Bad Days in American History: February 21, 1965

On February 21, 1965, Nation of Islam assassins shot and killed Malcolm X before a rally in New York City.

Malcolm's death was precipitated by his break with Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad over Muhammad's sexual peccadillos, corruption, and weird version of Islam. Of course, Malcolm's story is well-known to anyone who's read his autobiography--and really, if you haven't, I don't know what to say except to go buy it and read it right away. Born in 1925 in Omaha, Malcolm's family had to flee the Ku Klux Klan because of his father's civil rights activism. A follower of Marcus Garvey, Earl Little led his family to Lansing where whites probably murdered him in 1931. After falling through the very wide cracks of 1940s America, Malcolm ended up in prison, where the ambitious young man found direction through conversion to the Nation of Islam. He became the group's most passionate and dynamic speaker after his release from prison in 1952.

The Nation of Islam preached African-American self-reliance, separation from whites, and armed resistance if necessary. Malcolm mocked the civil rights movement's integrationist goals. The media loved this and played up his differences from Martin Luther King, which probably helped King gain respectability among moderate whites.

Malcolm left the Nation of Islam in 1963, a decision that cost him his life. The NOI had no tolerance for apostates. Malcolm was hardly the only member they assassinated, a major activity for the organization well into the 1970s. Among the NOI leaders deeply involved in these assassinations was Louis Farrakhan, who later became the group's leader.

Before his assassination, Malcolm visited Mecca and began to understand both that the NOI had a distorted view of Islam and that there were white Muslims who had a similar worldview to his own. Now, modern-day moderates take this as proof that Malcolm was softening. He's become something of a mainstream hero over the past 20 years. Like King, that's come with a dilution of his message. My reading of Malcolm's political evolution is that he was becoming a more class-based warrior rather than strictly race-based. But there's no room in this mythological history for such an analysis. Instead, Malcolm supposedly was moving closer to King's position, culminating in their single, but friendly, meeting. In fact, both  King and Malcolm evolved with the times, both coming to a class-based analysis that might have differed on tactics, but I believe they two men increasingly understood the problems of their people through similar analysis.

We can mourn Malcolm's death for so many reasons. Very few civil rights leaders had the combination of vision, charisma, respect, and discipline to see the movement into a post-segregationist future. King certainly did, though he struggled mightily in the years after 1965. Malcolm probably did too. Ralph Abernathy, Stokely Carmichael, Andrew Young, Julian Bond, and others most certainly did not have this combination of virtues, yet they became the faces of the movement after Malcolm and King's deaths. Had Malcolm lived, it's likely he could have provided real leadership for the black nationalist movement that arose during and after 1965; perhaps he could have reigned in the movement's excesses while channeling its passions to substantive policy goals. He certainly would have led the anti-Vietnam movement--I can only imagine the powerful voice he would have provided.

Or maybe J. Edgar Hoover would have killed Malcolm during the COINTELPRO era anyway.

I'm most sad about Malcolm's death when I think of the paucity of African-American leadership during the 1980s and 90s. The fact that a charlatan like Farrakhan became a nationally respected leader through the Million Man March suggests how huge the vacuum had become. Of course, much of the problem during those years was how to keep fighting through massive white backlash. And one can certainly argue that millions of African-Americans worked very hard in those decades to slowly break down barriers that eventually led to Barack Obama's election to the presidency. Maybe they were the collective great civil rights leaders of the period. But white abandonment of the city during the 60s and 70s, the crack epidemic, persistent poverty, and institutionalized racism speaks to how badly African-Americans needed leaders during these decades to lead the unfinished civil rights revolution.

Who knows what Malcolm could have provided African-Americans and the poor during the 1970s and 80s. But almost certainly more than Farrakhan, Jesse Jackson, or other veterans of the civil rights generation who couldn't seem to find their way during that long dark time.

Bad Days in American History: February 8, 1887

On this date in 1887, the U.S. Congress passed the Dawes Act, breaking up Native American lands.

By 1887, the white assault on indigenous people was nearly complete. By the Civil War, Native peoples east of the Mississippi has either been subjugated or driven west. On the West Coast, the rise of European-American settlement was causing havoc on indigenous peoples and the relatively decentralized tribes west of the Cascades and Sierra were precipitiously declining. Beginning during the war, the U.S. army and average civilians engaged in an all-out assault against the last holdout of indigenous peoples, the Great Plains, a process that would continue well into the twentieth century.

