We Are The Future Generations

The Unfortunate Apartheid Between Military History And Academic History

2018-10-08T16:35:00.002-04:00

I really fell in love with Jill Lepore's These Truths: A History of the United States starting with the Abraham Lincoln quote at the beginning - "We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country."

Guns And Drums And Drums And Guns - Hurroo

My childhood version of American history was one in which people, overwhelmingly white and male people went from one positive achievement to the next. Then there come counter narratives in which all the good guys become bad guys. I call it the Dances With Wolves syndrome. Most people, probably because they have more sense than I do, don't spend so much time engaged with history. They will be content with the single narrative that they learn, which will vary depending on their age, or will embrace a counter narrative learning that what they originally learned is what "they want you to think" and here is the real story.

There are other people that engage with history much more passionately than I do, but by focusing very narrowly can have their overall narrative go undisturbed. You see that a lot if you hang around Civil War sites. If you study for and pass the exam to become a licensed battlefield guide at Gettysburg, you will know a tremendous amount of very detailed history. According to one guide, I spoke to though you are not required to know about anything that did not happen between 1861 and 1865 ( That was an exaggeration. As you can see from the sample questions you need to know about how the park was developed and preserved)

Just as a test of that, I stumped a guide by talking about Margaret Fuller. He didn't know who she was. There are even aspects of the military history that hard core Civil War guys are weak on, such as the service of black troops in the Union Army.

At any rate what Jill Lepore is promising is a more nuanced if not so detailed overview of American history where she notes that the Columbian Almanack that could be sold with a copy of the Constitution as an appendix included an advertisement of the sale of a "likely young negro wench".

The Error

So I am a little upset that I am getting hung up on a mistake that she made fairly early in the book. It is a matter that is tangential to her sweeping narrative, so I could just let it go, I suppose. And it is an odd coincidence that made me notice it, despite it being obvious to someone familiar with the topic addressed, but I think it is important because it is indicative of an apartheid between academic historians and the general run of people who find history of interest and are inspired by it. Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. An endowed chair at Harvard. That's about as good as it gets.

Anyway, here is the offending passage, which will be followed by a meandering explanation as to why I caught it so easily.

In 1781, in hopes of taking the Chesapeake, the British general Lord Cornwallis fortified Yorktown, Virginia, as a naval base. His troops were soon besieged and bombarded by a combination of French and American forces. The French were led by the dazzling Marquis de Lafayette, whose service to the Continental army and impassioned advocacy of the American cause had included lobbying for French support. Cornwallis was vulnerable because British naval forces were occupied in the Caribbean. He surrendered on October 19, not realizing that British forces were that very day sailing from New York to aid him. Cornwallis’s defeat at Yorktown ended the fighting in North America, but it didn’t end the war. The real end, for Great Britain, came in 1782, in the West Indies, at the Battle of the Saintes, when the British defeated a French and Spanish invasion of Jamaica, an outcome that testified not to the empire’s weaknesses but to its priorities. Britain kept the Caribbean but gave up America. (Emphasis added)

My Lafayette Obsession

For the last year or so I have been obsessing about commemorating the bicentennial of Lafayette's Farewell Tour 1824-25. In order to make it happen, I am thinking that we need to have various venues do commemorations in the years leading up to the bicentennial. I spent the last year working on two events. There was a pretty authentic representation of Lafayette's reception in a small New England Town, that was held at Old Sturbridge Village on September 2. My role there was mainly instigator.

Julien Icher working for the French consulate in Boston in front of Rider Tavern where Lafayette stopped in 1824

On the previous day there had been an event more designed to capture the spirit of Lafayette's reception at the still extant Rider Tavern in Charlton, MA. At that event anachronism was not tolerated, it was actively embraced, including Lafyette thanking World War II veterans, some of whom had served in France. In the spirit of 1824 Lafayette was greeted by a variety of groups including the Daughters of the American Revolution and Masonic Colonial Craftsmen.

I had done much of the recruiting for that event. As part of that project I spent August 4 at Old Sturbridge Village during their Redcoats and Rebels weekend trying to recruit a few more reenactors. I had some success with people who reenact some of the French regiments that fought in the American Revolution. About eight of them showed up in Charlton pretty spontaneously and ended up standing guard. The white uniforms were a really nice touch. I wonder how they keep them so clean.

One of the fellows who came portrays a French officer and he had just a bit of arrogance about him. He made it a point that his guys would not have been serving under Lafayette. Americans are utterly unreserved in their love of Lafayette, the French not so much. Lafayette had run off to America and been made a major general in the Continental Army when he was about nineteen. It was thought to be a more honorary thing, but then he did well at the Battle of Brandywine.

Then he went back to France to "lobby for support" as Professor Lepore puts it. And France certainly came back with a lot of support. There was still resentment of Lafayette for having disobeyed orders to fly off to America. And a major world power giving command of its expeditionary force to a twenty-something kid because the rag-tag rebels think highly of him?

Imagine some crazy kid drops out of West Point and goes to the Eastern Ukraine to help the anti-Russian forces there and, God forbid, we actually end up at war with the Russians and the Ukrainians just love that kid to death. That would make for an interesting story and all, but one thing that is not going to happen is the US Army giving the twenty-something West Point drop-out four stars so he can command the NATO forces engaged there. Things were different in the 18th Century. but probably not that different.

So as I was engaging with the "French officer" he pointed out that the French forces at Yorktown were commanded by Rochambeau. Lafayette, of course, was there. And he commanded a division - an American division. So not only did Lafayette not have overall command of the "French", he did not command any French at all (except maybe some random guys sprinkled in the American troops (and 300 Canadians) that he did command.

How Did That Get By?

What intrigues me about this error is not that Professor Lepore made it. It's an easy one to make if your knowledge of Lafayette and strictly military history is on the light side. What is amazing is that it went undetected to publication. Why wasn't anybody with some level of expertise in the military history of the Revolution invited to take a look at the book? I'm pretty sure any of them would have caught that instantly.

Again going back to my kidhood version of history, it was mostly about war and and a bit about politics. As I majored in history and then went to graduate school, I gained a more sophisticated view, but there was this odd thing I noticed. In graduate school I was working on a project that might not have been ill-conceived but was definitely poorly executed. It was inspired by The Discovery of the Asylum by David J. Rothman. And the notion was to do a multiple career line biography of the members Association of Medical Superintendents of American Institutions for the Insane. The organization is still extant, although it is now known as the American Psychiatric Association.

One of the things that struck me as I was studying this crew was the way that the Civil War cut across their lives turning some of them from country doctors to running large establishments. One of them seeing bad tactical decisions decided he could save more lives by becoming a line officer.

At any rate, my point is that military history is very important and should not be just left to military historians and hobbyists. And if you are going to let some military history seep into your grand narrative, you should probably avoid making obvious errors. because it will reinforce the people who think only pure military history is worthwhile.

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Peter J. Reilly CPA majored in history at the College of the Holy Cross and after a year in VISTA took a stab at being a historian. It did not end well, but public accounting has been good to him.

Lafayette At The Rider Tavern Septermber 1 - Live Blogging

2018-09-01T11:58:00.000-04:00

Today we commemorate Lafayette's Farewell Tour specifically his stop at the Rider Tavern in Charlton. I'll be live blogging as time permits.

11:50 Earlier this morning was at Sturbridge Host with American Friends of Lafayette who are now at the Worcester Art Museum checking out its Lafayette collection. Evie and I hosted Julien Icher who is documenting the trail last night.

Arrived at Rider Tavern around 10:00 AM final arrangements with Frank Morrill. Chairs and podium in the militia field and weather looks promising.

Film crew started coming in a half an hour ago and are setting up.

Frank is back on the scene.

Looking good.

Noon

Evie reports AFL done at museum and heading to lunch

12:23 Flags are set. And Charlton Historical here in force

Lafayette In Charlton On September 1 2018 - Press Release

2018-08-15T08:53:00.001-04:00

Contact: Peter J. Reilly

Phone: 774-364-2595

Email: peterreillycpa@gmail.com For Immediate Release

Website: We Are The Future Generations

September 1 - Commemoration of General Lafayette’s stop at the
Rider Tavern in Charlton Mass on his 1824-25 Farewell Tour -
Rain Or Shine

Tours of Rider Tavern (255 Stafford St) from 1:30 to 3:00. Event 3:00 to 6:00

Julien Icher documenting Lafayette Trail with Frank Morrill of Charlton Historical Society at Rider Tavern

The Charlton Historical Society and the American Friends of Lafayette will join with
other community groups in commemorating the reception of
Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette. Known to
Americans simply as ‘Lafayette’ or sometimes ‘the Marquis,’ a title he had renounced,
Lafayette was considered the “hero of two worlds” as he played a critical role in the
successes of both the American and French Revolutions.

Invited by President Monroe to visit the republic as it approached its 50th birthday,
his reception in America was like nothing before or since. Everywhere he went
he was mobbed by crowds and entertained with great ceremony.

In celebrating Lafayette, who turned 67 during the tour, making him the only
surviving Major General who had served under George Washington, Americans
were celebrating their experiment in government by the people with the veterans of the
Revolution still among them. Divided by one of the most bitter Presidential contests in
our history, they put aside differences to celebrate Lafayette and freedom.

Among those greeting Lafayette (portrayed by Ben Goldman) will be:

Alan Hoffman - President American Friends of Lafayette and translator
of Lafayette In America

Dorothea Jensen - Author of a Buss From Lafayette

Julien Icher - Developer of Lafayette Trail App - Julien accompanied President Macron on his
White House visit.

Bud Holland - Bud is a World War II veteran credited with service in the
Normandy, Northern France and Rhineland Campaigns including the Battle of The Bulge

Senator Anne M. Gobbi and other public officials

Frank Morrill - Former President of Charlton Historical Society

Among the organizations sending contingents to greet Lafayette are

Colonel Henry Knox Regimental Color Guard - Sons of The American Revolution

General Ebenezer Learned Chapter - Daughters of the American Revolution

Colonial Craftsman of Colonial Massachusetts
Veterans of Foreign Wars

The Spirit Of 1824

2018-08-15T08:39:00.000-04:00

... there never was nor will be such a meeting in this or any country ,,,

Salem Towne Junior July 25, 1824

Salem Towne Junior wrote those words to encourage his wife to come to see
how Lafayette was greeted in Boston. I haven’t found out whether she managed
it, yet. But Mr. Towne might not have realized that there would be a chance to greet
Lafayette in his native Charlton. Had fortune favored Charlton with an overnight by
the General, he might well have stayed at Salem Towne’s impressive house. It
was a relatively quick stop, so he was at the Rider Tavern on Stafford Street, a
remnant of the Stafford Turnpike, then the main drag connecting Worcester to Hartford.
You can still visit the lovely Towne house, but you have to go to Old Sturbridge Village,
where it was moved in 1952.

Rider Tavern is still where it was though, across from the militia field, which the town
of Charlton has preserved.

And Towne’s prediction that there never will be “such a meeting in this or any
country” holds to this day nearly 200 years later. Depending on our age we will
each be able to tell a story about exactly where we were when we heard of certain
events and there was a great sense of unity among all of us.

There are not that many though and they are mostly tragic. We can talk about
them some other time. And the reaction went on for days or weeks not a whole year.
Lafayette’s tour lasted a year, but of course for each town he stopped at it might be just
an hour or less. But when you look you will find that it was the biggest thing that
happened in that town in that decade or more. People fortunate enough to have had
some role in the greeting of Lafayette would remember it as one of the high
points of their life and it would likely be mentioned in their obituary decades in the future.

On September 1, 2018 at Rider Tavern, we will try to recapture the spirit of the
crowd greeting Lafayette. The event will not be an attempt at reenactment,
you should go to Old Sturbridge Village on September 2 for that. (Really you should
go. It is going to be great.) At the Rider Tavern event, time will be a little more fluid.
It will be 2018 and then it will be 1824. And it might be 1781 when combined
American and French forces defeated Cornwallis at Yorktown. And it might even
be 1944, as striding off the pages of history comes one of the many thousands of
Americans who helped liberate France, just as France helped the United States
achieve Independence.

Among the people greeting Lafayette in 1824 were the first generation to have been
citizens of the United States of America and, pretty far along in years, veterans
of the Revolution. There were still people alive who had been involved in writing the
Constitution, but that did not prevent contemporaries from arguing as vigorously as we
do now about exactly what it meant and what it did or did not allow.

And perhaps most salient, Lafayette had landed in America during one of the most
divisive and bitter presidential campaigns in the nation’s history even to this day.
For the first time, the President would not be one of the Founding Fathers, since of
course the few that survived were quite old. There was talk of a military coup, in the
event that the election was “stolen” from General Jackson, which in the eyes of some
it was in a “corrupt bargain” between John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay,
as the presidency went to Adams and Clay was named Secretary of State.

Calmer heads prevailed as Lafayette’s secretary remarked in his account of the tour
quoting a strong Jackson partisan:

----------------

“ We were, indeed, very busy shouting; but our adversaries did not take account
of it, and they were right; they have judged us better than we would have wanted
them to. Now that the law has spoken, we have only to obey it. We will second Adams
with the same zeal as if we had supported him; but at the same time, we will shine a
light on his administration, and according to whether it will be good or bad, we will
defend it or attack it. Four years are passed very soon. And the consequences of a bad
election are very easy to repair. –

“Yes,” I said to him, “easier than the consequences of legitimacy or heredity.
– They left me while laughing, and on the following day, no one spoke of the
election any more.”

Even during the campaign, the divisiveness was put aside when Lafayette,
came to town, because they all felt that they shared with Lafayette an
attachment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence

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-------Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from
the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to or to abolish it ……
………………………….Prudence, indeed, will dictate that
Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes;

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And the Declaration of the Rights of Man

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The representatives of the French people, organized as a National Assembly,
believing that the ignorance, neglect, or contempt of the rights of man are the
sole cause of public calamities and of the corruption of governments, have
determined to set forth in a solemn declaration the natural, unalienable, and
sacred rights of man ………..

1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions
may be founded only upon the general good.

2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and
imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and
resistance to oppression.

3. The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation.
No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not
proceed directly from the nation. ……………………………….They were aligned
against the “crowned heads of Europe” who did not believe that the people were fit
to govern themselves.

We sometimes judge the Founders harshly, because there were things that
they sanctioned that deserve harsh judgement. But those things, like slavery
and the oppression of women, were generally from too narrow a definition of who
was included when they referred to “the People”. Standing on the shoulders of giants
we might see further than they did but we should not congratulate ourselves too
much nor be blind to their breakthrough, as on that day, they celebrated the
hero of two worlds, Lafayette, who having played a key role in two revolutions
still had one more in him as he would in 1830 urge France into an experiment
in constitutional monarchy.

Children and grandchildren of the people present at the Rider Tavern that day
in 1824, would march from Charlton and be buried in places like Antietam,
Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Go to the center of town and read their names some time.

The results of the 1860 election were not greeted with an attitude of let’s
see what happens and fix it in four years. The appeal that Abraham Lincoln
made then went unanswered yet it evokes the spirit at the Rider Tavern on that day
in 1824, when they put their differences aside, to celebrate
Lafayette, the Revolution veterans and themselves and their new way of life –

“We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not
break our bonds of affection.The mystic chords of memory, stretching from
every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all
over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched
as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

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Peter J Reilly is a resident of North Oxford MA, birthplace of Clara Barton, a member of the
Charlton Historical Society and vice chair of the Farewell Tour Bicentennial Committee of the
American Friends of Lafayette

Lafayette On The Stafford Turnpike

2018-04-15T18:27:00.004-04:00

I am involved in the planning for an event this coming Labor Day weekend. It is the beginning of a long term project to celebrate the bicentennial of Lafayette's Farewell Tour 1824-1825. I don't intend to make WFG all Lafayette all the time, but you will be seeing quite a bit more about him. I wrote this for the American Friends of Lafayette who will be in Central Mass this Labor Day weekend.

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September 1 to 2 Save the Dates

Join us this Labor Day weekend in historic Sturbridge Massachusetts where we will party like it is 1824 again including dinner at the Publick House Historic Inn where Lafayette stopped as he made his way from Boston to New York in 1824. The dinner will cap the festivities as we welcome the Nation’s Guest in the authentic setting of Old Sturbridge Village.

When Lafayette began his visit to the United States in 1824, he was not quite certain how long he was going to stay. His epic reception in New York and the cheering crowds as he went through various towns on the way to Boston and his reception in Boston, where he was invited to be present at the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument nearly a year later probably made him realize that it would be a while.

There has been no celebratory event that has so brought Americans together on such a grand scale as Lafayette’s visit. It gave them the opportunity to celebrate a nation founded on ideas. There was an extremely divisive election going on as for the first time the Presidency would not be held by one of the Founding Fathers. For the first time the Constitution would be tested as the election went to the House of Representatives with the office going to John Quincy Adams in what opponents called a corrupt bargain. But there was no controversy about Lafayette. Just a competition for every place he visited to greet him in a grander manner. Although the story of Lafayette’s visit is enshrined in national history, the real magnitude is buried in local history. Here is Levauseur’s account of the beginning of his trip from Boston back to New York

“September 2 – Upon leaving the ball, we boarded the carriage to return to Boston, where we awaited our companions for the trip to New York. Having arrived at two o’clock, we set out again at four, making our way by Lexington, Lancaster, Worcester, Tolland and Hartford. In each of these places, General Lafayette received displays of affection from all the citizens, which touched him deeply, but to which he had hardly the time to reply, so swiftly did we travel.”

Despite all that swift traversing, there are detailed accounts of Lafayette’s stops however as he proceeded on the Worcester-Stafford Turnpike – Opened in 1810, the Worcester-Stafford Turnpike was one of a number of toll roads built by private investors with the purpose of broadening business opportunities.Used primarily for commercial travel, passengers along the turnpike were charged 25 cents per coach and 4 cents for each man and horse at tollhouses built approximately 10 miles apart where horses would have to be changed during the 12-hour ride from Worcester to Hartford.

One such tollhouse was an inn that stood adjacent to the Sturbridge Town Common that has long outlived the very road it was built to serve. That tollhouse, now known as the Publick House, is still a favored destination for travelers and diners alike.

So join us this Llbor Day weekend as we follow Lafayette and cheer him as he goes from Worcester to Connecticut.

Lafayette reenactor Ben Goldman will portray the elder Lafayette as he is greeted at in Charlton at the still extant Rider Tavern, which has a collection of Lafayette memorabilia that will be open by special arrangement with the Charlton Historical Society

Ryder Tavern (Julie Icher in the foreground)

Julien Icher at Rider Tavern

The high point of the weekend will be Sunday afternoon when Lafayette is greeted at Old Sturbridge Village. There is probably not a better venue anywhere than OSV for capturing the look and feel of a small town greeting the Nations Guest. Old Sturbridge Village is the largest living museum in New England covering over 200 acres and including 59 antique buildings, three water-powered mills and a working farm. It recreates life in rural New England from 1790-1840. We have been working with the OSV staff to make the reception of Lafayette a memorable event. Our members will be mingling with the general visitors and militia contingents welcoming Lafayette.

Accommodations will be at the Sturbridge Host Hotel & Conference Center a short distance from both OSV and the Publick House. We have obtained a favorable group rate at the hotel

Sturbridge Mass is extremely easy to reach. At the junction of I-84 and I-90 (Mass Turnpike), it is an hour or less from airports serving Boston MA, Worcester MA, Providence RI and Hartford CT .

This Labor Day special is a wonderful opportunity to spend quality time with Lafayette and to get a real sense of how he was received in small town America. Look for details and registration materials soon.

Kent Hovind Critic Deborah Henderson Weighs In On Holy Cross New Testament Controversy

2018-04-11T15:57:00.001-04:00

Holy Cross in the news. Senior Elinor Reilly's article in The Fenwick Review made a splash first in the right wing blogosphere and then the mainstream media leading to out of town demonstrators descending on the College and the Bishop of Worcester issuing a stern warning to the College. I reached out to logical sources and have coverage here and here.

I couldn't resist reaching out to other members of my theological brain trust. Covering the tax woes of young earth creationist Kent Hovind has introduced me to a number of interesting people with strong view on biblical matters.

One of the most interesting is Deborah Henderson - Domineering Deborah. DD has managed to alienate people by giving them handles that they find insulting. I decided to just embrace that tendency. I gave her a handle and requested that she upgrade mine. She kind of likes the "Domineering Deborah" moniker and upgraded me from "Pansy Pete" to "Impertinent Peter".

Deborah was active on youtube, but has slacked off of late. Here is an example

She recently told me that I am somewhat to blame for her most recent conversion. I asked her where she stood on a few issues that roil around in Hovind territory. She checked off a belief in young earth creationism and the King James only view on bible translations. She was against vaccines and in favor of geocentrism. She wasn't sure about flat earth though and my questioning of her made her look into it more. So now she is in the flat earth crowd too.

At any rate I thought her thoughts on the Holy Cross matter would be really interesting. The executive summary is more or less - Jesuits! What else will you have but awful heresy, but that doesn't do her response justice, so here it is.

JUST TO BE CLEAR - views below are those of Deborah Henderson not We Are The Future Generations or Peter J Reilly.

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The origins of the jesuits was for control of the masses, to lead them away from God and believe the strong delusion God warns us about. Catholic authority has been burning and torturing Christians alive with their Bibles from the origins of this demonic Babylonian religion. Constantine first formed this abomination by pulling a reece's peanut butter cup, mixing pagan religion with Biblical Christianity. AND NO, PETER WAS NOT THE FIRST POPE, I REPEAT PETER WAS NOT THE FIRST POPE.

This is not surprising to me in the least to hear a jesuit say such blatant blasphemous things about my Jesus. Most, if not all jesuits are sodomites and only the mind of a reprobate sodomite could think and say such things. The god they worship is lucifer, the light bearer. They truly believe this baphomet will conquer the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the great 'I AM.' This is also the reason for the surge in the androgynous movement.

Romans 1:26-32 KJB

26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature:

27 And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.

28 And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient;

29 Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers,

30 Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents,

31 Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful:

32 Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

The Olympics are a huge pagan celebration for their gods, which they believe are half man and half woman. They have fallen for satan's lie he first told Eve in Genesis 3:5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

In order to have wealth and fame, you must bow down to satan, and he has disguised himself as an Angel of Light to those who have sold their souls, Jesuits, celebrities, athletes, presidents, etc. The devil does everything backwards, therefore, he requires you to become a sodomite and trans your gender.

As for the controversy of the college paper being named 'The Crusade,' who cares, when there are so many issues facing our youth today. The Holy Cross will be destroyed by God himself, in the meantime He is separating the wheat from the tares, the goats from His sheep. People are waking up, yet more people have been duped into believing the 'strong delusion' and woest unto them.

500 ad to 1500 ad civilized civilization was controlled by Rome.

A globe earth is unproven pseudo-science but is believed worldwide. It is a huge lie that has taken on a life of it’s own, being passed from generation to generation. Anyone who dares question it is mocked and ridiculed. Vladimir Lenin reportedly observed: “A lie told often enough becomes the truth.”

