Financing the Revolution

Mary Ellen Pleasant was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1814 into a free, middle class black household. There were no schools in the city for black children, so when Mary Ellen was seven years old, her father took her to live with business associates on Nantucket Island which had a “colored” school.

Mary Ellen Pleasant

Unfortunately, the Hussey family of Nantucket were less than honest. They pocketed the tuition money from her father but didn’t send Mary Ellen to school. Instead, Mary Ellen was put to work in the Hussey general store. Recognizing the balance of power based on skin color, Mary Ellen worked hard to be indispensable to the Hussey family.

She was charming and friendly, brilliant at selling to every customer who came into the store. She helped the Hussey family make money while learning all aspects of their business. She used her experience and knowledge to amass a fortune later in life. She even remained on good terms with the Hussey family throughout her life.

She had arrived in Nantucket just as the whaling industry was creating vast fortunes, giving her a front row seat to the earliest boom town in the U.S. Boom towns shake up the roles of race and gender, at least temporarily. White, Indian, and black people worked together in the whaling business. As the men moved into higher paying jobs on the docks and on whaling ships, women took over running the shops, hotels, and other businesses that supported the whalers.

One of the centers of growing wealth was Newtown, a free black community separated from Nantucket by a fence. Newtown’s business leaders used some of their wealth to support the abolitionist cause. In 1841, Frederick Douglass was invited to speak at a local abolitionist meeting. He talked about his life as a slave and his escape from slavery. His speech inspired Mary Ellen to fight for an end to slavery.

In 1842, she moved to Boston, where she met her first husband, James W. Smith, a businessman from Charles Town, West Virginia. Smith was an abolitionist who bought slaves at slave auctions so that he could free them. Unfortunately, Smith died two years after they married. When his estate was settled, Mary Ellen inherited $45,000 ($1.2 million today).

In 1848, she married JJ Pleasant, but he soon abandoned her to join the California gold rush. Mary Ellen followed JJ to San Francisco in 1852, only to discover he had joined the crew of a steamship that operated a regular route between California and Panama. Mary Ellen decided to secure her own future. Like Mark Twain, she quickly figured out that there was more money to be made in San Francisco than in the mining camps.

Mary Ellen made money as an investor and as an arbitrager. She used part of her inheritance to loan money at 10% interest. As an arbitrage trader, she bought gold and then exchanged it for silver. When she had amassed a sufficient amount, she sold the silver to eastern investors for an incrementally higher price than she had paid. By 1858, she was worth more than $150,000 ($4.2 million today).

She was successful because she was able to easily build rapport with people at every economic level of San Francisco. However, she preferred to stay in the shadows, operating through white men. San Francisco was a melting pot of whites, Hispanics, blacks and Chinese immigrants. But it also overflowed with racists who blamed black and brown skinned people for everything from “stealing” jobs from whites to being criminals. Chinese immigrants were regularly subjected to ICE-style raids by mobs that resulted in property destruction and murder. For non-whites, there was no legal recourse.

In 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled that non-whites were banned from testifying against whites in court, in the Folsom v. Leidesdorff case. The ruling allowed James Folsom, a politically connected white man, to steal an estate valued at $1.4 million ($38 million today), from the heirs of black entrepreneur, William Alexander Leidesdorff. A state law codified this grotesquely racist decision.

Recognizing the political reality, Mary Ellen protected herself by staying in the background and quietly using her wealth to try to change the status quo. She donated to efforts to overturn the California state law and supported a variety of abolitionist newspapers and organizations. Her most spectacular and risky donation was to finance John Brown’s revolution.

John Brown was a murderer who suffered from delusions of emulating the Haitian Revolution in which black slaves led by Toussaint L’Ouverture overthrew French colonialism. His revolution would begin with a slave insurrection in West Virginia. But first, he would need to steal guns and ammo from the U.S. military depot at Harper’s Ferry.

Mary Ellen gave Brown a bank draft for $45,000 ($1.3 million today) to underwrite his revolution. She later traveled to West Virginia, meeting with slaves to encourage them to join the revolution. Alas, she misread their enthusiasm. The slaves didn’t rise up in rebellion and Brown’s raid was crushed in about 48 hours. (John Brown was hanged a year later, becoming a thoroughly undeserving martyr to the abolitionist cause.)

Mary Ellen briefly went into hiding before returning to California in 1859. Most of her fortune had been blown on the revolution, but she insisted she never regretted her choice. She set about rebuilding her fortune.

After the Civil War, she decided to use the new federal Civil Rights Act of 1866 to challenge local laws which prohibited black people from riding the San Francisco streetcars. A white friend boarded the chosen streetcar and watched as the conductor zoomed by the next stop where Mary Ellen was waiting to board. Mary Ellen sued for discrimination.

A streetcar

In Mary E. Pleasants v. NBMRR, the court ruled that the local streetcars must be desegregated and awarded her $500 ($6,863 today) damages. She was able to testify because the old state law had been repealed. The case was widely cited in the 1950’s and ‘60’s civil rights litigation.

The inevitable backlash to her lawsuit was a smear campaign alleging that Mary Ellen was a former slave, a mammy, a voodoo priestess, or a madame, depending on which pseudo-journalist one chose to read. The backlash included the election of a white supremacist as governor in 1867 who rammed through laws stripping legal rights from non-whites.

However, voters quickly tired of the racists, who whined about the unfairness of life, while catering to the wealthy and ignoring the problems faced by most people. In 1871, a reformer was elected governor after promising to address the housing shortage and food insecurity faced by most Californians. One of his biggest campaign donors was Mary Ellen.

The new governor had lived at the downtown San Francisco boarding house owned by Mary Ellen. They remained friends until his death. Her closeness with the governor proved that Mary Ellen had the connections and the money to get things done. She used both to quietly underwrite a political and social revolution.

Mary Ellen Pleasant died in 1904, leaving an estate valued at $600,000 ($16.2 million today). Her final wish was that people would remember that she had devoted a large part of her fortune to the cause of ending slavery.

Mary Ellen Pleasant’s story appears in Black Fortunes, by Shomari Wills (2018). A movie about her life, “Meet Mary Pleasant”, is available on Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Nepo Baby from Hell

Lucius Domitius Ahenobarbus was born in 37 AD to Agrippina the Younger and Gnaeus Domitius Ahenobarbus. Daddy is irrelevant since he ever-so-coincidentally died when his son was three years old. Mommy was a granddaughter of Emperor Augustus and sister to Caligula.

In ancient Rome, ambitious women used ruthless cunning and sex to get what they wanted since they had no legal rights. Agrippina was a master of both. She decided that her son should become emperor, but there was a hindrance. Her uncle Claudius was emperor and he already had a son. These impediments were a mere speed bump for her.

First, Agrippina arranged for Claudius’ wife to be executed for adultery. Then she convinced Claudius to pressure the Senate into changing the incest laws so that she could marry her uncle. Next, she had her son designated as the spare heir with the adopted name of Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus. Having served his purpose, Claudius was poisoned by Agrippina. Disposing of Claudius’ son wasn’t even a speed bump.

In 54 AD, Nero was declared emperor and Agrippina arranged his marriage to Claudius’ daughter, Octavia. Agrippina was an acute political operative who had a sense of how far she could push her cruelty without causing a fatal backlash. Nero learned only to emulate her cruelty.

As a teenager, he liked to disguise himself as a slave and wander the streets of Rome with friends, visiting brothels, shoplifting, and assaulting bystanders. His viciousness was tolerated because of his mother’s social and political influence.  When his identity leaked to the public, copycat attacks on distinguished people increased. The rule of law slowly died as the emperor engaged in criminal behavior.

The problem with bullies like Nero is that he was a physical coward. He could dish it out; but he couldn’t take it. When Senator Julius Montano was attacked in the street, he fought back instinctively and punched Nero. Montano immediately apologized when he recognized the emperor, but Nero deemed the apology a slur and forced Montano to commit suicide. After that Nero always surrounded himself with soldiers and gladiators who protected him in the street brawls.

Nero may have been a coward but he loved watching violence. In his day, theater performances were often disrupted by rival gangs who supported different dance troupes. (A modern equivalent is soccer club “ultra” fans who attend games solely to start drunken brawls in the stands. Ultras are criminally prosecuted and usually banned for life from games.) Nero waived legal penalties for hooliganism and even offered prizes to the gangs. He often hid in the shadows, watching the fights. Eventually, public complaints about the violence forced Nero to station troops in theatres to keep the peace.

Nero’s attacks on the rule of law weren’t limited to hooliganism on the streets or in the theaters. He had the Senate appoint him as consul even though as emperor, he couldn’t legally serve as a consul.  He used his consulship to protect a serial criminal and murderer named Publius Celer. Nero couldn’t simply pardon Celer, since the crimes weren’t committed in his province, but he ensured the court case dragged on long enough for Celer to die of natural causes. Tacitus doesn’t give a reason why Nero protected Celer but there is a hint of one crook protecting another.

Nero’s flood-the-zone approach to lawlessness was enabled by the supposedly independent Senate. Senators were wealthy and often came from aristocratic families, but that could not save them if Nero decided they were a threat to him. Besides, with corruption beginning at the top and the rule of law being ignored, nobody’s property or person was safe, so each Senator was busy grabbing what they could.

The fighting in the top 1% of society didn’t bother most people initially. They cared more about economic issues, like taxes. Tax collection was delegated to third parties who paid for a license and guaranteed a fixed amount of taxes were paid to the national treasury. The tax collectors could levy additional fees and tax amounts without any governmental oversight. Even people bad at math can see the scope for corruption.

Private tax collectors managed to climb the social and income scale almost as fast as modern tech bros, leaving a trail of financial ruin in their wake. In 58 AD, Nero decided to win public acclaim by abolishing all taxes. At that point, the Senate invited him for a chat where they flattered him for his noble generosity before explaining that an empire without revenue is doomed. Nero agreed to make tax collection fairer by setting maximums on tax rates and limiting the extra fees charged by tax collectors. Public announcements of the new limits can be seen on surviving monuments.

After this popular triumph, Nero reverted to being a selfish, greedy nepo baby. In 59 AD, he orchestrated the murder of his mother, removing the only restraint on his paranoia and megalomania. Free to live as he wanted, he decided he wanted to be a charioteer. Then he wanted to be a musician and began playing the lyre. He also declared himself a poet.

To showcase his talents, he created the Youth Games. The games were held in a newly built district consisting of brothels and taverns. He dished out money to ordinary people who could only spend it in his new redlight district. At later games, the Senate cut to the chase by offering Nero the first prize and creating awards to feed his ego.

None of it was enough. He had Puteoli (modern Pozzuoli) renamed after himself. He surrounded himself with yes-men like Tingellinus who claimed Nero was loved and admired. Tingellinus also convinced Nero to banish or murder anyone who threatened Tingellinus’ influence and power.

But everyone was becoming bored with Nero’s erratic antics. Rumors circulated that attendees were bored by his performances and that privately senators and aristocrats mocked him.

Then a fire burned Rome in 64 AD. It spread rapidly through narrow, twisty streets lined with wooden buildings. Gangs of looters prevented people from fighting the fire. As the city burned, a second fire started on the estate of Tingellinus. When the fires finally burned out, three districts were levelled, seven were barely habitable and only four districts were intact.

Nero immediately decided to build a Domus Aurea (Golden House) on the levelled districts. He bragged about marble floors, gold trimmings, and lavish murals at a time when most Roman citizens were homeless and starving. He was shocked to learn they were angry, so he ordered food to be distributed to buy their goodwill.

It wasn’t enough. Rumors circulated that Nero was playing his lyre while the city burned, or that he had started the fire so that he could steal the land to build his gilded palace. Popular opinion swung completely against him. For years, ordinary people had witnessed his excesses, thinking it didn’t affect them. But as the rule of law was hollowed out, corruption trickled down from the top 1%, gutting government services that could have assisted in rebuilding Rome.

Nero got his Golden House (parts of which have been excavated in recent years) but he didn’t get to enjoy it. In 68 AD, to avoid assassination, Nero committed suicide, abandoned and loathed by everyone. His gruesome sidekick, Tingellinus was forced to commit suicide in 69 AD.

Today we may debate whether Nero was a sociopath or a psychopath; he was certainly a mass murderer.  His reign highlights how corruption at the top undermines the rule of law and quickly destroys society because no one’s property or person is safe from the criminals.  His name survives as the Italian word for “black”.

This account of Nero comes from The Annals of Imperial Rome, by the historian Tacitus.

Creating Hope in a World With None

Anna Essinger was a force of nature. Her optimism kept her moving forward against crushing challenges. She was born in Ulm, Germany in 1879 into a family of prosperous, assimilated Jews. In 1926, she started a school at Herrlingen (now Blaustein), Germany. She was known to her students as Tante (Aunt) Anna.

In 1933, she organized the transfer of the school’s Jewish students and teachers to England to protect them from the Nazis. [See November 2025 blog.] The school resettled into a rundown manor house in Kent, England, called Bunce Court. Since there was no money to pay for repairs, the students and staff renovated the property and transformed it into a sort of friendly Hogwarts. The students worked in rotating teams that repaired the buildings, tended a vegetable garden and beehives, and raised chickens and pigs.

