Oh Say Can You See? IV: The Rise of Big Brother: Pt. 4

Series: Oh Say Can You See? IV: The Rise of Big Brother
Entry 4: “Band of Big Brothers”

(This is the 4^th entry in a series on The Rise of Big Brother.
Be sure to start with Entry 1
in order to understand the following material in context.)

 The US Government was far too busy at the beginning of the US involvement in WW1 to place a major federal emphasis on trying to track down draft-dodgers…labeled “slackers” in early 20^th Century slang. It had neither the manpower nor the bureaucratic organization in place to effectively deal with this issue. So government officials were pleased as punch when the home-grown super-patriotism of hundreds of thousands of US citizens prompted them to join the volunteer ranks of the American Protective League—and the League volunteered to rally all its volunteers to take on the task of tackling the slacker problem.

Voluntarism also shaped the “slacker raids,” vast dragnet operations of interrogation conducted by the 250,000 volunteer members of the American Protective League. … the American Protective League put a local face on a distant federal power, but that power was only possible in the first place because citizens voluntarily participated in the league. This was what bottom-up state-building was all about.

The idea for slacker raiding developed from within the American Protective League itself. The Bureau of Investigation depended on the APL’s detective work, and many operatives—even if they were not technically authorized to make arrests—did so. (They also eagerly claimed the $50 rewards that the U.S. Army offered for the delivery of alleged deserters to military camps.) Similarly, league men had been making individual interrogations and small-scale raids on their own initiative for some time. [Uncle Sam Wants You: World War 1 and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (USWY)]

The federal government had done its part in trying to bring down the numbers of those avoiding the draft, including through hard-sell propaganda posters that used “shame” to promote enlistment.

But that wasn’t enough, and it appeared as if hundreds of thousands of men were shirking their patriotic duty. So…

In the spring of 1918, authorities in the War Department, responding to the offers of the eager patriots of the APL, contemplated using their services to bring in slackers.

…Its first citywide sweeps took place in Minneapolis and Pittsburgh on March 26, 1918…These were followed by the first multi-day, large-scale slacker raid, which took place in Chicago from July 11 to 14, 1918. There, more than 10,000 men from all branches of governmental authority participated, interrogating more than 150,000 men in the course of a few days.

The Chicago incident typified slacker raids nationwide. For one thing, a wide variety of men claimed the authority to detain possible slackers. Chicago’s APL operatives joined professional Department of Justice agents, city police, and soldiers and sailors on furlough in the city. Evidence from the Chicago raids and later ones in New York suggests that despite the presence of military personnel and local police, the Justice Department and the APL called the shots; the league handled about 75 percent of Chicago’s cases. [All further quotations in this entry are from USWY]

What was a slacker raid like?

The Chicago slacker raid was a thoroughly modern phenomenon. It targeted places of mass entertainment and congregation: railroad stations, movie theaters, even a baseball game at Comiskey Park. It used automobiles to shuttle detainees across town, as well as telephones and telegrams to communicate with their draft boards. The scope and scale of the Chicago raid testify to the APL’s ambition; this was no Sunday picnic. Modern bureaucracy came in handy, too: what happened to a man during a slacker raid had little to do with his political views or, ironically enough, whether he was actually liable for military service. What mattered was his ability to demonstrate a state-sanctioned identity, age, and classification status to the satisfaction of the authorities by showing his card.

Those of draft age were expected to carry their registration card with them at all times. But draft registration had only been around for a few months. Remembering to put your draft card in your pocket every time you stepped outside your home was no doubt a habit instilled in very few men…before the slacker raids. And what of those men who didn’t “look their age”? The Selective Service Act of May 18, 1917, required men ages 21-30 to register. This was changed in August, 1918, to 18-45.  In either case, men just a few years younger than the minimum might well look draft age, and could be stopped and interrogated. And if the interrogator was convinced the young man might be of draft age—and he couldn’t produce “proof” of his age—he was liable to being taken into custody. The same would be true of men a year or more older than the upper age limit. If they appeared to be draft age, they were liable at any time to being stopped and asked for proof of age, and for proof of registration if they were of draft age.

Proof of age might be a driver’s license…which a large proportion of young men would not have possessed, since only 1 in 13 families in the US owned a car in 1918. Or it could have been a birth certificate. But how many people, even today, go around with a copy of their birth certificate in their pocket? Most people back then probably didn’t even own a copy of such a certificate.  The original would just reside in a court house somewhere.

The zealous APL men had absolutely no interest in the issue of false arrest. They had invented a job to do, and they did it with a vengeance. To very little good purpose, as it turned out.

As would be repeated nationwide, the number of draft evaders rooted out during Chicago’s raids was trifling in comparison with the effort required to carry them out. Questioning in Chicago yielded some 20,000 detainees (mostly for failure to carry identity cards), of whom 1,200 alleged draft evaders were turned over to army authorities; nearly all were hastily released. These dismal results would be reproduced in cities across the country during the summer of 1918.

The Chicago slacker raid met with general approval. The Spy Glass, the APL’s official newsletter, noted that “there was little or no disturbance and few attempts to resist the authority of the League men who conducted the roundup. Most of the young fellows took their arrest as a disagreeable joke due to their own neglect and waited patiently until their identification could be completed.”

The power of the APL was not just regional. Men from all parts of the country were eager to possess an imposing membership card, wear a flashy badge, and take part in slacker raids!

…Slacker raiding reached a fever pitch in the late summer of 1918, with raids at New York City’s Coney Island on July 21 and in Trenton on August 2 (with a follow-up raid later that month). League men hit Atlantic City on August 15 and Galveston, Texas, on July 3 and August 28. On September 1, they rounded up San Francisco’s slackers, moving on to Sacramento two days later.

They also raided Los Angeles, as shown in this headline clipped from an August 1, 1918, Los Angeles paper.

And that brings us to New York City. Just fifty years earlier, New York City had been the site of the horrendous four-day draft riot that devastated much of the city and injured or killed so many, described in the previous entry in this series. But the mood of the US populace had definitely shifted in the intervening years. I wonder just how those pugnacious Irishmen of the 1860s would have dealt with the stuffed-shirt, middle class APL men who wandered the streets of New York in early September, 1918, accosting men who were minding their own business.

But of all the earlier drives, none matched the New York City slacker raids of September 3 to 5, 1918—in size or in controversy.

…For the patriot volunteers of the American Protective League, the time for action was now. And the place for action was New York City: “we find that the great states of each coast are practically foreign—New York most of all,” bemoaned Emerson Hough. The War Department offered its own bit of foreshadowing for the raids, announcing in New York newspapers on September 1 that “a great organization, extending into every State … has been constructed to hunt down those attempting to evade the new selective service law.” As Provost Marshal General Enoch Crowder noted in the same article, “The registrant’s protection is to have with him at all times his registration cards.… Failure to carry these credentials will render him liable to arrest at any time.” The Justice Department would later point to this article as “fair warning” of events to come.

Conveniently, the Justice Department also shut down the offices of the New York Civil Liberties Bureau and the New York Bureau of Legal Advice two days before the raids.

I’m always surprised at people today who rant how their “rights as citizens” are being trampled on by whatever regime is present in Washington, as if this is some new thing! And when they do, it is often for the most minor irritation. How would they have liked to have been a 22-year-old man without his draft card, minding his own business out on the town in New York City, perhaps in a soda shop having a sundae with his lady friend, on September 3, 1918?

Beginning at 6:30 A.M. on a hot, sticky day with on-again, off-again rain, the New York City slacker raids marked a unique marshaling of American political culture’s powers of enforcement. The APL later estimated that somewhere between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand men participated: city police, government agents from the Department of Justice, more than two thousand soldiers and one thousand sailors, and thousands of American Protective League operatives. For three days, they scoured the city’s streets and public places, interrogating somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 men.

A man who lacked a draft registration or classification card found himself escorted by these self-appointed authorities to the nearest police station and from there to one of the city’s armories or, in some cases, municipal jails.

Yep, they were herded just like cattle, as can be seen from this snapshot taken during that infamous three-day Raid.

Although some men did complain afterward of rough handling, operatives had been cautioned to be “courteous but firm,” and there is remarkably little evidence of physical violence; the Nation later marveled at “the long-suffering patience of the public.”

The raiders began their work that busy Tuesday morning by surrounding the exits and entrances of every train, ferry, subway, and elevated station; before rush hour was over, nearly 2,500 men had been seized from the stations alone.

And there is no question that the raiders had absolutely no sense of “mercy rather than justice” in special cases.

One couple, fresh from their wedding in upstate New York, stepped off the train in Grand Central Terminal and found themselves accosted by a sailor. “We were only married in Plattsburg [sic] yesterday, and you don’t suppose I thought anything about draft board cards?” the husband asked. Unmoved by the couple’s newfound marital bliss, the sailor whipped back, “Hard luck, but you’ll have to come along.”

There was no limit to where they would accost men in their single-minded quest to ferret out slackers.

By noon, the raiders had shifted their attention to Manhattan’s midtown and downtown business districts, often cordoning off whole blocks and interrogating the men on the street. Later, they raided theaters, saloons, billiard parlors, and boarding houses. Sailors wandered through the city’s restaurants, moving from table to table inspecting the cards of diners. Frequently, they then moved from the dining room to the kitchen…

Nor did raiders show any partiality to those who were “on their side.”

… By 1:00 P.M., authorities had gathered “a considerable crowd” at Lafayette Place and Fifth Street. A nearby truck driver volunteered to haul the men to the armory at Twenty-Sixth Street, but after performing his bit for the country, the driver was unable to produce his own draft card and had to leave his truck at the curb and go inside the armory.

Operatives were soon told to cease interrogating drivers at the wheel because abandoned vehicles were interrupting the flow of traffic.

Nor did the raiders show any favoritism to celebrities.

One of the more dramatic raids took place at the Lexington Avenue Theatre, where soldier-actors from nearby Camp Upton performed the musical comedy Yip, Yip, Yaphank before a crowded house. Just before one of the intermissions, a slacker patrol—made up primarily of navy men, but under the direction of an APL inspector—entered the orchestra pit and, as the curtain fell on the act, demanded to see the registration cards of all the eligible men in the audience. Confusion ensued, and the investigation was put off until the end of the show, thanks to the intervention of a military officer: Sergeant Irving Berlin, the musical director of Yip, Yip, Yaphank, who was responsible for the men in the cast and furious that his performance had been interrupted.

By the second day of the raid, New Yorkers had already learned to carry their draft cards; the intensity of the raids did not abate, but the number of arrests did. “Young men walking for two or three blocks in Times Square were usually held up six or seven times in that distance, but few complained,” a reporter noted. “Nearly every one had his draft card handy and showed it with a smile.” Many made hasty efforts to document their identities. So many men crowded the offices of the State Military Census Bureau looking for duplicate registration cards that the police had to be called in to disperse the crowd after the forms ran out.

I wonder how many of these super-patriots had ever been in the military service themselves? And if not, I wonder if they had the slightest twinge of cognitive dissonance about their crusade. Probably not. I suppose some might have served in the Spanish-American War…

By the third day, the draft dodgers still did not appear, and some slacker raiders’ initial enthusiasm began to wane. Others stepped up their methods, raiding a restaurant on the Lower East Side, where they captured a handful of men who had been wanted in association with socialist agitation (although their draft papers were apparently in order). Army privates and military police invaded the city’s financial district, interrupting trading at the Wall Street curb market and closing off the Equitable Building, where they interrogated the building’s seventeen thousand employees. They uncovered just twenty-two men without registration or classification cards; all of them were eventually released.

You’d kind of think that with up to 500,000 men interrogated in just three days, there would have been a real bonanza of slackers forced to jump on the patriotism bandwagon. Not so.

But authentic slackers and enemy aliens were few and far between. By the end of the three days, 60,187 men had been detained in New York City and its surrounding suburbs. But of these, only 199 were actual draft dodgers who would later end up in military uniform. And the number of “willful deserters”—men who had deliberately ignored Uncle Sam’s call-up and were therefore eligible for court-martial—was even lower. New York City’s draft director, Martin Conboy, could identify only eight men who were actually shipped off to Camp Upton as a result of the raids.

So for every real “slacker”…

…there were approximately three hundred men who spent the night in a city jail solely because they could not document their identity, age, or draft registration status to their interrogators.

The next time you are tempted to gripe about how much you think “liberty” in America has been infringed upon in recent years, and to wax nostalgic about how much better you think it would have been a century ago…take a little reality break and consider the Slacker Raids. You didn’t need some central “Big Brother” figure to keep an eye on you back then…you had a whole gigantic Band of Big Brothers ready to box your ears if they even THOUGHT you might have gotten out of line.

But don’t stop there. Watch for the next entry in this series, come on along with me, and let’s examine even more of what it was like to live in the Land of the Free in the Good Old Days of a century ago.

Oh Say Can You See? IV: The Rise of Big Brother: Pt. 3

Series: Oh Say Can You See? IV: The Rise of Big Brother
Entry 3: Burning More Than Draft Cards

(This is the 3rd entry in a series on The Rise of Big Brother.
Be sure to start with Entry 1
in order to understand the following material in context.)

 The administration asserts the right to fill the ranks of the regular army by compulsion…. Is this, sir, consistent with the character of a free government? Is this civil liberty? Is this the real character of our Constitution? No, sir, indeed it is not…. Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take children from their parents, and parents from their children, and compel them to fight the battles of any war, in which the folly or the wickedness of government may engage it? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremendous and baleful aspect, to trample down and destroy the dearest rights of personal liberty?

Guess by whom, where, and when the speech excerpt above was delivered. I’ll follow up with the answer in a few paragraphs.

