Fists of Time

George Wallace and Laurel Mall

Forty years ago last week, George Wallace was shot at the Laurel shopping mall.  Last week, my local community newspaper read, "Laurel Mall officially closed."  Along with an anniversary, an era has ended.

Growing up about twenty miles away in Anne Arundel County, I always thought it was just a historical oddity that Wallace was shot at a local mall.  Laurel Mall was just an aging commercial relic, the kind that seemed to exist in just about every town.  As Chris Rock once quipped, each town has "got the white mall, and the mall white people used to go to."  Only when I was in college did I study and discover Wallace's dark connection to Maryland.

In each of his presidential runs - 1964, 1968, and 1972 - George Wallace garnered significant support in Maryland.  (The first of these runs, I should point out, was just a year after his infamous "segregation forever" remarks.)  The Alabama governor drew support from a certain portion of (but not a majority of) blue-collar whites.  Many of them were concentrated in the Baltimore area but also in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.  And if there was a blue-collar suburb of Washington, D.C., it was Laurel.

But like many of the original blue-collar white suburbs, they didn't stay white forever.  When my mother worked at Laurel High School in the mid-1990s, the school was a mix of Asian, Latino, black and white students.  And Laurel Mall was on a downward spiral, still anchored by some department stores (and a movie theater that featured the occasional Bollywood film), but rusted and outdated.

Likewise, other Laurel landmarks like the race tracks (apparently a haunt of the original New Dealers) started to lose money.  It eventually closed down a few years ago.  And now, Laurel Mall has finally gasped its dying breath.

Growing up and learning about your state's legacy of racism, you start to notice the remaining traces of white racism.  The Laurel Mall will not be white racism's tombstone but continue to be its landmark.  I'll be glad to see it razed.

Boston and Books

I am in Boston on business this week and the only sightseeing that I planned was to visit some book stores.  I recall getting a tour of Cambridge from some friends many years ago and marveling at the number of book stores there.  The preponderence seemed natural for the home of Harvard University.  As the years have gone by, though, local book stores in my area have dwindled and died.  That has only enhanced the aura that surrounded the Cambridge stores I'd walked past.  I've already seen the Freedom Trail, Bunker Hill, and other area landmarks.  What I wanted to do this week was some book shopping.

First stop was Raven Used Books.  This store has three solid book shelves on U.S. history, including subsections on Native American, colonial, and African-American history.  A separate bookshelf is filled with biographies, autobiographies and memoirs of cultural figures like Alfred Kazin, or Anthony Burgess's book on D.H. Lawrence.  Especially impressive is Raven's large sections on world history and political science.

Personally, I picked up two books that I have already read but did not own.  Taylor Branch's Parting The Waters is a seminal narrative history of the civil rights movement in the 1950s leading up to the 1963 March on Washington.  (Nominally a 'biography' of Martin Luther King, Jr., this work actually provides a panorama of civil right activism at the time.  After reading James Patterson's Great Expectations this month, I was suprised at how much Patterson relied on Branch's accounts of civil rights battles.)  Merton Dillon's 1966 biography of Benjamin Lundy was a true gem, and worth every effort to visit Cambridge.  Unlike Parting the Waters, this work is out of print and is the only biography of Lundy to appear in the last 150 or so years.  As I wrote last month, Lundy was the subject of some research of mine, and maybe this purchase will prompt me to try to write about Lundy for a popular local audience.

After a stop for the kids at the Curious George store, which has a small but impressive selection of children's books, the next stop on my stroll down Massachusetts Avenue was Harvard Book Store.  Harvard features new and used books.  New books are on the ground floor; while searching for the staircase, I couldn't help but appreciate the impressive selection of new hardbacks, ranging from new academic releases to mysteries and other genre niches.  (I also tried not to disturb the book reading in progress.)  The downstairs used book selection was massive, especially their fiction section, which comprised at least one dozen shelving units.  Like at Raven, I was a little disappointed at the overall selection of U.S. history choices but very impressed at the entire used selection.  I selected David Halberstalm's The Fifties, which should follow Great Expectations rather well.

