Forgotten American Bastard Blogging: Thomas Midgley

Americans love technology. We follow technology's lead wherever it may take us. We don't care if it destroys all notions of privacy. We don't care that it pollutes the planet. We don't care that it is produced in the backyards of poor people. We don't care that we have to despoil developing world countries to make the stuff. None of this matters. When new technology comes knocking, we always answer the door. Of course, our national technological fetish has been pushed by industry and government as much as by consumer demand.

While much of this technology has made our lives better, some of it has had disastrous effects. A surprising amount of this technology was created by one man: Thomas Midgley. Born in 1889 in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, Midgley grew up in Columbus, Ohio and graduated from Cornell University in 1911 with a degree in mechanical engineering. In 1916, he began working at the Dayton Research Laboratories. A subsidiary of General Motors, Midgley was part of a team looking to improve the performance of automobiles.

In 1921, Midgley discovered that when you added lead to gasoline, it boosted engine performance and allowed manufactures to sell edgier and faster cars. People weren't really comfortable with leaded gasoline. We forget that early cars were not always precursors to the environmental nightmare of current automobiles. Many were electric. These electric cars were largely designed for women, who were not thought able to start an engine. Sadly, the industry  left these electric cars behind when engines became easier to start; in fact, today's technology barely surpasses that of the 1910s.

The problem Midgley was working on was something called "engine knock." Basically, electrical engines were causing the engine to rattle around at high (for the time) rate of speeds, potentially destroying it. Midgley discovered that if you add tetraethyl lead to gasoline, you eliminated the knock. The automobile, oil, and lead companies celebrated.

The thing is that there were other ways to get rid of engine knock. If you burned grain alcohol in an auto engine, you didn't get engine knock at all. But there was no money in grain alcohol. People could make their own fuel. That was not a good business model for GM, Standard Oil, and other interested parties.

But they faced opposition. In 1922, William Mansfield Clark from the U.S. Public Health Service publicly explained that tetraethyl lead was extremely poisonous and could endanger public health along highways and in cities. U.S. Surgeon General H.S. Cumming wrote a letter to Pierre du Point, chairman of the DELCO, the chemical company, about leaded gasoline's health hazards. Midgley was given the task of responding. He admitted that he had done no studies, but "the average street will probably be so free from lead that it will be impossible to detect it or its absorption." At the same time, Midgley himself was recovering from lead poisoning he received working on the project.

In 1923, GM agreed to allow the U.S. Bureau of Mines to do a study of leaded gasoline, but it forged agreement with the agency that the reserachers had to submit their report to GM first for comment. This ensured nothing damaging to the company would come out. A series of studies in the 1920s claimed lead gasoline caused no harm. Some scientists publicly attacked these biased studies, but GM had its way.

Meanwhile, beginning in 1923, DELCO was producing leaded gasoline. GM, Du Pont, and Standard Oil came together in 1924 to form a company to sell ethyl gasoline and America's leaded gasoline craze began in earnest. Unfortunately, people working on the project began dropping dead. 2 died of lead poisoning in 1923. They built a new plant in New Jersey, but 8 more workers died in the next year. In response to a public health outcry and in order to prove that leaded gasoline didn't cause sickness, Midgley called a press conference where he breathed in a bottle of tetraethyl gasoline for 60 seconds. However, he kept from the media that the case of lead poisoning he suffered was so severe that it took him nearly a year to recover.

Midgley also invented Freon, the world's first chlorofluorocarbon, in 1930.While the discovery of CFC's helped make Midgley a rich man and gave Americans air conditioning and hairspray cans, CFC's also put a huge hole in the ozone layer. After over fifty years of unregulated CFC use, a giant hole in the ozone layer developed over Antarctica that was definitively linked to CFC usage. Luckily, we have found this one environmental problem relatively fixable, as the hole has generally not grown in the last 20 years as most of the world has cut back on its CFC usage. Nevertheless, Midgely's invention proved spectacularly ruinous to the environment for most of the 20th century.

With his developed of both lead gasoline and CFC's one environmental historian noted that Midgley "had more impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in earth history."

Somewhat ironically, Midgley died from one of his own inventions, though not the ones that would kill so many others. In 1940, he contracted polio. He fought that terrible illness, designing a series of pulleys that would drag him from his bed. However, in 1944, he got caught up in the ropes and they strangled him.

Forgotten American Blogging: Julian Mayfield

Among the many important African-American civil rights figures that are largely forgotten today is Julian Mayfield. This pioneer of pan-Africanism provided a radical critique of race in the United States at an early stage of the civil rights movement and migrated to Ghana in 1961. While he never saw most of his dreams fulfilled, Mayfield stands an important reminder of the strong history of radical opposition to racism and that there were many ways of fighting against racism during the post-war era. Each contributed to the civil rights victories.

Born in Greer, South Carolina in 1928, Julian Mayfield grew up in Washington, D.C. He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and soon became involved in acting and writing plays. Mayfield became a member of the radical Harlem African-American arts scene with such figures as Maya Angelou, Harry Belafonte, Lorraine Hansberry, Sidney Portier, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee. He continued his literary career after he moved to Puerto Rico to escape McCarthy-era repression in 1954. There he published his first novel, 1957's The Hit, to strong reviews. He followed that up with The Long Night in 1958 and The Grand Parade in 1961. All of these books dealt with African-American issues in the ghetto and provided Mayfield's strong critique of American racism.

Mayfield was also a big supporter of the NAACP radical Robert Williams, who advocated that blacks arm themselves for protection from whites. Mayfield was visiting Williams' North Carolina house in 1961 when a mob attacked. When a group of whites tried to ram his car off a bridge, he grabbed his gun and started threatening them, much to the horror of the non-violent SNCC members there. Williams, Mayfield, and the rest of the civil rights workers escaped that night. Many went into exile. Williams headed to Cuba. Mayfield and his wife went to Ghana.

Mayfield moved to Africa to serve Ghana's new president, Kwame Nkrumah, however he could. Nkrumah was one of Africa's decolonization heroes and was the obvious choice to become president when that nation became independent in 1960. Nkrumah faced many of the problems that many decolonization leaders dealt with when he took over--a nation patched together among different tribal peoples, a long history of exploitation, deeply entrenched poverty, a weak central government, and endemic corruption. But Nkrumah also served as a hero for many African-Americans who saw him and the decolonization struggles as deeply connected to the problems of the African diaspora. Seeing a black hero and a black leader made Ghana the leading destination for radicalized African-Americans who had given up on any hope that the United States would ever provide their people with equal opportunities. The most famous expatriate was W.E.B. DuBois, who died in Ghana in 1963. But none was probably more influential in Ghana than Julian Mayfield.

Mayfield strongly believed that the American Dream would permanently be denied to African-Americans. He did not believe that African-Americans would ever see meaningful change, and in fact, said in 1959 that he saw "a tragic future for the American Negro people." During the late McCarthyist 1950s, Mayfield and other radicals saw Ghana, and exile more generally, as an attractive option from the atmosphere of repression they faced every day. As historian Kevin Gaines writes, "Ghana afforded them what was impossible in America: the freedom not just to speak but to advocate democratic socialism and economic justice; not just a sanctuary from exile but an external vantage point that enabled critical insight into U.S. overseas propaganda and the nation's relationship to the world....Their skepticism toward reformist racial change in the United States was informed by their location in Ghana, at the front lines of not only the African revolution but also the formation of a new American empire as the United States sought to expand its hegemony to Africa and to replace European hegemony there."

Mayfield was central to this expatriate effort. He placed great hope in the Nkrumah experiment and hoped to spread it throughout Africa. He openly criticized the United States' increasing role in Africa, particularly its complicity in the overthrow and assassination of Congo's president and anticolonization leader Patrice Lumumba. He began a journal entitled African Review, which served to promote revolutionary African and African-American ideas in an international context. He was hired by the Ghanaian government to promote its ideological agenda and did so with aplomb.

Mayfield certainly didn't find all his time in Ghana fulfilling. The American expatriates were suspected by many Ghana residents of being CIA stools, and in fact some African-Americans were working for the CIA. He didn't find himself being used by the Ghanaian government very much and certainly not to his satisfaction. He frequently considered moving to one of the newly freed east African nations. Finally by 1965, he looked to leave Ghana and did so, spending a couple of years in Europe. Still though, he supported Nkrumah even after a US-supported coup overthrew him in 1966 and blamed the United States for his fall.

Mayfield returned to the U.S. in 1968, teaching at various universities, as well as serving for 2 years as an advisor to Guyana's prime minister, Forbes Burnham. He wrote important critical essays throughout his later years critiquing African-American life during and immediately after the civil rights movement. He died in 1985.