The 1870s saw most of the Plains Indians capitulate to white domination. Whites hunted the bison out, undermining food sources. Smallpox and other diseases continued ripping through the population. Alcoholism and suicide were on the rise. Whites took children from their homes and sent them to Indian schools in the east. There they faced physical punishment for speaking their own language. Racist whites commonly murdered random Indians. And despite the occasional victory such as at the Little Bighorn in 1876, superior white numbers and military force completely overwhelmed indigenous people.

Whites originally chose Oklahoma as Indian Territory because the government figured no whites would want to live there. They saw the Plains as the Great American Desert. But by the 1860s, these attitudes had changed. Whites wanted the Plains to build new cities, farms, ranches, and railroads. How to deal with the remnant Indian populations was the first question. First was to assume they would go away over time. Most Americans in the late 19th century believed Indians would be extinct in a century or so. A big boost to the new field of anthropology was the necessary to collect languages, art, and cultural artifacts from the Indians before they went extinction. We could keep them in museum collections like the passenger pigeon. 

The other way to deal with the Indians was to find ways to expropriate their land. This process had already begun. The post-Civil War strategy to isolate Indians on worthless land known as reservations always came with the unwritten assumption that these borders could change at whites' discretion. The various Sioux peoples were given the Black Hills during the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, but the subsequent discovery of gold forced them into much more marginal land east of the Hills.

Still, whites were constantly looking for new ways to take Indian lands. Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes came upon a plan in the 1880s. Whites always talked a big game about assimiliating Indians into white culture. They never really cared about this much, but it made a good excuse to destroy Indian cultures. So Dawes introduced a bill into the Senate requiring Indians to take up 160 acre plots on their own reservations. Since their populations were dwlinding and since they used much of their land for hunting anyway, this created millions of acres Indians wouldn't farm. The government could then sell this land to whites.

And so they did. This process, known as allotment, opened up Oklahoma for white settlement and allowed whites to buy cheap lands across the Plains. It helped destroy traditional hunting cultures on the Plains, as this now private property couldn't be used for hunting. The Dawes Act was another important step on the road to forcing indigenous people under white domination. The act remained in effect until 1934, during which period oil was being discovered on Oklahoma lands still owned by indigenous peoples. Whites then developed new ways to steal the oil money, declaring most Indians unable to manage such resources and giving the money to white agents to oversee. Of course, most Indians never saw a dime of it.

In the 47 years the Dawes Act was in effect, 90 million acres were stolen from Indians, approximately 2/3 of their land in 1887. Around 90,000 people were left with no land at all.

Bad Days in American History: February 3, 1959

Fifty-one years ago today, a plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper crashed on route from Clear Lake, Iowa to Moorhead, Minnesota, during a brutal winter tour of the upper Midwest. The Day the Music Died turned out to be one of the worst days in rock and roll history.

One wonders what would have happened to these guys had they lived. How would they have adjusted over time? Of course, it's impossible to say. Of all the 50s rockers, only Jerry Lee Lewis really changed his art much over time. Little Richard struggled to remain relevant, Chuck Berry basically kept doing what he was doing (which was awesome so he had a good reason), Elvis became Vegas Elvis, and Bill Haley died in a ditch.

On the other hand, Holly was really ambitious and getting involved in the New York City music scene. If Holly had been in New York in 1961, how would he have responded to Dylan? Would he have been a kind of crazy Texas mentor to The Band and any number of other late 60s bands? Buddy Holly on acid? That sure sounds interesting! I feel that he would have evolved in interesting ways. But again, it's really hard to say. The early 60s were pretty bad for rock and roll, though obviously the British Invasion changed everything for the better.

Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper I'm less sure of. Valens might have explored Latin music more. Or he might have been taken up by the late 60s psychedelic movement. The Big Bopper always seemed like a minor act to me, though I could be wrong.

Another interesting point about the tragedy--Buddy Holly has assembled a new band for this tour. On bass was one Waylon Jennings. Had Waylon been on the plane (and the legend is that he gave up his seat for The Big Bopper), we never would have his wonderful country albums of the 1970s. The Outlaw movement would have looked far different. And my life would have been less complete.

Bad Days in American History: January 31, 1968

On this date in 1968, the United States suffered one of its most embarrassing military setbacks in history--the Tet Offensive.

Early January 1968 found both North Vietnam and the United States in a difficult position. The U.S. was struggling with a war that seemed to never end, supporting an unstable, corrupt government in South Vietnam that had no support from the people, and fearing the fall of South Vietnam to communism would mean the loss of all Asia.

Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese were suffering greatly from the pounding American pilots were providing every day. They wondered how long they could hold out against this beastly assault. In addition, their great anti-colonialist leader Ho Chi Minh was weakening. The North Vietnamese leadership knew they needed a big victory before Ho's passed away. So they decided to take the war to the U.S.

