invitation and appeared as instructed at an apartment on Central Park South. As Kennedy was enumerating data on Justice Department progress regarding civil rights, Smith grew angry. The attorney general appeared to see progress in terms of statistics. “There was a tremendous amount of violence, all over, that wasn’t being documented,â€? Smith said. “We were questioning the value of nonviolence when there was no support coming from Washington. Kennedy had only a numerical relationship with what was going on, and no comprehension. I felt a sense that we were losing because so many folk had been banged up all over the South. It was a bad, bad situation.â€? So the 24-year-old civil rights worker let loose, upbraiding [OL UH[PVUÂťZ JOPLM SH^ LUMVYJLTLU[ VɉJPHS 2LUULK` ^V\SK not understand what it meant to be black in America “until tragedy knocks on your door,â€? Smith told him. Six months later, it did. “After Robert Kennedy lost his brother, he had that sense of loss, and he began to understand,â€? Smith, 77, said recently. “I think he would have made a great president.â€? —Nancy Tappan DECEMBER
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Voter Fraud in the Real World A contested 1880 election in South Carolina shows the true nature of the crime By Barbara Finlay
48 AMERICAN HISTORY
ILLUSTRATION BY PAUL FISHER; PHOTOS: ISTOCKPHOTO (7)
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“TREAT HIM AS AN ENEMY” The original text accompanying the illustration above: “The negroes of the South are free—free as air,” says the parliamentary Watterson. This is what the State, a well-known Democratic organ of Tennessee, says, in huge capitals, on the subject: “Let it be known before the election that the farmers have agreed to spot every leading Radical negro in the country, and treat him as an enemy for all time to come. The rotten ring must and shall be broken at any and all costs. The Democrats have determined to withdraw all employment from their enemies. Let this fact be known.”
“OF COURSE YOU WANT TO VOTE THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET!” Democratic “reformer:” “You’re as free as air, ain’t you? Say you are, or I’ll blow yer black head off!”
Hard Sell An 1872 pro-Democrat cartoon bears the title “Canvassing for Votes.” 50 AMERICAN HISTORY
I
THIS PAGE: ISTOCKPHOTO; OPPOSITE: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES (2)
n recent years, legislators, often in Southern states, have tightened requirements for voter identification, claiming rampant election fraud. Foes of such laws, citing a study of a billion ballots cast from 2000 to 2014 that found only 31 “credible allegations” of voter impersonation, claim that although voter ID laws masquerade as barriers to fraud, these measures actually undermine the constitutional right to vote. Lately, courts have been agreeing.
Electoral disputes stretch back to the nation’s creation. Widespread voter suppression, however, has a particularly ugly history, dating to the aftermath of the Civil War, when authorities in the former Confederacy physically barred, intimidated, or procedurally precluded newly freed slaves from voting. In 1865, the federal government enacted Reconstruction, a series of measures to reunite the republic while combating efforts to resurrect white supremacy. Federal troops oversaw the reestablishment of state governments, and many former Confederates were temporarily barred from voting or holding elected office. Freed blacks and newly arrived Northerners took over state and local government, and soon blacks held many elected positions in state and national government. By 1877, support for Reconstruction was weak, and a compromise ensuring the election of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes as president over Democrat Samuel Tilden ended Reconstruction. President Hayes ordered any federal troops remaining in the South to return to their barracks. White Southerners then seized the opportunity to reestablish the antebellum social order. But freed blacks, who constituted majorities in many jurisdictions across the South, had a tool denied slaves: the vote. To reassert power, white supremacists had to neutralize black voters, who leaned Republican in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln. Retaking offices ranging from seats in Congress to sheriff, white Democrats worked to suppress the black vote, sometimes by administrative feint, often by fear and violence. African-Americans sticking with the GOP saw their crops, barns, and houses burned. Many were whipped or lynched. By one estimate, 150 African-Americans were killed during the 1876 South Carolina gubernatorial campaign alone. After federal troops departed the South, the region’s election managers—the officials responsible for keeping elections fair and accurate—were likely to be white Democrats willing to use any means necessary to keep blacks away from the ballot box. Paramilitary groups of armed white men known as “Red Shirts” patrolled polls, supposedly to ensure fairness but in reality to intimidate blacks.
Between 1865 and 1900, there were 262 disputed House elections. Most occurred in the states of the former Confederacy. The 1880 election that produced the 47th Congress of 1881-83 gave rise to 19 cases of alleged election fraud. One egregious example was the race for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in South Carolina. In that state’s First Congressional District, a one-two punch of violence and fraud wrenched political power away from a black majority that had voted strongly Republican during Reconstruction. The First District election of 1880 pitted incumbent Democrat John S. Richardson against Republican Samuel J. Lee. Both had served in the Confederate Army, both were wounded in combat, both had political experience. But they had little else in common. Richardson, 52, was the son of a rich white rice planter and politician. Lee, 38, was born in slavery. During the Civil War, Lee accompanied his owner, General Samuel McGowan, into combat and was wounded twice. After the war, Lee read law and in 1871 was admitted to the South Carolina bar, gaining a reputation as an outstanding attorney. He served in 187274 as the first African-American speaker of the South Carolina House. In 1874, running as an Independent Republican, he narrowly lost a race for the U.S. House seat representing the First District. Subsequently, Lee became a judge of the probate court. In 1878, he became involved in the prosecution of a white man, prompting threats of violence. He moved to Washington, D.C., where he spent a year as a clerk at the U.S. Treasury Department. In December 1879, Lee returned to Sumter County, outside Columbia, to challenge Richardson for the U.S. House seat representing the First District. Lee was counting on his district’s majority black population to send him to Washington. Richardson and allies meant to overcome that racial skew. During this and other South Carolina campaigns during that year, gangs of Red Shirts roamed the countryside, urging whites to vote Democrat and terrorizing blacks out of voting at all. A key First District locale was Darlington, seat of Darlington County. The night of November 1, election eve, DECEMBER
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whites made a show of hauling two wagonloads of rifles into Darlington and carrying the weapons into a building next to the courthouse. That was the last anyone saw of the rifles, but by daylight on Election Day most townspeople knew about them. That morning, a large number of African-American residents filled the market house, the usual polling place, to find that Democratic election managers had moved the polls to the courthouse, beside the supposed arsenal. To vote, a man had to climb either of two narrow staircases to the court building’s second floor. Jamming those stairs were knife- and gun-wielding Red Shirts who shoved, jostled, threatened, and otherwise deterred blacks from voting. The Republicans stayed for hours, until the party’s Darlington County chairman urged that, given the impossibility of casting ballots, they should go home. South Carolina voters could vote at any precinct, but at the nearest alternate polling place, Florence, 10 miles away, a similarly ominous scenario unfolded, and across the district blacks consistently experienced intimidation. Earlier, overwhelmingly black Darlington County had voted 80 percent Republican, but the 1880 vote went more than 90 percent Democratic. Out of 31,816 votes officially counted for the entire First District, Richardson led by 8,468. To challenge House election results, an aggrieved candidate had to notify his opponent in writing explaining his complaints within 30 days of results being announced. The opponent got 30 days to respond. Both sides then had 60 days to build cases for review by the U.S. House Committee on Elections in Washington, D.C. Even if a petitioner’s challenge succeeded, he might not be seated until the congressional term had nearly ended; in the interim, the contested victor served. On December 15, 1880, Lee sent Richardson a notice specifying 20 points of challenge, including ballot box stuffing and multiple violent incidents. Richardson countered that all had been in order and denied that any intimidation had occurred. During the next two months, Lee called 594 witnesses for his attorneys to question and Richardson’s to cross-examine. Richardson called 151 rebuttal witnesses, handled similarly, as were Lee’s 52 rebuttal witnesses. Depositions ended in June 1881. In Washington, the sworn, notarized documentation came to 825 typed pages detailing how every contested precinct’s election managers had been Democrats who prevented Republican poll workers—and sometimes federal elections supervisors—from doing their jobs. For example, Elections Supervisor I.W. Gadsden, assigned to monitor a polling place in Florence, testified that “town authorities or policemen” forcibly kept him out of the premises until after voting had begun. Managers refused
