Sherry Chandler

The opening paragraphs of Chapter 42 of East of Eden, (Viking, 1952):

A war comes always to someone else. In Salinas we were aware that the United States was the greatest and most powerful nation in the world. Evey American was a rifleman by birth, and one American was worth ten or twenty foreigners in a fight.

Pershing’s expedition into Mexico after Villa had exploded one of our myths for a little while. We had truly believed that Mexicans can’t shoot straight and besides were lazy and stupid. When our own Troop C came wearily back from the border they said that none of this was true. Mexicans could shoot straight, goddam it! And Villa’s horsemen had outridden and outlasted our town boys. The two evenings a month of training had not toughened them very much. And last, the Mexicans seemed to have outthought and outambushed Black Jack Pershing. When the Mexicans were joined by their ally, dysentery, it was godawful. Some of our boys didn’t really feel good again for years.

Somehow we didn’t connect Germans with Mexicans. We went right back to our myths. One American was as good as twenty Germans. This being true, we had only to act in a stern manner to bring the Kaiser to heel. He wouldn’t dare interfere with our trade—but he did. He wouldn’t stick out his neck and sink our ships—but he did. It was stupid, but he did, and so there was nothing for it but to fight him.

The war, at first anyway, was for other people. We, I, my family and friends, had kind of bleacher seats, and it was pretty exciting. And just as war is always for somebody elses, so it is also true that someone else always gets killed. And Mother of God! that wasn’t true either. The dreadful telegrams began to sneak sorrowfully in, and it was everybody’s brother. Here we were, over six thousand miles from the anger and the noise, and that didn’t save us.

It wasn’t much fun then. The Liberty Belles could parade in white caps and uniforms of white sharkskin. Our uncle could rewrite his Fourth of July speech and use it to sell bonds. We in high school could wear olive drab and campaign hats and learn the manual of arms from the physics teacher, but Jesus Christ! Marty Hopps dead, the Berges boy, from across the street, the handsome one our little sister was in love with from the time she was three, blown to bits!

And the gangling, shuffling loose-jointed boys carrying suitcases were marching awkwardly down Main Street to the Southern Pacific Depot. They were sheepish, and the Salinas Band marched ahead of them, playing the “Stars and Stripes Forever,” and the families walking along beside them were crying, and the music sounded like a dirge. The draftees wouldn’t look at their mothers. They didn’t dare. We’d never thought the war could happen to us.

Eugene Deb’s most famous saying is probably this one:

While there is a lower class I am in it; while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

So I found this portrait of him in Moundsville prison, from Democracy’s Prisoner, telling:

Prison offered certain mind-expanding experiences for Debs as well. For decades he had been preaching about the problem of crime. Criminals were not evil, he had argued, but were the victims of social conditions created by capitalism. Always a champion of the underdog, Debs now lived among some of society’s most disenfranchised men. “I belong in prison,” he told [the journalist] Karsner. “I belong where men are made to suffer for the wrongs committed against them by a brutalizing system.” Though Debs had promised the warden he would not talk socialism to other inmates, he spoke through the power of practical example. From across the country hundreds of well-wishers sent him presents—flowers, cakes, books, and boxes of fruit. Keeping little for himself, he spread these gifts among the other inmates, white and black, who were delighted to be “smoking high grade cigars and eating choice candy, the like of which they had never before tasted.” …Some of the most hardened convicts still suspected that Debs was some kind of “schemer and palaverer,” but most were won over by his kindness. Sitting on the hospital porch in the evenings, he was surrounded by men who wanted his advice and sympathy, or his help writing letters home. With growing admiration, the warden conceded that Debs was one of the few men he had ever known who “practiced absolutely what he preached.”

Debs was very well treated in Moundsville. Not only was the warden taken with him but he also knew that many of Debs’s supporters would be looking for cause to protest. Debs was given light duties in the prison hospital, to help out “when he felt like it.” And he did have a bad heart so there was some reason for this treatment. But he also had a room of his own that looked out over landscaped prison grounds and he was allowed to take his meals in his room. His bending of the rules about mail privileges was also winked at. Nevertheless, he was in prison and he considered himself one of the prisoners.

By the way, Moundsville prison features in Davis Grubb’s book Night of the Hunter as well as in the film of the same title. It is in Moundsville that the preacher meets the young bankrobber and learns about the hidden money.

Moundsville was decommissioned in 1995 and is now a tourist attraction with a haunted house theme.

And one more aside. Eugene Debs reportedly also said:

It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.

