Yet Another Reason Not to Put Your Finger in Somebody's Mouth

You may know about the recent incident at a California health care rally where a health care reform supporter bit off the pinky finger of a health care reform opponent who was punching him in the face. Although my research hasn't been able to find another example of somebody who bit off somebody else's finger for political reasons, I did find this UPI wire story from the front page of the October 9, 1969 edition of the Anniston Star of Anniston, Alabama.

Julia Child Makes Primordial Soup

Everybody's favorite French Chef was a true advocate for science who had no truck with creationists, nosiree Bob! Enjoy, and bon appetit!

The Plot To Blow Up the Statue of Liberty

In 1965, three black militants from a group called the Black Liberation Front conspired to blow up the Statue of Liberty with help from a white Canadian woman in the Quebecois separatist movement who provided them with dynamite. The photo below is a UPI photo of the four bomb plotters from the front page of the February 17, 1965 issue of the Zanesville, Ohio Times-Recorder.


An interesting 1965 article from Time magazine's online archive describes the "Monumental Plot" in further detail. Robert Steele Collier, the ringleader of the plot, got the idea to blow up the Statue of Liberty (which he called "that damned old bitch") after visiting Cuba in the summer of 1964. Another plotter, Walter Augustus Bowe, later convinced the group to blow up the Liberty Bell and the Washington Monument too, after a replica of the Statue of Liberty convinced them they could blow up the statue's head and torch. The group then obtained dynamite from a Quebecois television personality, Michelle Duclos, but the plot was foiled by Ray Wood, an undercover police officer who was in on the plot the whole time.

Two months later, a Quebecois man who had provided dynamite to Michelle Duclos committed suicide in his jail cell by hanging himself with a leather thong attached to his artificial leg. The newspaper story reporting his death is taken from the front page of the April 19, 1965 issue of the Columbus Daily Telegram.

Rare Silver Apples Article

Vintage article on the cult electronic psychedelic band, the Silver Apples, from the El Paso Herald-Post in August 1968.

Vintage Article on Julia Child

From p. 18 of the November 20, 1961 issue of the Pasadena Independent. The article mentions that Julia Child and her husband were staying with Julia's father and stepfather in Pasadena and also mentions Julia's performance in "fairytale operas" (!) put on by the Pasadena Junior League when she was younger. Click on the article to get a closer look.

Julie, Julia, & the Red Scare

My wife and I saw the movie Julie & Julia last night, which has some interesting biographical details about Julia Child. I was already aware that Julia Child had worked for the OSS, the World War II spy agency and precursor to the CIA, but I was not aware about how her personal history intersected with McCarthyism and the Red Scare in the United States. I have not yet had a chance to read the Julia Child book, My Life in France, but the blog Strange Culture has a post summarizing how the Cold War, the Red Scare, and the later development of McCarthyism shaped Julia Child's life:

1. The historical story that is nestled into this book is fascinating. It's certainly interesting to see how America's foreign policy following WWII changes and adapts through the administrations of Harry S Truman and Eisenhower through the eyes of Paul and Julia Child. Paul Child's diplomatic role in furthering a presentation of American culture and art through ECA (Economic Cooperation Administration) is interesting as a direct arm of the Marshall plan, yet the lack of promotional opportunities for Paul, the increased emphasis on military expansion, as well as the growing fear that was associated with McCarthyism in the United States really was shown through the life of Paul and Julia and their experiences in Europe as American citizens, especially when Paul gets a surprise trip to Washington DC were he is interrogated.

In addition, the movie Julie & Julia depicts Julia Child and her husband as staunch anti-McCarthyite Democrats who occasionally had disagreements with Julia's father about Joseph McCarthy. Paul Child was even questioned by federal investigators about whether he was a homosexual, a common practice during the McCarthy era, as depicted in the book The Lavender Scare. According to My Life in France, Julia Child's father wrote her a letter that said, "I think it's time you two [Julia Child and her husband] had a vacation at home and got the American idea and forget what the Socialistic element of Europe are trying to sell you."