Gadsden access to voting lists and would not reveal who or how many people had already voted. Another federal supervisor told of a manager forcing him at gunpoint out of his assigned polling place, declaring his federal authority to be of “no account.” In at least five First District precincts, managers surreptitiously moved polling places as far as a mile and a half, without notice to federal supervisors or black voters. In one of Darlington’s largest precincts, a large number of Republicans assembled at their usual polling place very early on Election Day, only to find the polls relocated, creating confusion and a lull in which Democratic election managers could have tampered with ballot boxes. Such events occurred across the district. Violence and intimidation were common in heavily black areas. In Sumter, for example, white Democrats kept would-be black voters from casting ballots. “Because the stairway leading to the poll was crowded with white men and boys,” an African-American man testified, “when I attempted to go up I would be squeezed and mashed so that I would be injured.” That witness said he gave up and went home. The federal supervisor assigned to that location testified that “occasionally they would let one [black voter] in after sticking him with pins, abusing him, and cursing him, and telling him this was no damned Republican poll.” At Florence, 200 to 300 black Republicans stood outside the polls attempting to vote from 6 a.m. until closing time; a crowd of whites, including policemen and town marshals, barred their access. County officials arbitrarily rejected returns from several precincts in their entirety, usually on the spurious pretext that the courier delivering returns to a county board did not produce a letter authorizing him to deliver them. Many other rationales also were fabricated for rejections. Officials threw out the return from Midway because Democratic managers there had closed the polls before the stipulated time of 6 p.m.; officials voided another precinct’s vote because the managers “had adjourned for breakfast and dinner.” In Sumter Precinct 1, officials rejected the vote—1,499 for Lee, 9 for Richardson—without giving a reason. The rejected polls shared one characteristic: All involved votes tallying large Republican majorities. For elections in Darlington and Chesterfield counties, managers provided no poll lists, official returns, or other paperwork, and afterward no one could be found to swear that the returns were true. Nonetheless, the state board counted those votes. Following an intense, two-year investigation, along with inquiries into 18 other contested elections, the
Jamming the stairs, knife- and gun-wielding Red Shirts shoved, jostled, threatened, and otherwise deterred blacks from voting.
52 AMERICAN HISTORY
The South Ledges, Appledore, 1913
FROM TOP: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA SCHOOL OF LAW (2); MPI/GETTY IMAGES
Samuel J. Lee With Reconstruction over and U.S. troops gone, Lee lost the First District in 1880.
House Committee on Elections, chaired by Rep. William H. Calkins, R-Indiana, agreed that in South Carolina’s First District “fraud, violence, and intimidation were practiced and fraudulent returns were made, which must be corrected.” Committee members and staff agreed to adjust most First District results, add results thrown out on technical grounds, and adjust for fraudulent ballots. But they disagreed on how to handle the Darlington results. Eight members wanted to let the Darlington vote stand; seven wanted it dumped—a critical split, since counting the Darlington results would mean Richardson won; ditch Darlington, and Lee had a lead of 284 votes. Witness J.A. Smith testified that obstruction and intimidation in Darlington kept him and 700 to 800 fellow Republicans from voting. “I made three attempts to reach the ballot box—myself and others,” Smith said. “I found it impossible to do so without a collision with the Democrats and Red Shirts who had the steps packed from bottom to top.” “I couldn’t get to the polls,” another man testified. “They were standing on the steps leading up to the box. I attempted to go up, and they said, ‘No radicals here; no radicals in here,’ and all caught arms together and shoved me back.” In all, 240 witnesses swore that they had come to the Darlington polling station to vote for Lee, but had been intimidated from doing so. Several testified that 800 to 1,000 Republican men were prevented from voting at Darlington, where the results gave Richardson 1,271 votes
John S. Richardson Denying thugs and ballot box stuffers aided him, he got a little push from House Democrats.
‘The First Vote’ On an 1868 cover, Harper’s Weekly shows dramatic change occurring in the South.
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knives, armed with guns, to prevent these colored men from going up the steps to vote...We took the testimony of two hundred and forty witnesses at the Darlington poll, who testified that it was impossible for the colored men to get up those steps and vote without being killed themselves...And who were on the steps? They were white Democrats dressed in red shirts, the meaning of which we in the South know very well. That uniform means in the South violence; it means to the colored man: stand back.” Richardson, like Representative Jones, said simply that black voters could have voted if they had waited until the white men left Election Day afternoon. Richardson denied allegations of violence and intimidation, arguing that those who gave up and did not vote were negligent in not traveling to an alternate polling place to cast their ballots. The same day, the House, voting 124-114, passed a minority resolution “that Darlington should be rejected, and Lee be declared elected by 284 votes.” This was the first time in that session of Congress that the House voted against a majority of the Elections Committee. But Democratic shenanigans, including multiple uses of the “disappearing quorum”— representatives refusing to vote when present—prevented the additional round of voting needed to seat Lee. Just after midnight the next day, the 47th Congress adjourned for the final time. In 1882, Lee ran unsuccessfully for a new gerrymandered “black district,” District 7, campaigning as an Independent Republican against Republican Edmund Mackey. Lee went on to prosper as a lawyer in Charleston, where he acted as a mentor to young African-American attorneys. Richardson did not run for re-election in 1882. Cases like Lee v. Richardson recurred in the post-Reconstruction South until the mid-1890s. By then, the states of the former Confederacy had passed laws imposing poll taxes, literacy exams, and other measures that effectively disenfranchised African-American citizens, precluding the need to steal elections. The fight to regain voting rights would resume full force in the 1950s and bring about enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. +
and Lee 117. Previous elections at Darlington had tallied no more than 300 Democrat votes compared with about 1,400 Republican votes. A minority of seven Republican members of the Elections Committee voted to reject the Darlington results. An eight-member majority—six Democrats and two Republicans—voted to accept the results. “The danger of bodily harm was not sufficient to warrant this course [that is, leaving without voting], and there was an entire lack of diligence on the part of these voters to maintain their right to vote,” the majority said. Since voters could use any precinct, the majority concluded, frustrated Darlington voters could have gone elsewhere—though at the polling place in Florence, 10 miles away, resistance kept 200 Republicans from voting. The Elections Committee submitted its contradictory reports to the full House on February 24, 1883. Debate on the matter began March 3, the last day of the 47th Congress. Samuel Lee, along with John Richardson, got 15 minutes to make his case. Lee scorned the contention that Republican voters had not encountered threat enough to warrant leaving without voting. “I would like my friend from Indiana, the chairman of the committee, to make a visit down to the Southern states at some of our elections and attempt in the guise of a colored man to go to one of these polls: he will find out whether the violence is sufficient or not to keep colored men away from the polls,” Lee said. “What did they do at Darlington? They crowded the steps...They were dressed in red shirts, armed with pistols, armed with
“And who were on the steps? They were white Democrats dressed in red shirts, the meaning of which we in the South know very well. That uniform means in the South violence; it means to the colored man: stand back.”
