Historical Image of the Day

Manumission papers of America Barnett, Cincinnati, OH, 1859

Historical Image of the Day

This week's images are dedicated to African-Americans before the Civil War who were not in slavery.

Martha Ricks, early emigrant to Liberia, late in life.

Historical Image of the Day

The General Laws and Liberties of Massachusetts Colony, revised version, 1672

Historical Image of the Day

John Winthrop, leader of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

You Got the Wrong Thatcher, There

This is too funny:

A misconstrued text message announcing the passing of a beloved pet has sparked a flurry of diplomatic activity in Canada. Transport Minister John Baird sent a message reading: “Thatcher has died”.

Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was soon informed that 84-year-old former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had passed away.

But it was actually Mr Baird's beloved cat, named after his political heroine, who had died.

I'd feel worse for Baird, but if you're political heroine is Margaret Thatcher, it's hard to ratchet up the sympathy guage very far.

Facial Hair of the Weekend

This is the first in a series of Mexican political leaders from the 19th and early-20th century and their facial hair. This weekend: Emperor Maximilian I, the Austrian emperor of the short-lived Second Mexican Empire (1864-1867), and his awesome sideburns/beard combo.

Historical Image of the Day

Cotton Mather, son of Increase, and leading Puritan minister in Massachusetts.

Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Caetano Veloso - Angry, Bitter, Jealous Old Men

A couple of Brazil's more famous political and cultural leaders have decided to make complete asses out of themselves in the past few weeks. The ugliest, worst, most infuriating, and most hypocritical incident comes from Fernando Henrique Cardoso himself, writing about Lula. The not-too-subtle title of his editorial? "The Time Has Come to End Lula's Monarchy in Brazil." This is rich on so many levels, not least of which because Lula has only served two terms. Why was it possible for him to serve two terms? Because of a constitutional amendment passed in 1998....giving Fernando Henrique Cardoso permission to run for re-election (an amendment that was surrounded by controversy and not-unsubstancial accusations that Cardoso engaged in corrupt practices and promises in order to get Congress to pass his request for an amendment that would allow him to run for re-election).

From there, Cardoso's rhetoric just gets more hilarious. He accuses the Lula administration of offering little more than "odd government decisions, apparently meaningless presidential phrases and so much propaganda," which sounds really witty and completely out of touch with reality. Aside from getting the World Cup and the 2016 Olympics (which aren't exactly empty statements of "propaganda"), Brazil's economy has bloomed under Lula in ways that Cardoso only dreamed of as he used the blank check he received for the plan that stopped hyperinflation in 1994 in Brazil in order to ravage the country with his neoliberal policies and hollowed-out monetary policies that saw the real drop in value by half to the dollar immediately after his re-election.

As I said, the development and growth Brazil is now experiencing dwarfs even Cardoso's hopes, and to add insult to injury, Lula was able to achieve this growth by basically taking the opposite approach to the national economy that Cardoso did. Lula halted the privatizations that Cardoso pushed; he increased federal investment in state companies like Petrobras, with great results; where Cardoso tried to attract foreign businesses and offer tax relief to the upper class, Lula invested in programs like Fome Zero and the Bolsa Familia to help the country see real improvements in standards of living and consumption rates; and instead of relying on investment from European and American multinationals, as Cardoso did, Lula instead sought to diversify Brazil's global economic relations, bringing in deals with Africa, China, and India, even while continuing to establish deals with the U.S. and Europe when it was practical and beneficial to Brazil.

In short, Lula did everything Cardoso spurned, and under Lula's policies, and not Cardoso's, Brazil has finally seen the growth that many have expected for Brazil for decades. As a result, Cardoso's rant comes off as little more than the humorous, impotent rumblings of an angry bitter man whose policies have been rightly spurned, and, what's worse, proven to be ineffective in the face of a political rival's much greater successes.

If Cardoso has reached the point of a hollow shell of an angry old man, then Caetano Veloso has gone beyond the point of self-parody. Veloso is highly respected musically globally, even while he puts out pretty middling stuff. However, while Veloso may have once been pretty politically engaged in opposing Brazil's dictatorship, he jumped the ship of political progressivism years ago. Back in the 1990s, he declared that Brazil no longer had racism (something with which his former collaborator and friend Gilberto Gil strongly disagreed with, and in any debate on whether a country is racist or not, I'm going to tend to side with the guy who would experience racism).