I graduated from high school in June 1964, and entered college in the fall of that year, just as the US military involvement in Viet Nam was heating up.  That left me keenly aware of The Draft. As a female, I wasn’t subject to this potential governmental disruption of my life. But plenty of my male friends were. And very early on, some of them didn’t take it lying down. In May 1964, the first of the Draft Card Burnings took place.

Oh. Wait. That isn’t a poster from the US Viet Nam Era…that’s from Australia! Yes, they had their own draft resistance when their government started drafting men to be sent to fight in Viet Nam, and young men there borrowed the draft card burning idea from their contemporaries in the US. That poster is from Melbourne in 1966. Here is a pic of a home-grown draft card burning event in Central Park in New York in 1967.

Although I was aware of the draft in 1964, I actually had no concept of when and how it had become a part of the American Way of Life. And, in fact, only in recent days have I looked into the history of the institution of “conscription”—forced military service—in the US.

I don’t remember what my assumptions were back in my teen years, but I think it was likely that I just assumed the US federal government had, from Colonial Times, put in place a system that could draft men into a national army, to be used if and when the country was threatened by external military forces. If so, I would have been wrong.

In America before 1862, combat duty was always voluntary, but white men aged 18 to 45 were usually required to join local militia units. Colonial militia laws—and after 1776 those of the states—required able-bodied white men to enroll in the militia and to undergo a minimum of military training, all without pay. Colonial Pennsylvania (controlled by Quakers) did not have such laws. Members of pacifist religious denominations were exempt. When combat troops were needed some of the militiamen volunteered for short terms of service, for which they were paid. Following this system in its essentials, the Continental Congress in 1778 recommended that the states draft men from their militias for one year’s service in the Continental army; this first national conscription was irregularly applied and failed to fill the Continental ranks.

In 1814, President James Madison proposed conscription of 40,000 men for the army, but the War of 1812 ended before Congress took any action. An 1840 proposal for a standing army of 200,000 men included conscription, but it never passed and military service was voluntary before 1862.[Wiki: Conscription]

The quote at the beginning of this blog entry was made in 1814 in relation to Madison’s proposal for conscription. It was delivered by Daniel Webster in a speech in the US House of Representatives, in protest against the conscription bill being considered in Congress. Webster was very passionate about the topic:

The services of the men to be raised under this act are not limited to those cases in which alone this Government is entitled to the aid of the militia of the States. These cases are particularly stated in the Constitution — “to repel invasion, suppress insurrection, or execute the laws.”

The question is nothing less, than whether the most essential rights of personal liberty shall be surrendered, and despotism embraced in its worst form. When the present generation of men shall be swept away, and that this Government ever existed shall be a matter of history only, I desire that it may then be known, that you have not proceeded in your course unadmonished and unforewarned. Let it then be known, that there were those, who would have stopped you, in the career of your measures, and held you back, as by the skirts of your garments, from the precipice, over which you are plunging, and drawing after you the Government of your Country.

…The administration asserts the right to fill the ranks of the regular army by compulsion. It contends that it may now take one out of every twenty-five men, and any part or the whole of the rest, whenever its occasions require. Persons thus taken by force, and put into an army, may be compelled to serve there, during the war, or for life. They may be put on any service, at home or abroad, for defense or for invasion, according to the will and pleasure of Government. This power does not grow out of any invasion of the country, or even out of a state of war. It belongs to Government at all times, in peace as well as in war, and is to be exercised under all circumstances, according to its mere discretion. This, Sir, is the amount of the principle contended for by the Secretary of War (James Monroe).

Is this, Sir, consistent with the character of a free Government? Is this civil liberty? Is this the real character of our Constitution? No, Sir, indeed it is not. The Constitution is libeled, foully libeled. The people of this country have not established for themselves such a fabric of despotism. They have not purchased at a vast expense of their own treasure and their own blood a Magna Carta to be slaves.

I’d never seen this speech before today. I’m suspicious it may have been quoted a number of times back at the height of the Anti-War movement in the 1960s and 1970s! Read the complete speech here.

No, there had been no national draft until the Civil War. At the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, both Union and Confederate leaders may have felt that their causes were so compelling that the men in their “nations” would gladly swell the ranks of the armies as volunteers. This may have been true at the beginning of the war, but it wasn’t long before disillusionment of the common man set in, and fewer and fewer came forward.

At that point, unable to raise enough soldiers to fill the needs of their military forces by volunteers, both sides in that ignominious war resorted to creating a system of conscription.

The Confederacy had far fewer inhabitants than the U.S., and Confederate President Jefferson Davis proposed the first conscription act on March 28, 1862; it was passed into law the next month.  Resistance was both widespread and violent, with comparisons made between conscription and slavery.

Both sides permitted conscripts to hire substitutes to serve in their place. In the Union, many states and cities offered bounties and bonuses for enlistment. They also arranged to take credit against their draft quota by claiming freed slaves who enlisted in the Union Army. [Wiki: Conscription in the United States]

Although both sides resorted to conscription, the system did not work effectively in either. The Confederate Congress on April 16, 1862, passed an act requiring military service for three years from all males aged eighteen to thirty-five not legally exempt; it later extended the obligation. The U.S. Congress followed with the Militia Act of 1862 authorizing a militia draft within a state when it could not meet its quota with volunteers. This state-administered system failed in practice and in 1863 Congress passed the Enrollment Act, the first genuine national conscription law, setting up under the Union Army an elaborate machinery for enrolling and drafting men between twenty and forty-five years of age. Quotas were assigned in each state, the deficiencies in volunteers required to be met by conscription.

…In the Confederacy, the “Twenty Negro Law” permitted one owner or overseer of any plantation to exempt themselves from military service; this proved extremely unpopular with many Confederate soldiers and contributed to the oft-spoken adage of “a rich man’s war, and a poor man’s fight.” [ibid]

Resentment and resistance was much worse in the North, culminating in the July, 1863 “New York Draft Riots.”

The New York City draft riots (July 13 to July 16, 1863; known at the time as Draft Week) were violent disturbances in New York City that were the culmination of working-class discontent with new laws passed by Congress that year to draft men to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. The riots were the largest civil insurrection in American history.

President Abraham Lincoln diverted several regiments of militia and volunteer troops from following up after the Battle of Gettysburg [which had occurred only two weeks earlier] to control the city. The rioters were overwhelmingly working-class men, primarily ethnic Irish, resenting particularly that wealthier men, who could afford to pay a $300 commutation fee to hire a substitute, were spared the draft.

Some historians note that a major precipitating factor bringing on the riots was that political leaders of the time had persuaded many immigrant Irishmen to apply for citizenship so that they could vote. What these new voters didn’t realize until too late was that their new status would also make them liable to being drafted!

The Democratic Party political machine of Tammany Hall had been working to enroll immigrants as U.S. citizens so they could vote in local elections, and had strongly recruited Irish, most of whom already spoke English. In 1863, with the war continuing, Congress passed a law to establish a draft for the first time, as more troops were needed. In New York City and other locations, the new citizens learned that they were expected to register for the draft to fight for their new country. Black men were excluded from the draft as they were not considered citizens, and wealthier white men could pay for substitutes. Free black men and immigrants competed for low-wage jobs in the city.

… There were reports of rioting in Buffalo, New York, and certain other cities, but the first drawing of numbers on [Saturday] July 11, 1863 occurred peaceably in New York City. The second drawing was held on Monday, July 13, 1863, ten days after the Union victory at Gettysburg. At 10 a.m., a furious crowd of around 500, led by the Black Joke Engine Company 33, attacked the assistant Ninth District Provost Marshal’s Office, at Third Avenue and 47th Street, where the draft was taking place. The crowd threw large paving stones through windows, then burst through the doors and set the building ablaze. When the fire department responded, rioters broke up their vehicles. Others killed horses pulling streetcars and smashed the cars. To prevent other parts of the city being notified of the riot, they cut telegraph lines.

But the destruction of the draft office was only the beginning of the rage. The crowds began roaming the streets of New York and destroying everything in their path.

… The Bull’s Head hotel on 44th Street, which refused to provide alcohol to the mob, was burned. The mayor’s residence on Fifth Avenue, the Eighth and Fifth District police stations, and other buildings were attacked and set on fire. Other targets included the office of the New York Times. The mob was turned back at the Times office by staff manning Gatling guns, including Times founder Henry Jarvis Raymond. Fire engine companies responded, but some of the firefighters were sympathetic to the rioters, since they too had been drafted on Saturday.

…Rioters turned against black people as their scapegoats and the primary target of their anger. Many immigrants and the poor viewed free black men as competition for scarce jobs, and worried about more slaves being emancipated and coming to New York for work. Some rioters thought slavery was the cause of the Civil War. The mob beat, tortured and/or killed numerous black people, including one man who was attacked by a crowd of 400 with clubs and paving stones, then lynched—hanged from a tree and set alight.  [Actually, 11 black men in all were lynched during the riots, with at least another 100 blacks killed. At least 20 whites were killed, and likely over 2000 people wounded.] [Source]

The military did not reach the city until after the first day of rioting, when mobs had already ransacked or destroyed numerous public buildings, two Protestant churches, the homes of various abolitionists or sympathizers, many black homes, and the Colored Orphan Asylum at 44th Street and Fifth Avenue, which was burned to the ground. [ibid]

Yes, not even young children escaped the mindless wrath of the mad mob.

The rioters’ targets initially included only military and governmental buildings, symbols of the unfairness of the draft. Mobs attacked only those individuals who interfered with their actions. But by afternoon of the first day, some of the rioters had turned to attacks on black people, and on things symbolic of black political, economic, and social power. Rioters attacked a black fruit vendor and a nine-year-old boy at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street before moving to the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue between Forty-Third and Forty-Fourth Streets. By the spring of 1863, the managers had built a home large enough to house over two hundred children. Financially stable and well-stocked with food, clothing, and other provisions, the four-story orphanage at its location on Fifth Avenue and Forty-Second Street was an imposing symbol of white charity toward blacks and black upward mobility.

At 4 P.M. on July 13, “the children numbering 233, were quietly seated in their school rooms, playing in the nursery, or reclining on a sick bed in the Hospital when an infuriated mob, consisting of several thousand men, women and children, armed with clubs, brick bats etc. advanced upon the Institution.” The crowd took as much of the bedding, clothing, food, and other transportable articles as they could and set fire to the building. John Decker, chief engineer of the fire department, was on hand, but firefighters were unable to save the building. The destruction took twenty minutes.

In the meantime, the superintendent and matron of the asylum assembled the children and led them out to Forty-Fourth Street. Miraculously, the mob refrained from assaulting the children. But when an Irish observer of the scene called out, “If there is a man among you, with a heart within him come and help these poor children,” the mob “laid hold of him, and appeared ready to tear him to pieces.” The children made their way to the Thirty-Fifth Street Police Station, where they remained for three days and nights before moving to the almshouse on Blackwell’s Island—ironically, the very place from which the orphanage’s founders had hoped to keep black children when they built the asylum almost thirty years earlier. [Source]

It’s not clear from the record how many rioters may have taken part in the four days of rioting, but since it took 4,000 armed soldiers to put an end to the rioting, there were no doubt several thousand people involved.

I had never heard of the New York Draft Riots of 1863 until just this week. But when I mentioned the topic to my husband, I was surprised to find out he knew a lot about them. Not because he is a reader of history books…but because he saw Martin Scorsese’s 2002 movie Gangs of New York, that starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Daniel Day-Lewis, and Cameron Diaz. Set in 1863 New York, the climax of the film is a recreation (not totally historically accurate, but very effective in accurately portraying the mood, the look, and the level of violence of the event) of the Draft Riots. Here is a link to a clip of 3 minutes or so of that cinematic climax. I do not doubt in the slightest that the real-world event was this bad…or far worse. Be forewarned, you may find the images disturbing if you are not an aficianado of violent movies.

Gangs of New York clip

I share all this preliminary information to make clear just what a risk the US government was taking in 1917 in choosing to establish conscription as a major building block in its World War 1 military planning.

This was the nation’s first experience with mass conscription; drafted men made up just 8 percent of soldiers in the Union army during the Civil War, but they constituted 72 percent of Uncle Sam’s forces in World War I. [Uncle Sam Wants You: World War 1 and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (USWY)]

This is not to say that the government didn’t make an effort to “learn the lessons” of the Civil War draft fiasco.

… The Selective Service Act of 1917 was carefully drawn to remedy the defects in the Civil War system and—by allowing exemptions for dependency, essential occupations, and religious scruples—to place each man in his proper niche in a national war effort. The act established a “liability for military service of all male citizens”; authorized a selective draft of all those between 21 and 31 years of age (later from 18 to 45); and prohibited all forms of bounties, substitutions, or purchase of exemptions. … In 1917 10 million men were registered. This was deemed to be inadequate, so age ranges were increased and exemptions reduced, and so by the end of 1918 this increased to 24 million men that were registered with nearly 3 million inducted into the military services, with little of the resistance that characterized the Civil War, thanks to a huge campaign by the government to build support for the war, and shut down newspapers and magazines that published articles against the war. [USWY]

Yes, this time the draft wasn’t limited to poor working men from the ghettos.

(Harry Houdini, age 44 and already famous at the time, whimsically listed his middle name on his registration as “Handcuff.” George Gershwin, only 19 at the time, already listed his occupation as actor and composer. )

And that brings us back to the American Protective League—the beginning of the rise of Big Brotherism in America. No, there was no one central Big Brother, no Fuehrer, no Hitler or Stalin or Mao-like totalitarian leader to insist that everyone toe a certain line. The American President couldn’t pull that off. There was no shadowy small junta of men in secret rooms establishing and dictating—and enforcing—exactly what all “loyal Americans” must speak and believe. The fragmented political scene in America, with Democrats, Republicans, and extra parties vying continually for power, didn’t allow any one small group to be endowed with that much power.