Mayfield's life was hardly perfect. He was an alcoholic, which helped him toward an early death at the age of 56. His fictional writing mostly disappeared after his move to Ghana. He defended Nkrumah to the end, even though the latter made a lot of mistakes that helped galvanize opposition to him. He found his return to the US rough; he was unable to find steady university appointments and those he did receive often included onerous teaching loads. But Mayfield was a very important representative of a particular kind of African-American liberation thought. He dedicated his life to improving the lot of his people and Africans more generally. He tried to accomplish good and he did to a great extent. I don't know how much more we can ask of a person.

Most of this information comes from Kevin Gaines' interesting book, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2006.

Forgotten Bastard Blogging: Earl Butz

The unfortunately but perhaps appropriately named Earl "Rusty" Butz was a true American bastard. Not only was he a complete asshole and racist, but he has contributed more than any single person in American history to the obesity epidemic in the United States today.

Butz was the Secretary of Agriculture under both Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. I know you are surprised that an appointee of Nixon would make Bastard Blogging, but sometimes shocking things take place. Butz was born in beautiful Albion, Indiana in 1909. In 1932, Butz graduated from Purdue University, which by chance will be losing to the University of Oregon in a football game this fall. In 1935, he received a Ph.D. from the same institution in Agricultural Economics.

He quickly rose in the farm world. By 1948, Butz became vice-president of the American Agricultural Economics association and in 1954, President Eisenhower named him Assistant Secretary of Agriculture. He served there until 1957. He resigned that year and went back to Purdue, becoming a member of the school's administration. Occupying high posts in a university administration is a pretty good reason to make Bastard Blogging but that is not the reason we are discussing Butz today. He also served on the board of directors of several food companies, including Ralston Purina.

In 1971, Butz became Secretary of Agriculture under Nixon, a position he served in until 1976. This is where he really earned his bastard stripes. First, he was an incorrigible racist. He made fun of Pope Paul VI's Italian accent publicly, which was bad enough. But in 1976, he was on a flight to the Republican National Convention with Pat Boone and John Dean. Boone asked why black people didn't vote Republican (um, perhaps because the Republican party of 2008, er, 1976 was openly racist). Butz responded:

"the only thing coloreds are looking for in life are tight pussy, loose shoes, and a warm place to shit."

John Dean leaked this to Time magazine, which jumped on the story. Perhaps they also explained the loose shoes reference, which makes absolutely no sense to me. Anyway, Butz was forced to resign.

Classy, eh? I'll bet Nixon and Butz had a good ol'time telling racist jokes in the Oval Office.

Butz also served time for tax evasion in 1981, though all but 30 days of his 5 year sentence was suspended. Typical. You know, if we threw wealthy tax evading criminals into real prison for their offenses and made them serve their sentences, I bet we'd see a lot less tax evasion.

What I really hate Butz for is his role in spurring unregulated corn production. You might ask how corn production is worse than a racist joke. Certainly his racist joke is reprehensible, but it doesn't make him any different than just about anyone else in the Nixon administration. But his corn policies are a major reason for the food problems we have today.

In 1972, the Soviets were suffering from bad harvests. The US offered to sell the Soviets all the grain they needed. From a geopolitical perspective, this was a sensible move. It was a nice peace gesture to the Soviets and saved people from dying. It was also intended to undermine support for George McGovern in farm states that fall. This turned out to be an unnecessary worry.

According to the environmental writer Michael Pollan, the problem with the grain sell off is that it took place at the same time that bad weather undermined the nation's grain crops, sending food prices spiraling up and leading directly to the big inflation problems that began in 1973. Butz, a free market fanatic, responded by encouraging farmers to grow all the grain they could. He dismantled the New Deal program of price supports for farm goods and replaced them with direct payments to farmers. Butz believed that the New Deal was nothing more than socialism that hurt American farmers because its programs didn't allow them to grow all the crops they wanted. Nevermind that the New Deal agricultural programs worked pretty well before Butz' time and had helped end the continual farm crises that plagued the nation throughout its history. Butz was a true believer in the free market. Reality be damned.

The transition from ending price supports to paying farmers directly sounds minor, but as Pollan explains, what this did was end the price floor for corn. When corn prices got low, the government subsidized farmers to ensure they still would keep growing up. The American taxpayer picked up this cost. American consumers would have cheap food. Agribusiness could handle the cost of low-priced corn. Small farmers got squeezed pretty hard by this and were forced to keep growing corn (and then soybeans for the same reason) because it became the only cash crop to sell, despite the abysmal prices.

The effect of Butz's policy was to make it in farmers' interests to grow as much corn as possible. This led to an immense amoutn of corn. The food industry began inventing ways to use that corn. The most profitable and widespread was high fructose corn syrup. This was invented in 1980 and today makes up an enormous part of our diet. Corn syrup replaced sugar in many products, most notably soda. And when just changing from sugar to corn syrup wasn't enough to consume all that corn, the soda companies just made their products bigger. Americans liked that a lot. High fructose corn syrup found its way into many other foods as well, from hot dogs to ketchup to chips to bread. All of this corn-based sugar that Butz and his agribusiness friends forced us to eat has led to not only high levels of obseity but also the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes that we are now only coming to terms with.

Perhaps Earl Butz doesn't deserve all the blame for this transformation. Agribusiness would have found some other tool to make massive crop production and low prices happen anyway. But Butz did start the process, changing the way Americans farm, eat, and live. And all for the worse. Combine this with his racism, tax evasion, and just general bad nature, and you have yourself one fine example of an American bastard.

I consulted Michael Pollan's The Omnivore Dilemma and this Tom Philpott post from Grist, which goes into more detail on the changes to farming.

Forgotten American Bastard Blogging: Elihu Root

Elihu Root was Secretary of State under William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. He was a leading architect of American imperialism. He may not quite be on the bastard level of, say, Philander Knox, but in my view, he was a pretty bad guy. If you think American imperialism was great, maybe you'll feel differently.

Elihu Root was born a member of the New York elite in 1845. The men of this elite class from New York would come to dominate American foreign policy (and much of American domestic policy) during the McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft administrations. Among them was Theodore Roosevelt, born in 1858. Root became one of America's leading corporate lawyers during the Gilded Age, representing such fine Americans as Boss Tweed and Jay Gould among others.

In 1899, Root was named Secretary of War by the new president, William McKinley. In this role, he did do a good thing. He dedicated himself to professionalizing the U.S. military. While I'm certainly no fan of the military today, the amateur nature of the institution in the 19th century was pretty unacceptable, including the reliance on the militia, i.e., the National Guard, for major conflicts. Root expanded West Point, established the U.S. Army War College, as well as the General Staff.

Root was an ardent imperialist. He was the primary author of the Platt Amendment. Imperialists were upset over the Teller Amendment of 1898, which forbade the United States from taking Cuba as a colony. So Root and others did all they could to make Cuba a quasi-colony after the Spanish-American War. The Platt Amendment forced Cuba to allow the United States to station troops in Cuba, limited Cuba in the conduct of its foreign relations, and allowed the U.S. to establish a permanent naval base on the island at Guantanamo Bay. And nothing bad ever happened there again. The U.S. army ended its official occupation of Cuba in 1902 but the survival of Cuban governments depended almost entirely on U.S. approval until the Cuban Revolution succeeded in 1959.

In 1905, Root became Secretary of State for Theodore Roosevelt's second term. Root was primarily responsible for the Open Door policy. I like calling the philosophy of the Open Door "Equal Imperialism for All." By 1900, Chinese ports had been divided up among the European powers, as well as Japan. The U.S. wanted access to Chinese markets. European powers were less interested in providing that access. Feeling left out of the general looting of China, Root and U.S. policy makers pleaded with Europe to accept the Open Door policy, which would allow everyone to trade everywhere in China. To say the least, this was ignored by Europe. John Hay, McKinley's Secretary of State, first promulgated this policy in 1900 and Root pushed it during the latter half of that decade.

Root also pressed for increased intervention with Latin America, hoping to turn the area into a corporate colony for U.S. interests. In 1906, he returned to the U.S. after a trip to the region. He told a convention of businessmen that the time had come for the U.S. to dominate Latin America. He discussed the differences between the two regions: "Where we accumulate, they spend. While we have less of the cheerful philosophy" which finds "happiness in the existing conditions of life," they have less of the inventive faculty which strives continually to increase the productive power of men." Very nice.