Anna Essinger

During the war, many of the children worked on neighboring farms to supplement the school’s finances and to obtain more food. The school also accepted local English children as required by the local school board as the price for obtaining the necessary permits to operate as a school. Their tuition provided additional financial support for the school.

The majority of students at any given time were Jewish refugees who arrived in several phases. Each group had specific psychological and emotional problems based on their wartime experiences. The first group were the original refugees from Herrlingen. They had suffered the least emotional damage because they escaped Germany before persecution of the Jews had ramped up.

The next group were Kindertransport children who arrived between December 1938 and September 1939. Tante Anna coordinated with the Refugee Children’s Movement which organized the Kindertransport trains. Children could only gain a seat on a Kindertransport train if someone paid for their passage (essentially a ransom) and there was a family, preferably Jewish, who would foster them when they arrived in England.

Kindertransport children arriving in England

Most of the Kindertransport children were from assimilated Jewish families. That didn’t matter to a rabbi who delayed one trainload of children in Germany because, in his opinion, there weren’t enough Orthodox Jewish families among the volunteer foster parents.

In early 1939, England appealed to the U.S. to allow 20,000 Jewish refugee children into the U.S. The proposed legislation needed to waive the severe limits on legal immigration stalled in Congress. One idiotic and unidentified member of Congress argued that “admitting children without their parents was against God’s law”.

Some of the Kindertransport children arrived at Bunce Court. Unlike the children who fled in 1933, these children were deeply traumatized. They had been subjected every day to casual brutality and then witnessed the looting and murders during Kristallnacht. Today, these children would be diagnosed with PTSD. In 1939, Anna and her staff helped these children learn to have hope again through music, art, gardening, and caring for the farm animals.

Bunce Court

Then, more financial bad news hit the school. In 1939, the owner of Bunce Court informed Anna that the school’s lease would not be renewed. The property was valued at £5,000 (equivalent to $513,222 today), an impossible sum. A lesser person would have folded at the knees. Anna refused to give up. She decided to hold a fundraiser.

In June 1939, the school staged The Magic Flute for the local community and their patrons. Additional money was raised from the sale of the students’ art and handicrafts. The Dean of Canterbury Cathedral was so impressed, he invited the students to restage their production at the cathedral. Anna raised enough money to convince the School Council (her board of directors) that they could obtain a mortgage to buy Bunce Court. The school was saved again.

But the hits kept coming. In June 1940, Bunce Court was requisitioned for use as an RAF base and the school was given three days to evacuate. While students and staff packed up the school, Anna traveled to the west of England and found another rundown estate called Trench Hall. In the space of three days, Anna signed the lease, hired buses and trucks to move their belongings, and arranged for the youngest children to temporarily stay at another school. The school took another financial hit when they had to abandon their chickens, pigs, beehives and vegetable garden at Bunce Court.

Trench Hall had no electricity, no plumbing, a leaky roof, and a lack of space. In the first few weeks, the staff stayed up all night operating a hand pump to provide enough water for everyone the following morning. The students immediately got busy repairing the buildings. Soon, the older boys were sleeping in the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Garages and the Saddler’s Shoppe. Teachers slept in renovated horse stalls. A sunken rose garden was converted into an open-air theater.

While operating at Trench Hall, the school received a third wave of students, Kindertransport children who had been living in English foster homes. These children were traumatized while living in Nazi-occupied countries and then again by foster families who had no idea how to cope with their emotional problems ranging from food hoarding to nightmares to angry outbursts.

When the war ended, the school returned to Bunce Court. They found the place completely trashed by the RAF. Tante Anna didn’t hesitate and neither did her students, who were old hands by now at fixing up uninhabitable spaces. They repaired the buildings and planted a new vegetable garden.

While these repairs were being made, Bunce Court received a fourth and final wave of students. These students were known as the “concentration camp boys” because they had survived the camps or by living rough in the Polish countryside. (Girls were less likely to survive because the Nazis classified them as “useless eaters” to be murdered immediately.) These deeply traumatized survivors were each adopted by a group of their fellow students who helped them to “become human again”, as one survivor put it.

The refugee children of Bunce Court ended the war as orphans. Tante Anna coordinated with the Red Cross and Jewish refugee organizations to trace the families of her students. The parents and most of the extended families of the children had perished in the Holocaust.

About 900 students passed through the school before Bunce Court closed in 1948. Most of them became college graduates and leaders in their professions. A few of the students never recovered from their childhood trauma, leaving a trail of depression, broken marriages, and substance abuse that affected their own children. However, they never forgot the kindness and caring of Tante Anna and stayed in touch with her until her death in 1960.

Today, Bunce Court is divided into four apartments. A resident became interested in the history of the building after talking to several people who showed up to look at the house. The visitors were former students or the children and grandchildren of students.

Anna Essinger is one of a very rare breed of people who refuse to allow a world without hope. To learn more about this remarkable woman and her school, see The School That Escaped the Nazis, by Deborah Cadbury (2022)

The Little School That Escaped the Nazis

In 1933, the mainstream conservative political party invited Adolf Hitler to become chancellor of Germany in a cynical ploy to stay in power. The conservatives knew that Hitler was a danger to Germany’s fragile democracy. They didn’t care.

The conservatives claimed that Hitler didn’t really intend to abolish all independent power bases in Germany, starting with journalists and government departments. They said Hitler didn’t mean it when he threatened retribution against his enemies. (Immediately after coming to power, Hitler ordered the arrest of the attorney who had prosecuted him for tax evasion years earlier. He also filed bogus criminal charges against a prominent newspaper that was critical of his policies, forcing the paper to close.) They also claimed that Hitler wasn’t serious about eliminating the Jews in Germany and Europe.

But not everyone was so willfully stupid or greedy for power. Some people believed Hitler meant what he said.  One such clear-eyed individual was Anna Essinger.

Anna Essinger

Anna was born in Ulm, Germany in 1879 into a family of prosperous, assimilated Jews. At the age of 19, Anna joined a widowed aunt in Nashville, Tennessee, then moved to Wisconsin to attend college. She was studying for her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin when World War I began in 1914 and anti-German sentiment forced her return to Germany.

While in the U.S., Anna had become acquainted with several influential Quakers.  She melded their humanitarian and compassionate values with her belief that education is the key to progress. In 1926, she started a school at Herrlingen (now Blaustein), Germany.

The Herrlingen school was unlike anything ever seen before in Germany.  The school looked like a private home and many classes were held outdoors. The curriculum emphasized art and music. The only rules were to be honest, hard-working, to resolve conflicts peacefully, and to treat others fairly. Misbehaving students were sent to Tante (Aunt) Anna for a compassionate chat about how their bad behavior affected others.

For several years, the school flourished as Jewish and non-Jewish parents looked for an alternative to the typical regimen of corporal punishment and rote learning.  That changed as the Nazis gained political power in the Reichstag and began gaining control of local and state governments. An early target was education and school curricula.

Adolf Hitler at the Nuremberg Rally

Local Nazi bigwigs threatened to close the school unless Anna taught a curriculum approved by the Nazis which emphasized obedience to the state, glorification of the military, and “history” lessons blaming Jews for everything wrong in Germany and the world. Then they ordered all non-Jewish staff and students to leave the school. Tante Anna knew it was a matter of time before the Nazis forced the school to close.

Anna decided to save her school from the Nazis. She masterminded an audacious plan to move the school to England with the help of Quaker acquaintances. The logistics were a nightmare, requiring travel documents and permissions from multiple levels of government in Nazi Germany and the countries they would travel through. Parents had to consent to send their children to England with no promise that they would ever meet again.

In the summer of 1933, she put her plan in motion using a cover story that they were taking an educational school trip. School trips during the summer break were popular in the 1930’s as part of the “wanderlust” movement, in which students and young adults traveled around Europe to visit cultural sites and experience local cultures. The wealthier ones could even afford to travel to the U.S.

Tante Anna’s students were split into three groups accompanied by their remaining teachers. Each group left from the local train station but took a different route over the following week. The cover story was that they would take a two-week educational holiday before returning to Herrlingen. Instead, the groups met up at the Belgian port city of Ostend and boarded a boat to England.

The school resettled into a rundown manor house called Bunce Court in Kent, England. Anna immediately embarked on a never-ending struggle to scrape together enough money to pay the rent each month and buy food. Most of the teachers were refugee Jews who received room and board in lieu of a salary.

Anna’s optimism inspired everyone. Under the supervision of a teacher, students in the woodworking shop churned out materials needed to repair the manor house and outbuildings. Other students assisted the handyman who maintained the boiler that provided heat and hot water. The most popular duty was assisting in the kitchen since that often meant getting a little extra food.

The school was soon self-sustaining as the students planted a huge vegetable garden and raised pigs. They later added beehives and sold the honey. It wasn’t all hard work. The former lawns were transformed into a swimming pool, an outdoor amphitheater, and a football (soccer) pitch. Classes were held outside whenever the weather permitted.

Meanwhile, the lives of their parents in Germany were increasingly hopeless. Jews seeking to emigrate were forced to sign over all their assets to the Nazis as the price for leaving Germany. But they also needed to find a country willing to take them, which was nearly impossible since they would be destitute upon arrival.

In June 1938, England and the U.S. headlined a conference at Evian, France to discuss waiving immigration quotas to allow German Jews to emigrate. But the conference quickly fizzled into nothing. Americans were isolationist and anti-immigrant. Politicians of all stripes claimed that Jewish immigrants would be a burden on taxpayers.

The indifference of democratic countries encouraged the Nazis to ramp up their activities. In November 1938, they stage-managed the destruction of Kristallnacht, blamed the Jews for the violence, and stripped the Jews of their citizenship. Anna’s brother was forced to hand over the family’s furniture business to a Nazi-approved goon, who quickly bankrupted the company.

The children at Bunce Court learned about the struggles of their parents and siblings from letters they received. Mail delivery between England and Germany continued until war was declared on September 1, 1939. After that, the Red Cross and other private organizations attempted to pass along information.

The children were never able to reunite with their parents, who perished in the Holocaust. After the war, Tante Anna spent many hours working with Jewish refugee organizations and the Red Cross trying to locate relatives of the children but was rarely successful.  

The Herrlingen school building was confiscated by the Nazis. It was later gifted to Field Marshal Erwin Rommel as a reward for military service. (He had already collected every possible military decoration.) Rommel was living at the former school when he was forced to commit suicide in October 1944. The building is now a museum for both Rommel and Anna Essinger.

Most people, when faced with dictators and evil, will concede without a whimper engaging in “anticipatory obedience”, a term coined by Professor Timothy Snyder. Anna Essinger is one of a very rare breed of people who refused to give in to evil or to allow a world without hope.

To learn more about this remarkable woman and her school, see The School That Escaped the Nazis, by Deborah Cadbury (2022)

Anarchy Rules

For ten long years, the workers had fought for improved working conditions. They wanted an 8-hour workday, a shorter workweek, increased attention to worker safety, and to be treated with respect as human beings.

Their demands were met with police truncheons and militia, the private armies hired by the factory owners. National Guard troops were often activated by governors who owed their political office to the people with the money.

 The madder the workers got, the more scared the employers became and the more extreme their reactions. As union membership expanded, employers hired spies to infiltrate the organized labor movement. Union organizers lost their jobs, were frequently arrested on dubious charges, or turned up dead. Employers locked out union workers, then brought in strikebreakers, who were protected by Pinkerton agents that had been temporarily sworn in as sheriff’s deputies.

On May 4, 1886, some workers gathered for another labor rally in Haymarket Square in Chicago. As the speechifying began, a bomb was thrown at the police forming a perimeter around the crowd. The police responded by blasting away with live ammo. In the aftermath, seven policemen and four civilians lay dead. Uncounted numbers were injured.

Although no one was ever conclusively identified as the bomber, eight individuals were charged with murder. A quick trial in August 1886 resulted in convictions and eventually four were hanged. Newspapers sympathetic to workers published images of gallows and nooses next to sketches of the “martyrs”. Newspapers sympathetic to the factory owners branded labor unions and workers as “anarchists”.

Anarchy was a muddled middle-class political philosophy projected onto the labor movement. The middle class then, as now, was a sandwich being squeezed from above by aristocrats and fabulously wealthy industrialists and from below by the growing masses of urban factory workers. The middle-class could never become aristocrats like the Crawley family at Downton Abbey and they lacked the resources to become factory owners. But they could slide down into the ignominy of poverty. They felt that they were not reaping the benefits of Gilded Age capitalism.

Anarchy was initially defined by individuals like Prince Peter Kropotkin, a Russian aristocrat with a first-rate education and a gift for gab. He developed “white guilt” at the privileges enjoyed by his social class while most Russians were still serfs, essentially slaves to the aristocrats who owned the land worked by the serfs. Tsar Alexander II decreed an end to serfdom in the 1860’s only to be assassinated by an anarchist in 1881. His son, Tsar Alexander III, reacted much like Stalin or Putin, imprisoning and torturing anyone even vaguely suspected of dissent.