Catholic authority were tying Bibles around Bible believing Christians and tortured and burned them alive. The Catholic hierarchy was presented with a perfect opportunity to lay the groundwork for a worldwide deception to bear fruit in the final generation. The deception required a small, globe earth, spinning through vast, limitless reaches of space, a space inhabited by aliens and other sentient life forms. This created doubt in the Bible as the inspired Word of Jesus, for the Bible presents the earth as unmoving. It also removed the Creator far away from His creation by presenting a universe unimaginably vast. The change agent to engineer this transformation in belief was the newly created Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits.

The Jesuit order was established in 1540 under the approval of Pope Paul III—the very pope with whom Copernicus had corresponded regarding calendar reform and to whom Copernicus dedicated his book, Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies!

Guided and inspired by supernatural demonic intelligences, the Jesuits became infamous for their adeptness at deception and subterfuge; their ability to infiltrate governments and institutions of learning, and the influence they wielded, standing as advisors to kings and leaders in education. Working through government entities and education, they have been able to guide scientific research to further their own ends and present the biggest lie of all time: a globe earth.

As long as people accepted Scripture’s cosmology of the earth as a fixed, immovable mass under a protective covering, there was no foundation on which to build lies designed to make the human mind doubt the word of Jesus. By decreasing people’s trust in the dependability of the Bible, it curiously increasedconfidence in the pope as Heaven’s appointed authority on what to believe. The Jesuits have always been enemies of the Bible. Since the Catholic Church ranks papal decree and tradition above the Scriptures anyway, decreasing confidence in Scripture increases confidence in pastors, priests and the pope as authorities that know more than the common man can.

“The Big Bang Theory is [today] the leading explanation about how the universe began. At its simplest, it talks about the universe as we know it starting with a small singularity, then inflating over the next 13.8 billion years to the cosmos that we know today.”7 The Big Bang Theory is atheist science’s answer to Genesis 1.

That is correct. The author of the Big Bang theory was none other than the Jesuit-trained priest, Father Georges Lemaître.Follow from cause to effect: without a globe earth circling the sun through the far reaches of space, you do not have the Big Bang. Without the Big Bang, you do not have evolution. Without evolution, you are more likely to accept creation as an act of intelligent design by a divine Creator. The Roman Catholic Church does, in fact, accept evolution. In her report, Kerr further stated: “The pope said it is possible to believe in both, insisting God was responsible for the Big Bang from which all life evolved.”

NASA’s public releases of information, promoting the idea of an ever larger, expanding universe of incomprehensible size, has led naturally to the supposition that there must be alien life on other celestial bodies. After all, if the same serendipitous events that produced life on earth, existed everywhere due to the Big Bang, why couldn’t intelligent life have evolved elsewhere as well? In combination with Hollywood and the science-fiction genre, NASA has created an environment in which contact with extraterrestrial life forms is as desired as it is feared.

The Catholic hierarchy was presented with a perfect opportunity to lay the groundwork for a worldwide deception to bear fruit in the final generation. The purpose for this entire intricate, multi-layered deception spanning centuries is to deceive the world’s masses in order to create a desired outcome.

This deception would never work if people knew the true shape of the earth and the universe. Hence, the need for a massive re-education program.

For 500 years, this Jesuit conspiracy has taught a globe earth, circumnavigating the sun—itself spinning around the center of an immense galaxy that is likewise speeding through limitless space. Within this immense realm, it is presumed there are other species of intelligent life that inhabit other worlds. These lies will culminate in the climactic “alien invasion” prophesied in Revelation 9. The ultimate deception will occur when the pope negotiates a peace treaty on behalf of the human race with demons. As Satan’s representative, he will assume leadership of the world and, in the person of the pope, Satan will have achieved his long-desired goal as ruler of the earth.

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I realize that many people might think it irresponsible of me to give a platform to far out of the mainstream views, but I think it is important that you be aware of what is out there and I kind of like Deborah. -PJR

Prominent Historian Weighs In On Holy Cross Queer Theory Uproar

2018-04-11T11:43:00.003-04:00

When I looked into the flap surrounding an article in The Fenwick Review by Holy Cross senior Elinor Reilly - New Ways in Theology at Holy Cross-, I reached out to David O'Brien who retired as Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies at the College of the Holy Cross. Professor O'Brien is an authority on the history of American Catholicism. It seemed like I was not the first person to ask as he had a two page response. I am delighted that he agreed to let me publish it here.

Professr O'Brien had some brief comments on my post on the topic which I will resist calling QueerJesusgate, tempting as that might be. I will share some of them at the end. Here is Professor O'Brien:

Might Jesus have been gay? And how might gays, lesbians and transgendered people encounter Jesus in the Scriptures? At Worcester’s College of the Holy Cross controversy has exploded around such questions. A student journalist discovered a ten year old academic publication that offered some speculative ideas about Jesus and sexuality. The scholar who wrote that paper was then in California and is now at Holy Cross. The College President and Provost have praised the professor’s teaching, scholarship and character, and they have properly reminded everyone of the importance of academic freedom. Some Catholics, including Worcester’s bishop and some devoted alumni of the College, are not persuaded. They claim to be “outraged” at the very idea that a professor at a Jesuit and Catholic college would speculate in public about Jesus’ sexual orientation. They are particularly offended by the scholar’s admittedly provocative use of language, language made familiar in recent years by newly assertive gays and lesbians. Upset critics probably have heard these words before but they apparently worry that these ideas might endanger the faith of Holy Cross students and even “blaspheme” against Christian faith itself.

Of course these same church leaders and well educated Holy Cross graduates would surely agree that Jesus was fully man and well as fully God, and, as a man, he was probably subject, like all human beings, to emotions, even desires, including the desire to love and be loved. Some Christians might quickly respond that, “well, Jesus was like us in all things but sin”, suggesting it seems that sex and the emotions associated with sex are in themselves sinful, and therefore not part of the humanity of Jesus. All of us, and especially Catholics, might think about that for a while.

As for deliberately provocative language, we might recall what Catholic leaders at the very highest level of the Church said just a few years ago in instructing the faithful about homosexuality.

“Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder”. Of course violence against homosexual persons should be condemned, but “the proper response to such attacks should not be to claim that the homosexual condition is not disordered. When such a claim is made and when homosexual activity is consequently condoned, or when civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right, neither the Church nor society at large should be surprised when other distorted notions and practices gain ground, and irrational and violent reactions increase.”

One does not have to look far, probably not far from one’s own parish or family, to find good people who have been deeply hurt by the contempt communicated by this presentation of church teaching. At a key moment of public discussion in our country that language about gay love gave legitimacy to extreme anger leveled by some at “out-of-the closet” gay men and lesbians. More broadly it raised questions about whether or not such men and women could be fully members of the Christian (or any other) community if they acknowledged their “disordered” orientation, much less acted on it. In my own work with the contemporary American Catholic church I encountered priests, even a bishop or two, who were disciplined because they offered Mass for gays and lesbians and their families or, even worse, allowed out-of-the closet gay and lesbian Catholics to meet on church property.

As a retired Holy Cross Professor I can assure friends of the College that the faculty and administrators who hired this professor did so with due deliberation, weighing the problems that would unfortunately arise if this earlier essay became widely known against the quality of his overall body of work. They must have determined that he would make an important contribution to the “conversation about basic human questions” that is central to the Holy Cross mission. I know and love Holy Cross graduates and the College’s many friends, and I believe deeply that Christian intelligence and imagination are invaluable to people of all sorts and to our diverse and often contentious human family. But I also know that our faith communities have long histories of opposition to homosexuals, often expressed in languages of contempt that would make this professor’s flip phrases look benign. Even now Catholic and wider Christian discussion of gay sex and gay marriage centers almost exclusively on sex, not love, even though we Christians all believe that love alone gives deep meaning to sex, and to life for that matter. Our church most of the time teaches that genuine love more than anything else makes God present in our world. I am confident that the Holy Cross community, which has welcomed and now supports this professor, is deeply committed to teaching and research that leads to truth, and to love for the world and all people. In this and much else it is as Catholic as it ever was.

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Professor O'Brien's comment on my piece - How Obscure Article By Holy Cross Prof Made It Into The Right Wing Outrage Factory -was "a good job as far as it goes"/ Considering the source I take that as high praise. He also told me that when he was at Holy Cross he found The Fenwick Review deplorable, but never missed reading it.

Commenting on how The Fenwick Review piece ended up on Breitbart he wrote that in the seventies and for a while after the left and center were organized and networked, while now the right has the organization and networking while left and center are fragmented.

More background- according to its website, The Fenwick Review was founded in 1989 by Father Paul Scalia son of the late Supreme Court Justice, who I can never resist pointing out was a graduate of Xavier High School.

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Peter J Reilly CPA writes about taxes on forbes.com.

Here is Professor O'Brien giving a lecture on Catholic social teaching.

How Obscure Article By Holy Cross Prof Made It Into The Right Wing Outrage Factory

2018-04-09T15:13:00.001-04:00

How did a second semester senior at Holy Cross manage to create what I can only describe as a major you know storm for our college including a rebuke of sorts from the Bishop of the Diocese of Worcester and out-of town protesters at the gates of the college? In one of my rare forays into being an investigative reporter of sorts, I think I found the answer. It was Breitbart and a crafty unidentified Jesuit priest. Here is the story as far as I have been able to put it together.

Crusading Without Weaponry

My alma mater, The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester Massachusetts has been providing grist for the right-wing outrage mill of late. There was the matter of the Crusader moniker which, no surprise if you reflect on it, has some negative connotations. They resolved that probably to no one's satisfaction with keeping the nickname but demilitarizing it - no more knight in white and purple armor with a blunt lance as a mascot.

New Testament Queer Theory

Well that was fun, but the latest is something else. LGBT Jesus! Holy $$$$!

The story is all over the place, but you want a really balanced treatment so here is Fox News - Jesus was 'drag king' with 'queer desires,' claims theology professor' by Caleb Parke.

A theology professor at a Catholic college is making some bizarre – some would even say blasphemous – claims about Jesus Christ that is causing a stir on campus.

Dr. Tat-siong Benny Liew, chair of New Testament Studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., said Jesus was a “drag king” who had “queer desires.” He also claims the Last Supper was a “literary striptease” and that Jesus was not a man, but gender fluid.

The “Gospel of John” professor cited the book of John in the Bible to try to back his arguments.

Now I am not going to get too deep into what Dr. Liew wrote for a very good reason. I have not read "Queering Closets and Perverting Desires: Cross-Examining John's Engendering and Transgendering Word across Different Worlds". In order to read it I would have to get my hands on We Were All Together in One Place: Toward Minority Biblical Criticism. There is no kindle edition and the paperback is forty bucks. I did find some links in the other coverage, but they seem to be to google books, so you don't get the whole thing. Regardless, I pretty much don't understand it. Here is the overarching concept of the book.

Critics from three major racial/ethnic minority communities in the United States African American, Asian American, and Latino/a American focus on the problematic of race and ethnicity in the Bible and in contemporary biblical interpretation. With keen eyes on both ancient text and contemporary context, contributors pay close attention to how racial/ethnic dynamics intersect with other differential relations of power such as gender, class, sexuality, and colonialism. In groundbreaking interaction, they also consider their readings alongside those of other racial/ethnic minority communities. The volume includes an introduction pointing out the crucial role of this work within minority criticism by looking at its historical trajectory, critical findings, and future directions.

I have a small taste for New Testament scholarship, but I have some skepticism that after a couple of hundred years of treating the scriptures like any other historical document, they are going to come up with much that is new. Of course the Gospel of Thomas and the Dead Sea Scrolls did give them some new old things to chew on.

Regardless, if we think of the Gospels as documents created by humans, there has to have been a lot more thought about them than went into them in the first place making it tough to come up with anything new. As it turns out gay Jesus is not something new. Check out the wikipedia entry on the sexuality of Jesus and you will see what I mean.

The Second Semester Senior

What intrigues me is how this became a thing and the implications of the Fox story to the contrary notwithstanding, it is not because Professor Liew has been shouting from the rooftops that Jesus is gay or even telling his undergraduates that Jesus was of indeterminate gender.

No. The source of the current scandal may well be a sort of Holy Cross second semester senior prank. We didn't have the Fenwick Review back in my time at Holy Cross 1970-1974. Its role was filled by my friend Bob Gasser who was ready to give his life to prevent the Radical Students Union from firebombing the Air Force ROTC building (the one with the peace symbol painted on the roof) again. Anyway the conservatives got their own journal. It's mission statement is:

As the College of the Holy Cross’s independent journal of opinion, The Fenwick Review strives to promote intellectual freedom and progress on campus. The staff of The Fenwick Review takes pride in defending traditional Catholic principles and conservative ideas, and does its best to articulate thoughtful alternatives to the dominant campus ethos. Our staff values Holy Cross very much, and desires to help make it the best it can be by strengthening and renewing the College’s Catholic identity, as well as working with the College to encourage constructive dialogue and an open forum to foster new idea

In the March Issue Elinor Reilly Class of 2018, whom I am certain will turn out to be a cousin after we do enough research, wrote New Ways in Theology at Holy Cross. In typical second semester senior fashion the article was posted at 4:15 AM and updated at 5:32 AM. It provides the juicy quotes from Dr. Liew's work that have lit up the internet, but here is the thing that I really love. Ms. Reilly's article is in no way judgemental. It is really pretty much just the facts.

Professor Liew’s unconventional readings of Scripture has brought a new theological perspective to Holy Cross. The position and prestige which accompany an endowed chair in Religious Studies testify to the esteem in which his work is held by the College’s administration and academic community. He continues to be held up as an example and a bold successor to the learned and discerning tradition of our Catholic and Jesuit College of the Holy Cross.

I just love that sentence - Professor Liew’s unconventional readings of Scripture has brought a new theological perspective to Holy Cross - I mean how can that be a bad thing? The only way you can tell that Ms. Reilly might be a conservative is the platform. The piece could have been promoted by Abigale and Allies the Holy Cross Gay-Straight Alliance to let everybody know what a great guy Professor Liew is.

The viewpoint that she is putting forth subtly in that pieces is much clearer in the review of Beyond The Abortion Wars in the November 2017 issue.

"Beyond the Abortion Wars" has good points throughout, and Professor Camosy’s analysis of the actual views of the American public on abortion is particularly interesting. However, as a Catholic theologian working at a Catholic university, his deceptive statements about Catholic teachings and moral truths are unacceptable. He should clarify the instances in his book where he dissents from Church teaching—or better yet, he should cease teaching theology at a Catholic institution and stop representing himself as Catholic if he so clearly disagrees with the Church. As a Catholic teacher, he ought to recognize that he has a duty to his students’ (and readers’) souls as well as their minds. There is a tradition in Catholic religious communities that when a superior dies, he or she will have to answer at the throne of God for anyone led astray under their care. Professor Camosy would do well to reflect on this idea. (Emphasis added)

And then, working backwards through the archive there is "Why Holy Cross Needs A Monastery" in September 2017

Holy Cross needs a monastery so that we can return to our Catholic roots. I do not suggest that we abandon altogether our career searching and grad-school applying, only that each of us re-evaluates our priorities. A monastery on campus or just outside the gates is a way to emphasize the importance of prayer and refocus the mission of the school on bringing souls to heaven and not just to Fulbrights. The spiritual and financial investments would be worth every bit.

Clearly my second semester senior prank interpretation is unfair to someone as committed as Ms. Reilly, but I still think there is an element of it in the article about Liew.

Conservative Catholics

I have a certain grudging sympathy for the views of conservative Catholics even though like the faculty adviser to the Fenwick Review Professor David Schaefer, who is quoted in the Worcester Telegram, I don't have a dog in the fight. Professor Schaefer, a long serving teacher of political science at Holy Cross, is Jewish and I am a Unitarian Universalist.

Like a conservative Catholic, I don't understand why somebody who has the perfectly reasonable view that not practicing birth control can be irresponsible or that it is just fine if graduates of Xavier High School or pre-1974 Holy Cross graduates marry one one another (Both all male schools) chooses to remain a Catholic. Unitarian Univesalism is much more suitable and if you really like all that ritual there is always the Episcopal Church, as long as you pick the right diocese.

Only I do understand it, because it is tribal. And there is a attachment to many fine institutions and I don't share the embitterment that many ex-Catholics have. And those institutions were built and supported by people who didn't necessarily swallow all that infallible teaching whole and sometimes had a jaundiced view of the clergy.

That American Catholicism had for a time possibly the most devout laity in the world may well have some roots in Ireland where Catholics were persecuted with the persecution continuing in milder form as they moved into being the most despised white people in the United States and of course successive waves of immigrants from Catholic countries have faced prejudice which helped bind them to the church, regardless of their thoughts on particular points of doctrine.

The Bishop Reacts

The wave of outrage includes a stern warning from Bishop McManus of Worcester.

Holy Cross has a duty to, at least, ask Professor Liew if he rejects the biblical positions he penned some ten years ago or if he supports and defends those positions today. If he disavows them, then he must state so publicly, so as not to create confusion about the nature of Christ. If he does not, then it is my duty as the Bishop of Worcester to clearly state that such teaching is a danger to the integrity of the Catholic faith and, in prudence, warn the Catholic faithful committed to my pastoral care that such unorthodox teaching has no place in a Catholic College whose mission is to promote and cultivate the Catholic intellectual tradition.

Well I guess compared to burning at the stake it is not that stern a warning. After all nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition

The College Reacts

The Holy Cross response to the whole thing is kind of interesting. Back to the Fox Story

Holy Cross spokesman John Hill told Fox News that Liew hasn't taught the controversial material in the classroom. “The decade-old work referenced in the Fenwick Review article was not intended for an undergraduate classroom, nor has it ever been assigned at Holy Cross. It was an intentionally provocative work, not a statement of belief, meant to foster discussion among a small group of Biblical scholars exploring marginalization. No one has made a complaint about the content of Professor Liew’s classes in his four years at Holy Cross.”

Here we get an implicit, very subtle rebuke to Elinor Reilly. What is she doing publicizing stuff written in a book that normal people would never read? Doesn't she know that old truth - What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

A More Eloquent Defense of The College.

To get a different sort of Catholic view of the matter I reached out to Professor David. J O'Brien who retired from Holy Cross as the Loyola Professor of Roman Catholic Studies. He is an historian. He was one of the people who inspired me to want to be an historian, but I try not to hold it against him. I'm not the first person who has asked since he came back with a two pager, which I would publish here if he ever got back to me with permission. Here are some of the high points:

The College President and Provost have praised the professor’s teaching, scholarship and character, and they have properly reminded everyone of the importance of academic freedom. Some Catholics, including Worcester’s bishop and some devoted alumni of the College, are not persuaded. They claim to be “outraged” at the very idea that a professor at a Jesuit and Catholic college would speculate in public about Jesus’ sexual orientation

As a retired Holy Cross Professor I can assure friends of the College that the faculty and administrators who hired this professor did so with due deliberation, weighing the problems that would unfortunately arise if this earlier essay became widely known against the quality of his overall body of work. They must have determined that he would make an important contribution to the “conversation about basic human questions” that is central to the Holy Cross mission. I know and love Holy Cross graduates and the College’s many friends, and I believe deeply that Christian intelligence and imagination are invaluable to people of all sorts and to our diverse and often contentious human family.

I am confident that the Holy Cross community, which has welcomed and now supports this professor, is deeply committed to teaching and research that leads to truth, and to love for the world and all people. In this and much else it is as Catholic as it ever was.

But How Did This Become A Thing?

I also reached out to Professor Schaefer who, having no dog in the theological fight, did have something to say on the academic side of things to the Worcester Telegram along with a bit of pride in what the students had accomplished:

I would be inclined to guess that this is the biggest scoop the Fenwick Review has run in 28 years.

He goes on:

I want to emphasize what is quoted from this man’s writing is the same kind of approach that has infiltrated what are broadly called the humanities across the United States. About 20 years ago somebody ‘discovered’ that the composer Handel was gay. Needless to say, Shakespeare was a cross-dresser and so on. Whether in English, philosophy, religion, history, and I’m sorry to say, in political science, my own field, this is how you get ahead: by coming up with something that first, will be outrageous or cutting edge, and second, will appeal to certain constituencies

I have to say that there may be as much or more of a threat to academic freedom from the left as there is from the right, but this time it is the right acting up and I wanted to find out how it got started. Professor Schaefer got back to me quickly. He didn't know but couldn't resist plugging the achievement of the students.

Please understand that as faculty adviser to the FR I have no supervisory role - barring some catastrophe (such as has never occurred) - and am limited to offering suggestions to the editors, both positive and negative, that they are free to ignore. I had no idea whatsoever that this article was being written or published, nor have I ever met the author. So I was in no position to anticipate any sort of reaction to it. Nor, finally, do I know how it wound up on Breitbart (and until your email I did not know it was there.) So far as I know the first national medium to pick up the story was National Review and I don't know how they got wind of it.

I have not seen O'Brien's response, but I will simply observe that since the story appeared nobody has come forward to deny a single statement in it - not surprising since the author apparently drew directly on the professor's own writings. In my opinion the story seems to be a most impressive and much-needed work of journalistic enterprise.

Breitbart

Like Professor Schaefer, I had thought that National Review had broken the story on a national basis. There was Defending the Indefensible at Holy Cross by George Weigel a followup on March Madness at the College of The Holy Cross.

Under the regnant canons of academic freedom, Liew’s repulsive eisegesis will doubtless be defended by some, including colleagues at Holy Cross, as a “challenging” opinion that causes his readers to think again. To which the appropriate response is, “Bosh.” This isn’t challenging exegesis; if you want challenging exegesis, try the Anglican scholar N. T. Wright, or Duke’s C. Kavin Rowe. Liew’s eisegesis is ideological besottedness from the academic fever swamps. Anyone who considers it “scholarship” calls into question his or her own credentials as a scholar.

I tried reaching out Mr. Weigel who is a distinguished senior fellow of Washington's Ethics and Public Policy Center, but didn't have any luck. If I ever got to talk to him I think I would want to ask how you can ever keep a straight face when your title is "distinguished senior fellow".

So I went through the tedious process of doing a day by day google search and I'm pretty sure I found the first shoot from the seed planted by Elinor Reilly and the Fenwick Review -

Holy Cross Theology Professor Says Jesus Was A 'Drag King' With 'Queer Desires" by Thomas D. Williams Ph.D who is the Breitbart Rome Bureau Chief. I don't think the lead paragraph is that fair of a characterization of the Fenwick Review piece:

The theology program at the Jesuit-run College of the Holy Cross has taken on a new tone ever since the school appointed a gender-obsessed Chair of New Testament Studies who claims Jesus was a “drag king,” a new article contends.

Doctor Williams has a lot more theology training than I do, though. I suspect that he is not responsible for what you might call the flaming Jesus photo that accompanies the story. Doctor Williams expresses a concern:

What makes the heterodox perspectives of Professor Liew all the more scandalous at this Jesuit institution is that they are not reserved for some obscure graduate seminar, but are offered to undergraduates. In his prestigious role as chair of New Testament, Professor Liew often teaches “New Testament,” the College’s primary New Testament class.

