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Watching From Here to Eternity yesterday reminded me of how miraculous Americans can be when they work together. One example of this would be the battleship California, sunk at her berth at the head of Battleship Row. These photos show her position a few days after, surrounded by repair vessels, trying desperately to keep California afloat, but she would finally sink and settle on December 10  You can see also the capsized Oklahoma and the sunken Arizona, with her bow blown away.

And here is California being raised from the mud at Pearl. She would not only be raised, but she’d be re-designed, repaired and put back into action by early 1944. Her lines (seen below) were far more beautiful than they’d ever been.

California had been launched in 1921; but even in her more ungainly interwar version, I found this photograph enchanting. Here she is passing beneath another American engineering miracle, still under construction: The Golden Gate Bridge.

It struck me how incredibly productive Americans can be—I looked forward every year to teaching my U.S. History students about 1930s bridge-building. But nothing demonstrated our productivity and ingenuity more than the civilian response to World War II, including the fabled “Rosie the Riveter” (women made up a third of the labor force).

The image that so vividly demonstrates this part of our national character is this photograph of masses of supplies being offloaded onto Omaha Beach shortly after D-Day. I think this is one of the most inspirational photographs in our history.

There is something else that reclaimed ships, bridges and wartime factories suggest, and that’s the capability of our national imagination, something I took for granted growing up when I would pad out into our living room, wrapped in a blanket against the cold, to watch a Mercury Program launch from Cape Canaveral. This is John Glenn, one of my Mercury heroes.

But the best example of this element of our national character–our imagination–didn’t come in wartime or in the New Deal years–and not even in the heady days of the seven Mercury astronauts. I think it came in 1956.

The largest work project in American history came in Ike’s time: The National Highway Act led to the construction of 41,000 miles of roads and generated hundreds of thousands of jobs. We proved once again that we could think big and build big.

And of course the Highway Act led to my life the way it’s turned out; when my father became the comptroller of Madonna Construction–he bid jobs up and down the state–that led to the family’s move from Taft to Arroyo Grande, my hometown.

I am sick of those who proclaim us a “failed country,” because they know nothing about our history. We don’t need them anymore than we needed Copperhead Clement Vallandigham or snake-oil salesman like Huey Long or Joseph McCarthy.

What we need to do is to remember who we are.

Watched a fascinating HBO documentary last night on what used to be called “New Journalists.” It focused on two New Yorkers, Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill. I was particularly struck by Breslin–not necessarily an admirable person, he was a brilliant writer and, even better, a brilliant reporter.

Two examples from JFK’s assassination: While the pack of print journalists hunkered down in front of Malcolm Kilduff for the announcement and followup details of the president’s death, Breslin tracked down the ER doctor who’d tried to keep Kennedy alive. The story even included the sandwich the doctor was eating when he was called to Examination Room 1, and Breslin’s description of Jacqueline Kennedy and her stoicism there is some of the most brilliant writing I’ve ever read.

Example #2: On the day of the funeral, Breslin looked around and realized he was one of 3,000 reporters covering the funeral procession. He broke away, sped to the cemetery, and found the man who was digging the president’s grave. It was, the man said, an honor, for which he was paid $3 an hour. Breslin’s story about the gravedigger somehow crystalized the entire nation’s grief.

The two journalists were a study in contrasts. Breslin agonized over every word. Hamill, like me, wrote rapidly and his New York “Times” pieces–on politics, on social justice, on the civil rights movement–still have a kind of shimmer to them today.

While Breslin was fond of the companions he’d immortalize in “The Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight”–button men, professional arsonists (!), mob lawyers, gamblers–Hamill was dating Shirley McLaine and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. His best work–on his own alcoholism–was yet to come then, in the early 1970s.

He’d almost quit writing in 1968, when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. He’d made a mistake, he said. He’d gotten too close to his subject. Bobby’s death nearly killed him, too.

Old history: It’s estimated that 20 million people were living in the Americas in 1500, when Europeans began to arrive. By 1800, fewer than two million survived. Most of the difference—except for the premeditated deaths— can be explained by the diseases Europeans brought with their animals.

The Chinese, it’s said, eat bats, and it’s the “wet markets” that are popularly blamed for Coronavirus.

The Europeans ate beef and sheep and chickens–in fact, in winters, early modern Europeans slept with these animals. The animals kept them warm as both animals and humans conserved calories in a kind of suspended animation that enabled them to survive until spring. Then the Europeans ate their companions.

Europeans were therefore immune to the influenza and measles and the smallpox–a remarkably resilient disease–that dropped the Americans like scythed wheat, another European import.

Current events: In South Dakota today, the Lakota (Sioux) people are stopping cars on the highway where they enter reservation land so that they can protect their people from the novel coronavirus.