Prince Peter Kropotkin

Kropotkin fled Russia to evade a one-way trip to a Siberian prison. He went to Switzerland where he made fiery speeches advocating the overthrow of the capitalist system. Kropotkin preached that society could only survive if the bourgeois world was destroyed. Bourgeois intellectuals and college students packed the halls where he spoke.

As support grew, so did the inevitable backlash. No one has ever willingly given up a single privilege, particularly when there is a financial penalty, say higher taxes, attached to such a sacrifice. Besides, the anarchists couldn’t offer an economic system that would be fairer to everyone. Those who saw benefits in capitalism decided that Switzerland would be better without the gabby Russian.

The Swiss government expelled Kropotkin, so he went to Paris, where he promptly engaged in dubious activities leading to his arrest. In exchange for a pardon, he agreed to leave France. He went to England, which has a long tradition of tolerating political refugees and oddballs.

But while Kropotkin and his friends enjoyed their gabfests, they had no idea what life was really like for the “victims of capitalism”. In Chicago, the workers who met in Haymarket Square led an almost unimaginably grim life. They worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, with no paid leave and no retirement plan. They made about $1.50 a day (about $50 a day at today’s rates). A worker injured on the job or who was no longer physically able to do the job found himself unemployed. A worker killed on the job left behind a destitute family who faced homelessness and starvation.

There were no social welfare programs providing a safety net for workers or their families. A lack of healthcare meant poor people (and wealthier folks) self-medicated with laudanum, a mixture of opium and alcohol. It was as addictive as OxyContin and as deadly. Accidental or intentional overdoses ended the physical and emotional pain of those overcome by despair.

Living conditions were horrible. Entire families were crammed into squalid tenements, not much bigger than today’s efficiency apartments. When New York City required a specific amount of square footage per adult tenant, landlords gamed the system by building tenements with 15-foot and 20-foot ceilings, counting all that air space in the square footage calculations.

In the face of these obvious inequities, politicians decided anarchism was the real threat. They used a divide and conquer strategy to pit native born against immigrant workers to protect the privileges of the wealthiest one percent. Anarchists railed against landlords, factory bosses, cops, and judges as the representatives who enforced the capitalist system.

The slow pace of change eventually caused a split in the ranks of anarchists. Non-violent sorts like Kropotkin were optimists who believed that capitalism would collapse under the weight of its rottenness. A small offshoot advocated a violent overthrow of the capitalist system.

Political assassinations became popular. In 1878, the kings of Spain and Italy survived assassination attempts and Kaiser Wilhelm I survived two attempts. In 1898, Empress Elisabeth of Austria was killed by a knife-wielding nut. In 1901, President William McKinley was assassinated in Buffalo, New York. (Have any presidents visited Buffalo since?)

President William McKinley

Anarchism was never an organized political movement. It was the philosophical meanderings of individuals who felt that they were not winners in the political and economic system of their day. The assassins tended to work alone because they were radicalized privately by what they read in books and political pamphlets.

Anarchism lost its appeal in the U.S. when progressive politicians began enacting laws that protected workers (but not immigrants). In Europe, anarchism became irrelevant when the old socio-economic system was destroyed by World War I.

The modern equivalent of anarchism is the antifa (anti-fascist) philosophy. Antifa advocates tend to be educated and middle class. Some suffer white guilt like Kropotkin and long for an indefinable social justice. All come from families who feel squeezed by the current system in which they will never attain the wealth of an IT billionaire but could easily slide down into poverty.

Like the anarchists before them, antifa is not an organized political movement. Also like the anarchists, most are non-violent with a sprinkling of violent actors. As a result, this new Gilded Age will also be marred by political assassinations committed by lone wolves radicalized by what they read and see on social media. The current government will overreact by openly siding with the billionaires whose money got them elected and passing laws that protect their privileges.

Eventually, the level of inequities will become so outrageous that a new progressive era will usher in a new round of social justice legislation to make capitalism feel less predatory. Or we’ll destroy the current system with another world war. Then a new cycle will start and a new version of anarchism and antifa will emerge.

For a more in-depth look at how the original Gilded Age mirrors today’s world, including the similarities of anarchism and antifa, read The Proud Tower, by Barbara W. Tuchman (1966).

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Let’s See What’s Out There

At the end of the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Jean-Luc Picard says, “let’s see what’s out there” and the USS Enterprise sets off once again to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life forms”.

Those phrases capture the vision of the founders of America. The founders of the U.S. supported public education and scientific research and development. They knew that was the best path to prosperity for the people and the country.

That is why the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which transferred federally owned land in what became the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, required the new territorial governments to set aside land for schools and universities. Public schools educated the children (because a democracy depends on an educated electorate). Public or land grant universities had a dual purpose of providing a college education and conducting research related to agricultural and mechanical (A&M) projects to bolster American farmers and industry. In the past 200 years, American universities have helped develop higher yielding crops that are more resistant to disease and lousy weather, thereby reducing world hunger.

For more adventurous souls seeking out new worlds and life forms, the U.S. government funded exploration. In 1804, the federal government funded a Voyage of Discovery, more familiarly known as the Lewis & Clark Expedition, that explored the vast lands President Jefferson had bought from France. This scientific expedition found a land full of wealth just waiting to be exploited for capitalist gain, from the logging industry to farming. The cities came later.

Since government money covered the cost of the trip, reports on discoveries and expenditures were due to Congress. Meriwether Lewis was on his way to Washington to answer questions about his expense reports when he died mysteriously on the Natchez Trace, near Hohenwald, Tennessee.

After the American Civil War, relentless westward expansion meant there were additional areas to explore. In 1869, Congress voted to fund a scientific expedition to explore the upper Colorado River. As its leader, they chose a one-armed Civil War officer, Major John Wesley Powell, a native New Yorker who lived by the maxim to “stay curious” long before Steve Jobs thought up that tag line for his overpriced consumer products.

Powell was a lifelong learner. He was a university professor of geology who dabbled in scientific research on a variety of topics, as well as ethnography, which came in handy when he met indigenous tribal people along the Colorado River. He was an eternal optimist. Without his optimism, the expedition he led would probably have been a dismal failure. No matter how bleak the situation seemed, he always had faith that the crisis could be resolved successfully. That came in handy during his white-water rafting trip down the Colorado River.

The expeditionary troop he assembled consisted of ten men that he thought would be resilient and who could work as a team.  Their first task was to build custom rafts durable enough to survive any rough waters they encountered. Then they had to choose food that would remain edible over the long haul, such as flour, sugar, coffee (naturally!), bacon, and dried apples.

Eventually, they pushed their rafts into the Colorado River, scrambled aboard, and launched themselves down the river. Over the next three months, they passed through parts of modern-day Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arizona.

What a three-month ride it was! They almost drowned while exploring tributary creeks in side canyons near the Grand Canyon when storms upriver caused flash flooding. Most famously, Powell dangled off a cliff with his one good hand until he was rescued by a team member. Their rafts were repeatedly snagged on sandbars or flipped by white water rapids.

When the rafts flipped, all their supplies were dunked and waterlogged. Everyone grabbed what they could and pulled it ashore on the riverbank or a sandbar. They would pause for a day or two while they waited for their food to dry in the sun or by a fire lit from driftwood.

They never recovered all their supplies and gradually the food dwindled. Eventually, they faced starvation as their supplies ran out. Several of the men couldn’t take it anymore and mutinied. Powell tried to convince them that even though the situation was grim, it would get better.

His optimism persuaded most of the men to stick with him but three decided to walk back to civilization. The three men vanished near the mouth of the Grand Canyon and no one has ever learned what happened to them. Almost immediately after the three men left, the expedition encountered a group of Indians who gave them food. Powell decided to end the expedition before they entered the Grand Canyon.

After the trip, Major Powell wrote a report for Congress describing the expedition’s adventures on the river, the local Indian populations, and the geology of the area. His report was so informative and exciting, he was encouraged to publish it as a book. More than 100 years later his adventures are still a roaring good tale of optimism and perseverance.

Powell later became the director of the U.S. Geological Survey, shaping it into the trusted institution it is today. He was also the first director of the Bureau of Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution, where he encouraged linguistic and sociological research.  

Today, the vision of America’s founders is crashing and burning. Federal grants to fund education and R&D are being terminated to “eliminate government waste” in one of the most blatant examples of self-sabotage and self-harm in the history of the world.

At the end of 2024, the U.S. was a world leader in scientific research and had more Nobel Prize winners (physics, chemistry, medicine, etc.) than any other country. Americans held more patents than the citizens of any other country. We are now abandoning all that greatness. China is rapidly approaching parity on patents and their national investment in R&D now matches (and has probably already overtaken) the U.S.

Regardless of your political affiliation, ask yourself this question. How can America be great if it rejects its founding principles and refuses to invest in its own future?

John Wesley Powell’s book was originally published in 1895 as “Canyons of the Colorado” and is available today as “The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons”.  You’ll learn a lot about different types of rocks while enjoying Powell’s death-defying and sometimes hilarious adventures.

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I Hate You. But I Hate Them More!

In 1932, in a desperate bid to stay in power, the conservative politicians in Germany cynically offered a power sharing agreement with Adolf Hitler. Hitler was even more cynical and unprincipled than the conservatives; in less than a year, the conservatives were completely out of power. [See “Stuck in the (Center Right) With You”, 7/27/2020]

After a few years of bludgeoning Germany into submission, Hitler went after France. He hated France because it had insisted on punishing Germany after World War I. Germany was forced to pay crushing reparations, to demilitarize its border with France, and limit the size of the German military. Hitler promised to make Germany great again by destroying their old enemy, France.

When Hitler attacked in 1940, France was a political, social, and military mess. France was still recovering from the fallout caused by the Dreyfus Affair (1894 – 1906), when the highest-ranking Jewish officer was falsely accused of treason to cover up the actual treason by another officer who had better political connections. Politicians and the military high command backed each other’s lies until it became impossible to distract public attention from the truth.

The Dreyfus Affair fractured French society, revealing deep pockets of antisemitism and intolerance. It discredited the main political parties allowing the rise of new parties ranging from fascists to socialists, conservatives to communists. Protestants and Catholics fragmented into support for each political faction, except the communists who were anti-religious.

The French still believed in their “Grand Army” which had conquered Europe for Napoleon more than 100 years earlier. But the military leadership had put their faith in a static defense based on the Maginot Line, a string of half-built fortresses, at a time when military tactics were shifting to mobile warfare with mechanized troops.

In May 1940, the Maginot Line became irrelevant when the Germans simply went around it. French citizens were shocked because they had been told the Maginot Line made France invincible. Then their Grand Army fell apart so rapidly that the whole campaign was over within six weeks. By June 1940, the Germans were parading down the Champs Elysees in Paris.

The shocking loss discredited the French military leaders and politicians. Later some of them openly collaborated with the Nazi occupation, in hopes of maintaining some of their privileges and power. Cynical people mouth patriotic drivel while selling out their countries for personal gain.

French citizens, on the other hand, were mad as hell and they weren’t going to take it. Small groups immediately organized into resistance cells. But the resistance groups mirrored the political and cultural divisions of France and had difficulty setting aside their petty bickering in the face of a common enemy. They trusted only the people they knew. No one trusted the communists because they took their orders from Moscow and had refused to fight the Germans until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941.

Henri Frenay

Conservatives flocked to Combat, led by Henri Frenay, while socialists opted for groups like the Socialist Resistance Leaders, led by Christian Pineau. Most groups operated locally. One of the few resistance groups operating across France was The Alliance, led by Marie-Madeleine Fourcade. [See “The Hedgehog Who Ran Rings Around the Nazis”, 1/28/2019]

Marie-Madeleine Fourcade

In the early days of the occupation, resistance groups were amateurish and lax about security. It was easy for collaborators to infiltrate an organization and arrange for the Gestapo to arrest everyone. Arrest meant undergoing torture as the Gestapo demanded the names and whereabouts of anyone who had escaped the original roundup. (Counting backward from 100 was recommended as a distraction while being tortured.)

To support the French resistance, outside organizations quickly formed to offer supplies, training in spy craft, and channels for relaying intelligence reports. But the outsiders had different objectives for France, which meant they didn’t trust each other.

The Free French were led by Charles de Gaulle who wanted an all-French liberation of France, with himself as the leader, naturally. He had to rely on the British for supplies but disguised this weakness by projecting strength through his speeches broadcast into occupied France and his steely determination to always have a seat at the Allies’ table when decisions were made.

Charles de Gaulle

Prime Minister Winston Churchill was an imperialist who wanted to protect the British and French empires so that their vast resources could be used by the Allies to win the global war. Churchill created the Special Operations Executive (SOE) which coordinated the British government’s activities in France.

Winston Churchill

The SOE consisted of individuals who had lived in France and sounded like natives, rather than English tourists with bad accents. The SOE ran its own agents in occupied France as well as supporting activities with resistance groups in France. One of the groups supported by SOE was the Maquis, a militia operating in central France. (In the TV series, “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”, a small group of rebels called themselves the Maquis in homage to the WWII group.)

