01/16/13

What The Sixties Did To America? (The 1960s)

 

Happy New Year! Yes, it’s been a while since my last post here at Y and T, but I’m still around. This blog has mostly been focused on nineteenth century history because that has been my primary focus of study for the last several years. These past weeks though, I’ve moved a hundred years into the future to the 1960s and ’70s. Since I was born in 1955, these were the years of my own youth. Demographically, I am part of the ”baby boomer” generation, usually defined as those born between 1946 and 1964. Somehow though, I’ve always felt just a little behind. My parents were children during WWII, so they don’t fit the “returning G.I.” explanation for the baby boom. I was the first born, so I had no older siblings through which to learn about the world. I was only eight when JFK was shot; thirteen when his brother and MLK met the same fate. Sixties culture affected me, but only superficially. I loved the music, especially the Beatles, but I was only nine when they first appeared on Ed Sullivan, and they broke up when I was still in high school. I listened to the Monkees along with Creedence Clearwater Revival; the soundtracks of Mary Poppins and the Sound of Music along with the Rolling Stones. I loved the clothes; the bell bottomed pants, the paisley billow-sleeved shirts, and the leather fringed jackets and vests. To my parents chagrin, as a young teenager I started letting my hair grow and combed it down across my forehead. Some of the kids at school called me “hippie” but the real hippies had already come and gone by the time I graduated from high school in 1973.

At fifteen I was very focused on obtaining a driver’s license and a car. Maybe it was because I lived in Southern California, or maybe because the town I lived in was a long freeway drive to the “city” and to the beach, but to me “freedom” required a car. I guess a lot of kids in those years figured out ways to roam the country without a car, but not me, and a car required money, which required a job. I worked hard for that first car, and every car I’ve owned since. In 1974 I enlisted in the Marine Corps. Obviously, the “peace movement” hadn’t affected me. The war in Vietnam was a defining issue of the baby boom generation, but it was basically over by the time I enlisted.

So, for me, memories of the sixties and even the seventies is like “looking through a glass darkly.”  So much happened in my junior high and high school years, but I was growing up in the far out suburbs of Southern California. The tumult of the Watts riots in Los Angeles in 1965 might as well have been on a different planet. And if Los Angeles seemed far away, Chicago and Newark and Detroit and all those other places that exploded in the sixties over race and poverty and war I don’t think ever entered my young consciousness. Last night I watched a movie about the Chicago 8. All these years I didn’t know that the line from Graham Nash’s song Chicago, “Though your brother’s bound and gagged and they’ve chained him to a chair” was a reference to Bobby Seale, because I knew nothing of the Chicago 8 trial. I have to wonder, if I, a “trained historian” who actually lived through the past fifty-plus years can’t remember everything that happened, then how is the average citizen, more and more often younger than I am, supposed to make sense of today? The 1960s might as well be the 1860s for many people.

Today, the baby boom generation, my generation is in charge. It sometimes feels like the country is so divided that surely it will all come crashing down any time now, but I have to remind myself that it’s always been this way.

     The heated discussion conducted in recent years by press and platform on the merits and demerits of liberalism and conservatism causes the student of American history to search his mind concerning the effects of these opposing types of thought on the past history of the United States. In such an inquiry, an initial difficulty presents itself: what do the terms, “conservative” and ” liberal,” mean? Popular usage has tended to rob these expressions of exact meaning and to convert them into epithets of opprobrium and adulation which are used as the bias or interest of the person may dictate. The conservative, having mapped out the confines of truth to his own satisfaction, judges the depravity and errors of the liberal by the extent of his departure from the boundaries thus established. Likewise the liberal, from his vantage-point of truth, measures the knavery and infirmities of his opponents by the distance they have yet to travel to reach his goal. Neither conservative nor liberal regards the other with judicial calm or “sweet reasonableness.” Neither is willing to admit that the other has a useful function to perform in the progress of society. Each regards the other with deep feeling as the enemy of everything that is fundamentally good in government and society.

The above quote could have come from 2013. It’s actually from Arthur Schlesinger’s 1922 book, New Viewpoints in American History. (I did substitute the word “liberal” for Schlesinger’s label “radical,” but the point is the same.) People want to use “history” to support their particular world view, but then pick and choose which pieces of history they want to remember. They also often make the mistake of believing that somehow, somewhere in time there was a “consensus;” a golden time when everyone knew what was right and what was wrong, and, oh, if we could just get back to that time… That way of looking at history just doesn’t work for me.