On January 31, the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong took a page out of the U.S. historical playbook, picking a major holiday to launch a surprise attack. They launched operations in all parts of South Vietnam, even infiltrating the U.S. embassy in Saigon for a brief time. From a military perspective, the Tet Offensive was a total failure. The North Vietnamese had way over-extended themselves and they could not hold the positions they took against superior firepower.

But despite the military losses and high casualty rates, the Tet Offensive succeeded beyond anything the Vietnamese could have expected. This was the turning point in the war.

The U.S. was in Vietnam for any number of reasons. Lyndon Johnson committed himself to the war effort because he was captured within Democrats' box of fear of being called soft on communism. Johnson was determined not to be the next Harry Truman, whose reputation was at a low point during these years. Republicans tainted Truman with "losing" China. This was utterly unfair since a) Chiang Kai-Shek was a terrible leader and not popular with his people and b) it's entirely unclear what more U.S. military support would have accomplished except for more dead Chinese and Americans. When the newly communist Chinese entered the Korean War, it was a great embarrassment for Truman and emboldened Republican shouts of a communist-infiltrated government.

Johnson wouldn't let this happen to him. But of course he didn't know what to do about Vietnam. No one did. Knowledge of Indochina in the State Department amounted to a hill of beans. Almost no one spoke these languages or specialized in the region. We backed up French recolonization efforts after World War II because we wanted to get the French back on their feet as an anti-communist ally. We fretted after Ho's forces kicked the French out in 1954 after their victory at Dien Bien Phu. We refused to allow Ho to take over the country, creating a puppet regime in Saigon known as South Vietnam. This was only supposed to last 2 years, leading to a 1956 election that would reunify the country. But fearing Ho's communism and afraid it would lead to more red advancement in an area where the U.S. had almost no economic or strategic investments before this, the Eisenhower Administration refused to allow the elections to be held. Eisenhower and Kennedy raised the stakes and when Johnson took over in 1963, he felt he had no choice but proceed.

Like any successful politician after World War II, he had to talk a big game about fighting communism. And when things started to go bad, he didn't think the American people were ready to hear it. So he began to lie about everything associated with Vietnam.

The Tet Offensive put the lie to the Johnson Administration's claims that the war was near victory. The ensuing "credibility gap," which had begun before the offensive grew. Johnson's ability to govern fell. He was hopelessly trapped in lies and with no good options. Seeing no light at the end of the tunnel, Johnson, who had won the presidency in 1964 in one of the greatest landslides in U.S. history, withdrew his name from nomination for re-election in 1968.

From an American perspective, the most tragic thing about the Tet Offensive is that it provided the final nail in the coffin to the man who could have been the greatest president since Lincoln. While Johnson was hamstrung by Cold War imperatives, he also showed the greatest passion for the poor of any president in our history. His desire to end poverty, to create environmental legislation, to sign civil rights legislation--these were the hallmarks of a great leader. But in the end, fighting the Cold War took precedence, even if it meant tens of thousands of dead Americans and hundreds of thousands of dead Vietnamese. Even if it meant throwing his presidency away on a country America knew nothing about.

From a Vietnamese perspective, obviously this day marks a enormously important point in their freedom struggle. I'm not sure how the Vietnamese mark the day today, but I imagine they see it as a great day of martyrdom for the cause of freedom. And we should probably see it that way as well.

Bad Days in American History: November 22, 1963

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed by Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas, Texas.

I'm not including this in the bad days series because of the death itself. Sure, its bad when the president gets killed. But I'm not convinced that the assassination of Kennedy was that outstandingly worse than, say, Garfield's killing. It certainly doesn't compare to Lincoln, at least in my point of view. I know the baby boomers would disagree, but then, isn't everything about their own perceptions? Kennedy is a vastly overrated president. Had he lived, he probably would have signed the civil rights legislation Johnson did, though it's unknown whether he would have pressed for it like his successor. His glamorous image disguises the great mediocrity of his policy.

The reason I discuss this is because it is the prime event in the history of one of the most annoying things about this nation--conspiracy theories. From antimasonry to Populism to Roswell to 9/11, Pearl Harbor, and even John Wilkes Booth, Americans love to think there's a vast shadowy conspiracy looking to take down our nation. I can't think of a single time when this sort of thought has led to anything positive. It's particularly embarrassing when famous people on the left engage in this. Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 is a prime example of this. While a movie on this topic was worthy, there's enough real things to expose to the public than think about potential conspiracies which probably don't exist.