It turns out it was “We The People,” self-styled “True Patriots,” who developed a passion for imposing conformity on the US populace. And not by wholesome dialogue and persuasion, but by tactics that can be characterized as bullying at best and terrorism at worst. In the “person” of the APL organization—

America’s vaunted culture of voluntarism intersected with and amplified state power, rather than acting as a check on it.

A Big Brother “state” did not develop a clandestine program for identifying and recruiting a cadre of snitches and bullies—the snitches and bullies came blatantly knocking down the door of the government in Washington in broad daylight, demanding to be given authority…and endorsement for their own narrow vision of “whipping the country into shape” for the war effort. Civil liberties? Civil rights? Protection from unreasonable search and seizure? HooHah! said the pseudo-Secret Service agents of the APL.

And thus arose the Slacker Raids. Come along and join the Merry Band o’ Raiders in the next entry in this series:

Band of Big Brothers

Oh Say Can You See? IV: The Rise of Big Brother: Pt. 2

Series: Oh Say Can You See? IV: The Rise of Big Brother
Entry 2: All in the Family: Uncle Sam and Big Brother

 (This is the second entry in a series on The Rise of Big Brother.
Be sure to start with Entry 1
in order to understand the following material in context.)

There is no question that we are living in an intrusive age. Surveillance and inspection really do play a part in our daily lives. You can’t even go visit Mickey Mouse in Disney World’s Magic Kingdom without having a security employee of Disney World rifle through your purse, camera bag, and back pack before you are allowed to enter.

All across the country, even in smaller towns and cities, cameras have gone up at some busy corners to record every single vehicle passing through the intersection, and spot drivers who fail to obey the traffic signals.

When the ticket comes in the mail showing a clear photo of your car entering the intersection after the light has turned red, you realize that you have no wiggle room to argue about the fine.

More despised by most people are the airport security inspections, that may include pat-downs or even full-body scans. And although not quite as intrusive, arbitrary traffic checkpoints (for such issues as auto emissions problems or sobriety checks) are a real hot button issue for some people.

Some would like to insist that these intrusive procedures mean our American society is now almost to the point of being “just like” the Orwellian society of the novel 1984. And that this is because we have a national government…perhaps even a single national leader, Barack Obama…who is “just like” Big Brother of Orwell’s novel. “Oh,” they insist, “if only we could return to the Land of the Free as it was 100 years ago. Back when Big Government didn’t exist, and you could come and go as you liked without any fetters on you.”

Is this true? Did we “once upon a time”…and until not all that long ago, maybe at least until the end of the 1950s…have an idyllic country, void of any hint of “totalitarianism,” peopled with “fiercely independent” men who would not tolerate any interference with their “personal sovereignty”?

We might first ask…is the type of surveillance and inspection I’ve described above really “just like” the tactics of Big Brother? Yes, the technology really has progressed to the point that the “system” used by Big Brother is now possible, in a way it wasn’t in 1948 when Orwell wrote. Video transmission methods now would make possible imposing two-way transmitters in every home. But the purpose of the use of that system in the novel wasn’t for security purposes, for safety purposes, or for dealing with the threat of physical terrorism. It was used very specifically to indoctrinate and brainwash the total civilian population to accept a mindless existence, and to have no opinions or wants of their own.

Is that really the purpose of inspecting bags at Disney World, or body cavities at the airport? Is it really the purpose of traffic checkpoints or red light cameras?

I am in full agreement with those who think that some of the intrusive methods used in society these days exceed common sense, and have been imposed as an over-reaction to perceived threats, especially after 9/11. There is no doubt that some governmental agencies should be required to tone down some of their activities, and citizen lobbying for that to happen is a good idea.

But no, I do not think that Barack Obama is some sort of mesmerizing puppet master using such technology to turn people’s brains to mush and allow him to “take over” permanently as a dictator. If that is his intent, he’s certainly a very ineffective puppet master! He has continual problems getting adequate support from the public or from Congress for even his most cherished programs.

The specific question being addressed in this “Rise of Big Brother” series is this: Whatever level of interference in “personal freedom” you may think is prevalent in our society now, do you think you would have been SO much happier with “the way it used to be” 100 years or so ago?

Let’s examine that possibility.

Back in 1913, the US had just elected a Democratic president for his first term, Woodrow Wilson.

Before the end of his second year in office, a major war broke out among the European nations. The general mood in America regarding becoming involved “over there” at the time, and for the next three years, was contrary to such involvement. Reflecting this attitude of the populace, Wilson himself made every effort to keep the country neutral, and to attempt to “broker a peace” among the combatants in Europe.

Fast-forwarding a half-century—are you old enough to remember the 1964 presidential campaign, that pitted the incumbent Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, against Republican candidate Barry Goldwater? One of the pivotal incidents of that campaign was the airing of an ad by the Johnson campaign that featured a two year old girl. This classic ad, that barely takes a minute to watch, is called “Daisy Girl.”  Pause here and have a look at it.

Though only aired once (by the campaign), it is considered an important factor in Johnson’s landslide victory over Barry Goldwater and an important turning point in political and advertising history.

… “Daisy” aired only once, during a September 7, 1964 telecast of David and Bathsheba on The NBC Monday Movie. Johnson’s campaign was widely criticized for using the prospect of nuclear war, as well as for the implication that Goldwater would start one, to frighten voters. The ad was immediately pulled, but the point was made, appearing on the nightly news and on conversation programs in its entirety. [Wiki]

Goldwater’s campaign had indeed provided fodder for this ad, since he openly promoted an aggressive US military. Johnson implied at the time that he was in favor of de-escalating or limiting the US involvement in the Vietnam War, while Goldwater was enthusiastically supportive of the military action there and even suggested the possibility of the US using nuclear weapons to gain the victory if necessary.  In the fall of 1964, in comparison to Goldwater’s hawkish attitude, Johnson looked like a Dove to the large proportion of the US population that had no stomach for sending its young men to die half-way around the world for obscure reasons that seemed to have little relevance to American security. Looking back with hindsight, of course, we all know that Johnson actually headed up a period from 1965 on of drastic escalation of the war effort, and sparked an era of anti-war protests.

As casualties mounted and success seemed further away than ever, Johnson’s popularity plummeted. College students and others protested, burned draft cards, and chanted, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” Johnson could scarcely travel anywhere without facing protests, and was not allowed by the Secret Service to attend the 1968 Democratic National Convention… [Wiki]

And therein is an amazing analogy with Woodrow Wilson.

Going into the 1916 election season, incumbent president Woodrow Wilson was the “candidate of peace.” A visitor from another country could have figured that out immediately from the campaign buttons people were wearing.

The main slogans promoted by those campaigning for him were variations of the phrase “He kept us out of war.”  Such as the entry in the campaign poster list on this campaign truck: “Who keeps us out of war?”

Or the slogan on the poster on the wall in this British cartoon of the time: “Vote for Wilson who kept you out of the war!”

Some voters were pacifists by nature. They felt military solutions to world problems should be abandoned. Even among those Americans who were not opposed to the basic concept of war, a significant proportion felt that a European war was none of our business. Many even thought that it was being fought, on both sides, for purely “imperialistic” and/or economic purposes by all the powers involved. Americans saw no need for American Democracy to shore up the territorial claims of ancient monarchies across the sea.

Actually, there’s no evidence Wilson’s opponent, Republican Charles Evans Hughes, was particularly “hawkish” on the war. His campaign was much more focused on domestic issues. But the Democratic campaign did push the notion that a Republican victory would likely lead to war with both Germany and Mexico. (The Germans had approached Mexico with a bargain…if they would join Germany against the US, they would get back most of the territories they had lost to the US in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona–but not California.)

Wilson won, but just like Johnson, he had barely taken the second oath of office when circumstances led him to change his mind. After German submarines sank seven U.S. merchant ships, Wilson requested that Congress issue a declaration of war on Germany. Congress approved such a declaration on April 6, 1917.

But how to make war? The previously neutral US had barely 120,000 men in a standing army. The first step was obviously to encourage men to volunteer for military service. And thus was born the most famous poster in American history.

And it was followed by many more.

Along with popular songs and sheet music on the same theme.

But there wasn’t time for a gradual build-up of enthusiasm for volunteering—the war had already been raging for three years and if the US was going to be of help to the Allies, it needed to become a force to be reckoned with very quickly. Yet by six weeks after the declaration of war, only 73,000 men had volunteered for service. Added to the 120,000 already in uniform, that was barely 200,000. Wilson was asking for a million-man army—just for starters!

The only logical option seemed to be to institute the first draft of civilians since the Civil War. “Conscription” had been suggested for some years as an option to create a bigger standing army as part of just general “preparedness” for the country.  But it had been a highly controversial idea. Some protested against a draft because they felt an all-volunteer Army would be more efficient. Others protested that a draft was against principles in the Constitution itself. Others insisted that a democracy such as the US shouldn’t use “imperialistic” methods such as forced conscription.

President Wilson himself had been publicly on record as being opposed to conscription as late as February 1917. But once war was declared, it very quickly became clear that relying only on volunteers to man the war effort would be impossible. Secretary of War Newton Baker (who had never been in the military and who had a reputation as a pacifist at the time he had been appointed to his position by Wilson in 1912) recommended to Wilson that he support a draft. Baker’s plan for such a draft was submitted to Congress, which enacted the Selective Service Act May 18, 1917. It required all males ages 21-30 to register for military service. (In August 1918, that age range was changed to 18-45.) By the end of the war, around 2 million men had eventually volunteered for various branches of the armed services, and another 2.8 million had been drafted.

President Wilson had an odd way of introducing this new draft. One would tend to think of the term “draft” as meaning that someone who had not individually wanted to be in the Army was being forced by the power of the US government to show up for induction, under penalty of law. For of course, if most of the men of the country had been just itching to do their patriotic service for their country, they could have swelled the ranks of the volunteers immediately after the declaration of war. But instead of admitting this reality, Wilson chose to put it this way in his proclamation about the Selective Service Act … for the term “selective service” was carefully chosen:

“It is in no sense a conscription of the unwilling; it is, rather, selection from a nation which has volunteered in mass.”

From the evidence of history, there was a measure of truth to his statement. On the first official registration day, June 5, 1917, 9.6 million men between 21 and 30 showed up at the 4,000 national registration sites … “for what Newton Baker correctly predicted would be a day of “festival and patriotic occasion.”

As the months rolled by, the US government was immersed in its own priorities of running the war effort. Although it was aware that a certain percentage of draft-age men were evidently avoiding registration, it had neither the manpower nor the technology at the time to pursue these men and “make them do their duty.” And it was more focused on the actual needs of the troops, administering war-time production of food, armaments, supplies, and more. No, there was no governmental “Big Brother” in place to deal with those who had avoided the draft, to have its 2-way cameras in place everywhere, spying on who was and who wasn’t 100% American.

But I’m here ta tell ya that one aspect of the spirit of Big Brother WAS already alive and well and beginning his rise. He just wasn’t where you might have expected to find him, in some secret room in the basement of the White House. And just as Orwell’s Big Brother was likely not any one man, but just an “icon” representing a group of men, this Spirit of Big Brother was manifested in multiple groups of people. (I kind of look at it as a “many-headed monster.”)

People who were convinced that they were “on a mission.”  A mission to make everyone conform to their own view of exactly what America should be all about. And exactly how “real Americans” should behave themselves. And exactly what “real Americans” should think. As Orwell coined the word in his novel, they were bound and determined to impose “Groupthink.”

Let me take you back a century and introduce you to some of these people, and give you a glimpse of their modus operandi. When we’re done, you tell me … do you really think you would have preferred to live back in those “Good Old Days”? Are we really living in the “Worst of Times” in the 21^st century, with “less freedom” than US citizens “used to have”?

So let’s start with a definition.

The 1960s made the term “draft dodger” almost a household word. It meant, of course, someone who was subject to the draft who refused to cooperate with the system. He might avoid registering in the first place and hope to “fall through the cracks” of the system and be ignored. Or if “called up,” he might refuse to be inducted into the Army, or even emigrate to another country, like Canada, to avoid having to serve in the US military.

This term wasn’t common during the period of World War 1.  At that time, the household word for such a person was a slacker. We still use the word slacker today in slang, but now it particularly seems to imply a person who has no “work ethic,” who is lazy. In 1917, it was particularly applied to a person who tried to avoid doing their civic duty by serving in the Armed Services when called upon by “their country” to do so, or who didn’t give “110%” effort at their war-time job. Notice the statement using the word “slacker” at the top of this motivational poster from the War period, signed by Woodrow Wilson.

Of course the slacker was universally despised, including in Britain…

And in Canada.

So what was to be done about slackers as the draft efforts of the country ramped up? It became as big…or bigger…an issue to just plain ol’ citizens as it was to the government.