Novel, or new, diseases have a horrific impact on indigenous people: The 1918 influenza killed more than half the Native Americans in Alaska. The death rate for the H1N1 influenza in 2009 was four times higher among Native Americans than among the general population.

So the Lakota people are wary. And they are stubborn. The checkpoints exist because even though they live amid the most abject poverty in the United States, they want, above all things, to live.

The government is going to take the to court to force the highways open. The Lakota people are going to fight back, in court.

They will lose, of course. In 1890, the Lakota fought back against the government. They fought back by trying to run away. This is how the government responded, and this is how they lost. I wrote this piece six years ago.

* * *

In the winter of 1890, Lakota Chief Big Foot led his people away from the Standing Rock Reservation, in North Dakota, where Sitting Bull had just been killed, because he was afraid for them, afraid there would be more violence. He was fleeing for the Pine Ridge Reservation, in South Dakota, when the Seventh Cavalry caught up to his band. Big Foot was exhausted and sick from pneumonia. He raised a white flag.

When the Seventh confiscated the group’s weapons the next morning, Dec. 29, a rifle discharged. The regiment, which had surrounded Big Foot’s people, opened up with everything they had, including four Hotchkiss guns—42 mm howitzers.

They killed as many as 370 Lakota, including Big Foot. Rifle and shellfire killed many as they huddled close together—fish in a barrel—in panic, in the scant shelter of a creek bank.

Many others were killed while they were running away. The power of their fear was such that a few women and children, hungry and numb from cold, ran for two miles before troopers remorselessly rode them down and shot them.

Twenty cavalry troopers received Congressional Medals of Honor for the work they did at Wounded Knee that day.

The Lakota survivors—the blood from their wounds was frozen—were brought to an Episcopal chapel, decorated for the Christmas season, where, as historian Dee Brown notes, they were laid out on the floor under a sign that read:

“Peace on earth, goodwill toward men.”

My lovely wife, Elizabeth, found my (second) Davy Crockett hat. The story of the first one is tragic.

Okay, if you insist.

For you wee bairns, in the 1950s, Walt Disney ran a series of wildly imaginative episodes on the life of Davy Crockett, who was played by Fess Parker, who later made immense amounts of wine in Santa Barbara County. Davy wore a coonskin cap whose origins—poor innocent eviscerated raccoons— should have horrified us. But Disney made gazillions of dollars on the assembly-line production of knockoff coonskin caps made of petrochemicals, not raccoons, and my parents got me one.

It wasn’t hard to imagine being a frontiersman like Davy. Elm Street crossed the end of our street, Sunset Drive, and everything beyond was sand dunes and eucalyptus trees until you finally reached the Grover City city limits, where everything was sand dunes and eucalyptus trees until you hit civilization, represented by the Blinking Owl Bar.

It was important, this hat was. Living on the wild frontier during the Cold War made that hat a powerful symbol. Davy Crockett was a 100% American, the obverse to Godless Communism. Our other Disney hero was Wernher von Braun, the rocket scientist, who exuberantly described the future of space travel, a subject in which he had expertise, having made Nazi rockets that obliterated entire English neighborhoods.

But Dr. von Braun was our Nazi, by golly. We nabbed him before the Commies did.

But that’s another story.

I was four. I was pretty much a Davy Crockett fanatic. I don’t remember much about being five because that occurred after the Disney episode where Davy got kilt (proper Tennessee spelling) at the Alamo by hordes of Marxist-Leninists disguised as the Mexican Army.

That was a desert year, being five.

But I DO remember wearing my Davy Crockett hat to the Margaret Harloe Elementary School Open House in 1956. My big brother was a Harloe student who had finally decided to come down from the flagpole he’d climbed to try to escape the first day of school. They’d decided to wait until he got hungry.

That’s another story, too.

But what I remember about that night was the immensely tall Cub Scout–he must’ve been at least 4′ 6″– in his navy blue uniform standing at the entry way to the covered walkway near the principal’s office.

The flagpole is still there, as is the walkway, if you’d like to take colored chalk, measuring tape and a camera there to reconstruct the crime.

Anyway, this is what happened: This Cub Scout stood in the hallway, his legs slightly parted, and began to question the seriousness of my Davy Crockett hat.

This is true: I have always had a hot temper. That comes from Dad’s side of the family, implacable Ozark Plateau Confederates and roughnecks (one of Dad’s uncles had inserted a Taft oilfield camp cook into a boiler after a particularly bad meal), though not at the same time.

So this was a matter of Ozark Plateau honor, right here at Margaret Harloe Elementary School in 1956–the eve of Sputnik–and, given the historical times, I reacted as my ancestors would have reacted.

