US History Archives - Page 10 of 24

Media and Politics From the Prague Spring Archive

In an unpublished letter to the Soviet daily newspaper Izvestiia, Liudmila Chukovskaya wrote that “muteness has always been the support of despotism.”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.

henry_wadsworth_longfellow_by_thomas_buchanan_read_img_4414-1

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.

lyndon_johnson_meeting_with_civil_rights_leaders-1

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).

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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.

fidel_castro_-_mats_terminal_washington_1959-1

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)

Stokely Carmichael: A Life

June 2016 marked fifty years since Stokely Carmichael (later Kwame Ture) called for “Black Power!” during a political rally for racial justice in Greenwood, Mississippi. Carmichael defined Black Power as radical social, political, economic, and cultural self-determination Carmichael’s political legacy indelibly shaped civil rights and Black Power organizing and provides important historical context for understanding the contemporary movement for black lives.

Poised between Dr. Martin Luther King’s shield and Malcolm X’s sword, Stokely Carmichael stands as the bridge between two generations of black political activists. Born in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, Carmichael arrived in America in 1952, attended the prestigious Bronx School of Science, and was mentored by Bayard Rustin, the openly gay black social-democratic activist and pacifist who would serve as a key advisor to King and organize the March On Washington in 1963.

Like the current generation of Black Lives Matter activists, Carmichael devoted his energies to exposing American myth and lies. At Howard University he became the most charismatic and outspoken student activist in the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG), the campus satellite of the larger Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced “snick”). SNCC grew from lunch counter sit-ins that spread across the south, then nationally, in the winter of 1960 into the most important grassroots civil rights organization in postwar American history. The group, guided by the political and organizing genius of Ella Jo Baker, organized for voting rights, set up freedom schools, and civic education in some of the most dangerous parts of America.

While attending Howard University, Carmichael participated in local struggles in Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Maryland for racial and economic justice, the desegregation of restaurants and public accommodations, and the integration of the building trades. Beginning in 1961, he traveled to Mississippi where he was arrested as a Freedom Rider and jailed in Parchman Penitentiary, alongside future March On Washington speaker, SNCC chairman, and Georgia Congressman John Lewis. By Stokely’s count, between 1961 and 1966 he was arrested twenty-seven times for civil rights activism.

Like many of his Howard colleagues, Carmichael utilized non-violence as a political tactic, rather than a way of life. His own political philosophy hewed close to the social-democratic teachings of Rustin, the Marxist-Leninism he imbibed in study groups in high school, and the pan-Africanism he reveled in while hearing reports of successful liberation movements in Ghana and listening to South African singer Miriam Makeba (his future wife) on the radio.

Carmichael’s allegiance to civil rights struggle did not prevent him from listening to Malcolm X at Howard University or form friendships with black nationalists and political radicals who fit outside the civil rights mainstream. Despite his militancy, Stokely led the Second Congressional District during Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 and dutifully protested outside the Democratic National Convention on Atlantic City’s Boardwalk in a vain effort to seat the Mississippi Freedom Party Delegation led by sharecropper turned activist Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer.

The Democratic Party’s refusal to seat an integrated delegation that organized for democracy under the threat of death convinced Stokely to forever abandon mainstream politics. He re-emerged from the disappointment in Atlantic City as one of SNCC’s biggest voices supporting independent black politics, which took shape in tiny Lowndes County, Alabama during 1965-1966. Carmichael helped to organize sharecroppers, poor people, and community activists to create the Lowndes County Freedom Organization that would be nicknamed the Black Panther Party.

By the time he called for Black Power in 1966 Stokely Carmichael had become a touchstone to multiple streams of political and cultural radicalism. Carmichael spread the word about black being beautiful before James Brown, came out against the Vietnam War before Dr. King and Muhammad Ali, and helped to popularize the Black Panthers by headlining “Free Huey” rallies in Oakland and Los Angeles, California.

In doing so, Carmichael defied the dictates of American hegemony by traveling overseas to Cuba, challenging the Johnson Administration’s moral and political integrity, and vowing to go to jail rather than ever serving in the armed forces.

Global black lives mattered to Carmichael. During his 1967 tour of Africa, the Middle East, Cuba, and Europe he visited Conakry, Guinea and met former Ghanaian Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah and Guinean President Sekou Toure. By 1969 Carmichael relocated to Conakry where he argued that Pan-Africanism represented Black Power’s highest stage and would, over the next three decades until his premature death in 1998, remain an unapologetic black revolutionary.