At any rate, I just wanted to relay where I’m at right now and that this blog is not dead and no, I haven’t left the nineteenth century for good. By the way, I think the video above raises some very interesting questions about “my generation,” and yet I can’t see much of my own life experience in it.

 

11/21/12

You Lie!

     On December 4, Amy S. Greenberg, author of A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, will be guest speaker at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site. Dr. Greenberg titled her book after a quote by Ulysses Grant:

I do not think there was ever a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico. I thought so at the time, when I was younger, only I had not moral courage enough to resign. – Ulysses S. Grant, 1879

     I’m about halfway through the book and I’m finding it engaging and an easy read. Greenberg warns her readers right off that this is not a study of the military campaigns of the war with Mexico, but rather it is “a story about politics, slavery, Manifest Destiny, Indian killing, and what it meant to prove one’s manhood in the nineteenth century. It explores the meaning of moral courage in America, the importance of legacies passed between generations, and the imperatives that turn politicians into leaders.”

     This could obviously be a post about several important issues, but I want to share one passage I’ve found particularly interesting; that is Greenberg’s take on James K. Polk:

In the chilly first months of 1845, many Democrats came to believe that the president-elect had a predilection to make promises, or appear to make promises he had no intention of keeping… Newly  seated senator John A. Dix of New York… trusted Polk, because “his honor is a sufficient Security” to prevent him from lying. Dix believed Polk, because he assumed the president, like other men of his profession and class, cared about his reputation as an honorable man. Honorable men did not lie, at least not without plausible deniability.

Dix and others quickly learned, however, that James K. Polk’s “honor” offered little security…Before he was even inaugurated he had won a reputation as a man who couldn’t be trusted. It was becoming clear that Polk’s “mind was narrow, and he possessed a trait of sly cunning which he thought shrewdness, but which was really disingenuousness and duplicity.” No Democrat would dare say it out loud, but the new President was a liar.

     I couldn’t help but think of our recent history and the election campaigns we just passed through. Just like John Dix, we all would like to believe that men (and women) “care about their reputation.” We would like to believe that their “honor is a sufficient security” to prevent them from lying, yet we are also cynical. Trust is often an issue in political campaigns, but it is often a matter of which candidate lies the least, rather than which one is actually honest. Indeed, it has been argued that lying is a requirement in a successful politician. See here, for instance.

     Some of us also tend to think that lying politicians are a recent phenomena. Greenberg reminds us that is wistful nostalgia for a time that never existed, not true history, “Honest Abe” notwithstanding.  

 

 

 

11/13/12

Was Grant Correct On Texas Secession? (re-visited)

     In the wake of the re-election of President Obama, there is suddenly a lot of media attention being paid to petitions for secession coming from various states. In particular, a petition from the great state of Texas has apparently garnered over 60,000 signatures. According to Wiki, Texas has a population of 25.7 million, so there’s going to have to be a lot more signatures before I am convinced that this is serious. Nevertheless, I thought it might be good to re-visit a post I published last year. See here.

11/12/12

Was Ulysses Grant Anti-slavery?

One of the primary issues that I have grappled with in my four years as a Park Guide at Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, the place the Grants called White Haven, is the question of what Grant’s personal views on slavery actually were in the years before the Civil War. I do not believe the issue has any direct bearing on what caused the war, as Grant was not really involved in the political debate that led to secession. Nevertheless, given his prominent role in suppressing the slaveholders’ rebellion it is a question that is often raised. Grant scholars, or anyone interested in Grant the man, must tackle it.

In a letter written to Elihu Washburne in August, 1863, Grant explicitly stated, “I was never an Abolitionest, [n]ot even what could be called anti slavery.” In his Memoirs he wrote, “For some years before the war began it was a trite saying among some politicians that ‘A state half slave and half free cannot exist.’ All must become slave or all free, or the state will go down. I took no part myself in any such view of the case at the time.” These would seem to be pretty straightforward statements directly from Grant himself.

