The Legend of James K. Polk – Did he really plan to make California and Oregon part of America?

James K. Polk, eleventh US President, has gone down in history as the man who finished the westward expansion of America through a great plan to acquire California and Oregon. And even more remarkably, he achieved this very rapidly.

But, did he really have a grand strategy to expand America and achieve a number of great measures? Or did events just play their course? William Bodkin returns to the site and explains the legend of James K. Polk.

A portrait of James K. Polk.

What if the one thing America remembered about a President was false?  James K. Polk, who seemingly came from nowhere to become America’s eleventh President, is remembered for the four “great measures” of his Administration: (1) obtaining California and its neighboring territories following the Mexican War; (2) negotiating the purchase of the Oregon territories from Great Britain; (3) lowering the nation’s tariff on imported goods to promote free trade; and (4) establishing an independent treasury to put an end to the nation’s money problems.  Polk is celebrated for stating, at the outset of his Administration, that he would accomplish these goals in four short years.

Polk’s bold prediction and follow through led another President, Harry Truman, to describe him as the ideal Chief Executive.  Truman famously opined that Polk knew what he wanted to do, did it, and then left.  Unfortunately, while these are unquestionably Polk’s accomplishments, there is little to no evidence that he predicted them.  Instead, the prediction seems to have been created after the fact by one of Polk’s top advisors, historian George Bancroft.

The President From Nowhere

How did Polk become President?  In 1844, John Tyler was winding down William Henry Harrison’s term of office.  Tyler, in becoming President on Harrison’s death, alienated the two dominant political parties in America, the Democrats and the Whigs.  Tyler had angered the Democrats prior to becoming President, when, although a Democrat, he agreed to run with Harrison on the Whig ticket.  When he became President, Tyler governed mostly as a Democrat, angering the Whigs.

Waiting in the wings for the Democrats was Martin Van Buren, yearning to avenge his loss to Harrison.  Van Buren, however, before even receiving the nomination, stumbled on one of the key issues of the day, admitting Texas to the Union.  Texas had declared its independence from Mexico in 1836, seeking to join the United States.  Tyler, in one of the last acts of his Presidency, pushed to admit Texas, but failed.

The presumed Presidential nominees, though, both opposed admitting Texas. Henry Clay, for the Whigs, opposed Texas because it would be admitted as a slave state.  Van Buren, in a political calculation that backfired, claimed he opposed admitting Texas because he didn’t want to insult Mexico.  In truth, Van Buren believed that supporting Texas’s admission into the Union would cost him his traditional, staunchly abolitionist Northeast electoral base.  The gamble failed.  It cost Van Buren the support of the political powerhouse who had actually propelled him to the Presidency: Andrew Jackson.

Jackson favored admitting Texas.  Furious over Van Buren’s position, Jackson summoned Polk, his Tennessee protégé, to The Hermitage.  Polk, still reeling from a run of bad political luck, had been eyeing the Vice-Presidency.  A former Congressman, he had been Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1835-39, largely through Jackson’s support.  He left the Speaker’s chair to become Governor of Tennessee, but served only one term before being ousted in 1841.  In 1843, Polk tried and failed to win back the governor’s mansion.

At his estate, Jackson made his views plain.  Van Buren’s Texas position must be fatal to him.   The nominee would be an “annexation man,” preferably from what was then the American Southwest, meaning, Tennessee.  Polk was the best candidate.  As usual, Jackson got want he wanted.  At the Democrats’ Baltimore convention, Van Buren’s support eroded and the Democrats turned to Polk who narrowly won election over Clay. 

‘Thigh-Slapping” Predictions

Polk, once in office, resolved that despite Jackson’s support, he would himself be President of the United States.  According to Polk’s Secretary of the Navy and Ambassador to Great Britain, historian George Bancroft, Polk set his goals early on.  Bancroft said that in a meeting with Polk during the early days of the Administration, the President “raised his hand high in the air,” brought it down “with great force on his thigh,” and declared the “four great measures” of his administration.  First, with Texas on the road to statehood, the question of Oregon would be settled with Great Britain.  Second, with Oregon and Texas secure, California and its adjacent areas would round out the continent.  Third, the tariff, which was crippling the Southern states economically, would be made less protective and more revenue based.  Fourth, an independent national Treasury, immune from the banking schemes of recent years, would be established. 

Bancroft’s tale is problematic in two respects.  First, such a display was uncharacteristic of Polk.  Polk has been described as peculiarly simple.  He was a straightforward man and not particularly outspoken.  Polk was a workaholic, with few friendships other than his wife, no children, and no interests other than politics.  By most accounts, he was phlegmatic in disposition at best, and unlikely to engage in any dramatic exclamation.

The second problem with this story is that it comes from Bancroft.  While a superb historian, Bancroft is unfortunately a dubious source. He served in Polk’s administration, wholeheartedly endorsed its expansionist policies, and burned to write Polk’s official biography.  Polk rejected Bancroft as administration historian, instead seeking to have his former Secretary of War, William Marcy, do the job. Marcy had been in Washington for the entire administration; whereas Bancroft had left for London in 1846.  Despite this, Bancroft remained loyal to Polk.  By the late 1880s, Bancroft was the only remaining living member of Polk’s cabinet.

This is significant because during the 1880s, a number of historians dismissed Polk as being controlled by events round him and having been bullied into his expansionist policies.  The young historian and future President Theodore Roosevelt took this view, finding Polk’s administration not to be particularly capable.  Other historians viewed the Mexican War as having led to the Civil War, and condemned Polk for it.

Bancroft was offended by these assessments.  By the late 1880s, despite Polk’s previous opposition, Bancroft resolved to write a biography of Polk.  The earliest known mention of the “thigh-slapping” conversation is in an unpublished manuscript located in Bancroft’s papers titled “Biographical Sketch of James K. Polk,” apparently written in the late 1880s.  Historian James Schouler, in his “History of the United States of America, Under the Constitution,” first published the story.  Schouler noted that Bancroft had relayed the anecdote to him in a February 1887 letter.  After its initial publication, the “thigh-slapping” story was re-published, gradually taking on a life of its own.

Recent scholarship, however, indicates that Bancroft might have manufactured the incident.  On August 5, 1844, Bancroft wrote an admiring letter to Polk where he inventoried all of the administration’s accomplishments, including the annexation of Texas, the post-war purchase of New Mexico and California, the establishment of the Treasury and the overthrow of the protective tariff.  Bancroft wrote to Polk that these accomplishments “formed a series of measures, the like of which can hardly ever be crowded into one administration of four years & which in the eyes of posterity will single yours out among the administrations of the century.”

Did Bancroft help the “eyes of posterity” look more favorably toward James K. Polk?  It seems likely.  However, an historian, when examining primary sources, can never truly know the intent of historical actors and what motivated their writings.  Despite seeming evidence to the contrary, the ”thigh-slapping” story could have happened as Bancroft said it did.  History, it has been said, is written by the victors.  There are times though, when the person who writes the history determines the identity of the victor and the extent of the victory.

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Finally, William's previous pieces have been on George Washington (link here), John Adams (link here), Thomas Jefferson (link here), James Madison (link here), James Monroe (link here), John Quincy Adams (link here), Andrew Jackson (link here), Martin Van Buren (link here), William Henry Harrison (link here), and John Tyler (link here).

References

• Anthony Berger, “2014 Presidential Rankings, No. 7: James K. Polk,” www.deadpresidents.tumblr.com
• Walter R. Borneman, “Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America,” Random House, 2008.
• Tom Chaffin, “Met His Every Goal? James K. Polk and the Legends of Manifest Destiny,” University of Tennessee Press, 2014.
• Milo Milton Quaife, editor, “Diary of James K. Polk during His Presidency, 1845-1849.” A.C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1910.
• Sean Wilentz, “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln,” WW Norton and Company, 2005.
• Jules Witcover, “Party of the People, A History of the Democrats,” Random House, 2003.