Eugene Debs did appeal his conviction under the Espionage Act, all the way to the Supreme Court. But it was a thoroughly conservative court that counted among its number Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Here is Ernest Freeberg on Holmes, from Democracy’s Prisoner:

He was a steely-eyed pragmatist who thought of the law as an expression of the majority’s will to power. Truth, as he famously put it, was determined by “the majority vote of that nation than can lick all others.” A Civil War veteran who had been wounded in battle, Holmes believed that the majority had a primordial right to defend itself by drafting men and sending them to the front. “No society had ever admitted that it could not sacrifice individual welfare to its own existence,” he wrote. “If conscripts are necessary for its army, it seizes them, and marches them, with bayonets in thier rear, to death.” [p. 123]

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I was musing this morning about what it is that makes me want to post this information, what I think the take-home message is.

One part of it is, as Holmes makes clear in this quotation, power will always protect itself, especially in time of war. And we will always need citizen watchdogs over government power. That belief is what makes me more Jeffersonian than not.

Another part is that these things are cyclical. These battles have to be fought over and over again. Which, I suppose, is the nature of life itself. Yesterday morning as I mopped up after one of our aging cats whose arthritic back makes it hard for him to hit the litter, I found myself whining that I am really tired of losing the same battles over and over again. But life is like that. And so is democracy. (Or even a republic.)

Some good things came in the aftermath Wilson’s repressions. For one thing, the American Civil Liberties Union was born and though they’ve been known to anger both sides, conservative and liberal, they have done good work for nearly a century in protecting our individual freedoms.

The last part is my desire to share this very good book with you. Though I got a little bogged down in the chapters about the legal niceties of Debs’s trial and appeal, for the most part I’ve found this glimpse of our history fascinating. And it’s good to have a human face to put on Eugene Debs, who has been hardly more than a name and a few quotable quotes in my universe.

“My heart cries out,” Helen Keller wrote to Debs when she heard the news that his appeal had been denied. “I should be proud if the Supreme Court convicted me of abhorring war, and doing all in my power to oppose it. . . . The wise fools who sit in the high places of justice fail to see that in revolutionary times like the present vital issues are settled, not by statutes, decrees and authorities, but in spite of them.”
— quoted in Ernest Freeberg, Democracy’s Prisoner (Harvard, 2008)

When Eugene V. Debs was sent to prison in 1919, activists on the left thought there would be a great uprising and general strike of American workers. This did not happen, but the government was so in fear of it that they secreted Debs through the back roads from Cleveland to the West Virginia State Penitentiary, otherwise known as Moundsville. They were in fear of mass demonstrations along the main routes.

The instrument used to send Debs to prison was the Espionage Act of 1917. Although the title of the act is at least more sensible than the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, which has to be one of the most insulting acronyms of all times, it was just as repressive. The Espionage Act, quoting Wikipedia, made it illegal

• to convey information with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the armed forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies. This was punishable by death or by imprisonment for not more than 30 years
• to convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation or success of the military or naval forces of the United States or to promote the success of its enemies and whoever when the United States is at war, to cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States, or to willfully obstruct the recruiting or enlistment service of the United States. This was punishable by a maximum $USD 10,000 fine (almost $170,000 in today’s dollars) and 20 years in prison.

Pay particular attention to those words “with intent.” That meant that the speech did not have to have results, only “intention.”

The Act was the second prong of Woodrow Wilson’s two-pronged attack on widespread domestic dissent against his war policies. The first prong was the Committee on Public Information, which spread pro-war propaganda. A cynical person might call these two “prongs” misinformation and repression. Both are, I suppose, always a temptation for governments in wartime and are not particularly unique to the Bush administration.

Like U.S.A. PATRIOT, the Espionage Act addressed a real internal threat, in this case, German spies, saboteurs, and agitators. According to Freeberg:

Provisions of the new “spy bill” that targeted thesse activities were uncontroversial, though in the end they proved futile. During the war, the Justice Department did not convict a single German spy or saboteur under the Espionage Act. [p. 46]

So, I suppose, the Bush administration is not unique in this ineffectiveness either. (Speaking of which, the latest from the military commission trial.)

Provisions in the bill to control domestic speech were not at first well received, especially by the major newspapers, which argued, as they did not long ago, that they were already self-censoring and that surely nobody would really think a newspaper would publish information that would aid the enemy.