In 1942, the Americans showed up and decided to back Admiral Darlan. The Americans didn’t really like Darlan; but they hated de Gaulle. Apparently, de Gaulle’s massive ego and condescending attitude clashed with the massive egos of the Americans. The Americans created the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) which ran its own agents behind enemy lines.

The ultimate goal of all this activity was to prepare for the expected Allied invasion of France. But with so many different networks of agents running around France, the situation remained chaotic. Eventually, de Gaulle and Churchill cooperated minimally to support the Conseil National de la Resistance (CNR) led by Jean Moulin. Moulin was a former prefect (i.e., governor) who was energetic and had good organizational skills. His job was to persuade all the major resistance groups to coordinate their efforts in the months before the Allied invasion.

Jean Moulin

Henri Frenay, the arch conservative, refused to cooperate with the CNR because he (falsely) accused Jean Moulin of being a communist. The Americans reflexively despised anything “communist” or that they didn’t directly control. Churchill’s attention, meanwhile, was already drifting toward preserving the British Empire.

Despite mutual suspicions, massive egos, and contradictory goals, a master plan was successfully implemented by the French resistance which added to the chaos behind German lines when the Allied invasion began in June 1944. By August 1944, Paris was liberated.

After France was liberated, the old fractures immediately resurfaced. A witch hunt ensued for collaborators. Women who had fought for France, been tortured by the Gestapo, but survived the war were unceremoniously dumped by the governments of France, Britain, and the U.S. and their contributions were erased from official records.

But the women and men of the French resistance, whatever country they originated from, show us what we can accomplish when we don’t allow fear to deter us from our goals. They believed fighting intolerance and injustice was more important than their own lives. That belief allowed them to overcome their differences to achieve the common goal of defeating fascism.

There are many books about the French Resistance, including many memoirs. For this article, I relied on Soldiers of the Night, by David Schoenbrun (1980).

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Love and Hate, Medieval Style

Lust. Sibling rivalry. Murder. Infidelity. Intertwined family trees. Double and triple crosses. Inheritance battles. Meet the Angevins! Henry and Eleanor, and their obnoxious sons, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John. An ordinary, loving family when they weren’t trying to kill each other.

Eleanor inherited the Aquitaine and the County of Poitou at the age of 15 when her father died while on pilgrimage to Saint James of Compostella. He had gone to ask the saint’s help in smiting some of his vassals with whom he was feuding. Apparently, the saint wasn’t listening, since he died while awaiting the saint’s blessing.

Aquitaine and Poitou covered two-thirds of modern-day France, a prosperous area of farms and vineyards. That wealth enabled the counts of Aquitaine to support the finer arts, hosting poets and troubadours who sang chansons d’geste and chansons d’mour. (Today, the best-known chanson d’geste is the Song of Roland.) Eleanor grew up in a rich, cultured court unmatched at the time in Europe.

Her overlord was Louis VI (a/k/a the Fat), king of France, who was hellbent on expanding French crown territory. Wasting no time, Louis the Fat arranged the marriage of Eleanor to his 16-year-old heir. Eleanor was escorted from sunny, southern France to a dank, drafty abode on the Ile de France in the Seine River.

Louis VII was a saintly lad, more priest than king, while Eleanor was raised by a father who fought the church when he wasn’t fighting his vassals. She eventually gave birth to two daughters, but no heir for the French throne. Not surprisingly, Eleanor was bored with Louis and Paris after ten years of marriage. Then she met a tempestuous 18-year-old, Henry of Anjou.

Henry’s family was even more screwed up than Eleanor’s. His mother, Matilda, was the daughter of King Henry I of England and widow of the Holy Roman Emperor. She insisted on being called Empress Matilda even after becoming the Countess of Anjou when she married a much-younger man, Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. Count Geoffrey was an odd, capricious man. One of his odd habits was wearing a weed (Latin name, planta genet) in his cap.

Love had nothing to do with their marriage. It was an alliance of two ambitious people hoping to use each other to grab more power. Matilda expected to inherit the crown of England because her father arranged for the English barons to swear allegiance to Matilda after his son (Matilda’s brother) died.

But raw power beats a sacred oath any day of the week. When her father died, Matilda’s cousin, Stephan of Blois, had himself crowned King of England in 1135. For the next 19 years, Stephen and Matilda fought a civil war across southern England for control of the English crown. (The Brother Cadfael mysteries by Ellis Peters are set during this civil war.)

Matilda, probably stupidly, looked to her husband, Geoffrey, for assistance. Since she had made no secret of the fact that she thought marrying him was a step down in prestige, it’s not surprising that Geoffrey always seemed too busy to lend her any knights to fight in England. After all, he was busy fighting Stephen and the French king for control of Normandy.

Meanwhile, Henry was shuttled between his parents, much like a child today whose divorced parents share custody. During one of his stays with Geoffrey, Henry was taken to Paris to swear allegiance to the French king as the heir to the County of Anjou and Duke of Normandy.

Henry was 18 years old, a strapping, athletic lad with reddish brown hair. Eleanor was 25 years old with a dull, saintly husband. They fell deep into lust. For Eleanor, it must have felt like a real-life version of a chanson d’mour. But before they could get together, something had to be done about her husband.

Their brilliant plan was to ask the pope for an annulment on the grounds of consanguinity. After some delicate and skillful negotiations, the pope annulled Eleanor’s marriage to Louis in 1152 on the grounds that they were too closely related. All the European aristocratic and royal houses have overlapping family trees, whether in the 12th century or the 21st century. Eleanor promptly married Henry to whom she was even more closely related.

In 1154, King Stephen of England died. Based on his settlement with Matilda that had ended the English civil war, Stephen cut his own son from the inheritance and Henry became Henry II of England; the first Angevin king of England. Henry II and Eleanor now controlled all of England and most of modern-day France. They made a great team, ruling in tandem, at least until they started fighting each other.

Henry II couldn’t keep his britches on. He was a serial philanderer and Eleanor quickly lost patience and tolerance for his catting around. By 1167, she had returned to Poitou, where as Countess of Poitou, she was a vassal of the French king and could count on his support. Eleanor and Henry were at war with each other.

As their sons, Henry, Richard, Geoffrey, and John, grew older, they inevitably joined the family feud. Henry II had fought for everything he had, and he expected his sons to do the same. Henry’s favorite home had a mural showing eaglets attacking an adult eagle, which he bragged was a visual description of his relationship with his sons.

The eldest son, Henry, was slated to inherit the English throne. He badgered his father incessantly about his inheritance until he was given a coronation and became known as Henry the Young King. Richard was Eleanor’s favorite, and she ensured he was made heir to the Aquitaine. Geoffrey was made heir to Brittany, a region his father stole from the French king. John, the youngest son, had no land to inherit and was derisively nicknamed John Lackland by his father.

As any idiot could have predicted, parceling out Angevin lands was like adding gasoline to a fire. The boys fought each other to grab a bigger piece of the inheritance. They fought their father, often with the support of the French king, to whom they owed allegiance for their French lands. Eleanor usually supported her sons as they fought Henry II. (Hell hath no fury…)

In 1173, Eleanor and her sons rebelled against Henry II with support from the French king. From the Pyrenees to the Scottish border, Henry’s realm was in flames. But Henry II practiced 12th century blitzkrieg, traveling at a speed that confounded his enemies. By 1174, he had broken the rebellion and captured Eleanor, imprisoning her. (She remained a prisoner until Henry’s death.) Their sons negotiated a surrender to stay alive and out of a dungeon.

Henry and Eleanor tomb effigy

In 1183, Henry the Young King died and that meant Richard was next in line for the English throne. Henry II decided to reapportion the inheritances of his remaining sons. That set off their last rebellion, which included John Lackland, who had previously sided with his father. They were still fighting when Henry II died in 1189. Eleanor lived well into her 80’s, dying in 1204.

Richard the Lionhearted tomb effigy

Henry II was the first Angevin king and one of the greatest kings of England. But he was a dud as a husband and father. He was succeeded by his son, Richard the Lion-hearted, who bankrupted the kingdom to pay his ransom when he was captured on the way back from the Crusades. His younger brother John was a vicious, arbitrary soul, who liked to torture people. One of John’s victims was his nephew Arthur of Brittany. In 1215, John was forced to sign the Magna Carta to keep his crown. After John died, the Angevins rebranded as the Plantagenets. The last Plantagenet king was Richard III, who died in 1485.

King John tomb effigy

A brief article can’t possibly do justice to the intertwined family trees and medieval allegiances that explain so much of the complexity of Eleanor and Henry II. To get a more in-depth understanding, see Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings, by Amy Kelly (1950) and The Greatest Knight, by Thomas Asbridge (2014).

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Weary Work for Women

Lucretia Mott was barely five feet tall, weighed less than 100 pounds and she scared the hell out of men.  She believed that slavery was morally repugnant and should be abolished.  She also believed women should have equal rights with men, including the right to vote. Men feared her because she was a powerful and persuasive public speaker. 

Lucretia Mott was doubly dangerous because she was an organizer. In 1833, she and other Quaker women founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society.  The new group immediately caused a scandal because (gasp!) black women, like the poet Sarah Forten, were full members. Most abolitionist groups either banned African Americans or offered them second-class membership. 

Lucretia and James Mott

The women’s group was formed in response to the American Anti-Slavery Society which was also founded in Philadelphia. This group was dominated by men who ignored the suggestions of women during the debate over the content of the group’s constitution. Their dismissive attitude didn’t stop Lucretia from repeatedly interrupting the debate to offer her own suggestions.  The women were also denied the right to sign the society’s constitution. 

The women’s group was immediately attacked in newspaper editorials. Many editorials ordered them to stop poking their noses into politics and to return to their “domestic duties” as wives and mothers. Other editorials attacked them for mixing races, which was an affront to almost all white Americans at that time.  Some editorials worried (correctly) that women would use the abolition movement as a starting point to argue for women’s rights, most importantly, the right to vote.  

Underlying all the criticism was an amorphous fear that equality for women was a threat to men. Lucretia Mott was fortunate in having a husband, James, who supported her political organizing.  Most of the women in the early abolitionist movement had to maneuver around their husbands’ disapproval or they were unmarried women. 

Since women couldn’t express their opinion through their votes, they had to find other methods for getting their abolitionist message in front of Congress.  They chose to petition.  Today, petitions constantly circulate on social media with a plea to readers to “sign” the petition, an effort of dubious value since there is no way to verify these electronic signatures.  The abolitionists did it the old-fashioned way; they trudged from town to town, clutching a paper copy of their petition and asking everyone they met to sign it.

It was dangerous and dirty work.  One society’s report called it “weary work”.  Men yelled abuse at the women, claiming they had no right to be involved in politics and accusing them of sedition. The women were often spit upon and constantly ridiculed.  One woman stated that they weren’t just fighting to end slavery, “we must also overthrow the injurious prejudices relative to the real duties and responsibilities of women”. 

Many of the canvassers were teenage girls as young as 11 years old. They were taught a script, which included handling hostile responses.  Their motto was “Let no frown deter, no repulses baffle. Explain, discuss, argue, persuade”.  One of these teenage volunteers was Susan B. Anthony.  She later used the skills she had honed during the petition drives to fight for the right to vote.

One of the earliest petition drives was organized by Lucretia Mott.   By 1835, petitions calling for an end to slavery were flooding the halls of Congress, outraging Southern slave owners and their northern sympathizers, many of whom were merchants profiting from sales to southern states or manufacturers who bought slave-produced goods like cotten. 

Sen. John C. Calhoun

Sen. John C. Calhoun (South Carolina) had already led an effort to ban the U.S. Mail from delivering abolitionist newspapers and pamphlets in slave states.  Another South Carolinian, Rep. James Hammond proclaimed that abolitionists should be punished with “terror - death” and demanded that Congress should reject any additional abolitionist petitions.  For politicians, censoring speech they didn’t like became an obsession.

Rep. James Hammond

A gag law was passed by the House of Representatives which prohibited members of the House from reading or discussing the petitions and from referring them to committees.   Committees are the basis upon which Congress acts, gathering information and drafting new laws. If no committee could review the petitions, the petitions were essentially toilet paper.

The Senate never passed the gag law, but they routinely ignored the petitions that flowed in from the folks back home. Both houses of Congress appeared indifferent to the concerns of their constituents and out of touch (particularly with women who couldn’t vote despite being half the population). 

Even people opposed to abolishing slavery worried that Congress was destroying the constitutional liberties of Americans by censoring speech.  If Congress could arbitrarily decide what kinds of speech were safe or dangerous, then “farewell, a long farewell to our freedom,” opined The Evening Post of New York.   The criticism caused many Northern state legislatures to abandon efforts to pass state censorship laws.  

The gag law turned out to be a spectacular recruiting tool for abolitionists.  Women flocked to the abolitionist societies and volunteered to canvass communities with new petitions.   The abuse and ridicule they suffered energized the women’s rights movement.

