US History Archives - Page 10 of 25

Hatton Sumners and the Retirement of Supreme Court Justices

We are especially pleased to post this essay by a long-time supporter of the UT Austin Department of History. Josiah M. Daniel III, of counsel at the international law firm Vinson & Elkins, LLP, received his J.D. from The University of Texas School of Law in 1978 and his master’s degree in History from UT in 1986. In 2011, Mr. Daniel was elected to membership in the prestigious American Law Institute. He is an inaugural member and former Chair of the UT History Department Visiting Committee.

By Josiah M. Daniel, III

Working this month in historical archives and observing the news of the April 10, 2017 appointment of Neil Gorsuch to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, have reconfirmed for me that history (if known) can illuminate current events.

Appointments of Justices of the Supreme Court are matters of high public interest. Presidents appoint individuals for that office, with “advice and consent” of the Senate, because their nominees share the president’s views on key public issues. After all, the final word on constitutionality and interpretation of legislation and executive actions resides with the Court as part of the Constitution’s checks and balances. And, as mandated by Article III, Supreme Court justices, and all federal judges, serve lifetime appointments “during good Behaviour” with “compensation . . . not [to] be diminished during their continuance in office.”

The Supreme Court Building (via Wikimedia Commons).

Presidents are attuned to the age and health of each serving justice in anticipation of vacancy, whether by death, resignation, or retirement. On the other side, the decision of any justice of advancing years to leave office, rather than to serve until death, has often been a difficult personal choice. For the past 80 years, that decision of aging justices has been eased by an enactment sponsored by a Dallas congressman, Hatton W. Sumners (1875-1962).

Sumners’ statute, the 1937 Retirement Act, guarantees undiminished lifetime salaries to retiring justices and it authorizes them to continue in the adjudication of federal cases in the lower courts, if desired. Sumners had been appalled when, early in the Great Depression, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, aged 90, resigned after thirty years’ service and had his pension immediately halved in a penny-pinching measure. The Retirement Act prevented that situation but is also noteworthy because of its role in the “court-packing crisis” of 1937.

Sumners’ definitive biography remains unwritten, but he was a significant Congressman over four decades of the 20th century. In 1894 Sumners moved from Tennessee to Texas and quickly became a lawyer. In 1912 he won the at-large seat for the U.S. House of Representatives and two years later he won a seat in Dallas’ Fifth Congressional District, which he held until 1946. His papers reside in the archive of the Dallas Historical Society, where I have been reviewing them.

Congressman Hatton W. Sumners in 1938 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Sumners was devoted to his work and old fashioned in dress and speech. One woman who lobbied him in the late 1930s described him as “the epitome of the Southern conservative [who] even wore a frock coat. . . . a relic of the past.” From 1932 until he left office, Sumners chaired the House’s Judiciary Committee, a position he used, among other things, to block anti-lynching legislation based on his spurious and degrading view of African Americans. This did not prevent President William Howard Taft from calling him “the best lawyer in Congress,” or a 1939 LIFE magazine poll rating him most highly for integrity among all Congressmen (a video clip of Sumners speaking in 1937 can be found here).

Roosevelt’s first term, from 1933 to 1937, generated a surge of innovative legislation, commonly known as the “New Deal,” that tackled the deep economic and social problems of the Great Depression with innovations such as Social Security, relief for the poor and unemployed, reform of the financial system, and economic recovery.

A scene of destitution during the Great Depression (via Wikimedia Commons).

But virtually all of those new federal laws were challenged in the federal courts on constitutional grounds including the argument that the legislation violated “substantive due process,” the predominant constitutional theory typified by the famous Lochner v. New York decision of 1905 that generally vindicated private-property rights over other interests and policies.

On the Supreme Court, the “Four Horsemen,” Justices Willis Van Devanter, Pierce Butler, James Clark McReynolds, and George Sutherland, were committed to that doctrine; and, at the start of the series of overturnings of New Deal enactments in 1935 and 1936, their ages ranged from 69 to 76 (at the time, male life expectancy was 60). The newest justice, Owen Roberts, appointed by President Herbert Hoover in his final year in office, joined them frequently for the 5-4 majority in those cases. FDR was outraged and after winning reelection by a landslide in November 1936, the President announced his so-called “court-packing plan” to overcome this roadblock to his legislative agenda by increasing the Supreme Court’s membership from nine to a maximum of fifteen if justices reaching the age of 70 declined to retire.

Sumners had joined the New Deal legislative team when Roosevelt took office in 1933, but he was more conservative than the President, often seeking to steer a middle-of-the-road course on the various issues of FDR’s legislative program.

‎President Roosevelt signing New Deal legislation, 1933 (via Wikimedia Commons).

After a preview of the court-packing plan at the White House on February 5, 1937, Sumners made a pithy comment that was misquoted, then and subsequently, as “Boys, here’s where I cash in my chips,” interpreted to mean he was departing the FDR team because he disagreed with its tactics.

But as a letter in the Dallas Historical Society’s archive shows, Sumners had not spoken the last two words, “my chips,” and what he meant was “to go in and to do what I could to help straighten things out.” Sumners helped defeat FDR’s plan to pack the Court with more progressive justices; but in the same letter, written after the defeat of the plan, he added that in the future “it will be generally agreed that I have been able in this matter to render a service of value to the President, the party, and the country, especially when considered in connection with the other legislation which I sponsored.”

That last reference was to Sumners’ efforts, prior to Roosevelt’s unveiling of the court packing plan, to accomplish the President’s desired result—the addition of new, more progressive members to the Supreme Court—by other paths. On one hand, he was close to and in communication with Van Devanter and the Chief Justice, Charles Evan Hughes, urging calm and patience about the court-packing plan.

Sumners to Charles Evans Hughes, March 22, 1937 (Sumners Papers, Dallas Historical Society, via author).

On the other hand, the congressman sponsored a bill to incentivize the older justices to retire by assuring the continuity of their salary if they were to do so. On January 11, 1937, he had introduced H.R. 2518:

Justices of the Supreme Court are hereby granted the same rights and privileges with regard to retiring, instead of resigning, granted to [all other federal] judges . . ., and the President shall be authorized to appoint a successor to any such Justice of the Supreme Court so retiring from regular active service on the bench, but such Justice . . . so retired may nevertheless be . . . authorized to perform such judicial duties, in any judicial circuit . . . as such retired Justice may be willing to undertake.

Sumners’ bill sailed through Congress, and on March 1, 1937, the President signed it into law.

H.R. 2518, enacted as Public Law No. 10, codified at 28 U.S.C. § 375 (via Legisworks).

The court-packing plan was defeated in the Senate, 70-20, on July 22. Most historians credit the defeat, not to Sumners’ Retirement Act, but to the “Switch in Time that Saved Nine.” That is, the youngest justice on the court, Owen Roberts, who had been voting with the Four Horsemen in those 5-4 reversals of first-term New Deal programs, suddenly voted to sustain the constitutionality of the minimum wage law in a decision issued by the Court on March 29, 1937. Commentators have noted, for instance, that Roberts cast his vote in that case before the advent of the court-packing plan, and some have perceived a jurisprudential shift already underway.

But the most recent scholarship substantially credits Sumners, who obtained an initial draft of the Retirement Act from FDR’s team, for pushing it through quickly, which did in fact induce several rather quick retirements. These retirements gave Roosevelt vacancies to fill, assuring the survival of New Deal legislation and enabling FDR to shape the Court for a long time.

Justice Van Devanter on his last day before retirement, with Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (via Wikimedia Commons).

First, Justice Van Devanter took advantage of Sumners’ enactment and retired on June 2, 1937 at age 78, which vacancy FDR filled with one of most consequential justices of the twentieth century, Justice Hugo Black. Then Justice Sutherland retired on January 17 the next year, replaced by Justice Stanley Reed.