Root also helped press for the Gentleman's Agreement between the United States and Japan in 1907. Japanese immigrants came to the U.S. in large numbers during the late 19th century. White Californians, who saw their state as a place for whites only, were furious, especially once the Japanese began having economic success in farming. At the same time, the Japanese government was growing and becoming more powerful. They were less interested in having their citizens leave since their work at home could lead to a more powerful Japan. So Root and Roosevelt agreed with the Japanese to stop most permanent immigration from Japan. The Japanese government and racist Californians were happy. As for the Japanese people, no one asked them.

In 1909, Root became a senator from New York, where he continued his influential role in American foreign policy. He only served one term, leaving office in 1915. He spent the rest of his life working for influential agencies and corporations that dealt with international issues. In particular, he the president of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace from 1910 until 1925. He received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912 for his work. That said, it's not as if the Nobel Peace Prize always goes to people who really believe in peace. After all, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger are also past winners. Root belongs closer to this group than to real peace advocates.

Root opposed Woodrow Wilson during his first term. Part of this is that he wanted the Republican nomination for president in 1916, which went to Charles Evans Hughes instead. But Root also wanted the U.S. to join World War I. Root was part of a generation of men who believed that war defined masculinity. Like Roosevelt, Madison Grant, and other New York elites, Root hoped that war would regenerate the United States, allowing for a glorious Anglo-Saxon race that would properly rule the world. The carnage of World War I pretty much killed this extreme romanticization of war, though the connections between masculinity and war remain strong in American culture to this day.

Once the U.S. joined World War I in 1917, Root supported Wilson more or less. He began advising the president. After the overthrow of the Russian Czar in 1917, Wilson sent Root to Russia to help shore up the new government, an abject failure given the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.

Root's final accomplishment was growing really old. For awhile he was the nation's oldest living senator. He finally died in 1937 at the age of 91.

Does Elihu Root qualify for Bastard Blogging? For the Platt Amendment alone I have to say yes. On the other hand, his professionalization of the military actually was a good thing. But not good enough to make up for his excitement over fighting World War I, his role in the Open Door, and the Gentleman's Agreement, as well as the Platt Amendment.

Much of this information comes from Michael H. Hunt's The American Ascendancy: How the United States Gained & Wielded Global Dominance, a newish book I hope to write a full review on by the end of the week, and Walter LaFeber's classic work, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America.

Forgotten American Blogging: Victoria Woodhull

I thought I'd write about a character in last week's discussion of Anthony Comstock for this edition of Forgotten American Blogging. Comstock's nemesis, Victoria Woodhull, is a fascinating woman in her own right and easily deserving of a post.

Born Victoria Claflin in Homer, Ohio in 1838, Woodhull became one of the most notorious figures of the Gilded Age. She entered a bad marriage when she was 15. She met an alcoholic doctor from Rochester named Canning Woodhull. She quickly had two children by him. It seemed like she would be become a pretty standard housewife of the mid-19th century. Thinking about her awful marriage though, she became attracted to free love. The mid-19th century was a time of great ferment in American society. Industrialization spawned a wide variety of reform movements from abolitionism and temperance to Mormonism and solitary confinement. Among these reforms were also feminism and different sorts of sexual experimentation which ranged from free love and polygamy to the weird celibate rituals of the Shakers.

Victoria wanted out of her bad marriage. Divorce was not easy to come by in these years. For example, I have examined state legislative records from Washington Territory from the late 1850s. To get a divorce, you had to have it approved by the territorial legislature. Sometimes they approved it, sometimes not. But it was certainly not easy anywhere in the country, especially for a woman. For Woodhull then, free love was about being with a partner of your choosing outside of marriage. She is sometimes seen as a pioneer of the sexual revolution, but that is not really accurate, for she believed in monogamy, just outside of the bonds of marriage. However, what is important here is that if the relationship didn't work out, either party should be free to move onto another partner, which was farther than some free love advocates were willing to go.

Woodhull was also a bit of a financial genius. She was born to a very poor family, but got rich pretty young when she became a magnetic healer. This kind of odd spiritualism was again part of the societal upheavals of the Industrial Revolution and there was a real market for new religious movements, weird as they may seem today. In 1870, Woodhull joined with her sister to become the first woman stock trader on Wall Street. She knew Cornelius Vanderbilt and he backed her for this pioneering venture. While some newspapers thought this was a good thing, many New Yorkers were disgusted by the idea that a woman could be on Wall Street. Publications came out comparing her and her sister to prostitutes and showing them in sexualized positions (which to be fair, could have been showing an ankle or something. It was 1870 after all).

Woodhull, along with her sister Tennessee, took the money they made on Wall Street and opened a radical paper in 1870. By this time, the reform spirit in the U.S. was pretty much dead. The religious movements of the antebellum days had sunk into obscurity or exile. Feminism was isolated. Temperance was still strong but concern for the rights of freed African-Americans was in decline. People began seeing Reconstruction as a failure. The Gilded Age was upon us. There wasn't a lot of tolerance for an old-style radical. The Woodhull sisters did not care. Their paper published the first American printing of Karl Marx's The Communist Manifesto in 1871. It promoted such ideas as free love (still, the more conservative version of it), vegetarianism, women's suffrage, and, God forbid, short skirts. The famous cartoonist Thomas Nast drew an image of her entitled, "Mrs. Satan." She appeared as a devilish figure holding a sign reading, "Be Saved by Free Love," showing it to a woman suffering from an alcoholic husband and poverty. The woman's response, "I'd rather travel the hardest path of matrimony than follow your footsteps." So as you can see, Woodhull kind of shook up Gilded Age men.

In 1871, she announced herself in her typically boisterous fashion to the American public. Thanks to one of her patrons, the Massachusetts Senator Benjamin Butler, Woodhull addressed the House Judiciary Committee, claiming that women already had the right to vote, which was guaranteed in the 14th and 15th Amendments. She quickly became a leader in the suffrage movement, even though her self-promotion and prickly personality quickly turned leaders like Susan B. Anthony against her. She also had the unfortunate tendency to brand her newspaper as a weapon. When people crossed her, she threatened to publish the sexual histories of her enemies, which included prominent members of the suffrage movements, as well as other prominent Americans. Suffragists later accused her of extortion, saying that she wanted $500 to keep quiet about their sexual activities. She denied this and said she just wanted them to stop gossiping about her. Either way, the situation hardly puts her in a good light.

In 1872, the newly created Equal Rights Party nominated Woodhull for president and Frederick Douglass for vice-president, though he never acknowledged it. Anthony refused to vote for her, instead casting her non-counting ballot for President Ulysses S. Grant. Despite the abject failure of her campaign and the split it caused within the feminist movement, she became nationally known for her actions.

It was the paper that made Woodhull nationally notorious. First of all, there was her run for president which she promoted through her infamous media outlet. But if that wasn't enough, she attacked an American religious institution on November 2, 1872, just before the election. For the nation's most famous minister, Henry Ward Beecher, denounced her free love philosophy. However, she found out that Beecher was sleeping with one of his parishioners. She published this tale and all hell broke loose. Adultery was a crime in these days. Her charges led to Beecher going to trial for this in 1875. It also helped destroy her. Woodhull, her husband, and her sister were arrested on charges on indecency for sending such filth through the mail. This is where Anthony Comstock came in. Comstock, on the verge of becoming a nationally known figure, set his fangs of intolerance against her. He was as media-savvy as she; for both, the ensuing trial was a chance to press their agendas to a larger public. Although she was found not guilty by a technicality, Comstock won the ultimate battle. He went on to national fame. Her career was over.

Depressed, and abandoned by the suffragist movement for a move that they rightfully saw as a self-promoting stunt, Woodhull left for England. She remained active in that country for a short time. She married for the third time, to the English gentleman John Biddulph Martin, in 1883. She remained somewhat active in U.S. life, trying to run for president again in 1884 and 1892. She ran a magazine during the 1890s. But after the death of her husband in 1901, she led the quiet life of a member of the landed gentry until her death in 1927.

Like most figures from the past, Victoria Woodhull is a bit hard to judge. Certainly she is an important early feminist. Her positions on women's rights are mostly quite admirable. However, she did strongly oppose abortion and seems to havebelieved that life began at conception. She was also an early eugenicist. To be fair, it is believed she was influenced in this because her son was extremely mentally retarded, something she blamed on her first husband's alcoholism. Finally, there is her blackmail of other suffragists. She mostly seems like a really unpleasant person to know. Still, like most figures, we have to look at the good and bad surrounding Woodhull and there was plenty of both. Nonetheless, there's no question that she is an important figure of 19th century women's history that needs to be known by a much wider audience.

For further reading, see Johanna Johnston's Mrs. Satan: The Incredible Saga of Victoria C. Woodhull and Lois Beachy Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull. And like last week's discussion of Comstock, Helen Lefkowtiz Horowitz's excellent article, "Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s," from the September 2000 issue of the Journal of American History was extremely valuable in putting this together.