As noted above, the College denies that Professor Liew was bringing these matters up in his classes. You know the as long as you don't frighten the horses defense or undergraduates in this case.

I reached out to Doctor Williams and was pleasantly surprised when he got back to me.

A friend of mine (a Jesuit priest…) sent me a heads-up on the story. He thought it might be good to give it some publicity

Something tells me that that particular Jesuit priest did not call Father Philip Boroughs, President of the College of the Holy Cross, to ask him whether it would be a good idea to get his friend Thomas at Breitbart interested in the story.

Everybody Should Lighten Up A Little

Although, of course as the saying goes I don't know most of them from Adam, I really kind of like everybody involved in this story. I think they are all engaged in "A free and responsible search for truth and meaning", the Fourth Principle of Unitarian Universalism and all trying to do the best job that they can. There is probably a good chance Father Burroughs and Bishop McManus are frenemies.

My personal problem is that I tend to be attached to and admire various institutions I encounter, but seem to lack the ability to become a true believer in anything and muddle along as best I can. I feel bad that my lack of attachment to any side in this debate has me experiencing a bit of schadenfreude.

Overall I think Dr. O'Brien comes out best:

Our church most of the time teaches that genuine love more than anything else makes God present in our world. I am confident that the Holy Cross community, which has welcomed and now supports this professor, is deeply committed to teaching and research that leads to truth, and to love for the world and all people. In this and much else it is as Catholic as it ever was.

But what do I know?

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Peter J. Reilly CPA writes about taxes for forbes.com and whatever piques his interest on this blog. He graduated from Holy Cross in 1974 with a degree in history. He has gotten over them changing the words to the school song, so nothing will phase him now.

Natalie McMasters Is No Nancy Drew - A Female Detective For The New Millenium

2018-01-28T13:59:00.000-05:00

If you are one of those people who likes detective fiction, (And really - are there people who don't?), I can't think of a better investment of your time and money than Stakeout by Tom Burns.

The money part is the really good deal

Like my page and send me your email at tom@3mdetectiveagency.com and I'll send you a free copy of the first Natalie McMasters story - Stakeout!
— Tom Burns (@tekrighter1) January 28, 2018

And then there is the time part. Stakeout is only 24 pages. As I was reading it I was getting nervous that it was some sort of teaser and that I was going to have to jump through some other hoop or, God forbid, spend some money to avoid being left hanging on the cliff, but Stakeout is a satisfyingly complete, if rather compact short story. So seriously, give up the like and shoot the email. You won't regret it.

Short Story - Short Review

I can like a story for any of three reasons - character, plot and setting. Stakeout is very strong on plot with a classic ticking clock that kept me on edge. And Natalie McMasters, the first person narrator, is engaging and likable with a great sense of humor and she paints a wonderful picture of her mentor/boss/ detective uncle.

Natlaie is a twentiesh college student private detective trainee working for her uncle. Their work is extremely mundane - monitoring "the disabled" on behalf of insurance companies. But what will she do if she notices something beyond feigned disability?

In my role as critic, I would say that setting is on the weak side, being somewhat generic. The school Natalie attends is called State and I could really not get much of a feel for where in the country things were happening. Also nothing I noted to placed the story in time. Finally there is one key character, who I think should have been fleshed out better.

Can't give you much more without creating plot spoilers, but really you should go for it. If you get hooked on Natalie, Tom has a novel waiting in the wings. It's the movie I am really looking forward to, but that may take a while.

Full Disclosure

Tom Burns, not a nom de plume, is one of my best friends from high school. He is a recurring character in my memoir series and even made a contribution - Xavier High School Memories Of The First Inspection. As students we shared many of the same reading tastes. Jean Shepherd (although that was more his radio work) and Robert Heinlein come to mind. Some of my fondest memories of teenage years are walking up Fifth Avenue from 16th Street to 42nd street talking with Tom. One literary passion of his that I did not take up until later was Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe. Natalie, in spite of being a cute blond college student does have just a bit of Stout's Archie Goodwin, the narrator of the Wolfe novels, about her. A realistic eye for the foibles of humanity transcends time, space and gender.

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Peter J Reilly writes about taxes for forbes.com and, on this platform, in the words of Tom Burns - "anything he damn well pleases".

Sister Kathleen Reilly 1942-2018

2018-01-17T14:56:00.002-05:00

Sister Kathleen Reilly died on Wednesday, January 17 at Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern, NY after a long illness. She was 75.

The daughter of Jerome Reilly and Muriel (Lyons) Reilly, she grew up at 380 Kennedy Drive (formerly Broad Street) in Fairview, NJ. She attended St. Johns school in Fairview and Holy Rosary Academy in Union City

In 1960 she entered the Pallottine Sisters of the Catholic Apostolate and began her formation at Queen of the Apostles in Harriman, NY. She taught elementary school in New York City and then attended Hunter College where she received a masters degree in biology,

She was Director of Financial Aid for Harriman Junior College and then taught science at Holy Rosary Academy, St. Joseph’s High School in West New York, NJ and finally at Christ the King Preparatory School in Newark, NJ.

She is survived by her brothers Peter J Reilly and Robert J Reilly and his wife Annamarie (Carbone) Reilly, her niece Kaitlyn Reilly, nephews Timothy Reilly, Michael Reilly and William Reilly, and her Pallottine sisters.

In lieu of flowers donations can be made to the science department of Christ the King Preparatory School 239 Woodside Ave Newark NJ.

Viewing will be Sunday January 21st from 3:00 PM to 8:00 PM.
Funeral Mass will be Monday, January 22nd at 11:00 AM.
Both will be at Queen of the Apostles Convent - 98 Harriman Heights Road Monroe NY.

Colonel Retread The Best And Worst Memoir I Have Ever Read

2017-11-20T19:31:00.000-05:00

The Recollections of Colonel Retread
1942-1945
Carlton Ketchum
Hart Books
1976

I don't know what it tells you about an author when you pick up a personally inscribed first edition of his work for short money in a used book store. This was one of my random acquisitions at the Book Bear in West Brookfield. I thought it would tie into one of my literary interests and it does.

The book is Carlton Ketchum's World War II memoir and it is really terrible in two ways. It is just kind of slapped together much of it excerpts from letters. And Ketchum himself has to be about the most bigoted person I have encountered. And I really did feel that I had encountered him after reading the book, so maybe there was a method in his organizational madness.

About Ketchum

Carlton Ketchum was a pioneer in fundraising and public relations. The firm that he founded with his brother is now known as Ketchum Inc, a subsidiary of Omnicom Group

When the memoir was published in 1976 Ketchum was 84 years old. The term "politically incorrect" was just coming into common use and Ketchum's book could have been used as a manual for how to stay consistently politically incorrect.

I'm thinking the people at the firm must have been having conniptions. But what could they do. The old man wanted his memoirs published. What could they do? I'm glad it got out.

Being born in 1892, Ketchum was not part of the Greatest Generation. That would be his son David born in 1920. He was the previous generation that actually led the Greatest Generation in the struggle against fascism. Ketchum was two years younger than Dwight Eisenhower.

Great Content

We'll save the bigotry for later and tell you why this is one of the best memoirs that I have ever read. It has extremely interesting content. And it does tie in with my literary interest - James Gould Cozzens - Ketchum ran the program that was responsible for commissioning Cozzens in the Army Air Force, which gave us probably the best World War II novel, the Pulitzer Prize winning Guard of Honor. It was also a factor in the fictionsl career of the narrator of Cozzens's last novel - Morning Noon and Night.

The fictional Henry Worthington relates how things were in February 1942:

Through a friend of his in the Air Judge Advocates's department Jon found out that right then Air Force recruiters in several cities were busy with an intensive, carefully unpublicized project meant to snap up before the draft could get them experienced professional men of the very various kinds judged likely to be needed to fill a vast number of non-flying, really non-military, administrative positions in the organization now explosively expanding out of the old Air Corps.

Military aviation though no longer in its infancy was hardly an adult in 1942. There were officers still serving who had learned to fly from the Wright brothers, so there was not much of a pool of retired officers to draw on to fill many non-flying positions.

That was where Calrton Ketchum's program came in. Ketchum had served in World War I and also was a major player in the business world. One of his friends was Trubee Davison, a brigadier general in 1942. Ketchum got a call from him on January 2, 1942.

General Arnold wants to see you. The Air Forces is going practically everywhere in the World. We have no reserve officers, being so new a branch, and we are going to need thousands of men who have specific skills - in transportation, communications, various kinds of engineering, intelligence, and all sorts of things. We can't wait for these twenty-year old candidates to be trained, and they won't know how to do the things that I am talking about when they are trained. We have to find a huge number of men over draft age who are experts in these fields, get them to volunteer, bring them into the Air Force as commissioned officers and put them to work fast.

I'm wondering if this type of thing could have been pulled off now. America of that day was still largely ruled by a WASPocracy where if everybody didn't know everybody they knew somebody who did. Never mind six degrees of separation, it was probably more like two.

How To Find Thousands Of Officers - Stat

Ketchum went down to Washington and met with Arnold and Davison and stayed up late typing up a plan.

Then he got a surprise Arnold asked him how soon he could take charge. Ketchum told Arnold that although he could coach the plan would have to be implemented by an officer with a staff. Arnold responded that he wanted to know how soon Ketchum could take the physical for his commission.

It was an interesting project.

We had thirty-five categories of service to be filled of which the hardest one to find adequate numbers for was that of weathermen.

And it was successful on a pretty grand scale.

Between the end of January and the end of September 1942, we considered approximately 490,000 applications of which nearly one fifth were approved/ ........ Out of these approximately 18,000 men were commissioned in the Air Force, while the Navy and the Ground Troops commissioned 8,000 or 9,000 on our papers

Ketchum handled some of the special recruiting himself. General Harmon had command of the Gulf Coast Flight Training Command with 20,000 to 30,000 men getting flight training. He had plenty of money to feed them, but they were practically starving from a lack of competent mess officers and cooks.

He spoke to brothers Vernon and Gordon Stouffer, who would not get into frozen food until 1946, and at that point had a restaurant chain. Ketchum told them that the Air Force needed one of them right away. They selected the younger Gordon and he headed straight out to get his physical and then down to Washington. Six weeks later, Ketchum was greeted as a hero when he visited Texas.

He was also on the lookout for Flying Tigers as they returned for China. He had to fight to bring them in at rank commensurate with experience.

The big push was done by September 1942 and Ketchum was sent overseas. He went to North Africa, Sicily and then England in a bewildering variety of intelligence assignments. The only one that he describes in detail in coherent detail is being in charge of a committee that prioritized reconnaissance missions during the summer of 1944. One particularly tough story was about sending pilots to try to locate the paratroopers around Arnhem knowing that the pilots were unlikely to make it back.

In that job he was nominally under the command of FDR's son Eliot. He did not like Eliot and it is implied that it was not surprising since he did not think highly of FDR.

Regardless, the book is really worth picking up for the wealth of anecdotes.

About The Bigotry

Some of the passages struck me the first time through the book. As I went through to write this, I realized they were not quite as pervasive. Here is a pretty complete accounting of them. Ketchum has lots of people he praises and thinks highly of, but the ones he does not like, he does not like. I think many of his attitudes would not have been so shocking in 1944, but in 1976 he might have been advised to keep them to himself, but being 84 and all, he didn't give a shit. So here they are by category.

Regular Army Officers Except The Top Stars

In this way and other transactions of the time, I developed the feeling that the top level of officers in the regular service was so high as to make them utterly invaluable and that most of them were men of the highest character. On the other hand, the routines of the regular service in peacetime had made a lot of officers almost totally incapable of thinking or doing anything not laid out in detail in "The Book". That type was really no good under war conditions, and I'm afraid most of that element had lost any real usefulness for later life in whatever capacity.

------
He was a time-serving, lazy officer, a Lieutenant Colonel like myself at the time, one of the group who continued to draw flying pay because he got into somebody else's airplane and flew or was flown for two hours a month

_____-

Washington cannot believe we need privates and second lieutenants and always sends us majors for whom we have no use at all

____________________________________________________________________

.....the right number of people to do an eleven-man job is ten, so that each of them will be busy working hard and consequently satisfied with life and operating at his best.

....lesser of two evils -keep all the work in the hands of the ten men doing it, let the other seven sit around...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In handling personnel problems, our professional soldiers are entitled to very scant respect. What gains in procedure have come about seem always to be initiated by the "amateurs".
__________________________________________________

Their were too many of the Regulars, however, who of their own motion found it impossible to do anything but "go by the book" -- stodgy, stubborn, petty men who contributed little indeed to their country's cause in return for the excellent preparation that had been given them.

The Sixties

Since then in the Sixties and earliest Seventies, we have seen a disheartening worsening of loyalty, respect for our country's laws and neighborliness. It is good to note that we are now well into a period in which the voices of treason, and of condoning of criminality and inhuman action on the part of others are fewer and lower in tone.

____________

African Americans

Tomorrow I am going to church; there are four Protestant services and three Masses scheduled, besides a service for the three hundred Negroes aboard

--------------------------------------------
Joshing a British lady

and that as for Colonel Mears' state, California, experiments were being conducted to determine whether white people could live there, in which case we were willing to annex it
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Charley Adams told me about the two negro overseas soldiers who were reading their hometown paper. It told of Wilkie's candidacy - of Dewey's availability - of the Bricker boom, etc. Said Mose, "What's all dis business about a new president? We's already got us a president" "Shom sho we has" said Sam, "but de white folks wants one too!"

________________________________________

Women

A small minority of ladies on a long voyage with a large number of men look just so-so the first few days out. They apparently improve in appearance as the voyage continues

----------------------------------------------

Italians

....if ever we meet any Italians who really put up a stiff fight, it will be a source of astonishmet

----------------------------------------------------------

The people of Rome are about the best looking I have seen since I left the USA. I should think a good many of our GIs would go for the Roman gals. There are more blondes there than one expects, thought I think some of them have given Nature an assist.
......

On the standpoint of character, our people think all the Itis rank low.

Their morals are all but non-existent, which seems to me should make an intelligent Catholic wonder, for the Church has completely dominated them for so many centuries .... and yet the soldiers say 'A really moral Iti is a guy that isn't pimping for his own sister.

The French

The attitude toward the French is almost universally that of disgust

--------------------

An easy worst was the French group.

If those goldbrickers ever accounted for death or injury to anyone, it was by driving mad the officers who had to try to deal with their constant objections and try to get them to do anything but object. We had been better off if they had joined up with the Germans.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

What The Frogs Look Like

A striking characteristic of the people in both Normandy and Brittany is their homeliness. Scanning a great many faces of all ages, I did not see a handsome man nor a beautiful woman

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Next to the people of Brittany and Normandy, to whom I yield the palm, the Aberodnians are the homeliest white people I ever saw.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Arabs

The Egyptians are, like the Indians, predominately dirty and lazy

------------------------------------

He said I ran the greatest chance of being murdered there, that the Arabs were no good at any time

________________________________________________

Olive growing is just right for a Berber (the Arabs of North Africa) because it gives him most of his time to catch up with his loafing.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Before I drop the subject of Tunis, it is notable for high prices, everyone doing his best to rook the Anglo-Saxons as hard as possible. Yet business hours are either from 8 to 12, or from 9 to 12 and 4 to 6. Those joes do not favor work.

______________________________________________________________________

In approximately ten months, during which we saw many thousands of these people, none of us ever witnessed an act of kindness, thoughtfulness, generosity or affection on the part of one them. The men acted brutally toward the women; the adults toward the children; all of them toward the animals. Apparently compassion was unknown among them.

If there were any who did not seize every opportunity to steal, we were not blessed with the knowledge of that forbearance; and they were the filthiest people any of us had ever seen.

All in all, the Americans and British who spent part of their participation in the war in Northern Africa unite in the view that these people must surely be the lowest form of animal life. If I have overlooked mentioning their laziness and incompetence to do anything worthwhile, I will insert it here.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

Irish Americans

He is an Irishman, and I'll bet he was brought up in the ward politics school of thought which leads to an unending demand for favors and the feeling that he is entitled to them

---------------------------------------------

Jack Benny

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sat next to Jack Benny at dinner last night, helping to entertain him and his associates all evening. A completely self-centered, crude manipulative boor.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Benny arrived that night half drunk and during cocktails before dinner finished the job. He came in to the table loud and lewd, telling dirty stories at the top of his lungs and downing drink after drink.

Eliot Rosewater

Colonel Roosevelt was the kind of man who gives President's sons a bad name.

Also like his father, he told the truth or kept his word when it was convenient for him to do so.

_________________________________________________

Before You Read Ketchum

If you haven't read Guard of Honor by James Gould Cozzens. Well, I mean, what is the matter with you? Cozzens was a well established writer when he went in to the Air Force in 1942 and ended up with positions where he got a great picture of the service in all its vastness including things that were kept under wraps to avoid embarrassment. Cozzens came from the same sort of WASPy privilege that Ketchum did, but his novelists eye could discern the same foibles in his crowd that Ketchum reserved for "the other".

Another great source is A Time of War -James Gould Cozzens diary and Pentagon memos 1943-1945.

Another Fictional Ketchum Recruit

Harvey Slocum the narrator figure in 12 O'Clock High would also have been one of Ketchum's recruits.

____________________________________________________________________

Peter J Reilly blogs on taxes for forbes.com and on whatever he feels like here.

Another View Of Jack Benny

I offer this as a supplement. It is an anecdote that Jack Benny shared about his time entertaining troops.

"At Abadan I had an unsettling run-in with racial prejudice. I had gone into a canteen to get a sandwich and a ginger ale. There was no air-conditioning in the place. A ceiling fan was lethargically stirring up the hot air. I got my food and sat down. A sergeant sat down beside me and said, 'Hi, Mistuh Benny. Ah'm comin' to see your show t'night. You all got Rochester with you?'
'No,'I said.
'Well, I sho am disappointed. You cain't have much of a show without Rochester. He's just about the funniest damn coon in the world.'
I didn't think it was my place to get into a discussion with him about his racist language, so I merely said, 'Well, I hope we'llput on a nice show even without Rochester.' I was there to bring our men a little time out for laughter--they sure needed any relief.
But this fool wasn't satisfied. 'Seems to me, Mistuh Benny, without Rochester, you ain't got no show.'
'You really love Rochester, don't you?' I said.
'Love him? Why, sir, ah tell you ah'd walk ten miles to see that Rochester.'
'You love him so much, huh? Well, let me ask you something. Would you walk into this canteen and sit down with him at the same table?'
His expression got nasty. 'Well, sir, ah come from a part of the country where we don't sit down with nigras.'
'I thought so, young man, and that's why I didn't bring Rochester on this trip. I didn't want him to be embarrassed and humiliated by ignorant folks like you. You say you love Rochester. You'll walk ten miles to see him perform. But you won't sit down at the same table and drink a coke with him. You make me sick.'
I walked out of the canteen.

The Subtle Genius of Jimmy Breslin

2017-08-02T09:48:00.001-04:00

When Jimmy Breslin died a few months ago, it hit me pretty hard. I gave him my standard forbes.com treatment - seeking for his appearance in tax litigation. Other than a fleeting mention , there was nothing in the body of federal material, but there was an interesting story about a Manhattan restaurant named Jimmy's in his honor, but that was not enough.

One of the things that was mentioned in his obituaries was his gravedigger column. The assassination of John F Kennedy was one of those unifying moments for my generation when everybody was paying attention to the same event. Breslin focused on a small detail of the funeral that would have just about everybody glued to their TV. The digging of the grave.

The resulting column became an iconic piece of journalism. Much has been written about it, but there was a subtle piece of genius in it that, as far as I can tell has gone unremarked.

I am certain that I read that column when it first ran in the Herald Tribune. My old man would always bring home the Herald Tribune and we would talk about Jimmy Breslin and Art Buchwald columns. I remember the thing that struck me

One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.

$3.01 an hour sounded like pretty good money.

As I read more about the column there was a detail that surprised me. It is mentioned in an interview with Clifton Pollard, the gravedigger, in 1988.

Pollard said softly.
'I thought about the job I had to do and who I was doing it for. I liked Kennedy. He was a nice man who did things he said he would do. He helped open schools (to blacks). He was against discrimination.'
Pollard, who is black, began working at the cemetery in 1946 after a stint in the Army during World War II.

I didn't remember anything about the gravedigger being black. I think I would have remembered that.

I went over Breslin's column a couple of times and it is not mentioned. Only it is.

Thomas Ferraro, the UPI reporter who interviewed Pollard in 1988, noted his status as a veteran "a stint in the Army during World War II"

Breslin was more specific.

Pollard is 42. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II.

If you look in your copy of Shelby Stanton's World War II Order of Battle, you will find on page 551 - 352nd Engineer Service Regiment (Colored).

To an eleven year old white boy in Fairview NJ Pollard being black was immaterial and perhaps in that context distracting. But it would probably be of interest to Breslin's readers in Harlem and he figured out a way to tell them. There were probably enough veterans who would have recognized the reference without help from Captain Stanton' book, which would not come out for a couple of decades.

It was a great thing that my father did when he introduced me to Jimmy Breslin and Art Buchwald along with the rest of what was the successor to Margaret Fuller's newspaper. I'm sure he would have been pleased to learn that I heard Breslin speak at Holy Cross in the early seventies and that Art Buchwald was the commencement speaker at the graduation of the Class of 1974. Maybe even that my Margaret Fuller obsession had me reading Tribune columns from the eighteen forties.

Sadly both he and the Herald Tribune died before I started high school. And now Breslin is gone too.

__________________________________________________________________________
Peter J Reilly CPA writes about taxes on forbes.com and whatever he feels like on this blog.

The Flag Of Our Love - A Response To The View of a Sesquicentennial Tourist

2017-07-13T07:45:00.003-04:00

Recently I spiffed up a guest post from two years ago. It was by Georg Snatzke, one of the friends I made during the Civil War Sesquicentennial. Georg is an amazing guy, one of the scary smart people whose interest in the Late Unpleasantness was piqued by complex strategy games like A Gleam of Bayonets. We met walking together from the parking lot to the Cornfield at Antietam in the early morning of September 17, 2012, the 150th anniversary of the deadliest day in American history. We lost contact, but reconnected at Appomattox.

What is really interesting about Georg is that, he came to his interest in the War with no preconceived cultural baggage or pop culture exposure. He grew up in Bavaria in the eighties. So that he ended up being very sympathetic to the Confederacy was something I found rather fascinating. He explains it in some depth in From Secession 1861 to Appomattox 2015: The View of a Sesquicentennial Tourist.

I met Michael Schaffner at my very last Sesquicentennial event, the Grand Review in Harrisburg PA on November 14, 2015. Black troops had been excluded from the original Grand Review in Washington in 1865, although not from its Sesquicentennial, which was a project of the African American Civil War Museum.

Michael was portraying one of the white officers of the 54th Mass. He is passionate about the contribution of African Americans to Union victory, the preservation of the Republic and the elimination of slavery. I thought he might like to respond to Georg's piece and did he ever. With footnotes and everything. That's enough introduction.

Software gremlins have played havoc with the pictures. They are available here while I struggle with malevolent forces.