In 1848, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other women met at Senaca Falls, New York for a convention on women’s rights.   They demanded civil rights, including the right to own property in their own name, the right to an education, and most crucially, the right to vote.  Women finally won the right to vote in 1920 when the 19th Amendment was ratified.

The petition drives of the 1830’s demonstrate that a reactionary and out-of-touch government cannot ignore social justice issues forever.  Social (and political) reform is a long game, measured in years and sometimes decades.  Eventually repressive governments collapse under the weight of their own hypocrisy and corruption.  But this can only happen when citizens are sufficiently motivated to fight for their own interests by resisting political and social injustices. Resistance begins by registering and then voting in every election at all levels of government.

This account of women abolitionists who became suffragists is based on The Republic of Violence, by J.D. Dickey (2022). 

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Creator of the Modern World

The world we live in today would not exist without Napoleon Bonaparte.  Napoleon I was a stubby, later chubby, Corsican with a gigantic ego.  He decided that his best path to glory and fame was through a military career.  Volunteering for military service continues to be a path to fame and fortune, as illustrated by the number of military veterans elected to political office across the U.S. 

Napoleon was an artillery officer. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, artillery was an elite branch of the military because artillery barrages could shatter defensive emplacements and kill scores of the enemy without endangering one’s own troops. Napoleon followed conventional military tactics which required opening every battle with artillery barrages to soften up the enemy position before committing the infantry, usually in a frontal assault on the enemy position. Napoleon was so successful that armies around Europe and in the U.S. adopted his tactics while ignoring technological upgrades of military weaponry. 

Napoleon’s troops, for example, faced the “Brown Bess” a British gun that was only effective at close range. Fifty years later in the American Civil War, everyone used Springfield rifles which were accurate at a distance. One hundred years later in World War I, troops went over the top into machine gun fire that mowed down a generation of young men. But in December 1944, the Germans omitted an artillery barrage (lack of ammunition) and caught American troops off guard in the Battle of the Bulge.   

Napoleon’s career sputtered following the French Revolution in 1789. The revolutionary government caromed from one crisis to the next. Revolutionaries and radicals tend to turn on each other after they get rid of their original opponent, in this case the French king and queen. The country descended into a low-grade civil war as the various factions fought for control.  

Initially, none of the factions wanted to include Napoleon because they were leery of his ambition. But desperate times lead to hasty, stupid decision-making. One faction asked for Napoleon’s help to defeat a rival faction, fully expecting to dump him when the deed was done. That failed when they realized Napoleon was more popular than they were.  

In 1798, Napoleon was packed off to Egypt with the goal of breaking British supply lines that stretched to India. To ensure plenty of favorable PR, he invited scientists and artists to accompany his troops. They were fascinated with the monuments of ancient Egypt and busily sketched and painted everything they saw. Their sketches and paintings inspired others to dig in the Egyptian sands. Effectively, Napoleon created a new academic discipline, archaeology.

While the invasion of Egypt was an abject military failure, Napoleon didn’t care and neither did most French citizens. Back in France, people had decided that democracy required too much effort, and that ceding their civil liberties was worth the price of a dictatorship promising law and order. Naturally, Napoleon was one of the three members of the new dictatorial Consulate. He quickly dispensed with the other two members and in 1804 he was crowned emperor.

Unlike most egotists and dictators, Napoleon was intelligent and had excellent organizational skills. Under his leadership, revisions to the legal code were finalized in 1804 into the Napoleonic Code. The Code is still used by countries that were part of the French Empire and by the state of Louisiana. He also reformed the army, which was necessary for his other goals.

Napoleon had bold plans for expanding French territory in Europe and overseas, including plans to reoccupy Louisiana after selling it (and most of the North American continent) to the U.S. Since the French navy was no match for the British navy, and because he was an artilleryman, he opted for land battles in Europe.

Every battle won was a propaganda opportunity to convince opponents that resistance was futile. Some countries caved in, signing treaties with France which Napoleon had no intention of honoring. Napoleon excelled at exploiting the fears and political divisions of everyone in Europe. 

Europe was a patchwork of countries and territories with fluid borders from centuries of warfare. The biggest and weakest political entity was the Holy Roman Empire (962 – 1806 AD) which covered most of central Europe and stretched down into northern Italy. Napoleon blew it apart. The Holy Roman Empire splintered into self-selecting groups based on their local languages and customs, eventually forming the countries we know today.

Napoleon’s successes lulled him into believing his own propaganda. He decided to invade Russia because he was unhappy with Tsar Alexander I for not sucking up sufficiently. Like all egotists he had surrounded himself with sycophants who cravenly agreed that stretching supply lines past the breaking point to attack a country spread across 11 time zones was a good idea. Napoleon’s Grand Army starved in the snow outside Moscow or drowned at the Berezina River during the retreat. (Archaeologists recently found the graves at the Berezina River.)

When a bully is down, it is irresistible to kick the stuffing out of him. (It’s why bullies and tyrants are terrified of losing power.) Everyone in Europe who opposed Napoleon and French control piled on. By April 1814, Napoleon was backed into a military and political corner and forced to abdicate.

Napoleon’s influence on the modern world is undeniable, both the good and bad. The good category includes creating the academic discipline of archaeology and modernizing the laws and political structure of France. Destroying the Holy Roman Empire had both good and bad consequences. 

As the Holy Roman Empire transitioned into modern Europe, the new countries needed more than just a common language to maintain cohesion. They needed to believe their country and their culture was superior to all others, a notion that underpins the jingoistic patriotism that still plagues too many countries today. This laid the groundwork for the 19th century arms race that culminated in a World War in 1914.

Napoleon didn’t invent imperialism, but his desire to build an empire encouraged other nations to prove their superiority by colonizing the non-white world. Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, European countries and the U.S. scurried around the world subjugating Asian and African people in a mad scramble to create empires that would supply minerals and natural resources to the imperial power. They brought along their racism and cultural chauvinism, treating the local cultures as inferior. The residue of these attitudes continues to poison international relations today.

We can honor Napoleon for the good consequences arising from his rule. But we should be appalled by the bad consequences the flowed from his actions.

There are scores of books about Napoleon examining his personality, his military prowess and his political career from every possible angle, for those who would like to delve more deeply into this fascinating and flawed man.  

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Family Secrets

What if you suddenly learned that your family history is a pack of lies told to cover up shocking crimes?  At the age of 38, Jennifer Teege suddenly learned that her grandfather was Amon Goeth, SS commandant of the Plaszow labor camp near Krackow, Poland.  Goeth was tried as a Nazi war criminal and hanged in 1946.

Her beloved grandmother, Ruth Irene lived with Goeth in the house where he stood on the balcony and shot at Jewish prisoners with a high-powered rifle.  (In the movie Schindler’s List, Ruth Irene buries her head under the pillows while he shoots.)   Ruth Irene told Jennifer that Goeth was a cultured, educated man, kind and gentle, who never killed anyone. 

Jennifer Teege was a German girl of mixed race born at a time when that was uncommon.  Her biological father disappeared after conception and her single mother placed Jennifer in an orphanage. While Jennifer loved the family that adopted her, she couldn’t stop wondering what flaw in her had caused her mother to abandon her. 

As an adult, Jennifer learned that her mother, Monika, spent her entire life coping with the emotional fallout of knowing who her father was and what he had done.  Everyone who met Monika said she looked exactly like her father.

Monika’s struggles mirror the mental and emotional distress experienced by other children of Nazi war criminals. The children remembered their fathers and their mothers as loving parents who cared for them, arranged birthday parties, and came to their school activities.  But history books and Holocaust documentaries revealed that their fathers were sadistic monsters who believed in white supremacy and committed murder on an industrial scale.  Many of the children succumbed to alcoholism and suicide. Some worried that their genes were “bad” and underwent voluntary sterilization. 

Jennifer also struggled with depression after learning the truth about her grandparents.  When she revealed her biological family’s history to her adopted family, it almost destroyed them too.  Her adopted father became obsessed with discovering exactly how many people died in the Holocaust. (We’ll never know because records were destroyed, lost or never created.  On the Russian Eastern Front, for example, researchers compare eyewitness accounts of massacres to military reports about the amount of ammunition expended on that date and then estimate the number of likely victims.)

When Jennifer’s adopted father was dying, he finally revealed that his obsession was based on his fear of what his parents might have done.   Was it possible that his father had committed crimes against humanity while serving in the Army in World War II?  What if his father knew of crimes committed by others but said nothing?  Does silence or guilty knowledge create criminal culpability?  What should the next generation do with that knowledge?

In the aftermath of the war, silence was golden to everyone.  Germany was destroyed and everyone was more interested in finding food and shelter than in rehashing the past.  In France, Charles de Gaulle ordered everyone to draw a veil over the past because he feared that France would tear itself to pieces over the issue of collaboration during the Nazi occupation.

In Palestine (later Israel), Holocaust survivors were often silent because what they had been through was so horrific, they didn’t know how to talk about it.  They also kept silent due to social pressures.  Some Jews who settled in Palestine before the war apparently believed that Holocaust survivors must be criminals themselves, staying alive by stealing food from their fellow inmates.     

Today, it’s common to criticize the generation of Europeans who “stood by” while the Holocaust happened.  We tell ourselves that we would never stand by while such terrible crimes were being committed.   

Unfortunately, horrific crimes don’t happen in a vacuum.  They happen because of our assumptions and attitudes which are internalized to the point of invisibility.   

The Holocaust happened because social attitudes made it easy to hate Jews.  Jennifer’s adopted father was told by his mother that Jews were hated because they owned all the shops in Germany.  Germans suffered hyperinflation during the Great Depression which made it easy to blame greedy Jewish storeowners, even for people who weren’t openly anti-Semitic. 

The U.S. also has a lengthy history of hate-filled social attitudes which allowed terrible crimes to be perpetrated.  The country continues to engender people who believe in the racial superiority of European Americans.  From slavery to Jim Crow to “the only good Indian is a dead one”, the attitudes we learn at home are so much a part of us, we don’t recognize them for what they are.  Much like Jennifer’s adopted father, a good man who didn’t recognize the anti-Semitism he was taught.

Standing up to injustices means losing our social standing, our friends, and sometimes our lives.  In Nazi Germany, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stood up to the Nazis and was thrown into a concentration camp, then murdered.   Ida B. Wells publicized the horrors of lynching and was chased out of Memphis.  Her enemies smeared her reputation so viciously that 90 years after her death, she is finally being honored for standing up.   More recently, Alexis Navalny stood up for the rule of law in Putin’s Russia and was murdered by Putin’s puppets.

Bonhoeffer, Wells, and Navalny are reminders of the risks of standing up to those who commit unspeakable, horrific crimes.  Whether in Nazi Germany, or today’s Russia and the U.S., crimes are perpetrated because most people tacitly agree with the perpetrators or because they are afraid of becoming targets themselves.  

Jennifer, her biological mother, and her adopted father never had to decide whether to stand up to the Nazis but were guilt-ridden because of the decisions of the prior generation.  The generation that follows us will face the same dilemma when they discover our decisions on standing by or standing up to those who commit horrific crimes.

To learn more about how Jennifer Teege and her family coped with the truth about her grandfather, see her book, My Grandfather Would Have Shot Me (2013).   You may also be interested in The Nasty Girl, a 1990 German film loosely based on the true story of a girl who had grown up hearing that her town resisted the Nazis.  When she begins uncovering what really happened during the war, the town turns on her and her family.

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The Engine of National Growth and Prosperity

“No Irish need apply,” screamed the job ads.

 They “have no standard of morals,” thundered labor organizer, Samuel Gompers, himself a Jewish immigrant from England, attacking Chinese immigrant-workers.

 Italians came to America, “to cut throats, throw dynamite, and conduct labor riots and assassinations,” screeched anti-immigrant fearmongers.

German immigrants “are generally the most stupid sort of their own nation….and will soon outnumber us,” complained Benjamin Franklin in 1753.   Ben was grumpy because he was taking a hit in his wallet.  His printing press in Philadelphia was losing business to a German-run printing press 70 miles west at the Ephrata Cloister. 

Ben Franklin’s complaint is at the heart of hostility towards immigrants.  Every new immigrant group is accused of stealing jobs from Americans.  That fear oozes into distrust of anything “different”, whether it is skin color, language, clothing, or religion. 

Most of the earliest immigrants from Europe were Protestants, notably the joyless Puritans in New England.  Although Catholics and Jews were present, their numbers were negligible.  Thus, was born the myth that the U.S. is a “Protestant” nation.

That began changing in the 1840’s when Irish Catholics arrived by the thousands escaping starvation and economic misery caused by the potato blight.  Starvation became inevitable when landowners who controlled Parliament refused to reduce tariffs on imported agricultural products so that they could protect the profits generated from their vast farming estates.  

In the decade from 1845 to 1855, 20% of Boston became Irish. In 1884, Boston elected its first Irish mayor.  The Irish were followed by Italians, east Europeans, and Jews.  By 1900, 400,000 Bostonians from a population of 560,000 had at least one foreign-born parent. 