54 AMERICAN HISTORY
BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
Brief Boost An 1876 image of South Carolina legislators shows Reconstruction’s fleeting effect.
NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY/GETTY IMAGES
Demolishing Reconstruction Events in 1880 in South Carolina’s First District (p. 53) stemmed from the demise of Reconstruction, the federal effort to block resurgent white supremacy in former Confederate states. The 1876 election to the presidency of Republican Rutherford B. Hayes spelled Reconstruction’s doom. That tumultuous contest, pitting Hayes against Democrat Samuel Tilden, involved disputes in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina—Southern states still controlled by Republicans. Reconstruction had brought freedmen a degree of municipal and state political power, but the country had wearied of federal involvement in electoral politics in the states of the former Confederacy. Candidate Hayes pledged that should ex-secessionist states
respect all citizens’ rights, he would remove the federal troops who remained in Louisiana and South Carolina. Hayes lost the popular vote 4,288,546 to 4,034,311 and in the Electoral College lagged Tilden 165 to 184—until Congress named a commission to resolve disputes affecting 20 electoral votes in four states: Oregon (1), Florida (4), South Carolina (7), and Louisiana (8). The Republican-controlled election boards in the contested states of the former Confederacy had certified results in favor of their party, and Democrats had submitted tallies disputing the Republican-certified results. In Oregon, a challenge to an elector’s qualifications put one of the state’s three electoral votes in play. The 15-member commission—selected by Congress and composed of
five members each from the House, the Senate, and the U.S. Supreme Court—had seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and one independent, a Supreme Court justice who resigned before the vote and was replaced by a Republican member of the court. Commissioners voted along party lines; the Republicans won, granting all disputed electoral votes to Hayes and boosting his Electoral College tally to 185, one vote more than Tilden. Within weeks of his inauguration, Hayes reassigned federal troops in the Southern states to their barracks, ending Reconstruction. As Southern whites increasingly reasserted supremacy through intimidation and violence, black citizens no longer had any kind of federal military protection. Nor did blacks have
legal redress, thanks to an 1876 U.S. Supreme Court decision concerning an insurrection in Colfax, Louisiana. In April 1873, a white mob in Colfax killed at least 80 blacks—and possibly dozens more—who were attempting to defend Republicans appointed to office in the town. Federal prosecutors faced so much local resistance and violence by whites that they succeeded in convicting only three of eight defendants charged with conspiring to violate two black victims’ constitutional rights to assemble and to carry arms. The charges were brought under the Federal Enforcement Acts of 1870-71, legislation designed to create tools for protecting the constitutional rights of newly enfranchised African-Americans. The Colfax convictions were suspended
in United States v. Cruikshank (1876). In that ruling, the Supreme Court highlighted that the prosecution neglected to establish in evidence that victims’ race figured in the alleged crimes. That opinion powerfully undermined progress in civil rights for freedmen because the Justices held that the 14th Amendment confers equal protection under the law only from actions by the state, not those of private individuals. (For a highly readable account, see LeeAnna Keith’s The Colfax Massacre.) Coupled with federal troops’ exit and ex-Confederates’ renewed political power, Cruikshank helped peel back the veneer of protection accorded freedmen and their civil rights in the postwar South, and white supremacy rose again. —Sarah Richardson DECEMBER
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America’s Other Immigrant Isle On Angel Island, exclusion, not admission, was the name of the immigration game By Judy Yung 56 AMERICAN HISTORY
Isla de Los Angeles Angel Island, seen here from the north, lies three miles from San Francisco.
TODD E. QUAM
I
n San Francisco Bay, three miles north of the city’s Pier 41, is a hilly 1.2-square-mile grass- and woodland-covered island where, a millennium ago, the Coast Miwok tribe fished and hunted. In 1775, Spanish explorers christened the landmass Isla de Los Angeles. Other explorers, whalers, and crews of naval vessels used Angel Island as a base. When California was under Mexican rule, from 1821 until 1848, ranchers grazed cattle there. After the Mexican-American War, Mexico ceded its North American holdings to the United States, which remade the island as a military base, a quarantine station, and, from 1910 until 1940, an immigration station. Angel Island Immigration Station was the primary point of ingress and sometimes unwilling egress—by deportation—for a million immigrants. Two-thirds came directly from China or Japan; the remainder took circuitous routes beginning elsewhere in Asia as well as in Europe, Latin America, and Australia. The island’s role in immigration into the United States had its roots in anti-Chinese sentiment that surfaced when the California Gold Rush drew thousands of Chinese miners. As early as the 1850s, residents of San
Francisco’s Chinatown were forming district associations to provide mutual support and defense against racial antagonism. Starting in 1864, American companies hired Chinese laborers in great numbers to build the Transcontinental Railroad and for other projects to develop the West, a necessary but not necessarily welcome work force. In the 1870s, with the economy in recession, Americans complained that Chinese émigrés were working too cheaply, taking white men’s jobs, and looming as a moral and racial threat. Labor leaders, politicians, and pressure groups in California led a campaign to drive the Chinese from the labor market and ban them from entering the country. In response, after nearly a century of free immigration, the United States began a period of vigorous restriction on immigration and for the first time barred a specific group by nationality, race, and class. The 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act forbade immigration by Chinese laborers and denied Chinese aliens already in the United States the chance to become citizens. A few categories of Chinese— merchants, diplomats, teachers, students, and visitors— could still enter. The same year, the United States enacted a general immigration law that refused admission to criminals, DECEMBER
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Anxious Faces Inspectors could spend days interrogating would-be immigrants.
Ellis Island West Angel Island station as it was in its last decade of operation.
58 AMERICAN HISTORY
Rainbow Ride Emigres of all stripes came through Angel Island’s immigration processing station.
Crooked Path Youngsters often claimed ties to “parents” already established in the United States.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: CALIFORNIA STATE PARKS (5) BOTTOM LEFT: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
prostitutes, lunatics, and those “likely to become public charges.” Congress gradually expanded that list to include contract laborers, polygamists, anarchists, and aliens convicted of “moral turpitude.” Among Asian nations, only Japan, in 1907-08, was able to negotiate an informal “Gentleman’s Agreement” with the United States under which Japan regulated emigration from its shores and its colony, Korea. The accord closed the door to Japanese and Korean laborers but allowed Japanese laborers already in the United States to send for their families, a benefit pointedly left out of the Chinese Exclusion Act. By the early 1900s, nativists had formed the Asiatic Exclusion League and Americans were largely maintaining a “close the gates” attitude toward immigration, leading to restrictions aimed at South Asians, Southern and Eastern Europeans, and Filipinos. The Chinese Exclusion Act slowed but could not stop immigration. Desperate to leave a poor, war-torn country, many Chinese took the wai lo, or “crooked path.” A favored gambit was to claim exempt status—usually as a merchant or relative of an American citizen. A lucrative business in false papers developed. Chinese hoping to pass as merchants could buy fictitious partnerships from sympathetic companies in the United States. First-time Chinese arrivals or those re-entering the country after visits home often claimed to have left behind offspring who turned out to be phantoms, creating immigration slots worth $1,000 to $2,000 when sold on the black market to “paper sons” or “paper daughters.” With false papers came coaching books of answers to questions immigration inspectors were likely to ask. The Exclusion Act forbade ships’ passengers to land in the United States until immigration officials had inspected and approved them. From 1898 to 1910, inspection at San Francisco took place on the Pacific Mail Steamship dock
Confined Space Cramped, unsanitary dormitories awaited arriving Chinese.