Spanish Civil War - History of a Battle for Europe’s Soul – Spain’s Great War (Required History)

So, you think that World War 2 began in 1939?

Then you’re evidently not familiar with the Spanish Civil War.

The war was Spain’s Great War. The country suffered death, destruction, and repression on an unprecedented scale. There were large-scale military battles that left tens of thousands dead. The world witnessed some of the largest air battles that it had ever seen. People from all parts of society, from labor unionists to priests, were heartlessly murdered. Extremists and radical groups saw an exponential rise in their size and influence.

But, it was not just Spain that experienced its Civil War. The Spanish Civil War was also Europe’s and the world’s war. There was significant international involvement and interest in the war from the start, and it was a microcosm of the far greater war that was to follow it. It involved battles between democracy and dictatorship, Fascism and Communism, Germany and the USSR. The Great Powers of Europe tested out military strategies and new technologies, while tens of thousands of idealistic foreigners joined the war to battle against Fascism.  At the same time, the great democracies of Britain and France played a more muddled role.

Get the book on Amazon

This introduction to the Spanish Civil War is the second book from George Levrier-Jones. The book considers the brutal war that arose between the political left and right in Spain over the years 1936-1939.

The topics in the book include:

• 19th Century Spain and the path that led to the Spanish Second Republic
• The chronic instability and changes of the Spanish Second Republic
• The major differences between the two sides
• How the 1936 election led to the Spanish Civil War breaking out
• International involvement and the instability of 1930s Europe
• Why the Great Powers of Europe intervened in the war
• The early Nationalist advances in the war
• How General Francisco Franco consolidated the Nationalist side
• The civil war within the Spanish Civil War
• The great Republican counter-attacks and General Franco’s responses
• Events across Spain from Madrid to the Basque Country, and Barcelona to Valencia
• The closing stages of the war
• What the victors did in the years and decades after winning the war

The approximately 100-page book is the perfect complement to the Spanish Civil War History audio series that is available as part of the ‘History in 28-minutes’ podcasts.

So come and join the past – buy the book now!

Communism and Race in the 1930s Deep South

The Deep South has a history of racial animosity, but what happened when somebody tried to unite whites and blacks? Well, in Great Depression era Atlanta, Angelo Herndon tried to do just that. And he did so as a committed Communist. Bennett H. Parten returns to the site and explains what happened when the authorities tried to prosecute Herndon under an antiquated law…

General Research Division, The New York Public Library. (1926 - 1947). Let me live : the autobiography of Angelo Herndon. Retrieved from http://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47db-d7dc-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Atlanta, Georgia is an anomaly, if not an oxymoron. It’s a commercial and industrial oasis in the middle of an agricultural desert, a regional capitol with an international profile, and an emblem of the Old South with an insatiable appetite for modernity. In the early 1930s, the city’s exceptionality emerged again as it somehow juggled being both a hub for Communist activity and a bastion of conservatism. The city, sadly, could only juggle this thorny coexistence for so long.

Fueled by civic boosterism and an influx of Northern capital, Atlanta experienced a period of rapid growth during the first few decades of the 20th century; however, the dawning of the Great Depression brought the engines churning industrial development to a screeching halt. As a result, unemployment lines swelled, the number of homeless grew, and wages were cut, leaving many to survive off of the city’s limited relief budget.

Enter Angelo Herndon. Born in Ohio, Herndon arrived in Atlanta by way of Kentucky and Alabama. While working for the Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company in Birmingham, he was exposed to Communism through various labor organizers drifting through the Deep South. Officially joining the party in 1930, Herndon became an organizer and gained a degree of notoriety in Alabama, prompting a string of arrests and his eventual migration to Atlanta.

A volatile city

By the time he arrived in 1932, Atlanta’s relief situation had reached boiling point. The city’s relief budget was exhausted and payments were suspended. A number of citizens pushed the county commissioners to alter the budget so that there was more relief funding, but a number of commissioners believed the level of suffering in the city had been exaggerated, demanding that evidence of such hunger and starvation be proven before altering the budget. In a show of force, Herndon organized and led a “hunger” march on the courthouse in Atlanta that, by the time it was finished, accrued close to 1,000 angry workers demanding a continuation of the relief payments.

Never before had the city seen such a concerted statement on behalf of its working men and women. The march frightened Atlanta’s conservative commercial elite, revealing to them just how volatile and unstable the city had become. What frightened them the most, however, was the social make-up of the marchers. Poor whites as well as poor blacks marched step by step with one another, breaking Jim Crow South’s rigid social hierarchy. Interracial class solidarity on the part of the working men and women would, in the eyes of the business elite, only breed more discontent and challenge the city’s traditional conservative political leadership.

Their response was to simply destroy the movement by attacking where they believed it began: the Communists. Atlanta police began targeting suspected organizers and kept a watchful eye on the post office since the only piece of evidence on the leaflets used to announce the protest was a return address marked P.O. Box 339. Eleven days after the march, on July 11, 1932, Angelo Herndon was arrested while retrieving mail from the box in question.

Herndon was formally charged by an all-white grand jury with “attempting to incite insurrection” under an old statute originally designed to prevent slave insurrections. He received legal counsel from the International Labor Defense, better known as the ILD, whom placed noted Atlanta attorneys Benjamin Davis Jr, the son of a prominent Atlanta newspaper editor and Republican politician, and John Geer at the head of the Herndon case. The two young black lawyers designed a defense that sought to attack the constitutionality of the antiquated insurrection law and Georgia’s judiciary system by calling into question Georgia’s informal practice of excluding African Americans from serving on juries; Herndon’s defense would thus be one that would attempt to strike a major blow to the justice system’s role in preserving Georgia’s Jim Crow laws in addition to exonerating Herndon.

The trial

But Georgia’s seasoned justice system would not go down without a fight. As the trial commenced, the defense team set its sights toward the legality of all-white grand juries like the one that indicted Herndon. All of the witnesses testified that there had not been a black participant on a grand jury in recent memory, but in the absence of proof that African Americans had been systematically excluded, Judge Wyatt, whom Davis had said “used the law with respect to Negroes like a butcher wielding a knife to kill a lamb,” would not be moved (Davis 62-63). The legal team left the courtroom after the first day in an air of defeat.

The second day started off much better for the defense. The duo of Greer and Davis, with the help of attorneys A.T. Walden and T.J. Henry, launched an attack on the prospective jurors, getting one to confess to Ku Klux Klan membership. The team eventually landed on twelve jurors deemed suitable. The charge of insurrection was then debated. Atlanta policemen Frank Watson was the first to testify, reading off a list of items found in Herndon’s room. The list included rather harmless materials such as membership and receipt books, but Herndon did possess two books, George Padmore’s The Life and Struggles of Negro Toilers and William Montgomery Brown’s Communism and Christianism, that emphasized the Communist Party’s policy of self-determination for the South’s “Black Belt”, a stretch of land in the heart of the Deep South that housed large numbers of African Americans. The prosecutor, accompanied by a large map of Georgia, pointed out to the jury that under this policy a large majority of the state would fall under black political leadership, all but destroying the state’s white political stranglehold. But even with this evidence, Davis’s cross examination of Watson revealed that Watson never actually witnessed Herndon distribute radical literature or give a speech with revolutionary intent; Watson had merely seen Herndon checking his mail.

When Angelo Herndon took the stand, the momentum won with the Watson cross-examination again shifted away from the defense. In the witness stand, Herndon unleashed quite an oration, one more idealistic than inflammatory. He unabashedly emphasized the interracial aims of the party, pointing out the immense levels of suffering of both poor whites and poor blacks. He described the horrid conditions of the Fulton County jail, claiming that he had to share a jail cell with a dead man whom was denied proper medical treatment. His most radical claims, though, were made when he blamed the capitalist regime for race baiting, constantly pitting white versus black as a substitute for the natural animosities between the rich and the poor. Needless to say, Herndon’s own testimony did not do him any favors with the jury.