According to some, Grant was instilled with anti-slavery views by his father, Jesse Grant. Jesse Grant indeed held anti-slavery views which he expressed in newspaper articles written for an anti-slavery newspaper. As a child Ulysses undoubtedly was taught his father’s political views and those of Jesse’s political friends and allies. Whether or not he adopted his father’s political principles as his own is far more problematic; examples abound of men who completely reject their father’s beliefs and opinions. During the Civil War, fathers and sons often found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. Grant’s letters to his father show respect and a desire for approval, yet his relationship with his father was often strained, and his letters show no indication of shared political views. In fact, in a letter written to his father in April, 1861 following the attack on Fort Sumter, Grant began with the statement, “Whatever may have been my political opinions before…” This could easily be interpreted as an apology of sorts for not following in Jesse’s political footsteps.

Young Ulysses never ran for political office, never gave a speech, never wrote a letter to a newspaper, never even voted prior to 1856, by which time he was 34 years old. Grant did criticize the Democrat President Polk’s handling of the Army in letters written during the war with Mexico, and in later years he would argue that the war had been an unjustified pro-slavery land-grab. There are, however, no known letters written by Grant prior to the late 1850s that mention politics, political parties, specific individual candidates, or the controversy over slavery. Grant voted for James Buchanan in 1856, and rejected the Free Soil arguments of Frank Blair and others in St. Louis in the late 1850s. As a result, historians searching for evidence that Grant was personally opposed to the institution of slavery before the Civil War have had to rely on post-war reminiscences of Grant’s family and acquaintances, and on Grant’s actions rather than his words.

However, the historic record is mixed. Grant was reported to have treated the slaves he worked with at White Haven humanely; he was reputed to have paid free blacks whom he hired the same wages as whites; the Dent’s slave cook, Mary Robinson, remembered Grant saying he would free his wife’s slaves when he could (see here and here); in letters written to his father he carefully avoided the term slave, calling them servants instead. He freed the one slave he is known to have owned, a man named William Jones, rather than selling him, however there is only one piece of primary documentary evidence available to historians regarding Jones; the manumission paper written in Grant’s own hand. Grant never referred to Jones in any other known writings. Exactly when, how, or why Grant acquired Jones in the first place is uncertain. Grant’s actual motivations in freeing Jones are also uncertain. See here.

Despite this limited evidence of a personal antipathy to slavery, the fact remains that Grant accepted the role of slaveholding planter-farmer at White Haven until it became economically untenable to continue. Grant biographer Jean Edward Smith described Grant’s antebellum views on slavery as “ambivalent.” In Triumph Over Adversity, Brooks Simpson wrote that Grant was “confused about the peculiar institution” after quoting Grant’s sister-in-law: “Emma recalled that he opposed the institution of slavery, yet added, ‘I do not think that Grant was such a rank abolitionist that Julia’s slaves had to be forced on him.’”

There is no question Grant recognized immediately that slavery was the root cause of secession, as his April 19, 1861 letter to his father-in-law clearly acknowledged. “In all this I can but see the doom of slavery.” The letter, however, showed no personal objection to slavery; only that it was slavery that was causing the disturbance. Pam Sanfilippo, Site Historian at U.S. Grant NHS, wrote in a Historic Resource Study, “It seems that war made Grant realize what slavery really was, and he did not want to see it continued in the country…like Lincoln, he thought first of the union of the states, and what was necessary to keep the country whole…this could only happen with the abolition of slavery…A national resolution to the issue of slavery would, in Grant’s view, restore peace and re-unite the North and South.”

The views of many people regarding slavery changed during the war – some radically. John Logan, Benjamin Butler, and George Thomas come to mind. In his later years Grant would recall that slavery was a stain on the republic. Whether he only saw this in hindsight, or believed it all along, does not change the fact that it was Grant who led the country to victory in a war that abolished slavery. Nor does it undo his postwar record of fighting for the equality of all Americans.

