Category Archives: American History

Miscellany. Wherein I Defend Confederate Monuments In Public Places.

31 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by in American History, Art, Uncategorized

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Mrs CorC? was laid off last week in a cost-saving move by corporate. Sucks. We are using the down time to clear out junk in the old hacienda.  I took some books to the Y for their book sale. My dream is that we will be rid of enough stuff to commence work on the home remodel. The pricy stuff will be new windows, a rear patio door and hardwood flooring downstairs. With luck, we can have the house ready for the family at Christmas or Thanksgiving.

I’ve been on course to reach my weight loss goals. My swimming is coming along, well uh, swimmingly. I will do a 2-mile swim now without a second thought.

I live in Richmond, Virginia. We have in Richmond, an avenue where Confederate monuments are placed in positions of honor. They have been here for over a century. It is lovely statuary in an exquisite urban setting.  If political ideology clouds your aesthetic sense, you will be offended by monuments to Robert E. Lee and others.  Sorry. The street, Monument Avenue, is lovely .  Destroying beautiful things are what barbarians do. Art is also supposed to make one think and frequently makes us uncomfortable.  Think about that.

Yes, I know all about slavery. We Southern white males are not idiots. Nor are we ignorant. How is destroying Monument Avenue, even with its allusion to a tragic past, going to eliminate the horror of slavery from our history ?  Books in this country are already banned for superficial reasons. The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn is not taught in schools because Mark Twain used the “N” word.   The study of  history and literature isn’t for the timid.  Art isn’t about sentimentality. How can people we don’t much care for or agree with create beautiful things? Yet they do. And always have. 

This has been on my mind for a while. I needed to express my thoughts. 

Re-thinking The Automobile

22 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by in American History, food, Suburbia

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I actually walked somewhere I needed to be yesterday, instead of driving.  Rather than use the word “liberating” to describe a small act of resistance against Car Dependence, I think the term “Common Sense” is more apropos. 

My parents grew up in a world of sidewalks and street cars.    If they needed to get somewhere, they walked or took the street car.  Their neighborhood, Church Hill, was divided from the downtown area of Richmond by Shockoe Valley. Mom would cross Shockoe Valley and trudge up Broad Street Hill when she walked to the old John Marshall High School. I suspect it was roughly the same distance I walked yesterday.  It was no big deal eighty years ago to do what I did.  The numerous immigrants from the developing world think nothing of walking to places when they arrive in America.  Our church sponsored South Sudanese refugees (the famous “Lost Boys”), fleeing that now-forgotten civil war in the 1990’s.  These young men simply walked where they needed to go, out of habit and necessity.  They did not drive.

In my part of Henrico County, sidewalks are a hit or miss proposition.   For example there is was no sidewalk to my destination on the route I took from home, but there was a sidewalk for use on my return route.   Sidewalks are useful if a pedestrian wants to reduce the chance of being hit by an automobile.

After World War Two, the suburban paradigm captured American urban planning and the popular imagination.  Sidewalks were an afterthought and a redundancy.  Cars were the indispensible necessity when planning communities.  It was a given that a household had at least one car, possibly two.   The distances between housing developments and supermarkets (to name one destination) would be breached by a car.  A family bought a week’s worth of groceries on the jaunt to the store; such purchasing was made possible by a freezer and frozen foods.  I remember so well the frozen bricks of spinach, green beans and cauliflower my mother bought.  Fresh meat could be frozen, then thawed and cooked later.   Walking to a store and returning with a sizeable quantity of food was a challenge.

So back to 2017.   The challenge we now face, living in suburban America is to shift our thinking around the automobile from a necessity to a convenience.  I set out a rough guideline. If a distance to destination is under two miles, I will make an effort to walk there and plan my day accordingly.  We shall see how this turns out.

 

Popeye-Killed in Action 27 November 1944

27 Sunday Nov 2016

Posted by in American History, World War II

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Of course, Popeye is a fictional character. How could he die in battle?  Who died on this day in 1944 was Willard G. Bowsky. Willie Bowsky was born in 1907 to a Jewish father and Italian mother and grew up in the New York metropolitan area. He was a talented artist who found work in the Fleischer Studios, run by Max and Dave Fleischer. He drew Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons, soon directing a team of animators. The Bowsky cartoons stand out from the ones done by the Seymour Kneitel team.  The manic synergy between the action and the music characterizes his work.

Unlike the Warner Studios (Looney Tunes) or Disney,  based in Hollywood, the Fleischer Studios operated in New York.  There is a characteristically “urban” quality to the cartoons with street scenes and traffic commonplace. The Fleischer output was sold exclusively to Adolph Zukor’s Paramount Studios.  They developed a patented technology  that had the characters move on a three dimensional background that gave the cartoons a unique “depth”.