Closing the trial

As for the closing remarks, each of the four attorneys—two defense counselors and two prosecutors—took turns. When it came time, Benjamin Davis, vaunted for his oratory skills, released an emotional critique of the justice Herndon had been served. He charged that Herndon had simply been attempting to better the conditions of Atlanta’s working people in a peaceful way as the march on the courthouse was not violent nor did it cause any harm. According to Davis, Herndon was charged not for inciting insurrection but for being black, and his attempts to unite both races for the common welfare should be lauded. Davis’s remarks drew ire from the whites in the courtroom as well as those in the jury. Whenever he approached the jury box during his summation some of the jurors refused to listen and turned their backs on him. Davis, unfazed, went on. He read from one of the radical pamphlets found in Herndon’s possession that described the lynching and burning of a pregnant black woman. The description was so graphic and Davis’s dramatization so intense, one spectator fainted.

His summation hinged on the inherent irony of supposed “justice” in Georgia: a peaceful interracial Communist protest was condemned as insurrectionary while the justice system turned a blind eye to lynchings and other forms of racial oppression. He concluded his remarks by stating that if a guilty verdict was served, it would be derived only from the “basest passion of race prejudice”, and such a verdict would be “making scraps of paper out of the Bill of Rights” and the Constitutions of both the United States and Georgia (Herndon 351-354). Sadly, such an impassioned plea for justice was rendered fruitless as the white jury found Herndon guilty as charged.

But the battle was not over. Almost immediately, Davis and company submitted their appeal. Over the course of five years, their appeals garnered almost no headway at the national or local level. Finally, in 1937, with his case in the national spotlight—and Let Me Live, Herndon’s newly published autobiography on the bookshelves of civil libertarians and liberal thinkers nationwide—the Supreme Court struck down Georgia’s insurrection stature, arguing that it violated the First Amendment. Herndon was exonerated, and Georgia, a bastion of white conservatism, was forced to release an avowed Communist and radical interracial labor organizer. Jim Crow obviously did not die with Angelo Herndon, but his victory stood as a major blow to conservative Georgia’s ability to deal out so called “justice” in the courtroom.

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Bibliography

Davis, Benjamin J. Communist Councilman from Harlem: Autobiographical Notes Written In A Federal Penitentiary. New York: International Publishers, 1991.

Hatfield, Edward A. "Angelo Herndon Case." New Georgia Encyclopedia. 03 December 2013. Web. 30 June 2015.

Herndon, Angelo. Let Me Live. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007.

Martin, Charles H. The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976. 

Slavery and the Fourth of July: Is This the Land Your Fathers Loved?

Frederick Douglass was born a slave, but his life was to later move into a different world. He became an important figure in the US abolitionist movement in the mid-nineteenth century. Here, Christopher Benedict looks at Douglass’ views on the Fourth of July and whether slaves could really appreciate Independence Day when they were not free.

Frederick Douglass in 1856.

From Plantation to Platform

The Douglass family, which in 1848 consisted of Frederick and his wife Anna, not to mention their five children Rosetta, Lewis, Frederick Jr., Charles, and Annie, settled into their new nine room home at 4 Alexander Place in Rochester, New York.

From here, Douglass contributed to and edited the abolitionist newspaper North Star, embarked upon speaking engagements in New England, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, made the acquaintances of John Brown and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (whose suffrage movement benefitted from his being the sole public voice of assent), lobbied for the desegregation of Rochester’s learning institutions when Rosetta was forced to leave her private school, supported Free Soil candidates Martin Van Buren and Charles Francis Adams, and sheltered numerous fugitive slaves while assisting them with safe passage to Canada.

These surroundings and circumstances may have been a far cry from the Maryland of his birth thirty years earlier, but his youth spent on Holme Hill Farm in Talbot County, and particularly his year as a rented resource to farm owner and brutal overseer Edward Covey, would never fade into distant memory. His mother was an indentured servant named Harriet Bailey and it was believed by fellow slaves, though never confirmed nor denied, that Frederick’s father was also his white master, Aaron Anthony, which would hardly have been an uncommon occurrence.

After escaping Baltimore for Wilmington, Delaware by train in 1838 using protection papers given to him by a merchant seaman, he first sets foot in free territory after reaching Philadelphia by steamer. A second locomotive journey lands Frederick in New York City where he is reunited with Anna after their engagement back in Maryland and abandons his birth name of Bailey in favor of the alias Johnson. It would be at the urging of the welcomed and securely protected black community in New Bedford, Massachusetts that he then dropped the all-too-common Johnson for Douglas, inspired by the character of the Scottish lord from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (and adding the additional ‘s’).

Because he had become proficient at the trade of caulking at the Baltimore shipyards of his mostly benevolent former possessors Hugh and Sophia Auld, where he began as bookkeeper after Sophia had taught him to read and write (which was then frowned upon and discouraged, necessitating his own covert self-education), Douglass easily finds work in the storied whaling village, joins the congregation of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and subscribes to William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator.

Invited to appear before an abolitionist fair in Concord, MA which was attended by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he then began what would become his hugely successful autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written By Himself, published in 1845 (as an aside, this is still celebrated in New Bedford every February with a community read-a-thon sponsored by its Historical Society, which I proudly got to participate in while an unfortunately short-lived resident of the Bay State in 2011-12).

It begged reason for many to accept that an uncultured black man, one that the bulk of white society took on face value to be an exchangeable and disposable commodity rather than a human being with hopes and dreams and love and hurt in his heart, could compose without generous assistance such a thoughtful, highly articulate work of literature.

Nonetheless, the man born into bondage had not only endeavored toward his liberation, but was now embraced within the most illustrious intellectual circles, walking freely and proudly into their literary salons and halls of academia.

Now a distinguished citizen of Rochester, Douglass was asked to deliver a speech from the stage of Corinthian Hall on July 5, 1852 commemorating the anniversary of America’s independence. The irony, if it was not intentional or, for that matter, even at first apparent to some, would be manifested brilliantly and manipulated scorchingly.

As With Rivers, So With Nations

Treading lightly while wading toward troubled waters, Douglass begins on a misleadingly modest note, offering apologies for “my limited powers of speech” and “distrust of my ability”, professing to have thrown “my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together” owing to “little experience and less learning”.

Douglass compares the deliverance of the country’s political freedom to the Passover celebrated by the emancipated children of god, noting the buoyancy inherent to the Republic’s relatively youthful age, 76 years, which he remarks is “a good old age for a man, but a mere speck in the life of a nation.” Perhaps, Frederick suggests, “Were the nation older, the patriot’s heart might be sadder, and the reformer’s brow heavier. Its future might be shrouded in gloom, and the hope of its prophets go out in sorrow.” 

Interestingly, Douglass refers to the free and independent states of America through the use of feminine pronouns, whether as a repudiation of their former British fatherland and/or the noble words and deeds of the nation’s Founding Fathers he feels are now being bastardized, or as an unspoken remembrance of his own birth-giver, the mother he last saw at the age of 7 or 8 when she presented him with a heart-shaped ginger cake and the pet name “Valentine”. 

“Great streams are not easily turned from channels, worn deep in the course of ages,” says Douglass. “They might sometimes rise in quiet and stately majesty and inundate the land, refreshing and fertilizing the earth with their mysterious properties. They may also rise in wrath and fury, and bear away on their angry waves the accumulated wealth of toil and hardship.”

While the river “may gradually flow back to the same old channel, and flow on serenely as ever,” Douglass begins the shift in his discourse with the warning that “it may dry up, and leave nothing behind but the withered branch, and the unsightly rock, to howl in the abyss-sweeping wind, the sad tale of departed glory.”