In the decades since, only five justices have resigned, most recently Abe Fortas in 1969, but 24 have retired with the benefits of the Retirement Act. Some retired justices have elected to continue to adjudicate cases. Justice Tom Clark sat, after his 1967 retirement, in the lower courts for ten years, and more recently Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who retired in 2006, has joined judicial panels deciding scores of cases in the Courts of Appeal in almost all federal circuits.

Today, two sitting justices are in their 80s, and one is 78. Will the Retirement Act encourage any of them to retire and provide an additional appointment opportunity for the current administration?

Sources:Hatton W. Sumners Papers, Dallas Historical Society.Elmore Whitehurst, “Hatton W. Sumners: His Life and Public Service: An Extended Biographical Sketch,” n.d., Web

William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (1995)

Marian McKenna, Franklin Roosevelt and the Great Constitutional War: The Court-Packing Crisis of 1937 (2002)

Burt Solomon, FDR v. the Constitution: The Court-Packing Fight and the Triumph of Democracy (2009)

Judge Earl Glock, “Unpacking the Supreme Court: Judicial Retirement and the Road to the 1937 Court Battle,” Mar. 2017, Web

The Media Matters: Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Discovery of Hunger in the U.S.

by Laurie Green

April 11, 2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of a historical moment that is far more relevant today than we might wish: the discovery of hunger in the U.S. or, perhaps better put, the point in the late 1960s when severe poverty and life-threatening malnutrition in the world’s wealthiest nation suddenly soared into public view on the national political stage. This anniversary matters today not only because proposals to restructure federal food programs threaten their very viability, but also because of the role played by the media, then and now.

The very meaning of “discovery,” when it came to the politics of hunger in the late 1960s, rested in part on the production and reception of news, documentaries, visual images, and editorials that, at times, provoked explicit confrontations over who had the right and expertise to say whether starvation existed in America. The one media production that scholars have written about, CBS’s renowned Hunger in America, first broadcast in May 1968 and vividly recalled by many who watched it, is notable as much for the reactions it provoked as its content. Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman denounced the program’s critique of federal food programs as “biased, one-sided, [and] dishonest.” San Antonio’s county commissioner, A. J. Ploch, reported threats on his life for his statement that Mexican American kids didn’t need to do well in school, for which they needed better nutrition, because they would always be “Indians,” not “chiefs.” Later it came out that the Mississippi congressman who headed the House agricultural appropriations subcommittee borrowed agents from the FBI to track down and survey the cupboards of every interviewee in order to prove the show had been a pack of lies. Drama over who controls truth in the media is not a new phenomenon.

Fannie Lou Hamer speaking at a hearing of Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 10, 1967. Rev. J. C. Killingsworth is seated beside her. (Photograph: Jim Peppler)

On April 11, 1967, Senators Joseph Clark (D-Pennsylvania) and—famously—Robert Kennedy (D-New York) conducted a daylong tour of the Mississippi Delta that brought them face to face with residents, especially young children, who bore signs of malnutrition so severe that they could only compare them with what they had observed in Latin America and Africa. Their shock at what they witnessed triggered an ultimately victorious decade-long campaign to expand, alter, and establish the federal food programs that are in jeopardy today. Within months, investigations in locales as disparate as Kentucky, San Antonio, and Washington, D.C. precipitated a cascade of further discoveries confirming that hunger was not solely a Mississippi problem.

Senators George Murphy, Jacob Javits, Joseph Clark, and Robert F. Kennedy of the Senate Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty, listening to testimony during a hearing in Jackson, Mississippi, on April 10, 1967 (Photograph: Jim Peppler)

Kennedy and Clark had flown to the Delta from Jackson, where the day before they had heard Mississippi activists testify at a senate hearing on the War on Poverty that starvation had become a genuine threat in their counties. Fannie Lou Hamer, Marian Wright (Edelman)—then an NAACP attorney in Jackson—and others ascribed this devastating situation not only to joblessness caused by cotton mechanization but voting rights repression. County officials, they argued, used government regulations to prevent them from receiving food stamps. Back in Washington two weeks later, Clark, Kennedy, and other members of their committee released a letter they had sent to Lyndon Johnson describing their shock at witnessing malnutrition and hunger among the families they had met and urging him to send emergency food to the area. Johnson denied the request, the press reported, blaming the problem on congressional cuts to the poverty program. Hunger was not new in the U.S., nor had activists previously held their tongues, but now it arrived on the national political stage wrapped in drama and political conflict.

Daniel Schorr’s typescript for CBS News, April 11, 1967. (The Daniel Schorr Papers, Library of Congress, Manuscripts Division)

By evening on April 11, 1967, reporters and photographers had filed stories and images of the senators’ Delta tour. Daniel Schorr’s CBS Evening News report and Joseph Loftus’s New York Times article helped frame what would be cast as ground zero for the politics of hunger. Both portrayed Kennedy surrounded by enthusiastic crowds, but whereas their coverage of the previous day’s hearing had centered on the Mississippi politicians’ assault on Johnson’s War on Poverty, these stories concerned Kennedy and Clark’s critiques of Johnson from the left. Loftus reported that Clark had declined to label what he witnessed as starvation, but asserted that the deplorable conditions indicated the poverty program’s weakness. Schorr mused that RFK might have found a platform other than Vietnam, from which to challenge Johnson.

Schorr began his next report by stating: “Congress talks of poverty and how it should be dealt with, but rarely does it go to look at it.” Clark and Kennedy, however, had gone themselves “to see if the reports of starvation were true.” He described their shock at seeing “children with distended bellies” and speaking with “poor Negroes earning $6 a day for cotton chopping, and many earning nothing.” Many, Clark learned, “could not even scrape together the $2 a month to buy $12 worth of food stamps.” The senators had not spoken of “starvation,” but Schorr had. That term spurred irate Mississippi politicians to launch their own investigations to disprove its existence. Journalist didn’t invent this language—African American activists in Mississippi did that; however, they helped create the context for national controversy.

Simeon Booker

Simeon Booker covered similar ground in his article for Jet, aimed at black readers, but he made Kennedy and Clark’s Delta tour inseparable from what occurred at the hearing the previous day. This strategy allowed him to present a trenchant critique of racism in the antipoverty program from the vantage point of activists at the hearing. At a time when some journalists had begun to separate hunger from other problems the hearings had addressed, Booker took a different tack, beginning and ending with Kennedy’s responses to witnessing hunger and malnutrition but diving into economic, medical, and political challenges in between.

Others pursued feature stories that combined “behind-the-scenes” investigation, vivid language, and political insight. Robert Sherrill’s June 4 New York Times essay, “It Isn’t True That Nobody Starves In America,” took readers to Alabama and Mississippi, while slamming the beltway politicians who had structured federal food programs such that they could produce starvation as easily as nutrition. Mississippi could pride itself on having food stamp programs in more counties than elsewhere in the South, he declared, but purchase requirements meant that the poorer one was, the more unlikely one was to access benefits. Sherrill minced no words, criticizing even Kennedy for using euphemisms like “extreme hunger.”

Sherrill’s article preceded national hearings on hunger and malnutrition that Clark’s Senate poverty committee held in Washington in July 1967. People watched the hearings on television or read reports of such moments as when Senator John Stennis lit into North Carolina pediatrician and civil rights activist Raymond Wheeler. Wheeler was one of six doctors sent by the Field Foundation to investigate starvation in Mississippi and had accused white elites of trying to starve blacks out of the state. Stennis, who had his own radio program and was well aware that cameras were rolling and reporters were scribbling, accused him of “gross libel and slander.”

William Hedgepeth and Al Clayton, “The Hungry World of Teresa Pilgrim,” LOOK, December 26, 1967.

Questions of proof inspired one of the most intimate and widely-read features to appear in a mass-circulation glossy magazine, Al Clayton and William Hedgepeth’s “The Hungry World of Teresa Pilgrim,” which ran in LOOK’s Christmas 1967 issue. Struck by Clayton’s photographs, which Kennedy displayed at the hearings as proof of starvation, Hedgepeth teamed up with the photographer for a story about a family surviving conditions the senators described. Both white southerners — Clayton from southeast Tennessee, Hedgepeth from Atlanta — they spent days with the Pilgrims, especially with six-year-old, bright-eyed Teresa, whose photograph opens the story. Public response was off the charts for LOOK, as readers asked where to send Christmas gifts and money.