Forgotten American Bastard Blogging: Anthony Comstock

Has there ever been a more loathsome American than Anthony Comstock? The self-appointed regulator of American morality, Comstock acquired great power during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through taking advantage of the anxieties of the upper classes to pass anti-obscenity legislation and prosecute those he thought were smut-peddlers. Loathed even in his own time, but with powerful protectors, Comstock represents the worst of puritanical America. His pernicious influence still lives with us today.

Comstock was born in New Canaan, Connecticut on March 7, 1844. He grew up as a Congregationalist. I don't think the Congregationalists can engage in postmortem excommunications, but they may want to rethink this policy for Comstock. He enlisted in the Civil War, fighting for the Union between 1863 and 1865. Sadly, Confederate bullets missed Comstock. He started his moralizing crusades while in the military, protesting against the use of foul language by his fellow soldiers. By all accounts, the soldiers that served with Comstock ridiculed him mercilessly, seeing him for the uptight bastard that he was. He poured his own ration of whiskey on the ground, which would have convinced me to ridicule him too.

After the war, Comstock took a job with the YMCA in New York City. He saw a city teeming with prostitutes and pornography. While he was right about this, he was also disturbed that people might also enjoy sex. Even by this early date, the YMCA was a center for gay men to hook up, though I am not sure how aware Comstock was of this. While working at the YMCA, Comstock managed to prosecute two men for peddling pornography. One of the men later slashed him with a knife, leaving a good sized scar on his face. Like during the Civil War, Comstock managed to survive, helping to show that evil is hard to kill.

Comstock's first bit of fame came in 1872 when he attacked the feminist Victoria Woodhull after she reported a story detailing an affair famous American preacher Henry Ward Beecher had with one of his congregants. Woodhull was already famous in America in 1872. She declared she was running for president and convinced Massachusetts Senator Benjamin Butler to make a statement on her behalf before Congress, claiming that as citizens, women already had the right to vote. Woodhull also advocated free love, making her scandalous at the time. Woodhull's belief that sex might be a good thing brought Comstock's wrath upon her. Woodhull was arrested under obscenity statues for this story. She correctly argued that if she was a man, she would not have been arrested. But for Comstock, women talking about sex was even worse than men talking about sex. A technicality got Woodhull off, but Comstock became famous around the nation. He also destroyed Woodhull in the process. She lost her backers, moved to England, and married a proper gentleman, retreating into a traditional Victorian marriage.

Comstock frequently referred to himself in typical modest fashion as "the weeder in God's garden." In 1873, Comstock started on his national career of prudity by creating the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Through his powerful congressional benefactors, Comstock pushed through Congress in 1874 the notorious Comstock Law, which made illegal sending "obscene, lewd, and lascivious" material through the U.S. mail. Examples of such material included information on birth control and biology textbooks that showed accurate representations of the human body. Comstock believed the birth control devices caused lust to rise in the human body and lewd behavior to follow. It was primarily to stop birth control from being propagated that Comstock fought for the law that bears his name. Soon after, 24 states enacted similar laws to prevent the dissemination of birth control on the state level. The worst of these laws was in Comstock's home state of Connecticut, where even the use of birth control was a violation of the law. Married couples could be prosecuted for using birth control in the privacy of their own homes and sentenced to a year in prison.

Comstock saw all erotic material as, "a deadly poison, cast into the fountain of moral purity." Erotic books, "breeds lust. Lust defiles the body, debauches the imagination, corrupts the mind, deadens the will, destroys the memory, sears the conscience, hardens the heart, and damns the soul. It unnerves the arm, and steals away the elastic step."

Comstock used to brag about how 15 people had killed themselves because of his attacks. Among them was Ida Craddock. Craddock has been convicted violating the obscenity laws for authoring sexually explicit marriage manuals and sending them to paying couples who needed help in the bedroom. On the eve of reporting to federal prison for such a heinous crime, Craddock killed herself, leaving a lengthy note blaming Comstock for driving her to this. It was one of his proudest moments.

Comstock also had other obsessions. For instance, he managed to shut down the Louisiana Lottery, the only public lottery in the United States at the time. He really loved burning books too. He claimed to have arrested more than 3000 people and burned 15 tons of books in his career. He also fought against abortion and went after abortion providers with all the power he could muster. But abortion had many proponents during the Gilded Age. For instance, he had Sarah Chase arrested five times for violations of the Comstock Law because she was sending birth control through the mail, as well as for providing abortion. She was convicted only once, when a patient died after an abortion. Chase fought back too, suing Comstock for $10,000 after her 1878 arrest. She didn't win, but she continually outfoxed Comstock through their dual careers. Birth control and abortion were widely sought after in America, even though people had to go underground to find it.

Many of Comstock's contemporaries held a special place in their heart for hating Comstock. George Bernard Shaw coined the term "comstockery," meaning "censorship because of perceived obscenity or immorality," after Comstock attacked his play "Mrs. Warren's Profession." Shaw said, "Comstockery is the world's standing joke at the expense of the United States. Europe likes to hear of such things. It confirms the deep-seated conviction of the Old World that America is a provincial place, a second-rate country-town civilization after all." Comstock, showing all the class you would expect, simply referred to Shaw as an "Irish smut peddler."

As the historian Andrea Tone writes,

After 1873 others, too, let their own views on morality and privacy guide their assessments of contraceptive criminality. Although Comstock took solace in blaming repeated acts of clemency on the ineptitude of officials or the treachery of his enemies, it was the reasoned deliberation of those who made up the court system, not its corruption, that returned birth control proprietors to the streets. To be sure, the leniency accorded birth control offenders may have been related to widespread loathing of Comstock, the man. Comstock's belligerence and courtroom histrionics offended judges, alienated prosecutors, and prompted a steady stream of derogatory editorials, cartoons, and poems in turn-of-the-century newspapers and journals. But, although the frequent ridiculing of Comstock may help explain support for violators of the Comstock Law in general, it cannot account for the special leniency accorded birth control offenders in particular. Rather, those entrusted with the responsibility for enforcing contraceptive laws made choices that bespoke tolerance of birth control and compassion toward those who sold it, a willingness to see as gray what Comstock could see only as black-and-white. The judicial decisions of an age when popular attitudes toward criminal behavior and reproductive control are often difficult to gauge index broad-based support of bootleg birth control. Such support had economic ramifications. Favoring acquittal almost as often as conviction and light sentencing as a rule, judges and jurors created an environment in which black market birth control could thrive.

Emma Goldman, the famous anarchist and feminist, loved Comstock almost as much as Shaw, called him the head of America's "moral eunuchs." Many local police officers and judges hated Comstock's laws as much as Shaw and Goldman and just refused to enforce them. Only 16 out of 105 people arrested for birth control violations between 1873 and 1898 were sent to prison. In virtually all the cases they were guilty of the violating the law, but sympathetic judges and juries usually either dismissed the charges, found them not guilty, or suspended the sentences. Ulysses S. Grant, who signed the Comstock Law, also felt sympathy and went out of his way to pardon 5 of the 12 people sentenced to prison during his presidency. His successor, Rutherford B. Hayes, also pardoned at least one person.

On the other hand, Comstock did have his followers. One big fan was J. Edgar Hoover. I guess cross-dressing wasn't so obscene in those days. I'm sure Comstock would have agreed.

Comstock died on September 21, 1915. His health suffered in his later years after an anonymous attacker whacked him in the head. Unfortunately, his assiliant failed to kill him and he managed to pollute the planet for several more years.

Immediately after his death, the young birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger began her campaign to overturn these laws. In 1916, she opened the nation's first birth control clinic, in New York City. She was arrested for violating the Comstock Laws. In 1918, courts sided with Sanger, making it legal for women to use birth control devices, though only for therapeutic purposes. In 1936, Sanger pushed a case that resulted in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in United States v. One Package that made it legal to distribute contraceptives across state lines. This made it legal to mail birth control devices around the nation.

Modern day disciples of Comstock must include former Attorney General John Ashcroft first and foremost. Ashcroft used his time in the office to fight against sex any way he could, including in 2002 covering up the semi-nude statue "Spirit of Justice" at the cost of $8000 of taxpayer money. The statue was in the press conference room in the Justice Department. The site of a nude breast on a statue was too much for Ashcroft to bear. Someday, after he dies, Ashcroft will deserve a Forgotten Bastard post of his own.