“The Flag Of Our Love”
M. A. Schaffner

Reading Dr. Snatzke's recent guest post explaining his affection for the Confederacy, I felt a deep, nostalgic kinship balanced by dismay. Like him, many Americans view “the South” as a uniquely authentic region of the United States, and its civil war armies as the most courageous troops we have ever raised, led by our most skilled generals.

They too see the “South's” cause as one of country against city, local against central rule, popular culture against elitism, and nearly every other manifestation of individual against collective values they wish to project upon it. The battle flag itself never passed from popular affection (among whites, anyway) and American troops have carried it into every war fought since 1865, including World War II, Vietnam, and even Korea, as we see in this picture of my own father, serving there as a navy corpsman with the Marines in 1953.

And yet each of these projections of uniquely “southern” virtues and strengths carries with it fatal misunderstandings of our national history and culture, particularly in regard to race.

The Seductive Nature of the “Southern” Cause

But how could it have been otherwise for me? As a boy raised in Virginia during the centennial years I watched TV shows extolling Mosby's Rangers, saw re-runs of “Gone With the Wind,” visited Mount Vernon, and drove past the Confederate memorial in Alexandria – a dismounted cavalryman with his back turned calmly and defiantly to the north. There were Johnny Reb cannon, Thomas Industries HO scale lead soldiers, Avalon Hill war games of Gettysburg and Chancellorsville, and plastic army men holding detachable muskets and supported by spring-loaded cannon.

More significantly, my school books bulged with paeans to “southern” glory and feats of arms. My very county takes its name from Arlington House, the Custis-Lee Mansion, from which one can easily view the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and the Mall over the graves of the national cemetery. I remember our history text – “Cavalier Commonwealth” – which, as I recall, finished its account of the Civil War with Pickett's men breaking through at Gettysburg, then abruptly skipped to its final chapter detailing all of Virginia's history since that “high tide” of glory.

I think I was in the fourth grade before I realized that the Confederacy actually lost that war, which is perhaps not so silly when you think that we still have schools here named after J.E.B. Stuart and Robert E. Lee.

About this time I became satiated with the civil war and turned to feast on other realms of military history. The Thomas Industry figures went into a box and the Marx toys to Goodwill, with their ranks to be filled by Zinnfiguren of the Seven Years War from Aloys Ochel in Kiel. Frederick the Great became my hero, followed by many others from the endless annals of European wars.

It was not until I was much, much older that I returned to the civil war, this time as a reenactor, and with my understanding less informed by Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote than by a degree in world history, reinforced by the works of Hans Delbruck, Charles Oman, and Ardant du Picq.

Most reenactors come to the hobby with the same boyish love of military history, firearms, and play. For most it only reinforces their initial romanticized view of war and the justice of one side over the other. For others hobby-related questions – the authenticity of particular weapons, uniforms, tactics, rations, camping arrangements, etc. –will sooner or later lead to more extensive readings of period politics, culture, and economics.

Once I started down that road, and became immersed in the original sources, the reading led me away from the reinforcement Dr. Snatzke has drawn from his, all beginning with the questioning of certain basic assumptions.

What Was “The South”?

The reader noticed that I have placed “southern” in quotes and may question why I so qualify a war commonly seen at the time and ever since as one of “North” against “South.”

One reason lies in an interest in accuracy. Geographically we even today refer to the MasonDixon Line as the border between north and south, yet during the war that line lay well within “the North.” Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and Delaware all stayed loyal, unlike “the South.”

And even in “the South” deep fissures appeared as soon as the war started. Every state in the Confederacy provided troops to the United States Army. This went beyond individual soldiers like the Virginian generals Scott and Thomas, who stayed true to their oaths to the republic. It included entire units. All but South Carolina provided white formations; every state in the Confederacy would contribute soldiers to the United States Colored Troops.

My own Virginia raised “Loyal” regiments for the US army beginning in the first year of the war. Loudoun County – the stomping grounds of the famous Mosby – would raise a cavalry battalion, “The Loudoun Rangers” from around the little Quaker town of Waterford, and Chincoteague where my wife and I have vacationed for more than thirty years, provided the “First Eastern Shore (Loyal).

Closer to home, both Accotink and Falls Church fielded their own Union Home Guard – civilians armed by the Provost Marshall of the Defenses South of the Potomac to defend their towns. Both units were virtually unique in containing both African Americans and whites in their ranks.1

These units reflected the stance of their communities. The truck farmers in the country part of Alexandria County, now my own beloved Arlington, voted more than two to one to remain in the United States. Among the watermen of Chincoteague the vote went 148 to two (some sources say one

Altogether, some 400,000 “southern” men served in the US army: about 75,000 from rebellious states, 220,000 from loyal “border” slave states,and more than 100,000 African Americans from the states in rebellion.3 Additional African American recruits served in USCT regiments credited to loyal non-slave states, adding perhaps 20,000 more to the total.

This number is significant. About two million soldiers served in the United States Army during the war and about one million in the rebel army. A shift of 400,000 from the first column to the second would have changed the military balance from a massive superiority to a rough parity. It would have made the reunification of the country a hopeless endeavor.

If geography did not prove decisive, did the rebellion rest on cultural affinities – say, a mysterious sympathy between the diverse barbecue cultures of North Carolina, Memphis, and Texas, as distinguished from the pit beef of Maryland?

Or was there a more direct connection? You can guess where this leads.

The Centrality of Slavery

A young academic I know introduced me to the following dictum: If you know nothing about the civil war it's all about slavery. If you know a little, it's more complicated and involved things like states rights and tariffs. But once you learn a lot, you realize it's slavery, slavery, slavery...

Let's just briefly revisit the statements by the decision makers behind secession. Dr. Snatzke mentions the South Carolina declaration of the reasons for secession, but in fact five states – every state that bothered to give a reason – mentioned the same causus belli, which was the Republican Party's commitment to keeping slavery out of the territories.4

For an extra helping of reasons, you may also want to check out Alexander Stephens' “Cornerstone Speech” here, which contains the immortal passage “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery – subordination to the superior race – is his natural and normal condition.”5

Despite this clarity at the time, the popular history of the Civil War so centers on the lives of white men and the daring deeds of Confederate arms and generals that it remains fairly easy to minimize how essential slavery was to the society and economy of rebel states, and their white population. Dr. Snatzke spends little time on this, so I hope the reader will bear with me as I explain.

We often hear that the average rebel soldier was a poor farmer who had no slaves and so couldn't possibly be fighting for so base a cause, or was manipulated by wealthy planters. This was in fact Karl Marx's interpretation in October 1861 when he wrote of the “unrestricted oligarchy of the 300,000 slaveholders.”6

But Marx overlooked the slaveholders' families; after all, today we speak of families that own their own homes – we don't deduce home ownership from the number of names on deeds and conclude that all other individuals rent or live on the street. From that perspective the numbers are stunning. In the first two states to secede, South Carolina and Mississippi, nearly half of all white people lived in households that owned black people. In every state that rebelled the percentage reached 20% or more and overall it averaged more than 30%.7

The historian Joseph Glatthaar, in analyzing ownership statistics in Lee's army found that those coming from slaveholder households made up more than 40% of its ranks. Whether this affects one's assumption of the involvement of the “average” soldier, it still comprises a substantial minority and would no doubt include the majority of officers.8

Marx used another statistic to draw a connection between slavery and rebellion – the percentage of enslaved African Americans in the states that seceded. This is also instructive. In those first two states to secede more than half the population consisted of enslaved African Americans, and they over all comprised more than a third of the Confederacy's population. No seceding state had an enslaved population less than 20%.

With one exception the twenty-percent threshold formed the key determinant of rebellion. That exception was Kentucky, a state with an enslaved population of 20% and of slaveholding families of 23%.9 In other loyal states percentages fell well below the 20/20 threshold – in Delaware it was 3/2, in Maryland 12/13, in Missouri it was 13/10.

But think of what that 20/20 threshold means! Think how lightly we say “South Carolina left the Union” as if the state were a Scarlett O'Hara that picked up its collective crinolines and walked off in a huff at an imagined insult. A different phrasing might, and should, come to mind if we simply reflect that more than half of all “South Carolinians” were enslaved African Americans.

Think also of what it means to live in a society where the upper 20% own human beings and the lower 20% are enslaved from birth. Even if you own no one in such a society the more affluent 20% would benefit from a capital wealth that ensured them a disproportionate share of any positions of power, be they bankers, justices of the peace, sheriffs, aldermen, congressmen, state militia officers, cotton brokers, etc. etc. etc.

In this sense, though, Marx's use of the term “oligarchy” has some value, for the true difference between comfort and real wealth was commonly seen to fall at the level of the “planter” who held twenty or more African Americans enslaved. This class constituted just over 10% of slaveholders but their influence did play an enormous role. Jefferson Davis enslaved more than a hundred African Americans, every member of the Confederate cabinet either owned or had owned slaves,10 and Robert E. Lee as executor of his father-in-law's will enslaved more than two hundred until the end of 1862, just past the legal deadline for emancipating them under the terms of the will.

On the other end of the scale the lowest 20% of the population would present a floor below which you could never sink, simply from the privilege of being born white. No matter how ignorant, dissolute, incapable, or immoral you might be, you would still retain the rights of a citizen under the Constitution and free man under Common Law even as that lowest band must settle for the approximate legal rights of lawn furniture.

Further arguments existed for nonslaveholders' support of slavery, including the availability of cheap rental labor, the prospect of eventual ownership oneself, and more, as detailed in such works as J. D. B. DeBow's “The Interest in Slavery of the Non-Slaveholding Southerner.”11

But slavery went beyond the simple but brutal reality of how many white families owned how many black people. The economic implications were enormous for the people and the states involved. The average African American in 1860 could bring $800 on the auction block – $150,000 using an “unskilled wage comparison” or a total of half a trillion for the 3.5 million enslaved in the rebel states. But as a portion of GDP, this would come to more than $13 trillion today (speaking of compensated emancipation, try coming to Congress today and asking for that much to solve Global Warming).12

Some 20% (there's that number again) of all the capital in the United States resided in the bodies of enslaved black people, and throughout the rebellious states they often held greater value than the land itself.13

Moreover the income the enslaved brought for their owners reached great heights just before the Civil War. The value of overseas cotton exports in 1859 exceeded $160 million – more than twice the entire federal budget and nearly as much as the US would spend on ordnance during the entire war to come.14

With slave agriculture comprising more than half of all US exports DeBow and others would complain that “the South” must also be paying a majority of all import taxes, the main revenue source for the national government. However, quite apart from overlooking GDP, this failed to note that twothirds of the customs duties were paid in New York. Observers such as Frederick Law Olmstead noted a paucity of imports in planters' estates. Besides, the greatest “protective tariff” in US history was the constitutional ban on importing slaves – this ensured the high market value for the domestic “product” even as slaves could be got from the west coast of Africa for as little as $30-40.15

But GDP is critical. While slave-based agriculture produced hundreds of millions of dollars, it is doubtful that it reached a tenth of that annual total of $4.4 billion. Any number of people other than slaveholders profited from it, including “northern” shippers, bankers, brokers, and insurers, but they didn't rely on it. Push come to shove they could shift among diversified interests, as New England insurers did: when they could no longer write policies on slaves hired out in the “south” they could turn to the Chinese immigrant gangs hired to work on the transcontinental railroad.

And all that slave wealth rested on a brittle base. Cotton production ruined the land and guano or other attempts to restore it cost money. Old slave states sold their excess at great profit to newer ones farther west and these in turn looked to fresh soil in the territories. The slave economy did not just exploit human beings; it depended on a supply of new lands as well.

It also depended on the control of an unwilling population and the cooperation or coercion of every state. The old argument that “the South” fought for “States Rights” against federal power is belied by the Fugitive Slave law, which required even non-slave states to betray runaways and the national government to return them. It's also rebutted by the Confederate constitution itself, which required that “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.”16

Thus, when the Republican Party won the Senate and Presidency (they already held the House) in 1860 on a platform calling for the preservation of slavery in situ but a ban on further expansion into the territories, the leaders of the states most deeply involved in the culture and economy of African American slavery had a choice. They could adjust to its eventual extinction or they could fight.

The response came almost immediately, taking the form of seizures of federal forts and arsenals, sub-treasuries and customs houses, the closing of the Mississippi, the forced capitulation of the army in Texas, the siege of forts Moultrie, Pickens, and Sumter, and actual firing on federal ships. In March the Confederate Congress called for 100,000 one-year volunteers by which they raised by the time of Lincoln's inauguration some 35,000 men, or twice as many as then served in the regular army of the United States.

And then, after four months of increasing aggression, they fired on Sumter.

Cavaliers and Mudsills

If you ever have a day or two to kill, gather a dozen Civil War “buffs” around a table and ask them which side had the best troops, or what regiments they admire most, or who their favorite general is and you can depend on taking notes till exhaustion sets in.. Because the Civil War wraps so many of our favorite legends and half our apocrypha in one great national epic, you can rely on endless discussion without conclusion.

The funny thing about this is that, from an objective, analytical perspective, the kind we might get from a Hans Delbruck, the conversation is entirely fruitless. For the Civil War presents the rare historical spectacle of what is essentially the same army fighting itself.

The vast majority of troops are raised through the same process – state volunteers under the Militia Act mustered into their respective federal services. The majority also share a strikingly similar demographic – young white farmers and laborers, all of similar height, weight, and age. They come from similar communities, they elect local notables to lead them, their best generals all went to the same school and in many cases have fought on the same side against Mexicans or Indians, and they all drill to slight variations of the same tactical manuals plagiarized from the French. Some regiments do better, some worse, but they all occupy the same continuum of wretched to elite based on the same factors of length of training, quality of officers, logistical support, and luck.

There were differences, but not those generally thought. The image of Southern knighthood bravely standing up to hordes of mercenaries and plodding immigrants can only go so far. If the rebels had more than their share of aristocrats, it was balanced by an illiteracy rate more than twice that of the US army. For armies hugely reliant on paperwork, that made a difference. While Jefferson Davis cherry-picked the old army to assemble the management team that ran circles around US arms at Second Bull Run, the latter retained the bureaucracy that kept them in the field long past the point of Confederate desperation.

If the US had a larger proportion of immigrants, those included large numbers of experienced officers, skilled artillerists, and true believers in the cause, of which I'll just pick one example, the young August Horstmann, who wrote home to Oldenburg after the battle of Cross Keys that,

… even if I should die in the fight for freedom & the preservation of the Union of this, my adopted homeland, then you should not be too concerned, for many brave sons of the German fatherland have already died on the field of honor, & many more besides me will fall! – Much the same as it is in Germany, the free and industrious people of the North are fighting against the lazy and haughty Junker spirit of the South. But down with the aristocracy who are lacking only in titles, and may industrious and free men revive the glorious soil of the South…

That these men and their generals fought as well as their more often lauded opponents is clear to any objective student of the war. If Lee had his string of victories from the Seven Days to Chancellorsville (with that little interruption at Antietam), Meade and Grant had theirs for the last two years of the war. To Grant's later string must be added his earlier victories in the west, including the capture of an entire rebel army at Vicksburg and the rout of another at Chattanooga. And to this we can add Sherman's triumphal parade through Georgia and the Carolinas in the last year of the war, as well as Sheridan's conquest of the Shenandoah and Wilson's destruction of Forrest. Taken in total the accomplishments of the United States Army inspired the British analysts Wood and Edmonds to remark that, “The conquest of such a vast expanse of territory, held by a nation in arms, has no parallel in history.”17

There was one great exception to the rule of similarity though, and it's another that underscores the way standard Civil War narratives, buffs, and reenactors overlook the principal characters in the war. The United States Colored Troops, first raised sporadically in late 1862 and then in ever increasing numbers after the Emancipation Proclamation, constituted the largest group of soldiers raised directly by the national government in the history of the United States from its foundation to the First World War. By the end of their service there had been some 209,000 – one out of ten men in the US army and the largest force of men of African descent under one flag, from the dawn of history to the reign of the Emperor Menelek II of Ethiopia.

I'll elaborate more on their services in the final section, but it's more than worth noting that they entered in the second half of the war when most others just wanted to go home, stood the worst duty, fought in some of the most grinding battles, and won respect from the most skeptical observers. General Victor de Chanal, observing on behalf of the French general staff remarked:

We have seen regiments, after but two months service, drill in a very remarkable manner. After one repetition, the white officers left the ranks and the drill continued under command of the colored non-commissioned officers and appeared to be quite as good as before. In all the battles in which these troops fought, they gave such proofs of bravery that even the most prejudiced were compelled to do them justice.

And no wonder – with many of their families still in chains, their race despised or ignored by whites both north and south, and the Confederate Congress having put a noose around the necks of both officers and men under the “Retaliatory Act”18 they had far more than most to fight for.

Lincoln and the Union

If the war was all about slavery, one might ask, why did Lincoln repeatedly state that he fought entirely to “save the Union”? Why did he overrule every US general from Fremont, to Phelps, to Hunter, who tried to emancipate slaves by proclamation in the field? Why do passages in his debates with Douglass fairly drip with racism as he committed time and again to protect slavery where it existed?

The quick answer, simple to the point of glibness, is that if slaveholders wished to destroy the Union in order to perpetuate slavery indefinitely into the future, then a war “just” to preserve the Union was in fact a war to end slavery. Whatever else Lincoln said, he never compromised on the party plank that called for keeping the peculiar institution out of the territories and he had already gone on record in the “House Divided” speech with his intention in that regard:

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.19

That is, he knew as well as the slaveholders what restricting slavery would mean, and he never deviated from that goal. Any confusion on that score results from assuming that because he did not call for freeing all African Americans already enslaved he didn't plan to end slavery itself. Before the rebellion he had no authority to do the first, but he had long planned to do the second.

At the same time, the idea of “perpetual Union” was never simply a legalism. At the very beginning of the Revolution it was clear that any alliance of what were then colonies had to be permanent and inviolable or it was useless. The new nation shared land borders with two major world powers – Britain and Spain – as well as with major Native confederacies capable of destroying any army sent against it unless it was well led and strongly supported (see St. Clair).

Further, the idea that any part of this Union could remove itself at will at any time was anathema to the Founders, if for no other reason than the havoc it would visit on the national credit. This was one of the core arguments in the Federalist Papers for the “more perfect union” of the Constitution, and part of the argument Lincoln threw back in the faces of the nascent Confederacy in his “Special Session” address of July 4, 1861.20

As for the claim of Lincoln's “racism,” it's evinced in speech that would not be generally acceptable to politicians today (perhaps excepting the current president), but in its essentials it's eloquently supportive of the basic rights of humankind. The two blend together in this passage from the debates with Douglas :

I agree with Judge Douglas that he is not my equal in many respects, certainly not in color- perhaps not in intellectual and moral endowments; but in the right to eat the bread without the leave of any body else which his own hand earns, he is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every other man 21

While the first part might offend us, the second reminds me of nothing so much as the lyric of Nina Simone: “You don't have to live next to me; just give me my equality.”22

The Civil War in Black and White

To me, the saddest aspect of Dr. Snatzke's piece is the ease with which he seems to overlook the vital presence of African Americans. He condemns slavery, but then immediately admits his heart still beats for “Dixie.” He then provides his own interesting version of the popular neo-Confederate motif of blaming the war on a tyrannical Abraham Lincoln.

Leaving aside the point that “Dixie” is more of a sentimental abstraction than a realistic description of the “South,” and even avoiding the reasons for the rebellion, this one-sided condemnation overlooks the fact that the dying was inflicted from both sides.23 One side did it to save the existing republic, the other to establish a new one based on human bondage.

Nor can anyone claim the Confederacy was merely defensive. If the whole point of the rebellion was to maintain the right to expand the domain of slavery, then its essential goal was aggressive – either to seize the territories of the United States, or to expand further south into lands already unsuccessfully invaded by “filibusteros” from Walker to Lopez. Hence Lincoln's rejection of the “Crittenden Compromise,” stating that its acceptance “would amount to a perpetual covenant of war against every people, tribe, and state owning a foot of land between here and Tierra del Fuego.”

While the war that followed killed as many as 850,000 Americans it freed four million others, liberated loyal whites within the boundaries of rebellious states, and spared the rest of the hemisphere the future predations of the slave power. As bloody as it was, rarely has a war balanced the sacrifice of the many with the emancipation and freedom of so many more.

And we need to understand that African Americans were not passive recipients of emancipation as a gift. They numbered four and a half million in 1860, three and a half million enslaved in states that rebelled, a half million in loyal states. They comprised one out of seven Americans, and the quarter of a million living free in loyal states had lobbied incessantly for their rights as human beings since the 18th century. They built schools and churches, lobbied legislatures, published newspapers, and spoke truth to power in every forum available.24

When war came, African Americans throughout the country responded immediately. The first refugees from slavery appeared before Fort Monroe in May, 1861. The first volunteer unit to arrive in Washington from Pennsylvania included Nicholas Biddle, an unauthorized black soldier who, attacked by a mob as they marched through Baltimore, became the first “combat” casualty of the Civil War.

The refugees continued to arrive in increasing numbers until their very presence made them impossible for the government to ignore. By the first anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, the New England Freedman's Aid Society estimated that 300,000 African Americans had already escaped the rebels, 50,000 of whom were in the army. Six months later the American Freedman's Inquiry Commission noted that 300,000 African American men in the army – 200,000 as soldiers and 100,000 as noncombatant support, would represent a million and a half total including families, most coming from the states in rebellion.25

Family is key. While the families of the enslaved had no legal existence in the rebellious states, they nonetheless existed in their own hearts. Countless illustrations in Harper's, Frank Leslie's, and other publications during the war repeated the motif of “slaves coming into the lines” and invariably these illustrations never show just one or two men. African Americans came as families and no one was too young or too old to bring out with the able-bodied.

Nor was black agency and resistance confined to those who fled or resided in lands liberated by the United States Army. As the rebel General Patrick Cleburne complained:

All along the lines slavery is comparatively valueless to us for labor, but of great and increasing worth to the enemy for information. It is an omnipresent spy system, pointing out our valuable men to the enemy, revealing our positions, purposes, and resources, and yet acting so safely and secretly that there is no means to guard against it. Even in the heart of our country, where our hold upon this secret espionage is firmest it waits but the opening fire of the enemy's battle line to wake it, like a torpid serpent, into venomous activity.26

The number of enlisted personnel in the USCT did ultimately reach 200,000, with noncombatants ranging from 100-200,000 more.27 Many of these came from the loyal slave states and non-slave states, but well over half came from the rebellious states themselves. This translates to something like three-quarters of a million people abandoning the side of the rebellion for the side of the republic.

More than one hundred and twenty thousand men went from growing cotton for the master to shooting at him, and several multiples of that number supported the war effort in other ways. This simple transfer of strength would have won the war for the United States even had the USCT never fired a shot. But the USCT fired lots of shots.