I punched the Cub Scout. Right in the stomach.

However, being a little fellow, my punch didn’t quite reach his stomach. He got a full-force enraged Davy Crockett Fan Club overhead left direct hit in the groin.

I remember my satisfaction at watching him double over like a folding jacknife.

What I remember next is the searing pain of my mother grabbing my earlobe and guiding me, through a force she light-heartedly called Friendly Muscle Persuasion, back to our home on Sunset Drive.

It’s not a far walk unless you’re being pulled by your earlobe.

When we got home, I was read three Riot Acts. I had brought dishonor on our family, on Margaret Harloe Elementary and on the Cub Scouts USA, a double-whammy since Mom was also a Den Mother.

Before I was confined to my room, I did one more hot-tempered thing. We’d come home to Sunset Drive with a fire Dad had built just before the Open House. It was a good one by the time we got home.

So I threw my Davy Crockett hat into the fireplace.

We all marveled at what I’d done but even more at the violence of the blue flames the burning hat produced and then, a moment later, at the ghastly smell. I would wonder, years later, if Chernobyl smelled like my Davy Crockett hat had.

Anyway, I did my time in my room. I came out chastened, I admit, but afterward, as I’ve said, they got Davy at the Alamo and being five was interminable.

Sometimes Mom would catch me singing mournfully, just under my breath

Day-vee…
Dav-y Crockett
King of the wild fron-tier…


But, thanks to Elizabeth, sixty-four years later, the wounds have healed. I’m back, Davy.

This should be simple. I needed a new mouse pad. My little mouse has been slippin’ and slidin’.

I found this one online and it was on sale and it was the last one! I bought it for $8.79.

And I bought it because I love Civil War history, and because this photo is in my Civil War book, Patriot Graves, which is about the nearly sixty Civil War veterans buried in my California home town, Arroyo Grande, about their combat experiences but also about their remarkable postwar lives.

I am, after all, named for a Confederate, James H. McBride, who may (or may not) have been a brigadier general. This is his photograph, taken before the war, when he was a county judge and a bank president. While I have limited formal medical training, Gen.-or-Not McBride died in 1862, and I suspect, from the photographic record, that it was from Terminal Constipation.

There’s even a chapter of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans named after my namesake. They’re in Springfield, Missouri, where the 1861 Battle of Wilson’s Creek was fought, one that included McBride and a regiment of Ozark Plateau secessionists armed with squirrel rifles. The SCV chapter even has a Facebook page.

It gets more complicated. My middle name, “Douglass,” is for Gen. McBride’s son, a young staff officer who had a disagreement with a Union artillery shell in Arkansas in 1862. So it goes. Family lore has it that they brought young McBride home draped over his horse, his boots reversed in their stirrups, JFK style.

Nope. It you’ve been sundered by a an explosive shell, this is how you come home:

And, not to put too fine a point on it, but when Elizabeth and I took our young boys to Gettysburg many years ago, I stood on top of Devil’s Den and realized that Lee had sent boys not that much older than my sons to take this Union strongpoint, atop boulders left behind by ancient glaciers, and all that happened in this eminently defensible position is that Lee got his boys butchered. The length and the polysyllabic nature of the profanity I heaped on Lee that day cannot be be adequately captured here. I love history. I love my sons far more.

What impressed those two boys were the hundreds of graves in the National Cemetery where the markers are brass numbers, not names. We found, on the battlefield, a proper marble headstone that read:

Forty Confederates buried here.

I am not the only one to consider Lee a butcher. It is pleasant for many to denounce those who protest Confederate statues today as politically correct crybabies. But when Lee’s statue was installed in the United States Capitol in 1909, the loudest and most passionate protest was from Union combat veterans. Bobby Lee had killed their closest friends. I don’t think the veterans, either living or dead, could be called “snowflakes.”

The protests didn’t end there. Fifty years after their war had ended, Union veterans condemned D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, especially its glorification of the Ku Klu Klan. This is Lilian Gish—she was to 1915 what Meg Ryan was to 1995—being rescued by a Klan leader (and former Confederate colonel) portrayed by actor Henry B. Walthall. What Walthall has rescued is the purity of Gish’s white womanhood. That purity had been endangered, in the film, by black Reconstruction troops.

Most of them were portrayed by white actors in blackface.

Which brings me to the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They were big supporters of this lot, seen in a familiar-looking city in 1926:

Here’s a photo of the Daughters. They look as if they’re reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. They seem to be facing the wrong way.