Another hidden connection between the Red Scare and Julie & Julia can be found in the character of Avis DeVoto, Julia's pen pal who helps get publishers interested in Julia's cookbook. The movie does not emphasize this much, but Avis DeVoto was the wife of the writer, Bernard DeVoto, a New Deal liberal who ran afoul of the FBI before Joseph McCarthy was even elected to the Senate. (It is a point that doesn't get emphasized enough that anti-Communist witch hunts were in effect in the 1940s during the Truman Administration, a few years before Joseph McCarthy got to federal office.) Bernard DeVoto attracted the FBI's attention, because he wrote a column in October 1949 in Harper's Magazine mocking the FBI, titled "Due Notice to the FBI." I highly recommend reading the column, because it has just the right mixture of outrage over the violation of civil liberties lightened with humor and bemusement.

Even more interesting, when you consider Bernard DeVoto's connection to the movie Julie & Julia, is his depiction of how "foodie" behavior used to be viewed as a sign of Communist sympathies by J. Edgar Hoover's agents. In the column "Due Notice to the FBI," DeVoto depicts some of the ridiculous questions FBI agents would ask about their target's food preferences:

Does Harry S. Dewey belong to the Wine and Food Society? The Friends of Escoffier? Has he ever attended a meeting of either group? Does he associate with members of either? Has he even been present at a meeting of any kind, or at a party, at which a member of either was also present? Has he ever read Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste? Does he associate with people who have read it? Has he ever been present at a meeting or a party at which anyone who has read it was also present?

DeVoto also describes how the FBI used nosy neighbors to get information:

But Mr. Craig goes a few doors down the street and interviews Frances Perkins Green, who is a prohibitionist and has suffered from nervous indigestion for many years. She has seen truffles and artichokes and caviar in the Dewey garbage. The Deweys' maid has told Mrs. Green that they have porterhouses much oftener than frankforts, that they always have cocktails and frequently have wine, that sometimes cherries and peaches come all the way from Oregon by mail.

Cherries and peaches from Oregon, oh my! The right wing and its obsession with "latte liberalism" and the food preferences of its ideological opponents will never change, I suppose. Anyhow, the more I read about Bernard DeVoto, the more I like him. For his very funny column about the FBI, the FBI compiled a massive FBI file about him for his trouble. And all this happened, not because DeVoto was a Communist agent or any threat to national security, but because DeVoto simply believed in an America where people should mind their own business about their neighbors. As Devoto said,

I like a country where it's nobody's damn business what magazines anyone reads, what he thinks, whom he has cocktails with. I like a country where we do not have to stuff the chimney against listening ears and where what we say does not go into the FBI files along with a note from S-17 that I may have another wife in California.

It's a message we could do well to listen to today.

More on Reagan's Operation Coffee Cup

Here's a clipping from the November 2, 1966 issue of the Long Beach Press-Telegram. Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown of California evidently made a campaign issue out of how Ronald Reagan used over-the-top rhetoric about totalitarianism in an attempt to squelch the creation of Medicare. Brown eventually lost reelection as governor of California to Ronald Reagan, but when I read the clipping, I am struck by how forcefully Brown was willing to call out alarmist right-wing rhetoric for the total crock of B.S. it was. If only some Congressional Democrats now had similar courage in dealing with right-wing nonsense...

Wake Up & Smell the Coffee Cup

The recent right-wing temper tantrum over health care reform bears an interesting resemblance to this 1961 recording, Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine:



The LP was part of Operation Coffee Cup, an early 1960s campaign developed by public relations consultants for the American Medical Association in opposition to the creation of Medicare for seniors. On the LP, Reagan engages in gloom and doom rhetoric, warning his listeners that if they fail stop the creation of Medicare "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." Reagan not only warns that the government will command doctors where they can practice medicine, but that in the future, children will have their professions chosen for them by government schools.

Needless to say, Reagan's alarmist predictions turned out to have zero validity. In fact, Medicare has been so unobtrusively integrated into the fabric of American life that health care reform opponents are now engaged in widespread denial that Medicare is a government program. The same reactionary elements who cried socialism in opposition to Medicare in the early 1960s are now wailing against socialism while simultaneously claiming to be defending Medicare. The hypocrisy is galling, of course, but then again, I can see no better illustration of how conservatism consistently fails to accept when its premises have been disproven.