By the end of the Civil War, African American soldiers in the United States Army provided one out of eight men in the trenches before Petersburg and Richmond, raided the enemy coast from the Northern Neck of Virginia to the Florida panhandle, garrisoned the Mississippi, besieged Charleston, and served everywhere the US Army went. They were among the first troops into Richmond and Mobile, and the first into Charleston. Well before the war ended Lincoln himself would write:

We can not spare the hundred and forty or fifty thousand now serving as soldiers, seamen, and laborers. This is not a question of sentiment or taste, but one of physical force.... Keep it and you can save the Union. Throw it away, and the Union goes with it. Nor is it possible for any Administration to retain the service of these people with the express or implied understanding that upon the first convenient occasion, they are to be re-enslaved. It can not be; and it ought not to be.28

In this light I find it difficult not to weep when Dr. Snatzke writes: “For me the Confederate flag stands as a symbol of defiance to the notion that an abstract principle or the pursuit of a political utopia count more than the fundamental rights of the individual: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

That flag stood for no such principle. It was the flag incorporated into the Second National flag of the Confederacy as “the White Man's flag” and it was the flag under which military commissions were to condemn to death United States officers for “inciting servile insurrection” through the honorable act of leading their black soldiers into battle.

The principle itself only stood for the “fundamental rights” of one race. The African Americans whose ancestors came here before the Mayflower, who grew the tobacco that enriched Virginia and the cotton that fed the Industrial Revolution, whose hands built the Capitol, the White House, Mount Vernon, and Monticello, had no such rights. They had to free themselves from bondage and gain those rights at the point of a bayonet.

But I cannot put it any better than Sergeant Major Daniel Atwood of the 100th United States Colored Infantry, who said this about the battle of Nashville:

It was the first time in the memorable history of the Army of the Cumberland that the blood of black and white men flowed freely together for one common cause... Each was cheered on to victory by the cooperation of the other, and now, as a result, wherever the flag of our love goes, our hopes may advance, and we may, as a people, with propriety claim political equality with our white fellow-soldier and citizen; and every man that makes his home in our country may, whatever be his complexion or progeny, with propriety, exclaim to the world, 'I am an American citizen!' I ask, is there not something in this over which to rejoice and be proud?29

If Dr. Snatzke wants a flag that celebrates the rights of the individual – every individual – over tyranny and enslavement, then he can do no better than that which flew over Sergeant Major Atwood and the USCT in all their battles.

___________________________________________________________________________

1 Both men died the night of October 18, 1864 – Brooks shot defending the town against Mosby's Raiders, Read captured and taken 15 miles away to Hunter Mill where he was assassinated with a pistol shot to the back of the head.

Official Records, Series I, vol. 43 (Part II), pp. 414-41 i

i Official Records, Series III, vol. 4, p. 1269 African American enlistments credited to loyal slave and non-slave states are included in those states' totals. The overall number of African American enlistments was reported by the Bureau of Colored Troops in October 1865 to total 179,000 but research in the Archives conducted by the Mormon Church for the African American Civil War Memorial found more than 230,000, which when duplicate names were consolidated produced 209,000, still a likely under count. 3

4 https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states States that did not publish formal declarations of reasons nonetheless left enough of a paper trail to point to the same cause of secession. Even North Carolina, which held out till Lincoln's call for volunteers, had struggled with the issue since the election, with a secessionist movement driven by slaveholders.

5 https://www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~ras2777/amgov/stephens.html

6 https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Engels_Writings_on_the_North_American_Civil_War.pdf See p. 31 All these articles are interesting as a sort of real time analysis of the war from Marx's peculiar perspective; his opinion on Lincoln, for example, changes materially from the removal of Fremont to the Emancipation Proclamation.
7 http://www.civil-war.net/pages/1860_census.html The Census itself can be found here: https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html

8 The original article can be found in the September 2016 Journal of the Civil War Era published by the University of North Carolina

9 The difference between Kentucky and other states with similar proportions of enslaved and enslavers was that the average “holding” of slaves was less (a half dozen per family rather than ten), the cash crop was tobacco instead of cotton, and while Appalachians effectively cut it off from the rebellious states, the Ohio river provided an avenue of invasion over too broad a front to defend. Still, it stayed on the fence as long as it could.

10 Peterson, Confederate Cabinet Departments and Secretaries,

11 J. D. B. DeBow, “The Interest in Slavery of the Southern Non-Slaveholder,” Charleston, 1860: DeBow, a former Superintendant of the Census published a popular, pro-slavery journal before the war and was a well-regarded journalist. His wage comparisons here, though, are cherry-picked; better ones can be found in Edward W. Martin's "The Standard of Living in 1860"

12 “Measuring Slavery in 2011 Dollars” Williamson & Caine The 1861 price comes from Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch and Gavin Wright, editors, Historical Statistics of the United States: earliest times to the present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), series Bb212

13 Piketty, “Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century” pp. 158-163

14 For cotton prices and budget, see The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1861; pp. 175-176 give US govt. receipts and expenditure for the FY ending June 30, 1860 as about $77 million, little changed from the previous year; p. 185 gives cotton exports worth $161 million in 1859:For ordnance costs see Fred Shannon, Organization and Administration of the Union Army, Vol. II, pp. 80-81

15 The British consul at Johanna in 1857 reported slaves going for as little as $30-40 each; see p. 170 “Accounts and Papersof the House of Commons” Vol. LXI:

16 Emphasis added. See http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_csa.asp It's noteworthy that the only other major changes from the original text of the Constitution were the provisions for a single, six-year term for the President and a line item veto. This raises the interesting question of what the war was about if not slavery – did hundreds of thousands die for the line item veto?

17 W. B. Wood & J. S. Edmonds, Military History of the Civil War, (New York, 1937)

18 Officers generally did not suffer once the US government reminded the rebels that they too held prisoners, but the shortest book in the annals of Civil War history is that describing the fate of USCT enlisted men captured in battle. The refusal by the rebels to treat these as prisoners of war subject to exchange was the major factor leading to the suspension of those exchanges and its continuation nearly to the end of the war.
19 [Emphasis added] http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/house.htm

20 In that same speech Lincoln effectively demolishes every other argument advanced in support of the rebellion, including the specious claim of state “sovereignty” for entities that never existed until they became territories and then states in the union, as well as the secessionists' inability to argue the legality of their actions. For anyone who claims an interest in the subject, it's more than worth a read in its entirety: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=6980221 [Emphasis in original.] https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate6.htm

22 “Mississippi Goddam”

23 Given that both Dr. Snatzke and I both started as boys fascinated with some form of military glory, I should emphasize that the death was inflicted on themselves as well as the enemy – with twice as many dying from disease as battle, any residual view of glory must note that until the last century every army that ever walked the earth killed more of their own men through ignorance and neglect than the enemy did with steel and shot.

24 See Leon F. Litwack's North of Slavery (1961) for its catalog of racial injustice in the northern states before the Civil War, but also the efforts of both black and white abolitionists as well as the African American community generally.

25 “Second Annual Report of the New England Freedmen's Aid Society” (Boston, 1864) and “Preliminary Report of theAmerican Freedmen's Inquiry Commission” (New York, June 1863)

26 From a circular sent on January 2, 1864 from Cleburne and fellow officers up the chain of command as part of an unsuccessful argument for freeing and arming slaves by the Confederacy itself. See: The war of the rebellion: a compilation of the official records of the Union and Confederate armies. ; Series 1 - Volume 52 (Part II) p. 588

27 Herbert Aptheker in “Negro Casualties in the Civil War” estimated “something like 200,000 or 250,000 men and women” (p. 49)

28 William Dobak, Freedom by the Sword (Center for Military History, 2011) 29 Noah Andre Trudeau:

_____________________________________________________________________________

Michael refers to Georg as Dr. Snatzke. It is not the custom in America for PhD's in industry to be referred to as Doctor, but I have no doubt that he was being respectful. Georg is an easy going guy and does not introduce himself as Dr Snatzke.

Peter J Reilly CPA is trying to be the Tom Sawyer of blogging. If you want to help, contact him about putting up a guest post. You can keep your dead frog and marbles.

Boys Playing War In The Jungle In The Time Of Tin Soldiers And Nixon

2017-07-09T11:11:00.000-04:00

War Boys
M.A. Schaffner
Welcome Rain Publishers LLC
2002

____________________________________________________________________

Many novels, particularly thrillers, make it with their plot. Jack Higgins comes to mind. Others do it with characters. Lots of those, but none better than James Gould Cozzens, except, perhaps, for George Eliot.

The merit in War Boys by M.A. Schaffner though is in its setting. Not only the place in a geographical sense, but also the time and social circumstances. The pictures drawn there more than make up for weaknesses in plot and character, which to be frank, may be more my failure as a close reader rather than those of the author. I had to drop being English major because I thought of Moby Dick as a story about a bunch of guys who worked in the whaling industry.

What A Father

One well drawn character is the protagonist and viewpoint character Charles Barker, who is about 14 or so when the story begins. His family has just moved and as he wakes up imagining his father getting ready to go to work, we meet another memorable character and learn much about the circumstances Charles finds himself in:

He didn't have to see his father leave to know that the old man had put on his service khakis, pressed sharp, with the new commander's oak leaves on the collar and the bright gold scrambled eggs on the shiny visor of his cover. He'd have worn brown shoes you could see up girls' dresses with and a breastplate of fifteen or twenty silk ribbons from all his campaigns and achievements since 1944, including the one he had the most pride in, the maroon Good Conduct Medal that only enlisted men could earn, and that told everyone he met he'd worked his way up, step by step, form E-1 to O-5. They'd see it and know that behind the open smile and easy, down-home manners of this slightly chunky, balding former Texas farm boy stood a man who knew more about the navy, than any officer who'd gotten his stripes straight from Annapolis or NROTC, including all the tricks and wiles of his sailors.

I tell you. In my mind that passage alone is worth the price of admission. And it gives us a picture of a boy with a very clear idea of what a man should be. I'm reminded of some of the Cozzens characters who never could quite be the man that they thought their father was.

Navy Brats

The passage also tells us how Charles (and his friends we will later learn) is immersed in military culture purely from being a Navy brat. As one of his friends puts it when trying to conceive of doing anything other than becoming a Naval officer.

I mean so what do I do now? I never really thought of anything else, man. I hate to admit if, but I don't know dick about anything but this. I mean, just what do civilians do, Charles? Just what the fuck is an accountant or an insurance executive?
.....I'll tell you what I do know, dude. I know the name of every rank from E-one to O-six. I can tell a squid's job from the color of his jersey stripes and those fucking cartoons on their sleeves. I know carriers are named for battles, battleships for states, cruisers for cities .... fuck. I know the price of a blow job in every port in the Western Pacific and how much you can save by paying in the local currency. -

I suppose I should mention the language is pretty rough. It strikes me as quite realistic though. I was a teenager during the same period and when you throw in that Charles and his friends spent time with marines and sailors a few years older then they were, I mean, what do you fucking expect?

Charles goes into military culture in a different way than his friends. He is fascinated with military history and collects highly authentic tin soldiers, that he paints himself, and fights battles with using detailed rules. He would probably have preferred sticking with that rather than the more dangerous play soldiering that Explorer Post 360 exposed him to.

In The Jungle

The plot centers on Explorer Post 360. And here is where the setting comes becomes critical. Commander Barker, has just been transferred to Subic Bay in the Philippines where he will supervise the construction of a new wing of the naval hospital.

There aircraft carriers docked looking like ghost gray cities rising from viridian sea into cobalt sky, while their white warplanes waited on the the adjacent airfield like a well-organized flock of nesting seabirds.

Explorers are kind of a post-Boy Scout experience that can be kind of specialized. I remember briefly being part of an Explorer post that consisted of going to the headquarters of an insurance company in New York and listening to talks on business. Explorer Post 360 was nothing like that.
It was definitely outdoors focused and had an ideal setting.

The hills occupied most of the base, and bore fifteen thousand acres of mostly uncut and unvisited rain forest, the last of its kind on the island of Luzon, protected from local citizens and all other enemies foreign and domestic by the U.S. Navy.

Charles also goes out for the wrestling team, which leads to something of an epic journey as middle class American high school kids in order to go to a wrestling match against other middle class American high school must journey by bus through the third world.

...they couldn't seem to travel more than a few miles without encountering a jam caused by anything from a broken-down jeepney to a carabao laboriously crossing the road to an encouraging chorus of car horns and shouting drivers.

When they finally reach the town they are headed for Charles notes lights on the wall.

Those aren't lights, dude, That's the sun setting on the broken glass
It's to keep the Joe's out.

The dark part of the story centers on a mock Viet Cong Village which Marines had used for training. The boys camp there and play war using flash lights.

Whoever gets caught in a beam is blown away.

Back To The Father

Charles is hesitant about his Explorer adventures and subtly tries to get his mother to forbid his participation, but his father ends up encouraging him. When Explorer Post 360 participates in a recreation, under somewhat more benign conditions, of the Bataan Death March, his father encourages him going so far as to loan him his combat boots.

"But you wore those in Korea."
"Yeah, and there were a few nights when I'd have given anything to know that someday I'd be loaning them to my son."

(This is one place where I would like to learn more about Commander Barker. Given his job as an officer in medical administration, it seems that as an enlisted man he might have been one of the corpsmen who provided first aid to Marines in combat. I have reasons to know that there is a heavy dose of the autobiographical in this novel and I can only hope that someday Michael Schaffner might write something like James Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers.)

The Core Story

Although I would not have wanted to lose any of the details that Shaffner dwells on, the movie version of his book will likely focus on the central part of the story as Explorer Post 360 gets for its "adult leadership" a young petty officer who is borderline psychotic and decides to carry the adventure and toughening aspects of the Explorer experience beyond anything the parents would have approved.

What the hell you little jerk-offs whining about? A little rain? Shit, man, hundreds of dudes die every week in 'Nam - thousands if you want to get technical and count slopes - and you're complaining? Shit.

Petty Officer Prahler tells the boys wild stories about his experience in Vietnam with the Navy SEALs and riverine naval operations, which seem altogether inconsistent with his current duties supervising a riding stable.

The most senior boy in the Post struggles to inject some sanity into their activities

..he heard him whisper to Prahler like a loyal XO whose captain had just steered a little closer to the iceberg.

To no avail:

..most of the boys had begun to show up primarily from morbid curiosity, wondering if their next outing would involve something like a quick march on short rations around the wrong end of a firing range in the middle of the next typhoon

The dramatic tension builds and one of the expeditions goes very, very badly.

The problem with War Boys as something of a dark boys adventure story is that Petty Officer Prahler enters on page 169 and the dramatic climax is on page 260. The book is 325 pages making for rather a longish epilog if you think of it as being mostly about the misadventure in the jungle.

And The Times

Although it is clear from early on that the action takes place during the Vietnam War, it is only towards the end that there are references to events that anchor the chronology more firmly in time. And here I must admit that this is not just a book review but in a way part of the high school memoir series that I have been working on for a year.

The Explorer Post 360 boys are much closer to the Vietnam War in a sense of pure geography and their interaction with men or sometimes boys not much older than them going to and coming back from Vietnam, but their peculiar circumstances insulate them from the way Americans back home are experiencing Vietnam.

The events leading up to and the adventures with Petty Officer Prahler absorb Charles's freshman year in high school. The first easily datable event happens after that.

The collision of the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans with the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne off Vietnam had the destroyer cut in half. The bow went down within five minutes resulting in the death of 74 men, That was on 3 June 1969. It made a profound impression on people at Subic Bay where the remaining part of the ship would be towed.

I entirely missed that and have no contemporaneous memory of that. That is also true of the Stonewall riot that occurred a few blocks from my high school that same month.

We follow Charles into his Sophomore year, where he notes a story in the back of Stars and Stripes about 100,000 people attending a war protest in Washington in November 1969. He thought at first it was a misprint. Not long after the story of the My Lai massacre broke. The boys Charles knew all had a lot of sympathy for that company of Army grunts who probably had good reason for killing all the adults in the village and it's not like you could leave the babies to fend for themselves.

In my high school, the war and peace movements were cheek by jowl. Xavier High School in Manhattan was a Jesuit High School, but it was also organized as a Junior ROTC regiment. We wore uniforms and marched and received classroom instruction in military science. A classmate who had a career as an Army officer told me that the classroom instruction was of high quality. I was a senior in 1969-1970 and one of the blocks of instruction was Counter-Insurgency taught by an officer who had recently been in Vietnam.

Ah but the peace movement. One of the most prominent peace activists at the time was Father Daniel Berrigan, a New York Province Jesuit on the run from the FBI. Ironically, more than a few Xavier graduates chose the FBI as their career. The young Jesuit scholastics and priests became embarrassed by teenagers in pseudo Army uniforms saluting them in the street.

Other Issues

Charles has his first romance and the girl raises doubts about the war. Asking him if he would go, he says he didn't think he would know how not to.

Charles also reflects a lot on history. I wonder if some mature reflections of the author were kind of backdated into the young lad. When his family visits the site of MacArthur's last headquarters in 1942, he reflects on the situation then.

Pampered, underequipped, and wholly unready to fight, that garrison scarcely gave the Japanese a good workout before dying piteously on a forced march to prison camps. Still, Charles thought, they'd done what they could. In that way, it seemed to him, they set a more realistic standard of bravery than any hero he could imagine, including the general who had a abandoned them with a fatuous phrase. Charles wanted to see a real memorial here - a bronze statue of a cavalryman eating his horse, or a cook trying to set the sights on a Springfield rifle. It didn't seem right to boil it all down to MacArthur and "I shall return". It then occurred to Charles that most soldiers never did return from the wars, he enjoyed reading about and re-creating with games and toy soldiers.

The Shadow Of Vietnam

One of my classmates recently staged a play about our high school during that period. He called it The Institute - Coming of age during the Vietnam War.

Cautioning him to not let the strange setting he finds himself in warp him, one of his teachers makes a fateful prediction

You're not a sailor or a marine, Charles, The war will end before it gets to you.

That was true for Charles and also for my bunch of cadets who kept marching and learned about platoon tactics and counter-insurgency and the psychology of leadership (the mission and the men - officers eat last). We almost all went to college and miraculously the war ended before we graduated. Only it wasn't true because the war still got to us - in attitudes toward government and institutions and other changes in the culture. That might have to be another post, though.

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I met Michael Schaffner at the Grand Review in Harrisburg, PA, my last Civil War Sesquicentennial event. Black troops were excluded from the historic Grand Review in Washington. So the City of Harrisburg compensated for that. Michael Schaffner portrays one of the white officers in Company B of the 54th Mass based in Washington DC. There will be a guest post from him on this site soon.

Michael Schaffner (second from left) as Harrisburg Grand Review 2015

Peter J Reilly CPA blogs on taxes for forbes.com which is not nearly as lucrative as doing tax work, but a lot more lucrative than this blog. This piece meets the minimum content requirement to be part of my Xavier High School series.

Update

Michael Schaffner told me that his father was in fact a combat corpsman in Korea, It is worth noting that War Boys is dedicated to Captain L.J. Schaffner, MSC, USN

Scholar Goes To Rest With Margaret Fuller

2017-06-26T19:06:00.000-04:00

Some stuff you just can't make up and the final chapter, perhaps the epilogue, in the life of Marie Olesen Urbanski Whittaker is like that. This being my blog and all, I'm going to tell it from my point of view, which may seem a bit improbable.

Let's Make A Movie

Some years ago, I became obsessed with the notion that the life of Margaret Fuller needs to be a major motion picture. My vision of it is as the most romantic tragedy in American history - brilliant young woman associating with iconic intellectuals, smarter than all of them, leading women in discussion of empowerment, authors fundamental feminist text, uses a platform as a literary columnist to examine issues of class race and gender, covers a revolution, marries a man ten years her junior who probably couldn't read her books but worshiped her, participates in a revolution, dies in a tragic shipwreck with her husband and son.

When I first heard about Margaret Fuller in 1972, it was as a marginal literary figure. Editor of a journal that had a short life and a short print run inspiration for Zenobia in Blithedale Romance. That was pretty much it.

It took a virtual lifetime of random unsystematic reading focused on the ante-bellum social reform movements for me to rediscover her. Unlike most Margaret Fuller scholars I am much more interested in the Civil War, abolition and the womens rights movement than I am in literature. To many Margaret Fuller is kind of a marginal Transcendentalist. To me the Transcendentalists, the whole lot of them, are mainly important as a launching platform for Margaret Fuller.

Regardless, my nonliterary background may be why I think the film treatment is so important. As luck would have it I know Jonathan Schwartz of Interlock Media. He convinced me that we needed to do a documentary first. That and the best bonus I had in my career launched the project which has been going on for quite a while.

The Talent Scout

I mention all this to explain the improbable assignment I had last year. I was a talent scout for Interlock Media. Me. A CPA. A writer of sorts, but one who writes mostly about taxes. I count myself among the most literary of the tax bloggers. I mean check out my coverage of JD Salinger's estate planning problems. But really not much of a literary person.

At any rate my tax blogging has honed my otherwise pretty good research skills making me not so bad at finding experts in this or that to add color to my stories. We had interviews with two major Fuller biographers already shot and my mission was to find some other scholars.

An Elusive Scholar

One of the more elusive was Marie Mitchell Olesen Urbanski author of Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century: A Literary Study of Form and Content, of Sources and Influence which was published in 1980.

The work was Professor Urbanski's Ph.D thesis. She had gone after the degree when she was already in her late forties, but still managed to land a position at the University of Maine. And it was there that she did the thing that really won my heart. In a site called Walking Tour About UMaine Women, I found:

The university’s “Gender Equity Plan for Athletics” exists to guide UMaine in its continuing efforts to maintain gender equity in its intercollegiate athletics program. We have come a long way since the 1970s when an English professor by the name of Marie Urbanski led a group to demand that women be allowed to use the weight room.

I still couldn't find her though.

I knew Marie had a daughter Wanda Urbanska (the feminine of Urbanski). Wanda is herself pretty famous. Among other things she had a series of simple living that ran on PBS

I was having trouble finding her too, but I finally struck gold with a story in the New York Times - Three Generations, Two Comfy Homes a Few Steps Apart

For Ms. Urbanska, a media consultant and author, the economics of shared living have eased some of the financial pressures she faces as a single mother. Together, she and her mother, Marie Whittaker, bought the three-bedroom home for $370,000 last year. They each contributed $60,000 to the down payment, which consumed a considerable portion of their liquid savings, or money that was not tied up elsewhere.

Well - what can you say? Despite being the very model of a second wave feminist, Marie had apparently changed her name again when she remarried.

Hurry Up

From there it was not too hard to get Wanda on the phone. Wanda was pretty impressed with the depth of my knowledge. She told me her mother was still quite sharp, although she had some trouble hearing, but if we wanted to film her we shouldn't put it off, because she was pretty old. Here is the note from our prospect file:

It turns out that Marie is still alive alert and very feisty and outspoken as reported by Wanda who is delighted that we called and impressed by the depth of our research. She was very much involved in her mother's work.
Marie is going strong. Wanda said that she is holding on so that she can vote for the first woman president.
Wanda is also familiar with production and could help with logistics on a North Carolina shoot.