During the course of the war, thousands of letters arrived at selective service headquarters alleging slackerism or disloyalty on the part of neighbors, colleagues, and even family members. Edna Shaw of St. Louis, Missouri, wrote to draft officials to turn in her friend Otto Schaflitzel. “I wouldn’t say anything about it,” she wrote, “only he is so disloyal for only being 24 years of age and single. [He is] hurting my feelings, when he talks about the country, ‘cause I have brothers in service and I will almost think … if I only had a gun I would kill him.” To ordinary Americans like Edna Shaw, giving herself over to the spirit of selective service required confirmation that the government would do its part to make sure that draft-age men were honest about their situations. [from Uncle Sam Wants You: World War 1 and the Making of the Modern American Citizen]

You didn’t even have to deliberately “avoid” the draft to be labeled a slacker:

Citizens also came up with their own definitions of draft evasion. In Worcester, Massachusetts, a French-Canadian machinist, whose skilled work in a war industry had exempted him from the draft, appeared before his local board eager to be reclassified as draftable: “Say, my girl says it’s all bunk, this line of talk of me being more use here than in the army. If I don’t go into the army, she won’t marry me. She’s right and you’ve gotta put me back in Class 1.” When the board refused, the young man’s girlfriend soon appeared, and she said, “I don’t care how many classes you have or what the rules say. Down my way, all single fellers between twenty-one and thirty-one are divided into just two classes, those who go, and those who don’t go. That’s my classification. Now if [he] don’t go, I’m through with him. He simply has got to go.” The board bowed to her request and reclassified the man; he soon found himself in uniform. In the end, the “draft dodger” was both a formal category created by the terms of American law and a figment of the nation’s collective political imagination. [ibid]

The slacker was widely perceived as a scourge on the integrity and honor of the United States of America. He was not to be tolerated. But what to do? The government was too busy to deal effectively with this undesirable element in society. So into the gap stepped some gung-ho volunteers. By the hundreds of thousands. Let me introduce you first to the most well-known of these. Well, well-known by those who have read a lot more American History than that in the average high school history text.  Actually, I’d never heard of this group or its activities until a few months ago, even though the stories about them are pretty stunning.

May I present to you, the Zealots of the First World War, the American Protective League:

At the outset of the war, the Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation had fewer than three hundred federal agents on staff, and letters pleading for the investigation of disloyal Americans were already swamping its offices. Among the first to arrive was an offer from a group of Chicago businessmen to create an “American Protective League,” a new organization dedicated to guarding the home front. In March 1917, even before the declaration of war, the bureau’s harried leader, A. Bruce Bielaski, accepted. By June, the American Protective League (APL) had one hundred thousand members in six hundred cities, and by the time the group dissolved in February 1919, as many as 250,000 men—and a handful of women, too, although official regulations denied them membership—may have served in this secret organization. The APL, a blend of local and federal power, and of old and new methods of social control, was the product of a political culture of coercive voluntarism. [ibid]

The APL was, to all intents and purposes, an extra-legal “vigilante” group. We’re used to old western movies showing vigilantes forming to deal with some very specific, local problem such as horse thieves.

But the power and influence all across the nation—and sheer massive numbers—of these new-style vigilantes of the early 20^th century pale all of that into insignificance.

What kind of men were part of the APL?

The volunteers of the American Protective League were professional men, typically above draft age or otherwise exempt. They joined out of patriotism and a sense of duty, to feel important in their communities, or just for something to do. Surviving documents from the Kansas chapters of the APL record white men in their forties and fifties with ties to a wide range of professional and fraternal organizations. They included a doctor, a bank cashier, a barber, an undertaker, a minister, a wrestler, insurance and real estate salesmen, some sheriffs and farmers, a lot of lawyers, the business manager of the Atchison Railway, Light and Power Company, and a reporter for the Emporia Daily Gazette, personally recommended for service by its prominent editor, William Allen White. [ibid]

And what kind of vigilantism did they indulge in?

League men embarked on unwarranted searches and seizures, detained and arrested draft-age men without charges, intimidated allegedly disloyal Americans, and broke up strikes. Sometimes deputized en masse by local police, sometimes warned that they had no right to make arrests, operatives rarely paused over the difference. There was too much work to do, and too many enemies waiting: “Bolsheviki, socialists, incendiaries, I.W.W.’s, Lutheran treason-talkers, Russellites, Bergerites, all the other-ites, religious and social fanatics, third-sex agitators, long haired visionaries and work-haters from every race in the world.” [ibid]

In spite of the image they tried to project to the public, they weren’t really “government officials,” but the government, through the Department of Justice, did end up “indulging” their egos.

The American Protective League had an ambiguous legal status. Members wore identification badges mailed out from headquarters in Washington and noted in their literature that they were “authorized by and auxiliary to the Department of Justice.” [ibid]

Yes, those cool badges …

“Secret  Service”! Sounds ominous. But the label carried NO legal power with it, and they didn’t “take orders from” the Justice Department. Most of the time they just went on their merry way doing what they thought needed doing. Yes, they dabbled in a wide variety of pseudo-policing, with seldom any interference from actual constituted authorities.

I’m guessing they got the same sort of ego boost that kids did back in the 1950s when they sent away enough box tops from Sugar Corn Pops to earn a “premium” from their favorite TV western—a gen-yoo-wine Junior Deputy Marshall badge.

Except they weren’t little kids—they were grown men, who could create a lot of grief for anyone in their cross-hairs. It wasn’t child’s play, as you can tell from the title of their regular newsletter.

And, as you can tell from the comments above regarding anyone who could be labeled as some kind of “-ite,” they didn’t waste any energy trying to hide any of their personal prejudices. Nor did they have any scruples about “civil rights.”

Initially, the American Protective League handled a wide range of cases: investigations of the character and loyalty of citizens and aliens, the circulation of seditious material or “enemy propaganda,” claims for draft deferments. But by the spring of 1918—probably because of agitation by rank-and-file league men—draft dodging became most chapters’ primary concern. Armed with earnest patriotism, their badges, and Section 57 of the Selective Service Act of 1917—which required men to carry their draft registration or classification cards at all times and show them to law enforcement personnel when requested—the 250,000 men of the American Protective League embarked on a series of large-scale interrogations that came to be known as slacker raids. [ibid]

I had never heard of a slacker raid. So when I first read the description of these “events,” I was utterly dumbfounded. If you think some governmental interference today with your total freedom of coming and going is problematic, be prepared to put it in the perspective of what US citizens put up with 100 years ago.

Read on in this series to see what I found out about this astounding phenomenon. In the next entry, we’ll take a flashback to the 1800s, to set the stage for a vivid description of the World War 1 raids:

 Burning More than Draft Cards

Oh Say Can You See? IV: The Rise of Big Brother: Pt. 1

Series: Oh Say Can You See? IV: The Rise of Big Brother
Part 1: 1984 Revisited

Dealing with the regimes of both Hitler and Stalin in the 1940s left Americans and Brits in horror at the idea of totalitarianism.

The term ‘an authoritarian regime’ denotes a state in which the single power holder – an individual ‘dictator’, a committee or a junta or an otherwise small group of political elite – monopolizes political power. However, a totalitarian regime attempts to control virtually all aspects of the social life including economy, education, art, science, private life and morals of citizens. “The officially proclaimed ideology penetrates into the deepest reaches of societal structure and the totalitarian government seeks to completely control the thoughts and actions of its citizens .”

So it’s not surprising that in 1944 British author George Orwell capitalized on this paranoia with plans for a dystopian (that’s the opposite of “utopian”) science fiction novel that would tell the chilling story of a bleak totalitarian future for Planet Earth. He completed his novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, in 1948. Here’s the original cover, as seen in the 1949 edition.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, one of three inter-continental super-states that divided the world among themselves after a global war. Most of the action takes place in London, the “chief city of Airstrip One,” the Oceanic province that “had once been called England or Britain.” Posters of the Party leader, Big Brother, bearing the caption “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU”, dominate the city, while the ubiquitous telescreen (transceiving television set [able to both transmit pictures to the viewer and take pictures to be seen by the broadcaster] ) monitors the private and public lives of the populace. The social class system of Oceania is threefold:

(I) the upper-class Inner Party, the elite ruling minority

(II) the middle-class Outer Party, and

(III) the lower-class Proles (from proletariat), who make up 85% of the population and represent the uneducated working class.

As the government, the Party controls the population with four ministries:

• the Ministry of Peace (Minipax), which deals with war,
• the Ministry of Plenty (Miniplenty), which deals with economic affairs (rationing and starvation),
• the Ministry of Love (Miniluv), which deals with law and order (torture),
• the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), which deals with propaganda (news, entertainment, education and art)

The protagonist Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party, works in the Ministry of Truth as an editor, revising historical records to make the past conform to the ever-changing party line and deleting references to unpersons, people who have been “vaporised”, i.e. not only killed by the state, but denied existence even in history or memory. [Wiki]

There is a lot more to the plot line, and if you’ve never read this classic sci-fi novel, you might want to seriously consider adding it to your repertoire.  If you don’t want to buy an inexpensive paperback version, almost every library in the English-speaking world likely has a copy to borrow. Or you don’t even have to leave your desk to read an online ebook version for free at this link. A free online audiobook version is even available.

Not much into reading? Then how about watching on Youtube a 1954 TV adaptation of the novel from the BBC, starring Peter Cushing (Governor Tarkin in the 1977 Star Wars, for anyone too young to remember his earlier career in classic horror films)?

A “loose” U.S. film adaptation was released in 1956, but it got fairly poor ratings.

A better version, made in Britain, was actually released in the target year of the title, 1984, starring John Hurt and Richard Burton.  If you happen to have Amazon Prime, you can watch it on instant streaming at no cost. Otherwise you can rent or buy it from Amazon.com .

Although there are many aspects to the plotline, perhaps the most famous factors in the book, even to those who have never read it, are the name and person of the totalitarian leader Big Brother, and the fact that his regime is using two-way tele-equipment to keep an eye on everyone in the whole society lest they stray even slightly from the ideology of the System.

Actually, it’s not even clear in the book whether Big Brother is an actual person, or a manufactured iconic head for the System around which the masses can rally. He is never seen by the masses “in person,” just as an onscreen persona. In any event, his picture shows up on posters, billboards, and video screens in every nook and cranny of the society. Here’s how he looks on a poster on the cover of a 1950 “pulp fiction-style” edition of the book.

Here he is onscreen in the BBC 1954 TV version.

Here he is on a poster and a billboard in the 1956  movie.

But I’m kind of partial to his look onscreen in the 1984 movie version, shown here at a mass rally.

This version is much more evocative of the original models Orwell was likely thinking of when he wrote his novel.

I bring all this up because references to Big Brother are extremely common these days on the Internet, particularly in politically-inclined blog writings. Authors use lots of hyperbole to try to convince me that the US has become or is well on the way to becoming, an Orwellian environment. It’s a common “meme” to see posters of Barack Obama cast in the part of Big Brother.

Then again, comparing a US president to Big Brother is nothing new. There were earlier Internet memes on the opposite side of the political spectrum …

So is this true? Am I being watched every minute of every day by whatever regime is in Washington, so that it can control my every thought? Honestly … to read some blogs, it is obvious that some people do believe that this is “the reality” on every street in every town and city in America. Is my daily life now, or in recent decades REALLY like this scene from the 1956 movie, with the All-Seeing eye of George Bush or Barack Obama checking me out?

Sorry, I don’t buy it. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I have no doubt that a whole lot of “surveillance” is going on in the name of various branches of government, including Homeland Security. Yes, I would be frisked and poked at and looked at with cameras … both externally and internally … at many airports. I don’t mean to minimize a certain amount of gross intrusiveness in some settings. And yes, I suppose all my emails are stored somewhere in a Cloud and could be accessible to rummage through if someone was inclined to do so, to see if I’m a subversive. Although it seems with the multiple billions of emails being churned out by even just Americans, it would be pretty counterproductive for some shadowy governmental spook to be checking on which Cat Video I am passing along to my forum buddies at any given moment.

No, I don’t believe that our US society (in spite of indeed some heavy-handedness by government in some areas) is currently, or is in position to anytime soon be, a carbon copy of Orwell’s dystopian vision. Nor do I believe that Barack Obama (or George W. Bush before him) is an incarnation of Big Brother … or The Antichrist.

But I have titled this blog series “The Rise of Big Brother.” Why?

Because…There is an aspect of US society, both in our present and in our history of the past century and more, that is a much better fit as a reflection of the idea of Big Brother than just a president with a two-term limit.  I am fully convinced that Barack Obama is going to wander on out of office in early 2017 without fulfilling a “prophetic role” and setting up a Big Brother Society … and without accomplishing a lot of the things he hoped to accomplish. Just as George W Bush never panned out as the permanent Big Bad Wolf envisioned by the meme-makers of past years.

But when Obama passes from the scene, just as Bush did, there will be a “presence” in our society that will still be here. The “spirit” of Big Brother began rising a long time ago, it’s here now, and it will be here in the future. If we recognize it, and take steps to contain it, maybe it will not be able to ascend to the kind of total power of the Big Brother of Orwell’s imagination.

If you’d like to be part of the Resistance Movement, come along as we explore the topic in this series, starting with the next entry in the series:

“All in the Family: Uncle Sam and Big Brother.”

h Say Can You See? III: 12 Ground Zero pt. 9 (conclusion)

Series: Oh Say Can You See? III
Entry 12: Ground Zero: Part 9 (Conclusion)

Click here to go to Ground Zero: Part 1

 After the Tulsa Race Riot Commission was finished with its work of preparing a meticulously detailed report of the events of 1921, it discussed suggestions for what might be “done about” their findings. The final report recommended a number of acts, including establishing a relatively small fund to pay token reparations to the few remaining very elderly riot victims or their immediate (aging) survivors.

While discussions were beginning about how the government would respond to these recommendations, Commission founder, State Representative Don Ross (D) of the Oklahoma House of Representatives joined a fellow state congressman on an interview show in 2001 to debate this possibility. Representative Bill Graves (R) took the “against” position. A tiny excerpt from that discussion:

REP. DON ROSS: Well, I agree in theory with the findings [of the Commission]. We have to understand that a deputized white mob destroyed the black community. In doing so, it institutionalized hate in parts of the soul of the city, an evil of which neither race has fully recovered. And I think reparations of some kind repairs that inhumanity and brings some closure to this sordid, hard affair of some eighty years ago.