Frankly, I don't care why JFK was killed in 1963. Oswald was unhinged and was almost certainly working alone. Theoretically, I might be interested in why Jack Ruby killed Oswald, but to begin exploring this is to expose myself to insanity. In any case, I doubt the mob, LBJ, Castro, Hoover, the CIA, or anyone else had anything to do with it.

Bad Days in American History: November 18, 1978

On this date 31 years ago, 909 people committed mass suicide at Jim Jones' compound in Guyana.

Any time 900 people die from one cause, it's a bad day. But I think this is an especially bad day because it represents some of the worst trends in American culture--religious extremism, mass violence, apocalyptic messaging. Those consistent threads in our history were exacerbated by the late 1960s and 1970s--too many drugs, too much instability, too many people thinking they needed to find themselves. Jones was hardly the only manifestation of someone taking advantage of this. Any number of gurus in the 60s and 70s popped up, some of which caused problems well into the 80s, such as the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh, who took over an Oregon town and starting trying to kill local residents when the government began cracking down.

I see Jim Jones, Rajneesh, Manson, and so many of these other lunatics as shining symbols of what I call The Worst Generation. The Worst Generation talks all about The Greatest Generation, but it's not that the WWII generation were that great, it's that the baby boomers were so terrible. It's been all about them since the 1950s and continues to be today. Their concerns trump all others, including national problems. Their constant search for who they are led to all sorts of annoying things during these years--37 minute Jerry Garcia solos, communes in New Mexico, the New Age movement, Hare Krishnas' Jim Jones. And then later, deciding to make money and going to Wall Street, buying huge mountaintop mansions in Colorado ruining views for everyone, voting in Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush, bankrupting the country for their own desires, etc., etc.

Perhaps I overstate the case. But I think it's a reasonable outline of the history of the last 40 years.

As for Jones in particular, he was a real interesting dude. Former commie, was hauled in front of the Senate during McCarthyism to answer about his politics, including his mother's friendship with Paul Robeson. He was freaked out, like a lot of other people, about the seeming inevitable coming nuclear holocaust, which is what led him to South America in the first place. He worked in the civil rights movement in Indiana, helping accomplish a lot of integrationist goals. He and his wife were the first white couple in Indiana to adopt a black child, in 1961. Later in the 60s, he began his cult, moving to San Francisco in the 70s, where his supporters helped elect San Francisco Mayor George Moscone (boy, that was left out of the film biography of Harvey Milk!). In fact, let me quote his Wikipedia page here--I know it's Wikipedia, but this stuff is pretty well cited.

In September 1976, Willie Brown served as master of ceremonies at a large testimonial dinner for Jones attended by Governor Jerry Brown and Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally and other political figures.^[46] At that dinner, while introducing Jones, Willie Brown stated "Let me present to you what you should see every day when you look in the mirror in the early morning hours ... Let me present to you a combination of Martin King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein ... Chairman Mao."^[47] Harvey Milk, who spoke at political rallies at the Temple,^[48] and wrote to Jones after a visit to the Temple: "Rev Jim, It may take me many a day to come back down from the high that I reach today. I found something dear today. I found a sense of being that makes up for all the hours and energy placed in a fight. I found what you wanted me to find. I shall be back. For I can never leave."^[49][50]

Well, that's pretty interesting! Wonder what Willie Brown would say to that now?

By 1977, it was all falling apart, as Jones' cult of personality had led to accusations of sexual abuse and tax evasion. He and many followers fled to Guyana. The next year, California congressman Leo Ryan went to Jonestown to investigate human rights abuses. He found plenty alright, but Jones had him killed before he left for the U.S. Seeing the end was near, he had everyone kill themselves.

Interestingly, three of Jones' adopted children survived because they were playing for the Jonestown basketball team against the Guyana national team at the time of the suicides.

Bad Days in American History: November 12, 1954

On this day in 1954 Ellis Island closed.

What's so bad about that? It was an old, increasingly unused, dilapidated facility. But it's the unused part that gets at me. It's a bad day because nothing better gets at U.S. immigration policy between 1924 and 1965.

15 million people came through the gates of Ellis Island from its opening in 1892 until its closing, the vast majority before 1924. It's a place of both great sorrow and great joy--it was where most people had to go through a series of examinations before being allowed into the U.S. If you were found to have a disease or be mentally slow (by the judgments of racist immigration agents) or a criminal or a radical or (later) a single woman, you were put back on the ship and sent back to wherever you came from. Families were torn apart this way. But if you made it through, you were in the United States. Whether that was to say (Jews) or to work for a couple of years and go back home (Italians and Greeks), it didn't matter--you had entered this new land.