CBS’s phones began ringing off the hook five months later, even before the broadcast of Hunger in America had concluded. Viewers not only sent food and financial support to those who appeared in it, but sent letters to their representatives demanding the overhaul of food programs that the documentary prescribed. While the Federal Communications Commission weighed charges that CBS had overstepped the ethical bounds of journalism, social commentators referred to the documentary as the turning point in bringing public awareness to the crisis of hunger.

The matter of truth, including who had the right to define it, was an incendiary one in April 1967 and for months thereafter. “Starvation,” unlike either hunger or malnutrition, implied that someone or something was responsible, raising the stakes in a conflict that drew in large swaths of the public via the media. Two years later, antipoverty activists in every region were fed up with hearings and investigations; they wanted change.

Also by Laurie Green on Not Even Past:

Women’s March, Like Many Before It, Struggles for Unity.
1863 in 1963.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600 – 2000.

Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive

By Ian Goodale

In an unpublished letter to the Soviet daily newspaper Izvestiia, Liudmila Chukovskaya wrote that “muteness has always been the support of despotism.” This quote is cited in the booklet, Czechoslovakia and Soviet Public, compiled by the Radio Liberty Committee in New York in August 1968 to analyze the coverage of the Soviet invasion of Prague. During the Cold War, the media—and radio broadcasts in particular—were used as weapons by the U.S. and the Soviet Union in their battle to define a geopolitical narrative in line with their respective national interests. By examining the ways that both U.S.-backed and Soviet-supported media sources attempted to portray the events of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, this booklet serves as an important resource not just for understanding this specific event, but for how media was used by the two superpowers in their struggle for power and influence.

Soviet invasion of Prague, 1968 (via Mitteleuropa).

The two media sources analyzed by the booklet, Radio Liberty and Radio Moscow, were key propaganda arms of the United States and the USSR, respectively. In addition to the comparison of the coverage of these events by Radio Liberty and Radio Moscow, the booklet contains evaluations of the Czech events by staff members of the Radio Liberty Committee in Munich and New York, utilizing various documents and press clippings unavailable to the general American public. As such, the document provides a comprehensive overview of the events surrounding the Prague Spring as they were depicted by the popular and state-run media. This is not a complete narrative of the invasion, but a direct account of the ways it was portrayed by opposing sides of the conflict.

The front page of the Radio Liberty booklet (via author).

Radio Liberty, a radio station funded by the U.S. government to counter the Soviet-funded Radio Moscow, was a key piece of the U.S.’s propaganda strategy in its fight against the spread of communism in Europe. Founded in 1951 as an anti-communist news service directly targeting the Soviet Union, it began broadcasting in 1953, four days before the death of Stalin. It eventually expanded from its initial broadcasting base in Germany to include transmitters in Portugal, Spain, and Taiwan, the latter of which was used to direct broadcasts to Russia’s eastern provinces. By December of 1954, Radio Liberty was broadcasting in 17 different languages.

Radio Moscow, a state-run station in the Soviet Union, served a similar propagandistic role, broadcasting in German, English, and French in an attempt to reach western European audiences. The U.S. began to be targeted by the broadcasts in the 1950s, during the Cold War, with transmitters situated first in the Moscow region and, later, in Vladivostok and Magdalan. In the early 1960s the station began broadcasting in African languages, further broadening its audience.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty still has an office in Prague and broadcasts in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Middle East (via Wikimedia Commons).

The booklet notes the differing strategies of the two countries in their handling of the invasion. Soviet media, for example, simply refused to acknowledge a host of inconvenient truths regarding Czechoslovakia, remaining, as the booklet notes, “blind and mute” to student demonstrations, the broader democratization of Czech society, and even the replacement of party leader Antonín Novotný with Alexander Dubček. While Radio Liberty broadcast favorable news widely to promote its agenda–such as the fact that Czech citizens missed “no occasion…to let the Soviet troops know they were not welcome…students walked brazenly with flags under the long guns of the tanks”–Radio Moscow remained silent on unfavorable events.

But this silence could not last. The Soviet strategy soon transitioned from this calculated muteness to one of scathing criticism of liberalization in Czechoslovakia. As Izvestiia proclaimed on September 7th, Radio Liberty and other Western media outlets–described as “press and radio working in the service of the monopolies”–were creating “vile anti-communist inventions” to undermine the Soviet Union. “Every day,” the paper proclaimed, “brings new proof of the provocatory role of imperialist propaganda.”

Alexander Dubček attempted to reform socialism in Czechoslovakia, which antagonized hardliners in Moscow and staunch Czech and Slovak anti-socialists (via Wikimedia Commons).

By comparing the reports from Radio Liberty and Radio Moscow side-by-side, these differing strategies become all the clearer. Situated within the broader Prague Spring archive, the document is a source that helps to understand how both the U.S. and Soviet governments strategized their media communications in a cultural and political battle, spinning events to serve their respective narratives. In an era of conflict and confusion over the geopolitical future, portrayal of the present became a battleground of ideologies, the media a weapon to promote each side’s agenda.

Olivia L. Gilliam and Edward P. Pell, August, 1968. Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Public. The University of Texas, Austin, TX. Accessed January 21, 2017. https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/38273
doi:10.15781/T2PN8XF39

More by Ian Goodale on Not Even Past:
The Prague Spring Archive Project.

The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture, by Pamela Haag (2016)

By Isaac McQuistion

Guns and America enjoy a symbiotic relationship, the one constantly evoked when you refer to the other. A Congressional Research Service report estimated that, in 2009, the number of firearms in the United States surpassed the number of people, 310 million compared to 306.8 million. That gap has continued to widen, and as of 2015, guns outnumbered people by 40 million. These aren’t exact figures; more concrete numbers are hard to come by. Still, they show that the number of firearms in the US, by an reasonable estimate, dwarfs that in any other country in the world. In the list of gun-loving nations, the United States has nearly twice the number of guns per capita as the next country, Serbia.

How do we explain this? How did the US become such an outlier? Many point to the Constitution and the second amendment, the right to bear arms folded into the fabric of our nation almost from its inception. Guns were what fueled westward expansion, and the citizen militia is what beat back the British. Therefore, the gun holds a spot of preeminence in the national lore of America.

Samuel Colt (via Wikimedia Commons).

Pamela Haag’s book The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture, offers a meticulously researched and beautifully written corrective to this mytho-poetic view of the gun. Haag, who received a PhD in history from Yale, takes the old journalistic maxim of “follow the money” and applies it to the American gun industry. As she writes, “We hear a great deal about gun owners, but what do we know of their makers?” This is the guiding light of her book: to trace the development of the gun industry and the loose constellation of entrepreneurs who laid the foundation for what we have today. These were men like Oliver Winchester, Samuel Colt, and Eli Whitney (yes, that one).

Haag’s overall argument is that it was the gun industry itself that turned the United States into a gun-loving nation. To begin her book, she points out what many gun enthusiasts themselves have been saying for years, albeit selectively and ahistorically: that guns were tools, used and marketed as such. They were unremarkable objects, with as much emotional resonance as a claw hammer or a bow saw.

Coupled with this reputation as ordinary and functional was a style of production that limited the number of guns that could find their way to the market. Guns were originally made by blacksmiths, few of whom specialized in manufacturing firearms, and were therefore often clunky items, prone to breaking and difficult to repair.

Two Pennsylvania rifles. Rifles like this were used by militiamen and snipers during the American Revolutionary War (via Wikimedia Commons).

Eli Whitney was among the first to propose a solution to this problem. In 1801, he made a presentation before President John Adams, demonstrating the merits of constructing guns out of interchangeable parts. This approach would enable him to quickly produce a large number of reliable firearms that could be easily repaired.