Too Late

Sadly we could not get it together. Not long after we talked I got a sad email from Wanda

It was so good to speak to you earlier this month about the scholarship of my mother, Marie Olesen Urbanski Whittaker, on Margaret Fuller. I had indicated that you should move quickly if you were planning to film her, but I didn't realize how quickly she would go. She died on Oct. 24.

Wanda included links to obituaries in the Raleigh News & Observer and The Mount Airy News. Best though was the story Wanda wrote for Glamour - The Last Thing My Mother Did Before She Died Was Vote For Hillary Clinton. They have early voting in North Carolina, which Marie took advantage of. As Wanda relates it:

This Monday afternoon, when I returned from the post office, receipt in hand, I stepped into the bedroom where Mama was barely hanging on.
"Did Hillary make it?" she asked once more, her words trailing, her voice almost inaudible. Looking at the fading light in her eyes, as her boney hand stretched out from her hospice bed, I considered how to respond. Do I tell her the truth? Hillary's poll numbers are looking positive, but the election is not in the bag.
"Yes, Mama," I told her. "Hillary made it."
It was what Marie Urbanski Whittaker had been waiting for her entire life. Within minutes, she was gone.

The post went viral and is pretty well known, although it is little noted that the story was about a pioneer Margaret Fuller scholar. I found that out a few months later.

Independent Scholar And Margaret Fuller Fan Boy

By May Interlock had a fifteen minute version of the documentary ready. I had moved from talent scouting to finding images and quotations. A delightful part of that process was rereading Margaret Fuller Ossoli by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. You literary types will think of Higginson as a bad guy in the Emily Dickinson story whose reputation was helped by the recent White Heat.

Somebody like me though is a lot more interested in his role as one of John Brown's Secret Six and commander of the First South Carolina Volunteers (33rd United States Colored Troops). It was Higginson's biography that drove home the Margaret Fuller story to me.

And as for Margaret Ossoli, her life seems to me, on the whole, a triumphant rather than a sad one, in spite of the prolonged struggle with illness, with poverty, with the shortcomings of others and with her own. In later years she had the fulfillment of her dreams; she had what Elizabeth Barrett, writing at the time of her marriage to Robert Browning, named as the three great desiderata of existence, “life and love and Italy.” She shared in great deeds, she was the counselor of great men, she had a husband who was a lover, and she had a child. They loved each other in their lives, and in their death they were not divided. Was not that enough?

At any rate the fifteen minute version of the documentary was shown at the American Literature Association conference. Lacking any academic affiliation my ID badge denominated me an "Independent Scholar", which struck me as a little grandiose.

At Margaret Fuller's Home

There was a meeting of the Margaret Fuller Society scheduled to coincide with the conference with a bus to take us from the conference in Copley Square to the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House. Margaret's childhood home in what was then called Cambridgeport has been a community center since early in the twentieth century (Thomas Wentworth Higginson, kind of the last of the Transcendentalists, was there at its original dedication).

As I talked to various Fuller scholars at the conference I found that although most of them were familiar with Marie's work, none of them seem to know her. This is not entirely shocking. She retired around the time that the Margaret Fuller Society was founded twenty five years ago. And few were aware of her connection to the Glamor story.

So I ended up having the honor of making a little presentation on her at the meeting. I of course included the story about the weight room. If I didn't say "let them be weight lifters, if you will", I should have, so let's just say I did. I concluded with something to the effect that she had gone to a better place where we have a different president.

One of the members dubbed me a Margaret Fuller fan boy and I think I might use that if I ever go to ALA again, but it gets better.

Resting With Margaret Fuller

I let Wanda know about the event and she was really pleased and then she asked if we could meet up. She was going to be hanging out at Logan Airport to meet up with her sister to go to a wedding on Martha's Vineyard.

We worked it out and she met with me, Jonathan and one of his interns. We were able to show her the fifteen minutes on one of our computers and had a great dinner. Most interesting was that she had Marie with her. Her ashes that is. Jonathan figured she was going to divide them with her sister. But that was not the plan.

Wanda and her sister, Jane Robbins, had a road trip planned. After the Vineyard wedding, they were off to Fire Island where they would scatter Marie's ashes. You and I both know that is where the Elizabeth went down with Margaret Fuller and her husband and son, but you have to consider the other readers.

I asked Wanda how it went and she wrote me:

We scattered the vast majority of Mama's ashes off of Fire Island, as was her lifelong wish. We saved a smattering of ashes to scatter in Seneca Falls, NY, at the base of the monument to those who organized the Women's Rights Convention.

_________________________________________________________________________

Peter J Reilly CPA, Independent Scholar, Margaret Fuller Fan Boy is looking forward to the full length documentary and the feature length biopic that is sure to follow. Tom Hanks will narrate as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, but we still don't know who should play Margaret Fuller..

Lafayette Was Here - Probably

2017-05-07T20:45:00.000-04:00

... there never was nor will be such a meeting in this or any country ,,,

Salem Towne Junior July 25, 1824

Burying The Lede With A Geographic Diversion

Stafford Street is one of those roads people who live in the area know about and use. It connects two of the main East-West roads in Central Mass - Route 20 and Route 9 with only a couple of traffic lights. It crosses over the real East-West drag I-90 - the Massachusetts Turnpike. In these parts. Stafford Street runs NE/SW between Worcester and Charlton a bit less than eleven miles. There is not a lot to look at unless you pay attention.

Stafford street can be a little bewildering to people unfamiliar with the area. A couple of times on my walks in Rochdale one of those Massachusetts places that rates a post office, but is not its own town (Rochdale being part of Leicester), I have had to help out people trying to get to Connecticut. Frankly, I find it a little confusing myself sometimes.

I was just a little startled to learn that Stafford Street is a remnant of something that was once a big deal. The Worcester Stafford Turnpike connected Worcester and Hartford. Tolls were collected until 1835. So it was kind of the main drag. And that accounts for the marker just across Stafford street from the Episcopal church at the corner of Pleasant street.

The Markers

On September 3, 1824, General the Marquis de Lafayette was greeted by the people of the Town of Leicester, led by Captain Howe, Here, on the site of Stone's Tavern, a welcome was made by the Rev. Joseph Muenschner of the Episcopal Church, which was followed by an address to the crowd by Lafayette.

If you are outbound from Worcester after passing through Rochdale, you will cross over the Mass Pike. A bit before that in Charlton you will see the Rider Tavern. The Tavern is preserved and can be viewed by appointment. Across the street is an open field, which according to one of the monuments is where Charlton's militia drilled. Another plaque indicates that Lafayette also stopped there on September 3, 1824.

My New Obsession

Those two markers which I view pretty frequently, the one in Rochdale practically daily, developed a hold on my imagination. I began imagining that special day in 1824, although I have only a dim idea of what Charlton or Leicester militia might have looked like. Maybe like the older guy in this picture taken at Old Sturbridge Village.

My primary interest in American history has always been the reform movements from 1830-1860, not that I can't get fanatical about the Civil War, Reconstruction, and World War II. At any rate, I spent quite a while obsessing about Adin Ballou, a rather odd figure, a Universalist turned Unitarian minister who became best remember by Catholic peace activists in the 1960s. Then there was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, also a Unitarian minister, better known than Adin Ballou. He knew just about everybody who became part of the canon of 19th Century American literature, commanded a regiment of freed slaves in the Late Unpleasantness and is best known in some circles as Emily Dickinson's mentor.

I read a large percentage of what Higginson wrote, which made it clear why he kind of missed being part of the canon himself. That led me to my obsession of the last decade. Higginson wrote a biography of Margaret Fuller. I really got somewhere with that one. At the upcoming American Literature Association conference one of the sessions is:

"Documentary Film on Margaret Fuller: A Preview," Jonathan Schwartz, Project Director; and Nan Byrne, Project Writer

I sparked that project and have been involved one way or another for several years. There is still a lot to be done with Margaret, but the groundwork for my new project should not interfere with that.

The new project is the bicentennial of Lafayette's visit coming up in seven years. It is going to happen and it is going to big. Before the progress report, though I should explain why I think it is so important.

About Lafayette

Lafayette is how we refer to him in America. Although sometimes it is Marquis de Lafayette, a title which he renounced. Or then there is the Marquis, because we really don't have any others. Anyway, the first paragraph in Wikipedia gives you the high points

Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette (French pronunciation: [maʁki də la fajɛt]; 6 September 1757 – 20 May 1834), in the U.S. often known simply as Lafayette, was a French aristocrat and military officer who fought in the American Revolutionary War. A close friend of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, Lafayette was a key figure in the French Revolution of 1789 and the July Revolution of 1830.

The most important point I would add is that Lafayette, with help from Thomas Jefferson, was responsible for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

About The Visit

Lafayette is altogether a fascinating guy with a fascinating biography, but he is mostly outside my primary area of interest. It is more what Lafayette came to represent and the profound affect that his visit had on the nascent democracy that intrigues me.

I scratch my head and can think of no event in American history that is comparable to Lafayette's visit. Everywhere he went crowds turned out for him sometimes waiting long into the night as he dealt with poor roads and unscheduled stops.

And they remembered. In the history of Ware, Massachusetts, you can read about a hurricane in the nineteen twenties that knocked down a venerable tree that was dubbed the Lafayette Elm, because Lafayette stopped beneath it for lunch on his second trip to Boston.

In the nineteen thirties the Berkshire Evening Eagle ran a series for several years about notables of the area from previous centuries. Men who had served in the Revolution or War of 1812 and held important offices. In the series, we learn about Phineas Allen (1776-1868) and Ezikiel Colt (1794-1860). Among the highlights of their lives:

Mr. Allen was a member of the citizens committee which met Gen. Lafayette at the state line on the famous occasion of the visit to Pittsfield in 1825.

In June 1825 he (i.e. Colt) was of the escorting party which met General Lafayette at the state line on Lebanon Mountain on the occasion of his visit to Pittsfield. Majors Colt and EM Bissell has command of a troop of cavalry.

In 1870, the City of Pittsfield congratulating itself on the large number of citizens who had reached the age of 70, held a dinner to honor the old timers. Prof WC Richards presented a narrative poem outlining his notion of what such fellows might remember including the following two stanzas.

Twas a proud day for the village an' you seldom see a prouder

And never throats and bells and guns went merrier or louder

When we gave the hero welcome as means great Lafayette

Whose name like that o' Washington we'll never more forget

I think twas twenty-five he come an the soges went to meet him

An the county poured its thousands out old and young to greet him

For he draw'd his sword to help us when we'd a mighty foe

And gratitude's a sort of debt we pay _ but allus owe.

Lafayette's secretary wrote an account of his travels, which has been translated by Alan Hoffman, President of the American Friends of Lafayette. Comprehensive as the account is you won't read about Leicester or Charlton or Ware in it.

Here is Levasseur's account of the day that Lafayette stopped in Leicester and Charlton

The first day in Bolton, we had stayed in the charming country house of Mr. Wilder, whose amiable hospitality will not be erased from our memory. The second day, we stayed at Stafford, after having attended the glittering festivities of Worcester, and on the 4th at ten o’clock in the morning, we arrived at Hartford,

The real story of the magnitude of Lafayette's visit is buried in local history.

Why?

Lafayette was invited to President Monroe to come and visit as the Guest of the Nation. It is well to remember that the American experiment with government by the people and civil equality was still very new. The people in the prime of life at the time were the first people to have spent their whole lives as citizens of the United States.

Lafayette, the only surviving major general from the Revolution, was a total hit with the veterans and the ceremonies surrounding the visit were as much a celebration of them as it was of him. One of the key events near the end of his tour was the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker HIll Monument.

The cause of self government did seem to be prospering as the name of Bolivar was bruited about and we had the the Monroe Doctrine. There was even optimism about a solution to the contradiction of slavery with the establishment of Liberia, its capital being named for the President. Of course, people nowadays have not such a high opinion of the colonization effort, but it is well to remember that one of the rationales for the movement was that white people would not treat the freed slaves well. It is not as if the experience of Reconstruction proved the colonizers wrong.

All in Lafayette was an ideal person to embody the spirit of the new nation. He had not been involved in American politics which was then heading for a very divisive Presidential election, that would be decided in the House of Representatives for the first time. And he was not associated with any region of the country. And his work for democratic government and civil equality in France aligned with the idea that America was about ideas not ethnicity. And that they were ideas that would spread.

Back To Me

My notion about the bicentennial, which became more and more elaborate, was based purely on the two markers and my previous knowledge about the visit and Lafayette, which was pretty sketchy. So I figured I needed to do some research.For a recent biography I went with Lafayette: His Extraordinary Life and Legacy by Donald Miller..

It was in reading the legacy part that I breathed a sigh of relief. I learned about the American Friends of Lafayette . I became a life member. This is great. I'm not on my own when it comes to the bicentennial. I communicated with Alan Hoffman, who besides being a translator of Levasseur's account is the President of AFL.

And it is was my contact with Alan Hoffman that facilitated last week's road trip. He let me know about a graduate student in geography from France who was documenting Lafayette's stops in New England. I offered to host him when he was ready to take on the heart of the commonwealth.

Lafayette In Massachusetts

Lafayette made a point of visiting all of the then 24 states of the Union. He probably covered Massachusetts more thoroughly than any, Having originally landed in New York, he visited Boston twice - once early in his travels in August-September 1824 and nearly a year later to lay the cornerstone for the Bunker Hill Monument. His tour of the south and west was constrained by his need to get to Bunker Hill in time.

If we overlay modern roads on the map of 1824 we can imagine Lafayette jumping on I-95 to get to Boston via Providence and then heading back to New York by taking Route 2 to I-495 to I-290 to pass through Worcester where he would switch to Route 20 to pick up I-84 in Sturbridge to head to Hartford.

In 1825, he was coming from the Albany area and was in a hurry, but the Nation's Guest did not pay tolls ruling out the Mass PIke. He was mostly on Route 9 from Pittsfield to Worcester and then on Route 20.

After the dedication he headed north to visit Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont and did not touch Massachusetts on his way back to New York.

Planning Our Road Trip

So towards the tail end of my post-tax season vacation I get a phone call from Julien Icher.

Julien has a business card that identifies him as the Project Manager-Lafayette Trail for Republique Francais - Consulat General De France A Boston. As we were chatting about his liking for the United States, I asked him what sort of document he was in the country on and he told me that he had a diplomatic passport.

Julien called me on a Sunday when my covivant and I were on the tail end of our post tax season vacation. He was ready for my part of Massachusetts and wanted to get together on Wednesday. That severely cut into the time I had hoped to spend preparing. Since CV and I were travelling on Monday, I was left with Tuesday. CV was gracious about having an unanticipated house guest for three days.

Julien told me not to worry about the abbreviated prep time. He already had some things planned and he had a "lucky star" that made things work out as he traveled around New England documenting Lafayette's stops. I managed to make a couple of the connections I had been hoping for. So we had a plan of sorts.

Julien has a bachelors in history, a masters in geography and a second masters in geographical information systems. He speaks English very well with just enough of an accent to let you know he is French. He loves idioms. He is particularly fond of "pulling your leg". I furthered his education by teaching him a few idioms that cannot be used in polite company or repeated on this blog.

Julien is 23 just two weeks older than my son. He treated me with the same deference that my son treats me. That is regularly mocking the eccentric old man. I think that I insisted on playing Ingress at our stops might have been a factor.

Day One

Julien set most of the program for Day 1. He got to my condo in North Oxford around 9:00 AM. We started off by going down to Rochdale, where I showed him the marker that had gotten me started. We hit the nearby diner where I had second breakfast and took Stafford street to Worcester reversing Lafayett's 1824 route.

That allowed us to do part of the 1825 route in reverse mostly on Route 9. We stopped in the Brookfields - town hall and local library. I just had to show him the Book Bear, one of my favorite bookstores. I thought we might score a good local history. But the lucky star only seems to work for Julien.

I had not yet caught on to the rapid research, that is the hallmark of Julien's methods. His end product is a piece of software with a map on which you can close in to view details on Lafayette's stops. That's the Geographic Information Services masters at work. I did however uncover the story of Ware's Lafayette elm.

As we were heading for lunch we tried to follow directions to the site of the Lafayette elm, but did not have much luck. Julien was not that excited by it. He told me there are lots of Lafayette elms scattered around.

We ate at a Subway in Walmart. Subway is Julien's favorite fast food place, as it is relatively healthy. He went for the whole grain bread. My covivant would have approved. He talked about how well known Lafayette is in America. I told him he might be dealing with a sampling problem. I speculated that if we started asking the people in Walmart about Lafayette, we might come up empty,

After lunch it was off to Northhampton. I used my Garmon for the shortest route which is not Route 9. And that probably accounts for Lafayette apparently not having visited Amherst. So if the lack of Lafayette references in the poetry of Emily Dickinson has been troubling you, now you know why. Her being born in 1830 and all is not a sufficient explanation.

Northampton was mostly the library. I should mention here that Julien was not keeping me informed on everything he found. I was more transportation and entertainment, of a sort. I'm pretty sure that I made it a point to show him where Jonathan Edwards preached.

We went back via Route 9 allowing Julien to see Amherst. He was mainly impressed by the college girls walking about. He is 23 after all.

Day Two

The second day is where my planning paid off. We were following Lafayette's 1824 route back to New York starting in Leicester again. As luck would have it Reverend DiBenedetto was about and she was able to give us a tour of the church building which was newly built when Lafayette passed by.

The Episcopal Church was created to serve recently emigrated people from England who were drawn to the area due to the mills powered by the water resources. It had taken a while to get a permanent minister so she was not able to shed any light on the Rev. Joseph Muenschner who had greeted the general. She referred us to the church historian, with whom Julien is following up.

Next stop was Charlton for our appointment with Frank Morrill of the Charlton Historical Society for our tour of Rider Tavern. We were a little early so we hung out in the militia field, owned by the town, across the street.

I think I explained a bit about the militia to Julien. One of my favorite pieces of Lafayette trivia is that the reason we call our National Guard the, well, National Guard is because of Lafayette. On 15 July 1789 Lafayette was elected to be the commander in chief of the newly formed Garde Bourgeoise which was soon renamed la Garde nationale. In 1824 with Lafayette's arrival the 2nd Battalion of the 11th Regiment of Artillery New York State Militia renamed itself the National Guard in honor of Lafayette. They started a trend which caught on. So if you are confused by us calling our state units national, you can blame it on Lafayette.

Frank Morrill arrived and took us inside the Rider Tavern which has a Lafayette room where the General dined on September 3

There is also a Lafayette ballroom upstairs. Frank told us about the difficulties of keeping local historic societies going and the work that has gone into preserving the Rider Tavern.

An interesting twist on the lack of integration between local and national history came as Frank mentioned that Lafayette stopped there on his way to Boston. Now, of course, you and I both know that Lafayette was on his way back from Boston when he stopped in Charlton. He had come up via Providence on his first trip and was further north on his second trip.

Julien saw it differently. He thought Frank was just testing us to see whether we were legit. At any rate, I have big hopes for the Rider Tavern in the bicentennial, but maybe some of the deeper pocket groups with an interest in the event should help them out a bit. I'm just the descendant of a Civil War veteran and an enlisted man at that so I don't have any pull with the Society of Cincinnati, but maybe they should be looking at Charlton. Just saying.

Next stop was Old Sturbridge Village where I began to fear that Julien's lucky star had sunk. Reverend DiBenedetto had told us that the historian of her church worked at OSV, but he seemed to have taken the day off. We pretty much breezed through the various displays. As it happens there are quite a few Ingress portals in OSV. I kept trying to reach Michael Arnum the Director of Marketing who I had spoken with on Tuesday.

Finally, we just walked over to the Administration Building and there he was. He had arranged with the librarian for us to see some Lafayette items. Included was the letter I quoted at the beginning of this piece. Salem Towne who seemed to have been on an extended trip was writing to his wife to encourage her to come to Boston to see Lafayette. There never had been nor ever would be anything quite like it was his prediction. And he was right.

We were then off to Hartford to visit the Connecticut Historical Society. I don't know what Julien came up with there but he seemed satisfied. Traffic foreclosed us hitting the towns in between. We ended up eating at the Publick House in Sturbridge. They have an elaborate story about there be arrangements to have fine china on hand for Lafayette but his never getting past the tap room. The account is that he left Worcester at 2:00 so if he stopped to eat in Charlton it must have been pretty late when he got to Sturbridge.

Day Three

We got up relatively early on Friday for our final day. We took the Mass Pike out to Pittsfield so we could follow Lafayette's 1825 track. We spent the morning at the Berkshire Athenaeum and I think I might have been finding my groove and contributed a bit more to the research effort. According to The Hoosac Valley - Its Legends and Its History by Grace Greylock Niles, Lafayette fell in love while in the Hoosac Valley, but Julien didn't take the claim very serious.

We had another museum stop in Pittsfield, but the place turned out to be mainly dedicated to Herman Melville who lived in Pittsfield for a while. I did, however, buy two t-shirts. One reads "Call me Ishmael" and the other "I would prefer not to". The second one is spoiled by giving the reference which you and I both know is to Bartleby the Scrivener, but you have to be considerate of others.

For lunch, Julien just had to have another Subway. And the one he found was in a Walmart. I thought I could liven up the journey with some music so we went in the back to see if there was anything worthwhile. I passed by his suggestions and picked up Billy Joel. Julien really liked Billy Joel including the Piano Man.

His lucky star had finally become obscured as we did not pick up much more on our stops. The selectman in Peru, Mass (pop 800) seemed a bit skeptical of our bona fides. We did, however, find a stretch of 149 that is designated the Lafayette Trail.

Eventually, we were back on Route 9 passing through Amherst so Julien could ogle the college girls again. We continued into Worcester to stop at That's Entertainment. Julien told me that he had a liking for graphic novels and that is the place for them. We met up with CV at The Sole Proprietor/.

Summary

I figure we drove about 400 miles and in the process I don't think I did too much damage to Boomer/Millenial or French/American relations. We ended up in the various towns looking at the monuments which in part commemorate young Americans giving their lives to bail out France or at least that was the spin I put on it - including Vietnam. Julien told me that in France they blame Vietnam on us. Go figure.

I'm contemplating how much time I want to spend in the next few years in libraries hunting down stories about Lafayette's visit. We'll see.

Julien will be speaking at the Lafayette Day ceremonies in Boston. He figures he is the youngest person to ever have that honor. He'll do fine.

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Peter J Reilly CPA mostly writes about taxes on forbes.com.

Update

I kept on having this regrettable tendency to call Julien Lucien which even crept into this piece which he was kind enough to point out to me and I have now fixed. He also insists that his lucky star shines as brightly as ever and that I neglected to mention how many M&Ms I consumed in the course of our road trip.

Stop Telling Me To Drink On St. Patrick's Day

2017-03-16T12:41:00.000-04:00

My St. Patrick's Day crusade which started out positively is turning nasty. The original idea was that people of Irish descent on the day that the common cultural has conceded is theirs should find a better way of celebrating their heritage than binge drinking.

I started a kind of leaderless resistance movement called San Patricios Against Hunger. The idea was to make a donation to a hunger fighting charity, a recognition of the large number of famine refugees in the Irish diaspora.