But all these immigrants made Anglo-Saxon Americans nervous. What kind of a nation could have Catholics and Jews on its shores? Not to mention anarchists, communists, labor organizers and Muslims. While Americans have traditionally allowed immigrants to enter the country, sometimes in very large numbers, there's always been a tension between people who either a) want cheap labor, b) welcome diversity, or c) want their family members to come live with them and racists. This led to the Know-Nothing party in the 1840s and the Minutemen today. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it led to increased restrictions on immigrants, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and continuing through the series of laws in the early 1920s that restricted immigrants from "undesirable" places from our shores. If you were Engish or French, it was fine. If you were Italian, Syrian, Russian, or Polish, it was not fine.

So in 1924, Ellis Island began to see a lot less traffic. And we weren't going to be swayed to increase that traffic either, not by the boatloads of Jewish immigrants desperately trying to escape Nazi Germany, and not by anything either. So in 1954, what purpose was there in keeping Ellis Island open? None, really. It was old and it was big and expensive to operate. Plus it was the 1950s, a period where nothing old had any value in American society. It's the same time that urban renewal was turning our city's historical cores into parking lots. So why not move our much more limited immigration center needs to a fancy office in a nice new modern building. So we shut it and let it sit there, falling apart. In 1961, the country put Ellis Island up for auction, but nobody bought it.

By the mid 1960s, postwar liberalism was at its peak in this nation. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing and having major success. Other groups began demanding more rights. Lyndon Johnson's Great Society was fighting a war on poverty. And Johnson began reconsidering our closed borders. In 1965, he signed the Immigration Act, reopening our borders. He kept the quota system of the 1924 laws, limiting immigrations from each country to a particular number, but seriously skewed those numbers to Asia, Africa, Latin America, and eastern Europe. He also reopened the nation to political refugees, a pretty necessary move given the escalating war in Vietnam. While this system is far from perfect (see the necessity for illegal immigration from Mexico and Central America), it is one of Johnson's most positive legacies. That it hasn't been improved on by subsequent political leaders is a shame upon this country.

Also in 1965, Johnson decided to turn the unused space at Ellis Island into an immigration museum for this country, though this was not completed until 1990. Today, it is one of the best places in the country to experience American history. It's basically a perfect experience, though I might quibble that they should focus even more on the anti-immigration propaganda of the period than they already do. Walking into the immigration center on Ellis Island is not just stepping into the past, it's feeling the heartbreak and tragedy, the opportunity and joy, of the American immigrant experience. Seeing the loads of lost and unclaimed baggage when you walk in makes you almost want to cry--what was in those bags? Who did they belong to? What are their stories? What happened to them? And it only goes from there.

In the end, I'd like to say that we've overcome the kind of prejudices that closed Ellis Island, but of course we haven't. We are still plagued with white supremacy, both the active kind but more insidiously, the kind that makes rural whites in Nebraska and Alabama fear that Mexicans are threatening the nation's white culture. Me, I'd say those places are far better off for the arrival of Latinos.

Bad Days in American History: November 11, 1919

This is reprinted from a piece I wrote 2 years ago. It's certainly worthy of revisiting and of the "Bad Days" moniker.

It's also what I think of when I think of Veterans' Day.

On November 11, 1919, the people of Centralia, Washington, a small lumber town in the southwestern part of the state, celebrated the first anniversary of Armistice Day with a parade. However, town leaders and the local American Legion post decided to turn the parade into an attack upon the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) union hall, which they considered the center of subversion and sedition in their community. When the Legion reached the hall, they broke in and began tearing the place apart. What they did not expect was that the radical loggers had prepared an ambush. The I.W.W. had stationed at least two shooters on a hill approximately ¼ mile away. In addition, some of the workers in the hall had weapons. In the hail of bullets, four American Legion members died. Warren Grimm, a University of Washington graduate and lawyer, had not only fought in World War I, but had also served in the military’s anti-Bolshevik force in Siberia before returning to his home town of Centralia. Arthur McElfresh had spent eighteen months in the army in France. The third dead Legionnaire was Ben Casagranda, a Greek-American who went to war for his new nation. The fourth was another University of Washington graduate and member of the Centralia elite, Dale Hubbard.