Dastards, Brave Men, and Mad Men

Conceding that “the point from which I am compelled to view them is not, certainly, the most favorable”, the nation’s founders were, in Douglass’ estimation, “brave men” and “great men”, also “peace men” who nonetheless “preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage”, “quiet men” who “did not shrink from agitating against oppression”, and men who “believed in order, but not in the order of tyranny.”

Likewise, they had intentionally not framed within their Declaration and Constitution the idea of an infallible government, one which Douglass believed had since become fashionable, while falling out of repute was the deliberate action of “agitators and rebels...to side with the right against the wrong, with the weak against the strong, and with the oppressed against the oppressor.”

Douglass’ assertion was that the natural clash of these contemporary ideologies culminated in the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which made legalized sport of hunting down and returning runaway slaves to their masters, and a grotesquely profitable one at that.

George Washington, Douglass pointed out, “could not die until till he had broken the chains of his slaves. Yet his monument is built up by the price of human blood, and the traders in the bodies and souls of men.”

He drives this point home by quoting from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.”

Inhuman Mockery

Now comes Douglass’ direct confrontation of the question pertaining to why he was called upon to give this address on this occasion, the answer to which lay in the larger matter of whether the “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” Thomas Jefferson bequeathed to America’s countrymen were rights that extended to him, as well as his kith and kin. If there remained any doubt about the reply, Douglass demolished it.

“The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

Unable to equivocate or excuse the great blasphemy of human slavery which made a mockery not only of the Constitution but of the Bible, Douglass declared to his “Fellow Americans” that “above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.”

He raises next the hypothetical argument of whether he and fellow abolitionists would be better served to “argue more and denounce less...persuade more and rebuke less.”

Again, his condemnation of these tactics arrives swift and decisive as a lightning strike.

“Am I to argue that it is wrong to make men brutes, to rob them of their liberty, to work them without wages, to keep them ignorant of their relations to their fellow men, to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh with the lash, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs, to sell them at auction, to sunder their families, to knock out their teeth, to starve them into obedience and submission to their masters?”

To do so, Douglass insisted would “make myself ridiculous and to offer an insult to your understanding.”

Unholy License

If the “peculiar institution” of slavery was upheld by American religion in addition to American politics, was it to be viewed as somehow supernal?

That the church largely ignored the Fugitive Slave Act as “an act of war against religious liberty”, how else could its rituals be regarded, Douglass wonders, but as “simply a form of worship, an empty ceremony and not a vital principle requiring benevolence, justice, love, and good will towards man?”

To this says Douglass, “welcome infidelity, welcome atheism, welcome anything in preference to the gospel as preached by those Divines.”

Using the word of god against itself with incendiary righteousness, he recites from the book of Isaiah. “Your new moons, and your appointed feasts my soul hateth. They are a trouble to me, I am weary to bear them, and when ye spread forth your hands I will hide mine eyes from you. Yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear. Your hands are full of blood. Cease to do evil, learn to do well. Seek judgment, relieve the oppressed. Judge for the fatherless, plead for the widow.”

Among the exceptionally noble men that Douglass gives name to are Brooklyn’s abolitionist firebrand Henry Ward Beecher, Syracuse’s Samuel J. May, and Reverend R. R. Raymond who shared the platform with him that day. Douglass charges them with the task of continuing “to inspire our ranks with high religious faith and zeal, and to cheer us on in the great mission of the slave’s redemption from his chains.”

Penetrating the Darkness

The Constitution will always remain open to the interpretation of those whose will is to bend and stretch the wording of its amendments one way or another to the advancement of a specific agenda. Regardless, Frederick Douglass maintained that it is “a glorious liberty document” in which “there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing” that is slavery.

Similarly, he drew encouragement from the Declaration of Independence, “the great principles it contains, and the genius of American institutions.”

Knowledge and intelligence, time and space, were colliding in many wonderful ways which gave Douglass, ultimately, reason for hope and optimism.

“Notwithstanding the dark picture I have this day presented...I do not despair of this country. There are forces in operation which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. No abuse, no outrage whether in taste, sport, or avarice, can now hide itself from the all-pervading light.”

And, despite the fact that they would shortly thereafter experience a bitter falling-out, Douglass ended on a conciliatory note, courtesy of a passage from William Lloyd Garrison:

In every clime be understood

The claims of human brotherhood

And each return for evil, good

Not blow for blow

That day will come all feuds to end

And change into a faithful friend

Each foe

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Sources

• What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?, speech delivered by Frederick Douglass July 5, 1852 in Rochester, NY
• Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life, My Bondage and My Freedom, and Life and Times by Frederick Douglass, edited and with notes by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Library of America, 1994)

The Intriguing Lost Conversation of the Civil Rights Movement: The Writer and the Monk - James Baldwin and Thomas Merton

Racial tensions have sadly been all too common in the United States over the years. Recent events in Ferguson, Missouri and elsewhere are but the latest in a long line of racial issues. Here, Edward J. Vinski presents a fascinating view on race in America, with the help of two very different people who wrote at the height of the American Civil Rights movement.

Photograph of a Young Woman at the Civil Rights March on Washington, D.C. with a Banner, 1963. From the U.S. Information Agency.

When one reads, one enters into a conversation with the writer. Such conversation, although naturally different from the more traditional face-to-face method, allows us to travel across time and distance and even to resurrect the dead. This, of course, is only in a manner of speaking, but in the world of letters the conversation is real. We may hear the words of persons long since dead and descriptions of places we might never visit.

For a brief moment during the height of America’s Civil Rights movement, an unconventional conversation occurred between two men: one, James Baldwin, an African American writer living in Europe, the other, Thomas Merton, a white Trappist monk living in a Kentucky monastery.  While their different backgrounds alone might make their interaction appear somewhat unusual, they shared a social consciousness that transcended their worlds. In this, they were, perhaps, more similar than they might initially seem.  What makes their conversation truly unique, however, is the way they communicated to each other and ultimately to their readers: they conversed primarily through a series of letters not addressed to each other.

The “Correspondence”

In his 1963 book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin demonstrates what it means to be black in America and how whites are, in fact, viewed by their black counterparts. The two essays take the form of letters[1]. The first and shorter of the two, “My Dungeon Shook”, is written as a “Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of Emancipation.” In it, Baldwin describes his own father, recalling that “he was defeated long before he died because at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 3), and he admonishes his nephew that “you can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger” (p. 4). Through this initial statement, Baldwin shows the connection between the movement toward black freedom and that of white freedom as well. By using the offensive word “nigger” he underscores this fact that American Blacks are an invention of White Americans. It is this creation that causes “defeat “ in those created, as in the case of the senior Baldwin, and it is the crime of which Baldwin accuses his countrymen. He writes that they are destroying:

Hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it […] but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime (p. 5).

Their so-called innocence lies in the fact that White America fails to see the crime. “They are, in effect,” Baldwin writes, “still trapped in a history they do not understand and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it” (p. 8). As such, the truth about integration is not that it means the acceptance of blacks by whites. Rather, Baldwin tells his nephew, “the terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them” (p. 8).

In his long-form essay “Letters to a White Liberal”, written in response to The Fire Next Time, Merton recognizes this very assumption among whites that white society is somehow superior to that of blacks. Perhaps more accurately, White America exists under the assumption that it has somehow achieved perfect human completeness.  From this perspective, as Baldwin suggests, blacks are “to be accepted into white society” (Merton, 1964, p. 58). Baldwin and Merton both call attention to the fact that equality does not mean the elevation of one group to the standards of the other. Rather, true integration and equality requires movement on both sides. “Your sister and I have every right to marry if we wish to,” writes Baldwin, “[…] if she cannot raise me to her level, perhaps I can raise her to mine” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 96). Merton concurs. In the only direct correspondence between the two men, Merton wrote a letter to Baldwin shortly after he read The Fire Next Time. In it, he states that human completeness comes only from the realization that “I am therefore not completely human until I have found myself in my African and Asian and Indonesian brother because he has the part of humanity which I lack” (Merton, 1964/2008, p. 226).[2]

Even if true equality means that blacks must unilaterally become more like whites, Baldwin questions whether blacks would accept these conditions. He writes that:

I do not know many Negros who are eager to be ‘accepted’ by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t want to be beaten over the head by the whites […] white people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this […] the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 21).