This information comes from a variety of places. Several websites to be sure. I also looked at Nicola Beisel's Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America, published by Princeton in 1997, Heywood Broun and Margaret Leech's 1927 biography, Anthony Comstock: Roundsman of the Lord, which is more critical than you might expect, Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz's article, "Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s," published in the Journal of American History in September 2000, and Andrea Tone's excellent piece, "Black Market Birth Control: Contraceptive Entrepreneurship and Criminality in the Gilded Age," also published in the Journal of American History in September 2000.

Allow me to say how much I enjoyed researching and writing this post. May you all do something obscene tonight and dedicate it to the memory of Anthony Comstock, American Bastard.

Forgotten American Blogging: Ella Baker

Kevin Levin, the writer of the excellent blog Civil War Memory, wrote this on Martin Luther King Day:

Martin Luther King Day has become too fashionable. At its worst it reinforces a skewed memory of the Civil Rights Movement as beginning with his organization of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 and ending with his assassination in 1968. It also obscures the complexity of organization on the grassroots level and the fissures that existed within the movement that followed generational, geographic, and gender lines. King's words are no doubt stirring and his actions are a model of civic dissent, but we run the risk of reducing the struggle for civil rights and its importance to the broader narrative of freedom down to a few choice lines and poor generalizations.

I could not agree more. I have complained about this myself. Levin chose to remember Vernon Johns on that day, a man certainly worth a Forgotten American post. Check it out.

I am going to take this opportunity to discuss another forgotten member of the civil rights movement, Ella Baker.

Baker was born in Norfolk, Virginia on December 13, 1903. Her grandmother installed a sense of injustice in her, telling her stories about being whipped in slavery for refusing to marry a man her master had picked out for her. She attended Shaw University, where she began developing her activism. She graduated as valedictorian and moved to New York where she became a full-fledged activist, including joining the Young Negroes' Cooperative League in 1930, which was an early black power organization, working for black economic self-sufficiency. She taught courses on African and labor history, as well as consumer education while working for the Works Progress Administration during the New Deal. She worked to free the Scottsboro Boys, protested against fascism, and more generally engaged in the social and political ferment of the 1930s.

Baker started her work for the NAACP in 1940. Beginning in 1943, she served as director of various branches of the organization, which she continued until 1946. In 1952, she became president of the New York City branch of the NAACP where she worked on issues of police brutality and school desegregation. In 1957, she left the NAACP to work for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that had been founded by Martin Luther King, Jr. following the successful Montgomery Bus Boycott. While working for the SCLC she organized voter registration campaigns among other things.

But here's the thing--because she was a woman, her incredible organizing skills were almost completely ignored by the extremely sexist leadership of the civil rights organizations. They had almost no one more qualified than Baker, but they never utilized her talents to the extent she deserved. Baker was also a strong feminist and had involved herself in women's rights campaigns since very early in her activist career.

Baker knew this of course and chafed against King, Ralph Abernathy, and the other sexist leaders of the movement. She respected their work on civil rights of course; that's why she stuck it out. But she was constantly frustrated, both by the overt sexism and because she knew she should take a larger role in the movement.

Rather than wait for the SCLC to understand gender equality, Baker moved on her own. When the four North Carolina A&T students engaged in their sit-in at the Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's, she recognized the potential of student activism far faster than the men of the SCLC. One thing that is forgotten in traditional narratives of the civil rights movement is that by 1960, it had stagnated. The success in Montgomery brought international fame to King and he continued to speak out and work on the issues. But there was deep disagreement within the SCLC on where to go next. Some wanted more bus boycotts, others wanted to work within the courts to overturn segregation. Remember that the only event between 1955 and 1960 that ever gets talked about is the Little Rock desegregation case and King had very little to do with that.

It took students to get the civil rights movement back on track. Baker quit the SCLC after the sit-ins. She organized a conference of the new student activists spreading across the South at her alma mater, Shaw University. Out of that was born the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which served as the core student organization within the movement until the late 1960s. Baker was their mentor; an experienced veteran who understood the long history of organizing around civil rights, a woman who encouraged students' direct actions and both listened to their issues and provided guidance and leadership. Among the activities that SNCC coordinated was the Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Mississippi voter registration that led to Freedom Summer in 1964. Baker herself played a key role in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in 1964 that traveled to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City to challenge the seating of the all-white delegation from Mississippi.

After 1964, Baker moved back to New York where much of her family lived. She took a bit more of a backseat on national campaigns after this, but remained active the rest of her life. She played an important role in the Free Angela Davis campaign, traveling the country speaking about the issue in 1972. She supported the independence movements of the developing world and particularly spoke out in favor of Puerto Rican independence and against South African apartheid.

Moreover, Baker got pretty annoyed as she saw the King-centered narrative of the civil rights movement developed. She notoriously said things like, "[the] movement made Martin, and not Martin the movement" and "There is also the danger in our culture that because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement." Even during the movement's height, she told activists that they needed to take control of the movement and not rely on a leader with "heavy feet of clay." Baker reflected the feelings of many of the more direct-action oriented in the movement on these issues.

Baker continued the struggle until her death on December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday. Both during her life and after her death, Baker's role has been consistently ignored by mainstream narratives of the civil rights movements. Among historians, Baker is mentioned but most of us tell fairly traditional stories about the movement with King in the middle. Even if we do focus on student radicalism, as I do when I teach the survey, Baker gets less attention than she should. It's far sexier to talk about the direct actions than the planning that went into those actions. Students are more interested in freedom riders being beaten by Alabama mobs than conferences in North Carolina. Yet none of this would have happened in the same way without the leadership of Ella Baker.

Baker believed strongly that collective power could counteract evil. In her own words:

“The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence…”

While she was talking about southern racism specifically, we can apply these words to fighting any sort of evil. Baker also fought against top-down political structures within activist communities, working to promote the participatory democracy that is so prevalent within social justice movements today. While occasionally I have found decentralized structures frustrating because it can lead to a lack of things getting done, consensus building also serves to empower people and get members to buy into organizations and the ideas they work around.

Where Baker is remembered is the activist community. I particularly want to point people to the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, which seems to work on African-American and urban issues in Oakland.

Unlike many of the people I write about in this series, Baker does have an excellent biography. Barbara Dansby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2003. Ted Glick has a wonderful remembrance of Baker at ZNet as well. There is also a 1981 documentary about Baker but it doesn't seem available.

Forgotten American Blogging: Barbara Jordan

I'm restarting the long lost Forgotten American Blogging series. It used to be just on Tuesdays, but I can't really commit to doing it every week at this point. So it will be more occasional I guess.

Although she died only 12 years ago, Barbara Jordan is pretty well forgotten about today by anyone who was not familiar with her during her life. The only possible reason any of my students would know about her is that the main terminal in the Austin airport is named after her and there is a big statue there of her. But there's no explanation as to who the heck she is.

And as at least some people know, she was an extremely brave and important person in U.S. history.

Born in Houston in 1936 to a Baptist minister and a domestic worker, Benjamin and Arlyne Jordan, Barbara Jordan would rise to become the first African-American woman ever elected to Congress from the South. She attended Texas Southern University, where she became a national champion debater. Her oratory skills became her calling card years later when she was a national political figure. She graduated from TSU in 1956 with a dual degree in political science and history. She then went to Boston University for her law degree, graduating in 1959. Jordan spent a year at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama before returning to Texas to take the bar, which she passed in 1960, becoming only the third African-American woman to be licensed as a lawyer in the state.

Jordan always had political ambitions. She ran for the Texas Senate in both 1962 and 1964, losing both times. But she won in 1966, becoming the first African-American to serve in the Texas Senate since 1883. She quickly moved up in the body, becoming chair of the Labor and Management Relations Committee and, in 1972, president pro tempore.

In 1972, she ran for the U.S. Congress and was elected from her Houston district. She was helped by her political mentor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, who helped ensure her a seat on the House Judiciary Committee. As a member of that committee, she became a leader in the fight to impeach Richard Nixon. She gave a speech during a televised session of the committee meeting that propelled her into national spotlight. She famously said,

"Earlier today we heard the beginning of the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, We the people. It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed, on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that We, the people. I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court decision I have finally been included in We, the people.

Today I am an inquisitor. I believe hyperbole would not be fictional and would not overstate the solemness that I feel right now. My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total. I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution."

She worked hard during her short time in Congress for working people and people of color around the nation. She lobbied to expand the 1965 Voting Rights Act to cover Mexican-Americans. She helped push the Workman's Compensation Act, which significantly increased benefits to workers injured on the job. She also sponsored the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which required banks to make lending services available to poor and minority communities.