REP. BILL GRAVES: Well, I — you know, what Representative Ross has described is an outrage and a disgrace to the city of Tulsa, and I sure could never ever condone any kind of action like that. I think it’s terrible, a terrible injustice on the black community up there. And one thing that makes it even worse, in my mind, is that these people were working hard to pull themselves up and become productive citizens and working hard. And as they called it, Black Wall Street there, they were following the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, who was one of my heroes. [I’ve recently read enough about Booker T to understand why he is very popular among southern white conservatives such as Graves…in the late 1890s and early 1900s he advocated that “negroes” be very, very careful not to demand anything of whites in the way of racial equality. They should humbly submit to segregation and all that implies, and settle for just being allowed to do “skilled labor” as part of the US industrial base, to make themselves so valuable that the whites would be willing to support their—segregated—efforts at improvement of the race’s future prospects.]

And then they had an outlaw element up there that came in and destroyed what they were doing. I think it’s a terrible injustice. At the same time, I think it would be an injustice on people now, eighty years later, to ask them to pay reparations for something they were not responsible for, which is what would be happening here. And that’s why I would — I oppose reparations being paid now. And, you know, it was a wrong occurred in 1921, but two wrongs don’t make a right. And so I would oppose reparations only we — you know, if we pay them now based on a sense of guilt, which I think is a sense of false guilt, since the people now alive are not responsible for what occurred in 1921, and that’s kind of my position on it.

REP. DON ROSS: The state had nothing to do with the Oklahoma City bombing, nothing. However, the state took full knowledge the summer its citizens were unjustly killed in that notorious and horrific event. I voted and the legislature voted to put $5 million dollars in that memorial. We have disasters here, particularly tornados, had one a couple of years ago. All the resources available from the state goes into repair that damage from tornados or hurricane or flood.

So it seems to me if we do it for a national disaster routinely, why can’t we do it for a human disaster, a disaster provoked by hate, whenever it happened? Bill well knows that the spirit of racism at that time and now, and that a full cover-up that this is — this is — eighty years it’s taken. It’s taken eighty years for those citizens to petition their government to reconcile this good state with its history.

REP. BILL GRAVES: Well, let me — if I can say, I agree with Don, it was a spirit of hate back then. Fortunately, that’s an age that’s dead and gone, and we Americans and Oklahomans moved forward and granted a great deal of equality to blacks.

By the way, in this same interview, Rep. Graves commented that he was against the US legislation…actually approved by the US Congress in 1988 and signed into law by President Reagan…that gave reparations to the American citizens of Japanese descent who were unjustly interned during World War 2.

Something like 120,000 had been removed from their homes practically over night in 1942, only allowed to take the possessions they could actually carry, and beyond that many lost everything…their jobs, homes, cherished family mementoes, everything.

It was VERY much like the situation that led to the Trail of Tears for the Cherokee described in a previous series in this blog. Notice the same kind of “soldiers with bayonets” who drove out the Cherokee, in this description of the situation from a former “internee”…George Takei, “Sulu” from the Star Trek franchise.

George:

Seventy years ago, US soldiers bearing bayoneted rifles came marching up to the front door of our family’s home in Los Angeles, ordering us out. Our crime was looking like the people who had bombed Pearl Harbor a few months before. I’ll never forget that day, nor the tears streaming down my mother’s face as we were forcibly removed, herded off like animals, to a nearby race track. There, for weeks, we would live in a filthy horse stable while our “permanent” relocation camp was being constructed thousands of miles away in Arkansas, in a place called Rohwer.  [Source]

George at four:

I recently revisited Rohwer. Gone were the sentry towers, armed guards, barbed wire and crudely constructed barracks that defined our lives for many years. The swamp had been drained, the trees chopped down. Only miles and miles of cotton fields. The only thing remaining was the cemetery with two tall monuments.

It was never shown that any of these people hastily shoved in concentration camps were an actual threat to the US, and many of the young men sent there subsequently fought valiantly on the US side on the European front of the war.

20,000 Japanese American men and many Japanese American women served in the U.S. Army during World War II.

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was composed primarily of Japanese Americans, served with uncommon distinction in the European Theatre of World War II. Many of the U.S. soldiers serving in the unit had their families interned at home while they fought abroad.

The famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which fought in Europe, was formed from those Japanese Americans who did agree to serve. This unit was the most highly decorated U.S. military unit of its size and duration. Most notably, the 442nd was known for saving the 141st (or the “lost battalion”) from the Germans. The 1951 film Go For Broke! was a fairly accurate portrayal of the 442nd, and starred several of the RCT’s veterans.

In January 1945, with no fanfare:

The freed internees were given $25 and a train ticket to their former homes. [Source]

If their homes still existed. If you and your family were suddenly snatched from your home next week and sent away for three years, with no one to look out for your interests “back home,” no one to care for a house if you owned it, no one to personally store your possessions that were left in your apartment or house…how much do you think you’d “come home to”? And what would be the chances that your “old job” was still there waiting for you?

But Rep. Graves thought that it was foolish to think that “the country” should do anything about this grave injustice. After all, that was long ago, and Japanese Americans now have rights. The US congress and some presidents who signed reparations bills, offered official apologies, and so on (including Gerald Ford and George HW Bush) disagreed with him. (But being honest, I am quite sure that a significant proportion of the “white population” of the US have agreed all along with Graves, and resented any attempts at somehow “making right” what was so wrong.)

When pressed about the Japanese situation, Graves added, “In the matter of the Japanese Americans that were relocated, or interned, as some people say, that was the federal government that did the relocation or internment. In Tulsa, it was the private citizens that instigated the riot.”   This, of course, ignores totally the reality that the “private citizens” didn’t just “instigate” a simple “riot.” They systematically burned down over a thousand homes and hundreds of businesses without any evident interference from the duly constituted civil authorities of Tulsa. In fact, in numerous instances, they were aided and abetted by those very authorities. In other words, instead of protecting the lives and property of the black citizens, the authorities were complicit in the destruction.

I think Representative Graves could use a good vocabulary lesson. There are two “legal” terms he seems to be mixing up in his mind: De Jure and De Facto.

At the time of the Tulsa riots, the truth is that black citizens had all sorts of “rights” that were de jure—a term that means “concerning the law.” They really DID have the right to safety of their persons and property according to both US law and Oklahoma law. But out in the real world, rather than in theory, they were subject to the de facto—a term that means “concerning fact”—reality that these rights were ignored.

Yes, in many parts of the US at that time in 1921, there were de jure situations that left blacks with unequal rights. Including segregated schools and public facilities such as buses and water fountains. State governments had the right under the US governmental system of the time to establish such “laws” that made blacks second-class citizens. But the Tulsa Holocaust wasn’t ever a matter of the blacks needing “equality” in terms of the later issues of Civil Rights. It was a matter of protecting the de jure rights they did have at the time. It was a matter of thousands upon thousands of white men flouting the law and indulging in totally illegal terrorist acts—without interference from the police at the time, and without ever having to face trial for any of them later. They were “outside the law.” For the reality—the de facto situation—in Tulsa in 1921 was that the law didn’t apply “in fact” to whites who wanted to “Run the Negro out of Tulsa.”

Rep. Graves seemed to think that the Civil Rights acts passed in the US at the national level in the 1950s and later somehow “changed” the de facto reality in the hearts of men. It did not. Not in Tulsa, not in anywhere else. There is no question at all that racial prejudice is a wide-spread problem in Tulsa to this day—otherwise there is no reason at all that the black citizens should be still primarily de facto segregated!

The thousands upon thousands of men who perpetrated the Tulsa holocaust never offered an apology, never offered to pay reparations for the losses suffered by thousands upon thousands of blacks. The government of the city never offered an apology for the failure of its police department to protect the innocent. Nor did it pay any reparations either, or get around to prosecuting the thousands of those involved in the terrorism—even though there were even photos of many of the men in action.  Decades went by, and there had not been the slightest PUBLIC evidence of any change of heart at all. Indeed, there were no doubt at the time of the holocaust and in the ensuing decades many white Tulsans who did not harbor hatred in their hearts for blacks. There were no doubt many who felt embarrassment and shame at what “the City” had done to its black citizens. At the time of the immediate aftermath of the riot, many did try to help out homeless blacks. But these people of good will never affected the de facto reality of a public cover up on a large scale.

“An age that’s dead and gone,” Rep. Graves termed it. I beg to differ with him.

As evidence I offer the current phenomenon of the Sundown Town.

What, you’ve never heard the term?  I hadn’t either until recently. But after studying into it, I realized that actually I had heard of the reality behind the term over two decades ago.

I used to live in the capital of Michigan, Lansing. The small town of Charlotte, Michigan, was nearby. In 1989 my family became involved with a small Christian outreach program in Charlotte. A congregation there had established sort of a “Christian Coffee House” setting for Friday and Saturday nights in their informal church building. They built a stage and a sound booth, set up seating at banquet tables for up to 200 people or so, provided free refreshments, and invited Christian musical performers from around the state to come and perform on a “donation” basis.

“Abba’s, the Alternative Entertainment Center” had been in operation for a couple of years by the time we discovered it, and had developed quite a reputation around the state as an uplifting and wholesome place for families to come. A wide variety of groups performed. There were people who played old-timey instruments like dulcimers. There were Southern Gospel singers. There were Hispanic Gospel bands, CCM  (Contemporary Christian Music) bands, Country Music Bands. And then there was the Black Gospel band.

I was chatting with the pastor of the congregation one day several months after we began attending these gatherings when he said something that really startled me. He admitted that the congregation was taking a risk inviting the black group to play at Abba’s…because it was “common knowledge” around the area that blacks were not welcome “after dark” in Charlotte. And that it would be dangerous for them to flout this custom. And dangerous for anyone to encourage them to do so. The church pushed back against the custom, and the band bravely came on various Friday and Saturday nights. And while I was involved there, no one was ever directly threatened. I’m not sure now, but I think the pastor may actually have “escorted” the group out of town when the performances were over late at night, when they first started coming to town.

“HEY,” I thought … “this isn’t the 1960s in the Deep South. This is pushing up close to the beginning of the New Millennium, and in the far north state of Michigan. Often a destination of the Underground Railroad back in ante-bellum days! How could this situation exist??”

I was later to discover that Michigan had long been a hot spot for the KKK in its heyday, and that the Charlotte area was a notable Klan center…Klan meetings were even openly held in the basement of the local county courthouse in earlier decades, perhaps up into the 1970s. We moved to Charlotte in 1992, and I was soon to discover that the Klan was still a force in the area. We lived in a home just a block away from that county courthouse—and I became very nervous in 1994 when the national Klan leadership announced a planned “rally” for the Courthouse lawn in Charlotte, Michigan!

For some reason, before it came to pass, the plans were changed to have the rally at the Capitol lawn in Lansing instead. I looked it up just now. Online records show that the Lansing Public Works department paid $200,000 that year to build a fence around the demonstration and provide security. And ended up using tear gas to subdue the nearby counter-demonstrators.

Only recently did I discover that the situation “after dark” in Charlotte was a common phenomenon throughout both South and North in the US, so common it had a name. Such communities are dubbed “Sundown Towns.”

Yes, a Sundown Town is one where blacks know not to be caught inside the city limits after sundown. Although this is an “unspoken custom” these days, back before the current national Civil Rights laws were put in place, such policies were even openly advertised on signs at the edge of some towns.

Hawthorne, California, was even more blunt on its city limit sign: “Nigger, Don’t Let the Sun Set on You in Hawthorne.”

The local racial reality was often openly advertised in real estate offerings for towns, such as this public service ad of the 1920s issued by the town of Mena, Arkansas.

One of the most notorious current Sundown Towns is Anna, Illinois.

Anna, Illinois, is a chicken-splat wide spot in the road in Union County that was notorious nationally as a Sundown Town.  Anna’s 1954 signs prohibiting blacks were commented upon in the national press.  Furthermore, the residents of Anna used to, and still will, tell newcomers a not very funny “joke”: the town’s name “Anna” stood for “Ain’t No Niggers Allowed”.  [Source]

And not much has changed in Anna for the past sixty years. For instance, here’s a little 2001 vignette:

“Is it true that ’Anna’ stands for ‘Ain’t No Niggers Allowed’?” I asked at the convenience store in Anna, Illinois, where I stopped to buy coffee.

“Yes,” the store clerk replied. “That’s sad, isn’t it?” she added, distancing herself from the policy. And she went on to assure me, “That all happened a long time ago.”

“I understand racial exclusion is still going on?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied.
“That’s sad.”

-conversation with clerk, Anna, Illinois, October 2001 [Source]

Another blatantly obvious current Sundown Town (or County, in this case) is in Kentucky.

McLean County, Kentucky, is one such Sundown County.  It has been blissfully (to it) white for longer than anyone can remember.  There are two African-American families that have been allowed to live in peace there.  They are not embraced, but are merely tolerated (they have lived there for many decades).  The populace of the county treats these blacks as tokens, and they use them to congratulate themselves about their forward-thinking and to show publicly they are not racist. (“See?  There’s our black people, right over there – both of ’em!”)

Yet, without having a sign that clearly says “Whites Only”, McLean County (and more onerously its county seat of Calhoun) is a Sundown community.  The word “nigger” can be heard off-handedly any day of the week in Calhoun.  Racist jokes that the denizens think are funny are told and retold.  Livermore, Kentucky (a town in McLean County), hosted a lynching in the mid 20^th Century.  The mere handfuls of token blacks who live in the area of Calhoun do not live in the midst of concentrated white populations.