Boston mirrored the country. In the 1890’s, 3.7 million Europeans arrived in U.S.  From 1900 – 1910, another 7.6 million immigrants arrived.  These immigrants came for the same reasons that motivated our families to come to America.  They were seeking religious freedom, economic opportunities, escape from political oppression, or some combination of these reasons.

Europe was a mess at the end of the 19th century.  Industrialists, like modern oligarchs, used their money to ensure that laws protected their privileges and wealth, while a permanent underclass of workers lived in poverty and periodically starved.  Asia was also a mess. China’s economy never recovered from the Opium Wars of the 1840’s, when Europeans forcibly dumped copious amounts of opium and other goods on the Chinese market.   With no jobs at home, Chinese men emigrated to the U.S. where they built the western end of the transcontinental railway while sending most of their earnings home.  (Countries around the world today rely on money sent by documented and undocumented immigrants working in the U.S.)

3rd Class Berth

Europeans could buy steerage class tickets on steamships at ports in western Europe. (Many east Europeans traveling west passed through a Polish rail junction called Auschwitz.)   Steerage class was invented by steamship companies who needed a “backhaul” from Europe to the U.S., where they loaded American products bound for Europe.  Immigrants were stuffed into the holds of ships and half-starved during the two-week journey to America.  The steamship companies made profits almost as outsized as modern tech companies.

Steamship

Boston Brahmins (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) who traced their families back to the Puritans watched in alarm.  They were a living, breathing version of an Edith Wharton novel and they fretted that their “tribe” was facing extinction. 

They discovered that between 1850 and 1890, the family size for Harvard graduates shrunk by 30%; and at nearby Wellesley College, women were averaging 0.86 child per graduate.  (Economic research shows that as incomes rise, families have fewer children. In addition, girls who get an education are older before they have their first child, and they have fewer but healthier children.)

Theodore Roosevelt criticized the “willful sterility” of white Protestants which was causing a decline in white Americans.  He complained to a friend that the “Finnegans, Hoolihans, Antonios, Mandelbaums, and Rabinskis had 8 – 9 children.”   His complaint lives on in the “white replacement” fiction.

Some of the alarmed Boston Brahmins banded together in the Immigration Restriction League (IRL) in 1894. They were funded anonymously by John Murray Forbes, who had made his fortune in the Chinese opium trade.  Their mouthpiece was Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, another Boston Brahmin, who devoted his political career to passing a restrictive immigration law. 

Henry Cabot Lodge

Beginning in the 1890’s, Lodge pushed a literacy test which required immigrants to read five lines of the U.S. Constitution translated into their native language.  But the test only applied to males over the age of 16. Women were exempted to ensure there would be a steady supply of cooks and domestic servants for the Edith Wharton set. 

Not surprisingly, the steamship companies were the most vocal critics of American immigration laws.  They lavished money on lobbyists who pressured politicians at federal and state levels to vote against any restrictions on immigration. Truth, as usual, was the first casualty in the fight.  The lobbyists claimed that restricting European immigrants would mean increasing immigration of “negroes and half breeds.” 

Slowly, the nativists won. In 1882, the overtly racist Chinese Exclusion Act became law, banning all Chinese immigrants. To avoid a similar fate, in 1908, a “Gentlemen’s Agreement” with the U.S. required Japan to restrict emigration of their nationals. 

Other laws added restrictions, such as banning anarchists, epileptics, polygamists, lunatics, people with poor physiques or contagious (trachoma, tuberculosis) or loathsome (syphilis, gonorrhea, leprosy) diseases.  But even with these restrictions, only 1% of European immigrants were denied entry between 1880 – 1914.

Meanwhile, Lodge’s literacy test was splitting the Republican Party. Their infighting threw the 1912 presidential election to a misogynist and racist, Woodrow Wilson.  As a parting shot, lame duck President Howard Taft vetoed Lodge’s literacy test immigration bill.   

Wilson later vetoed another version of Lodge’s bill after someone explained to him that a sizable chunk of voters hailed from eastern and southern Europe, and some had even voted for him.  Wilson decided they were white enough to stay (and vote).  In revenge, Lodge crushed Wilson’s presidential legacy by ensuring the Senate voted against joining the League of Nations. 

Finally, in 1917, an immigration law passed with a literacy test. The test excluded children under the age of 16 or women accompanied by a literate husband or adult son.  Asians were barred entirely.  This law also gave the federal government broad authority to deport alien “radicals” even if they acquired their radical views long after arriving in the U.S.

The nativists scored their biggest victory with the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 which set an annual quota of 155,000 immigrants.  The law also set a 2% quota for each nation based on that country’s representation in the 1890 census (i.e., before millions of immigrants arrived).  A West Virginia Representative hailed the law as necessary for “keeping pure the blood of America”.

Since 1924, the U.S. has lurched through various iterations of laws restricting immigration.  Everyone agrees the system is broken but can’t agree on a solution.   Meanwhile, immigrants tend to be younger than the average American and more entrepreneurial.  They pay taxes, regardless of their immigration status, while generally being ineligible for social welfare programs, such as Food Stamps, Social Security benefits, and Medicaid.  That means, whether documented or undocumented, their labor and taxes support everyone else.   

At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, James Madison argued that immigrants were the engine of national growth and prosperity.  He was right.

To learn more about this nativist period in American history and its shocking connections to eugenics (a racist pseudoscience created in America and adopted by the Nazis), see The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent (2019). 

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Brave to the Edge of Destruction

It was raining and he didn’t want to get wet, so David Ruggles bought a ticket to sit inside the coach. Ruggles was something of a dandy, wearing a long, double-breasted jacket, white pants, a cravat (tie), and a stovepipe hat. He was traveling on business to sell newspaper subscriptions.

But the driver ignored his ticket and ordered him to ride outside, away from the white passengers. Ruggles refused. The coach driver dived into the coach and grabbed David, preparing to throw him out. Clothes ripped; buttons went flying. Ruggles was dragged bodily from the coach and forced to walk to his destination.

In 1833, more than one hundred years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, a black man in western Pennsylvania refused to give up his seat in a horse-drawn stagecoach. He lost because the laws and public sentiment were against him. But he wrote about the event in news articles and pamphlets. His articles opened a window on the daily injustices perpetrated against black Americans and persuaded more people to become abolitionists.

David Ruggles was brave to the edge of self-destruction. He fought fist fights, escaped from lynch mobs, was tossed off trains, canal boats, and stagecoaches, and survived the firebombing of his home and business. He never once considered backing down.

He was one of the earliest black entrepreneurs in the country, but he lived in poverty because every penny went to his cause. He ran a grocery store until a lynch mob burned it to the ground. He ran a bookstore in New York City’s Five Points neighborhood with the only reading room available to blacks until it was trashed by a racist mob. He wrote pamphlets and articles for abolition newspapers. He travelled constantly selling subscriptions to abolitionist newspapers.

It was a lonely fight. New York City and other northern cities practiced Jim Crow segregation long before the post-Civil War southern states engaged in the practice. The Five Points area in lower Manhattan was the only area where all races mixed freely and intermarried. That’s where Ruggles lived and worked as a serial entrepreneur.

Even the abolition movement was segregated in the north, with upper class whites rarely welcoming black people, regardless of income, into their own organizations. Ruggles was one of the few to cross the color line. However, his philosophy soon diverged from the white abolitionists.

In the 1830’s, white abolitionists advocated pacificism and thought the south could be persuaded to give up slavery because it would be the moral (Godly) thing to do. But they didn’t offer an alternative economic model, and besides, southerners weren’t interested in a preachy message delivered by a bunch of snotty do-gooders whose own businesses depended on the cotton and food produced by slaves.

David Ruggles knew that pacificism didn’t help black people. Federal and state laws allowed bounty hunters to come north of the Mason-Dixon Line to snatch any black person they found and smuggle them south into slavery. A variation involved kidnapping a black person and going before a judge with a fraudulent warrant or a witness to falsely swear that the defendant was an escaped slave. Northern judges tended to be pro-slavery or racist or both; most kidnapped victims ended up enslaved.

Another injustice was rampaging mobs. Black neighborhoods across the north were repeatedly devastated by racist mobs while the police stood by or joined in the attacks. In many cases, black victims were prosecuted for disturbing the peace. Meanwhile, the attackers were rarely charged and almost never convicted for the destruction of property or the murders they committed.

Ruggles believed that black citizens should be self-sufficient and avoid relying on a political and legal system that was stacked against them. He advocated self-defense as the path to dignity and self-determination. Imagine Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X combined into one man.

His most important creation was the Committee of Vigilance in New York City. The Committee paid private investigators to dig up evidence showing that bounty hunters were using fraudulent documentation to “prove” an individual was an escaped slave. They paid lawyers to represent the black defendants in court. One cadre of black committee members surveilled bounty hunters and the police so that they could rescue kidnapped victims before they could be shipped south into slavery. The victims were then smuggled out of the city and relocated to a safe place.

Soon Committees were formed in most cities and towns in the north. These committees soon became stops on the Underground Railroad. Ruggles was one of the earliest conductors on the Underground Railroad. One of the runaways David Ruggles helped was a man calling himself Frederick Bailey. We know him better today as Frederick Douglass.

But all the brawls, arrests, dodging lynch mobs, and constant struggles to find money, took a toll on Ruggles. His entire body began shutting down and his eyesight was failing. He moved to Florence, Connecticut for a water therapy treatment. He found it so beneficial that he created his own treatment spa. David Ruggles died in 1849 at the age of 39.

David Ruggles is largely forgotten today, whitewashed out of American history. He laid the groundwork for abolition societies in unfriendly white towns across New York and Pennsylvania but white abolitionists who later visited those same areas are the ones credited in the history books with turning the locals into abolitionists. Trying to restore Ruggles’ importance in American history today would doubtless be deemed as “wokeness”. He would not be surprised, only disappointed at how little seems to have changed in almost 200 years.

For more on this incredible man, check out The David Ruggles Center for History and Education

To read more of this fascinating time in American history, see The Republic of Violence, by J.D. Dickey (2022). The book is exceptionally well researched but would have benefited from a better chronology of events. The story tends to leap from one abolitionist to another without clearly indicating the year when the events happened. That makes it difficult to follow the sequence of events.

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Mud, Blood and Hope

March 4, 1865, began with torrential downpours that turned Pennsylvania Avenue into a sea of mud. The canal used to ferry supplies to the Capitol, whose central dome was still under construction, stank like a sewer. But the soaked crowds remained upbeat as they slogged through ankle-deep mud. Washington overflowed with politicians, hangers-on, and excited citizens gathered to witness President Abraham Lincoln’s second inauguration.

As the big day dawned, Lincoln was sitting in a small space near the Senate Chamber. The outgoing Congress had worked through the night to pass legislation. As each new bill was passed, a scribe recorded the final wording and handed it to a clerk to carry to the president for signature.

When not busy signing bills into new laws, Lincoln was talking with visitors. Some were friends congratulating him on his reelection; some were individuals begging for government jobs; and some were politicians trying to ingratiate themselves with the man they had been undermining because they thought he was unelectable.

Lincoln was unpopular during his presidency. He won the election in 1860 only because the pro-Southern vote split between two candidates. Southerners despised Lincoln as pro-abolitionist while many Northerners thought he was a hick from the sticks who would destroy the country in a needless war.

Both viewpoints could be supported by facts. By 1864, the Union had bankrupted itself spending $1.4 billion a year on the war. To manage the huge deficit, the government borrowed extensively and imposed the first federal income tax. None of the expense seemed worth it as the body count rose and the Union continued losing battles.

During the 1864 campaign, even Lincoln didn’t think he could win reelection. He was opposed by General George B. McClellan, whom he had fired, and by Salmon P. Chase, a former Cabinet member with a bad case of Potomac (i.e., political) fever. But then, the unexpected happened.

The war swung decisively in favor of the Union. Four years of carefully calculated patronage had put Lincoln’s allies in key positions in Congress, in federal departments and in state governments. A groundswell of support carried Lincoln over the line in the Electoral College.

A relieved but exhausted Lincoln occasionally cracked jokes on the morning of March 4th as he finished signing the new laws at the Capitol. Outside, the crowd swelled to an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 spectators, of which perhaps half were African Americans, some newly freed from slavery. Black soldiers of the Colored Troops guarded federal buildings and watched over the crowd.

Vice President Andrew Johnson arrived at the Capitol around 10 a.m., nursing a hangover from a celebratory party the previous evening. Johnson hailed from east Tennessee and owed his nomination to Lincoln’s desire to balance the ticket with a VP from a slave border state.

Johnson was jittery as he waited for his big moment and asked for whiskey to calm his nerves. Unfortunately, he didn’t stop at one drink. By noon when he was escorted into the Senate Chamber, he was flushed and drunk as skunk.

Johnson slurred through the oath of office. He then ignored the seven minutes allotted for his acceptance speech and embarked on a lengthy drunken screed bragging of his humble roots and implying that other Cabinet members lived in a privileged bubble. It was so embarrassing that even Lincoln’s enemies prayed to God to preserve Lincoln so that Johnson would never become president.