Lou Dobbs and Horse Show Hypocrisy

This weekend my wife, my mother, and I went to the New Jersey State Fair. While I was there, I learned that fair included a horse show. According to my farm show brochure, one of the horse show events with the biggest prizes is the $10,000 Lou Dobbs Tonight Show Jumping Hall of Fame Amateur-Owner Classic, named after CNN commentator Lou Dobbs. Now what gets me is that Lou Dobbs claims to be this populist tribune of the middle class, but he obviously has lots of money to throw around on the economically elite hobby of amateur horse raising. According to this gossip column in the Philadelphia Daily News, Lou's daughter Hillary Dobbs won several awards at the Devon Horse Show shortly after finishing her finals at Harvard. Ironically, Hillary won those awards while riding a German pony paid with money that her father earns by bashing immigrants for stealing American jobs! (What happened, Mr. Buy American? American ponies not good enough for your daughter, Lou?)

Lou Dobbs went from being a pioneer of financial journalism on cable news to turning into an anti-immigrant blowhard and bully. Yet, as he gets richer jumping on the anti-immigrant bandwagon, he still funds a subculture of rich amateur horse enthusiasts who rely on illegal immigrant labor. According to Vicky Moon's book, A Sunday Horse: Inside the Grand Prix Show Jumping Circuit, "This melting pot of international equine aficionados does not include the countless numbers of illegal Spanish-speaking immigrants who shovel the 40 tons of poop a day." Yet no matter how much poop those show horses produce, it still doesn't stink as much as the hypocrisy of Lou Dobbs calling for the mass deportation of immigrants who have made his daughter's opulent lifestyle possible.

Henry Ford Funding Hitler

From page 4 of the December 19, 1922 issue of the Bridgeport Telegram.

American Axis: Henry Ford's Nazi Connection

I don't have much to add to this newspaper clipping, other than to mention that it was taken from page 4 of the December 28, 1922 issue of the Fort-Wayne News Sentinel. Evidently, rumors of Henry Ford's financing of Hitler were active as early as the 1920s, when there was simultaneously speculation about Henry Ford running as a candidate for president.

More Vintage Walter Cronkite

Here's another United Press story from Walter Cronkite's days as a correspondent with that wire service. It's dated March 11, 1941, from the Evansville Intelligencer. According to the story, the Czech figure skater Vera Hruba received 2600 marriage proposals after she was temporarily threatened with deportation from the United States. According to Miss Hruba, "I got a letter from a convict in Texas who said he had 14 more days to serve on a 10-year sentence for killing somebody, and that he'd be glad to marry me. Another said that he was 32, good-natured and handsome, but that he thought it was only fair to tell me that he was drunk all the time." For his own part, Cronkite describes Hruba as a "beautiful and shapely girl with a pronounced accent," a description you would most definitely not find most newspapers these days. Cronkite does not provide context about why Hruba fled Czechoslovakia to go the United States, but her Wikipedia entry states that Hitler asked her at the 1936 Olympics to "skate for the swastika." Miss Hruba then told Hitler that she would rather "skate on the swastika." Later on, after becoming a naturalized U.S. citizen, Hruba adopted the name Vera Ralston and had a brief movie career that lasted from the 1940s to the early 1950s.

Why No USS Bill Clinton?

The blog Lawyers, Guns, & Money has a great post about the politics of naming military warships. It turns out, no big surprise, that most of the military hardware is named after Republicans. Most of the Democrats who have ships named after them were Southern Democrats, typically of the segregationist variety, who are thankfully no longer part of the Democratic coalition. As one of the commenters noted, there isn't even a single warship named after a supporter of the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s. Before even considering naming an aircraft carrier after Barry Goldwater, we should commission the USS Lyndon Baines Johnson or the USS Bill Clinton first.

America's Oldest Surviving Slave

Lately, I've been thinking lately about how the process of collective memory works. The older generation creates history. The next generation remembers that history. Then, as the older generation dies off, the history they created slowly fades away until nobody has any living memory of it.

I bring this up, because I find it amazing how close we are historically to the pre-Civil War era of slavery. In fact, the old age and death of most of the survivors of the antebellum slavery era may have been a necessary condition before the civil rights movement finally achieved its major victories in the 1960s.

One way to demonstrate how close we are historically to the institution of slavery is to examine the question of who was the last living African-American who was born a slave. The question may never have a truly definitive answer, because most slaves never had proper birth records. In practice, this meant that there were multiple candidates who claimed to be the last living American slave, but some candidates were more credible than others.

When Charlie Smith of Bartow, Florida died in 1979, he still claimed he was born in Liberia in 1862, then lured into slavery by an illegal slave ship. According to a thesis I found on the Internet, African American Longevity Advantage: Myth or Reality?, however, Mr. Smith's real age at death was closer to 100 or 105, according to marriage and census records. Since Mr. Smith's age would have placed his date of birth approximately sometime between 1874 and 1879, his claim to being a slave fell apart under the scrutiny.