They published a children’s book that glorified the Klan. They articulated and nourished the myth of the “Lost Cause.” Most of all, they funded thousands of statues that replicate, in stone, their heroes—the boys they’d never have the chance to meet at the cotillion so vivid in their minds, boys whose uniform collars glittered with gold braid.

In their minds, the UDC girls, in old age long, long after the boys of their imaginations, boys from another generation, had died, sundered by artillery shells, could still hear the crisp sounds of their own petticoats, freshly starched by the servants also alive in their imaginations, as they waltzed with handsome young soldiers on a warm night redolent with magnolia.

Since the UDC girls couldn’t have their cotillion, they created, in stone, a division of dance partners scattered across the South, most of them glaring fearlessly at the County Courthouse.

This one, in Rome, Georgia, is a tribute to Nathan Bedford Forrest, mentioned in passing in Forrest Gump, a Confederate cavalry commander who would be one of the Klan’s founders. He got a head start at the so-called Battle of Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in 1864, when his boys murdered 300 black Union soldiers who had already surrendered.

All of the United Daughters had to have swooned when Gone with the Wind was released. I am sure many of them, in the moments before death took them away, imagined themselves as Scarlett at Twelve Oaks, with all those handsome, chivalric young men paying court.

I’m still furtively proud of getting disinvited by the Santa Barbara chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. They wanted me to talk about my Civil War book, Patriot Graves, when it suddenly dawned on me that they hadn’t read it.

Excuse me, ma’ams. My ancestors were Confederates, too, Our Confederates were, as you might’ve noticed in my book, some of the finest combat soldiers in the history of the world, and not just America. They were incredible.

And they were deluded. Delusion is a theme that has gained currency in our nation lately.

These men, our ancestors, I wanted to tell the United Daughters, fought to defend a monstrous evil, led by the nose—and to their deaths—by cynical politicians (they called them “The Fire-Eaters”) who cared for nothing so much as their own wealth. This was wealth grounded in human chattel.

Every Confederate ordnance of secession cited the defense of slavery—and the “injustice” of antebellum measures to prevent its expansion into the West—as the root cause of the Civil War. I have to bring this up, I finally did tell them, if you want me to be your guest speaker.

In my heart, I wanted to tell them even more. I wanted them to remind them of this man, in a photograph I know that all of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Santa Barbara Chapter, have seen. This man is Whipped Henry, a habitual runaway from a Louisiana plantation. (Robert E. Lee endorsed the beating of slaves as a regrettable but necessary means of enforcing the social order he defended.)

I might even been compelled to bring up, to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the terror slaves faced at having their families broken up by sales. When one Virginia mother was “sold South,” to the factory-fields of Deep South Mississippi, she used a hatchet to chop off her own foot. That queered the deal. She mutilated herself because nothing was as important to her as her children.

This is how much and how passionately the people we call slaves—it was slaveowners who called them “servants”—loved each other. In the historic record, in the New Deal slave narratives, taken down by young historians on wire recorders, their love for each other is the only constant that transcends their hatred of slavery.

In the years after emancipation, the Klan hated far more. This is their legacy: The Emmett Till Memorial in Mississippi.

Fourteen-year-old Till, a Chicago 14-year-old, was beaten beyond recognition in 1955 and his body sunk in a bayou with a cotton gin fan used to weigh him down. When his corpse bubbled to the surface, the joke white folks told was this: “Ain’t it just like a nigger to go swimmin’ with a gin fan aroun’ his neck?”

This photo was taken ten months ago.

So I guess I will get a new mouse pad in the mail. You shouldn’t buy things on impulse. The impulse can release so many memories—even those that don’t belong to you. You’ve chosen, as a teacher, to adopt certain memories, so that you can pass them on to the students that you love so much, like the memory of Emmett Till, like the memory of the face of his heartbroken mother, Mamie, at Emmett’s funeral.

Robert E. Lee’s face is noble and grave and handsome—he was, in the years before the war, known as “the handsomest man in America.” He was a general. Mamie Till’s face is expressive and passionate and lovely. She was a schoolteacher.

She insisted that Emmett’s casket remain open for the funeral, so that Chicago folks could see what they had done to her boy. The photographs of Emmett’s face are horrific. His humanity has been erased.

You try to block out that face. Two more will appear in your imagination.

You’ll wonder, as you guide your mouse over Lee’s face, if somehow, in someplace that is not America, Gen. Lee and Mrs. Till might have the chance to sit down and regard each other in silence for a long, long time.

Sooner or later the great general, if he was any kind of man at all, would have to clear his throat and begin to speak in the gentle voice that his soldiers remembered. If he was any kind of man at all, he would surrender again and with the same grace he’d shown in Wilmer McLean’s parlor at Appomattox Courthouse.

This time he would surrender to Mamie Till.