Jordan's political ambitions remained high. She gave the keynote address at the 1976 Democratic National Convention, a feat she would repeat in 1992. Jimmy Carter was interested in naming her either attorney general or U.N. ambassador but she remained in Congress. She was interested in challenging Republican Senator John Tower in 1978. However, although she was barely 40 years old, her health was in a state of collapse due to multiple sclerosis, which she started fighting in 1973. Instead, she retired from Congress because her health could not stand the workload any longer.

She went home to Texas where she became a professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas. But her impact of public affairs was not confined to the classroom. She came back to Washington in 1987 to testify against the nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court. She ripped Bork apart in her testimony:

I am opposed to the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court of the United States. My opposition is not a knee-jerk reaction of followership to the people or organizations whose views I respect. My opposition is a result of thinking about this matter with some care, of reading the White House position paper in support of Robert Bork, of reading the Judiciary Committee's point-by-point response to that position paper, discussing the matter with friends and people I respect, reading some of Judge Bork's writings. But more than any of that, my opposition to this nomination is really a result of living fifty-one years as a black American born in the South and determined to be heard by the majority community.

Remember that Bork played a huge role in Watergate and that Jordan became famous because of her speech regarding Nixon's impeachment. Bork was the key figure in the Saturday Night Massacre on October 20, 1973, firing special prosecutor Archibald Cox when both Attorney General Elliott Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned before they would do so. In the Bork confirmation hearings, Jordan said

All I can say is that on the day and at the time that Robert Bork fired Archibald Cox, there were rules and regulations in place, viable, alive, with the force and effect of law. They were violated, and, to me, that means the solicitor general acted illegally...For you to confirm Robert Bork to the Supreme Court I think sends the wrong message. I believe that such a confirmation would indicate that it is all right with you for a person to sit on the Supreme Court who has utter disdain for the Office of Special Prosecutor....A new justice should help us stay the course, not abort the course.

Texas Supreme Court justice Rose Spector later said, "I knew it was all over for Bork when I saw Barbara Jordan wheel into the committee room to testify against him." Instead of Bork, we have Anthony Kennedy, who is a conservative guy but one who is massively less terrible than Bork would have been. Thanks to Jordan's testimony, as well as others, innumerable bad Court decisions have not happened. Can you imagine a Court right now made up of Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Bork? Say goodbye to Roe to begin with.

Bill Clinton was a great admirer of hers. He considered her for a Supreme Court nomination, though her health would not allow it. He did grant her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.

Jordan's health remained terrible however. She died in 1996, at the age of only 59, and with the last 18 years of her life forced out political life because of that health. One must wonder what would have happened if she had lived a long life. Would she have been the first black female president? Could she have knocked out both barriers at once? Even today, she would only be 72, the same age as John McCain.

But Jordan would not only be the first black female president. She also would have been the first lesbian president. Jordan had a lifelong partner, Nancy Earl. Jordan kept her sexuality out of the press. For a politician in the 1970s, the taint of homosexuality would likely have killed their political ambitions, possibly not in her congressional district, but certainly nationally. Have we come very far from that? I don't know. It's at least possible that Janet Napolitano, the governor of Arizona, may be a lesbian. She should be a leading candidate for the vice-presidential nomination. And people are already worried about how her sexuality would play in front of a national audience.

I will close this post by quoting the closing remarks Jordan gave at her keynote speech for the 1976 Democratic National Convention

Now, we must look to the future. Let us heed the voice of the people and recognize their common sense. If we do not, we not only blaspheme our political heritage, we ignore its common ties that bind all Americans. The great danger America faces is that we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups--city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual, each seeking to satisfy private wants. If this happens, who will then speak for America? Who then will speak for the common good? This is the question to be answered in 1976.

Are we to be one people bound together by a common spirit, sharing in a common endeavor, or will we become a divided nation?

We must address and master the future together. It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done. There is no law that can require us to form a national community. This we must do as individuals. There is no president of the United States that can veto that decision.

As a first step we must restore our belief in ourselves. We are a generous people, so why can't we be generous with each other. We need to take to heart the words spoken by Thomas Jefferson: "Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life are but dreary things."

I have confidence that we can form a national community. I have confidence that the Democratic Party can lead the way. I have that confidence.

It is hypocritical for us to exhort the people to fulfill their duty to the Republic if we are derelict in ours. More is required. We must hold ourselves strictly accountable. We must provide the people with a vision. If we promise, we must deliver. If we propose, we must produce. If we ask for sacrifice, we must be the first to give. We must be.

What we have to do is strike a balance between the idea that the government can do everything and the belief that the government should do nothing. Strike a balance.

Let there be no illusions about the difficulty of forming this kind of national community. It's tough, difficult, not easy. A spirit of harmony can only survive if each of us remembers that we share a common destiny. If each of us remembers.

I have confidence that we can form a national community. I have confidence that the Democratic Party can lead the way. I have that confidence.

Now, I began my speech by commenting to you about the uniqueness of a Barbara Jordan speaking to you on this night. I am going to conclude my speech by quoting a Republican president and ask you to relate the words of Abraham Lincoln, relate them to the concept of a national community in which every last one of us participates: "As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master."

This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference is no democracy."

Sounds to me like the Bush Administration seriously needs to read this speech.

Much of this information is taken from Mary Beth Rogers, Barbara Jordan: American Hero, published by Bantam Books in 1998.

Tuesday Forgotten American Blogging: Louis Hughes

In 1865, Louis Hughes was a 32 year old slave. Like many slaves, his father was white and his mother was black. He was born near Charlottesville, Virginia in 1832. When he was 11, his master separated him from his mother. He never saw his mother again after 1844. He was sold to a man in Richmond who later sold him to another slaveholder in Mississippi. While there, he was abused by the master's wife. However, in 1850, he was sent north to a new estate near Memphis that his owner had recently purchased. He was living here when the Civil War began in 1861. He was married to a woman named Matilda, also owned by the same master. Like many slaveholders, Hughes' master sent him back downriver when the Union armies came.

Despite what neo-Confederates would have you believe, nearly all slaves yearned to escape. Louis Hughes was among them. Louis repeatedly took off during the war, but had bad luck, running into Confederate troops in one case. In 1864, in part to keep him from escaping, Hughes' owner sent him to work in the Confederate salt works in Alabama. At the beginning of 1865, this is where both Louis and Matilda lived and worked.

Louis was an excellent businessman and made a nice living for himself selling things to other slaves. Whites realized this at the salt works and made deals with him that helped everyone out, particularly as goods became scarce once the South was clearly losing the war. But like everyone else, he wanted out as soon as possible. In March 1865, Union forces moved to attack Mobile and all the slaves at the salt works were to be sent back to their owners. He worked in the fields for awhile back on his owner's plantation in Mississippi. But the Union armies never really came to Panola County, Mississippi. Much of the Confederate's plantation homeland never faced the realities of the war, at least until Sherman's march through Georgia and South Carolina. When the war ended, in April 1865, Hughes' owner ordered that no blacks could leave the plantation and they were to continue work as if nothing happened. By June, his master ordered that no blacks from outside the plantation could come onto his land without permission and it was clear that he was trying to close off his blacks to the outside world in order to continue appropriating their labor. At this point, Louis and another slave made their move, escaping the plantation at night and fleeing northward to Memphis. There they organized a rescue mission for the other slaves. They notified Captain Thomas A. Walker of the situation at the plantation. He could do nothing for them as he was overwhelmed with similar stories of recalcitrant planters refusing to free their slaves. On the way back though they ran into a couple of Union soldiers who were sympathetic to their plight. For the cost of two bottles of whiskey, the soldiers set them up with some soldiers who would help Louis and his friend out. Although the soldiers only numbered 2, they managed to bluff their way through the situation and fifteen slaves immediately left the plantation.

While Louis and Matilda at first were going to settle in Memphis, they soon chose to move north, and headed to Cincinnati later that summer. They continued north from there. Hughes arrived in Windsor, Ontario in December 1865, finding work as a hotel porter. He was disappointed that Canada did not provide him the opportunities he had hoped for. He spent the next few years working at jobs in northern cities, settling in Milwaukee in 1867. Louis and Matilda started a successful laundry business there. Louis became a founding member of St. Mark's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Milwaukee.

Louis also managed to find his long lost brother. With families split up all the time and spread across the South, most people never found their kin after emancipation. When they did, it was because of luck. One day, while working in Milwaukee, someone came up to Hughes and asked him if he had a brother because there was someone who looked just like him in Cleveland. Louis had accidentally chopped off one of his brother's fingers while playing as children and with this certain identifier, it was soon established that Billy was Louis' brother and they were reunited. Remarkable.

In the 1870s, Louis found himself in the nursing profession, which he proved quite skilled at. He travelled with patients as far away as Florida and California and became a member of the small, but growing, black middle class. In 1897, Louis Hughes published a memoir about his life as a slave, likely with help from one of his well-educated patients.