Lincoln waited down the hall until Johnson was finally herded back to his seat. Then he appeared in the Senate Chamber to take the oath of office before heading out the door to the Capitol steps to give the inaugural address. As they walked down the hall, Lincoln told an aide, “Don’t let Andy speak outside.”

Closely following the president as he walked down the hall was John Wilkes Booth. Booth was the Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt of his day, a famous actor who had fans on both sides of the political divide. He used his connections to obtain a VIP pass that allowed him inside the Capitol, where he planned to shoot Lincoln. As he pushed through the crowd around Lincoln, his erratic behavior caught the eye of the security guards. They detained him. Lincoln walked outside to give his address.

After all the anticipation, Lincoln’s address was deemed a dud. The gist of it was that the war’s suffering was God’s punishment on the North and the South for the sin of slavery. But having punished all Americans, Lincoln said, it was time to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and work together for a brighter future in a free and equal society.

That’s not what anyone expected to hear. Northerners wanted to hear jingoistic triumphalism about finally beginning to win the war. Black spectators couldn’t believe they were hearing the president advocate for racial equality. Southerners hated anything said by Lincoln.

Lincoln’s second inaugural address is now ranked with the Declaration of Independence for encapsulating our country’s aspirations. The speech is carved into the wall of the Lincoln Memorial next to the Gettysburg Address. The final paragraph begins, “With malice toward none; with charity for all.”

Many of today’s politicians claim the mantle of Lincoln. None of them comes close. They lack his wit and his political skills when negotiating with their political opponents. Most of all, their petty bickering and obsession with plans of revenge against their “enemies” is a desolate message; the polar opposite of Lincoln’s message of hope for a brighter future.

Additional fascinating details of Lincoln’s second inauguration can be found in Every Drop of Blood, by Edward Achorn (2020), a lively book crammed with vivid details.

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Why Does History Matter?

For most people, history is dull, boring and irrelevant. That attitude usually begins in a history class where the past becomes a slog through dates and events, often presented in the most boring way possible. Traumatized by dull lectures and duller history books, people routinely abandon the study of history. That is such a sad waste.

Understanding history is vital to our understanding of the world we live in today. First, history is full of role models, both good and bad. Second, history is our guide to understanding and (hopefully) avoiding the mistakes of the past. We should screw up in new ways so that our descendants have more choices when they study us.

Role models are easy to find since history is the written record of people and how they lived. History is full of heroes and villains unmatched by any video game, anime story, or movie. But it can be difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys in history because no one is ever all bad or all good.

A perfect example is George Armstrong Custer, the subject of almost as many books and movies as Adolf Hitler. Custer was a spoiled brat who managed to get an appointment to West Point where he apparently spent more time with women of a certain class than studying for exams. A recent biography hypothesizes that he was infected with syphilis while at West Point, the symptoms of which led to the dire consequences at Little Bighorn.

George A. Custer

Custer was cited for bravery as a Union Army general of cavalry troops during the Civil War. He was also a self-promoting braggart. In 1868, troops under his command attacked a peaceful Cheyenne encampment in the “battle” of the Washita, leaving the Indians without food or shelter in the middle of winter. In 1874, he led a military expedition to survey the Black Hills, an area sacred to the Lakota. Based on his fictionalized account of the expedition, whites swarmed the Black Hills seeking gold, in violation of several treaties with the Lakota (enforcement of the treaties continues in court to this day).

In June 1876, he ignored his orders, failed to do adequate reconnaissance and attacked an encampment at Little Bighorn (known to the Lakota as the Greasy Grass). Within hours, Custer was dead, along with most of his command, including a brother and a nephew. His widow, Elizabeth “Libby” Custer spent every day until her death in the 1930’s blaming everyone except her husband for the debacle. She even served as an advisor for a movie about Little Bighorn.

Or consider Vlad Dracul, of Wallachia, who committed unspeakable crimes against his subjects. But Vlad the Impaler is also a hero in eastern Europe because he successfully fought off the Ottoman Turks. As a result, Wallachia (now part of Romania) remained relatively peaceful while territory conquered by the Ottomans ripped itself apart in the 1980’s shattering into Muslim (Bosniak) and Orthodox Christian pieces.

Vlad Dracul

People are too complex to be simply good or bad. But history is written by the winners who want to present themselves in the best light possible while also demonizing their real and perceived enemies. That’s why every knucklehead out there wants to fight about what “history” is contained in the history books. The current battle revolves around whether women and minorities should get equal billing with white men when telling the story of our country.

Therefore, it is wise to always consider an author’s background and purpose for writing a book. A perfect example is the English translation of a biography of Oswald Boelcke, a World War I flying ace whose aerial combat tactics are still taught today. The original biography was written in the early 1930s so it harps on Oswald’s loyalty to Germany and obedience to his parents (traits that were important to Nazi control of Germany). Ignore the book’s Nazi propaganda and learn about the guy who taught the Red Baron how to fight.

The other reason to study history is to have a guide to understand our world today. Nothing happens in a vacuum. For every threat or opportunity that we face today, there is a parallel situation in the past. Looking at these past parallel events enables us to avoid making the same stupid mistakes – if we’re smart enough to figure it out.

In 2008, the American economy imploded under the weight of consumer debt. The consumer loans were packaged into bulk sales and sold as (mostly unregulated) securities. But overloaded consumers couldn’t keep up with debt payments and defaulted on the underlying loans, mostly mortgages. That meant the bulk sale “securities” didn’t provide sufficient dividends to cover the loan payments of investors who had borrowed to buy shares in the bulk sale “investment” products. The market crashed.

Then Bear Stearns, a New York based investment bank, collapsed. From Main Street to Wall Street, financial institutions suddenly didn’t trust each other because it was impossible to tell who was still solvent. Since the U.S. has the largest and deepest securities market in the world, it didn’t take long for the panic to spread to bourses around the world.

Fortunately for the U.S. and the global investment markets, the Federal Reserve was led by Ben Bernanke, a man who studied history. His PhD thesis examined the causes of the Great Depression of the 1930s and how the U.S. government’s reactionary (i.e., stingy) policies prolonged the financial mess. He applied the lessons learned to ensure that the financial collapse of 2008 didn’t turn into a 1930’s financial mess.

Ben Bernanke

For those workers (like me) who lost their jobs and whose 401(k)’s never recovered, it is heartbreaking. However, it could have been so much worse. After all, the 1930’s crash led directly to the rise of protectionism with high tariffs which further impoverished consumers and political populism which culminated in the rise of Hitler and the destruction that followed World War II. Bad policies cause horrific outcomes.

Why does history matter? We can’t live in the present or make plans for our future without understanding how the past affects our choices.

As you celebrate the holidays, I encourage you to stop by your local public library and pick up a book (not yet banned by the morals police) about an historical person or event. I guarantee it will be worth the investment of your time.

Happy holidays! Happy reading!

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Election Shenanigans

Before the 1960’s, there was no Republican Party in the old Confederate states.  There was only the Democratic Party; future Republican Party members were known as conservative Democrats.  So political fights revolved around factions of the Democratic Party.

The fights usually pitted rural interests against urban interests, conflicts that date back to the earliest days of the U.S.  It’s baked into the Constitution which requires each state to send two people to the U.S. Senate.  The original intent was to mitigate the risk of majoritarianism in the House of Representatives where states are allotted seats based on their population.  Political parties quickly realized that they could get around these checks and balances through election shenanigans. 

Election shenanigans in Tennessee from the 1930’s to the 1960’s were controlled by a crook from Memphis named Edward H. “Boss” Crump.  He decided who got elected to county offices and the state legislature, who became governor, and who went to Washington.

Boss Crump took a cut of all the state’s crooked activities, from bootleg whisky sales to kickbacks on government contracts.  Politicians got elected by turning a blind eye to the corruption of Boss and his boys.  The few courageous enough to object were beaten up by Boss’s thugs. Or they were arrested on bogus criminal charges and trotted in front of a Crump-elected state judge who would fine them or jail them.

Edward H. “Boss” Crump

When Boss needed extra votes to swing an election, his goons would round up black adults who were too poor to pay the poll tax.  The poll tax was a facially neutral law because poor whites were subject to it (they were never asked to pay it) that suppressed the black vote (who were forced to pay it if they wanted to vote).  Boss Crump’s men would pay the poll tax for their “voters” and then help them complete their paper ballots.  After voting, the black voters were carted back to their neighborhoods to be ignored until the next election needed to be stolen.  

But Boss Crump and his boys were beginning to feel the heat from a group of reformers based in Nashville. The reformers had already achieved a few successes, like implementing a system for permanent voter registration.  They also advocated the use of mechanical voting machines rather than paper ballots. Electronic voting eliminated stuffing the ballot box and stealing an election.  (Today’s election “integrity” idiots want to bring back paper ballots.)  

The reformers had also managed to eliminate the poll tax in some local elections. Their next challenge came in the 1946 election. The reformers planned to register World War II veterans as voters and select a few war heroes to run against Crump’s stooges. 

Crump’s machine set about ensuring the result they wanted.  That was easy since they controlled the state election commission. They moved the Democratic Party’s primary to November 1945 from the spring of 1946, hoping the reformers wouldn’t have time to organize.

In 1945, Davidson County and Nashville were two separate legal entities and a microcosm of the state’s rural voters squaring off against the big city. The rural Davidson County machine belonged to Boss Crump. The city machine accepted support from the reformers because they expected it to help their electoral prospects, not because they believed in reforming politics.

On the day of the primary, the hottest contest was for the office of Davidson County sheriff.  When the polls closed at 7 pm, each precinct tallied their ballots and telephoned the county election commission with the final numbers.  For most of the evening, the reformer’s candidate was in the lead. 

The last precinct to report was Hopewell. Hopewell was a primarily black neighborhood near Old Hickory Village, across the river from Nashville on the east side of Davidson County.  At 7 pm, the Hopewell ballot box had been collected by a couple of state troopers who worked for Boss Crump.  They drove around for hours drinking whiskey and periodically telephoning the election commission (controlled by Boss’s men) to get an update on the vote count.

Finally, late into the night, the Hopewell results were received by the election commission.  Boss Crump’s man had carried that precinct and won the primary. Some reformers noted that the voter turnout in Hopewell was suspiciously high, especially when compared to the overall low voter turnout.

That left the reformers with a dilemma.  If they sued to set aside the fraudulent votes, they would disenfranchise the black voters of Hopewell who had been duped, bribed, or intimidated into voting for Boss Crump’s candidate.  That would undo all their efforts fighting the Jim Crow voter suppression laws aimed at disenfranchising black voters.

Instead, the reformers sued claiming the results were invalid because the primary was held at the wrong time.  Crump’s machine owned the election commission lawyers who argued that it was only the primary; nobody was elected to office yet. No harm, no foul. The Crump judge agreed, conveniently ignoring the fact that in a one-party state, winning the Democratic primary was the same as being elected.

The reformer’s candidate decided to run as an independent against Boss Crump’s man. Boss’s men weren’t about to let voters decide the outcome.  In one precinct, the mechanical voting machines mysteriously failed and over 200 voters had to leave without voting to get to work.  During the noon rush, electrical power failed for an hour and a half.  These shenanigans ensured that Crump’s man became the Davidson County sheriff.

Today, the Hopewell community no longer exists.  Boss Crump’s political machine was eventually taken down in a series of corruption trials brought by the U.S. Department of Justice.  In 1962, Davidson County and Nashville merged into one legal entity, Metro Nashville.

Boss Crump’s vote stealing methods are out of fashion.  Today’s, election shenanigans revolve around gerrymandering in which political parties carve up their states’ voters into absurdly shaped districts to ensure their party perpetuates itself in power.

Tennessee is again a one-party state, now controlled by the Republican Party.  The state consistently ranks among the lowest for voter registration and voter turnout.   

This account of political corruption is based on, The Secrets of the Hopewell Box, by James D. Squires (2012).  Mr. Squires grew up in a family aligned with the Old Hickory branch of Boss Crump’s machine.  His book also describes the racial integration of Nashville in the early 1960’s, naming a veritable who’s who of the Civil Rights movement.    

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The Seductive Power of Victimhood

Everyone was mad about everything.  Society was changing with independent women demanding equal opportunities in education, jobs, politics, and sports.  Workers worried that new technology and immigrants were stealing their jobs.  The wealthy were getting richer while everyone else was struggling to pay their bills.

Britain in the 1930’s was a chaotic mess of seething fears as everyone was convinced that they would be the biggest losers in a changing society.   One group with deep-seated fears were the aristocrats.  The upper crust of England was in deep trouble.  

Aristocrats had been struggling for generations to keep up appearances.  They didn’t want to “smell of the shops” by getting a paying job. However, a centuries-old tradition of alcoholism (“drunk as a lord”) and gambling didn’t help their bank accounts.

Maintaining the family pile, whether a Georgian mansion or a castle, was hideously expensive.  Finding servants was difficult. The prestige of being “in service” was no longer attractive when workers could move to the city and make money working in a factory.  Much of the land was entailed, meaning held in trust for the next generation, but still subject to inheritance taxes that could bankrupt a family.