Infuriated, the Legionnaires chased a man they thought was Britt Smith, the local I.W.W. secretary, but who in fact was Wesley Everest, an itinerant logger and I.W.W. member. They beat him severely and threw him into a prison cell with other Wobblies they rounded up. That evening, still incensed, local men took Everest from his jail cell, possibly castrated him, and hanged him from a bridge on the Chehalis River. Trials quickly ensued for a dozen other I.W.W. members. A jury found eight guilty of second-degree murder, and they received sentences ranging from twenty-five to forty years at the Washington State Prison in Walla Walla. The I.W.W. claimed that the Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen (4-L), the American Legion, and local authorities had railroaded the eight men into prison; and their cause served as a rallying cry for an increasingly marginalized I.W.W. over the next twenty years.

Violence in this little lumber town took place as forces of order battled against radicalized loggers over control of the industry. Throughout the first two decades of the 20th century, timber companies treated their workers like animals. They forced them to live in horrific conditions in the timber camps. Daily these workers dealt with adulterated food, fleas and other vermin in their overcrowded housing, straw for bedding, the smell of disgusting wet socks drying near the bunkhouse's one heater, latrines located directly next to the dining hall so that they could smell feces everything they sat down to eat, etc. They were paid next to nothing for their work and frequently ripped off by a collusion of timber operators and employment agencies who would force men to pay for jobs and then the job not be there when they arrived. These men also lived in all-male spaces, completely isolated from women in their remote camps. Thus, when men could get to town, the first thing they headed for was to purchase the services of a prostitute. They could not live normally, either in the camps or when they returned to society. In desperation, and with the American Federation of Labor showing almost no interest in organizing these workers, they turned to the I.W.W.

By the summer of 1917, the woods were at war in what I call the Battle for the Body. The IWW organized directly around these environmental conditions and workers joined because the union was the only organization that could give them dignity and their bodies safety. Timber production plummeted that summer, but it could have continued interminably. However, when the U.S. entered World War I, the nation needed Sitka spruce to build airplanes. That tree only grows in the Pacific Northwest (and the west coast of Canada). Thus, the strikes became a threat to national security.

President Woodrow Wilson and General John J. Pershing realized they need to end these strikes. So they sent Colonel Brice Disque to the woods to figure it out. He ended up starting two organizations. The first was the Spruce Production Division, which was a squadron of soldier-loggers. Instead of going to Europe, these troops would cut down trees, which frankly sounds like a good deal to me, though there was a lot of squawking about these guys not being able to share in the manly glory that the war provided. Disque also began the Loyal Legion of Loggers of Lumbermen. Disque also supported a project to organize logging camps based on patriotism, hard work, and loyalty to the American government. This became known as the 4-L, or Loyal Legion of Loggers and Lumbermen. The pilot camp started on November 30, 1917 in Wheeler, Oregon, with 100% participation. Impressed by this, both Disque and the timbermen gave increasing support to the idea. On February 27, 1918, the Northwest’s lumber operators agreed to place their problems in Disque’s hands, which he responded to by officially announcing the 4-L, which became the nation’s first government-sponsored company union. Disque’s plan to settle labor disputes by improving workers’ environmental conditions proved effective. The 4-L set new standards of hours, wages, working conditions, and environmental conditions in the camps, regardless of whether they had SPD troops. SPD officers played a major role in pushing the 4-L, as they often worked hard to ensure high rates of enrollment among the loggers where they worked. In return for meeting the demands of agitated workers, the 4-L demanded that workers not strike during the war and instead consider the 4-L a mediating organization between themselves and their employers.

By forcing the hands of both the workers and the industry, Disque successfully brought peace to the labor industry through eventually became a government sanctioned, industry-wide company union. Most workers reneged on their 4-L membership. They didn't really believe in I.W.W. ideas of syndicalism anyway. They just wanted safe environments and bodily dignity. The 4-L provided that. But some loggers held out for the radical beliefs they held so dear. Those radicals were loathed in the Northwest. A year before, in 1918, Centralia residents had destroyed the local I.W.W. hall. They figured they could do so again. Little did they know that the union would set up shooters on the hills surrounding the town and arm some of the men inside.

In the years after the Centralia Massacre, both the I.W.W. and the American Legion fought over the meanings of the event, as well as over the fates of the prisoners. Both sides used ideas of masculinity based upon work in nature to build their arguments. Rather than bore with the details of these gender constructions, let me focus on the alleged castration of Wesley Everest. From the best I can tell, the I.W.W. made this up. None of the early accounts of the event mention it, and that includes Wobbly accounts. But soon the legend sprung up that the mob had castrated Everest, something promulgated by John Dos Passos in his novel, 1919. Although some scholars have tried to debunk the castration, it has generally come to the present as a fact, including in recent histories of the World War I era. Wobbly propagandists had little problem in promoting the castration story. The earliest publications about Centralia make no mention of castration. It first appears when I.W.W. writer Walker C. Smith wrote Was It Murder? The Truth about Centralia in 1922 as a spur to promote a retrial of the Centralia prisoners, he did discuss it, writing, “An automobile headlight was trained upon the dead man, plainly revealing that some sadist more demoniacal than his fellow degenerates had ripped Everest’s sexual organs almost loose from the body with some sharp instrument.”