From Harvard Book Store, I expected a long walk to Central Square, where I stopped for dinner.  On the way back to the Central MBTA stop, though, I couldn't help but notice another used book store.  Unfortunately, Rodney's Book Store was just closing.  Nonetheless, their selection, including an entire subsection on U.S. presidents, and even a sub-sub-section on the Kennedy family, was also impressive.  I'll have to spend more time there on my next visit.

I'm coming back from this experience with ambivalence.  Scrounging for books in the days of dwindling print media, I feel like I'm in a Mad Max movie, hoarding fuel in the wake of apocalypse.  Shouldn't everyone have access to Merton Dillon's biography of Benjamin Lundy?  Of course, that brings up so many other questions, like cultural literacy, the viability of e-books, and the actual availability and cost of e-books.  (See recent blogging by Mike O'Mally and Jon Fea on the latter questions.)  Am I actually hurting the cause of publishing by buying used books, or am I keeping the flame of literacy burning?  I don't have the answer but I can't deny that tonight's book shopping was a fun ride.

Does the NHD Website Category Stifle Creativity?

I had the honor of judging at National History Day's state-level finals for Washington, D.C. this weekend.  For those who aren't aware, this is a junior- and senior-high school-age competition where students submit presentations on a historical topic related to the annual NHD theme.  (I'm fond of comparing the event to the Science Fair, expect for history.)  Students are allowed to create exhibits on cardboard backdrops, write essays, and even film their own documentaries.  This year, I again judged submissions to the website category.

I am quite ambivalent about the way that National History Day runs the website category.  As I understand it, NHD once upon a time allowed students to write their own code for the web category.  For the last few years, however, contestants are required to use Weebly, a template based site that heavily manages, and thus strongly limits, the design options.

The main advantage to Weebly is that it easily democratizes the web design process.  No .html experience is required.  Many students, in fact, may feel more comfortable making a website than making a cardboard exhibit; students surely spend more time on computers nowadays than they do gluing or taping things together.  If the requirements for putting a site together are minimized, students might be more likely to participate in the event and be more motivated to study and present a historical topic.

On the other hand, if students at this age are really interested in making websites, they need to learn how to write code from scratch.  Weebly's heavily managed approach discourages students from understanding how websites actually work.  After looking at the websites that students submit to the website category, they quickly become repetitive because they are all based on a handful of templates, visual layouts, and stock images.

After the handful of times that I have volunteered as a National History Day judge, the students I met at this year's competition were perhaps the most enthusiastic.  I suspect that this may actually have to do with the dumbed-down approach to web design.  Students with somewhat limited computer skills can put together a good-looking, if unoriginal, website with a minimized risk of failure.

Perhaps the best conclusion about NHD's use of Weebly is that it helps promote the event's values of critical analytical thinking, but doesn't necessarily promote "digital history" or teach students to present history online.  And I suppose that is an acceptable compromise.

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Extra thanks to the National Archives and Missy McNatt for putting this year's competition together - it was a great success.

Anti-Slavery Congressmen versus Abolitionists, 1831-32

[Note: This post is a condensed version of an essay I wrote at George Mason University, which I will be discussing at the Master's Colloquium tomorrow.  Enjoy.]

In the aftermath of Nat Turner's slave rebellion of August 1831, the Virginia and Maryland state legislatures both debated and considered ending slavery.  As recounted in books such as William W. Freehling's Road to Disunion: Separatists at Bay, a diverse set of state representatives denounced slavery for a variety of reasons before ultimately being outvoted.  The crisis of a violent insurrection had prompted an unprecedented critique of the status quo in the Chesapeake region that had fathered American slavery centuries earlier.

In Washington, D.C., a brief but similar debate took place.  In D.C., as in Virginia and Maryland, congressmen discussed their disapproval of slavery and considered proposals to end it.  Unlike in Richmond and Annapolis, the discussion in Washington, D.C. was unique in one respect.  It revealed an emerging gulf between anti-slavery legislators and the grassroots activists who had come to be known as abolitionists.