I then discovered that somebody more organized than I was also taking the issue on. William Spencer Reilly (Relationship unknown, but I'm sure we must be cousins somehow) founded Sober St. Patrick's Day

To reclaim the true spirit of the day and to change the perception and experience of what St. Patrick's Day can be by providing family-friendly, alcohol free events that celebrate the depth of Irish culture, as well as year-round educational and cultural activities.

These are both good things and I still want to encourage them, but I'm starting to get negative and have decided for a moment to go with it.

By the way, when I say St. Patrick's Day is about binge drinking don't tell me that you drink responsibly on St. Patrick's Day. Check this out from the Governor's office in Maine from 2013.

Governor Receives St. Patrick’s Day Bill and Intends to Sign it into Law
March 14, 2013
For Immediate Release: Thursday, Mar. 14
Contact: Adrienne Bennett, Press Secretary (207) 287-2531
AUGUSTA – Governor Paul R. LePage announced today that he will sign emergency legislation to allow bars to start serving alcoholic drinks at 6 a.m. on St. Patrick’s Day, which is Sunday.
State law prohibits the sale of alcoholic beverages before 9 a.m. on Sundays. But St. Patrick’s Day falls on a Sunday this year so Rep. Barry Hobbins, D-Saco, submitted LD 216, “An Act To Extend the Hours for the Sale of Liquor on Sunday When St. Patrick's Day is on a Sunday.”
The Governor had promised to veto any legislation that arrived on his desk before the legislature approves his bill to pay the hospitals.
After a productive meeting with Rep. Hobbins on Wednesday, the Governor decided he would sign LD 216.
“Mainers know that I am a man of my word. But I am always open to reasonable suggestions,” the Governor said. “I’m pleased to sign this bill as a gesture of goodwill and as a supporter of Maine’s fine establishments that wish to open earlier on St. Patrick’s Day.”
“With that said, now is the time for the Legislature to move forward in paying our bills to the hospitals. The sooner the Legislature passes this bill, the sooner we can put Mainers back to work.”

Emergency legislation. What was the emergency? People would have to wait till 9:00 AM to start drinking on St. Patrick's Day, because it happened to fall on Sunday. And I could not find any indication that there was anybody that thought this was a bad idea.

Then a good friend of mine sent me an invitation. It was an event that featured Irish music and whiskey tasting. It is at a Unitarian Church. I mean really. When Unitarian Universalists feel that a negative ethnic stereotype can be casually alluded to, you know it is really deep.

I tried to do some research on the association between Irish descent and alcoholism. I came up with stuff like this post. Frankly, I don't know that this is one of those things on which the science is settled. So I'm going to go with the largely anecdotal evidence that indicates we have more than our share.

So if we are going to have a holiday that alludes to alcohol, it should be one in which nobody drinks at all rather than one in which people make sure that they drink more than usual..

I really had hoped to put more into this post, but I ran out of time.

I'll do better next year.

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Peter J Reilly will celebrate St. Patrick's Day by donating to a hunger fighting charity.

Two Cousins Far Apart In the Spring Of Tin Soldiers And Nixon

2017-02-18T16:17:00.000-05:00

As a reflection on the late sixties, my Xavier series has two serious flaws. Well two that I notice anyway. Xavier was a single sex high school. I still believe that single sex with uniforms is the best way to run a high school, but it has the effect of having all my contributors having been, you know, boys.

There is also the problem of our youth. Born in 1952, we were high school students when the really big stuff happened. It is fairly common for kids to believe that the kids a few years older are way cooler. Ultimately though you get over it. Unless you were born in 1952. The peak of the "sixties" phenomenon was probably the spring of 1970 when many, if not most, of the colleges in the country shut down in reaction to the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State shootings.

At Xavier, I remember the wearing of black armbands and a patriotic counter-reaction of American flag pins. In a marvelous display of consistency the JROTC instructors gigged both the arm band wearing protesters and the American flag pinning patriots. Out of uniform is out of uniform regardless of the sentiments behind it. Two months before, just five blocks from Xavier, a Greenwich Village townhouse had been blown up as SDS Weathermen a few years older than us prepared to up the ante of their bombing campaign.

As it happens I did have a family connection to the SDS. My cousin Marianne a few years older than I was quite the radical. We got together recently and she finally succumbed to my begging for a submission.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Taken For A Ride
by Marianne Reilly Dwyer

It was the Spring of the Cambodian invasion, Kent State massacre, and general unrest. Easter was early that year and it snowed in New Jersey where I was in college. The snow was an event that seemed to propel me to Berkeley California to join in political and communal life with Hank Dwyer (later to become my husband) and some others who had already committed to the wild idea of world changing revolution.

On that snowy Easter, Hank was already on the west coast with his friends from Ithaca, NY, who had been members of a commune there and were now charged with the task of establishing a Californian contingent. I was to join them after the current semester ended, but I had little stomach for my studies at that time and, well..., snow on Easter? I’d had it!... and booked a flight that very Sunday.

Our commune turned out to be a shared apartment on College Avenue near the Oakland/Berkeley border next door to a Lucky’s Supermarket. Although we spent evenings discussing Marx, Trotsky and quoting from Mao’s little red book, the days were spent in finding a way to survive. The guys would “shape up” at a Manpower franchise and I became a Kelly Girl with temp assignments at offices in Oakland. Although I didn’t sign up for this, I exchanged my bell-bottoms and dashikis for skirts and blouses and tied my long hair back like a good soldier going incognito for the well-being of the troops.

It was on the way back from such an office job in downtown Oakland that I was hitchhiking east on College Avenue to save the bus fare. After all, money was tight, we had even started adhering to a macrobiotic diet of brown rice and stir fried field greens in order to conserve cash and remain healthy. It was just this sort of purist revolutionary lifestyle that made us feel uplifted. Never mind that we regularly added mind altering substances to our regimen, we were the revolutionary future! I tried not to admit to myself that I would kill for a cheeseburger and was beginning to detest brown rice.

And so, on this day in a late California Spring, as I hitchhiked back home wearing my office girl camouflage, a long car pulled up and a back door opened. It wasn’t until I was inside and looked around that I realized that something seemed odd.

The driver was a man wearing a black suit jacket. I could see a ghostly pale, thin hand extending from a white starched cuff as it gripped the steering wheel but the position of his head looking straight out the windshield did not allow me to see his face. His hair, combed straight back, was black and reached the collar of his stiff white shirt.

Next to him was a young woman, equally pale, wearing a white, high collared blouse, a black maxi-skirt and very long straight black hair. She turned to look at me with a steady gaze, eyes dark with mascara, and asked simply, “Where to?” with little inflection or concern. Her mouth, dark red in an odd shade of lipstick, smiled as if secretly amused as I managed to stammer, “Just drop me at the Lucky’s.” She turned to the front and did not address me again. The car sped off.

My seat partner was a fidgety young man with floppy brown hair, crazy eyes with large dilated pupils and a silly grin. He said nothing but just stared at me nodding. OK, so I knew the signs, he was tripping and somehow I thought I may be tripping too.

When I first entered the car I had the impression that it was some sort of station wagon but as I looked behind my seat it became clear that I was in a hearse. The place for the casket yawned out the back as I wondered whose body it would hold next. My seat was plush and the air conditioned air felt stale, the ride so smooth and quiet that I lost connection with the city. Only the strange reality of the moment had any meaning.

It was expected, in those days, that when hitchhiking one would offer pleasant, interesting conversation in exchange for a ride. But I was struck dumb and the others were silent. I gripped the door handle as the hearse glided east.

When the hearse drew up across from the supermarket the young man stopped nodding and started laughing maniacally. I managed a quick “thanks” and jumped out gratefully. The two in front never turned their heads but the woman lifted her hand as if in blessing as the car continued on. As I crossed the street to the apartment I looked up at the Berkeley Hills shining orange in the evening sun. I shook my head and laughed. By the time I climbed three flights and opened the door, I was practicing how I would tell the funny story of the freaky folks who took me for a ride.

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So if you ever wondered what it was like to live in a commune, now you know.

Donald Trump On Getting Mad AND Getting Even - The Twissing of John Lewis

2017-01-18T11:49:00.002-05:00

I've decided to create a portmanteau - "Twiss" - a combination of Tweet and Diss. Since twist is already a word, it might not work, but we'll see how it goes. And of course the Twisser In Chief is Donald Trump.

Donald Trump celebrated the Martin Luther King Day prior to his inauguration by twissing John Lewis, one of the 13 original Freedom Riders.

Congressman John Lewis should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S. I can use all the help I can get!

Of course when you consider that he knocked John McCain for being captured, I guess it is not a surprise.

As it happens, Trump actually explained this type of behavior in one of his books. Think Big And Kick Ass In Business And Life. which he coauthored with Bill Zanker.

Think Big is like many of the books that the worst managing partner I ever had used to encourage us to read. There is some good advice in there, but there is something off about the whole thing. What is in there that you won't find in many self-help books is a chapter titled Revenge.

He starts it out with "I always get even". He gives a couple of examples of people who he considered disloyal because they did not come through for him when it was time for them to pay him back for what he had done for them. He had the same beef with Martha Stewart.

He had been "her single biggest promoter" on the Apprentice and never once did she call him to say "Donald, thank you very much". Then when the show failed she blamed him.

He wrote a scathing letter "Your performance was terrible.", etc., etc.

My motto is: Always get even. When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.

Then there was a dispute with Rose O'Donnell who criticized him for giving Miss USA a second chance. He had a choice. He could attack back or let it pass. This far into the chapter it was not hard to guess his choice. On Entertainment Tonight and several other shows, he lashed out calling her a slob who talks like a truck driver.

There's 26 minutes worth of back and forth.

In the Q&A, Trump reinforces his revenge based world view. On people in general, he writes:

In truth, it's a cruel world and people are ruthless. They act nice to your face, but underneath they're out to kill you. You have to know how to defend yourself. People will be mean and nasty and try to hurt you just for sport.

To a question about what to do when someone intentionally harms you, he replies.

When someone crosses you, my advice is "Get even!". This is not typical advice, but it is real-life advice. If you do not get even, you are just as schmuck! When people wrong you, go after those people, because it is a good feeling and because other people will see you doing it. I love getting even.

So that pretty well accounts for a goodly percentage of Trump's tweets. The problem he might have is that being twissed by Trump is going to turn into a badge of honor in some circles.

_________________________________________________________________________________

Peter J Reilly CPA thinks Donald Trump would do well as the managing partner of a regional accounting firm. Leader of the free world, maybe not so much.

Xavier High School Memories Of The First Inspection

2017-01-15T16:05:00.002-05:00

One of my early blogging goals was to become the "Tom Sawyer" of blogging by getting other people to create material for me. Sadly one of the occasional edicts from forbes.com put an end to that plan on my primary blog, but I have carried it on here and on Your Tax Matters Partner.. And I have had some luck on my Xavier High School series.

So I am very pleased to feature this Xavier post by Tom Burns. The first time I ever wrote at length about Xavier it was a story about Tom. That was many years ago in the preblogging days so all I could do was share it with a few people I knew, included Tom, who conceded it was mostly true. An abbreviated version of it appeared as part of this series under the original title - The Final Revenge of Corporal Burns.

I have kept up with Tom more than any other classmate, so I am really pleased that he is sharing this.

First Inspection

A Xavier Vignette

by

Thomas A. Burns, Jr.

“You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the

name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That

book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.

There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.” – Huckleberry Finn

I don’t remember exactly how it was decided that I would attend summer school at Xavier before I actually attended as a freshman. It wasn’t remedial work - my grades in grammar school were pretty good. I think someone sold Aunt Helen on the idea that I could get a head start if I took the summer courses, so, of course, I had to. I signed up for both Math and English. There was no military in summer school; we wore dress pants and white shirts with no tie.

My English teacher that summer was a rotund, fairly jovial fellow who was not a Jesuit. He was pretty laid back, but occasionally took some pains to remind us where we were. Witness the following interchange between us during the first week of the summer course. He had asked me a question, the substance of which I don’t remember, to which I answered:

“Yes.”

Teacher: “Yes, what?”

Me: “Yes.” (No, I’m not stupid, just stubborn. I’m still that way.)

Teacher: “Burns, the proper form of address from student to teacher at this institution is yes, sir!”

Boink on the back of the head with his college ring to reinforce the lesson. Oh brother! It was going to be a long four years.

However, the summer courses at Xavier were not representative of the normal atmosphere. Neither of my teachers was a Jesuit, and we saw little of them that summer. There were no upperclassmen present, and no military obligations. When school started for real, it wasn’t long before I wished I was at Seton Hall Prep.

The first assembly. I’m not sure now, but I think the frosh came in a day or two before the upperclassmen for orientation. We wore the summer gray uniform, the one that had a slit in the top of the shirt pocket just perfect to place a pen in except that it wasn’t allowed. One or two screw-ups wore the dress blues, the winter uniform. Talk about starting off on the wrong foot! We are assembled in the new gym with Father Rector, Father Headmaster, Father Prefect and the Vice -prefect presiding. We get a version of the “look-at-the-man-next-to-you-he-won’t-be-here-in-four-years” speech, as well as some general pointers on behavior expected of freshmen. I don’t really remember that assembly as being too intimidating. We even have a question and answer, open discussion with the various Fathers. It looked like this place wasn’t going to be so bad after all. Ha!

Xavier didn’t have a fourth class system like West Point or the Citadel no cadre, no hell week, no manual full of stupid questions and even dumber answers to be memorized verbatim. The Jebs probably figured that was too much to subject thirteen-year olds to, although I’m sure the army would have loved it. However, we still learned quite rapidly that we were freshmen slime who couldn’t behave in civilized company. The venue used to drive that lesson home was the second assembly.

We are all assembled in the new gym again. This time, the upperclassmen are present. I don’t remember what was discussed at the assembly. What I do remember is Father Prefect suddenly rearing up like a rattlesnake preparing to strike and pointing to an anonymous group of freshmen, accusing them of creating a nuisance. For punishment, the entire freshman class had to remain at attention for about two hours, after school had ended, with Father Prefect and his lackey the Vice-prefect stalking back and forth in front of us, just daring anyone to move. We didn’t realize it at the time, but we had just received our first session of Jug (Justice Under God) en masse.

It wasn’t long before the less-than privileged status of freshman at Xavier was again made apparent, in case we missed the point the first time. After all, repetition is an essential part of any successful teaching method.

We had to stand for a formal inspection once a week. This occurred first thing in the morning, in homeroom. Getting ready for that first inspection was much like trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Our shoes had to be spit shined (and nobody ever told you exactly how that was accomplished, except that it involved an arcane process involving shoe polish, water, cotton balls and a woman’s nylon stocking. Sounds like something that could get you twenty years. Our brass had to be polished to gleaming radiance and affixed precisely on the shirt collar with the use of a tape measure, and your hair could not touch either the collar or the ears and had to be less than two inches long on the top of the head.

The favorite place for many Xavier cadets to get a haircut was the Jolo Barber Shop. It was located in the subterranean bowels of the Port Authority Bus Terminal near Times Square. The place had about a dozen chairs and was staffed with white-coated Spanish-speaking immigrants, all who seemed to be about 5’3” and 200 lbs and were mostly from Brazil, I think. None of these jokers likely had any formal tonsorial training, but they could get you in and out of the chair in about thirty-five seconds, a great virtue when you’re running late for work or school. Most of them spoke no English, so you couldn’t tell them how you wanted your hair cut, but that didn’t matter because they knew the Xavier uniform and wielded the clippers accordingly. Some of them weren’t such bad barbers, but every once in a while you’d draw a guy who had just gotten off of the boat. In that case you could come out looking like you’d lost a fight with a lawn mower.

Another piece of equipment used to prepare for inspection was a curious thing called a caddy cloth, which was orange on one side and maroon on the other. I had no idea of what in hell to do with the goddam thing – polish my brass, shine my shoes or stuff it in my shorts. An additional problem, unique to freshmen, was the lacquer on the brass.

The brass consisted of an ornate insignia for the visored cap, two crossed rifles with a “X” surmounting the junction (to be placed on the shirt collars) and a buckle for the black web belt that held up the trousers. When newly purchased, these were covered with a transparent substance called lacquer that conferred a subdued golden shine and had been applied to keep the brass forever sparkling and untarnished. So naturally, we were told to strip the goddamn stuff off so we could shine the brass. (You get used to thinking this way after you’ve been around the military for a while.) Supposedly, the best method for lacquer removal was boiling the brass in vinegar. One of my most vivid memories will always be of Ma and me in the basement on the Wednesday night before that first inspection, weeping and choking on vinegar fumes, working Brasso into our bloodstreams via the fingernails.

So Thursday morning arrives. I arrive at school with some trepidation, but basically, I am OK. I have a fresh Jolo haircut (not too bad!), my shoes have a muted gleam and I spent a good bit of time with a ruler and protractor placing my shiny, delacquered brass. Name tag is in place. As I head for my homeroom, I pass an upperclassman who is carrying a clipboard. Obviously, he is one of the inspecting officers. My eyes travel down his body, to his shoes.

HOLY SHIT! I can see my teeth reflected in this guy’s shoes from ten feet away! I am in trouble!

I slink to my desk in homeroom and await the worst.

The class beadle hollers, “Class a ten-hutt!”

In stride two officers, one with hands empty, the other carrying a clipboard. Yes, he’s the same one I saw a little while ago, the guy with the shoes. They begin the inspection with the beadle, who has the first seat in the first row. I am three or four students back. I can’t tell how those in front of me have fared, because the officers speak in low tones, like Mafia hitman. The guy in front of me goes white. Oh shit, he looks better than I do! Now the officer is in front of me. He smells of Old Spice and tobacco. His hat is pulled down so I can barely see his eyes under the brim as they travel the length of my body. He grunts:

“Uncover!”

I obediently take off my hat with my right hand and place it under my left arm, displaying my Jolo coiffure to the world at large.

“Recover!”

Plunk! The hat goes back on the head.

He glances at my shoes for a millisecond, then growls:

“Fail. Get the lacquer off your brass, mister!”

WTF? I am totally incredulous! If he failed me for shoes I could see it, but he failed me for the one thing I have done right! Later I find out that only a couple of guys out of thirty or so passed (both have brothers who are upperclassmen). One will go on to win Cadet of the Month.

When it’s all over, the officers tell us we have one more chance, at re-inspection tomorrow morning. If we fail that one, we get a session of SATURDAY jug!

It’s about 5:30 that night when I get home from school. Ma and Aunt Helen are in the basement, from which the aroma of dinner arises. I go up to my room to get out of my uniform, then slink downstairs to face the music.

Aunt Helen is sitting there with her omnipresent scotch and soda. “Well, how was the inspection?” she asks.

I briefly consider a lie. “I failed,” I tell her.

“You failed! You failed your first inspection! Don’t you realize what a bad first impression can do to you…”

Aunt Helen’s diatribe continues for several minutes. It covers my future for the next ten years or so, and ends with me living on welfare in the projects in Newark, all because I failed my first inspection at Xavier. Finished, she stomps upstairs with a fresh scotch and soda to wait for dinner, unable to tolerate my odious presence further.

Ma has been silent throughout. She knows better than to interrupt Aunt Helen when she’s on a roll. But now she moves away from the stove and comes over to the table where I’m sitting. I’m dreading this one more than telling Helen, because I know what’s coming.

“Why did they fail you?” Ma asks. “I thought you looked pretty good when you went out of here this morning.”

I should have lied, but I didn’t. Aunt Helen I could snow in a minute, but not Ma. “They said I had lacquer on my brass,” I told her.

I saw her eyes go cold. Oh, shit! Trouble!

“There was no lacquer on that brass,” she said.

“I know it.”

“Well, did you tell them so?”

“Ma, it wouldn’t of made any difference. They failed everybody for something. You couldn’t pass!”

“I sat here last night for two hours helping you polish that brass. Maybe I’d just better call them up and tell them so!”

This is what I’ve been dreading. She has no idea of the shitstorm she’ll bring down on my head if she does this. All she knows is that, by God, there was no lacquer on that brass!

“Ma, please, don’t do that!”, I say as she reaches for the phone.

“And why not?” she asks.

“Because it won’t make any difference! And it’ll just get me in more trouble!”

“I thought I raised you to stand up for yourself when you were right.”

“They don’t want me to stand up for myself! They want to knock me down! And if you call them up, they’ll just make it worse for me!”

“So you’ll just go along? When you know you’re right and they’re wrong?” The contempt in her voice is obvious.

“I have to, goddamn it! I told you, you should of sent me to Seton Hall!”

That is a low blow. I see her face tighten. “Maybe I should of,” she says finally, “but you picked Xavier. Not your Aunt Helen and not me. You. I was just trying to teach you, you have to stick with decisions you make.”

Gotcha! “Then let me stick with this one. I’ll deal with it. Don’t call them up.”

She doesn’t like it, not one bit, but she says, “Okay. You deal with it.” She goes back to the stove to check on the meat, shaking her head. Thank Christ!

So that night, I make with the vinegar, the Brasso and the caddy cloth, which I finally found out was for polishing the brass after the laquer had been removed. When I am done, the brass looks the same as before I started. Ma is upstairs watching TV; she will have no part in it. I resign myself to spend the first Saturday of the school year marching around on the roof with a rifle.

The next day, at reinspection, it seems like the entire freshman class is there. I fall in on the roof with the rest of the failures and wait resignedly for the boom to be lowered. Up comes the same officer who failed me yesterday. The beady eyes, under the hat, scan my body like those of an automaton

“Your shoes look like shit, mister, but I’ll let you by, this time!”

Much later I would learn to answer that with, “Must be the reflection, sir!”

“At least you got the lacquer off your brass. You should have done that yesterday.”

Right.

As I leave the roof, I reflect on what has occurred. There was no visible difference between my appearance on Thursday and on Friday. Thursday, I flunk; Friday, I pass. But I’ve figured out their game the scene with Ma helped me do that. I’m a freshman, lower than slime, and they want me to think I can’t do anything right. They want me to work my ass off for their approval, then deny it to me, so that when I finally get it, I will be so grateful I’ll do anything they want for more. Right there, I resolve not to play anymore. No, I won’t show up for inspection looking like shit, but neither will I slave for hours to be perfect.

The 90% failure rate for freshmen lasted a while longer, maybe a month or so. It taught me some valuable lessons. Don’t try to buck an arbitrary system. You can’t. Don’t rely on the approval of that system as a measure of your self worth. It isn’t. Some of my peers spent the next several weeks getting shinier and shiner. A few made Cadet of the Month and were promoted to the lofty heights of PFC for the last month of freshman year, but most faded into obscurity. I never failed another inspection until senior year (and that’s another story!) and that was good enough for me.

______________________________________________________________________

It is worth noting that our classmate Scott O'Connell, who had a career as an Army officer thought the obsession with brass and shoes was excessive. In his contribution "How Real Is Junior ROTC?", he wrote:

The "Mickey Mouse" stuff such as short haircuts and the obnoxious focus on brass and shoes is more extreme than the ROTC or the army, other than real Army Basic Training (or any given day in the USMC). But it was good training and helped build character - I hated it though. I hated worrying about my spit shine and brass more than whether I had prepared myself enough for Latin class. But it is a military academy tradition such as West Point, VMI, and the Citadel put their cadets though. Although I'd say Xavier then was harsher than they are now.