This development is what made the modern gun industry viable and other manufacturers soon followed Whitney’s lead. It was not a very stable market, though. The gun business was largely tethered to the boom and bust cycle of war, with the United States government serving as its largest client. In times of peace, manufacturers turned to the overseas market, selling weapons to whichever foreign government happened to be in need of them.

But in order to expand their business, the gun manufacturers knew that they had to increase the domestic demand for their product. Through a close look at advertisements and items like dime-store Westerns, Haag brilliantly demonstrates how savvy marketing transformed the gun from a tool to an emotionally-charged emblem of masculinity, individualism, and the nation. As she writes, “what was once needed now had to be loved.”

An 1876 gun advertisement (via Wikimedia Commons).

In the earliest examples that Haag chooses, guns are listed as just one of many items that your local smithy could make and repair. Later ads would grow more sophisticated, but they would still focus on mechanical virtues and overall utility.

This began to change in the early 1900s, as the gun manufacturers switched from their previous text-heavy ads to more emotive, visual ads, rendered in full color and often regarded as works of art in themselves. They depicted excitement, romance, and nostalgia, drawing heavily on images of cowboys and hunters in the Wild West, their trusty firearm at their side as they faced down a vicious bear or band of Native Americans.

A 1898 Winchester ad (via Wikimedia Commons).

The manufacturers didn’t stop at wannabe woodsmen. They sought to make their market as wide as possible, and in doing so made the gun seem an integral part of American life and history. A key part of this process was to make owning a rifle synonymous with manhood, targeting the father-son relationship in particular. “You know [your son] wants a gun,” one ad reads,” but you don’t know how much he wants it. It’s beyond words.” Another tells fathers that a boy’s “yearning for a gun demands your attention. He will get hold of one sooner or later. It is his natural instinct.”

But guns weren’t the sole province of men. An ad for Smith and Wesson read, “Any woman can learn how to use a Smith & Wesson in a few hours, and . . . she will no longer feel a sense of helplessness when male members of the family are absent.” A Winchester ad from 1921 proclaimed that “Every man, woman or child has an inherent desire to own a gun.” Advertisements like these, alongside their countless depictions in popular culture, are what created America’s gun culture.

A 1914 Remington ad targeting women (via Wikimedia Commons).

Juxtaposed with the account of these early arms manufacturers is that of the women associated with them, and in particular Sarah Winchester, who married Oliver Winchester’s only son. Sarah led a singularly unhappy life. She lost her first daughter, Annie, when the child was only 40 days old. She’s believed to have suffered one or two more miscarriages, and she lost her husband to tuberculosis, and, shortly after, her mother also died.

At this point, Haag’s account drifts into speculation. She theorizes that Sarah thought herself cursed, haunted by the victims of all the guns that her husband and father-in-law brought into the world and thanks to whose money she lived in splendor. In a possible attempt to ward off the spirits she built the Winchester mystery house in San Jose, California, a vast mansion that she was perpetually making additions to, with stairs that lead to nowhere and rooms, fully furnished and decorated, that are completely walled off. Now a tourist attraction, it stands as an architectural depiction of madness.

The Winchester Mystery House (via Wikimedia Commons).

This is fascinating stuff and it’s readily apparent why Haag thought it necessary to counterpose her depiction of the gun manufacturers, who have all the humanity of adding machines and clearly distanced themselves and their capitalist aims from the visceral reality of the violence of the arms they made, with the almost unbearable humanity of Sarah Winchester. The one drawback is that because it is so highly speculative, this part of the book runs the risk of detracting from the brilliant research that Haag deploys elsewhere.

And the research really is quite brilliant. Haag gained access to the company archives of Winchester, Colt, and other gun manufacturers, and she makes excellent use of the privilege. Haag is a beautiful writer, able to weave together a compelling narrative studded with memorable lines and anecdotes, like the gun salesman in Turkey who, upon realizing during a demonstration that his gun was clogged with sand, solved the problem by urinating on the offending component.

Puck cartoon from 1881 satirizing gun culture in America (via Wikimedia Commons).

In the end, Haag strips away the mythology of guns in America to reveal a truth that’s both more ordinary and more profound than what existed before. It was the ineluctable logic of capitalism that drove the original gun manufacturers to seek out as wide a market as possible for their product, and it was the story that they told their customers that has lived on until today.

Pamela Haag. The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2016.

Also by Isaac McQuistion on Not Even Past:
Examining Race in Appleton, WI.

The Price for Their Pound of Flesh

By Daina Ramey Berry

The Price for their Pound of Flesh is the first book to explore the economic value of enslaved men, women, and children in the American domestic slave trade, from before they were born until after their death, in both public and private market transactions and appraisals. How was a slave’s price determined? How did planters and traders establish values for enslaved people with specific ages, specific skills, or specific health conditions? Studies of the domestic slave trade rarely discuss the economic meaning and social significance of the market values and appraisals assigned to enslaved people. When they do discuss slave prices, the focus has mostly been on prime male slaves. This study examines slave prices of women, men, and children during their entire “lifecycle,” including preconception, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood, the senior years, and postmortem.

Another original component of this work is its illumination of enslaved people’s reaction to being appraised, bartered, and sold. Enslaved people remembered their values. “Men or mechanics were worth from 12 to 1300 dollars,” recalled one former slave, “and boys 8 and 9 years old, 5 and 6 hundred dollars.” The book explores slaves as commodities and as people through all phases of their lives. Did slaves know their market values and/or appraisals? Were they impacted if they commanded high prices or if their buyers considered them “bargains”? How did their monetary values shape relationships within the enslaved community and beyond? Rather than explore how traders turned “people into prices,” as historian Walter Johnson did in Soul by Soul, this book converts the prices into people. The dollar values placed on enslaved people have more meaning when one considers their humanity, how they may have felt on the auction block, and how they responded to being sold “to the highest bidder.”

Now that the book is complete and on sale, I would like to share a few other thoughts about this decade long endeavor. First, I love being in the archives and have been called an “archive rat” with pride. The experience of discovery feeds my desire to locate untold stories and share them with readers. Enslaved people drove this research just as plantation records offered foundational evidence and a starting point. I combed through thousands of records to find individual enslaved people who were often overlooked in history. I wanted to bring their buried stories to life and to highlight their thoughts. The research was difficult and many of their accounts are heartbreaking, but when I consider that people survived and lived to tell their stories I was encouraged. The voices of the enslaved motived me to write and to keep writing. Sadly, for some I only knew a name and no other details. Others offered much more fruit for me to share—testimonies, emotions, feelings, opinions, etc. This book is meant to give a voice to enslaved people, particularly about their experiences of, and responses to, the commodification of their bodies.

Dr Berry and UT graduate student Lauren Henley offer these suggestions for further reading on the economies and medical histories of enslaved people in the United States.

Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999)

In Soul by Soul, Walter Johnson imagines the moment of a slave sale from the perspective of the buyer, the seller, and the enslaved individual. Drawing from slave narratives, enslavers’ letters, docket records, and nineteenth-century economic descriptions of the enslaved, Johnson highlights the processes by which labor, humanness, capital, race, and power were negotiated in physical and metaphorical spaces throughout the American South, showcasing the brazenly economic and political motivations that built the institution one sale at time.

Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America (2002)

Exploring the academic and popular histories of anatomy in American society, Michael Sappol considers the role corpses played in shaping American identity and subjectivity. His examination of nineteenth-century medical education and professionalization reveals a network of professors, students, grave robbers, state officials, and law enforcement officers directly benefiting from the death of others. The corpses that were often literally dragged into this operation were those of the poor and dispossessed, overwhelmingly represented by black men and women, in slavery as well as in freedom. Cadavers provided hands-on training for medical students, but they also reinforced notions of identity, class, culture, and hierarchy for all parties involved in their trafficking.

Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 (2015)

The Business of Slavery examines the buying, selling, and moving human of chattel in the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade, focusing on the forced movement of enslaved men, women, and children from the mid-Atlantic region to the Deep South.

Harriet Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2006)

Medical Apartheid charges the American medical profession with conducting extensive involuntary research on black bodies since at least the eighteenth century. From abusive and painful gynecological experiments on enslaved women to the now-infamous Tuskegee syphilis trials, Washington inverts the dominant narrative by showing that medical histories have always been written from the perspective of the field’s professionals, which has hidden the fact that advances of American medicine have been literally inscribed onto the bodies of society’s least fortunate—blacks, the poor, women, the infirm, and children. For centuries blacks’ mistrust of medical institutions has not been the manifestation of irrational fear, but a response to the failure of medical professionals to do no harm.

Craig Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (2013)

Directly linking elite universities in New England to Southern slavery and the eradication of Native Americans, Ebony and Ivy highlights both the all-encompassing influence of slavery on American society as well as the extent to which elite universities informed popular perceptions of race, slavery, and Americanness. This entangled history of education, slavery, exploitation, and capitalism challenges longstanding notions of ivory tower benevolence.

Longfellow’s Great Liberators: Abraham Lincoln and Dante Alighieri

By Guy Raffa

“We breathe freer. The country will be saved.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s response to the reelection of Abraham Lincoln in 1864 is a timely reminder of how, while they all matter, some presidential elections matter much more than others.

Five years earlier Longfellow was one of many who believed the time for peace had passed with John Brown’s execution for attempting to arm slaves with weapons from the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. “This will be a great day in our history,” he wrote on Dec. 2, 1859, the day of the hanging, “the date of a new Revolution” needed to move the nation farther toward the Constitution’s goal of “a more perfect Union.” Even “Paul Revere’s Ride,” his famous poem on the Revolutionary War, was “less about liberty and Paul Revere, and more about slavery and John Brown,” writes historian Jill Lepore, “a calls to arms, rousing northerners to action.” This rallying cry serendipitously appeared on newsstands on Dec. 20, 1860, the day South Carolina seceded from the Union.

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Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (via Wikimedia Commons).

Longfellow had voted early on Nov. 6, 1860 and was overjoyed by the news of Lincoln’s “great victory,” calling it “the redemption of the country.” His diary marks steps toward fulfilling the promise of this victory, from enactment of the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863 (“A great day”) and passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, formally abolishing slavery, on January 31, 1865 (“the grand event of the century”) to General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox on April 9, 1865: “So ends the Rebellion of the slave-owners!”

Longfellow had gained notice in abolitionist circles two decades earlier with publication of his Poems on Slavery. He judged his verses “so mild that even a Slaveholder might read them without losing his appetite for breakfast,” but still they triggered a “long and violent tirade” in a South Carolina newspaper and were left out of an 1845 edition of the author’s collected works to avoid offending readers in the south and west.

First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln, by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, 1864 (via Wikimedia Commons).

In 1863, New York’s Evening Post cast Longfellow as the nation’s prophet. Crediting the poet’s “discerning eye” for foreseeing “the inevitable result of that institution of American slavery which was the black spot on the escutcheon of our republican government,” the paper lamented that his words had gone “unheeded, until the black spot spread into a cloud of portentous dimensions, and broke over the land in a storm of blood and desolation.”

1863 also saw Longfellow complete a draft of his translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Working closely with Dante’s poem helped him cope with the traumatic loss of his beloved wife. On July 9, 1861, Fanny had suffered fatal injuries when her dress caught fire as she melted wax to seal a lock of her daughter’s hair. The translation provided “refuge” from an ordeal “almost too much for any man to bear,” he wrote to a friend.

Dante, poised between the mountain of purgatory and the city of Florence, a detail of a painting by Domenico di Michelino, Florence 1465 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Living with Dante’s vision of the afterlife also gave Longfellow some perspective on the war. On May 8, 1862, soon after translating Paradiso, he reflected, “Of the civil war I say only this. It is not a revolution, but a Catalinian conspiracy. It is Slavery against Freedom; the north against the southern pestilence.” The reality of this moral disease hit home when he visited a local jeweler’s shop. There he saw “a slave’s collar of iron, with an iron tongue as large as a spoon, to go into the mouth.” “Every drop of blood in me quivered,” he wrote, “the world forgets what Slavery really is!”

The war to eradicate slavery by suppressing this “conspiracy” brought its own set of horrors. Longfellow was acutely aware of the high toll of death and mutilation on both sides, the destruction extending far beyond the war zone. “Every shell from the cannon’s mouth bursts not only on the battle-field,” he lamented, “but in faraway homes, North or South, carrying dismay and death. What an infernal thing war is!”

Charles Longfellow in Uniform (1st Massachusetts Artillery), March 1863. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

The hell of war weighed heavily on Longfellow’s mind when he finally turned to translating Dante’s Inferno—he saved this first part of the Divine Comedy for last—on March 14, 1863. He began during an especially “sad week”: Charles, his eighteen-year-old son, had left home, unannounced, to join the Army of the Potomac in Washington. Initially attaching himself to an artillery regiment, “Charley” benefited from family connections to receive a commission as second lieutenant in the cavalry. “He is where he wants to be, in the midst of it all,” wrote the worried father. During this first month of Charley’s military service, Longfellow translated a canto of Inferno each day. Amid “many interruptions and anxieties,” he completed all thirty-four cantos by April 16, 1863. Two weeks later Charles Norton, Longfellow’s friend and fellow Dante expert, urged him to hold back publication of the translation until 1865 so it could be presented during Italy’s celebration of the poet’s six-hundredth birthday in Florence.

On December 1, 1863, Longfellow received a telegram from Washington saying his son had been “severely wounded.” He immediately left Cambridge with his younger son Ernest and headed south to find Charley and learn the extent of his injuries. The soldier, who had already survived a bout of the ever-dangerous “camp fever” the previous summer, made another “wonderful escape,” as his relieved father put it. Fighting near the front lines in the Mine Run Campaign, Charley took a Confederate soldier’s bullet in the shoulder. He returned home in one piece and slowly recovered from his wounds, but his fighting days were over.

As the war continued and congress worked to repeal the fugitive slave acts of 1793 and 1850, Longfellow resumed editing his translation in preparation for the Dante anniversary. He admired Charles Sumner’s speech on the proposed amendment to abolish slavery: “So long as a single slave continues anywhere under the flag of the Republic I am unwilling to rest.” Longfellow shared his friend’s relatively expansive view of liberty, observing on April 20, 1864: “Until the black man is put upon the same footing as the white, in the recognition of his rights, we shall not succeed, and what is worse, we shall not deserve success.” The following year Longfellow asked Sumner for assistance in having a privately printed edition of the first volume of his translation delivered to Italy in time for the Dante festivities. In the same letter of February 10, 1865, he thanked the senator for his role in abolishing slavery, proclaiming that “this year will always be the Year of Jubilee in our history.”

Longfellow’s translation of Dante’s Inferno took its place among the works by eminent foreigners on display in Florence to honor the poet’s birth. Three days of festivities in 1865 doubled as a celebration of Italy’s independence while the nation awaited the additions of Venice (1866) and Rome (1870) to complete the unification begun in 1859-61. At a banquet for foreign dignitaries, an American speaker drew rousing applause from his Italian hosts and their guests when he toasted the “Re-United States”—a poignant reminder that Italy was taking its first steps as an independent and (mostly) unified nation just as America emerged from the greatest test of its own unity and promise of freedom.

The statue of Dante Alighieri that today stands in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence was unveiled in 1865 during the festival (via Wikimedia Commons).

Dante’s prominence in these parallel national struggles was clear to Longfellow, as it was to the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass, the poet H. Cordelia Ray, and other black “freedom readers,” the title of Dennis Looney’s book on the African American reception of Dante and his poem. Longfellow wrote six sonnets on Dante to accompany the commercial publication of his translation of the Divine Comedy in 1867. The final sonnet, composed on March 7, 1866, glorifies Dante as the “star of morning and of liberty,” his message of freedom reaching “all the nations” as his “fame is blown abroad from all the heights.”