With a tendency for ridiculous statements in the past, you'd think Veloso would know when to keep his mouth shut. But he doesn't. In proclaiming his support in Brazil's 2010 elections for Green Party candidate Marina Silva, Veloso declared that Lula is "illiterate," a president "who doesn’t know what to talk about and when he does he’s coarse." That's fine - if Veloso wants to hold to that belief, that's his right. But that notion of Lula as an incompetent speaker was pretty much passe by 2002, as years of political experience had helped Lula sharpen his rhetorical abilities. Is he an Abraham Lincoln or Cicero when he opens his mouth everytime? Of course not, but neither is Obama, nor was Cardoso, nor are most people (including Veloso, in spite of how highly he holds his own lyrical ability). In his comments, Veloso doesn't come off as angry as Cardoso. Still, positions and statements like these are risible at this point; Lula's proven time and again he's far from "illiterate," and even if you don't think his every word is poetry, one might hope you'd realize that presidents are supposed, first and foremost, to help lead and improve their countries, and in that arena, Lula has been a major success. Sure, there are shortcomings even in his administration (hello, environmental policy), but to hear Veloso and Cardoso tell it, you'd think Brazil was ruined by the cult of personality of an illiterate laborer. It would be offensive if it weren't so disconnected with the actual current situation in Brazil.

Instead, Veloso and Cardoso just show their true colors: as bitter old men out of touch with Brazilian politics and development.

Greatest Magazine Cover Ever?

This is the cover of the latest issue of the Economist. For those wondering what the effects of lightning strikes on religious figures was, now we know.

Rescuing Our Slient Film Past

The Thanhouser family should be honored by this nation for rescuing the films their ancestor made between 1909 and 1918. The tiny independent studio in Milwaukee made about 800 films in 9 years, mostly the 12-15 minute one-reelers that dominated the day.

Probably 85% of silent films are lost. No one thought to preserve them. Plus they were highly flammable. So the vast majority were thrown out, unloved and unwanted. Thanhouser himself tossed his collection in the 1920s. But some prints survive. And more than we think in the end. New findings are happening all the time. The Thanhouser family has located about 200 of the films--that might be only 25%, but 25% is a lot.

What's important about this is not just film history. It's U.S. history. As a scholar of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, I have found these silent films the best single teaching tool in the world. I can talk about urban issues, the women's suffrage movement, immigration, etc., until my lips turn blue. And I think the students are interested. But put on a film like "How They Rob Men in Chicago," a short that shows both a robber and a cop cleaning out a poor guy walking down the street, and students get it in a whole new way.

This was a period before there was a way to make a movie. People were figuring it out as they went. Restrictions on what you could put on film remained in a nascent stage. So people did some amazingly crazy things in these films--things you could never get away with today. They put society and societal values on the nitrate. So not only are these early films important parts of film history, they are a window to a lost past. All movies are perhaps, but by the 1930s, the big studio systems had taken over, film had been bowlderized by the Hays Code, and audiences had begun to expect certain ways of telling stories. This doesn't mean film noir doesn't help us understand the late 1940s, but it takes a lot more analysis to make sense of it than it did in 1912, when they just made comedies making fun of women's suffragists, showing both great humor and also the increadible sexism of the day.

You can buy the Thanhouser collections here. It seems that only 1 is available through Netflix, which is unfortunate.

Bugs?

Salma Albdenour asks a fascinating question:

High in protein, low in fat, delicious, ubiquitous: why not eat bugs?

This has never really crossed my mind before, but it strikes me as a fascinating alternative. A lot of people will find this disgusting, but that's a simply cultural construct, not some biological fact. And I'm pretty fast-and-loose with my culinary experimentation; I will try almost anything at least once, with very few exceptions, and those exceptions usually involve my possible death if something goes wrong. And I don't see that existing with bugs, so while I don't think I'll face the "opportunity" to try some of the dishes in Albdenour's article, I wouldn't be opposed to it automatically if the chance arrived. And the eating of bugs raises some interesting dietary and environmental questions.

Of course, the skeptic in me immediately worries what the cost of eating bugs might be. Given how many bugs people en masse might have to eat to gain nourishment, what impact would this have on ecosystems of other animals (birds, bats, anteaters, etc.)? But some of the positives of eating bugs are fascinating, too. It's not just that it reduces our dependence on more wasteful animals (I love beef, but the amount of energy and resources, feed and otherwise, for cattle farming is pretty appalling); if eating bugs actually does reduce the need for pesticides, as Dennis claims, then it actually seems like an even better idea. And if people think these bug-dishes taste like seafood (which the guests at the dinner in the article seemed to agree upon), it could help people get that taste without ravaging the oceans as much.