Not one of the “good” Christians who live in the county would openly admit they discriminate or are racists.  In 2010, the local Catholic Church (the only one in Calhoun) was sent its new priest after the older one retired.  He happened to be African (from Kenya).  The priest moved into the church rectory – after settling into his new digs, he made the mistake of going out to walk around his new town.  Police response was immediate, and he was detained on the street unnecessarily while he tried to explain (in his heavily accented English) who he was and why he was walking around Calhoun.  He lives there and conducts his Church services.  But, unfortunately, the community does not embrace him, and they quietly resent his presence as both a black man and as a “foreigner” (of whom they are all suspicious).

As proof of Calhoun’s (and McLean County’s) Sundown status a look at the most recent 2010 US Census data bears out the claim.  In 2010, McLean County’s roughly 60 black Americans accounted for 0.6% of the county’s total population.  Unlike the counties in northern Idaho [mentioned earlier in this article as having few blacks just because of historical settlement patterns that didn’t include black migration], however, this is no accident of demography – the counties surrounding McLean County had black populations ranging from 4.5% up to 6.6% of their populace.  The Commonwealth of Kentucky in the 2010 US Census reported over 9% of its population as African-American or black.

McLean County’s paltry 0.6% black population (when compared to its neighbors and the Commonwealth at large) is proof of its racist Sundown status. [Source]

The author of another blog post on Sundown Towns eloquently addressed the history and present reality of Sundown Towns this way:

There is no need to utter the word nigger, post signs, or blow a whistle as the Sun sets, when the borg mentality of a sundown community shows in word and deed the hatred and contempt it has for its fellow Black American citizens. When that hatred is condoned, accepted, and not challenged. Some say that only a few bad apples live in sundown communities, but, if there were “good people” who lived in these communities, they would rise up and challenge the wrongs perpetuated by sundown societies—therefore, these “good people” do not exist. Their silence is acceptance of the cruelty and venom of sundown communities.

In contemporary Germany, Hitler’s rise brought anti-Semitism to a frothing boil.  Germany had many Sundown Towns with signs reading “No Jews Allowed”.  Surprisingly, when the 1936 Olympics came to Germany, Hitler ordered these signs removed to avoid embarrassment in the face of the international community that would soon be in his country.

Hitler’s order is in direct contrast to Southern California’s response during the 1932 Olympics.  Apparently, it was okay to not welcome blacks in California towns, because the City of Los Angeles, the County of Los Angeles, the State of California, and the United States Government did not require any of the communities surrounding the Olympic Games venue to remove their Sundown billboards and signs.  It is amazing that even Hitler recognized the importance of downplaying such racism under global scrutiny when Los Angeles (and America) could not. 

Yes, all these US towns finally took down the signs, under pressure from newly-minted Federal laws that were finally put in place in the 1960s and later. But taking down the signs didn’t change the hearts of those who put up the signs, and those who wish they could put them up again. Nor, in many cases, did it change the de facto practices of many communities. Sundown Towns (and cities) small and large exist across this nation, both north and south, to this day.

No, Rep. Graves, “that age” is NOT “dead and gone.” The Spirit of the Age has just gone under cover. Yes, we no longer have public lynchings where children receive token toes from the burned bodies for souvenirs like they did in my parents’ lifetime. Yes, we no longer have any towns with blatant billboards advertising their rabid racism. Nor do we have city paper editors writing headlines glorying in the violent routing of negroes from the community. There are strong legal sanctions about such things now, particularly on the national level. So most of the time racists and bigots of all sorts are forced to “sublimate” their disdain for those who don’t look like themselves. And they are forced to restrain their natural tendencies to want to engage in violent acts to protect their environment from encroachment by racially inferior folks.

But sometimes it surely bubbles VERY shallowly below the surface of our “civilized” communities. For most of my life I have admired pictures of the period of the early 20^th century. Everyone looks soooo civilized.  Think of the impression given by this scene below in the Music Man movie, which is set in 1912… just seven years before the “Red Summer” that saw the US wracked with at least 25 major white-on-black race riots, and numerous lynchings—including eleven in which men were burned alive. In public settings, while white men, women—and sometimes children—looked on…with many having their pictures taken for postcards commemorating the event.

Who’d ever think huge crowds of people who looked pretty much like this could be capable of such heathen barbarism?

Below are some pics from catalogs of 1927. Who would think that some people who could have ordered from these very catalogs, full of the “best that civilization has to offer,” could have just six years earlier taken part in acts of barbaric civic terrorism in Tulsa (and elsewhere)? In fact, I’ll bet that some of the hats, suits, and ladies’ frocks that showed up in even later postcards of lynchings came from these very catalogs or later versions of them.

No, thinking that the vast majority of folks in the US are deep down inside now so much “more civilized” than those who lived in the era depicted above, are all far less “prejudiced” than their parents or grandparents or great grandparents were, do not harbor any racism or bigotry in their hearts…is extremely naïve. The evidence of such factors as the perpetuation of Sundown Towns belies this extreme optimism.

Getting to the Biblical Bottom of the Story

So what are we left to conclude about this whole matter? This blog series has chronicled an amazing litany of hellishly vicious acts perpetrated by US citizens, against US citizens in their midst, merely because of the genetic makeup of those being victimized. This hasn’t been a description of one or two isolated freak circumstances. It has been details of a few examples of a pattern of evil that was widespread through every part of the country, and lasted over many decades—and which has had repercussions clear down to the present.

What does the Bible have to say about a “civilization,” a “nation,” a “people” who have such a historical record?

At the beginning of the history of the “Nation of Israel,” when God was about to take them to their “Promised Land” where they had a “manifest destiny” to be a light to the world and eventually even bring the truths of God to the nations of the world, God told them the following in no uncertain terms, recorded in the Book of Leviticus:

Leviticus 19:33-34 (Message version)

“When a foreigner lives with you in your land, don’t take advantage of him. Treat the foreigner the same as a native. Love him like one of your own. Remember that you were once foreigners in Egypt. I am God, your God.

By the time we reach the book of Jeremiah, it becomes pretty obvious that, as a nation, they failed in obeying this command throughout their history. The portion of the “people of Israel” known as the House of Israel—the northern tribes—had already gone into captivity as a result of ignoring this and many other biblical commands. So God gives the remaining tribes, the House of Judah, one more chance to have a change of heart and “get it right this time.”

Jeremiah 22: 1-4

This is what the Lord says: “Go down to the palace of the king of Judah and proclaim this message there: ‘Hear the word of the Lord to you, king of Judah, you who sit on David’s throne—you, your officials and your people who come through these gates. ³ This is what the Lord says:

Do what is just and right.

Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed.

Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.

For if you are careful to carry out these commands, then kings who sit on David’s throne will come through the gates of this palace, riding in chariots and on horses, accompanied by their officials and their people.

But if you do not obey these commands, declares the Lord, I swear by myself that this palace will become a ruin.’”

That “palace” did become a ruin, though, because there was never any heartfelt, permanent national repentance by the people and their leaders.

The New Testament tells us why all these details of the Old Testament are relevant to us today. The Message paraphrase really drives home the point…

1 Corinthians 10:11

These are all warning markers—danger!—in our history books, written down so that we don’t repeat their mistakes. Our positions in the story are parallel—they at the beginning, we at the end—and we are just as capable of messing it up as they were.

There are many 21^st century Christians who are absolutely adamant that the USA was literally founded as a “Christian nation.” They are convinced it was established by God Himself as a direct parallel to the ancient nation of Israel. They feel that through most of its history it was marching forward with a manifest destiny to be a “shining city on a hill” to light the way of the world. They feel that the evidence of astonishing military might and an ever-burgeoning gross national product compared to the rest of the nations of the world—starting  particularly at the turn of the 19^th/20^th centuries—is evidence that the US was God’s Favored Nation. And that it continued in that state of grace through the Glory Days of the 1950s.

And they are now chagrined that we as a nation seem to be slipping from that high pinnacle. This they blame on current and recent social trends, in particular gay marriage and acceptance of abortion. “If only” we can somehow vote in the right leaders, we can push back those trends and “get back to” the level of “righteousness” we had in 1900, and 1920, and 1940 … and once again recapture our role as that beautiful City on a Hill.

I would submit that this “closed narrative” of US national history is deeply in error. I offer as evidence the tip of the iceberg I’ve shared of the incredible level of institutionalized, totally unreasoning hatred toward and violence done to … our version of the Bible’s mention of “the foreigner among you.”

We allowed, from the very beginning of the US with its Constitution in 1789 (in spite of our claims that “All men are created equal…), for “our” citizens to acquire other human beings as slaves and bring them into permanent residence in our nation. Most folks are willing to admit that those who were slave owners at the time did NOT treat these foreigners “the same as the native,” nor did they “love him like one of their own.” We like to excuse those back in ante-bellum days as just not “enlightened” enough to know better. They just needed a bit more time for the country to become more “modern” in its thinking.

But most will not admit … or perhaps do not even know…that once we eliminated de jure slavery as an option in the country, we NEVER, “as a people,” replaced it with the biblically-mandated treatment. Never. Not in 1900, not in 1921 at the time of the Tulsa holocaust, not any time from then to now. In recent decades the federal government finally limited some unfair treatment of blacks (and other despised minorities among us) with some legislation, but there is no indication that this changed hearts. It’s good the laws are in place, but they don’t indicate that the vast majority of the white population of this “Christian nation” treats minorities “the same as the native” nor that they “love them like their own.” Far from it. Many just grudgingly “put up with” the laws related to Civil Rights. And in many places, they navigate around them with all sorts of subterfuges…and revel in their Sundown Towns.

So let’s look at just two more admonitions by the ancient prophets, line up our record as a nation, and see what we might be in for…

Zechariah 7:8-12

And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah: “This is what the Lord Almighty said: ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the foreigner or the poor. Do not plot evil against each other.’

“But they refused to pay attention; stubbornly they turned their backs and covered their ears. They made their hearts as hard as flint and would not listen to the law or to the words that the Lord Almighty had sent by his Spirit through the earlier prophets. So the Lord Almighty was very angry.

Ezekiel 22:1-4,6-7 (NIV)

The word of the Lord came to me:

“Son of man, will you judge her? Will you judge this city of bloodshed? Then confront her with all her detestable practices  and say: ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: You city that brings on herself doom by shedding blood in her midst and defiles herself by making idols…See how each of the princes of Israel who are in you uses his power to shed blood. In you they have treated father and mother with contempt; in you they have oppressed the foreigner and mistreated the fatherless and the widow…

To those Christians who are convinced that “who” needs to repent to “turn back the anger of God” from our nation is solely “people unlike themselves” who support gay marriage and abortion, I say that they may find some day that God has a much bigger laundry list than they do of what in our national historical record cries out for recognition, admission, introspection, and repentance.

Oh Say Can You See III: 11 Ground Zero pt. 8

Series: Oh Say Can You See? III
Entry 11: Ground Zero: Part 8

Click here to go to Ground Zero: Part 1

 The Disneyfication of American History

A few years back, through mutual friends, I met an interesting couple. They were both died-in-the-wool, card-carrying Disney Geeks. Both absolutely loved the classic Disney animated movies and the Disney theme parks. They first met at Disneyland in California, carried on their courtship there, and held their wedding right at the park.

By the time I met them, they were living near Walt Disney World in Florida, had their first child, a little boy who is about three now, and had carved out for themselves a joint Dream Job: They have built a cottage industry around their Disney fandom. They spend almost all their time at the Florida Disney parks, and research and write free-lance articles about everything Disney for publication.  They have a major Disney-themed website that brings in income also.

My Facebook feed includes family chit-chat from them, mostly covering the latest adorable thing their cute little one has done at a Disney park. By the time most little kids are three, you may notice them in the back seat of the car on the way to the store spontaneously breaking out into the lyrics of the latest ad jingle for McDonald’s or some breakfast cereal they heard on TV. Not this little one. He breaks out into… the COMPLETE narration for the Catastrophe Canyon attraction at Disney Hollywood Studios! He’s been on the ride so many times that he has just “internalized” the patter of the guide. I’m sure he can do this for multiple rides and attractions.

For each Disney attraction has a “narrative” that plays out exactly the same every time. If you go to the Carousel of Progress at Magic Kingdom, you will see a typical American Dad, who is going to talk about the never-ending improvements that electricity has provided to the lifestyle of the average American since the turn of the last century.

This is because the attraction was originally created for the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, paid for by General Electric as an “infotainment” attraction promoting its electrical appliances. The audio-animatronic Dad has his standard patter that he does in each scene of the attraction, followed by belting out the tune to the attraction’s theme song—“There’s a Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow”—as the audience seating room revolves around the center stage to encounter the same Dad in his ever-improving electrical home.

As you continue on around the stage’s pie-shaped sections to other eras, you hear a super-abbreviated narrative about the ways that electricity has made the American Dream of ultimate home convenience come true.

I say all that to say this … it’s a “closed narrative.” If you visit the attraction over a period of years, you will hear the same thing every time. You will not go there and suddenly encounter a scene outside the ideal home where Dad lives. There will never be a hint, for instance, of what “modern living” was like for the millions in the slums of New York and other American cities in 1900.

There will never be a peek inside the dark coal mines where horribly dangerous and abusive child labor is allowing cheap prices for the coal that fires the electrical plants of the time to power the conveniences of Dad and his family.

No, it’s a bright, colorful, neat, tidy, cheerful little closed narrative that allows the viewer to join Dad in singing praises for the Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow that “all Americans” have always enjoyed.

Now mind you, I’m not complaining! I love the Disney parks, and the Disney attractions. I expect to hear and see the same thing every time I go in a certain attraction. Like many geeky Disney park fans, I’m irritated when they retire one of my favorite attractions, like Horizons at EPCOT, that was discontinued in 1999.

Or World of Motion, that was retired in 1996.