In the late Thirties, the Fleischer Studios relocated to Miami, Florida.  The studio quickly fell on financial hard times, exacerbated by the expense of the move.   Dave Fleischer, director of the cartoons and brother of Max Fleischer, President of the Studios had a falling out. The source of the friction was Dave’s affair with his secretary, which rankled the straight-laced Max.  The studio went bankrupt in 1942, was absorbed into the Paramount organization and became known as Famous Studios.  Shortly after this acquisition by Paramount, Willard Bowsky joined the Army. He was 35 years old.  Most talented animators who enlisted in the Army readily found work producing cartoons for the war effort. Training films and propaganda to boost morale constituted most of their output.

Bowsky did not choose that route.  He volunteered for combat duty, and was assigned to a reconnaissance unit attached to the 14th Armored Division. On this day in 1944, his unit encountered German forces near Barr, Bas-Rhin, France. Willard G Bowsky was killed in the ensuing fire fight. He was posthumously awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart. He is interred at the Lorraine American Cemetery and Memorial.

Bowsky’s story stands out because he could have taken an easier way, but didn’t. Something to think about.

St Cecelia, Ngo Dinh Diem, JFK

22 Tuesday Nov 2016

Posted by in American History, Classical Music, Politics, Vietnam

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I would be remiss if I let 22 November pass unnoticed.  It is St Cecelia’s Day. Cecelia was a young woman martyred in Second Century Rome, who sang while her executioners went about their business.  She is now the patron saint of musicians.  Given the importance of music in the Catholic tradition, it is a special day.   Starting in the Sixteenth Century, the Protestants, beset with the graven image hang-up, allowed church music to flourish. We have Buxtehude, Bach, Handel, Mendelsohn from their side of the Christian house to enrich us.  My sister, a church organist, would take my cousin Annette to the Cathedral for the St Cecelia’s Day Concert.  It was Annette’s only predictable foray inside the walls of a church, an illustration of the maxim quality over quantity.

Jumping over the centuries, we come to November, 1963. On 2 November, 1963, President Ngo Dinh Diem was taken from the Cathedral in Saigon where he was attending the All Souls Day Mass and murdered in a coup d’etat.  The coup, we were to learn, was staged with the approval of the U. S. Department of State.  It seems the pezzo novante (big shots) at State didn’t care for how Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, the lawful leaders of the South Vietnamese government, were conducting the war. They proceeded to fabricate allegations of corruption against them and found men willing to depose and murder them.  The success of the war against the Communist Viet Cong guerrillas did not improve after the coup. The war “escalated”, to use a contemporary term.  After the deaths of millions of Vietnamese, Laotions, and Cambodians and thousands of Americans, we have the state of affairs that exists today. In a well-documented book The Lost Mandate Of Heaven (Ignatius Press, 2015), Geoffrey Shaw, PhD,  tells the story of Diem’s murder.  The U.S. government does not come off too well. Suffice it to say fundamental cultural insensitivity toward statecraft from the Confucian context of Diem prompted the coup.

Finally, one cloudy cold Friday in November, my Seventh Grade P.E. Class was playing soccer on the athletic field at Westhampton Junior High School, when Mrs. Aron, the Girls’ P.E. teacher,  came charging out. We learned that President Kennedy had been assassinated. I remember it as if it were yesterday.  Some kids cheered.  Patriotism and respect for authority were not the default settings, even then.  The next few days brought a great period of  mourning for the world.  I remember the pictures of President de Gaulle of France at the funeral.  Even the Russians were respectful; the Cold War forgotten for a few days at least.

The future of the country was changed by the killings of Diem and Kennedy. Kennedy’s death was viewed as a martyrdom for Civil Rights for Blacks.   President Johnson used his incomparable political expertise to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through Congress. He had overwhelming Republican support for the Bill, true bipartisanship.  1964 brought the Gulf of Tonkin Incident which spawned the Congressional Resolution establishing the President’s right to expand the war in South Vietnam and all of Indochina. The Democratic landslide in the 1964 Presidential Election gave President Johnson the Congressional power and popular mandate he wanted to wage his War on Poverty and usher in his Great Society agenda.  For good or ill we live with the legacy today.

In my life, the first outcome was school integration.  Black children now attended a school close to where they lived rather than try to get to the nearest segregated school for blacks.  The public accommodations section almost overnight changed Southern life. No more Jim Crow bathrooms, denial of access to restaurants and hotels for blacks. Today, when I go into Cracker Barrel and the patrons are split almost equally black and white, I wonder what the controversy was about in the first place.  I could have told you even in 1964 both communities like the same food.

My life from 1969 through 1973 was dictated by the Vietnam War  I turned 18 the day Nixon was inaugurated because January 20 fell on a Sunday that year.  I registered for the draft and received a student deferment.  The draft lottery system was introduced subsequently. My number was 129 and that was high enough to keep me from being drafted. We never questioned what might have been, had the 1963 coup never been attempted.