“Hideous news.” This was Longfellow’s reaction to Abraham Lincoln’s death on the morning of April 15, 1865, from the bullet fired by John Wilkes Booth the night before at Ford’s Theatre. Star of morning and of liberty: Longfellow’s epithet for Dante would have sounded like a fine description of Abraham Lincoln to millions of Americans who mourned the slain president.

Featured Image: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his study, 1868. Courtesy National Park Service, Longfellow House-Washington’s Headquarters National Historic Site.

Sources: “Complete Writings of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”; “Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” ed. Samuel Longfellow; “Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow”, ed. Andrew Hilen; “Poet’s Warning,” The Evening Post Jan. 20, 1863; Henry Clark Barlow, “The Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante Allighieri in Florence and at Ravenna”; Dennis Looney, “Freedom Readers: The African American Reception of Dante Alighieri and the Divine Comedy”

For more information on Dante and Longfellow, see the special edition of Dante Studies on this topic (vol. 128 in 2010), edited by Arielle Saiber and Giuseppe Mazzotta.

History Calling: LBJ and Thurgood Marshall on the Telephone

By Augusta Dell’Omo

When President Lyndon B. Johnson called Thurgood Marshall to offer him the position of Solicitor General of the United States, Johnson reiterated his commitment to doing the job that Abraham Lincoln started by “going all the way” on civil rights, but he warned Marshall that the appointment would cause the Senate to go over him with “a fine tooth comb.” In the July 1965 phone call, Johnson speaks on a wide variety of issues including the image of the United States abroad, the state of the Civil Rights Movement, the importance of “Negro” representation in the justice system, and finally, his thinly veiled, ultimate goal of placing Marshall on the Supreme Court. A monumental historical moment, LBJ’s call to Marshall set in motion a series of events that would culminate in Marshall becoming the first African American Solicitor General and the first African American Supreme Court Justice of the United States.

Thurgood Marshall talks to President Johnson at the White House (via Wikimedia Commons).

Thurgood Marshall rose to fame in the 1940s for his work with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, created by Marshall as the legal arm of the NAACP, designed to assault discrimination and segregation. Amassing a huge array of legal victories such as in Smith v. Allwright (1944), Shelby v. Kraemer (1948), and most famously Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954), Marshall came to be known as “Mr. Civil Rights.” At the time of Johnson’s call, Marshall was serving on the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, having been appointed in 1961. Johnson, however, had his attentions focused on not just the Civil Rights Movement, but also the growing war in Vietnam. Throughout June and July of 1965, Johnson was forced to consider raising the number of active ground forces and found himself continually at odds with his advisors and the American public. Coupled with the public resignation of the US Ambassador to South Vietnam, Johnson, who often did not want to focus on foreign affairs, found himself facing a series of political and military losses. Johnson hoped to focus his moral idealism and religious convictions on the civil rights struggle, and when told he should de-emphasize civil rights, Johnson remarked, “well, what the hell is the presidency for?”

This recording of the telephone conversation between LBJ and Thurgood Marshall is included in a collection LBJ’s White House telephone conversations made on Dictaphone Dictabelt Records between November 1963 and November 1969. Johnson initially began recording conversations and speeches while in the Senate and continued that practice as President. The recording of presidential meetings and phone calls was first begun by Franklin Delano Roosevelt who aimed to improve consistency in White House public statements and messaging, while also having the option for conclusive proof in the case of false claims made about the administration.

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President Johnson meeting with Dr. King and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement (via Wikimedia Commons).

The recording elucidates the tensions Johnson felt between the morality of the Civil Rights Movement and the practicalities of the political climate that he experienced throughout his presidency. Johnson’s actions during the Civil Rights Movement have been a subject of intense study by historians, who seek to understand where the motivations for Johnson’s involvement came from, and how strongly moral and religious principles guided him in comparison with political realities. Randall B. Woods argues that Johnson’s moral and ethical idealism drove both his home front and war front actions, while Sylvia Ellis contends that pragmatism and realism governed Johnson’s racial and foreign policies.[1] Johnson began the phone call to Marshall with an exasperated sigh stating that he has “a very big problem,” which he hopes Marshall will help him with. His tone seems exhausted and his choice to view the appointment as a problem, points to his pragmatism and recognition that the political climate made Marshall’s nomination very challenging. Throughout the call, Johnson never refers to the position as a great honor, but rather an opportunity to raise the character and image of the United States abroad, (he even tells Marshall that he “loses a lot” by taking the position). He seems to view the nomination of Marshall as a duty as well as a politically calculated choice of a “Negro” who is also “a damn good lawyer.” The pragmatic influence takes hold, and Johnson’s political calculations continue to be apparent, as he expresses the difficulties with pushing Marshall’s nomination through Congress, and not wanting to be “clipped from behind.”

Thurgood Marshall in 1967 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Johnson’s comments, however, could be viewed through the lens of morality, rather than pragmatism. His statements about Marshall being a symbol for the “people of the world” could reflect his view that Marshall would be an important beacon of equality across the world. Furthermore, his obvious admiration for Marshall’s political abilities and his strong conviction to back him regardless of what anyone else said, could show Johnson’s commitment to making a decision that reflects his own moral compass. Johnson says that he “doesn’t need any votes” and that he isn’t doing this for the votes, but rather because he wants “justice to be done.” This recording does not solve the debate on Johnson’s ambiguity, but rather continues it, with Johnson’s statements supporting both pragmatism and morality, depending on how one hears the recording.

What is left unsaid is just as interesting. Marshall says very little throughout the conversation. When Johnson describes Marshall as a symbol for “negro representation,” Marshall does not really respond. The question of Marshall’s role as a “race man,” who clearly defines his identity as “black” and seeks to bring about the progression of black people, has been a subject of much debate among historians and legal scholars that is not resolved by this conversation.[2] But this telephone call offers a snapshot of the struggle between practicality and morality would dominate the careers of both Thurgood Marshall and Lyndon Johnson.

Audio recording of this phone call may be found on Youtube. The original is housed at the LBJ Library: Recording of Telephone Conversation between Lyndon B. Johnson and Thurgood Marshall, July 7, 1965, 1:30 PM, Citation #8307, Recordings of Telephone Conversations – White House Series, Recordings and Transcripts of Conversations and Meetings.

Other Sources:
Wil Haygood, Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America (2015).
David Kaiser, American Tragedy: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Origins of the Vietnam War (2000).
Abe Fortas, “Portrait of a Friend,” in Kenneth W. Thompson, ed., The Johnson Presidency: Twenty Intimate Perspectives of Lyndon B. Johnson (1986).

[1] Randall B. Woods “The Politics of Idealism: Lyndon Johnson, Civil Rights, and Vietnam,” Diplomatic History Volume 31, Issue 1, 2007. Sylvia Ellis, Freedom’s Pragmatist: Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2013).

[2] Sheryll D. Cashin “Justice Thurgood Marshall: A Race Man’s Race-Transcending Jurisprudence,” Howard Law Journal, Vol. 52, No. 3, 2009.

Also by Augusta Dell’Omo on Not Even Past:
Trauma and Recovery, by Judith Herman (1992).

You May Also Like:
Jennifer Eckel reviews the HBO production Thurgood (2011).
Not Even Past contributors provide an overview of the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

Foreign Policy from Candidate to President: Richard Nixon and the Lesson of Biafra

By Roy Doron

On November 19, 2016, President Barack Obama, speaking on the transition of power to Donald Trump said “once you’re in the Oval Office … that has a way of shaping … and in some cases modifying your thinking.” The 2016 election will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most unconventional and even bizarre elections in American history. When Trump emerged victorious, he did so on a platform that promised to rethink virtually every aspect of American foreign policy, from free trade agreements to environmental treaties. Though the scope of Trump’s promises are unprecedented, his election was not the first time a candidate openly challenged U.S. foreign policy goals.