The brief debate in the U.S. Capitol took place as a result of a petition drive coordinated by Benjamin Lundy, publisher of the monthly anti-slavery newspaper Genius of Universal Emancipation.  As a member of the American Convention of Abolition Societies, Lundy had volunteered to coordinate an anti-slavery petition drive.  His goal was to lobby Congress to end slavery in Washington, where Article I of the U.S. Constitution permitted Congress "to exercise exclusive legislation in all cases whatsoever."

In 1828, Lundy gathered 1,100 signatures from Washington, D.C. residents opposing slavery.  When this so-called "monster petition" proved unsuccessful, Lundy changed tactics.  “Members of Congress will feel themselves under less obligation to answer our prayers, than those of their immediate constituents [emphasis in original],” he wrote in the April 1831 edition of the Genius.  Lundy, with a wide base of subscribers and allies in far-off abolition societies, took the petition drive nationwide.  As part of this continuing effort, Lundy met with Representative-Elect and former president John Quincy Adams to ensure that a petition would be read in the opening days of the next Congressional session.

Lundy's views, and those of his petitioners, were quite similar to those that had been expressed by the anti-slavery legislators in Virginia and Maryland.  Both groups had cited progressive economic development, public safety, and Enlightenment ideals of freedoms and rights ("republican ideals," in the words of one petition) in their critiques of slavery.  Both groups also proposed similar ways of ending slavery, including gradual abolition and compensation for slaveowners.  Both groups also considered plans to send (or even exile) freed slaves to African colonies.  (Only later in the 1830s did the abolitionist movement begin to turn against colonization schemes.)

Despite these many shared values and overlapping ideas, the abolitionist petition movement did not win over anti-slavery Congressmen in 1831.  John Quincy Adams himself, despite his anti-slavery sentiment, declined to endorse the very proposal that he had introduced into the floor of Congress.  The Chairman of the House Committee on the District of Columbia, Philip Doddridge, reacted similarly.  In Virginia, Doddridge was an executive member of the anti-slavery American Colonization Society; in the state's last constitutional convention, he had blasted slaveowner's disproportionate share of power.  As Chairman of the House Committee, however, he felt uncomfortable acting on slavery in Washington, D.C. and declined to pursue any emancipation scheme there.

Benjamin Lundy's scheme in April 1831 to gather Congressmen's "immediate constituents" nationwide further propelled the insurgent abolitionist movement.  By rallying petitioners from points as disparate as Tennessee, New Jersey, and Vermont, Lundy was creating a national movement.  Rather than gaining traction in the halls of Congress, this nationwide activism actually revealed a chasm between abolitionists and anti-slavery legislators.  Abolitionists were increasingly radical and wanted to use Washington, D.C. as a proxy war for slavery nationwide.  In contrast, congressmen like Adams and Doddridge were rooted in voluntarist principles and uncomfortable asserting their anti-slavery views outside of their home state.

Throughout the 1830s, as recounted in William Lee Miller's epic Arguing About Slavery, the petition drive would intensify.  The debate over slavery would gradually polarize Americans and leave little room for the more thoughtful debates that had occurred in Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. in 1831-32.  John Quincy Adams would soon warm up to these petitions and become a critical ally to abolitionists.  Benjamin Lundy would fade from the abolitionist movement, while his protoge William Lloyd Garrison became its principle leader.

Emancipation finally arrived in Washington, D.C. in 1862 - 150 years ago this past week.

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This episode was short, local, and soon eclipsed by a radicalization of pro- and anti-slavery forces.  What can we draw from it in the big picture?  The debates between anti-slavery legislators and abolitionists show us both the extent, and limits, of anti-slavery thought in the early 19th Century.  At least in the mid-Atlantic region, a surprisingly large number of white men despised slavery.  (Of course, this rarely was due to a sense of racial justice or equality.)  Nonetheless, few of them were willing to do act affirmatively to end slavery.  Even when a fierce critic of slavery like Philip Doddridge had a chance to help emancipate thousands of slaves in Washington, he declined the opportunity.

The events of 1831-32 also prompt an important question that is not adequately addressed in the historiography: what is an abolitionist?  Was John Quincy Adams?  Philip Doddridge, who owned one slave?  I would say no, but that is based on my own judgment.  I have done a fair bit of lumping and splitting here, dividing a number of historical actors into two distinct categories.  This takes a rhetorical leap of faith - I haven't bothered to define my terms.  That would be quite a bit easier if a major historian were to attack this question head-on.