____________________________________________________________________

Tom Burns is a scientist, writer and editor and the Managing Member of Tekrighter Scientific and Medical Writing Services LLC in Wendell NC.

Peter J Reilly CPA mainly writes about taxes.

This video will indicate that some of the old bs still goes on.

A Cheer And A Half For Meritocracy

2016-11-14T12:12:00.000-05:00

The system is rigged in favor of anyone who excels at getting her or himself educated to the graduate degree level and then working hard for decades. See, e.g., Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, almost all of the infamous 1%.

The quote above is from one of the several high school classmates that I have reconnected with on Facebook in the last few years. For purposes of this discussion, I am going to call him CM, although he may want to step forward. Other classmates may figure out who he is, but he did give me permission to use the quote.

Quotes like that are pretty common from him. He is upset about the Occupy mentality that demeans the 1%. He also finds the notion of white privilege silly.

Maroon And Blue

As I mentioned we were high school classmates. Xavier High School in New York City. Jesuit and military. A few blocks north of Greenwich Village. 1966-1970. Interesting times. I've got a series going of Xavier if you want to know more about it, so some of what I say here might seem a bit sketchy because I don't give you enough background.

High points of the school. Considered academically elite among metro New York Catholics, but it was probably not like Deerfield Academy elite. We commuted to school in uniforms every day. Three different uniforms. One looked like we were ready to march on Richmond, one like we were in the Army, kind of, and one that looked like we were mailmen or NYC police cadets.

All Deprivation Is Relative

My mother went to some sacrifice to send me to Xavier thinking the male influence would be good for me. My father had died when I was in eighth grade and we were technically living in poverty, although she at least owned the wall our back was up against. The only really persistent feature of our relative deprivation was that I did not learn to drive until I was 24.

CM's straits were much more dire than that, as he will sometimes mention in his facebook rants. One of these days I'd like to learn is how Xavier attendance was managed for him given his difficult circumstances. And he did not just get through. He was a top student and a cadet officer.

Me And My Classmate

He and I were not close. I forget how we overlapped other than running into one another on the subway here and there. We were in different homerooms. Science honors for him and classical honors for me. Might have had modern language or AP English together.

I remember a couple of interactions and the fallout from one that I don't remember. The latter was something that he said to me that I made the mistake of mentioning to my mother. I did not carry a grudge about it but she sure did. "Wasn't he the kid that said ____________", but I don't remember.

There is one interaction that I particularly remember though from when we were Sophomores just happening to be on the subway, I think. Besides being divided academically in homerooms, the school was also a Regiment, with each of us having rank and a position of some sort.

As a freshman you were a private and a member of something like the third squad of the second platoon of Company B of the First Batallion. Beginning in sophomore year you could get promoted getting as high as sergeant first class, even though there were not any positions to go around to justify that rank, since the most a junior could be is a squad leader.

All the higher ranks and positions from platoon sergeant to the Colonel went to seniors in one fell swoop at the beginning of senior year. One of the flaws in the system is that a freshman's first interaction with a senior who was not condescending to him or maybe yelling at him, was with a private standing next to him in the ranks at weekly drill. The freshman was a private because all freshmen were privates. The senior was a private after maybe ten or so promotion opportunities had not yielded a single stripe. To accomplish that without getting thrown out of the school required that you walk a fine line. Private Senior would be mocking the pretentious of his higher ranking classmates and serving as an allround bad example for Private Freshman.

Officers

I imbibed some of that and also a general disrespect for authority to arrive at the conclusion that it was kind of silly to worry about becoming a cadet officer. CM took the opposite tack in our discussion, indicating that it was quite important. Hey. There was a competition and he was going to compete.

As I related in the series. I never did become a cadet officer, even though I thought it likely that I would. It bothered me for a few hours mainly because I had lusted after the Sam Browne from which hung a saber on occasions of high ceremony. And the gold trim that replaced the never used chin strap on the hat. That was cool. My consolation was that being First Sergeant of the Regimental Supply Corps was a glorious job much more satisfying than one of the battalion S-4 slots that might have come my way. Being commander of the Supply Corps - the regimental S-4 - one of the Colonel's 12 apostles, but still a grungy Supply Corps type might have been better, but Paul Fulller probably executed that office better than I would have.

CM, on the other hand, became a cadet officer. He was, however, much more chagrined than I was at being a second lieutenant making him like everyone in my primary reference group a marvel of military mediocrity. In the past final rank had been much more attuned to academic standing, but the growing anti-military feelings had, I think, influenced Major Smullin to double down on military merit. There was also probably some politics going on. There were stories that having parents who donated to the school or heritage helped in the rank sweepstakes, but I never found any proof of that. Regardess, neither CM nor I had any of that, nor were we athletes, which helped. What we had going for us was being top students

Regardless, CM really seemed to feel he was treated unfairly, as was I.

And From There

But moving on into the competition of life. Relative to my background, I did pretty well. Partner in a large regional CPA firm. In the bottom tier of the compensation scheme and sometimes on the edge, but still it is not so bad.

CM on the other hand, as far as I can reasonably infer, has greatly exceeded that. Some multiple of my not so shabby low six digit compensation and likely corresponding net worth.

He attributes that success to hard work and making good decisions. He believes that he earned it all. And he really resents attacks on the 1% by Bernie bros and Occupy types and thinks white privilege is bullshit, because he started with zilch and earned it all. (I may be exaggerating his position a bit)

What Exactly Did You Build?

This is not an uncommon observation among successful people. There are some features of life that support the observation. Within each field of endeavor, you might get involved in, there tends to be a certain amount of rough justice. Figuring out what it takes to get ahead and focusing and executing greatly enhances your chances.

When you think about people who did not do as well as you, you will be able to discern the reasons. If you have enough humility, you will also be able to discern why others did better. Often it is true merit. And sometimes it is because they are bigger pricks than you are. The latter circumstance causes me to withhold total endorsement to our meritocracy.

The other thing is that if you firmly believe that your fate is in your own hands, you will probably be more successful. One of the Jesuit mottos we learned was "Work as if everything depended on you. Pray as if everything depended on God."

What I think people like CM can sometimes lose track of is the truth behind Elizabeth Warren's infamous "You didn't build that" statement.

Last night I saw John Frank's play - The Institute - Coming of Age during the Vietnam War

The play was based on his experience at Xavier, which corresponded closely with that of CM and me. One of the main characters is excited about being the first generation of his family to go to college. There is a point at which he feels intimidated by his classmates coming from much more prosperous circumstances. A teacher points out ot him that they are all dressed the same. We all commuted by bus and subway and wore the same uniform. Visible differences were based on personal effort and achievement.

Some kids were extra good at shoe shining and brass polishing. Top students wore honor cords and would advance in rank. Various activities and achievements would result in "fruit salad". The latter has really gotten out of hand among contemporary students, but that is neither here nor there.

So if you wanted to play Elizabeth Warren to CM, you might say that the very ethos that led to his success was at least strongly reinforced by the school and he didn't build that. Whatever the circumstances that allowed him to attend the school despite his dire straits, are also probably something that he didn't build.

In my view, there are two large groups in out elite. The graduate school attending non-fuckups from modest circumstances and people with an entrepreneurial flair who have access to capital. Essentially Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. And of course many in the graduate school group are not from modest circumstances.

What distinguishes someone like CM from the rest of the elite is that they are working without a net. George Bush Jr. and Donald Trump had multiple second chances. Others get only one shot. And I think that in the time that CM and I grew up things were not quite as hard for first-generation college graduates. You could get through without acquiring a crushing debt load and if, like me, you had a false start you could recover more easily.

This, in part, accounts for my being a little more sympathetic to those left behind than CM seems to be. I also think that you will be happier if you cultivate gratitude for all the undeserved gifts the universe has presented you. But maybe that is just me.

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Peter J Reilly CPA hopes to be first tax blogger to give up his day job. The dream keeps receding but nerver dies.

Live Blogging Election Night

2016-11-08T20:25:00.000-05:00

We went to the Unitarian Universalist Church of Worcester to watch the results. First discussion was what station to watch. I was for Fox since I thought we might learn more. Not a lot of enthusiasm for that, but we switched there during MSNBC commercial. Bill O'Reilly on now, but consensus is not Fox. Now we are on MSNBC,

Seven of us at 8:25.

Ancestry.com commercial.

One of the guys looking at his phone says 311 electoral votes for Hillary.

Lots of commercial.

Trump just took Alabama.

It is Hillary 75 to Trump 72. Florida is too close to call.

GOP will remain in control of the House.

We can't get the closed captions turned off. I hate TV remotes.

Bob Baty messaged me to keep an eye on the Conecuh county Commissioner race. You have to be a Hovindologist to get that one.

Florida close.

Red America is getting redder. Blue America is getting blue.

Still struggling with closed captions "Television is becoming exponentially more complicated"

Trump ahead 14 million to 12 million - "Oh my God"

"Are people insane ?"

Michigan going for Trump

Closed captions finally gone at 8:50

Commercials muted.

"It should be a landslide for Clinton"

"I think Clinton is going to win, but this is nauseating to watch"

"If somebody like Jeb Bush was running I'd be worried, but Trump is horrifying"

Florida in the balance. Trump has lead. Miami versus Panhandle. Could be Hovinidcators moving to Alabama might be hurting Trump.

9:00

Texas and Kansas Louisiana Nebraska to Trump Dakotas Wyoming

Clinton New York

Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia, New Hampshire, Virginia - Too close

Trump 137 Clinton 104 at 9:03

McCain reelected

We bailed out of the church around 10:00.

I'm in the basement office now.

10:30 and Clinton has Virginia

The funny thing is that the coverage makes it sound like something is happened, but really it is just counting. It's like Candyland where the game is determined after you shuffle.

Right now they are blaming the Comey letter.

Now it is white voters without college degrees.

Shutting down at 11:12.

The sun will come up tomorrow.

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Peter J Reilly CPA is not very good at live blogging.

Future Generations Endorses Hillary Clinton

2016-11-08T09:38:00.000-05:00

One of the reliefs of post-election will be the end of campaign appeals in my inbox. It is my own fault, as I sign up for everything in the hope of getting material for my blog. I think they are all written by the same person and they are all done in a very annoying manner. There is this incredible urgency for me to send it $5, $10 whatever.

I think it is like the way the baskets would come around multiple times at Mass, so that Monsignor O'Brien would get at leat thirty cents from each parishioner. And there is the presumed intimacy

Peter --
It's Election Day!! Millions of Americans are casting their ballots today and participating in our democracy.
I want to thank you for having my back during this campaign. This team gave me the strength to keep fighting.
This is the final step of the long journey we’ve been on together, but now it's in your hands. Make history by heading to the polls today.

Thank you -- let's go!
Hillary

If I ever meet Hillary Clinton, I will address her as Madame Secretary or, God willing, Madame President, so I really think that when she asks me for money she should call me Mr. Reilly, but I'm old fashioned that way.

The most troubling ad I got though was from Eric Trump.

Friend,
Our last ad we showed you did so well that we decided to release a new one -- and go even bigger with a last-minute $4 MILLION final ad-buy.
It’s an UNPRECEDENTED two-minute ad that presents voters with the true stakes of this historic election.

I found the ad very disturbing.

There is an element behind it that I have sympathy with. Back in the day, I think there was a better deal for ordinary people who were ready to show up for work and do what needed to be done. I suspect historically it was transient thing. I had a factory job in college where with the lowest pay grade and a lot of overtime I made a years tuition in a summer.

Thinking that some asshole who focused on luxury housing and casinos wants to bring back those days, or could if he wanted to, is pretty delusional, but I can't knock the guys who think that.

The thing that really concerned me was whether that piece was really effective propaganda on the Leni Riefenstahl scale.

I always refer questions like that to my filmmaker friend Jonathan Schwartz of Interlock Media. I was comforted by his response.

The Trump ad is meant to be an enduring anthem for conspiracy theorists, legitimized by the man who almost won the presidency. The use of compositing and special effects is average, mid level film technique and not spectacular. The important thing here is the message, and its pure and simple...there is a reason you are struggling, and that is because it is someone else's fault and they did it to you and must be eliminated.

So the message is disturbing, but apparently not delivered that well which makes it less disturbing.

The final Clinton two minute ad is much more comforting. Kind of boring actually.

So the choice is kind of like you are in the fourth grade. Do you want to join the class bully's gang and go beat up the kids from the other school? Or do you want to listen to the teacher?

Or put another way. Do we want to be ruled by the girls who went to college and got more knowledge or the boys who went to Jupiter and got more stupider?

Tell your inner ten year old to calm down, and vote like a grown up. If you do that you are allowed to skip watching the polls and stay up late watching war movies tonight.
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Peter J Reilly CPA made donations to just about every presidential candidate and all he got out of it was a lot of annoying email.

Not Every Women's Rights Narrative Starts At Seneca Falls

2016-11-03T19:31:00.000-04:00

.....memory is made, not found and what we remember matters. - Lisa Tetrault

This post is something of a personal reaction to The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement by Lisa Tetrault, so I should start with the most important thing before I go into the wandering digressions. It is a really good book and you should read it.

Some People Don't Get It

The most negative review on Amazon (a three star) highlights by omission what is really good about the book.

This book does reveal some nuggets of difficult to find information and the author is obviously extremely knowledgable and gifted but the book contains too much run-of-the-mill, feminist cheerleading and the revealing information in the book is revealed in a way that makes it seem as though it was included almost as an afterthought.
The book is overly verbose and should have been half its length but the author has a bad tendency to lapse into moments of drawn out flattery of the movement which we've already heard a thousand times. Even though the suffrage movement obviously deserves some cheerleading this book pours on the cheese a bit too much to warrant a higher rating.

The key words in the title are Memory and Myth. Lisa Tetrault's work is about how and why we make narratives about the past using a reasonably familiar (in some circles) narrative,illustrating its incompleteness and more importantly how and why that particular narrative was constructed.

Historiography

I could see this work becoming not only a standard text in women's studies or the history of social reform, but also in historiography , which the infallible source tells us is "the study of the methodology of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension in any body of work on a particular subject".

Tetrault quotes historian Lori Ginzberg:

Every event in history is a beginning, a middle and an end, it just depends on where you pick up the thread and what story you choose to tell.

Sam Gamgee made the same point:

We've got - you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?
'No, they never end as tales, said, Frodo. 'But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended

Frodo of course. recognized the essence of historiography in this clip.

Nothing like referring to the world's greatest bromance in a reaction to a great work on women's history. Back to the book.

The Myth

The "myth" under discussion in this work is illustrated in the National Women's History Museum's Woman Suffrage Timeline (1840-1920).

1840
Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton are barred from attending the World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London. This prompts them to hold a Women's Convention in the US.
1848
Seneca Falls, New York is the location for the first Women's Rights Convention. Elizabeth Cady Stanton writes "The Declaration of Sentiments" creating the agenda of women's activism for decades to come.

Due credit is given to conventions in Worcester in 1850 and 1851, which I have a particular attachment to, but beginning in 1853, the partnership between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B, Anthony starts to dominate, with Susan B. Anthony taking the limelight. To take a biblical analogy, Elizabeth Cady Stanton would be John the Baptist making Susan B. Anthony, well, you know.

Tetrault's work is about how that story became THE story. And it is not just about how Susan B Anthony became the main actor in the story, but also about how suffrage becomes the big story about women's right, white women's suffrage actually, since the 19th amendment did not help black women vote in the South, where black men had been systematically disenfranchised.

Like The Late Unpleasantness

Tetrault connects the story of the creation of the women's rights narrative to that of the construction of the narratives that help us remember slavery and the war with many names (Civil War, War Between the States, War of Northern Aggression - personally I prefer The Late Unpleasantness)

The fierce debate - over competing definitions of freedom - took place in the arena of memory. It was not the only arena, but it was a critical one. Because freedom had no inherent self-evident meaning, Americans debated its definition by attempting to define the past. Why had the Civil War been fought? Answers to that question, which varied widely, defined different paths forward. Had it been fought, as freedpeople and abolitionists argued for emancipation? If so that required a postwar political response that validated the needs of freedpeople and invested freedom with significant weight? Or had it been fought, as white supremacists argued, for valor, honor, and states' rights? If so, that required a postwar political response that elevated the rights of white Confederates over the rights of freedpeople, whose needs were largely erased by such a memory.

More Than A Counter-Narrative

I'm now going to be seguing from reviewing the book to my rambling personal reaction, but to sum up I will react to one of the five star reviews.

The publication of "The Myth of Seneca Falls" is a big event for those of us who like to live in the suffrage world. Professor Tetrault has come up with the first really effective counter-narrative to Eleanor Flexner's classic "Century of Struggle".

I really don't view Tetrault's work as a "counter-narrative". It is much more than that. It is a narrative of the making of the received narrative that suggests many other narratives that might be constructed and from there I will move to my personal reaction.

Searching For Margaret Fuller

I discovered Professor Tetrault's work from a hunt that someone had sent me on. The question as I might frame it now, having read Myth of Seneca Falls, was why Margaret Fuller, who, Margaret Fuller scholars consider with substantial support, a women's rights pioneer of the highest order, whose Woman in the Nineteenth Century was published in 1845 whose Conversations, arguably the 1840 version of second wave consciousness raising groups, included Elizabeth Cady Stanton does not appear in the Timeline.

It really would not be that hard. Between 1840 and 1848, you put in 1845 publication of Woman in the 19th Century. Fuller was in Italy covering and taking a hand in a revolution in 1848 when Seneca Falls took place. She had been invited to preside over the first national women's rights conference in Worcester in the fall of 1850. Sadly her only participation was in spirit during a moment of silence as she lost her life in the wreck of the Elizabeth, a 530 ton sailing vessel, that grounded off Fire Island on July 19,1850.

Professor Tetrault, answers the question even though her work does not even mention Margaret Fuller. In the received narrative the story really starts in Seneca Falls and focuses on Susan B. Anthony who is first mentioned on the timeline in 1853, but along with Stanton dominates it through the post-Civil War period. The received narrative was largely the creation of Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Not only are they center stage, but there is also a singular focus on suffrage.

Many Narratives

Probably, the most important thing we can learn about history is that there are many valid narratives that can be crafted from the raw material of the past. We can ask different questions of different sources and derive different stories. I think that many people when they encounter this reality find it rather disturbing. I know I certainly did when I asked my father how it was that Robert E Lee, chief bad guy in the Civil War, was accounted a national hero appearing on postage stamps. The budding neoabolitionist never got a good answer from his old man.

Professor Tetrault is an historian and they tend to be a bit allergic to counterfactuals, but as a graduate school dropout who loves Harry Turtledove, SM Stirling and Eric Flint, I'm different. Thanks to her book I am now in the grip of a profound counterfactual. What would have happened if the Elizabeth had docked safely in New York and Margaret Fuller had presided over the first national women' rights conference in Worcester?

My favorite biography of Margaret Fuller is the one by Thomas Wentworth Higginson and in it he saw her mainly as a woman of action ready to unleash. It is just possible that she might have been able to galvanize a different reform movement than the one that fragmented over votes for African Americans versus votes for women in 1866. In her work she addressed issues of gender, but also of race and class. She was rare among New England Unitarian reformers in having kind words for Irish refugees, then the most despised white people in America.

Higginson's assessment deserves to be taken seriously, because he, himself, had strong activist credentials - the Anthony Burns rescue, John Brown, command of a regiment of liberated slaves (First South Carolina Volunteers - later 33rd United States Colored Troops).

But maybe it was too soon to have a holistic reform movement and maybe it could have turned out worse - like when Spock and Kirk had to stop McCoy from saving the life of the 1930's peace activist in The City on the Edge of Forever.

I'm sorry I don't have the talent to write "The Elizabeth Must Sink", but I can always hope that a talented alternate history writer might pick it up.

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Peter J Reilly CPA hoped to be an historian, but public accounting has been good to him.

.

The Most Important Thing To Remember This Election

2016-10-01T18:44:00.002-04:00

I just saw the movie Sully and I really liked it. In those based on a true story films I always like to check what is, at least officially the real story and Sully comes off pretty well. There is a central plot element that is off in there not really being an attempt by the National Transportation Safety Board to railroad the hero pilot, but even that had something behind it. Maybe I should explain the movie thing a bit, not that it is the main point.

"Sully" played by Tom Hanks is Chesley " Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 which took off from LaGuardia Airport on January 15, 2009. Very briefly after takeoff the plane hit a flock of Canada geese. Both engines went out. Air traffic control gave Captain Sullenberger the choice of turning back to LaGuardia or going to Teteboro. Sullenberger chose the Hudson River and managed to put it down roughly midway between 48th Street and the Port Imperial ferry landing in Weehawken, NJ.

All of the 155 passengers and crew survived.

Spolier Alert - As part of the investigation fully briefed pilots were able to land simulators at the airport by executing an immediate turn. Allowing 35 seconds of reaction time, however, had them crashing which would have been really bad not only for the people in the plane but also for people on the ground. In the movie Sully points this out Perry Mason style at a public hearing. In real life NTSB figured it out. What the hell. It's a movie they had to have bad guys, I guess. Many other elements such as Sully having nightmares and checking the aisle twice to make sure everybody had gotten off, before being the last one to leave are supported in the record so to speak. End Spoiler Alert

Tom Hanks was really good and I have now formed a new ambition inspired by Sully and Bridge of Spies. Do something that will require Tom Hanks playing me in the movie. That is an upgrade from having my obituary in the New York Times.

What I like most about the movie though was the little vignettes that kind of make New Yorkers a co-star in the picture - ferry captains, scuba cops, etc. which is bringing me to the point but as it happens there is another Tom Hanks film (He is the narrator and it is only about 11 minutes so why don't your watch it.) that makes the point I am coming to even better.

For those of you who as the late Bruce Carlin would put it can't follow simple fucking instructions, the short documentary is about the response of people in boats to the 9/11 disaster as they evacuated lower Manhattan in an effort that Tom Hanks compares, perhaps a bit grandiosely to Dunkirk.

The best quote is from Robin Jones - Engineer of the tugboat Mary Gellatly

When American people need to come together and pull together they will do it.

Here is what is important about this when it comes to the election. The negative energy towards the two main candidates is about the highest I have ever seen. (For people who think it has never been worse. Well. You are wrong. The election in 1860 was a lot worse) There is a poll indicating that 7 percent of voters have ended friendships over the election. Basically quite a few people think not that the other candidate is a poor choice, but more that they are really evil. Here is the thing that it is very important to remember all the time, particularly if you are quite attached to one of the candidates being the spawn of Satan. Let's call him or her The Evil One.

If there is some really horrendous disaster where you live, there will be a courageous generous response from people across the country. First responders will be doing what they do all the time to general lack of appreciation, but other will also step up. If you survive the initial disaster, there will be food, water, medical assistance, whatever arriving in short order. And what you need to remember, all the time, is that at least 30% (probably more) of the people who will be there saving your ass will be voting for "The Evil One".

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Peter J Reilly CPA rarely tries to be this uplifting in his blog posts, but it happens.