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anchored by some department stores (and a movie theater that featured the occasional Bollywood film), but rusted and outdated.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.

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."

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.