Family Secrets Revealed in 1940 Census

At last the 1940 Census has finally arrived.  I have long awaited the public release of this census because, even though my parents were both born shortly after that decennial head-count, my grandparents, aunts, and uncles all lived in established households at that time.  And while I am close to both of my parents, I have to admit that I take comfort in the evidentiary basis of their versions of events.

I was never close to any of my grandparents; all of them passed away before I got to know them intimately.  Both of my parents can sometimes be either unpurposefully vague, or even taciturn when I've asked about their family's history.  I usually shy away from asking detailed questions about their own parents because I feel like I am prying.  And, given my urge to understand so much historical context, maybe I do actually pry.

Amidst this context, I always thought it could be possible to discover a "bombshell" in open public records.  Long lost aunt or uncle?  Fortunes lost or gained?  ...Nah.  Don't be ridiculous, I tell myself.

Looking through the 1940 census schedules on the National Archives web site, as it is currently set up, is a bit tricky.  First you have to identify an enumeration district, then, look page by page through the district's schedule - 50-100 long pages of detailed data.  Because the image files are large, they sometimes do not load quickly.  (These technical details alone are worth a separate blog post.)  As I searched page by page through the schedules, the suspense started to build.

With some tips from my parents, I found my grandparents, aunts, and uncles and the suspense was relieved.  There were no long-lost relatives, no secret fortunes.  The one thing I was curious to look up, though, was my mother's father's occupation in 1940.  At the time, he was just a few years out of college, and likely a few years from his long career as a civilian employee of the U.S. military.  Occupation, the form reads, "Clerk."

But not just any clerk.  "Clerk, F.B.I. - Dept. of Justice."

Pop Pop was a G-man.

Ok.  Maybe not a G-man; at 28, he could have been a pencil-pusher.  Pressed for an explanation, my parents recalled that they believe he was merely a tour guide or some sort of PR specialist, nothing remarkable enough to have bragged to me about as a boy.  I've shot off an email to the Textual Reference division at the National Archives to see if they can provide any FBI administrative files on the man.  Perhaps my archival research experience can reveal some more family "secrets."

MA Colloquium Invitation

I am excited to announce that I was recently invited to speak at the MA Colloquium at George Mason University later this month.  My essay on anti-slavery petitions was selected as a highlight among graduate student research of the past academic year.  This is especially stunning because I graduated with my Master's degree eleven months ago; I'm shocked that the university will have me back.

To speak competently about my essay, I will have to re-visit my long-past writing and research.  This could be the appropriate venue; stay tuned for some blog posts about my work.

Fact Checking, Presidential Research, and Rick Santorum

This one goes out to reliable reader Laszlo, who asked that I not shy away from the political debates that might already occupy the blogosphere.

I do not have much to add about Rick Santorum's comments about JFK's 1960 speech on religion and government.  Because I have experience conducting research at Presidential Libraries, though, I do have some thoughts to offer on the response to Santorum's remarks.

Joan Walsh - a Catholic liberal and fervent Santorum critic - turned the tables on the former Pennsylvania senator yesterday.  In her Salon.com blog, she posted his remarks back to back with JFK's.  Looking at then-Senator Kennedy's words, you may believe, as I do, that Santorum's reaction was overblown and paranoid.

Holding political pseudo-history accountable should be easy.  That is why, this morning, Walsh expressed both thanks and dismay at the reaction to her own post:

This is one of those rare times when I’d rather not be recognized, because – don’t tell my editors – what I did was easy. It took me exactly 10 seconds to Google JFK’s speech and another few minutes to read it. Then I cut and pasted Santorum’s comments next to JFK’s and voila, kids, I had a story. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart credited me with a “deep-dive,” and I appreciate the praise, but really, I barely got my feet wet.

The Atlantic did Walsh one better today and posted a YouTube video of Kennedy's speech.

Although I am basing my reaction almost solely on Walsh's critique, I am inclined to believe with her; major media organizations do not appear to have gone straight to the source of Kennedy's words to challenge Santorum's assessment of them.