10/31/12

Women, Religion, and Politics; The Candidacy of Victoria C. Woodhull

This Thomas Nast cartoon illustrated the choice women faced, depicting Victoria Woodhull as Satan. (From Morton Keller’s “The Art and Politics of Thomas Nast”)

     It’s been one hundred forty years since the Presidential election of 1872. One of  the more interesting persons put forth as a candidate for President in 1872 was Victoria C. Woodhull. Woodhull’s candidacy aroused the ire of the morality police of the era because she advocated what was termed “free love.” In November 1871, Woodhull had given a speech to a crowd in New York City which she titled, “The Principles of Social Freedom,” Involving the Question of Free Love, Marriage, Divorce, and Prostitution. Someone shouted from the audience that night, “Are you a free lover?” to which Woodhull replied, “Yes, I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love everyday if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere!” This kind of defiance against societal norms didn’t sit well with the self-appointed social arbiters of the day, but Woodhull’s social views particularly rankled Harriet Beecher Stowe, sister of the leading evangelist of the time, Henry Ward Beecher. Harriet wrote searing articles attacking Woodhull which were published in The Christian Union. Harriet and Henry’s sister, Catherine Beecher, also wrote articles condemning Woodhull.

     It might be instructive today to remind ourselves of the context in which Woodhull expressed her views. The following is from an excellent biography of Woodhull by Mary Gabriel:

Victoria believed that nearly all social problems were rooted in bad marriages. Crime, poverty, intemperence, abortion, and disease were all the direct result of ill-advised coupling. For her, social freedom for women meant the right to end  a bad marriage and begin again without being condemned by society. Although divorce was possible in the second half of the nineteenth century, the social stigma attached to it was more oppressive than any law. A divorced woman was an outcast, tainted, and immediately suspected of being immoral. Even if the woman sought a divorce on the grounds of physical cruelty, good society whispered that she must somehow have been to blame for the abuse. Her prospects for making a good second marriage were dim. But it was not just her good name or her future prospects  that a woman lost in divorce; she was also forced to give up her children, who by law were the property of their father. A woman’s choices were simple: remain unhappily married and retain a home, financial security, and one’s children or get a divorce and lose the children, one’s place in society and whatever wealth one might possess. Not surprisingly, most women decided to stay married and to abide by society’s unwritten code of conduct concerning bad marriages: the union should appear to remain intact, the man should be free to indulge his passions elsewhere, and the wife should remain in the home to raise her children and accept her fate.

     Woodhull may have miscalculated the extent to which society’s ills could be traced to bad marriages, but I wonder how many women today think it would be a good idea to go back to those nineteenth century laws and societal standards.  I have no doubt there are some men who think all of today’s societal ills can be traced to the relaxation of these archaic and rigid laws and societal standards.

 

 

10/20/12

Missouri and Southern Identity

 

This video and the following commentary were posted by my friend Dr. Joan Stack on Facebook today and I am reposting them here with her permission.

    [The video above is] a lecture by historian Christopher Phillips. Some of you may know that I have problems with Phillips’ interpretation of the life and career of Gen. Nathaniel Lyon in his book, Damned Yankee. I was surprised to find that I liked this lecture, although I disagree with a few points (specifically with the suggestion that artist G. C. Bingham identified with the Confederacy after the war). Phillips actually has some pretty great research and references in his talk. I will be looking for some of these citations when his book comes out next year. HOWEVER, while I like many of the specific examples and points that he makes in his lecture, I have some problems with the overarching argument. In the presentation and in his upcoming book, The Rivers Ran Backward (Oxford University Press), Phillips argues that after the Civil War Missourians came to identify themselves as Southern.

      In an interview, Phillips summarized this thesis as follows, “Before the war, loyalties and how people defined their local communities and regions ran in one direction. After the war, they largely ran in an opposite direction. The war caused a seismic shift that still echoes today, where states like Kentucky and Missouri became ‘southern,’ and Ohio, Indiana and Illinois became ‘northern,’ or, for others, ‘Midwestern.’”

      Phillips presents a persuasive argument that the rebel-leaning, white supremacist element in Missouri had a powerful resurgence from the 1880s onward. However, I would argue that there has also been continued resistance to this element among the majority of Missourians. As a lifelong Missourian I have NEVER identified as Southern or Confederate. Phillips’ attempt to force a Southern identity on Missouri reminds me of the earlier attempt by another focus of Phillips’ research, Missouri’s rebel Governor Claiborne Fox Jackson, to drag the state into the Confederacy against the will of the majority of Missourians!