I still have my doubts, and wonder what environmental scientists and others who study major ecosystems would have to say about this idea. And I just can't help but worry about what mass production would do to the environment, not necessarily because of the bugs, but because mass consumption of just about anything has proven to be pretty damaging, especially when corporations seeking profits enter the equation. Still, the objection that "it's gross" clearly isn't sufficient enough.

Sexism and Stupak

You know, over and over, lefties and liberals have told feminists that they have to look beyond sexism and abortion rights. Hell, I've been one of them. I criticized feminists during the primaries who seemed to excuse blatant racism from the Clinton campaign while freaking out about Obama calling a reporter "Sweetie." I've noted that historical feminism was a white middle-class movement with white middle-class goals.

But right now, I'm really, really pissed about this Stupak amendment (as if you couldn't tell). And yes, this is an issue that is personal for me: I'm a cisgender woman, heterosexual and of childbearing age, and I have no desire for kids.

And I'm sick and tired of hearing that I should look at the broader picture, that there are worse issues than sexism, blah blah blah.

I've heard this from well-meaning "liberal" men, but I've also heard it from activists I admire, who are usually RIGHT when they point out the myopia of much of the feminist movement (such as it is).

But this is the thing: millions of poor women, many of them women of color, will be hurt badly if this amendment stays in the bill. Shit, it'll affect me, but I can probably still get an abortion if I need one. This isn't a bourgeois issue and we're not being myopic or selfish assholes to be righteously, ferociously angry and ready to fight this tooth and nail.

This is women's lives. I care about race and class issues, poverty and health care and immigration and transgender people's rights.

There are lots of lines in the sand that I'll draw. One of them has been crossed right now, and yes, it's personal. Because over and over again our issues get written off as things that should be compromised for the greater good, or we're made to feel guilty because we're worrying about something silly when there are worse oppressions out there.

I'm not going to play oppression olympics or other such bullshit. I'm just going to keep fighting this with every breath I've got, and I don't care who you are, if you tell me I'm wrong for that, you can kiss my ass.

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.

Historical Image of the Day

Record put out by Puritan Records, 1920s.

How the Repression in the Favelas Goes Beyond Simple Police Violence

For those who think that I may overstate the police violence in Rio's favelas, here is an article that touches upon many of the issues I've discussed in the past.

A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.

Police response to the attack has been predictable: more repressive, violent force in the favelas (shantytowns). In this war between the police and the drug traffickers, 24 people have been killed. Among the dead are police, drug traffickers, and, as the city government has just admitted, three innocent bystanders.

The mainstream media's coverage of the helicopter attack seems to have given the police the green light for the use of excessive violence, such as the practices of "exterminations" and the invasion of houses without any warrants.

That last sentence gets at something very important. The police occupations of favelas goes well beyond the murder of innocent civilians alongside drug dealers. Residents in the favelas are often confronted with scenes like this and this, and face daily violations of basic right. "Police invasions" may sound sanitized, but stop and ask yourself: how would you like it if the police periodically just raided your home, threw things around, and violated your home and your privacy, with absolutely no warrant or no cause whatsoever? You'd probably be pretty outraged; after all, the police would have violated the 4th amendment of the Bill of Rights (if you're a U.S. resident), and that's a pretty serious offense. And that still doesn't deal with the strip searches that police employ. It's not like Brazil is so different; it's constitution may only date back to 1988, but it still prevents the entering and searching of a home without a warrant. Yet police constantly violate this provision in the favelas.

And the violence still continues, as well, getting uglier and uglier all the time. To wit:

An independent study in Brazil suggests that the soaring number of police killings of suspected criminals in Rio's war on drugs is linked to bonuses now paid to 'courageous' police officers, according to a newspaper report Monday.

The group that conducted the study - the Institute for Studies on Religion (ISER) - tallied the deaths of 10,216 people from 1995 to 2007 in police raids on the favelas, or slums, and other places inhabited by drug gangs, according to the daily O Estado de Sao Paulo.

It found that the ratio of dead to wounded climbed significantly after the city started offering bonuses to police in 1995 to particularly courageous officers.

Those numbers may seem odd, but if anything, they may be understated. Why? Because the statistics come from the official government stats of Rio de Janeiro's government itself. One would hope that the government is honest in its statistics, but it's not like governments are objective organs always seeking the "truth." If at any point the government understated the numbers that the study is based upon in order to "clean up" its own image, than the study's findings would go up even further. But nevermind the numbers in the study; the sheer fact that 10,216 people were killed in the favelas in 12 years should be alarming enough. 10,216 people dead in 12 years. As I commented a few years ago, to put that number in perspective, "That's roughly 9,700 more than were killed during the 21 year Brazilian dictatorship. That's 7,000 more than died in Chile under Pinochet." And does anybody really believe that there are over 800 drug lords killed per year, and that some of them include 70-year-old women or presidents of neighborhood associations?