Louis remained bitter about slavery his entire life. In the memoir, Thirty Years a Slave: From Bondage to Freedom, he wrote about "the scars which I still bear upon my person, and...the wounds of spirit which will never wholly heal." He also attacked the Lost Cause myth, just becoming mainstream at that time, reminding his readers that if the Confederacy had won, he would still be a slave.

Matilda Hughes died in 1907. Louis lived until 1913, when he died in Milwaukee at the age of 80.

All of this information is taken from Stephen V. Ash's excellent, A Year in the South: Four Lives in 1865, which I highly recommend for anyone teaching the first half of the U.S. survey. Ash takes us on a journey through the eyes of 4 Southerners as they try to make it through the difficult year of 1865. Really first rate stuff.

Tuesday Forgotten American Blogging: Henry Wirz

For this edition of Bastard Blogging, we turn to the famous Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. A fitting choice for today's Forgotten American during Treason in Defense of Slavery Month is that camp's commander, Captain Henry Wirz.

Wirz was a Swiss immigrant who immigrated to the United States in the late 1840s, settling in Louisiana. When the Civil War began in 1861, Wirz enlisted as a private in the 4th Louisiana Infantry, but soon was assigned the job of guarding prisoners.

In February 1864, the Confederates opened a new prison camp for captured Union soldiers at Andersonville, Georgia. Places like Andersonville became necessary for the Confederacy after Union General Ulysses S. Grant voided the policy of prisoner exchanges after Confederate troops under the leadership of the odious Nathan Bedford Forrest murdered black Union troops after they surrendered. Grant simply figured that the South needed their troops more than the North needed theirs. Thus, both sides had to create prisoner camps.

Wirz commanded the stockade. Commentators who defend Wirz's actions at Andersonville point out that prison camp conditions were bad on both sides during the war. This is true enough. However, there is absolutely no evidence that Wirz did anything to help the prisoners. On the contrary, Wirz ordered his guards to abuse the prisoners and he withheld much of the prisoners already slim rations. Andersonville in general was a place of extreme overcrowding, filth, and death. At its height, the Confederacy placed 32,000 Union troops at Andersonville, far more than it could reasonably hold. Of the 45,000 men held there at one point, approximately 13,000, or 28% died.

John L. Ransom, brigade quartermaster of the Ninth Michigan Calvary, was a prisoner at Andersonville. He described Wirz: "Is not a very prepossessing looking chap. Is about thirty-five or forty years old, rather tall, and a little stoop shouldered; skin has a pale, white livered look, with thin lips. Has a sneering sort of countenance. Makes a fellow fell as if he would like to go up and boot him." Ransom's opinion of Wirz certainly didn't improve as conditions in Andersonville got worse: "Capt. Wirtz [sic] very domineering and abusive. Is afraid to come into camp any more. There are a thousand men in here who would willingly die if they could kill him first. Certainly the worst man I ever saw." In reading Ransom's diary, what makes him come across as a bastard is not so much the bad conditions in the prison, for that was a problem everywhere. It was that Wirz clearly did not care. It simply seems that he was glad to see Yankees die, and in the most inhuman way possible. Among many other things, Wirz allowed raiding parties to attack prisoners inside the barracks and steal everything they could from them. Wirz eventually stopped this and hanged six prisoners who were at the head of these problems, but only after several months of this happening with his knowledge and after a riot within the prison walls.

At the end of the Civil War in April 1865, Henry Wirz was captured by Union troops and sent north to Washington, D.C. In July 1865, Wirz was placed on trial by the United States government for conspiring to impair the lives of Union prisoners of war. The trial lasted two months and Wirz was found guilty of these charges as well as eleven counts of murder. He was hanged on November 10, 1865. Wirz claimed he was just following orders. Perhaps he was right. Henry Wirz was the only Confederate officer executed after the war. The lesson may be that the Union should have executed his superiors as well. Recent scholars such as R. Fred Ruhlman, in his book Captain Henry Wirz and Andersonville Prison have tried to portray Wirz in a more forgiving light. However, I think this is wrongheaded. Ruhlman blames Wirz' execution on "four years of bloody war, escalating policies of revenge and retribution, lingering sectional hatred, and the assassination of President Lincoln, coupled with the overzealous ambitions of Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton and Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt." But although Ruhlman makes the kind of big claims about his objectivity that most historians avoid today, he faces some problems. This adjunct history professor at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga saw the University of Tennessee Press pull his book after he was found to have plagiarized most of it. But regardless of the plagiarism issue, which is irrelevant to the point at hand, Ruhlman is still wrong. What were those "escalating policies of revenge and retribution." No one else was executed after the War, even Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, who both clearly deserved to be hanged from the highest tree. "Lingering sectional hatred." Sure, the South hated the North. But where is the evidence for the opposite? With the exception of having to give up slaves, the South won the peace. They were able to do what they wanted to blacks for the next 100 years, forcing them into sharecropping, lynching them at will, and placing them under a strict system of segregation. Did the North step in to stop any of this? No. Did the North chase down Confederate officers and execute them because they were Southern traitorous bastards? No. What exactly is this anti-Southern sectional hatred that Ruhlman and so many other Southerners claim existed? Are they talking about William Tecumseh Sherman, arguably the most loathed historical figure in the American South today? If they are, they forget that Sherman is a hero who did a great deal to end the rebellion in defense of slavery and who worked hard to free slaves during his march to the sea. If the South hadn't committed treason to defend their ability to rape, kill, sell, and enslave African-Americans, they wouldn't have had this problem.

Today, the Andersonville prison is Andersonville National Historic Site. As documented in Tony Horwitz's 1998 book Confederates in the Attic, the battle to give the site to the Park Service saw Southern politicians in an uproar. They demanded that the story of the prison camp be watered down with more general discussions of prison camps and how they affected American soldiers. Thus we see this site, a place so strongly identified with the horrific treatment of Union soldiers trying to crush the pro-slavery rebellion, be turned into a general ra-ra pro-American soldier site with lots of stuff about Vietnam POWs, etc. While you can still learn a great deal about Andersonville at the site, the average visitor hears multiple narratives that severely undermine the power that the story of Henry Wirz and the Andersonville prison should tell us.

Tuesday Forgotten American Blogging: Abraham Ribicoff

Abraham Ribicoff was one of the Democratic Party's leading lights during the 1960s and 70s. A Senator from Connecticut, Ribicoff was one of the most progressive voices in the Senate, fighting for reforms at every corner and attacking injustice across the United States.

Born in 1910 New Britain, Connecticut, Ribicoff grew up in a tenement slum. He worked from the time he was a small boy, delivering groceries and selling newspapers. Ribicoff, a Jew, managed to work around the quota systems so dominate in pre-World War II American colleges and graduated from the University of Chicago Law School in 1933, even though he had never earned an undergraduate degree. He soon turned from the law to politics and won his first race to serve in the Connecticut legislature in 1938. He was a strong New Dealer and continued to promote progressive politics throughout his long and distinguished career. He entered the United States House of Representatives in 1949 and served for two terms. In 1952, he ran for Senate but lost to the Republican candidate Prescott Bush. Nothing was ever heard from the Bush family again...

He built upon his defeat, becoming the first Jewish governor of Connecticut in 1955, leaving the post in 1961 when President John F. Kennedy named Ribicoff Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Ribicoff was an early and vocal supporter of Senator Kennedy and it was a good position for him, as he had shown himself a leader on issues of public health and welfare during his political career. Ribicoff only served in the post for a year. Prescott Bush was retiring from the Senate and Ribicoff wanted the post he had lost ten years earlier. He won the 1962 election and served in the body until 1981.

It is during these nineteen years that Ribicoff made his name. He quickly became a leader on Progressive concerns. He chaired the Senate committee that hauled in the president of General Motors after it was discovered that GM hired women to seduce Ralph Nader in order to discredit him after the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, as well as sending detectives to follow him. He was a friend of South Dakota Senator George McGovern and it was his support of McGovern that made his name nationally known. As many of you no doubt know, Ribicoff was speaking at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago to support McGovern. Of course, the 68 DNC was dominated by the way Chicago Mayor Richard Daley dealt with the thousands of antiwar protesters outside--by having his police beat the hell out of them. Ribicoff said in front of a national television audience, "If George McGovern were president, we wouldn’t have these Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago." The cameras focused on Daley who could be seen mouthing, "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch."