     In an informal survey of people that I know, the only Missourians who consider themselves southern come from southern Missouri. Most others feel uncomfortable with any regional identity and if they had to pick one, would consider themselves Midwestern.

     Many Missourians, including myself, have a split or schizophrenic identity. This fractured understanding of self gives many people from my state insight into a variety of regional allegiances. I believe Missourians’ complex identity has sometimes allowed them to understand the multifaceted nature of America as a whole better than residents of other states (think Mark Twain, G. C. Bingham, and Thomas Hart Benton).

With that said, Missouri’s recent entrance into the SEC supports Phillips’ argument, (but remember, we almost joined the Big Ten!)

10/9/12

Brown Sugar

     The other night as a couple of my co-workers and I were walking out of the park to our cars to head home, the chords of a familiar song came wafting through the air. A garage band in the neighborhood had launched into a cover of the Rolling Stones’ classic Brown Sugar.  The Stones released Brown Sugar in April 1971, when I was just a sophomore in high school, and it went to number one on the Billboard charts. The infectious blues-rock guitar riffs, the raucous horns, and the dance beat captivated me then and the song remains one of my favorite Stones compositions. But one of my co-workers said he didn’t like the song and when I asked why not, he replied, ”because it’s about a master raping his slave.”  Now I’ll admit that I could always hear something about a slave ship in the opening lines, but Mick Jagger has never been known for clearly enunciating his lyrics so I never really knew what most of the rest of the lyrics were. My curiosity piqued, I did what we all do nowadays, I googled. Lo and behold, there are a number of postings related to the controversial Brown Sugar.  It turns out that I’m not the only one who isn’t quite sure what the lyrics actually are (although watching the above performance, they seem pretty clear now), and it also appears that Jagger has used different lyrics at different times. Nevertheless, I have definitely not been singing the correct words these past forty years. More interesting than the exact words however, is the different ways the song is interpreted (the Stones haven’t been especially helpful in their own explanations) and in the process, how slavery itself is interpreted and remembered.

     I’ve always thought that one of the more ironic arguments put forth by the advocates of slavery in the antebellum years was that emancipation would bring an “amalgamation” of the races, or “miscegenation.” White men were particularly afraid that freed black men would suddenly be coming after white women resulting in a to-be-feared mixing of the races. The irony was that white men were busy across the slave states “amalgamating” with black slave women. Theodore Weld’s famous American Slavery As It Is, published in 1839 and condemned in the slave states as Northern abolitionist propaganda, included several references to  sexual relations between white masters and slave women. The testimony of one North Carolinian was particularly direct: “Amalgamation was common. There was scarce a family of slaves that had females of mature age where there were not some mulatto children.” In his landmark study, The Peculiar Institution, Kenneth Stampp wrote:

To measure the extent of miscegenation with precision is impossible, because statistical indexes are crude and public and private records fragmentary. But the evidence nevertheless suggests that human behavior in the Old South was very human indeed, that sexual contacts between the races were not rare aberrations of a small group of depraved whites but a frequent occurrence involving whites of all social and cultural levels….According to the census of 1860, more than a half million (about twelve per cent) of the colored people in the slave states were “mulattoes.” This was certainly an underestimate, because the census takers classified each individual on the basis of his appearance. Persons whose complexions were very dark were listed as Negroes, though they might have had some white ancestors. Others whose complexions were very light were listed as whites, though they might have had some Negro ancestors.

     Without doubt, rape has been used as a weapon of war and as a method of subjugation since time began, but “human behavior” and human relationships are complex and not always easily understood or explained. I was reminded of this as I read an exchange of comments Kevin Levin recently had on his blog about the master/slave relationship in regard to slaves who “willingly” or “unwillingly” went to war alongside their masters. Kevin said regarding the emotions involved in the master/slave relationship, “This is something that I have very difficult time understanding and I doubt I will ever come to terms with it.” This is a statement I agree with because, obviously, I’ve never been a master or a slave. I will never personally know all the emotions that relationship might produce. Human sexuality is also complex and a continuing subject of study, debate, and taboo. In regard to sexual relations between a master and a slave, it would seem that the very nature of the relationship negated consent on the part of the slave, but I am willing to consider that there *might* have been some relationships that were sincere. Note that Jagger’s lyrics don’t specifically say anything about rape; it is merely taken as a point of fact that any sexual relationship between a master and slave was rape by definition. Let me be clear, this in no way is a defense of slavery or an attempt to lessen the evils of slavery. In fact, these men should be reminded of this sordid aspect of slavery.