Richard Nixon campaigning (via Wikimedia Commons).

On September 8, 1968, Richard Nixon, then Republican candidate for president, issued a statement calling on the United States to take a central role in intervening in the Nigerian Civil War and the growing humanitarian catastrophe that was unfolding in secessionist Biafra. Titled “Nixon’s Call for American Action on Biafra,” the candidate called the Nigerian government’s war against Igbo secessionists a genocide and demanded that the United States take a leading role in stopping what he termed “the destruction of an entire people.” “While America is not the world’s policeman,” he declared, “let us at least act as the world’s conscience in this matter of life and death for millions.” (Kirk-Greene, 334-5). But the clarity of the candidate’s call to arms soon had to confront the realities of the office of President. The demands of America’s Vietnam-era foreign policy forced Nixon to abandon his personal sympathy for Biafra.

Many in the United States and in Nigeria and Biafra saw candidate Nixon’s statement as a call for active intervention in the war, which by the end of 1968 had turned increasingly in Nigeria’s favor. Nigeria’s civil war began when Biafra declared independence on May 30, 1967 after a protracted crisis that included two coups and ethnic violence that claimed the lives of thousands, mostly Igbo from Nigeria’s southeast. Though Biafra enjoyed several early successes, the war quickly turned into a protracted blockade against the Igbo heartland, with thousands of civilians dying every day from starvation and disease in the beleaguered enclave that Biafra had become.

Children receive a food ration in Nigeria in 1968 (via Wikipedia Commons).

To counter the military losses, the Biafran leadership embarked on a global public diplomacy drive spearheaded by MarkPress, a Swiss public relations firm owned by the American William Bernhard, calling the blockade and ensuing starvation genocide. MarkPress’ access to global media outlets helped the Biafrans garner significant attention in an already chaotic year in world history. The Tet offensive in February 1968 created a seismic shift in American support for the war in Vietnam, turning the majority of the population against it for the first time. This was followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy only two months apart; the latter’s occurring in the middle of a tumultuous election campaign. In Europe, student protests in Paris almost brought down Charles De Gaulle’s government, while a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August ended Alexander Dubcek’s “Prague Spring.” However, with nightly news broadcasting images of starving children directly into homes around the world, many groups rallied to the Biafran side, with protests in cities around the world and benefit concerts featuring Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez.

The Prague Spring was part of the global crisis of 1968 (John Schulze via Flickr).

These efforts, however, had little effect on government policies, because the Nigerians and their allies in the Organization of African Unity (OAU), eager to prevent a repeat of the Katanga Crisis in Congo, blocked most deliberations on the war in the United Nations, insisting that the matter was an internal African one. Biafra, led by the eloquent and charismatic Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, sought to use the humanitarian crisis to create a global outcry that would force Nigeria to come to terms with the secessionists and guarantee Biafra’s independence. Failing that, Ojukwu hoped for internationally recognized relief corridors that would be protected from the Nigerian military. However, any large scale international intervention would require either a ceasefire or a demilitarized zone. For the Nigerians, led by General Yakubu Gowon, any agreement for relief was preconditioned on Biafra renouncing secession and the ending of the war. In fact, despite frenetic efforts at two hastily convened OAU peace conferences in May and August 1968, the sides could not agree on either an end to the war or on any agreement to address the humanitarian concerns.

In the United States, the Lyndon Johnson administration was inundated with demands to help Biafra but could do little but support relief efforts led by the Red Cross, Joint Church Aid and Caritas. Walt Rostow, Johnson’s National Security Advisor, summed up the administration’s effort by saying “we are doing everything we can, which is very little.” Nixon’s statement, coming from a candidate that most believed would win the election in November, gave hope to many on the Biafran side that a new American administration would take a more active role in helping the beleaguered secessionists. For Ojukwu and Biafra, Nixon the candidate was a friend and they hoped that President Nixon would continue to be one.

Biafran leader Chukwuemeka Ojukwu (via Logbaby).

Though Nixon was personally sympathetic to Biafra, once he became president he could do very little to change the course of the conflict or to influence humanitarian efforts beyond what Johnson had done before him. In fact, like Johnson, Nixon attempted to assist in convening another round of peace talks, but, according to Nigerian historian George Obiozor, during a visit to London in February 1969, Nixon sacrificed his commitment to Biafra in order to secure British support for America in Vietnam. Nixon continued to personally support Biafra, despite his inability to translate it into policy. In one briefing document, he wrote in the margins “I hope Biafra survives!”

Candidate Nixon’s comments on Biafra showcase the limitations of a serious presidential candidate’s ability to transform foreign policy once they arrive in the White House. Many in Biafra hoped for a more interventionist United States and Nixon’s election gave hope for Biafra to hold out well into 1969, until it became clear that Nixon’s policy would closely mirror Johnson’s. When the war ended on January 15, 1970, the death toll, by most accounts, had reached a million people, most from the humanitarian crisis, and helped create organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières. Though the effects of Nixon’s 1968 comments cannot be quantified, his inability to translate them into policy illustrates the limitations of even the world’s most powerful executive.

Roy Doron (UT Austin History PhD, 2011) is an Assistant Professor of History at Winston-Salem State University. He is author, with Toyin Falola, of Ken Saro-Wiwa, part of Ohio University Press’ Short Histories of Africa and a forthcoming history of the Nigerian Civil War with Indiana University Press.

Sources:

H. M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook (1971).

George A. Obiozor, The United States and the Nigerian Civil War : An American Dilemma in Africa, 1966-1970 (1993).

How Washington Helped Fidel Castro Rise to Power

By Jonathan C. Brown

Fidel Castro had two political assets that enabled him to stay in power for a half century. He possessed the knack of turning adversity into an asset and he knew his enemies, particularly the anti-communist politicians of Washington, D.C. His guile and skill became evident early on as he established his revolution under the gaze of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.

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Fidel Castro in 1959 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Upon taking control of the Cuban military with his guerrillas acting as the new officer corps, he set out in January 1959 to bring to justice the thugs and killers of the old regime. He ordered Che Guevara in Havana and Raúl Castro in Santiago de Cuba to establish revolutionary tribunals to judge the police and army officers for past human rights abuses. In all, some six hundred convicted men faced the firing squads in a matter of months.

Fidel also instructed the US military mission to leave the country. He accused it of teaching Batista’s army how to lose a war against a handful of guerrillas. Cuba no longer needed that kind of military training, Castro said. “If they are going to teach us that, it would be better that they teach us nothing.”

Castro supporters in Havana joke about US criticism of the executions of Batista’s “war criminals.” (via author)

Cubans applauded these procedures as just retribution for the fear and mayhem that Batista’s dictatorship had caused. But American newspaper editors and congressional representatives condemned the executions as revolutionary terror. Fidel used this criticism to rally his followers. Where were these foreigners, he asked, when Batista’s men were snuffing out “the flower of Cuba’s youth?” Soon thereafter, the guerrilla comandante became the head of government as prime minister.

In his trip to Washington in April 1959, Castro endured the constant questions from reporters about communists showing up his new regime. President Eisenhower found it inconvenient to be in Washington when the new Cuban leader arrived. He arranged a golf game in Georgia, leaving his vice president to meet with the visiting prime minister. It was not a meeting of the minds. Richard Nixon and Fidel Castro differed on just about every subject: the communist threat, foreign investment, private capital, and state enterprise. The vice president tried to inform the new leader about which policies would best serve his people, and he ultimately described the unconvinced Castro as being naïve about communism. Unbeknownst to the CIA, the first Cuban envoys were already in Moscow requesting military trainers from the Kremlin.

Castro and Nixon following their interview in April 1959 (via author).

Then in the summer of ’59, Fidel began the agrarian reform project by nationalizing plantation lands owned by both Cuban and US investors. Without any fanfare whatsoever, communists took control of the new agency that took over sugar production. Chairman Mao sent agrarian technicians to act as advisers. The US embassy in Havana demanded immediate compensation for dispossessed American owners. Instead, they received bonds due in twenty years.