Years earlier, Merton had come to a similar conclusion. Working for a time among Harlem, New York’s poor, sick and dispossessed at Baroness Catherine de Hueck’s Friendship House led him to conclude that “there is not an Negro in the whole place who does not realize, somewhere in the depths of his nature, that the culture of the white man is not worth the dirt in Harlem’s gutters” (Merton, 1948/1976, p. 386). Not only do they not wish to be integrated in to such a world, the sickness, drugs and death of Harlem stood not only as a contrast to the corruption and greed of white society, but as an indictment against that very society. Reflecting on what he saw, Merton concluded that such pockets of resistance against White American society may be all that prevents God’s wrath from wiping that very society from the planet.

While both men recognize that the races need each other to achieve perfection, they also acknowledge that awareness of this fact is difficult for people to grasp. Baldwin indicates that such a realization is more difficult for those in power writing that “people are not, for example, terribly anxious to be equal […] but they love the idea of being superior” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 87). For whatever reason, Americans have long mistrusted standards of civilization that are not cut from the European model. As a result, white Americans have come to believe that they possess something “[…] that black people need or want.  And this assumption […] makes the solution to the Negro problem depend on the speed with which Negroes accept and adopt white standards” (p. 93).

Merton concurs. Whites, according to him, all too frequently assume that they have nothing to gain from blacks and that black society is therefore “more or less worthless” (Merton, 1964, p. 59), thus echoing the sentiment expressed in his letter to Baldwin. The truth that both writers present is that “different races and cultures are correlative. They mutually complete each other” (Merton, 1964, p. 61).

The problem is that the self-knowledge necessary to change this perception would require an abandoning of the most cherished American myths: that of “freedom-loving heroes” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 100). These are the myths that whites believe and about which blacks know better[3]. As such, most blacks “dismiss white people as slightly mad victims of their own brainwashing” (p. 101). Blacks can’t hate whites, according to Baldwin, because they know how much whites have to lose if integration was to become complete, and that the fear of this loss is such that it is impossible for whites to act with love toward them.

Merton draws the same conclusion, writing:

If the Negro […] enters wholly into white society, then that society is going to be radically changed. This, of course is what the white South very well knows and it is what the white Liberal has failed to understand (Merton, 1964, p. 8).

Equality, thus, can only be obtained through sacrifice particularly on the part of whites. The world they knew will be radically altered on economic, social, and psychological levels. But this is the price to be paid for a new society. “The only way out of this fantastic impasse is for everyone to face and accept the difficulties and sacrifices involved, in all their seriousness, in all their inexorable demands” (Merton, 1964, p. 9).       

The writer and the monk bring their respective books to a close with calls to action. Baldwin attempts to rally “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks” of America. “If we […] do not falter in our duty now, we may be able […] to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country, and change the history of the world” (Baldwin, 1963/1985, p. 104-105). But if we fail, he writes, the prophecy of the old spiritual will come to pass: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time!” (p. 105).

Merton’s ending is, perhaps, less dramatic, but just as powerful. Recognizing the difficulty that whites have in understanding the message of the Black Americans, he writes:

This is the message which the Negro is trying to give white America. I have spelled it out for myself, subject to correction, in order to see whether a white man is even capable of grasping the words, let alone believing them (Merton, 1964, p. 70).

Then, acknowledging that the truly prophetic vision of a racially equal America’s potential can only come from the perspective of Blacks, he brings this message home: “For the rest, you have Moses and the prophets. Martin Luther King, James Baldwin and the others. Read them, and see for yourself what they are saying” (p. 70).

Conclusion

The passage of the thirteenth amendment abolished slavery in the United States, but it did not end racial injustice. The Brown vs. The Board of Education court decision helped integrate American schools, but did not end racial inequality. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of the 1960s did not end racial tensions. The last half-century has been one in which periods of relative calm are punctuated by flare-ups of old resentments and suspicions. The events of Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York; and Baltimore, Maryland have been nothing but the most recent examples of long-simmering racial tensions boiling over. With each event, there are calls for a national conversation on race. Sadly, people on both sides of the divide often bristle at and deflect any real attempts at open discussion. In the meantime, opportunists seek to achieve their own ends. In so doing, they add a further level of distraction to matters, often doing little more than confirming the worst fears of those on whichever side they seem to oppose.

The truth is that the story of America is intertwined with the messy story of racism, and until the entire nation comes to grips with this disturbing fact, it is likely that a resolution to the problem will continue to elude us. Fifty years ago, Thomas Merton and James Baldwin exchanged “letters” devoted to this topic. If there is any significant lesson to be learned from their “correspondence” it is this: racism in America will not be solved by the nation’s liberals or conservatives, politicians or activists.

Rather, change will be brought about by its prophets who can see the problem from a self-critical, but not self-condemning perspective.

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Author’s note

I ask to be excused a slight stylistic indulgence.  In light of my thesis that the written word allows a measure of immortality, I have written most of this piece in the present tense. I believe that the conversation is too important to have simply happened once and for all in the past. Rather I believe that Merton and Baldwin continue to speak to each of us to this very day.  

References

Baldwin, J. (1963/1985). The fire next time. New York: The Modern Library.

Campbell, J. (1991) Talking at the gates: A life of James Baldwin. New York: Viking.

Leeming, D. (1994). James Baldwin: A biography. New York: Arcade

Merton, T. (1948/1976). The seven storey mountain. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company.

Merton, T. (1963/2008). Letter to James Baldwin. In W.H. Shannon and C.M. Bochen (Eds.). Thomas Merton: A life in letters. New York: Harper One.

Merton, T. (1964). Seeds of destruction. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Footnotes

1. The New Yorker, in which the essays were published before being collected in The Fire Next Time, required that all submissions be in the form of a “Letter from….” (Campbell, 1991)

2. As not all of Baldwin’s personal papers have been released to the public, I am not aware of whether he replied to Merton. 

3. This is not an exclusively American problem. While visiting an elementary school in Senegal, Baldwin was outraged to find the children’s textbook referring to their ancestors from Gaul (Leeming, 1994)

Gin in 18th century England… Could prohibition work?

Gin arrived in Britain in the late 17th century following the arrival of a new monarch from the Netherlands, King William III. Here, Janet Ford tells the story of how gin’s extraordinary popularity in 18th century England led to Parliament trying to restrict its sale… And how successful these Gin Acts were.

The Gin Shop, a cartoon about drinking too much. By George Cruikshank, 1829.

How popular was gin?

It was estimated that in the year 1730, 10 million gallons of gin were produced. The average Londoner got through 14 gallons of gin a year or two pints a week - which is a lot of gin!

Why was gin so popular?

The main reasons why gin was so popular were the price, its strength and the life of the working classes, who drank it the most. Gin was very cheap, which allowed the poor to drink it. Gin was much more stronger than ale and beer, and so would get people drunk quicker. But life for the working class during the 18th century was difficult, as living conditions were poor, and so having a cheap and strong drink would have numbed the pain of real life and given the poor and working class some relief from their stresses.

The Gin Acts

There were various acts brought in which aimed to restrict the sale and consumption of gin, with the Acts of 1729, 1736, 1749, 1751 and 1760. The 1736 Act, ‘taxed retail sales at 20 shillings a gallon and made selling gin without a £50 annual licence illegal’ (1) and the 1751 act, ‘lowered the licence fee and forced distillers to sell only to licensed retailers trading from respectable premises’ (2). In general, Parliament wanted to make gin difficult to make and sell to the nation.