Then World War I killed off a generation of aristocrats who served as military officers. The empire they fought for began to crumble as their colonies demanded independence.  Voters were increasingly restless, feeling that the aristocrats running the country were out of touch with everyday problems. 

Aristocrats could feel their power and privileges oozing away.  On top of all their other troubles, they felt threatened by communism.  Lenin wanted to spread Russian communism around the world which scared the hell out of those paying attention to the rising body count as Russia purged enemies of the state.  England wasn’t facing the level of violence seen in Germany where communists and fascists fought street wars with military grade weapons, but every labor strike was viewed as the first domino falling in a communist takeover.  

Who could the aristocrats turn to for answers to their fears? In 1933, Mein Kampf was published in England.  Adolf Hitler’s book explained that nothing was their fault because they were victims of an international Jewish conspiracy. 

 In the 1930’s, Jews comprised about 0.65% of England’s population. Despite this, a group of aristocrats saw Jewish conspiracies everywhere.  Like the QAnon conspiracies of today, their conspiracies ranged from laughably ridiculous to scarily nihilistic.  Jews controlled the British film industry. Jewish bankers controlled the world by lending money at high interest rates so that the whole world was in hock to them.  Jews controlled English newspapers that pumped out fake news about honest, pure-hearted fascists. Jews in New York were plotting to start another world war.   

 For fascists, like QAnon believers today, a lack of actual evidence was proof that the conspiracies were true.  It allowed them to believe that they were victims of circumstances beyond their control.  The fact that Hitler blamed Jews supported the existing world view of English aristocrats who were already prone to anti-Semitism. 

Hitler was a chameleon like all populist politicians, telling his audience what they wanted to hear.  One English newspaper praised Hitler for being “definitely Christian in his ideals”. 

Carefully stage-managed interviews portrayed him as being opposed to war, even as he began rearming Germany.   

The English fascists continued to support the policy of appeasement even after England declared war in 1939.  They blamed Jews for starting World War II and believed that Nazi Germany would win easily because its military was superior to England’s.  Their rationale is eerily similar to the U.S. and European politicians who blame Ukraine for Putin’s invasion and who have been shocked by Ukraine’s spirited defense.

 The English fascist movement revolved around a small group of right-wing aristocrats who met for country house weekends and dinners at their London houses, living in an echo chamber of complaint about how Jews were destroying the world.  They tended to be members of a few families or of the same social clubs.  A well-known example are Unity and Diana Mitford who were raised in a rightwing, anti-Semitic household.   

Diana Mitford was the mistress of Sir Oswald Mosely, an aristocrat and Member of Parliament who founded the British Union of Fascists (BUF), also known as the Black Shirts.  Diana used her first husband’s money to fund BUF activities.  In 1936, Diana married Mosely in Berlin after they had dumped their cuckolded spouses.   

Unity Mitford moved to Munich and chased after Hitler like a groupie chasing the lead singer of her favorite rock band.  In her eyes, Hitler could do no wrong. When Hitler ordered the murder of Ernst Rohm and other leaders of the Sturm Abteilung (SA), Unity wrote that it was so sad for Hitler to have been betrayed by Rohm. 

English fascism never caught on.  They blamed their lack of popular support on “fake news” that vilified them, never mind that they had their own newspapers spreading their “truths”.  When England declared war, they were arrested. After the war, Oswald and Diana Mosely moved to Paris where they lived near their old friends, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.  Unity Mitford was repatriated from Germany in 1940 and died of meningitis in 1948. 

Victimhood continues to be attractive socially and politically. Victimhood allows believers to never take responsibility for their own actions; they can simply blame every real and perceived setback and loss on others. (If it sounds tedious and depressing, that’s because it is.)

For a quick read about English fascists and Unity Mitford’s pursuit of Hitler, see Hitler’s Girl, by Lauren Young (2022).

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Pandemics Then and Now

In October 1347, a ship with a crew of dead and dying sailors slipped into the harbor at Messina, Sicily. The infected sailors were covered with stinking, oozing sores and they were delivering an unexpected cargo, the Black Death.

The Black Death had two varieties. One strain infected the bloodstream causing swelling (buboes) in the lymph nodes and internal bleeding. It killed within a few days. The other strain was pneumatic, infecting the lungs. There were no government mandates requiring masks, so coughing people spewed their infection on everyone in their vicinity. The respiratory version could kill within 24 hours.

Europeans had been hearing stories for more than a year about a dreadful disease with hideous symptoms that killed almost instantly. The stories that passed along the Silk Road and other trade routes were so horrifying they sounded like a fairytale. Most Europeans thought death on such a scale was impossible.

The disease spread faster than a wildfire across Europe, as more ships with infected crews arrived at European ports. International trade shut down as port cities began refusing ships permission to dock in a doomed effort to stop the spread of the disease.

The Black Death gyrated around Europe, infecting one region, then moving to another region. During winter, it seemed to disappear only to start killing again the following spring. As dead bodies piled up, officials had difficulty finding volunteers sufficiently healthy and willing to dig the graves. In Avignon, France, bodies were simply tossed into the Rhone River.

Jean Froissart, the medieval French chronicler, claimed that a third of the world died from the disease. Tax rolls indicate that about half the people died in many places. Major cities suffered the most thanks to the wretched sanitary conditions. (The modern equivalent of medieval city life are the slums around great cities in Africa, India and South America; places full of small businesses and entrepreneurial people who are neglected by the politicians living in gated communities with guards and flushing toilets.)

As people died, the medieval social contract collapsed. The medieval world was hierarchical, with a king (or sometimes a queen), sitting atop a pyramid of land-owning aristocrats which included the Catholic church, and agricultural workers who were literally owned by their liege lords. Everyone owed allegiance to the tier above them. But with so much death, allegiance meant nothing.

Those who didn’t die were left in a fog of anxiety and gloom. To alleviate their fears of death, many people stopped working and indulged in a frenzy of partying, fornicating, and thievery. (Thucydides records similar behavior during the great plague of Athens in 430 B.C. Another example is Berlin in 1945 when Nazi functionaries drank, fornicated, and stole whatever they could before the Russians arrived.)

Farmers stopped farming as they sank into a numbed apathy caused by the death of friends and family. As much as half the arable land was abandoned because there was no one to work in the fields. Since the harvest of one year was critical for winter food supplies and the seed needed for the following year’s crops, much of Europe faced the threat of famine.

After a couple of years, the Black Death subsided and a new “normal” took over. The new normal looked a bit like the aftermath of the covid pandemic with bargaining power swinging to the workers. Nothing helps to raise wages like killing off half the workforce.

In 1349, the tanners of Amiens demanded huge wage rises to compensate them for the extra work caused by staff shortages. Textile workers in northern France received three pay raises within a year after the Black Death laid waste to their region. It wasn’t just labor shortages; the price of everything was rising.

At first, merchants had taken a huge hit as they marked down excess inventory. Then goods became scarce due to slow production caused by a lack of workers and supply chain interruptions. Prices soared leaving many people unable to afford necessities, like food.

When the Black Death arrived, Europe was already transitioning to a new economic model based on money rather than barter. The new economy shifted power to the cities and their guilds. The Italian banking houses were amassing vast sums of money that greased the wheels of commerce. Now, with a shortage of workers and peasants transitioning to paying jobs in the cities, the relative losers were kings who collected taxes from fewer taxpayers and aristocrats who had land but no money. (Fans of Downton Abbey will recognize the theme of genteel poverty.)

The kings and aristocrats naturally objected to their relative loss of power and passed laws suppressing wage rises. England’s Statute of Laborers issued in 1345 was used until the 20th century as the basis for “conspiracy” charges against union organizers. The reactionary laws caused rising resentment and friction between rich and poor, aristocrats and peasants. Aristocrats may have lacked cash, but they were still one-percenters in the eyes of the peasants.

In 1381, rising taxes in England and France led to open revolts. The kings and aristocrats eventually won, but at the cost of many more lives and vast stretches of ruined land and cities. It was an exercise in futility. The old Medieval social contract was gone for good. After the Black Death, cities steadily gained power as everyone transitioned to a money-based economy.

This account is based on A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century, by Barbara W. Tuchman (1978). For those wanting a deeper dive into the transition to a money-based economy try Feudal Society, by Marc Bloch (1939). In the public TV series Secrets of the Dead, (Season 3, 2002), a geneticist studied an English village which escaped the Black Death due to a genetic mutation. Interestingly, the mutation seems to also create an immunity to the modern scourge of HIV/Aids.

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A Moral Man in an Immoral Society

Is it possible to remain ethical while working for a government built on corruption and violence?  That is the dilemma faced by Fridolin von Senger und Etterlin, a German general in World War II.

Senger was born in 1891 in Bavaria.  He could easily have become a scholar rather than a soldier.  In 1912, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar, where he became fluent in French and English.  But when World War I began in August 1914, he returned to Germany and joined the German Army.

FRIDOLIN VON SENGER UND ETTERLIN

His war record was meritorious enough to ensure he was selected as one of the 100,000 soldiers allowed by the Versailles Treaty during the Weimar Republic.  The rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis must have been a depressing shock.  Senger was a devout Catholic and a lay Benedictine who hated Hitler as the immoral demagogue he was.

In 1934, Hitler changed the oath of allegiance for the military.  Where the military had sworn allegiance to the German Constitution and the country, the new “Hitler” oath required them to swear unconditional obedience to Adolf Hitler. 

The new oath was one of the earliest moral tests experienced by Senger.  Whatever his personal feelings, and those of the other anti-Hitler officers, they all took the oath.  They may have believed they could mitigate the damage inflicted by Hitler and his sycophantic entourage by staying on the job. It was also the only way to keep their jobs, although most ended up watching individuals with fewer moral qualms get promoted ahead of them. 

Senger was never promoted above the level of a corps commander despite serving well in the 1940 campaign against France and the invasion of Russia.  In 1943, he was transferred to the relative backwater Italian front where he served until the end of the war.   He is remembered today for what he did – and didn’t do – in Italy.

The Italian theater of operations began in September 1943 when the British and Americans crossed over from Sicily.  The Allies thought they could be in Rome within weeks because they expected the Italians to surrender (they did) and the Germans to retreat to the Alps (they didn’t). 

Invading Italy from the south is militarily stupid.  The Apennines Mountain chain runs up the spine of the peninsula with a fringe of low-lying ground on each coast.  The mountains are broken up by valleys and rivers.  The Germans usually held the high ground, choosing when to fight and when to fall back to the next line of defense. They were able to defend every inch of ground despite being outmanned, outgunned, and lacking air support. 

The Allies suffered huge losses as the Germans retreated slowly from one fortified position to the next.  Senger was the key tactical architect of these defensive maneuvers as the commander of the XIV Corps.  His corps had orders to delay the Allied advance as long as possible to allow time to strengthen the main defensive line south of Rome. 

The main defensive line was the Gustav Line, stretching across the narrowest point of Italy and blocking the road to Rome.  It consisted of a series of fortifications across the mountains near the great Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino.  Although Senger built many strongpoints around the Abbey, he ordered his troops to avoid the Abbey itself.  As a Catholic and an amateur historian, he made it clear that he didn’t want to weaponize the Abbey. 

In January 1944, the Allies bombed the Gustav Line, reducing the great Abbey to ruins.   The Allies argued that the Abbey was a fortified defensive position for the Germans; the Germans retorted that they only moved into the ruins of the Abbey after it was flattened by the Allies.  This operation remains controversial, in part because it destroyed a cultural monument.  (The United Nations has since adopted rules that make the destruction of cultural monuments a war crime. War causes moral dilemmas on many levels.)

The Italian campaign had other controversies related to the rules of war.  As the Germans retreated, Italian partisans attacked their supply lines and troops.  In a fit of rage, Hitler ordered reprisals against civilians in the areas where partisans operated.  (A war crime.)

Senger refused to obey, and he ordered all the troops under his command not to engage in reprisal attacks or murders of civilians.  Senger managed to avoid being fired by Hitler, probably because his tactical skills were needed as the Germans continued to retreat toward the Alps through a seemingly endless series of improvised defensive positions.   When the Germans in Italy finally surrendered in May 1945, Senger represented the German Army. 

Senger’s dilemma resonates today as populists are once again lying, cheating and bullying their way into power.  Populists and dictators (two sides of the same coin) know their positions are morally and ethically bankrupt. That’s why they hate, and fear, moral people who see through their demagoguery.  While it’s popular to talk about “speaking truth to power”, few people have the suicidal courage exhibited by Alexei Navalny who did and was murdered on Putin’s orders.  

Senger managed to stay alive and remain a moral man while serving an immoral regime led by a paranoid megalomaniac.  He died in 1963. 

For a philosophical view on this topic, I recommend, Moral Man and Immoral Society, by Reinhold Niebuhr, continuously in print since 1932.  Niebuhr was an optimist; he believed that individual morality could overcome an immoral society.

MORAL MAN AND IMMORAL SOCIETY

This account of Senger’s life is based on, Fatal Decision, by Carlo d’Este (1991), a well-researched account of the Italian campaign focusing on the flawed Anzio-Nettuno operation.   

FATAL DECISION

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