in a ramshackle two-story shed notorious for being overcrowded, unsafe, unsanitary—and a breeze to escape from. As an alternative, in 1904 Congress appropriated $250,000 to build a Bureau of Immigration station at Angel Island. The new center would be modeled on New York’s Ellis Island, which had been processing European immigrants since 1892. The Angel Island station opened in 1910, with a staff of 100 to process and detain newcomers pending results of medical and immigration inspections and hold those being deported for crimes, radical politics, or fraudulent entry. The same occurred on Ellis Island, but in other ways the immigration stations differed dramatically. The United States, eager for white immigrants, meant for Ellis Island to welcome Europeans under laws that controlled access but did not automatically exclude anyone. Most Ellis Island arrivals stayed only a few hours for a cursory physical exam and a brief interview intended to weed out undesirables. Of more than 12 million immigrants to reach Ellis Island across 62 years, officials sent less than 2 percent home. By contrast, Angel Island was meant to keep out Chinese—and later, immigrants from elsewhere in Asia. At Angel Island, officials thoroughly examined and interrogated applicants, often detaining individuals for weeks, months, even years. As soon as a passenger ship from abroad docked at San Francisco, immigration and medical officials boarded. Passengers in first class, usually white and wealthy, underwent visual medical examinations in their cabins, and then could go ashore. Passengers in second and third class, mostly Asian and poor, as well as the visibly ill and anyone of doubtful eligibility, boarded a ferry for the threemile trip to Angel Island. Passengers arriving at the island stowed their luggage, crossed a pier, and registered at the two-story administration building. The staff strictly enforced racial and gender segregation, separating whites from other races, and Chinese from Japanese and other Asians. Men and women, single or married, remained apart until their cases were settled. On the upper floor of the administration building, segregated dormitories held European men, European women, and Asian women and children. Segregated quarters in a detention building out back awaited Chinese and other Asian men. Segregation by race and gender DECEMBER
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Picture Brides Japan negotiated a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” that allowed in thousands of women participating in arranged marriages.
extended to recreation yards, dining halls, and hospital wards. Race, nationality, class, and gender often determined the length of an immigrant’s Angel Island stay, which could last from two days to two years. Europeans tended to remain briefly, enjoying better accommodations and food than their Asian counterparts. Detained on Angel Island in 1929, Canadian Ivy Gidlow wrote her sister describing her clean, white room, the hot baths, and the well-stocked library. A typical dinner consisted of vegetable soup, fresh bread and butter, roast beef or pork served with potatoes and one other vegetable, and tea or coffee. Officialdom was harshest with Chinese immigrants, crowding them into barracks even immigration inspectors deemed unsafe and unsanitary, feeding them what the Chinese described as “pig slop,” and barring visitors from the mainland. The Chinese, who made up as much as 70 percent of island detainees, faced longer examinations, interrogations, and detentions than any other immigrant group, averaging 18 days in detention. Appealing exclusion could mean a year on the island. As on Ellis Island, newcomers underwent a line inspection and eye exam to detect trachoma, tuberculosis, syphilis, leprosy, and other diseases that warranted exclusion. Heart disease, hernia, “poor physique,” and other conditions that could leave a person unable to work were also grounds for exclusion. Mainstream science of the day held that Asians carried serious strains of diseases as well as parasites, so they had to go through a blood and stool examination for traces of hookworm, liver flukes, and threadworm, among others. Applicants with curable conditions could apply for treatment at the island hospital, for which they paid $5 a day. Inspectors
routinely rejected more Asians than Europeans on medical grounds. When detainees died on Angel Island, officials usually released their bodies to relatives. Chinese families customarily buried immigrant dead at a San Francisco cemetery, after a few years disinterring the remains and sending the deceased back to China. Applicants of questionable eligibility went before a Board of Special Inquiry—two inspectors, a stenographer, and, when necessary, an interpreter. Records of board hearings show a pattern of European applicants undergoing brief inquiries and obtaining admission in a day or two. So did Japanese and Korean wives, protected by the Gentlemen’s Agreement—except that board members usually asked a husband to prove he could support his immigrant spouse. Since American law outright banned Chinese immigration, inspectors assumed Chinese applicants were trying to hoodwink them—as they often were—whether by posing as “paper sons” and “paper daughters” or by memorizing answers. In this international cat-andmouse game, inspectors staged interrogations that could last days, probing family history, relationships, living arrangements, and village life: What are the birth and death dates of your grandparents? Who lives in the third house in the fourth row of houses in your village? How often did your father write and how much money did he send home? Examiners put the same questions to an applicant’s ostensible relatives; if both parties’ answers did not line up, rejection could follow. When applicants appealed exclusions, their petitions went to authorities in Washington, D.C., and then the federal courts, necessitating hiring a lawyer and months more on Angel Island. Courts usually ruled in petitioners’ favor, and
Since American law outright banned Chinese immigration, inspectors assumed Chinese applicants were trying to hoodwink them—as they often were...
60 AMERICAN HISTORY
CALIFORNIA STATE PARKS; U. S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES
Pointed Questions Hunting impostors, inspectors probed for gaps in cover stories.
This poem was found deeply etched in a first-floor lavatory wall. Detained in this wooden house for several tens of days, It is all because of the Mexican exclusion law* which implicates me. It’s a pity heroes have no way of exercising their prowess. I can only await the word so that I can snap Zhu’s whip.** From now on I am departing far from this building. All of my fellow villagers are rejoicing with me. Don’t say that everything within is Western-styled. Even if it is built of jade, it has turned into a cage
DANA FRITZ
— Translation from Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung.
Chinese applicants became adept at the judicial process. Between 1910 and 1940, inspectors at Angel Island rejected 10 percent of Chinese applicants. Of those thousands, 88 percent appealed using lawyers; of their appeals, 55 percent succeeded. In 30 years, only 5 percent of applicants were returned to China. In an example of a failed appeal, Angel Island officials detained Lee Puey You for 20 months. Lee had come to America in 1939 claiming to be an American citizen’s daughter, but her and her supposed father’s testimony did not match, triggering a deportation order. Her family hired an attorney who took an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court—to no avail. The United States deported Lee Puey You to Hong Kong in 1940. “Everybody said that coming to America was like going to heaven, but at Angel Island they treated us Chinese like criminals,” she said much later. “Day in and day out, eat and sleep, eat and sleep. So much mental anguish. Waiting at Angel Island, I must have cried a bowlful of tears. It was so pitiful!” In its handling of European immigrants, Angel Island more closely resembled Ellis Island. During the station’s
* In 1931, Mexican authorities ordered hundreds of Chinese Mexicans to leave their homes in Sonora and Sinaloa and cross the border into the United States, where officials sent the deportees to Angel Island to await removal to China. ** Zhu Ti (266-321), a famous Chinese general, recovered parts of the Yellow River Valley that invaders from the north had captured.