Fidel knew how to provoke yanqui reactions in ways that exposed the big power chauvinism of Washington. He hosted Soviet officials and concluded a deal to take on supplies of Russian crude petroleum. Castro asked the American-owned refineries to process the oil into gasoline, which the State Department advised them not to do. Castro had his excuse to confiscate the refineries.

A French ship filled with Belgium weapons arrived in Havana harbor in March of 1960. It exploded and killed 100 Cuban longshoremen. Castro rushed to the TV station and denounced the CIA for sabotaging the shipment. He gave a fiery anti-America speech at the funeral service in the Plaza of the Revolution to which a host of left-wing personalities flew in to attend. Simone Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre arrived from France, Senator Salvador Allende came from Chile, and ex-president Lázaro Cárdenas traveled from Mexico. At this event, Fidel introduced his motto “Fatherland or death, we will overcome,” and the Cuban photographer Alberto Korda took the famous image of Che Guevara looking out over the crowd.

Che Guevara in Cuba, 1960, by Alberto Korda (via author)

At that point that President Eisenhower ordered Director Allen Dulles of the CIA to devise the means to get rid of Castro’s regime in which Washington’s “hand would not show.” Agents attached to the US embassy in Havana contacted Catholic and other youth groups who objected to Fidel’s communist friends. They received airline tickets to leave the country and salaries to train as soldiers in Guatemala. Fidel had spies in Miami and Central America sending him progress reports on the émigré brigade in training. Now he had Eisenhower’s diplomats on the defensive. They had to deny Castro’s accusations about an upcoming CIA invasion.

In the meantime, Castro announced plans to socialize the economy, a project that Che Guevara headed up. What was the White House to do? The 1960 election had swung into full gear. The Democratic challenger in the first presidential debates famously said that he was not the vice-president who presided over the communist takeover of the island just 90 miles offshore from Key West. Eisenhower responded with toughness. He lowered the amount of sugar the United States imported from Cuba, and Fidel seized upon this provocation to nationalize the remaining US-owned properties, especially the sugar refineries.

By now, the exodus of Cuba’s professional classes had been expanding over the preceding year until it reached a thousand persons per week. Middle-class families formed long lines outside the US embassy in order to obtain travel visas. President Eisenhower appointed Tracy Voorhees, the man who handled the refugees from the 1956 Hungarian Revolt, to manage the resettlement. He established the Cuban Refugee Center in Miami. A mix of American charities and government offices sponsored evacuation flights, housing, job-hunting services, emergency food and clothing drives, educational facilities, and family subsidies. Let them go, Castro told his followers. He called the refugees gusanos (worms), the parasites of society.

U.S. Embassy in Havana, 2010 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Castro benefited from such American interference. It cost him nothing to get rid of his opponents, especially as the US taxpayers footed the bill. He utilized the former privilege of these gusanos to recruit peasants and workers to the new militias. The huge military parade on the second anniversary of the Revolution in January 1961 featured army troops with new T-130 tanks and army units armed with Czech weapons. Thousands of militiamen marched with Belgium FAL assault rifles.

He did not shut down the American embassy but utilized Soviet-trained security personnel to monitor the activities of diplomats and CIA men. He waited until the Americans severed diplomatic ties in order to be able to pose as the victim of US malice. Eisenhower severed diplomatic relations with Cuba to spare the new president, John F. Kennedy. Anyway, the new president very soon would have to preside over the CIA-planned invasion of the émigré brigade whose coming Castro was announcing to the world.

Now the anti-communist onus had passed to Kennedy. He could not shut down the CIA project and return hundreds of trained and irate young Cubans to Miami. Neither could he use American military forces to assist the invasion. Nikita Khrushchev had already threatened to protect the Cuban Revolution with “Soviet artillery men,” if necessary. Also, citizens in many Latin American nations took pride in Cuba’s defiance of US power. Kennedy too was trapped by his own anti-communist bravado during the election campaign. He changed some of the plans and let the invasion proceed.

Kennedy and Eisenhower confer at Camp David following the Bay of Pigs debacle (via author)

The Bay of Pigs landing of April 1961 turned into a disaster. A bomber assault by exile pilots on the Cuba revolutionary air force failed to destroy all of Castro’s fighter planes. The few remaining fighters chased the bombers from the skies and sank the ships that brought the brigade to shore. The fourteen hundred émigré fighters killed as many militiamen as possible before they ran out of ammunition on the third day. Castro put 1200 of the surviving exiles in jail. In the meanwhile, neighborhood watch groups in Havana and other cities cooperated with state security personnel in rounding up thousands of potential opponents, most of whom were processed and returned home in due course.

Che Guevara summed up the result of the Bay of Pigs when he “accidentally” met up with White House aide Richard Goodwin at an OAS meeting in Uruguay. Please convey our thanks to your president for the Bay of Pigs, Che said. “The Revolution is even more ensconced in power than ever because of the US invasion.”

More by Dr. Jonathan C. Brown on Not Even Past:

The Future of Cuba-Texas Relations
Capitalism After Socialism in Cuba
A Rare Phone Call from One President to Another

The Blemished Archive: How Documents Get Saved

By Chris Babits

In a May 2016 podcast for the Journal of American History, Yael A. Sternhell said, “For the great majority of [historians], when we walk into an archive, we have this illusion that this is where historical knowledge lies. Raw primary sources. Untainted. Unblemished. Just waiting for us to pick them up and create [a] narrative that will adhere to the history of the topics we’re looking at.” She believes that this is not how we should look at archives. Sternhell challenges historians to think about how papers got to their respective archives, who arranged them, and whether the arrangement of items in special collections and archives affect the stories that historians construct.

university_of_north_texas_september_2015_11_hurley_administration_building-1

The University of North Texas (via Wikimedia Commons).

Sternhell’s words resonated with me recently when I went through the collections at the University of North Texas. The first collection was the Resource Center LGBT Collection, which contains 636 boxes of materials about the LGBT movement in Texas. Phil Johnson, the founder of the Dallas Gay Historic Archives, donated many of the materials in this collection. During my two weeks at the University of North Texas, I had come across numerous documents outlining Johnson’s hostility toward organized religion. Johnson blamed religious figures, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, for creating a hateful social and political environment for the LGBT community. That is why I thought little (at least at first) of coming across a box with a section labeled “Bigots.” This section was right before another titled “Religions.” It seemed likely that Johnson would have made these tags and grouped “Bigots” and “Religions” together.

The box in UNT’s archive (via the author).

After talking to Courtney Jacobs, the special collections librarian, I found out that I was wrong. Johnson was not the person who created these section dividers. Instead, Jacobs recognized the handwriting as that of the archivist who had organized and arranged the materials when the collection was being processed. The different handwriting on some of the folders, especially the ones that looked older and as if they had been stored away for some time, should have given this away. But, after talking to Courtney for ten minutes about this particular box, it was clear that someone at the University of North Texas had labeled a group of individuals as “Bigots.” On top of this, they separated these individuals from “Religions,” even though the religious groups or individuals in this section said some of the same things that the “Bigots” said about LGBT persons.

This experience in the archives gets to the heart of Sternhell’s last point: how does the arrangement of items in collections, and the labels they are given, influence the historian’s engagement with those items? Right now, I don’t how much these sectional dividers impacted how I interpreted the materials inside the folders. What I do know is this: sometimes historians are far too eager to get to what’s inside a folder to take the time to notice other clues (like different handwriting). I know I’ve learned some important lessons: slow down; never assume; and ask special collections librarians lots of questions.

More by Chris Babits on Not Even Past:
The Rise of Liberal Religion, by Matthew Hedstrom (2013)
Encountering America: Humanistic Psychology, Sixties Culture, and the Shaping of the Modern Self, by Jessica Grogan (2012)
Age of Fracture, by Daniel T. Rodgers (2011)

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