Contemporary movements for racial and economic justice owe a deep debt to Carmichael’s legacy of grassroots organizing, student activism, and willingness to speak truth to power. Before Black Lives Matter activists identified the criminal justice system as a gateway to racial oppression, Stokely Carmichael called out America as an empire who subjugated black and Third World people domestically and internationally. As a local organizer, Carmichael testified before civil rights commissions, attended conferences, participated in debates, and mapped policy strategies to help build two black independent political parties. Hounded by the FBI, local law enforcement, the State Department, and the CIA, Carmichael remained a committed political revolutionary until his dying breath. Carmichael’s legacy extends to the iconography of the black freedom struggle. His friendships with Martin Luther King Jr., Fidel Castro, Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Toure, the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, Kathleen Neal Cleaver, Ella Baker, and Fannie Lou Hamer offer nothing less than a political and intellectual genealogy of postwar decolonization and anti-racist movements, one that continue to reverberate from Black Power to Black Lives Matter.

What Killed Albert Einstein?

On April 17, 1955, Albert Einstein’s abdominal aortic aneurysm burst, creating internal bleeding and severe pain. He went to Princeton Hospital but refused further medical attention. He demanded, “I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially; I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” In the early morning hours of April 18, the on-duty nurse heard him say a few words in German, which she could not understand, and then Einstein died.

The Daily Princetonian front page on 18 April 1955 — *The Daily Princetonian* front page on 18 April 1955. Source: the Mudd Manuscript Library blog.

Dr. Janos Plesch, a physician and long-time close friend who occasionally treated the physicist, thought that syphilis caused Einstein’s deadly abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA). He said that Einstein was “a strongly sexual person” who enjoyed the company of numerous women even while married. Dr. Plesch conjectured that AAAs usually have a syphilitic origin. Why, he thought, would it be so unreasonable to assume that Einstein contracted syphilis on one of his escapades? Some authors have echoed Plesch’s claim, repeating it as undoubtedly true because it came from a close confidant of Einstein. But numerous studies, both before and after Einstein’s death, show that the connection between syphilis and AAAs is small. According to a study in 2012, only around 1% of untreated late vascular manifestations of syphilis result in an AAA in the descending aorta, the kind Einstein had.

Also, no evidence of syphilis was ever reported in Einstein’s body, including his famously dissected brain. These facts do not definitively disprove that Einstein had syphilis, although it appears very unlikely, but they do beg the question: Is there a more probable explanation for why Einstein developed his deadly aneurysm? Strangely, though many scholars eagerly investigate every facet of Einstein’s life, few or none have analyzed the cause of his death.

Einstein's brain before dissection in 1955 — Einstein’s brain before dissection in 1955. Source: *Discover*

The type of aneurysm that Einstein had is statistically linked with being old and male. However, the majority of people developing an AAA also have a history of smoking. Only lung cancer is more closely associated to smoking among tobacco-related diseases. In an analysis of risk factors for AAAs in more than three million individuals, 80% of people who developed the aneurysm were smokers. Another systematic study found that current smokers were 7.6 times more likely to have an AAA than nonsmokers. The aneurysm’s prevalence and size are strongly linked to the amount of smoking one does, and Einstein was a heavy pipe smoker for decades.

Einstein’s doctors ordered him to stop smoking during his various illnesses. He sporadically obeyed. When friends gave him gifts of tobacco during these brief periods of abstinence, Einstein would open the gift, sniff to enjoy the aroma, and then give it away to someone else. But Einstein always succumbed to the overwhelming temptation of his beloved vice. He often resorted to taking tobacco handouts from friends. Dr. Plesch especially felt sorry for the needy, embarrassed Einstein and provided him with a steady supply of tobacco and cigars despite the orders of Einstein’s other doctors and second wife, Elsa.

Einstein and his second wife, Elsa. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

During his doctors’ smoking bans, when Einstein walked to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, where he had worked since 1933, the old physicist picked up cigarette butts from the street and filled his pipe with bits of discarded tobacco. He initially walked to the Institute across from the nearby meadow, but he switched routes because the street offered more abandoned tobacco. Einstein tried to summon the courage to openly defy the bans, but he worried about offending his doctors.

In late 1948, Einstein had life-prolonging surgery to keep his AAA from bursting. The surgeon wrapped cellophane around the aneurysm. A photograph of Einstein leaving the hospital after surgery shows him inside a car with a pipe in hand. Soon after, Einstein became a lifetime member of the Montreal Pipe Smokers Club and wrote to its president, “Pipe smoking contributes to a somewhat calm and objective judgment in our human affairs.”

The famous physicist in 1933.
Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Images of iconic figures associate smoking with intelligence: Einstein, Oppenheimer, Freud, Sherlock Holmes. The pipe gives them a pensive aura. Einstein depended on smoking—not for his genius, as some writers claim, but as a repetitive set of actions to soothe and comfort. For Einstein, this was a tolerable trade-off for his health and, ultimately, his life.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

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