What really matters here though is not whether the mob in fact castrated Everest, which I believe did not happen, but how the Wobblies used the idea of castration, the ultimate demanning of the body, to further their agenda about manhood, the body, and the environment. For the I.W.W., within Everest’s testicles laid the core of working-class manhood. He showed his bravery throughout that hellish day in Centralia. His courage originated with his hard work in the woods in the midst of other men. For that daring, savage capitalists, fearful of this kind of true proletarian man, had to eliminate that manhood before ending his life. But of course, one could not eradicate the manhood of someone like Wesley Everest so long as his comrades continued his memory and the fight to destroy capitalism.

By the middle of the 1920s, the white heat blazing off the Centralia Massacre cooled. The story became untouchable in Centralia, and in fact no documents exist from anyone remotely connected with the American Legion or timber industry in that town. The I.W.W. focused much of its waning energy on freeing the Centralia prisoners, as well as its other incarcerated members throughout the nation. Many of the jurors who put away the Centralia radicals felt remorse about their role, and in the fall of 1925, five of them met with Washington Governor Roland Hartley to make a personal appeal for the prisoners’ release.

The real impetus for their release came from former army captain Edward Patrick Coll. In 1928, Coll, an active American Legion member and a close relation to Irish revolutionary leader Eamon De Valera, moved to Aberdeen to sell insurance. He could not believe the stories he heard about the organization’s role in the Centralia affair. Coll wanted the Legion to put on a program defending themselves, but they refused, citing explosive evidence against them if they were to do so. Concerned that the Centralia case would undermine the power of the Legion in southwestern Washington, Coll began a personal crusade to get the prisoners released, which the Legion opposed every step of the way. He started asking around Centralia and claimed that the relatives of dead Legionnaire Warren Grimm had admitted that Grimm helped lead the raid, the denial of which formed the basis for the prosecution’s murder case against the Wobblies. Governor Clarence Martin paroled most of the prisoners in 1933 but Rayfield Becker refused his parole, holding out until he received a full pardon. In 1939, Martin commuted his sentence to time served and Becker left prison, though without the full pardon for which he held out.
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Mentioning the Centralia Massacre quickly became totally unacceptable in the community. Literally none of the participants on the Legion side ever told their story. They all took it to the grave with them. At some point, I think sometime in the 80s, Centralia residents commissioned a bunch of murals for their town representing their history. There are lots of scenes of white people settling the land, but nothing on Centralia. The labor hall in town put up its own mural, though it is kind of hard to see from the road because it is on the second floor. You have to know where to look. Even today, it is an almost totally unmentionable subject.

Bad Days in American History: October 31, 1918

Some things are hard to date. Disease epidemics are one of them. Ultimately, in discussing them, you are often placing an arbitrary date upon a long-term epidemic. You don't usually know when it starts so you are kind of winging it.

That's what we are going to do today. By Halloween of 1918, death was not just something to mock and imitate. The nation was in a full bore epidemic of influenza. The dreaded Spanish flu had reached the United States in full force.

That year, an extra strong strain of flu was circling the globe. It's believed it started in China, but that is very difficult to pin down. In an era before rapid transportation (something that would contribute mightily to the rapid spread of AIDS), perhaps this plague might have remained in Europe and Asia. But this same year also saw the end of World War I. Soldiers were living in trenches in France, often in damp, horrid conditions. They caught this flu while fighting against the Germans. Ships were crossing the Atlantic almost daily, so long as they avoided German submarines. The flu quickly spread to the United States.

Today, we fear disease epidemics, but we don't really know what they are like. Swine flu (which I will perennially call it after that Israeli minister protested that this was offensive to his people, something that is so ridiculous as to be mocked for eternity) has the potential to reach epidemic proportions, but a true epidemic is a mass killer. This flu is an unusual killer only in the 24 hour news cycle. Pre-World War II America saw real epidemics--yellow fever, smallpox, influenza, cholera--and we have nothing to compare it to today except for AIDS, and that really only for those of us who remember the 1980s. Modern medicine is so far advanced that we can contain most potential epidemics; even HIV is not quite preventable, and we also developed high-quality medications to give those who contract it a fighting chance to live a long life.