I'm a bit unclear as to whether Ribicoff had presidential ambitions. He wrote a lot of books, suggesting that at the very least he thought he had something important to say for the American people. On the other hand, he quickly rebuffed George McGovern when he was tapped to replace Thomas Eagleton for the VP slot. Perhaps he simply recognized a sinking ship when he saw one. Incidentally, another person McGovern was interested in was Ralph Nader, which would have been weird to say the least.

Ribicoff spoke to a national audience on many of the issues he cared about. His book, The American Medical Machine (1972), discussed the difficulties average Americans faced in dealing with the American medical system. He concluded, "But if we want to make medical care a right in this country, a right in fact as well as in principle--and that is what our goal ought to be--then we have only one choice. We must move as quickly as possible toward a federally financed program of national health insurance. The program should establish a system of universal entitlement, one program for the entire nation. It should be open to everyone without exception and have no restrictions on the medical services that are covered or the length of time a person may receive the medical treatment he needs." Damn right.

Ribicoff published another book in 1972, America Can Make It!, which has chapters on many of the issues Ribicoff fought for throughout his career--school integration, housing problems, and welfare and poverty issues. In it, he discusses standing up for unpopular issues, especially concerning desegregation. In 1970, Mississippi Senator John Stennis proposed an amendment to a bill stating that the entire nation should be treated equally on school desegregation. That is, that if the South was going to have to have desegregated schools, the almost equally segregated northern schools should have to change too. Of course, Stennis proposed this hoping that the federal government would get out of the business of desegregation period, but Ribicoff called him on it. Ribicoff agreed that the North needed to desegregate and surprisingly gave his support to the Stennis Amendment. He argued that racism was a nationwide problem and that the entire nation needed to deal with it. He was pilloried in the press and by civil rights groups because the amendment was sponsored by Stennis. But you know what, Ribicoff was right. As we have seen in the 37 years since Ribicoff's stand, northern schools remain extremely segregated. The majority of northerners did not want their students going to school with black kids. Ribicoff knew that this was wrong and it is wrong.

Ribicoff was by no means perfect of course. He was a major supporter of the Shah for one thing and sharply attacked the Iranian Revolution. Attacking the Iranians was certainly bipartisan during the Hostage Crisis and for good reason, but the U.S.' relationship with the Shah, while advantageous at the time, has certainly hurt us in the long run and Ribicoff's vigorous support was a major part of this. He also made a terrible choice by hiring a young Joe Lieberman as an intern, thus launching this charlatan into his sickeningly moralistic and ego-driven political career. But who could tell this would happen at the time?

Ribicoff struggled with Alzheimer's Disease at the end of his life, but managed to work at his law office until only a year before he died in 1998.

Like so many of the people I've discussed lately in this series, there is no biography of Ribicoff. Frankly, I haven't been able to find out as much about the man as I had hoped. Again, here is a very important figure in mid-late 20th century American politics and no one has written anything on him. Odd.

Tuesday Forgotten American Blogging: Bella Abzug

One of the most disturbing aspects of Forgotten American Blogging is how quickly people are forgotten. Bella Abzug died 9 years ago. Yet who remembers her today? Some of you readers? No doubt. But if I were to ask my undergraduates who Bella Abzug was, I would be shocked if any of them knew. In fact, if I were to ask the master's students in U.S. history in my program, I would bet not so many of them would know anything specific about her. Will Gloria Steinem even be remembered a decade after her death? I doubt it. So sometimes, I feel the need to talk about someone whose history is recent and who should still be remembered by lots of people today as a key person in American history, but who is not.

Bella Abzug was born in 1920 in New York. Early in her life, she showed herself to be a leader. When her grandfather and father died, there was no male left to say the year of mourning prayers for her Jewish family. Although women were not supposed to do this, she went to temple and did so anyway. From the beginning of her career, she pushed for women's rights, labor rights, and civil rights. She was a professional pioneer, graduating from Hunter College with a B.A., then getting a LL.B. from Columbia. She was admitted to the bar in 1947 and immediately began practicing law, something far from common among women of her generation. Many of her early cases were in labor law, including the United Auto Workers. But she only worked with labor lawyers for two years because, in her words, "I left those dopey labor layers because they treated me like shit." Labor was more than a bit sexist at that time and most of these lawyers could not deal with a woman sitting at the table with them on an equal footing. A secretary, OK. But not a lawyer.

Abzug became a leading light in national campaigns to fight for civil rights, against the Vietnam War, and for the Equal Rights Amendment. She became counsel for several people forced to testify in front of HUAC or McCarthy's Senate committee. She really made her name though testifying for Willie McGee in the 1950s. In 1949, McGee was arrested in Mississippi for having sex with a white woman. He was found guilty of rape and sentenced to death. In reality, the relationship had been consensual and had gone on for three years. The woman charged him with rape when McGee decided to end the affair. The NAACP and the National Lawyers Guild took up McGee's case. The NLG asked the thirty year old Abzug to go to Mississippi to defend McGee in 1950. She argued that McGee was sentenced to cruel and unusual punishment. She succeeded in obtaining a six month stay of execution. She returned to argue a second appeal but could not find a place to stay in Jackson because the Klan was looking for this communist Jew defending a black man. The appeal was denied. A pregnant Abzug suffered a miscarriage. McGee was executed in 1951.

In 1961, Abzug showed up at a planning meeting for the group that became Women's Strike for Peace, a mother's group determined to fight the poisoning of food their children ate by atmospheric nuclear testing. She quickly took a leadership position in the group, convincing the organization to start lobbying Congress instead of simply protesting. By the end of 1962, she became legislative direction for the organization. She helped turn the organization from nuclear opposition to fighting the war in Vietnam. She helped the organization become more politically sophisticated and led the evolution of the group into one of the most powerful women's organizations in the country.

She was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1970, serving her Manhattan district until 1977. She won specifically on a platform of peace and women's equality, the first successful campaign on these grounds since Jeannette Rankin. She faced severe sexism within Congress. When she wanted to swim in the House swimming pool, she was told it was only open to women at 5 AM. She was told that she could not vote wearing her signature hats. She was given secondary committee assignments. She wanted a seat on the Foreign Affairs Committee given her campaign platform. Instead, she was placed on the Public Works and Transportation Committee. Abzug did not do what most good freshmen congresspeople are supposed to: shut up. Instead, she became a national phenomenon as the most prominent woman in Washington (along with Shirley Chisholm, speaking of Forgotten Americans). She was featured in Life magazine. But of course these features were almost all sexist, as they were written by the good ol' boys club of the Washington press corps. She was frequently referred to as a "battleaxe." Norman Mailer said her voice, "could boil the fat off a cab driver's neck." Despite this bad treatment, Abzug proved an effective congresswoman. She co-authored the Freedom of Information Act and the Right to Privacy Act. She was the first member of Congress to call for Richard Nixon's impeachment.

How did the New York Democratic Party respond to Bella Abzug. They redistricted her out of her seat at the end of her first term! Determined to keep on, she ran a tough race against the popular liberal congressman on the Upper West Side, a decision that led to deep animosity against her within the New York Democratic Party. Ryan had cancer though and was weakening. He died before the primary. Abzug's enemies claimed that she had killed him. In any case, Abzug won the race. When she returned to the House, although she had enemies in New York that hated her, she had won the respect of Majority Leader Tip O'Neill, who made Abzug a deputy whip. During her third term in Congress, U.S. News and World Report named her one of the three most influential members of Congress.

She hoped to continue her career in the Senate but lost the 1976 Democratic primary to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in a very tight race. More than likely, the race was thrown to Moynihan when the New York Times withdrew its support for her at the last minute. The Times editorial board voted 8-2 in her favor but Arthur Ochs Sulzberger exercised his prerogative as owner and forced a switch to Moynihan. She ran for a few other offices in New York during the next several years but her political time had past and she left electoral politics, spending the rest of her life fighting for the causes she cared so much about.

Bella Abzug died in 1998, at the age of 78. Her death was noted in the United States, but was mourned internationally. Kofi Annan spoke at her memorial service at the United Nations, reminding the audience that Abzug has assembled the first women's caucus on the environment in Rio in 1992. Over 1400 people attended that service, remembering Abzug's work on environmentalism, peace, human rights, military policy, globalization, and of course, feminism.

A less classy quip came from George H.W. Bush, who when asked about Abzug, who was in failing health, attending the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, remarked, "I feel sorry for the Chinese having Bella Abzug running around China."

Much of the information for this essay comes from Judith Nies, Nine Women: Portraits from the American Radical Tradition. Abzug's journal, Bella! Ms. Abzug Goes to Washington and her book Gender Gap: Bella Abzug's Guide to Political Power for American Women are also worth taking a look at, even so many years later. I cannot find a full-length biography on Abzug, which is ridiculous.