three decades, officials processed 8,000 Russians and Jews seeking economic opportunity or fleeing religious and political persecution. To reach America, these émigrés traveled east across Siberia, China, and Japan. By the time they reached the island, refugees from the Russian Revolution or Nazism often had so little cash as to trigger a “public charges” exclusion, but with assistance from the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and other affinity groups they filed and easily won appeals. A group of Russian students held for three months in 1923 wrote home praising Angel Island’s quarters and food; they also were allowed visits from friends and to put on concerts. Alice Edelstein, who as a teenager fled Vienna in 1940, remembers Angel Island as “the most beautiful place on earth.” Edelstein’s detention ended in three days when a relative sent her money for a train ticket to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Thanks to diplomacy, immigrants from Japan had the shortest average stay and the lowest rate of deportation among Angel Island arrivals. Between 1910 and 1924, when the United States dramatically tightened controls DECEMBER
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Give Me a Reason Rigorous medical exams were the norm for Chinese arrivals. 62 AMERICAN HISTORY
Angel Island Immigration Station closed; processing shifted to 801 Silver Avenue in San Francisco. Once the United States entered World War II, authorities used Angel Island’s surviving structures to process and house GIs, Axis prisoners of war, repatriates, and enemy aliens bound for inland internment camps. In 1943, as a goodwill gesture to ally China, Congress repealed the Exclusion Act; now Chinese aliens could become citizens—but only 105 Chinese a year could immigrate, compared with Britain’s annual quota of 34,007. America maintained nation-specific immigration quotas until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished them, allowing Asian countries a maximum of 20,000 immigrants a year, the same as other countries, based on a preference system that favored family reunification, so that family members of American citizens could enter as nonquota immigrants with no numerical limit. In 1954, after ceding Angel Island to California, the federal government installed a Nike anti-aircraft missile battery there. The battery was decommissioned in 1962, and a year later, the state made the island a park. Announcement of plans to demolish the old immigration buildings and build a picnic area spurred Asian-American activists to campaign to save the structures, an effort that lasted decades. In 1997 the site received National Historic Landmark designation. A $40 million fundraising effort underwrote preservation of the detention building, installation of museum exhibits, and conversion of the hospital building into the Pacific Coast Immigration Center. Since February 2009, the renovated Angel Island immigration site has been open to the public. +
U. S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES
on Asian immigration, 65,000 Japanese gained admission, usually within a day or two. Their ranks included 10,000 “picture brides”—partners in arranged marriages with men already stateside who knew their spouses only from photographs. The regimentation and foreignness of the setting dismayed many. “We didn’t understand the language, and though they gave us three meals a day, their food did not agree with us,” Teiko Tomi said of a 1921 stay in the women’s barracks. “We all cried and cried because we didn’t know when we’d be free.” Even before the Immigration Act of 1917 was passed to curb immigration from the subcontinent, Asian Indians had the highest deportation rate of all—55 percent of would-be entrants were barred from entering the country between 1911 and 1915. Primarily single men from the Punjab fleeing poverty and British colonialism, they tended to be rejected for hookworm or risk of becoming a public charge. Unlike the Chinese, Indians rarely had the wherewithal to appeal; unlike the Japanese, they lacked affinity groups and a powerful home government on their side. But in the land of the red, white, and blue, other colors, specifically green and gold, spoke forcefully. In 1915, Vaishno Das Bagai, an educated high-caste Hindu from Peshawar, where he had worked to end British rule, sailed to San Francisco with his family. The Vaishnos arrived on a Saturday; no immigration inspectors were on duty, relegating the family to three days on Angel Island. However, as soon as Vaishno revealed that he had $25,000 in gold, the gates opened. On August 12, 1940, a basement short circuit burned down the immigration center’s administrative building.
JUDY YUNG
One Family’s Angel Island Story The fifth daughter of parents who immigrated from China in the 1920s and made their living as a janitor and garment worker, I grew up in 1950s San Francisco knowing little of my ancestry and ethnic background. Even though my high school class held its senior picnic there, it didn’t dawn on me until much later that Angel Island had been my parents’ introduction to life in America. I did grow up knowing one thing—like everyone else in Chinatown, my family had two surnames. Relatives and friends knew us as Tom; on birth certificates and at school, we were Yung. If lo fan (foreigners or whites) asked our name, we were to say Yung; Tom would bring big trouble. I never understood why until I learned that my father had immigrated illegally. All his life he feared being caught and deported. In 1975, I heard about a state park ranger finding poems in Chinese carved into the walls of an old building on the island. One Saturday, friends and I caught the Angel Island ferry. The 15-minute ride across the bay was beautiful. We climbed a steep slope to the perimeter road and hiked a mile to the north side. From the road, the panorama of the bay was breathtaking. A ranger led us to a two-story wooden barracks, some of its windows boarded over, behind a barbed-wire fence. The ranger explained that the government had last used the worn structure during World War II to house Japanese prisoners of war; earlier, Chinese immigrants had stayed in it. The interior smelled musty. The floor creaked. Our guide took us to a firstfloor dormitory, empty except for 28 poles from which he said three tiers of beds once hung. Sunlight streamed through dirty windows onto the trashy floor and the peeling walls where the verse was. With a flashlight, we could make out Chinese calligraphy—line after line of poetry in the classical style that had been brushed and etched into the wood, leaving ghostly impressions of words. Touching the chipping paint that covered the words, I could hear the immigrants’ voices. “Grief and bitterness entwined are heaven sent,” one wrote. “Sadness kills the person in the wooden building,” wrote another. Moved to tears, I wondered why I had never heard of this place. Soon after my visit, I asked my father if he knew about
Angel Island. At first he brushed me off, but finally he said, “Yeah, that’s where they kept us when we first arrived.” My dad came to America in 1921. His name was Tom Yip Jing and he was 15, but to get into the United States, he claimed to be Yung Hin Sen, the 17-year-old son of Yung Dung, a merchant in Stockton, California. For two of his 34 days on Angel Island, immigration inspectors grilled him about his life in China and his “father’s” life in America and then finally let him in. Like my father, most Chinese who immigrated between 1882 and 1943 bought false papers. Other than being smuggled in, this “crooked path” was the only one they had, and it carried a heavy price: lives of deceit and duplicity, fear of deportation, long family separations, avoidance of politics, and loss of family history and ethnic pride. They kept their secrets well, including Angel Island’s hardships, and often went to their graves without revealing them. My father’s story, however partial and reluctantly recounted, led me to research and coauthor a book, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, and to appreciate the extraordinary determination my parents and so many others showed in making a new life in America for themselves and for their children. —Judy Yung
The Tom/Yung Family The author, far right, in a 1954 family photo. Above, a bogus name appears on her father’s 1921 immigration certificate.
DECEMBER DECEMBER
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Lebanon, KY is home to the Lebanon National Cemetery, its own Civil War Park, and it’s part of the John Hunt Morgan Trail. VisitLebanonKY.com today.
History lives in Tupelo, Mississippi. Visit Brice’s Crossroads National Battlefield, Natchez Trace Parkway, Tupelo National Battlefield, Mississippi Hills Exhibit Center and more.
“Part of the One and Only Bluegrass!” Visit National Historic Landmark, National Civil War Trust tour, historic ferry, and the third largest planetarium of its kind in the world!
Visit Chattanooga’s pivotal Civil War sites that changed America forever. Combine your stay in this top rated tourism destination with other world-class attractions, music festivals and unique dining.
A vacation in Georgia means great family experiences that can only be described as pretty sweet. Explore Georgia’s Magnolia Midlands.
Experience the Civil War in Jacksonville at the Museum of Military History. Relive one of Arkansas’ first stands at the Reed’s Bridge Battlefield. jacksonvillesoars.com/museum.php
Explore the past in Baltimore during two commemorative events: the War of 1812 Bicentennial and Civil War 150. Plan your trip at Baltimore.org.