Why laws were brought in?

There were various reasons why parliament and religious figures, who were also against gin, wanted to make gin difficult to sell and make.

One of the main reasons was the link between gin and crime. Many of those who wanted to ban it believed that gin increased crime. To an extent this would have been true; however, as gin was so popular, banning it could have increased crime, as those who wanted the drink, would have done anything to get it. One of the main examples of a crime being committed that was related to gin was that of Judith Dufour. Judith had been drunk on gin at work, which was normal for her. She also had a two-year-old daughter, who was found naked, apart from a scarf around her neck, strangled in a field. It was found that she had been killed by her own mother, while she was drunk on gin. These stories would have frightened not just politicians and religious figures, but also the general public.

Another reason was the role of women. Beer and ale were mostly drunk by men and not women. But this was not the case for gin, as both sexes drank it. As gin was sold in alehouses, women were starting to drink in them. Parliament and religious figures believed that this increase in interaction between men and women would increase prostitution and corrupt women.

The Effects of the Acts on Gin

One of the major effects the acts had was nothing at all. Gin was still made, sold and drank in various places, such as street corners and gin shops, throughout the 18th century. When the 1729 Act was brought in, production and the amount of gin which was drank did dip, but production increased in the 1730s.

One of the reasons why gin was still made were loopholes in the acts. The First Gin Act stated that gin was made with ‘juniper berrie, or other fruit, specie or ingredients’ (3) - which is what it is made out of. However, a loophole was that people would simply not put juniper berries in gin but use other ingredients in order to produce legal gin. This did make gin slightly dangerous, especially as some people put turpentine in their ‘gin’. If it gave gin a bad taste, the drinkers would not have cared, as they drank gin to get drunk, but it was still dangerous. Another loophole was related to the amount of gin sold. It was only illegal to sell gin if less than a gallon was sold. Many people actually bought over a gallon in order to still have gin. In most cases, it was either wasted, as it was a great deal of gin and storing it was difficult, or people drank it all and became ill or even died.

There was a great deal of criticism toward the reformers, as the acts were seen as discrimination towards the working class. This was due to them being the main group who drank it, even if the middle and upper classes were not excluded from drinking gin. Interestingly, the upper classes also drank illegal drinks, as they drank imported brandy, but there were far fewer consequences for them. It was such behavior which encouraged the working class to carry on making and selling the drink, as if the upper classes could do it, why not them? This discrimination made the working class less willing to compromise with Parliament as they were not being treated equally. 

The acts had a negative effect, as there was an increase in violence. There were many riots by the working class, as their drink was being taken away from them and they were being controlled by the upper classes. Another reason for the violence were fines. Those who were found selling gin were fined £10, which was a great deal of money to the poor and working classes. If they were informed on by their neighbors and were found guilty, that person who had informed on them was given some or all of the money. This would have been seen as a good deal, as they were given money without doing much work. However, if informers were found, they were attacked and, in some cases, killed.

In the late 18th century, the production, selling and drinking of gin declined. This was partly due to new acts, such as those of 1751 and 1760 being brought in, which were more about compromise than pure prohibition. Even so, the decline in use was mostly down to the bad harvests, which started in 1757. Parliament put a ban on exports of grain for a few years, which made the distillers angry, but Parliament was more concerned over food for the general population than the distillers. The acts and the bad harvests made gin very expensive for the poor, and most went back to the cheaper alternative of beer.

In the later 18th century, there was the introduction of gin brands, with Gordon’s in 1769 and Plymouth Gin in 1796. Parliament considered such brands both positive, as only a select few were making gin, and negative, as gin was still being made and in some ways became more established as bigger companies were making it.

Were the Acts successful?

To an extent the acts were successful, as they did make gin more difficult to sell. However, the acts actually made the situation much worse in other ways, as they increased violence and worsened the quality of gin. But more importantly, gin never disappeared, even with the decline, as there was still bootleg gin or brands.

And finally, gin has now become very much part of our culture.

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References

• 1/2 www.history.co.uk/study-topics/history-of-london/18th-century-gin-craze
• 3 Patrick Dillon, The Much Lamented Death of Madam Genava, (Review, 2002) p88

Bibliography

• Gin Lane, www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pd/w/ william_hogarth,_gin_lane.aspx
• www.history.co.uk
• www.self.gutenberg.org
• Patrick Dillon, The Much Lamented Death of Madam Genava, (Review, 2002)

Cold War History - Are we friends or enemies? – From the Vietnam War to Détente – Part 2: 1962-1979 (Required History)

In an unstable world, how do you know who your friends and enemies are?

You don’t.

The Cold War was international affairs for the second half of the 20th Century. Nuclear weapons testing, civil wars in all corners of the globe and the race for economic dominance were all key spheres of the Cold War, although they were just a few elements of a very complex global puzzle. More so than the great battles between Carthage and Rome in Ancient times or the Napoleonic Wars, the Cold War defined our world. But, there was one key difference between the Cold War and earlier major wars. Due to advances in technology and communications, the Cold War touched most countries on earth.

Get the book on Amazon

This introduction to the middle years of the Cold War tells the story of the great clash between the Communist Soviet Union and the capitalist USA. It considers events in an intriguing age for international relations. Following the Cuban Missile Crisis, there were calls to avert the risk of another nuclear near-miss, and this did lead to an improvement in the super-power relationship; however, underneath this improvement, there remained great tension. To further complicate the situation, China and Europe both became increasingly powerful and assertive. In the world of the 1960s and 1970s, it was hard to know who to trust and who to fear.

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The topics in the book include:

• The Vietnam War and its impact on the Cold War
• Decolonization and the opportunities that arose from it for the super-powers
• The growing power of Western Europe and a major change in Czechoslovakia
• The historic changes in the relationship between Mao Zedong’s China and the super-powers
• The super-powers as friends? Détente, Richard Nixon, and Leonid Brezhnev
• The major nuclear agreements and the arms race
• How serious tensions emerged once more

The approximately 90-page book is the perfect complement to the Cold War History audio series that is available as part of the ‘History in 28-minutes’ podcasts.

Cold War History - To the brink of nuclear destruction – From World War 2 to the Cuban Missile Crisis – Part 1: 1945-1962 (Required History)

Do you know why the world came to the brink of nuclear war?

Two words – ‘Cold War’.

The Cold War was international affairs for the second half of the 20th Century. Nuclear weapons testing, civil wars in all corners of the globe and the race foreconomic dominance were all key spheres of the Cold War, although they werejust a few elements of a very complex global puzzle. More so than the greatbattles between Carthage and Rome in Ancient times or the Napoleonic Wars, the Cold War defined our world. But, there was one key difference between the Cold War and earlier major wars. Due to advances in technology and communications, the Cold War touched most countries on earth.

Get the Book on Amazon

This introduction to the early years of the Cold War is the debut book from George Levrier-Jones. He tells the story of the great clash between the Communist Soviet Union and thecapitalist USA. George’s fast-paced, concise writing style will allow you to quickly learn about the key events of the Cold War, and to find out how the world came to the cusp of nuclear annihilation.

Get the Book on Amazon

The topics in the book include:

• The origins of the Cold War and why the USSR and USA emerged from World War 2 as super-powers
• How the Soviet Union and the USA quickly went from war-time allies 
• to enemies
• The key changes in post-war Europe
• The Berlin blockade and the building of the Berlin Wall
• Events in East Asia - the Chinese Civil War and why the Korean War became integral to the Cold War
• Nuclear weapons development
• Uprisings and revolutions in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, including the Hungarian revolution
• The most dangerous event of the early Cold War years, the Cuban Missile Crisis

The approximately 80-page book is the perfect complement to the Cold War History audio series that is available as part of the ‘History in 28-minutes’ podcasts.