I even balk at them tinkering with scenes or narration in attractions. I was shocked—shocked I say!—when  they pulled the authoritative voice of Walter Cronkite from its job guiding me through the Spaceship Earth depiction of the history of communication, and replaced it with a totally unfamiliar voice. I like to become familiar with the narrative…and then keep it permanently!

Yes, I don’t mind that the audio-animatronic white-washed version of history at the Disney parks plays out to a closed narrative. But I AM concerned that it seems “real” history out in the “real” world is mostly treated the same way. I am convinced that what almost everyone does… me included, in the past… with what they learn about American history over the early years of their life is subconsciously construct a cohesive “narrative,” that very early becomes set in concrete. It starts with their earliest memories of historic tidbits in kindergarten such as making “handprint turkey” pictures to go along with the Indian feather headdresses and Pilgrim hats that they make out of construction paper for the class Thanksgiving Play and luncheon.

The cast of the 5th grade Thanksgiving play at
Santa Ana, CA, Franklin Elementary School in 1931.

It continues as they read simplified stories in their grade school American history textbooks that skim rapidly over the “high points” of “how our country grew.” They may make little Pioneer dioramas with Conestoga Wagons, and read Little House books.

And do projects to help them remember the names and order of the Presidents.

Woven into all of this is an underlying current of a set of Ideals expressed in our early founding documents, and in such later pronouncements as FDR’s Four Freedoms—Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, equality, the brotherhood of man, freedom from want and fear, freedom of speech and religion. And among it all, the notion that Americans have all been “free to be all that they could be” throughout our history. (Well, at least after the slaves were set free in 1865.) That all it took was strong desire and hard work, and, why, any shoeshine boy might become a titan of industry!

(Which of course reminds me of the Tulsa Riot … which traces back to a story of a shoeshine boy. But doesn’t end up being a success story.)

This closed narrative that we each create in our subconscious, and the snippets of events that go into its construction, is reinforced for most of us throughout our lives by what you might call Civic Public Relations.  Popularized Patriotism. You see it in the attraction “American Aventure” at EPCOT.

You see it on floats in Fourth of July parades.

If you were around in WW2 you were utterly inundated with patriotic government posters. I even collect (digitally) the old WW1 and WW2 patriotic/propaganda posters and get all misty as I see the stirring messages on them designed to rally the American populace to sacrifice.

(See my growing collection of over 400 posters at this link on Pinterest.)

Yes, don’t get me wrong again …this kind of sentimental patriotism grabs at my heartstrings too. My dad was a WW2 Marine in the South Pacific–Guadalcanal and all that. I boo-hoo when a Marine Corps marching band goes by in a parade stirringly playing some patriotic song like “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

But in recent years I’ve come to understand that TRUE patriotism does not consist of feelings of pride for everything my country has ever done. It doesn’t consist of a desire to sweep under the carpet all the unpleasant truths about the less noble things that have been done.

My feelings of patriotism, of love of my country, doesn’t rely on me creating an artificial, stunted, closed narrative. My own personal extended family has had all sorts of good guys and bad guys in it. A comprehensive picture album of all of its history would include moments of triumph and moments of ignominy. It didn’t quit being my family when “bad stuff happened.” But neither would I gain any more “love” of my family if I would be able to fool myself that it had nothing but good and glory in its history. What I would do if I tried that would be to lose the integrity and honesty that makes me who I am.

Why should I treat my “American family” and its history any differently? Yet this is what most people do. Including me in the past. I built my understanding of the flow of American history out of a hodgepodge of class lessons, TV shows—anybody remember “You Are There” from the mid-1950s?…

…museum exhibits, magazine articles, even pop music songs… like “Battle of New Orleans” by Johnny Horton!

I bought into, essentially, an “American mythology.” It was a closed narrative about an America that never really was, outside of on Main Street in Disneyland and WDW Magic Kingdom. And it had given me a warped interpretation about what is going on in America today.

It also gave me a warped perspective on facing any information that I ran across that conflicted with my mythology. This is where the concept of “cognitive dissonance” comes into play. (For a detailed explanation of this psychological theory see the material on my Field Guide to the Wild World of Religion website on the topic.) Basically, this theory explains that when we try to hold two opposing concepts in our mind…when a piece of evidence conflicts with an assumption we have accepted…we experience “dissonance” in our brain. A jangling feeling that something isn’t quite right. It makes us uncomfortable, and we do whatever is necessary to make it stop.

Because our “Prime Directive” is usually to hold on to all of our long-held assumptions, most folks have a couple of main solutions they usually rely on to deal with Cognitive Dissonance. We can “discount” the new information and literally cast it aside, refusing to consider it any more. Or, if we are unable to do that because of some outside pressure forcing us to look at it, we can “make it over” …carving off pieces of it, reshaping it, until it will fit into our assumption system.

Very seldom are people willing to reconsider and make changes directly to one of their assumption systems…whether it is the one about their religious beliefs, about their political beliefs, or any other topic they hold near and dear.  This is either too painful…or too much work.

But there is another solution, and I think it is one that many American citizens who pride themselves on their level of patriotism use when confronted with very unpleasant information about a factor in American History. They quarantine it. We don’t see quarantine used much any longer in our everyday life. But back in the 1940s and before it was quite common to walk along a neighborhood street and see a sign like this on a window or door of a home.

The idea was that most of the neighborhood was disease-free. When one person cropped up with a disease, you could take that one person who had the problem and isolate them until they either recovered … or died… from the disease. And everyone else would be just fine.

I believe this may well be how there could have been so much hubbub in the public press around the year 2000 about the Tulsa Riot, and yet a decade later it has gone back into the shadows. I’m pretty sure that if even I had seen one of the History Channel or BBC specials about it, I would have looked at it in fascination—but would have considered it a “historical fluke.” A single, isolated incident of inexplicable violence—horrific, and fascinating in its details. But unrelated to my own “personal narrative” of the history of America.

Oh, I knew about slavery, but that was stopped at the end of the Civil War. I just “assumed” that from then on black people had lots of options in America. Well, yes, from a quite early age I had come to discover that lots of white people were “prejudiced” against black people, especially in the South. I knew they didn’t want to drink out of the same drinking fountain, and insisted that they be segregated into their own schools. But that was all. It seemed unfair to me, but it was just “the way things were.”  Since I grew up in a town in far north Michigan that didn’t even have a single black family, considering the state of racial relations in our country just wasn’t something that came up in daily life. Ever. Not only regarding race relations in the past, but in the present.

Until the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s came to national attention in the news because of riots and marches and such, I was pretty much blissfully unaware of the reality of what it REALLY meant to be a “person of color” in America throughout our post-Civil-War history.

By then I had my “narrative” very strongly established. Whatever was going on in Selma or Birmingham seemed to me as a teenager to be just some “current event,” based on some current grievances in limited sections of the country.

And I am convinced that’s how most outsiders may look at the story of the Tulsa Riot/Holocaust of 1921 when they hear of it. They admit it was awful. They declare that the white people involved were cruel. But they blithely assume it was a single event, in a single city in the US, during a single 24 hour period. An anomaly, not a symptom. And one that happened long ago. So it doesn’t really affect the narratives inside most people’s heads about the Land of the Free, the land where everyone has had, ever since the Civil War at least, the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. And if anyone tried to interfere with those rights, the Good People of America would Put a Stop to It posthaste.

So I’m suspicious that the average American watching a documentary on the History Channel of that infamous day would very quickly “quarantine” the event in their mind. It was a totally unexpected “outbreak” of craziness that was inexplicable. It didn’t connect in any significant way with the flow of America’s history—it was just an isolated incident. Those bad people of Tulsa didn’t reflect on “America” of the time…it was still the America of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers.

Uh, yeah …Covers that never, ever portrayed a black person, except in a subservient position, clear up into the 1960s. By decree of the publisher.

This is the reason that I have placed the story of the Tulsa Holocaust, this series I’ve titled “Ground Zero,” AFTER several stories of the United States of Lyncherdom. I want to establish beyond a doubt that Tulsa wasn’t a single outbreak of a sickness, that you can safely quarantine in your mind’s history narrative as “not relevant,” that you can place in the dusty museum room of your mind that you label “freaks of history,” just like in P.T. Barnum’s American Museum of the mid-1800s had displays of people and things that were commonly referred to as “freaks of nature.”

It was a symptom of a plague that was already raging. It wasn’t unique at all. (It was just a bigger outbreak than usual.) And the plague didn’t stop with it at all. And the after effects of that plague still exist to this day. But few are paying any attention, because, as mentioned in the intro to the whole Oh Say Can You See? blog series,  they are looking at all the wrong symptoms.

The researchers and writers of the Tulsa Riot Commission had great hopes that their efforts would make a difference. Here’s how they expressed it in the end of their report:

To paraphrase Maya Angelou: Our history, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived; but, if faced with courage, it need not be lived again. No matter what else we may do, we will not be whole unless and until we own our past, process it, and integrate its lessons into our present and our vision for the future. Teaching and learning are essential to this process.  So, so true.  This quote needs to be on billboards all over the city of Tulsa.

They had a number of hopes for their efforts. They really did have hope that the government of the city of Tulsa and the State of Oklahoma would realize that MAYBE the few living survivors of the Tulsa Holocaust might merit at least a tiny bit of “reparations,” just a token of the regrets of the community—since, after all, there had been a huge outpouring of civic financial generosity—in the millions of dollars—related to the Oklahoma City bombing. It wouldn’t have cost much to extend such a token.

As the commission submits its report [2001], 118 persons have been identified, contacted, and registered as living survivors of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot. (Another 176 persons also have been registered as descendants of riot victims.)

But no, too many in positions of authority decided ANY reparations of any kind might set an unwanted precedent among others with grievances from the past. The number of survivors has no doubt decreased drastically since that time. A baby born that year would now be 92. Any adults would be in their 100s. It would seem that to just extend a hand to the handful left would be a noble deed. But no, it appears that it is not to be, and that all the survivors will just quietly die off.

The authorities have offered a few crumbs of “good will.” Some metal plaques have been installed on sidewalks in the Greenwood area where riot events occurred. (In a black area, where few whites ever go to this day.) A “reconciliation park” has been created connected to a new semi-pro ball park in Tulsa. Although I’m not sure that most people who just go there for a nice picnic connect its existence to an effort at reconciliation between whites and blacks in Tulsa. Especially since most blacks in Tulsa STILL live “across the tracks” in the old Greenwood area, which has been rebuilt—but with none of the pride of its glory days.

One of the only homes remaining in the Greenwood community from the era of the 1920s is the John and Lucy Mackey home. Their wood frame home was burned to the ground during the riot, but they were able to rebound from the loss and build this fine brick home on the same lot in 1926. Amazingly, the Mackey’s were not “wealthy” people at all…they did domestic and yard work for white Tulsans. The home was for decades a source of pride for the local black community.  In 1995, it was incorporated into the plans for a new cultural center located in Greenwood.

The Greenwood Cultural Center, dedicated on October 22, 1995, was created as a tribute to Greenwood’s history and as a symbol of hope for the community’s future. The center has a museum, an African American art gallery, a large banquet hall, and housed the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame until 2007. The total cost of the center was almost $3 million. [Paid for by a federal “Model Cities” program grant.] The cultural center is a very important part of the reconstruction and unity of the Greenwood Historical District.

The Greenwood Cultural Center sponsors and promotes education and cultural events preserving African American heritage. It also provides positive images of North Tulsa to the community, attracting a wide variety of visitors, not only to the center itself, but also to the city of Tulsa as a whole.

In 2011, the Greenwood Cultural Center lost 100% of its funding from the State of Oklahoma. As a result, the center may be forced to close its doors. A fundraising campaign is now underway to try to raise private funds to keep the educational and cultural facility open. [Source]

The center has provided programs in drama, dancing, music, and the arts for disadvantaged youth in the area for many years. It’s one of the main places preserving in a museum setting the story of the Tulsa Riot—and telling the inspiring story of how much the black community HAD accomplished against the odds back in the period before the Riot. It has served as a gathering place for current residents. But from what I’ve seen on the Internet, it looks like they may lose their battle to remain open.

The flurry of activity around the time of the Riot Commission’s report that led to so much publicity also led to a couple of the main textbook publishers in America adding at least a perfunctory mention of the Riot in their high school history texts. And a number of groups have produced educational resources and materials for teachers who would like to include a “unit” in their social studies or history classes on the topic.

Other than that, I’m convinced that the story of the Riot is mostly going to just slip into the mists of history in the coming years. It doesn’t fit with the standard patriotic narrative.

The patriotic narrative *I* would like to see is one where the noble citizens of our country own up to the darkness in parts of our corporate past, truly and publically repent of the factors that caused the darkness… and the factors that caused the “cover ups.” And then seek true reconciliation among all races as we move together to create the noble nation envisioned by our founders. Where all men truly ARE able to live in a way that reflects their “inalienable rights.” Where FDR’s “Four Freedoms” (from want and fear, for religion and speech) were actually a reality, and we didn’t have to make excuses why… they haven’t been.

I still have hopes that this country could come much closer to living up to the aspirations of its founders.

But if we keep ignoring our past, keep lying to ourselves and others about that past, keep mis-diagnosing our current maladies as having nothing to do with that past, I certainly can’t judge how much hope I ought to have in … those hopes.

For a deeper examination of all of these issues in the light of the Bible, check out the final entry in this Ground Zero series, coming soon.