     There is also a line in Brown Sugar about “the houseboy doin’ all right.” Possibly, Jagger meant this as a reference to sexual relationships between black male slaves and white women. Stampp wrote in The Peculiar Institution: “Though white women were less involved in interracial sexual contacts than men, their role, especially in the colonial period when slaves and indentured servants worked on the same estates was never entirely negligible.” Further: “Numerous white men attempted to divorce their wives for allegedly having sexual relations with slaves. In one such case the wife not only admitted her intimacy with a slave but confessed that he had made her love him better than any body in the world, and she thought he must have given her something.”

     Not only have I never been a master or a slave, I am also not a black woman, so I found this blog post particularly interesting (and disturbing because I actually am a rather sensitive guy who doesn’t like to offend others). The blogger bitingly complained that the lyrics of Brown Sugar, as she interprets them,

 celebrate the rape of enslaved women, that exotify black women, that advance the Jezebel stereotype of the unrapeable, twisting, writhing, gyrating black woman with an animal need for sex, eager to get down on her knees…those lyrics aren’t racist or sexist…I bet you would call them “edgy”…. Songs about hypersexualized black women… may well be harmless to the cool, white folks who create them. But the impact felt by oppressed people is not harmless. Next time an 11-year-old black girl is gang-raped by 21 men and boys and people blame the victim, saying she was just “fast,” it will be because of all the past propaganda stereotyping black women as Jezebels, including songs like “Brown Sugar.” 

     But, then there was this comment:

I actually really like this song. I too was amazed when I read the lyrics about ten years ago. However, as a historian – and a black woman – I have no problem with the song or the subject matter. The Stones are stating a fact. The slave masters did rape black women. They’re neither condoning it nor celebrating it. Also, many of their songs are written either to provoke people, to get a reaction, or as a parody of someone else’s opinion. The Stones are not racist. The picture they paint in this song isn’t pretty but it is an ugly part of history and they’re basically telling a story.

     On another blog, I found this comment:

I am black, I like this song. I think some people who are offended are being too literal. Every time a pop/rock singer uses the word “girl” he or she, is not necessarily meaning someone under 18–same thing for the word “boy.” Just recently, well a year or so ago, a “study” was done that “determined” that black women were less attractive than white ones, and 13,000 people liked it on Facebook. To have a song that celebrates the sexual attractiveness, desirability of black women, makes me happy. I have always seen this song as a “calling out” of historical abusers–instead of dehumanizing the slave women, they should have admitted that they desired them, hence the chorus.

     The interpretation of history, and rock music, is never as simple as it might seem.

09/29/12

Civil War in Missouri at the Missouri History Museum

     I finally got over to the Missouri History Museum on Tuesday to see the Civil War in Missouri exhibit. On Tuesdays, residents of St. Louis and St. Louis County get in free, which is always a good price. I had heard good things about it and was not disappointed; well, except for one thing I’ll mention in a minute.

     First, I think the exhibit does a nice job of showing how Missourians contributed to, reacted to, and helped resolve the sectional crisis. The issue of slavery can’t be missed, but of course, there were cultural, ethnic, and economic issues as well. I was impressed with the artifacts on display. A few in particular. There is a large flag that was hand embroidered by the ladies of St. Louis for the Missouri State Guard which was at Camp Jackson. I don’t know how many ladies labored to create it, or how many stitches went into it, but it is a beautiful piece of art. Also, this Wide Awake pin and ribbon; it’s amazing that these things survive today. Finally, the actual  Ordinance Abolishing Slavery in Missouri from January, 1865. All of these items serve to remind us that the history we read about in books was so very real; that it involved real people in ways I sometimes think we can’t imagine.

     Now, my one disappointment. I could not find a single mention of B. Gratz Brown! Seriously, how could such a prominent figure in St. Louis and Missouri’s Civil War and Reconstruction history not even rate a mention? Oh well, I really do recommend seeing the exhibit if you live in the area or will be in the area. The time of display has been extended through June 2, 2013.