The more plausible claimants to being the oldest slave in the United States were more likely to approach 110 years of age than to claim they were over 130 years old, as Charlie Smith did. In a 1951 issue of a North Carolina newspaper, I found a reference to Alfred Blackburn, who died at the age of 109, as the oldest surviving slave in the state of North Carolina, although not the United States as a whole. In addition, I found a second story from 1966 about a women named Mary Walker from Chattanooga, Tennessee who was certified as "America's oldest student" when she learned to read at the age of approximately 116 years old. According to the article, she outlived a son who died in his nineties, so her claim is definitely the most credible I've seen. Even if she was "merely" 110 years old at the time, it's possible that she would still be the most credible claimant to being the world's oldest slave. In fact, according to this article from a Chattanooga paper that I found on an African-American genealogical bulletin board, Mary Walker even had a family Bible where she recorded the births of her children, which could verify her story.

The last claimant I could find came from an ad I found on Amazon.com for a very rare commemorative booklet that was given out at the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous "I Have a Dream" speech. Unfortunately, the booklet is no longer for sale, but the old listing states that there was a collage dedicated to Josephus, a man whom the march organizers designated as the "last living slave" in the United States (although Mary Walker was still alive in 1963 as well).

In the final analysis, it may not matter that we don't have a definitive answer about the last surviving slave in the United States. What matters is that there are centenarians who have not only endured centuries of discrimination, but thrived. Perhaps what matters is not who was the oldest surviving slave, but that the oldest slave long outlive the oldest slavemaster.

Blue Dog Origins

The efforts of Blue Dog Democrats at stalling health care reform have inspired me to look into the origins of the Blue Dog caucus. One of the founders of the Blue Dog Democrats was Billy Tauzin, who later became a Republican in 1995, one year after founding the Blue Dog caucus. As if Tauzin's willingness to shift partisan loyalties with the political winds wasn't damning enough, his career after leaving Congress is even more maddening. According to Tauzin's Wikipedia entry,

While recovering from a difficult fight with cancer, on January 3, 2005, the same day he left Congress, Tauzin began work as the head of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, or PhRMA, a powerful trade group for pharmaceutical companies.

It was reported that they had offered more than $2.5 million per year for his services, outbidding the Motion Picture Association of America, which had offered Tauzin $1 million to lobby for it.

In other words, Tauzin didn't merely sell out to the pharmaceutical industry. He was the pharmaceutical industry. Democrats need to pressure Ben Nelson (D-NE) and Max Baucus (D-MT) to make sure that campaign contributions from the health care industry don't lead those men down a similar career path.

Vintage Shaggs Ad

From the December 18, 1969 issue of the Porstmouth Herald in New Hampshire.

The Birth of Psychedelic Music?

In the October 24, 1965 issue of the Oakland Tribune, I found a theater listing with one of the earliest references to the term "psychedelic music" in print. According to the schedule listing, the Open Theatre in Berkeley was planning to host an evening of "psychedelic music" by Malachi and the Jazz Mice, featuring Jeanne Lee. The "Malachi" is probably the same Malachi who released the album Holy Music on Verve Records. Information on the Jazz Mice is rather sketchy, but they appear to be the same group as the Jazz Mice Septet mentioned on this vintage poster. Some more digging on Google reveals that the leader of the Jazz Mice was Ian Underwood, who would later have a long career as a sideman for Frank Zappa. Given Zappa's antipathy to drug use, I wonder what Zappa thought of Underwood's psychedelic musical experimentation before joining the Mothers Invention.

Did Henry Louis Gates Tell a Cop "Yo Mama"?

After the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates for allegedly breaking into his own house (?!?), the arresting officer Sgt. James Crowley filed a report claiming that he asked Professor Gates to step outside, at which point Prof. Gates replied "Ya, I'll speak with your mama outside." At first, I thought that the arresting officer was engaging in a little dramatic license (i.e., lying) by adding some street slang to his police report in a shallow attempt to make Gates look like a scary, bad black man.