Are you a history and culture buff? There are many museums and attractions, Civil War, and Civil Rights sites just for you in Jackson, Mississippi.
Experience living history for The Battles of Marietta tt Georgia, featuring reenactments, tours and a recreation of 1864 Marietta. www.mariettacivilwar.com
Experience the Old West in action with a trip through Southwest Montana. For more information on our 15 ghost towns, visit southwestmt.com or call 800-879-1159, ext 1501.
The Mississippi Hills National Heritage Area highlights the historic, cultural, natural, scenic and recreational treasures of this distinctive region. www.mississippihills.org
Once Georgia’s last frontier outpost, now its third largest city, Columbus is a true destination of choice. History, theater, arts and sports—Columbus has it all.
Over 650 grand historic homes in three National Register Historic Districts. Birthplace of America’s greatest playwright, Tennessee Williams. The ultimate Southern destination—Columbus, MS.
Six major battles took place in Winchester and Frederick County, and the town changed hands approximately 72 times— more than any other town in the country! www.visitwinchesterva.com
With a variety of historic attractions and outdoor adventures, Tishomingo County is a perfect destination for lovers of history and nature alike.
Home to more than 400 sites, the Civil War’s impact on Georgia was greater than any other event in the state’s history. Visit www.gacivilwar.org to learn more.
Greeneville, TN Founded in 1783, Greeneville has a rich historical background as the home for such important figures as Davy Crockett and President Andrew Johnson. Plan your visit now!
Richmond, Kentucky
Tishomingo County, MS Fayetteville/Cumberland County, North Carolina is steeped in history and patriotic traditions. Take a tour highlighting our military ties, status as a transportation hub, and our Civil War story.
Whether you love history, culture, the peacefulness of the great outdoors, or the excitement of entertainment, Roswell offers ff a wide selection of attractions and tours. www.visitroswellga.com
History surrounds Cartersville, GA, including Allatoona Pass, where a fierce battle took place, and Cooper’s Furnace, the only remnant of the bustling industrial town of Etowah.
Tennessee’s Farragut Folklife Museum is a treasure chest of artifacts telling the history of the Farragut and Concord communities, including the Admiral David Glasgow Farragut collection.
Seven museums, an 1890 railroad, a British fort and an ancient trade path can be found on the Furs to Factories Trail in the Tennessee Overhill, located in the corner of Southeast Tennessee.
Through personal stories, interactive exhibits and a 360° movie, the Civil War Museum focuses on the war from the perspective of the Upper Middle West. www.thecivilwarmuseum.org
The National Civil War Naval Museum in Columbus, GA, tells the story of the sailors, soldiers, and civilians, both free and enslaved as affected by the navies of the American Civil War.
Williamson County, Tennessee, is rich in Civil War history. Here, you can visit the Lotz House, Carnton Plantation, Carter House, Fort Granger and Winstead Hill Park, among other historic locations.
Explore the Natchez Trace. Discover America. Journey along this 444-mile National Scenic Byway stretching from the Mississippi River in Natchez through Alabama and then Tennessee.
Come to Helena, Arkansas and see the Civil War like you’ve never seen it before. Plan your trip today! www.CivilWarHelena.com www.VisitHelenaAR.com
Join us as we commemorate the 150th anniversary of Knoxville’s Civil War forts. Plan your trip today! www.knoxcivilwar.org
Historic sites throughout the county throw their doors open the first Saturday of every month through October. Free admission! www.visitqueenannes.com
Sandy Springs, Georgia, is the perfect hub for exploring Metro Atlanta’s Civil War sites. Conveniently located near major highways, you’ll see everything from Sandy Springs!
Treat yourself to Southern Kentucky hospitality in London and Laurel County! Attractions include the Levi Jackson Wilderness Road State Park and Camp Wildcat Civil War Battlefield.
Hip and historic Frederick County boasts unique shopping and dining experiences, battlefields, museums, covered bridges, and abundant outdoor recreation. Request a free travel packet!
Just 15 miles south of downtown Atlanta lies the heart of the true South: Clayton County, Georgia, where heritage comes alive! vv
St. Mary’s County, Maryland. Visit Point Lookout, site of the war’s largest prison camp, plus Confederate and USCT monuments. A short drive from the nation’s capital.
ALABAMA HISTORICAL COMMISSION Confederate Memorial Park is the site of Alabama’s only Home for Confederate veterans (1902-1939). The museum interprets Alabama’s Confederate period and the Alabama Confederate Soldiers’ Home.
Near Chattanooga, find glorious mountain scenery and heart-pounding white-water rafting. Walk in the footsteps of the Cherokee and discover a charming historic downtown.
Alabama’s Gulf Coast
If you’re looking for an easy stroll through a century of fine architecture or a trek down dusty roads along the Blues Trail, you’ve come to the right place. www. visitgreenwood.com
Southern hospitality at its finest, the Classic South, Georgia, offers visitors a combination of history and charm mixed with excursion options for everyone from outdoorsmen to museum-goers.
Relive the rich history of the Alabama Gulf Coast at Fort Morgan, Fort Gaines, the USS Alabama Battleship, and the area’s many museums. 'PSU .PSHBO PSH r
CIVIL WAR MUSEUM of the Western Theater
Vicksburg, Mississippi is a great place to bring your family to learn American history, enjoy educational museums and check out the mighty Mississippi River.
Follow the Civil War Trail in Meridian, Mississippi, where you’ll experience history first-hand, including Merrehope Mansion, Marion Confederate Cemetery and more. www.visitmeridian.com.
Fitzgerald, Georgia...100 years of bringing people together. Learn more about our story and the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s conclusion at www.fitzgeraldga.org.
Hundreds of authentic artifacts. Voted fourth finest in U.S. by North & South Magazine. Located in historic Bardstown, Kentucky. www.civil-war-museum.org
Come to Cleveland, Mississippi—the birthplace of the blues. Here, you’ll find such legendary destinations as Dockery Farms and Po’ Monkey’s Juke Joint. www.visitclevelandms.com
Historic Bardstown, Kentucky
Destination
Jessamine, KY Prestonsburg, KY - Civil War & history attractions, and reenactment dates at PrestonsburgKY.org. Home to Jenny Wiley State Park, country music entertainment & Dewey Lake.
Search over 10,000 images and primary documents relating to the Civil War Battle of Hampton Roads, now available in The Mariners’ Museum Library Online Catalog! www.marinersmuseum.org/.catalogs
History, bourbon, shopping, sightseeing and relaxing—whatever you enjoy, you’re sure to find it in beautiful Bardstown, KY. Plan your visit today. www.visitbardstown.com
Confederate Memorial Park in Marbury, Alabama, commemorates the Civil War with an array of historic sites and artifacts. Experience the lives of Civil War soldiers as never before.
STEP BACK IN TIME at Camp Nelson Civil War Heritage Park, a Union Army supply depot and African American refugee camp. Museum, Civil War Library, Interpretive Trails and more.
How Many More? Mary Ann Vecchio, a 14-year-old runaway, keens over the body of slain student Jeffrey Miller.