All of this really gets at the crux of the problem: it's not just that favelados are subject to arbitrary acts of violence from the forces allegedly designed to "protect" Brazilians. It's that one of their most basic constitutional rights is constantly ignored, as police ignore with impunity the constitution when they enter favelas. Many uninformed reports in the international media worry about the Olympics in Rio in 2016, but they have nothing to worry about. It's the favelados who face this indiscriminate violence and repression of basic rights on a daily basis who have to worry.

Geisy Arruda's Sane Decision

This sounds a bit more like the Brazil I remember, rather than the Puritanical one that appeared last week.

First, in regards to Arruda turning down the Playboy offer: good for her. I know about as much about Arruda as the rest of the world, which is to say: she goes to college, and she was expelled and humiliated for an outfit that very few found remarkably offensive or revealing. She was readmitted back to the school, and went back, seeming to genuinely want to earn her degree to improve her social standing.

Yet as is often the case, her instant "celebrity" led to Playboy knocking at the door, offering her quick money and fame, but nothing of substance. That is the Brazil I remember: the one that has a remarkable (even arguably by American standards) fascination with the celebrity-culture that pushes an obsession to be famous among certain sectors. These people are usually young men and women on reality-TV shows in Brazil. Almost always, an appearance on a reality TV show means a guaranteed offer to appear in Playboy or any other number of knockoffs; it's not even excluded to women, as young men on these shows often end up in nude photoshoots in other magazines. From then on, they remain famous as long as they keep popping up in these magazines, contributing nothing to society (save for some release for the teenagers who get their hands on these magazines), and as is usually the case with celebrity culture, when the latest phenomenon comes along, they're usually brushed aside.

Arruda decided to avoid that; instead, she chose to probably hopefully return to anonymity soon, and finish her studies. And for that,s he should be applauded.

Behold - the Wisdom of the Mangenius!

I've been steering the "fire Eric Mangini" bandwagon weeks before the NFL season even started; I secretly hoped I would be wrong, but I haven't been (and when Lyrad predicted the Browns would go 5-11, I said he was dreaming, and 3-13 was likely, and I might have overestimated the Browns). The season has quickly become a weird kind of sports-depression I've never experienced before. It's not that I'm down, or even despondent - those conditions would have required some sense of expectation of some success coming into this year, and I really had no expectations of any successes. Still, the speed at which Mangini has absolutely destroyed this team is mind-numbing. I didn't think they'd be good for at least 3-4 years coming into this season, but seeing the wrecking ball that is the "Mangenius," I don't think they'll recover for at least 5 years after Mangini's gone, and while it would be nice if that happened this offseason, it may not. Cleveland fans are used to "waiting for next year," and even when "next year" wasn't too likely (as with the Indians for 2010), at least you could hope they were building something good. But there's none of that here. Mangini isn't driving the team off a cliff - the stagecoach went over the cliff 10 miles back, and we're somehow still falling.

I'd take joy in my accuracy on the disaster of Mangini, but I don't - they're just terrible, and he makes some of the worst decisions I've ever seen in any professional sport and carries himself in one of the most appalling ways of any coach I've ever seen on any team. But I don't need to cite any examples - the snark over at this post at Waiting for Next Year hits it perfectly:

Once again, not only does [Mangini] leave the media guessing, but his two QB’s didn’t even know which way he was going. Brady Quinn, when asked if he was knew what his status for Monday Night, told the media he had “no idea.” Mangini claimed he would tell everyone Wednesday (today) what his plans are. “I haven’t sat down with the quarterbacks about it yet, so that’s part of it. We’ll talk about that in conjunction with our work on the Ravens.”

That’s exactly the way to run your team. Keep the QB’s in the dark when you had a bye week to prepare your chosen guy.

*Sigh*.....there's just nothing to hope for here, save for the removal of Mangini, and even when he's gone, it's going to take years to overcome the damage. I'd hope that the Cavs could keep LeBron, but fortunately, I'm a Cleveland sports fan. We had the audacity of hope mercilessly beaten out of us years ago.

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.
.
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.

Historical Image of the Day

Puritan minister Increase Mather

Thank Higher Power of Your Choice

I just don't know what I would have done had Aerosmith broken up. I thought all the good had gone out of the world.

In a related question, why has the city of Boston produced so many bad bands?