Perhaps caught off guard by this barrage of criticism, proponents of the bill implored their fellow lawmakers to trust the president’s good intentions. “If we cannot give our Executive power,” Senator Overman complained, “then God help this country.” The best reply to that line of argument came from New York’s freshman congressmen Fiorello La Guardia. “The law admittedly makes the president a despot,” he scoffed, “but with the comforting assurance that the despot about to be created has the present expectation to be a very lenient, benevolent despot.”

Love those New York legislators.

The censorship provision was defeated. But, also included within the bill was

. . .a provision that would give the postmaster general the power to deny mailing privileges to any publication “advocating or urging treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law of the United States.” . . .the “mailability” clause gave an indirect, but potentially broader, censorship power to Wilson’s postmaster, a conservative and crotchety Texan name Albert Burleson. The bill would allow him to punish a paper, not for revealing sensitive military secrets, but for using a tone that struck him as “treasonous.” With little debate and perhaps unintentionally, Congress was granting the Post Office what one historian has called “virtual dictatorial control” over the nation’s journals and newspapers. [p. 49]

Burleson used that power to put many Socialist, pacifist, and union newspapers out of business.

Protestors also were able to defeat the “disaffection” clause that made it illegal to “willfully cause or attempt to cause disaffection in the military.”

Harriet Thomas, a leader of the Women’s Peace Party, startled the committee when she told them, “It seems to me that under this act I would be liable to imprisonment for life, or a more drastic penalty, perhaps, if I should say that I would rather my sons be shot for refusing to go out and kill and bear arms against a supposed enemy of this country.” A congressman interrupted her to ask, “Then you do not honor your citizenship of this country?” Thomas stood her ground. “I feel I have a right to interpret my loyalty to my own country in my own terms of citizenship, and according to my own conscience, and I do not need any bill to tell me what my love of country shall represent.”

At that point, several on the committee told her that, once the Espionage Act passed, she would no longer have a right to make those kinds of provocative statements. “If your speech goes to the point of being treasonous,” one scolded her, “you are denied that right, and you ought to be.” Another exasperated congressman summed up the government’s position this way: “People should go ahead and obey the law, keep their mouths shut, and let the Government run the war.” [p. 50]

More and more familiar.

Gilbert Roe called the law “so indefinite that it simply becomes a vehicle for oppression.” He also said

“If you pardon the statement, I hardly see how it would be safe to say the Lord’s Prayer if this bill becomes a law. When we pray that our trespasses might be forgiven as we forgive those who trespass against us, I think it might be construed that we were praying for the forgiveness of our enemies, the Germans.” [p. 52]

When the law was passed, it dropped “disaffection.” But “with intent” was enough to get Debs,

The text of Deb’s seditious speech is here. He delivered at a picnic in Canton, Ohio on June 16. 1918. It took him a couple of hours to deliver it. People stayed to listen.

from Gregor Mendel and the Cats

Up the monastery wall, the brewery’s yeast-scent
huffles. And the dusty cat, stretched high
over warm stones, swings her blunt snout this way
and that, yeastward and monkward, from
release to salvation. In the bright sun
her irises, like shutters, close,
leaving just a strip of liquid glint, the pupil’s
vertical box.

I am sleepless today, the cats of my childhood
mewling all night, their phantom shapes
alit on my ceiling. Cat backs, stretched, flexed,
cat tails in counterpoint. Such mystery,
to be of the body perpetually …

— Linda Bierds

This poem is from Linda Bierds’s First Hand (Putnam’s, 2005) of which Bierds says in her “Author’s Note and Acknowlegments:”

As they trundle through the centuries, swaying this way and that, from wonder to foreboding, the poems in this book rest most frequently at the inscape of science. It is there, in that innermost space lit by the nature of human achievement, that their interest and questions lie, their praise and disquietude.

An inquiry such as this, which moves from third-century-B.C. theories of buoyancy to twenty-first-century biochemistry, must acknowledge what are for many the global and spiritual implications of a science increasingly adept at creating, extending, and annihilating life. To help me with that task, I turned to the character of Gregor Mendel, whose work on the hybridization of peas forshadowed genetic cloning. …”

Bierds’s biosketch at Poets.org reads in part:

Because her poems are often laden with historical references and challenging language, Bierds is often described as a difficult and overly-intellectual writer. In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bierds responds to the notion of obscurity by saying: “In grade-school classrooms, there’s this notion that a poem is similar to a mathematical problem and that it has a solution. That’s very off-putting to people. They remember back to fifth or sixth grade and how they didn’t ‘get’ poetry then and probably never will. But they did get it, just in a different way. Much of the reputation that ‘poetry is difficult’ comes from this mistaken thinking that a poem has one answer.”