Kent State: Death and Dissent in the Long Sixties by Thomas M. Grace (University of Massachusetts, 2016, $29.95)
66 AMERICAN HISTORY
Society comes off the hinges. Fear and hatred swirl out of control. Violence erupts. Outbursts of aggressive behavior attempt to regain control or to restore justice. We live in such times. Precedent offers a chance to reflect on how things turn violently wrong and how they might have gone differently. Three new books on events of May 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio examine the killing there of four young people by Ohio National Guardsmen. Compared to today’s mathematics of slaughter, that toll is puny, and the incident seems long ago. Yet all three volumes are gripping. Kent State holds the imagination by posing so many unanswered questions. The shootings were so profane. In a country that sends its youth to fight and die for
democracy, American soldiers killed American students exercising the rights of free speech and assembly on their campus. If our leaders truly hold those rights sacred, why not display more forbearance in the face of dissent—even if by foul-mouthed longhairs throwing rocks and human waste? Why did the guardsmen fire? Did outside agitators foment the violence? In Death and Dissent, Thomas M. Grace excavates the deep roots of protest at the Ohio university. With admirable rigor, Grace chronicles a 15-year interplay ranging over civil rights, free speech, and Vietnam that enmeshed student radicals and patriotic frat men, student and town newspapers, administration and faculty, police and military, and local, state, and national politicians. Out-of-town radicals did come to
PHOTO BY JOHN FILO/GETTY IMAGES; OPPOSITE PAGE: BETTMANN/GETTY IMAGES
Four Dead in Ohio
Kent, but Grace shows protest there to have been homegrown and enduring, tinged by the perspectives of blue-collar students and their union-member parents living in nearby Cleveland. “The growth of the antiwar movement was a complex phenomenon, and at Kent State its development owed much to Old Left connections,” he writes. The fusillade that helped swing opinion against the Vietnam War as never before came after days of campus protests nationwide reacting to President Richard Nixon’s April 30 announcement that he had sent American forces into Cambodia, enlarging the conflict. In downtown Kent, on May 1, rowdies smashed store windows. The next night, the campus ROTC building burned. On May 3, Ohio Governor James Rhodes, a U.S. Senate candidate in the coming week’s GOP primary who declared himself fed up with troublemakers he called “worse than brownshirts,” vowed he would “eradicate the problem” by having the National Guard drive protesters off campus. Most students at Kent State that spring weren’t antiwar activists, but many were infuriated by the Guard’s occupation of campus—a showing “massive in men and machinery” that included helicopters and bayoneted rifles, writes Howard Means in 67 Shots, a taut account. A rally was set for Monday, May 4. Despite the Guard’s presence, hundreds participated, with 2,000 other students
passing nearby bound to and from class. Guardsmen let off tear gas, prompting some protesters to raise middle fingers, scream obscenities, hurl rocks, and throw back gas canisters. Within minutes, guardsmen opened up with M1 rifles. Their bullets killed Jeffrey Miller, 20; Allison Krause, 19; William Schroeder, 21, and Sandra Scheuer, 20. Nine other students were wounded, including Dean Kahler, 20, left paralyzed from the waist down. Inquiries judged the shootings unwarranted. Probers rejected soldiers’ claims that rocks had imperiled them and that snipers had been shooting at them. Guardsmen, maneuveringing among hundreds of students, had orders to break up gatherings of more than two people. The men in uniform were fighting their own fear and fatigue—and anger. Some seemed to want to teach the punks a lesson. The troops were serving a fraught municipality. Drawing on Kent State’s oral history archives, Craig Simpson and Gregory Wilson illuminate in Above the Shots the extent to which some townspeople had reached the breaking point. Talk spread that students had cached rifles and dynamite. “We really thought kids were going to come down and burn us out,” said Kent resident Rosann Risland, then raising a toddler. “Not just the downtown. The people who owned businesses downtown really hated the students.” To many, the Guard was a godsend, bloody denouement or not. Town and state leaders failed in a fundamental democratic duty: to keep venues of dissent from becoming killing grounds. Means, Simpson, Wilson, and Grace render comprehensible the blinkered outlooks of students, guardsmen, and townspeople. The real lapse, Means concludes, was mingling so many armed guardsmen with so many students and trying to keep the Kent State campus open. “It didn’t require a Ph.D. in psychology to predict that prohibitions against peaceful assembly would be ignored,” he writes. “Increasingly forceful behavior on the part of the students and Guardsmen was all but certain to ensue.” —John Reichard is a writer in Silver Spring, Maryland
67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence by Howard Means (Da Capo, 2016, $25.99)
Above the Shots: An Oral History of the Kent State Shootings by Craig S. Simpson and Gregory S. Wilson (Kent State, 2016, $28.95)
Collateral Damage Passersby tend a man wounded by Ohio National Guardsmen on May 4, 1970.
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68 AMERICAN HISTORY
against AIDS and his role in the transition to his successor. Although Smith expertly augments the unfolding of events with comparisons to other presidents’ experiences, he typically ignores Barack Obama, even when Obama faced similar issues. Bush, Smith writes, “precipitated the deterioration of America’s position abroad, led the United States into a $3 trillion war in Iraq that cost more than four thousand American lives and an unwinnable conflict in Afghanistan, promulgated an egregious doctrine of preventive war, alienated America’s allies, weakened its alliances, and inspired young Muslims throughout the world to join the jihad.” Judging the move to topple Saddam Hussein, Smith trades in hindsight illuminated by information to which, in the moment, Bush 43 did not have access. In Bush’s post-9/11 statement that “we will make no distinctions between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them,” Smith sees “an extreme example of executive overreach” that has the president “placing the United States on a permanent war footing.” Indicting Bush’s “extreme theory of executive power,” Smith overlooks Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana, FDR’s wartime confinement of American citizens, and various Obama actions. “The Patriot Act was a direct assault on the civil liberties Americans enjoy, particularly the right to privacy, and may be the most ill-conceived piece of domestic legislation since the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798,” Smith writes. Yet he scarcely mentions Franklin Roosevelt’s unconstitutional activities and Supreme Court–packing scheme. If you seek a book that consistently disparages George W. Bush’s presidency, consider this one. If you want Bush 43 rendered with balance and objectivity, this is not the volume for you. —Richard Culyer is a writer in Hartsville, South Carolina
Bush By Jean Edward Smith (Simon & Schuster, 2016, $35)
Last Chore In January 2008, President George W. Bush held a final press conference.