The 1918 flu epidemic changed the world. An estimated 675,000 Americans died of the disease. Life expectancy in this country dropped by 10 years. The death rate from flu for those aged 15-34 rose by 20 times in one year. The war experience made everything worse--we already found our physicians and hospital facilities seriously overtaxed dealing with the thousands coming home with mustard gas lung burns and other war wounds. And we simply did not have the medical facilities we do today. People died all the time in 1918 of preventable illnesses anyway; to add a worldwide epidemic on top of it was a recipe for disaster. 1/4 of Americans and 1/5 of the world's population came down with the flu that year, including President Woodrow Wilson while he was in France trying to dictate to everyone what the post-war world should look like, selling out colonized peoples, and the like.

The lesson from the 1918 flu epidemic is that preventive medicine and technology can do a lot to help us. But it can't do anything. The technologies we have used to fight illness have had unintended consequences, particularly the development of drug-resistant super strains of illness. Eventually, we will deal with a real epidemic again. To our credit, I think we know this, thus the real worries every time we see a West Nile or SARS or swine flu. Less to our credit is the panic that results with each of these. It'd be nice to see rational policy-based responses to these problems and I think the government has generally done a good job handling these situations (with Reagan's handling of AIDS being a huge exception and arguably the worst thing he ever did, though union members and Central Americans would have something to say about that). But the 24 hour news cycle has acted with tremendous irresponsibility in covering these issues, whipping up a foaming panic with each death and creating a feeding frenzy of fear.

A lot of the details in this post came from this Stanford based website, which also has a lot of great links that you can check out if you want to read more.

Bad Days in American History: October 28. 1919

On this date in 1919, the United States officially went insane. That day marked Congress' overriding of President Woodrow Wilson's veto of the Volstead Act, for all intents and purposes banning the consumption of alcohol in this nation.

It's hard to stress how loathsome the temperance movement was. While it's true that early Americans were extreme drunks (as demonstrated amply in W. J. Rorabough's The Alcoholic Republic), the temperance movement moved beyond reforming extreme behavior and into a moral crusade that saw alcohol use as an overarching explanation for everything wrong with America. That included immigration and there were many connections between the temperance movement and the anti-immigration movement that succeeded in closing America's gates to most immigrants by 1924.

Now, one might think that Wilson vetoing the Volstead Act reflects well upon him, but he certainly didn't veto it out of principle. Rather, it was on technical matters concerning its relationship to wartime prohibition. Wilson had supported prohibition as part of the New Freedom when he was elected in 1912. As I was researching this, I was hoping to finally find something worthwhile about Woodrow Wilson; alas, I was again foiled in this quest.

The Volstead Act also demonstrated the worst characteristics of Americans: nativist, puritanical, simple-minded, insular. We became the laughing stock of much of the world (though in fact we were not the only nation to attempt banning alcohol during these years). Of course, prohibition had massive unintended consequences that its priggish supporters neither anticipated nor had any answer for. It made drinking cool again for the first time in decades. It created a massive surge in crime. It led to a huge black market. Police corruption became an epidemic as guys who didn't want to enforce the law found it really easy not to do so. Politicians and other societal leaders rather openly ignored it. Prohibitionists' reaction was simply to demand greater enforcement and tell everyone to go to church.

Prohibition played a major role in the standardization of bad beer in this country. I am just beginning research on a book length project on beer and local breweries in America and I understand that up until Prohibition, local breweries around the nation made a wide variety of sometimes very high quality beer. I hear the original recipe for Coors produces a quite delicious beer, though I have not had it. But after years of not drinking beer, the public had largely lost its taste for complex beers by 1933 and in order to survive, the breweries who managed to reopen after fourteen years found it in their interests to produce weak lagers that appealed to wider audience. I need to research this phenomenon in significantly more detail, but if we have the Volstead Act to blame for Miller Lite and Keystone, I am going to be even more full of rage than I already am.

Of course, the Volstead Act is hardly the only time the nation has decided to criminalize a drug for less than rational reasons. Many of the Volstead Act's less savory elements have contributed to the current War on Drugs. Combine this with a far more advanced police state than we had 90 years ago and you see the elimination of the 4th Amendment from providing any real protections for people, a skyrocketing prison population, and the forcing of perfectly decent people into lives of poverty and stigma because of harmless crimes.

All in all, I wonder if October 28, 1919 isn't one of the very worst days in American history. I know it's not quite on the same level as FDR's executive order placing Japanese- Americans in concentration camps or the founding of the KKK, or the election of George W. Bush, but it's pretty nightmarish. A social and political disaster, it reeked of the most disturbing and close-minded trends in American life that we still have to fight today.