I do find these poems difficult but the fault is mine entirely, in my ignorance of science. On the other hand, while I seldom “get” a whole poem in the way the teacher might have liked, I often find passages like the one quoted above that are just exquisite, and very clear and simple.

Edward Byrne in Valparaiso Review says of First Hand:

Presenting Gregor Mendel as a primary subject in her poetry, Bierds provides readers with a persona representative of the conflicted scientist, whether historic or contemporary, seeking to unlock mysteries of the physical world while maintaining a vigorous faith in the mysteries of the spiritual world. By extension, this poetic persona and his actions also show evidence of the intrinsic clash — often attendant and sometimes inevitable — between a search for knowledge and a trust in one’s religious beliefs, a pair of pursuits at constant risk of incompatibility with each other for inquisitive people who maintain a great faith.

…

Elsewhere, in “Gregor Mendel and the Cats,” Mendel speaks of painting blue the backboards of the monastery’s bookcases. The poem discloses Mendel’s thoughts on the importance of using the mind (“We are minds here,” he begins) as well as the body (“And hands,” he continues), stretching one’s intellect for both practical knowledge and imaginative purposes.

In talking about the poem “Sunderance,” Byrne leads me to hope I am not the only reader not quite learned enough to keep up:

At times, comprehending archival information in Bierds’s poetry does demand a greater degree of active intellectual involvement, perhaps even firsthand research, by readers. Nevertheless, while searching for information is sometimes required for a full understanding of clues embedded within the content of the poems in each of Bierds’s books (and may be a contributing factor that hinders her ability to attract a larger audience), when engaging in the process one can achieve a certain amount of satisfaction and delight, not to mention enlightenment about some lesser-known facets of historical events or individuals.

Bierds’s wanderings in scientific history takes her from Mendel to Newton back to Galileo, forward to Hedy Lamar and on to James Watson and Dolly the cloned sheep, with a detour to some fishermen stranded on breaking ice near St. Petersburg. Oh yes, and Marie Curie makes an obligatory appearance who is paired with the artist Paul Cadmus, working on a WPA project.

When a genetic scientist uses the term expression, s/he is referring to the action of a gene in the production of a protein or a phenotype, the gene expresses itself. When a poet speaks of expression s/he has something perhaps more lyrical in mind. In First Hand, Bierds shows us how to experience both kinds of expression firsthand.

As a sort of follow-up (and possibly a rebuttal) to my discussion of Dorothy Allison the other day, I point you to this post on Windows Toward the World. Helen features an Allison quote and a “Seriously Dangerous” poem.

I was actually sort of disappointed that nobody stood up for Allison the other day. Surely some of you all have read her work.

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And while we’re talking about stories that must be heard, Susie Madrak features another one:

PINEHURST, N.C. A former Army medic made famous by a photograph that showed him carrying an injured Iraqi boy during the first week of the war has died of an apparent overdose, police said.

Joseph Patrick Dwyer died last week at a hospital in Pinehurst, according to the Boles Funeral Home. He was 31.

The photograph, taken in March 2003, showed Dwyer running to a makeshift military hospital while cradling the boy. The photo appeared in newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts worldwide, making Dwyer became a symbol of heroism.

Dwyer laughed when a reporter told him of the photo and its widespread circulation, and he tried to deflect focus to his entire unit. His mother, Maureen, said then that the photo embarrassed her son because it singled him out while other soldiers were doing the same thing.

I didn’t think I was going to do this (post a Carlin YouTube that is) but Susie at Suburban Guerilla has this one up and I have to pass it on. My Daddy used to say this same thing, in language not quite so colorful, twenty - thirty - forty years ago. It’s only gotten worse.

RIP George Carlin.

Well, it broke yesterday anyway. That’s good enough for this blog. Always up to the minute.

A correspondent has sent me this item from WLEX-TV news in Lexington:

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) - A Kentucky grand jury has indicted an Ohio historian who led efforts to pull an 8-ton boulder from the Ohio River.

Greenup County Commonwealth’s Attorney Cliff Duvall says a local grand jury indicted Steve Shaffer of Ironton, Ohio, on Thursday for allegedly breaking Kentucky law by removing a protected archaeological object from the river. The charge is a Class D felony, punishable by one to five years in prison.

If you’ve been reading here, you know that we’ve been following the story of Indian Head Rock for over a year now.

Things is getting serious.