Researching the public statements of U.S. presidents should not be difficult in this day and age.  The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library has an exhaustive speech file of Kennedy's presidential speeches, and even has a version of the 1960 address in text and audio.  The Atlantic actually posted from a third party, but cspan.org has a full version on its site here.  C-SPAN and the Kennedy Presidential Library are authoritative, trustworthy, and accessible sources.  Contacting them or browsing their online holdings shouldn't be considered 'digging deep.'

The reference librarians at the Presidential Library are amazingly easy to reach; from their main page, click on "Contact Us" and the Research Room phone number is in plain view.  Even the reference desk staff can field questions about detailed events such as the Sept. 12, 1960 Houston speech.

Fact-checking Santorum's other distortions of presidential history might require a couple hours at the library; but when it comes to televised presidential remarks, it can be quite easy.

Beyond "Beyond the Bonus March"

Following Freedom from Fear, I have been digging a little deeper into Depression/New Deal history.  I thank C-SPAN for recording and streaming an excellent series of discussions at the Roosevelt Presidential Library.  The most interesting of these talks was Stephen Ortiz, who has recently written Beyond the Bonus March and the GI Bill (NYU, 2009).  Ortiz's work is not very groundbreaking but offers some interesting questions and thought exercises.  Why, Ortiz asks, is Franklin D. Roosevelt's opposition to Bonus bills not more widely recognized?

(Note: although there were a number of bills in Congress to allow World War I veterans to immediately receive service certificate payment - some of which differed in various details - I am using the term "Bonus Bill" to refer to all of them generally.)

This question has both merits and flaws.  Of course, Herbert Hoover's reaction to the popularly-supported Bonus March (and General Douglas MacArthur's excessive use of force) is still decried to this day.  Because that incident helped deliver the 1932 election to Roosevelt, it is easy to assume that FDR supported the Bonus Army's demand for early benefit payments.

That assumption, of course, would be wrong, but let us not set up a straw man.  Is anyone actually making the assumption?  Any close reading of 1930s political history should at least gloss over FDR's views in favor of balanced budgets and opposition to advanced veterans' payments.  Ortiz is most interesting when he asks, more precisely, why the big news story of 1935-36 (the debate, veto, and passage of the Adjusted Compensation Payment Act) is hardly noted in today's history.  He cites large, front-page newspaper headlines, a Madison Square Garden rally, and a joint session of Congress that was presided over by the president himself (a unique historical event).  There is clearly a disconnect between the public's interest in the Bonus issue at the time and historians' interest in the issue today.

I have shared this experience during my historical research in college.  While studying 1970s Baltimore, I browsed newspaper headlines about rallies, strikes, and lawsuits that were - and are - historically significant but not a part of the big-picture history of the era that has emerged.  There is clearly something to be said about the forgetting of major controversies over the passage of time.

Nonetheless, I have quibbles about Ortiz's question.  I think that the question of FDR's 'forgotten' Bonus Bill veto can be resolved with a simple point: the veto was easily overridden.  It was a moot point.  On top of that, it does not appear to me that FDR's opposition was really that inconsistent with his program.  Early bonus payments - like the Share the Wealth or Townsend programs FDR also opposed - were massive expenditures.  Social Security was ostensibly contributory, and Harold Ickes' budgets were tightly run.  I wonder, too, if his defeat here actually foreshadows the difficult relationship he had with Congress in the late 1930s - a relationship widely acknowledged in New Deal history.

Additionally, I object to the idea that the Bonus March was a watershed in veterans' interest group politics.  Ortiz does acknowledge that the Grand Army of the Republic set a precedent for these politics but inexplicably writes off the political centrality of Civil War veterans.  It does not just suffice to cite Blight's Race and Reunion in this regard; I must point out that Civil War pensions constituted an enormous government expenditure, entitlement program, and political interest.

In spite of all of my objections, Stephen Ortiz's work is genuinely stimulating.  The question of the Bonus Bill ties into several different topics and questions about the Depression and New Deal: Hoover's similarities and differences with FDR; the question of the balanced budget; inflationary policies; silver; FDR's conflicts with Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and, at times, congressional Democrats.  New Deal history can, at times, be an endless list of events, legislation, and programs.  The topic of veterans' benefits bisects so many issues that it is quite unique.  Without reading the book, though, I wonder if it actually runs deeper that Stephen Ortiz even acknowledges.