Robert Kennedy’s amazing climb up Mount Kennedy: Always Do What You Are Afraid to Do

Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a wave of tributes and memorials commemorated him around the world. One such memorial was the naming of a mountain in Canada – Mount Kennedy. Here, Christopher Benedict explains the story of how JFK’s brother, Robert Kennedy, attempted to make the first ever ascent of the mountain.

The Kennedy brothers in 1960. Robert is in the middle, with John on the left, and Ted on the right.

Difficult and Perplexing Times

There is no setting the clock on grief. Tragedy does not come with a catch-all instruction manual to help survivors cope in some uniform fashion with the incomprehensible. Retreating into a cocoon of counter-productive and self-destructive tendencies-denial, despondency, and inactivity-may suffice for most people. But, Robert F. Kennedy was not most people.

Which is not to suggest that he was impervious to such things. In the time spanning Jack’s murder and his own, he took to wearing his brother’s naval jacket, literally cloaking himself in sorrow. However, he also accepted this most wretched of calamities as a provocative personal challenge. To struggle against the stagnation of pre-conceived notions and overcome confidential fears and ideological obstacles to achieve forward progress in his own thought process and, therefore, of the society of which he was an active participant and public servant.

“He had always been a taker of risks from that day, so many years before, when he had thrown himself off the yawl into Nantucket Sound in his determination to learn to swim,” historian, Special Assistant to the President, and family friend Arthur Schlesinger wrote of Bobby, “and John Kennedy had said he had shown either a lot of guts or no sense at all, depending on how you looked at it.”

When the National Geographic Society proposed that the surviving Kennedy brothers Robert and Edward join the assemblage of experienced climbers seeking to be the first to ascend the Canadian mountain peak named for their fallen brother, a horrible plane crash less than seven months after Jack’s assassination, in which Ted suffered three broken vertebrae, two cracked ribs, and a collapsed lung, removed him from the equation.

It would have been more than understandable had Robert, terrified of heights and otherwise “rash but not reckless” in Schlesinger’s estimation, begged off the expedition, especially given the perilous nature of recent circumstances. For most people, this would have been perfectly acceptable. But, again, Bobby was not most people.

Lofty and Magnificent

Tributes to the martyred President John F. Kennedy emanated from all points on the globe common and obscure, his name and/or likeness affixed to coins, plaques, statues, stamps, streets, high schools and law schools, office buildings, an international airport in Queens, New York, the former Plum Pudding Island in the South Pacific from which Lt. Kennedy and his surviving PT-109 crew were rescued during World War Two after their craft had been demolished following an encounter with a Japanese destroyer.

The Canadian government had something in mind on a much grander scale. Though initially, in the opinion of Bradford Washburn, not grand enough. Washburn, founder and director of Boston’s Museum of Science, was a cartographer and mountaineer with an impressive list of first ascents to his credit, most notably the West Buttress of Mount McKinley, North America’s highest mountain.

He urged the Canadian Parliament to reconsider their original choice for Mount Kennedy, a 12,200-foot peak which he referred dismissively to as “a burble”. The uncharted 14,000-foot Yukon mountain near the Alaskan border that he had in mind was one Washburn had discovered himself from a Fairchild ski-plane during a 1935 mapping mission for National Geographic. Thirty years later, he was now gathering a survey and summit party on behalf of National Geographic and the Boston Museum of Science to set out for Mt. Kennedy and its two adjoining peaks. The expedition would include in its ranks Jim Whittaker, the first American to summit Mt. Everest in 1963, Barry Prather, who was a support member of the 1963 team but fell ill with pulmonary edema and was unable to continue, Mount Rainier park ranger Dee Molenaar and fellow Washington state native George Senner, British Columbia Mountaineering Club member James Craig, National Geographic photographer William Allard, and last  - but not least - New York Senator Robert Kennedy.

Asked by Whittaker about his training regimen for the upcoming journey, Bobby joked, “Running up and down the stairs and hollering, help!”

Lightheartedness was a fine defense mechanism to ward off the fear which must have been substantial to a novice climber. Even Whittaker worried over the potential for avalanches caused by melting spring snows, not to mention the concerns inherent to exploring uncharted territory where “one doesn’t know what those problems will be.” 

Mount Kennedy as shown from an airplane in 1984. Mount Kennedy is the high peak towards the left. Source: Gary Clark, available here.

Commitment of Body and Mind

His first actual sighting of the mountain came, “lonely, stark, forbidding” Kennedy recalled, on March 23, 1965 from a relatively safe sixty-mile distance in the confines of a Royal Canadian Air Force helicopter. The team members were deposited at 8,700 feet where Base Camp One had been established on the newly christened Hyannis Glacier for their first night’s stay. The following morning, the expedition gained an additional 4,000 feet of elevation over the unwelcoming terrain of Cathedral Glacier to reach the High Camp through a snowstorm that, by early evening, had developed into white-out blizzard conditions. This turn of events threatened the next day’s planned summit attempt.

Fortunately, wrote Robert Kennedy for his Life cover story, “during the night the snow stopped, the stars became bright, and the northern lights appeared over the ridge of the mountains.” As picturesque as it was propitious for the task at hand, their tents were nonetheless buffeted by 50 mph winds which “made sleep impossible” but also “either cleared or packed the fresh snow which had fallen and made our climb to the summit that much easier.” Not that it would be free of near disaster.

After waking at 6am to amenable temperatures of 5 above 0 for a breakfast of “soup, mush, and chocolate bars”, the climbers geared up and set off on their final assault at 8.30am. Bobby had learned well from his mountaineering mentors who were all duly impressed with the Senator’s efforts. He was, after all, a veteran of the legendary Kennedy football games on the front lawn at Hyannis Port which would not uncommonly end in bloody noses and bruised egos for brothers and sisters alike. He kept his attention on the progress of “how far we would be in 100 steps” but would also create a diversion in his mind by way of mentally reciting poems as well as passages from Churchill and Emerson. It was not for lack of focus, but simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that Bobby, negotiating a 65-degree incline, suddenly plunged into an icy crevasse up to his shoulders. Quickly pulled free, he looked down from whence he emerged unable to see the bottom, pondering in retrospect the advice given by his mother Rose: “Don’t slip, dear.”

What Am I Doing Here?

“I had three choices: to go down, to fall off, or to go ahead”, reflected Bobby, who was told by a newspaper reporter prior to his departure that he had already written Kennedy’s obituary. With the grim determination for which he was famous (and feared), he reassessed that “I really had only one choice.” 100 feet from the summit, the ridge flattened and widened considerably and it was about here that he was untethered from his rope team of Jim Whittaker and Barry Prather.   

Whittaker, who had been awarded the National Geographic Society’s Hubbard Medal by President Kennedy during a Rose Garden ceremony a mere four months before JFK was killed in Dallas, was the first to selflessly urge Bobby ahead of the pack of proud and accomplished climbers so that he could be the first man to set foot on the summit of Mount Kennedy.

Ironically, at approximately 1pm Robert Kennedy unfurled and planted at the pinnacle of the mountain a three-foot tall flag bearing his family’s crest - the official moment of death ascribed to his brother. He also set in the snow, “with mixed emotion”, two PT-109 tie clasps as well as a golden inaugural medallion which complemented the bound copy of the President’s historic “Ask Not” address encased in plastic. “It was with a feeling of pain that the events of 16 months and two days before had made it necessary,” Robert later wrote. “It was a feeling of relief and exhilaration that we had accomplished what we set out to do.”

Happy to be home, Kennedy would neither scale another mountain nor entertain the desire to do so. Removed from the immediacy of quick thinking and physical exertion necessary in the present moment, however, Bobby was finally able to treasure the views and elements which “I’m sure would have greatly pleased the man for whom the mountain was named.”