I’ve meandered my way back to the story of Eugene V. Debs as told by Ernest Freeberg in Democracy’s Prisoner (Harvard, 2008). I see certain irony in the way the same domestic policies failed in the early 20^th that are failing in the early 21^st. For example:

In the face of [opposition to the war], the Wilson administration developed a two-pronged strategy to impose unity where there was none. A week after declaring war, the government created the Committee on Public Information (CPI), headed by the energetic progressive journalist George Creel. Mobilizing powerful tools of mass persuasion, Creel hired thousands of writers, scholars, artists, and filmmakers to make the government’s case for war. As Creel later put it, the CPI embarked on a grand experiment in “advertising America,” at home and around the world. This publicity bureau churned out pamphlets, press releases, films, and talking points for a volunteer arum of “Four Minute Men,” cataloging the atrocities of the German army and extolling Wilson’s war crusade. Though Creel insisted that his agency fought foreign propaganda with the power of truth, many of his employees conceded that much of the CPI’s work was badly biased, and in some cases entirely fabricated. Whatever the committee’s value as a source of information about the causes and prosecution of the war, Creel turned the CPI into a megaphone that for the next eighteen months gave the government the loudest voice in the marketplace of ideas. (pp. 45-45)

The other prong of this strategy was repression of dissent. More on that later. Right now, I’ll observe only that unity may be harder than politicians would have us believe, especially when the policies of the government don’t match the desires of the governed.

Well, not all 43 really.

And technically, we haven’t had 43 first ladies. Some of our presidents were bachelors or widowers during their time in office. These men asked daughters or nieces or daughters-in-law to serve as hostess for them. Woodrow Wilson, on the other hand, became widowed and remarried while in the White House, so he had two first ladies. So if you define “first lady” as meaning a woman married to the President of the United States during his time in office, we’ve only had 37.

In their article “The Real Mrs. Lincoln” (The Lincoln Herald, Spring 2008), Watson, Berger, and Yon consider what a strange position “first lady” actually is:

First ladies are neither elected nor appointed, there is no constitutional or statutory basis for their “office,” and, therefore, no firmly established roles or responsibilities for presidential wives. Often, first ladies end up forging their approach to the office according to their personal inclination, the nature of the presidential marriage, and within the parameters of public opinion, prevailing sex role norms, and historical precedent.

In addition to the “scholarly rankings” I talked about last post, Watson et al. include several other comparison tables for first ladies that I found fascinating.

Take education. Six of our first 14 first ladies had “none.” That is 16% of our presidential wives, up through the Civil War to Eliza Johnson, who have had no formal education. That includes Martha Washington and Dolley Madison. Abigail Fillmore had “some.” Eleven (30%) have gone to finishing school. Our “finished” ladies include Mary Todd Lincoln, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jackie Kennedy, Lady Bird Johnson, and Nancy Reagan. Florence Harding went to a music conservatory and Betty Ford studied dance at the Calla Travis Dance Studio. Fifteen (40%) have gone to college, and Rosalyn Carter went to junior college. Hillary Rodham Clinton, with her Yale Law degree, is arguably our most highly (and impressively) educated first lady to date, most closely followed by Laura Bush, who has a Masters Degree in Library Science from University of Texas in Austin. If Barack Obama is elected, Michelle will become our second Ivy-League lawyer in the role of first lady.

Francis Cleveland was the youngest first lady, being 21 when she entered the White House. Anna Harrison was the oldest at 65 (Barbara Bush was 64, Nancy Reagan a young 59). Anna Harrison also had the most children: 9. Sarah Polk and Edith Wilson had none.

As you might expect, Jackie Kennedy has had the most “biographical works” (37), followed by Eleanor Roosevelt (35), Hillary Rodham Clinton (27), and Mary Todd Lincoln (19). Twelve, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford, Rosalyn Carter, and Nancy Reagan, have written memoirs or autobiographies. The love letters of the Wilsons, Trumans, and Reagans have been published.

Those most involved in their husbands’ political careers include Abigail Adams, Florence Harding (a very colorful character), Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosalyn Carter, and of course Hillary Rodham Clinton. Letitia Tyler, who was only 22 when she entered the White House, and Jane Pierce are rated least involved.

As for those rankings, Eleanor Roosevelt is always #1. Abigail Adams always #2 or #3. Mary Todd Lincoln, Florence Harding, and Jane Pierce are always in the bottom five. Nancy Reagan spent some time there too but lately her star has risen. By and large, in modern times, wives of Democrats fare better than wives of Republicans.

It would have made for real interesting times to have had a First Dude to factor in to all of this. But, ain’t gonna happen, so scholars of first wives can rest easy for a while. I would like to see that terminology “fist lady” changed, though.