Learning, and Recognizing, World War II

Sometimes you read and learn about something, and you can't stop seeing it and hearing it everywhere.  You might not have recognized it before, or it didn't resonate with you, but now you understand it.  That is the way that I feel after finishing Freedom from Fear and finally reading an extensive account of the U.S. experience in World War II.  (See my previous blog post about it here.)

In Freedom from Fear, David M. Kennedy discusses the German U-Boat threat to shipping vessels in the Atlantic Ocean, which resulted in the massive loss of the SS Port Nicholson.  Last week, I read that a treasure hunter says he has evidence to prove he has recovered the wreck.  Kennedy quotes Admiral Ernest J. King, who wrote, two days after that U-Boat attack, that "the losses by submarines off our Atlantic seaboard... threaten our entire war effort."

Kennedy writes about the troops who parachuted into France ahead of the D-Day invasion.  Days after reading about that, I heard about my town's loss of Bill Bladen, 86, who was wounded after jumping out of an airplane on June 6, 1944 and later in Holland.   According to Kennedy, members of Bladen's 82nd Airborne Division, "mindful of the slaughter of their comrades descending onto the Cotentin on the night of June 5-6, jumped over Nijmegen shouting, 'Remember Ste. Mere Eglise,' and with guns blazing."  (About that age discrepancy: according to a vernacular account I've heard, Bladen lied about his age to enlist.)

And then of course there is Red Tails, the new film dramatizing the experience of the 332d Fighter Group of the USAAF.  This group was an offshoot of the 99th Pursuit Squadron, which "distinguished itself in North Africa and Italy" and caused a "sensation, in both the white and black press."

Is there a name for the phenomenon of noticing things constantly after learning about them?

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Another note about our World War II veterans and Red Tails.  After Washington Post columnist Courtland Milloy panned the movie as unrealistic, 91-year-old Tuskegee Airman Henry L. Moore wrote back with an epic rebuttal: "we really could fly them that way."

Bill O'Reilly and the Lavender Scare

Politicians and political commentators seem to provide a wealth of history-blogging fodder because they always seem to simplify or distort the past.  I'm trying to avoid blogging about these sorts of things, but the latest news about Bill O'Reilly's comments about gay rights and McCarthyism have me knocking my head against the desk.

Yesterday, O'Reilly (perhaps improbably) defended Ellen DeGeneres from attacks by social conservatives who want to boycott JC Penney for signing a business agreement with DeGeneres.  (Perhaps more accurately, O'Reilly may in fact be defending JC Penney, not exactly DeGeneres herself, subtly allowing himself to emphasize business rights as much as civil rights.)  In doing so, he compares would-be boycotters to McCarthy supporters who blacklisted Communists.

What a fascinating argument.  Perhaps O'Reilly has never heard of the "Lavender Scare"?  McCarthy and the hard-line anti-communists did more than blacklist suspected Reds.  They actually engaged directly in the persecution of homosexuals, coordinating their purge from federal government employment.  Comparing the persecution of DeGeneres to McCarthyism is quite appropriate - until you, ironically, leave out the part about McCarthy's actual persecution of homosexuals.  (Let's not even get started on Roy Cohn.)

We have already heard that Bill O'Reilly is not exactly the best historian.  I don't expect him to be a great historian, but I would like our society to have an improved perspective about history and sexuality.  This doesn't just extend back to the Lavender Scare.  Social conservatives (like a headline-making one from the next neighborhood over from mine) make claims about how marriage has "always" been.

Skepticism towards cheap, passing claims about the way things have "always" been is the fruit of a good education.  We might not need a 'gay history law' like California's, but acknowledging that both family and sexuality is historically fluid is a sound start.  As the Lavender Scare demonstrates, the history of sexuality, politics, and even foreign policy can be intimately intertwined.  After we acknowledge the diversity of sexuality, and the right to love one another, maybe that holistic version of American history will be common knowledge.