There's certainly precedent for it. When I used to live in the Philadelphia area, the argument over whether the black nationalist Mumia Abu-Jamal shot the Caucasian police officer Daniel Faulkner was an extremely hot topic. Proponents of Abu-Jamal's guilt and execution often cited Officer Gary Wakshul's testimony that Abu-Jamal said at the hospital, "I shot the m*therf*cker, and I hope he dies." On the other hand, Wakshul's testimony contradicted an earlier report filed by Wakshul himself, which stated "the Negro male made no statement," mostly like because Abu-Jamal was comatose from a bullet wound at the time. In this light, Waskshul's testimony about Abu-Jamal calling a white cop a "m*therf*cker" may have been Wakshul's attempt to put "black street slang" falsely into Mumia Abu-Jamal's mouth in order to sublimininally portray Abu-Jamal as a scary black nationalist cop-killer.

A similar force may have been at work when Sgt. Crowley attributed "I'll speak with your mama outside." to Henry Louis Gates. But then again, is it possible that Henry Louis Gates actually said that? Part of me wants to believe he said that anyway, because I don't necessarily think it reflects badly on him, and I think it would be such a hilarious crotchety and curmudgeonly thing for a professor in his sixties to say to a cop. I mean to say, if you were harassed on your property by a cop, don't you think the cop might deserve a little sassmouth?

Then again, did the reference to "your mama" have anything to do with Henry Louis Gates and his career as a theorist of African-American literary criticism? Gates may be most well-known now for doing Oprah's genealogy, but the book that made his academic reputation was The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, which stressed the importance of African-American vernacular traditions like playing the dozens and insult games involving "yo mama" jokes. As the commenter "mistersquid" noted at Metafilter,

Henry Louis Gates references Clarence Major’s Dictionary of Afro-American Slang, which compares signifyin(g) to the “Dirty Dozens,” “an elaborate game traditionally played by black boys, in which the participants insult each other’s relatives, especially their mothers. The object of the game is to test emotional strength. The first person to give in is the loser” (qtd. in Gates 68).

So, there you have it. Either the cop was "blacking up" his report in order to make a African-American Harvard professor look bad, or Henry Louis Gates was engaging in literary criticism mind games with the cop who tried to arrest him. Either way, it's indicative of the fascination that African-American vernacular English holds for both blacks and whites in this country.

Walter Cronkite as Cub Reporter at Forgotten Tragedy

I went searching in my online newspaper archives for some early newspaper articles by the late, beloved Walter Cronkite. In the process, I found this gem, a 1937 article about an oilfield explosion in Texas that demolished a nearby school and left 425 children dead. The event is known as the New London explosion, one of the biggest disasters of the New Deal era, but almost completely forgotten today (even among "disaster trivia" junkies like myself). What strikes me the most about the article is how well-written the article Walter Cronkite wrote is, even though Cronkite was only a 21-year-old junior reporter at the time. Cronkite was hailed for his gravitas (an overused word if I ever heard one) as an older man, but you can actually see traces of that gravitas when he was only 21. Take these final paragraphs from Cronkite's article:

One hour and 20 minutes after the explosion, a cablegram came from Venezuela, from a father who had entrusted his children to his brother. "Tell me the truth," it said, "Are Bob and Vera safe?"

The brother wanted to reply truthfully, but even today he could not. The children were among the missing, neither listed as dead or injured. Perhaps the next brick pulled from the wreckage would tell."

You may think of Cronkite as just an old talking head on the television, but damn that man could write. Too bad they don't make newspaper men like him any more. As Cronkite later admitted in a 1977 interview, "I did nothing in my studies nor in my life to prepare me for a story of the magnitude of that New London tragedy, nor has any story since that awful day equaled it."

The History of Bias Accusations in Supreme Court Appointments

I just found an article by Alexander Tsesis with some great historical tidbits about accusations of bias in Supreme Court nominations. Some highlights from the article include:

• When Roger Taney was appointed as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the early 19th century, a newspaper editorial "lashed out against "Episcopalians and other Christian sects," for being "alarmed at the idea of making a Catholic, (Mr. Taney,) the Chief Justice of the United States" and conjuring up the chimera "of the Pope’s ruling the conscience of the Chief Justice."
  
  
• When Woodrow Wilson appointed Louis Brandeis to the Supreme Court, a newspaper accused President Wilson of pandering to "Jewish, pro-German and labor votes."
  
  
• LBJ's appointment of Thurgood Marshall was intended as a move to decrease the popularity of the Black Power movement. Marshall had previously given a speech in 1966 that denounced the movement for "Jim Crow thinking."