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Sources

• Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (1978, Houghton Mifflin)
• Our Climb Up Mt. Kennedy by Robert Kennedy (Life Magazine, April 9, 1965)
• Mountain Tribute to JFK Evoked by Kennedy Trip to Yukon by Michael Jourdan (National Geographic, August 5, 2013) 
• The Strange History of Mount Kennedy, http://www.theclymb.com/stories/out-there/the-strange-history-of-mount-kennedy/

You thought you were having a bad day? Bad days from May in history…

We’ve just found out about an intriguing book that tells tales of bad days in history. In fact it has one bad tale for every day of the year - from the weird to the terrible. And as we enter May, we thought we’d share a few of these with you… From trouble in the American South to Mary Lincoln, and a clash between a communist and somebody who was very rich! So, following is an excerpt from BAD DAYS IN HISTORY: A Gleefully Grim Chronicle of Misfortune, Mayhem, and Misery for Every Day of the Year by Michael Farquhar!

May 1, 1948 and May 14, 1961 and 1963

Raging Bull Connor

There must have been something about the merry, merry month of May that got Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor’s blood boiling. With spring in the air, and racial inequality to be maintained at all costs, the super-segregationist public safety commissioner of Birmingham, Alabama, seemed extra-energized by the season.

Bull Connor in 1960. Source: City of Birmingham, Alabama. Available here. 

Start with May 1, 1948, when Glen H. Taylor, U.S. senator from Idaho, came to Birmingham—“the most segregated city in America,” as Dr. Martin Luther King later called it—and tried to enter a meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress through a door reserved for blacks, rather than the “Whites Only” entrance. The senator, then running for vice president on the Progressive Party ticket, was promptly seized by the police under Connor’s control. “Keep your mouth shut, buddy,” they ordered, before hauling Taylor away to jail.*

Then came more invigorating May days in the early 1960s, when Connor’s bigotry blossomed furiously in the face of new challenges to white supremacy. The Freedom Riders were coming to town, and Connor was good and ready for them. He had arranged with the Ku Klux Klan a memorable greeting party for May 14, 1961— Mother’s Day. According to one Klan informant, the terrorists had been assured by Connor’s Birmingham Police Department that they would be given 15 minutes “to burn, bomb, kill, maim, I don’t give a goddamn . . . I will guarantee your people that not one soul will ever be arrested in that fifteen minutes.” The Klansmen used the allotted time well, unleashing a savage assault on the riders with iron pipes, baseball bats, and chains.

Two years later, during the first week of May, Birmingham’s children inflamed Bull Connor further when thousands took to the streets in peaceful protest. Mass arrests were followed by a full-on assault on demonstrators with fire hoses and attack dogs—images that were captured on film and sent throughout the world. The media glare and national outrage that accompanied it made Birmingham too blistering hot for Connor that May. Unwelcome change was in the air, change he had inadvertently unleashed. By the end of the month, he was out of a job. Worse, his viciousness had pushed the previously inattentive Kennedy Administration to finally address the gross injustices in the South that Connor so viciously represented in Birmingham.

“The civil rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor,” President Kennedy said. “He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”

* Connor had already given vent to his feelings about racial mixing a decade before, when he halted the integrated meeting of the newly formed Southern Conference for Human Welfare with this delightfully oxymoronic declaration: “I ain’t gonna let no darkies and white folk segregate together in this town.”

May 4, 1933

Immural Acts? Rockefeller vs. Rivera

Had it not been for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the lobby of New York’s RCA building at Rockefeller Center might still be graced by the work of the world-renowned muralist Diego Rivera. The Rockefellers, capitalists to their core, commissioned Rivera, an avowed Communist, to paint a dramatic centerpiece for the new building. The lofty theme: “Man at the Crossroads Looking With Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future,” which, in the midst of the Great Depression, would feature two opposing views of society, with capitalism on one side and socialism on the other. Perhaps some might have thought twice about such a potentially explosive topic, but family matriarch Abby Rockefeller was a big fan of the artist, despite, perhaps, his political views, and the fact that he had already ridiculed John D. Rockefeller in another work. Thus, Rivera set about his creative task—with a great big surprise up his sleeve.

A recreated version of Man at the Crossroads. It is by Diego Rivera and called Man, Controller of the Universe. Source: Gumr51, available here.

With work on the mural well under way, future New York governor and U.S. vice president Nelson Rockefeller went on one of his frequent visits to check on Rivera’s progress. This time, however, he saw something entirely unexpected incorporated into the work: a portrait of Lenin himself. Rockefeller was appalled, and on May 4, 1933, he shared his feelings with the artist in a letter asking him to change Lenin’s face to that of an unknown person.

Predictably, Rivera balked at the idea of altering his artistic vision. The same day he received Rockefeller’s letter, the artist responded: “Rather than mutilate the conception, I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety.” With that, what Rivera called the “Battle of Rockefeller Center” was on. The artist was ordered to stop work on the project, and his fee was paid in full.

Amid the ensuing uproar from the art world, Nelson Rockefeller suggested the plywood-covered mural be removed and donated to the Museum of Modern Art. But the museum’s timid trustees wouldn’t touch it. Then, the following February, Rivera’s work was suddenly and unexpectedly smashed to bits and tossed into barrels—an act one critic described as “art murder.” The family claimed the destruction was inadvertent, the result of an unsuccessful attempt to remove the artwork intact. But Rivera didn’t buy that, nor did many art connoisseurs. In a wire sent from Mexico City—where he eventually reproduced the destroyed mural—the artist seethed: “In destroying my paintings the Rockefellers have committed an act of cultural vandalism. There ought to be, there will yet be, a justice that prevents the assassination of human creation as of human character.”

May 20, 1875

The Son Sets on Mary Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln tolerated his wife’s wild extravagances and occasional fits of fury with benign chagrin; his son Robert, much less so. On May 20, 1875, just over a decade after the president’s assassination, the younger Lincoln had his mother committed to an insane asylum. It was an ambush, really, one for which Mary Todd Lincoln was entirely unprepared.

The day before her forced confinement, Leonard Swett, a lawyer and adviser to the late president, arrived unexpectedly at the Chicago hotel where Mrs. Lincoln had taken a room. Accompanied by two guards, Swett escorted her to a packed courtroom where a judge, a previously empaneled jury, and an array of witnesses awaited her. Robert Lincoln was also there, having orchestrated the entire proceeding. The son had been long mortified by the eccentricities of his mother, who had endured the tragic loss of two young sons and witnessed the assassination of her husband. But mostly he was concerned about money—and how much of it she was spending.

The former first lady sat in the courtroom that day, by turns bewildered and infuriated, as a parade of experts—many of whom had never met her—testified as to her unbalanced mind, based solely on reports they had received from Robert. Hotel maids and others were called as well, offering such damning evidence as “Mrs. Lincoln’s manner was nervous and excitable.”

Then Robert took the stand. “I have no doubt my mother is insane,” he declared before the court. “She has long been a source of great anxiety to me. She has no home and no reason to make these purchases.”

The defense rested without ever raising an objection or offering a witness of its own. Robert had his mother’s appointed lawyer in his pocket, and he wouldn’t have stood for any rebuttal. While the all-male jury retired to determine Mrs. Lincoln’s fate, her treacherous son approached and tried to take her hand. Rejecting the transparent gesture, Mary Lincoln made her only statement of the day: “Oh, Robert, to think that my son would do this to me.”

Ten minutes later, the verdict of insane was rendered, and the next day Mary Todd Lincoln was locked away. 

We hope you enjoyed the article! There is a bit more on the book below:

BAD DAYS IN HISTORY: A Gleefully Grim Chronicle of Misfortune, Mayhem, and Misery for Every Day of the Year by bestselling author Michael Farquhar is available for purchase on Amazon. It offers a compendium of the 365 most dreadful, outrageous, and downright disastrous days in human history, all shared with Farquhar's trademark wit.