Oh Say Can You See? III: 10 Ground Zero pt. 7

Series: Oh Say Can You See? III
Entry 10: Ground Zero: Part 7

Click here to go to Ground Zero: Part 1

In 1970, with the fiftieth anniversary of the horrific 1921 Tulsa Holocaust just one year away …

…Larry Silvey, the publications manager at the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce, decided that on the fiftieth anniversary of the riot, the chamber’s magazine should run a story on what had happened. Silvey then contacted Ed Wheeler, the host of ‘The Gilcrease Story,” a popular history program which aired on local radio. Wheeler — who, like Silvey, was white – agreed to research and write the article. Thus, during the winter of 1970-71, Wheeler went to work, interviewing dozens of elderly black and white riot eyewitnesses, and searching through archives in both Tulsa and Oklahoma City for documents pertaining to the riot.

Wheeler received anonymous threats related to his work on this article, but ignored them and finished it. Silvey began preparations to publish it in spring 1971, but once the management within the Chamber of Commerce realized just how pointed the article was going to be—including photographs never before published—they balked and killed the article. Silvey appealed to the board of directors, but they too nixed his plans.

Determined that his efforts should not have been in vain, Wheeler then tried to take his story to Tulsa’s two daily newspapers, but was rebuffed.

In the end, his article — called “Profile of a Race Riot” — was published in Impact Magazine, a new, black-oriented publication edited by a young African American journalist named Don Ross. [Source]

Don Ross was born in Tulsa in 1941. After high school he did a stint in the Air Force, and returned home to a job as a baker. He became involved in the civil rights movement in the 1960s, and was at the 1963 “I have a dream” March on Washington. In the early 1970s he helped establish a regional magazine called Impact, modeled on Ebony magazine.

And when Ross published Wheeler’s article…

Ross was quoted in a Knight-Ridder/Tribune News Service story, “Both blacks and whites got on my case for causing trouble. I had violated the conspiracy of silence going on for 50 years.”

Ross continued a career and studies in Journalism, and eventually got a master’s degree in Political Science. In 1982 he won a seat in the Tulsa House of Representatives and served there for many terms. He helped push through various civil rights laws. And he led the fight to get the Confederate flag down from its spot flying above the legislature’s building. In 1989 Oklahoma became the first state to take that flag over its government buildings down.

And then there was his central role in bringing the history of the Tulsa Riot to state, national, and international attention:

Ross was the principal organizer of the 75th anniversary commemorations [1996] of the 1921 riot. The ceremony included the dedication of “The Wall Street Memorial,” a ten-foot granite monument inscribed with the names of more than 200 black-owned businesses that were destroyed by the flames.

In 1997, Ross cosponsored legislation to establish the Tulsa Race Riot Commission. “Four years ago, if I had proposed a Tulsa Race Riot Commission, I would have been laughed off the House floor,” Ross commented in the newspaper Tulsa World at the time. “Even though the legislature is more conservative today, there are more people on all sides–including the governor and the mayor–who are pushing for this project and others that would benefit the citizens of north Tulsa [evidently STILL the area where most blacks are centralized in Tulsa, where Greenwood used to stand].” The Tulsa Race Riot Commission, an eleven-member group, was charged with studying the events of the riot, and making recommendations about reparations.

Here is Don Ross, standing at the corner of Archer and Greenwood Streets in North Tulsa, in the heart of what used to be “Black Wallstreet”—before it was burned to the ground by rioters in 1921.

And that brings us to the details of the Tulsa Race Riot Commission’s work, which has been the source of most of the information in this Ground Zero series. That report was completed in 2001. Here is the preamble to that report:

The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission originated in 1997 with House Joint Resolution No. 1035. … and became law with Governor Frank Keating’s signature on April 6, 2000.

…The statute also charged the commission to produce …”a final report of its findings and recommendations” and to submit that report “in writing to the Governor, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, and the Mayor and each member of the City Council of the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma.” This is that report. It accounts for and completes the work of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission.

A series of papers accompanies the report. Some are written by scholars of national stature, others by experts of international acclaim. Each addresses at length and in depth issues of expressed legislative interest and matters of enormous public consequence. As a group, they comprise a uniquely special and a uniquely significant contribution that must be attached to this report and must be studied carefully along with it. [http://www.tulsareparations.org/FinalReport.htm ]

The history of the Tulsa Riot was shrouded in secrecy for so long, that there was considerable concern that the Commission not just do a cursory job, leaving much to continued speculation. If it was to be a document that would speak authoritatively on this event, which has national import as arguably the most vicious act of racial terrorism on American Soil in our history, it needed to be researched and written by scholars with impeccable credentials, with input and oversight by representatives of the Oklahoma government. It was.

…The governor was to appoint six members…Two state officials – the directors of the Oklahoma Human Rights Commission (OHRC) and of the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) – also were to serve as ex officio members, either personally or through their designees.

[The Tulsa mayor] was to select the commission’s final three members. … One of the mayor’s appointees had to be “a survivor of the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot incident”; two had to be current residents of the historic Greenwood community, the area once devastated by the “incident.”

… Governor Frank Keating’s six appointees included two legislators, each from a different chamber, each from an opposite party, each a former history teacher.

The Commission was also granted funds to hire a few expert consultants. The two main ones they chose who worked from a broad perspective were John Hope Franklin and Scott Ellsworth.

… John Hope Franklin is the son of Greenwood attorney B. C. Franklin, a graduate of Tulsa’s Booker T. Washington High School (Fisk and Harvard, too), and James B. Duke Professor of History Emeritus at Duke University. Recipient of scores of academic and literary awards, not to mention more than a hundred honorary doctorates…

[Franklin recommended they include] Dr. Scott Ellsworth, a native Tulsan now living in Oregon…a Duke graduate who already had written a highly regarded study of the riot. [Ellsworth was the author of the extremely detailed description of the Riot that has been quoted throughout this Ground Zero series.]

In addition, they engaged the services of more focused researchers:

Legal scholars, archeologists, anthropologists, forensic specialists, geophysicists – all of these and more blessed this commission with technical expertise impossible to match and unimaginable otherwise. As a research group, they brought a breadth of vision and a depth of training that made Oklahoma’s commission a model of state inquiry.

The reason I take the time to include the information above, which may seem kind of pedantic, is this:

The Tulsa Holocaust was the subject of one of the most thorough, meticulous, scholarly studies done in recent times on a modern historical US event. The resulting reports leave no doubt about the heinous nature of this terrorist act aimed at a whole racial community (not aimed just at a few men with guns who were trying to protect a young man from a lynching!)

This event is not just an historical oddity, a unique situation that exploded “out of nowhere” and whose aftermath was irrelevant. The factors that led to it remain profoundly important in the Tulsa of today. And it was not an event that happened in isolation—it was just the worst of many such events that occurred over decades in the late 1800s and first half of the 20^th century, in communities throughout the country. Events which I’m willing to bet most Americans are as unaware of as they have been of the Tulsa Holocaust.

Sample:

Wilmington [NC] Massacre of 1898

Originally labeled a race riot, it is now termed a coup d’etat, as white Democratic insurrectionists overthrew the legitimately elected local government, the only such event in United States history.

In the Wilmington Insurrection, two days after the election of a Fusionist white mayor and biracial city council, Democratic white supremacists illegally seized power from the elected government. More than 1500 white men participated in an attack on the black newspaper, burning down the building. They ran officials and community leaders out of the city, and killed many blacks in widespread attacks, but especially destroyed the [black] Brooklyn neighborhood. They took photographs of each other during the events. The Wilmington Light Infantry (WLI) and federal Naval Reserves, told to quell the riot, used rapid-fire weapons and killed several black men in the Brooklyn neighborhood. Both black and white residents later appealed for help after the riot to President William McKinley, who did not respond. More than 2,000 blacks left the city permanently, turning it from a black-majority to a white-majority city. [Wiki]

Armed crowd of white men posing among the ruins

Destruction of the Manly printing press for the Wilmington Record on November 10, 1898. Destruction of the printing press was the first violent act by a mob of white supremacists. This newly discovered photograph provides more insight into the day’s activity and an up-close analysis of the men shows a large number of guns, pistols, and the clear destruction of the building. [Source]

Group of Red Shirts, a white paramilitary group, posing at the polls.

And here is a first-person account of that event.

What appears below is a rare eyewitness account provided by Rev. Charles S. Morris who became one of the refugees from the city. Morris provided the account in a speech in January 1899 before the International Association of Colored Clergymen meeting in Boston.

Nine Negroes massacred outright; a score wounded and hunted like partridges on the mountain; one man, brave enough to fight against such odds would be hailed as a hero anywhere else, was given the privilege of running the gauntlet up a broad street, where he sank ankle deep in the sand, while crowds of men lined the sidewalks and riddled him with a pint of bullets as he ran bleeding past their doors; another Negro shot twenty times in the back as he scrambled empty handed over a fence; thousands of women and children fleeing in terror from their humble homes in the darkness of the night, out under a gray and angry sky, from which falls a cold and bone chilling rain, out to the dark and tangled ooze of the swamp amid the crawling things of night, fearing to light a fire, startled at every footstep, cowering, shivering, shuddering, trembling, praying in gloom and terror: half clad and barefooted mothers, with their babies wrapped only in a shawl, whimpering with cold and hunger at their icy breasts, crouched in terror from the vengeance of those who, in the name of civilization, and with the benediction of the ministers of the Prince of Peace, inaugurated the reformation of the city of Wilmington the day after the election by driving out one set of white office holders and filling their places with another set of white office holders—the one being Republican and the other Democrat.

All this happened, not in Turkey, nor in Russia, nor in Spain, not in the gardens of Nero, nor in the dungeons of Torquemada, but within three hundred miles of the White House, in the best State in the South, within a year of the twentieth century, while the nation was on its knees thanking God for having enabled it to break the Spanish yoke from the neck of Cuba. This is our civilization. This is Cuba’s kindergarten of ethics and good government. This is Protestant religion in the United States, that is planning a wholesale missionary crusade against Catholic Cuba. This is the golden rule as interpreted by the white pulpit of Wilmington. [Source]

Or how about a few years later in East St. Louis, Illinois:

The East St. Louis Riot (May and July 1917) was an outbreak of labor- and race-related violence that caused between 40 and 200 deaths and extensive property damage. East St. Louis, Illinois, is an industrial city on the east bank of the Mississippi River across from St. Louis, Missouri. It was the worst incidence of labor-related violence in 20th-century American history, and one of the worst race riots in U.S. history. [Source]

In the East St Louis Riot over 300 homes and buildings were destroyed, 6000 blacks left homeless, many dead or injured.

And two years later there was the Chicago Riot:

The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 was a major racial conflict that began in Chicago, Illinois on July 27, 1919 and ended on August 3.During the riot, dozens died and hundreds were injured. It is considered the worst of the approximately 25 riots during the Red Summer, so named because of the violence and fatalities across the nation. The combination of prolonged [white on black] arson, looting and murder was the worst race rioting in the history of Illinois. [Source]

A white gang looking for African Americans during the Chicago Race Riot of 1919.

Black Victim Stoned to Death, Chicago Race Riots, July 1919

A group of white men and boys standing on the sidewalk in front of a house vandalized in the race riots of July-August, 1919, in Chicago, Illinois. The windows of the house are broken and the front steps are torn off.

Yes, the Tulsa Holocaust was by no means unique, just more wide-ranging in its destruction than most of the others.

The lessons the Tulsa event offers are relevant to the whole United States of America, of both the present and the future.

As the Commission’s final report noted:

Many have questioned why or even if anyone would be interested now in events that happened in one city, one time, one day, long ago. What business did today’s state lawmakers have in something so old, so local, and so deservedly forgotten? Surely no one cares, not anymore.

An answer comes from hundreds and hundreds of voices. They tell us that what happened in 1921 in Tulsa is as alive today as it was back then. What happened in Tulsa stays as important and remains as unresolved today as in 1921. What happened there still exerts its power over people who never lived in Tulsa at all.

How else can one explain the thousands of hours volunteered by hundreds of people, all to get this story told and get it told right? How else can one explain the regional, national, even international attention that has been concentrated on a few short hours of a mid-sized city’s history? As the introductory paper by Drs. Franklin and Ellsworth recounts, the Tulsa disaster went largely unacknowledged for a half-century or more. After a while, it was largely forgotten.

Eventually it became largely unknown. So hushed was mention of the subject that many pronounced it the final victim of a conspiracy, this a conspiracy of silence.

That silence is shattered, utterly and permanently shattered. What ever else this commission has achieved or will achieve, it already has made that possible. Regional, national, and international media made it certain. The Dallas Morning News, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, National Public Radio (NPR), every American broadcast television network, cable outlets delivering Cinemax and the History Channel to North America, the British Broadcasting Corporation – this merely begins the attention that the media focused upon this commission and its inquiry. Many approached it in depth (NPR twice has made it the featured daily broadcast). Most returned to it repeatedly (the New York Times had carried at least ten articles as of February 2000). All considered it vital public information.

…Here is the point: The 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Commission is pleased to report that this past tragedy has been extensively aired, that it is now remembered, and that it will never again be unknown.

What I find profoundly sad is that, in spite of that flurry of media attention during a brief period around the year 2000, I personally STILL never heard of the event until stumbling across information about it when looking up a related topic a few weeks ago. Nor had any of my friends whom I have asked about it ever heard about it. They are all educated people, some of them avid history fans. They watch the history channel. Some tune in NPR.

So the reality is, although the information is now “out there in plain sight” all over the Internet IF you know where to look…I’m pretty sure the vast majority of the populace still are utterly unaware. Not unaware of just this single event, but of the whole sickening, wide-spread pattern of rabid racial hatred, public terrorism against blacks, and the whole litany of hideous, vicious public lynchings—including multiple burnings alive at the stake!—that characterized a whole swath of many decades of our history long after the end of the institution of slavery.

How can this be? I have a theory to answer that question. It’s related to a concept I’ve mentioned before in this blog. And you can read about it in the next entry in this series:

Ground Zero: Part 8

Disneyfication of History.