©KRISTOFFER TRIPPLAAR/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
In this richly sourced volume offering much to admire but also much to view darkly, the biographer of presidents Eisenhower, Grant, and Franklin Roosevelt analyzes the American leader who dubbed himself The Decider. Jean Edward Smith renders George Walker Bush in three dimensions, thoroughly but almost always critically. To the author, his subject is a rough rider of few positive attributes who backed into the Texas governorship when opponent Ann Richards stumbled. Bush then had the good fortune to run for president against Al Gore, whose election it was to lose—a task accomplished agonizingly. Amid flashes of objectivity, the author comes across as a relentless partisan. Besides selective facts and opinions, Smith provides an interpretation for future readers vague on the Bush era, the presidency, and American politics. In his preface he states, “Rarely…has the nation been so ill-served as during the presidency of George W. Bush.” That declaration might surprise students of Andrew Johnson, Pierce, Buchanan, Fillmore, Tyler, and Lincoln. Time often changes perceptions; consider the reputations of the Great Emancipator and Harry Truman. Among negatives, Smith emphasizes Bush’s wartime decisions and leadership style, deploring his “sanctimonious religiosity” and habit of “strutting around like a cowboy.” In the partially positive column, he ranks Bush’s response to momentous financial market challenges. Smith considers the 43rd president’s truly positive achievements to be his overseas efforts
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The Roosevelts’ Hidden Helpmates Americans who loved Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt did so not only because the First Couple saw their country through depression and war but because they empathized with regular people. Alas, the Roosevelts had no empathy for one other. Kathryn Smith and Susan Quinn show that the Roosevelts stayed together after Eleanor’s 1918 discovery of her husband’s affair out of her sense of duty and his determination to rise in politics, then impossible for a divorcé. Marital love yielded to long-term relationships with other parties who sacrificed themselves—one losing a career, the other her life—serving the two principals. Eleanor nurtured Franklin’s ambitions after his disastrous 1920 bid for the vice presidency and his bout with polio. While he was boozily sorting out his life aboard a houseboat off Florida, she was developing as a force in New York Democratic politics by barnstorming New York on behalf of Al Smith’s 1924 gubernatorial bid. Aboard the Larooco, Franklin caroused with advisor Louis Howe and a “young woman of undistinguished background and shrewd judgment.” Marguerite “Missy” LeHand had joined Franklin’s staff as his private secretary in 1920. In her deeply researched volume, Smith explains that even before FDR’s polio crisis, Missy was his closest companion. Franklin could not stand to be alone, so LeHand became a sidekick, accompanying him on the raucous houseboat, at Warms Springs, and in the White House, where she functioned as Roosevelt’s de facto chief of staff. In The Gatekeeper, Smith forthrightly addresses the question of whether LeHand and FDR were lovers. Smith quotes son James Roosevelt as writing: “I suppose you could say they came to love one another, but it was not a physical love.” Smith tells in poignant detail the often rollicking but ultimately sad story of a woman who served her president, as he
70 AMERICAN HISTORY
said, “so well for so long and asked so little in return.” Missy did love “the Boss,” but the workload, the drinking, the smoking, and FDR’s neediness destroyed her health. LeHand never recovered from a 1941 heart attack and stroke, dying in July 1944 at 47. While Franklin and Missy were in cahoots, Eleanor was stretching her political legs and private life. In Eleanor and Hick, Quinn recounts the 1932 campaign meeting between the candidate’s wife and Lorena Hickok, a heavy, hard-drinking, chainsmoking Associated Press reporter whose writing gained her Eleanor’s trust. Before long, “Hick” was in love with the new first lady, who, as Quinn writes, “seemed to feel just as passionately about Hick.” Hick’s life was journalism, but increasing closeness to the first lady shredded her objectivity and she had to quit the AP. Eleanor helped engineer a job for her with Harry Hopkins’ New Deal relief programs. Hick traveled widely, reporting to Hopkins and copying in ER. Hopkins used Hickok’s material to direct relief funds. Hick fantasized about having Eleanor all to herself, but Quinn mines their correspondence to show Hick’s dawning recognition that Eleanor belonged not only to her, but to her family and her country. They made an accommodation: Hick moved into the White House, continuing to do legwork for Hopkins and pining for the moments she had with Eleanor. Quinn quotes from their letters, making a case for a relationship both deep and passionate. Still, the two could never be together and eventually Hick, while still living at the White House, took another lover. Hick’s letters demonstrate that even after their relationship ended, she pushed Eleanor to become involved in human rights, the cause that brought Mrs. Roosevelt postwar acclaim.—Nancy Tappan
The Gatekeeper: Missy LeHand, FDR, and the Untold Story of the Partnership That Defined a Presidency by Kathryn Smith (Touchstone, 2016, $28).
Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn (Penguin Press, 2016, $30).
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Continued from page 19 by Webster, was the Compromise of 1850, admitting California as a free state in exchange for perks given the South. Clay and Webster both died in 1852. Two years later, Democrat Stephen Douglas ignited a new firestorm, proposing a bill to allow slavery in the Kansas-Nebraska territory, if inhabitants wanted it. As long as slavery was off the table, Northern and Southern Whigs had been able to work together, but with bondage in its face, the party dissolved. Many northern Whigs, like Abraham Lincoln, became Republicans; Southerners joined the Democrats. Whigs disdaining either option gravitated to minor outfits like the Know-Nothings and the Constitutional Union Party, which ran former Whigs for president—Millard Fillmore in 1856, John Bell in 1860—in vain. The Civil War destroyed Whiggery and reset politics for 100 years. The most famous Whigs never reached the White House, and the lesser known Whigs who did could not reanimate their party’s economic centerpiece, the Bank of the United States. But the party’s demise required an issue—slavery—explosive enough to threaten the entire country’s existence. Obituaries for the GOP are premature. Donald Trump, win or lose, is a new element in the political firmament. But none of Trump’s concerns—trade, immigration, Hillary Clinton’s probity—risks sundering the country. Our two major parties are old, big, rich, and, for all their stodginess, cunning enough to weather ordinary crises. In the past they have done so by changing principles, leaders, and constituencies, and they can do so again. Absent a national neardeath experience, they won’t. +
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… honors the builder of one of LA’s oldest production lots by dressing Kermit the Frog like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp. In 1917, when the actor/director/producer bought acreage at 1416 North LaBrea Avenue in Los Angeles, the property was an orange grove. Chaplin marked his turf with a signature and shoeprints splayed Tramp-style in concrete near the soundstage on which he made Gold Rush, The Great Dictator, and many more. In 1960, Red Skelton began taping his TV show on the premises—and moved Chaplin’s signed sidewalk to his Palm Springs pad. Skelton sold to CBS, which produced TV series Perry Mason at 1416. In 1966 A&M Records arrived, adding music studios. Quincy Jones convened 50 music stars here to record 1985’s “We Are the World.” The Hensons, owners since 1999, restored Chaplin’s screening room and film lab—and reproduced the Chaplin signature slab. A trompe l’oeil image of Chaplin graces a door in Kermie’s gatehouse. The lot is closed except when someone rents the courtyard or soundstage, but a tour awaits at historynet.com/AnAmericanPlace.
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Robert E. Lee and His High Command UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA
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How Did Robert E. Lee and His Men Shape the Civil War? Few Civil War personalities have held our attention as much as General Robert E. Lee. But was Lee just an “old-fashioned” general or was he a brilliant strategist? How did he choose the officers who served under him? And how did his leadership influence the outcome of both specific battles and the entire war? Robert E. Lee and His High Command answers these and other pointed questions about this captivating commander and his Army of Northern Virginia. Taught by award-winning Professor Gary W. Gallagher—one of the world’s foremost Civil War authorities—these 24 insightful lectures create vivid portraits of men whose names are an indelible part of American military history. More than anything else, this course gives you tremendous insight into how the critical decisions of the Civil War were a product of the individuals who made them.
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Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia The Making of a Confederate General Lee’s Year of Fabled Victories Lee From Gettysburg to Appomattox Was Lee an Old-Fashioned General? The Making of the Mighty “Stonewall” Jackson Stonewall Jackson as Lee’s “Right Arm” James Longstreet’s Road to Prominence Longstreet’s Later Confederate Career The Rise of Jubal Anderson Early Early’s Path to Defeat “Jeb” Stuart as Soldier and Showman One Promotion Too Many—A. P. Hill Forced from Center Stage— Richard S. Ewell A Straight-Ahead Fighter— John Bell Hood Could Robert E. Lee Make Hard Decisions? The Problem of Attrition Younger Officers I—Robert Emmett Rodes Younger Officers II—Stephen Dodson Ramseur Younger Officers III— John Brown Gordon Younger Officers IV—Edward Porter Alexander Gifted but Flawed—J. E. Johnston and Beauregard Drama and Failure—Magruder and Pickett Before the Bar of History—The Lost Cause
Robert E. Lee and His High Command Course no. 8557 | 24 lectures (30 minutes/lecture)
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