I am constantly amazed by the hardships of frontier life in our county. Infant and child mortality statistics were horrific: Mr. and Mrs. William Dana of Rancho Nipomo lost 11 of their 21 children, a statistic comparable, a century before, to Johann Sebastian Bach’s family. One little girl, named for Dana’s sister, must have been especially beloved. Adeline is buried in the sanctuary wall of Mission San Luis Obispo.
It’s pretty clear that the Danas adored their children. [And that Mr. Dana adored his wife, Josephine Carrillo de Dana. When the gentlemen adjourned after dinner for brandy and cigars—this is how Dana might’ve heard the news of the 1848 gold strike at Sutter’s Mill— she, like many Californio women, joined them.] One story has another daughter climbing up to the little cupola of the family adobe, sited on one of the most beautiful spots in the county, to direct one of the rancho’s vaqueros to rope for her the horse she wanted to ride that day.
Another Dana, a little boy, hasn’t left Rancho Nipomo. Docents and volunteers still see him from time to time: he’s solid and real but his visits are very brief.
Deaths like these among the Dana family came at a time when, thanks largely to better diet, infant and child mortality among the middle classes of Europe and America was declining rapidly. We would be shocked at the detachment between parents and their children in the centuries before the Victorian Era (Francis Branch, Arroyo Grande’s founder and William Dana’s friend, came to the Valley in 1837, the same year that Victoria ascended the throne.) That detachment was a function of mortality among children: Parents could not afford to invest emotionally in children who were likely to die.
By the 1860s, that had changed. It’s macabre to us, but by then photography was common enough so that affluent parents who’d lost a little girl or boy paid to have them photographed. They weren’t willing to let them go.
In the summer of 1862, Francis Branch, by now the wealthiest man in the county, with tens of thousands of acres as his portfolio, was away on business in San Francisco when one of Rancho Santa Manuela’s vaqueros found him and told him that a traveler passing through had brought smallpox to the ranchero’s family.
Francis Branch was a pragmatic Yankee from Scipio, New York, Small, spare, wiry, he was possessed of enormous energy and, despite the image here, a good sense of humor, even when the joke was on him. His wife, Manuela, was from Santa Barbara. She rode home to deliver one baby rather than have it in the wilderness of Arroyo Grande. In 1886, when a father and son were lynched from the PCRR trestle at the base of Crown Hill, they were refused a Christian burial in the town cemetery. Manuela offered them a place in the same graveyard where she’d buried her husband and children.
Branch rode hard—the man must have been desperate—to get home to his wife, Manuela, and his children. By the time he got to Santa Manuela (the ranch house was sited on a hilltop just below today’s Branch School) two of his girls were dead and a third died soon after. They ranged in age from five to sixteen.
The decaying Branch Adobe in a 1913 watercolor. The damage to it had begun with the massive 1857 Fort Tejon earthquake. From the Autry Museum of Western History.
The next year, a drought came that killed thousands of Branch’s cattle. He lost the modern equivalent of eight million dollars.
Bad as it was, the drought wasn’t the central tragedy of Branch’s life.
Next to his big tombstone in the family graveyard are the smaller tombstones of the three daughters. Branch died eight years after the smallpox had come to the big adobe atop the hill. When his family laid the great man to rest, they made sure he was close to his little girls.
One of the great joys of my teaching career was getting approached by this young man when he was a junior at Arroyo Grande High School. He had the sheer audacity—the kind that’s required of directors—to ask me to design a high school semester course in film history.
Which I did, because it was Barry’s idea, which made it an honor.
I once designed a course in Cultural Anthropology, so this was only my second attempt at inventing a class from scratch. But the Grand Poobahs at UC Berkley approved that course and, to my delight, they approved this one, too.
Designing the film course took me a long time, but I don’t much mind creating things. The only sadness was that I didn’t have room on my schedule to teach it—or to watch again films ranging from Chaplin’s The Gold Rush to Preston Sturges’ Easy Living (I have a great fondness for the actress Jean Arthur, who also finds James Stewart’s courage for him in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) to John Ford’s The Searchers to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner.
But I was pretty proud of myself—almost but not nearly as much as I am of Barry, a now-seasoned professional who directs and writes screenplays. He is possessed of immense courage.
Last night, I had an immense and badly-needed dose of humility. I was merely channel-surfing when—damn you, PBS!—I tuned in, midway, into a three-hour documentary from 2016, My Journey through French Cinema, about the critic Bertrand Tavernier.
No, I had no idea who he was.
The film was subtitled, but the French the narrators spoke bore no resemblance to the proper names I was reading in the subtitles. I was always sorry that I did not take French in my years as an AGHS student. The teacher, Mrs. Koehn, was enormously attractive to us teenaged boys. She took to driving a convertible MG at high speed in her later years, which endeared her to me in a whole new way when she became my teaching colleague.
But this documentary cured me of learning French. I could never force my American mouth to make sounds like that.
That’s not the point. The point that was brought home to me was how little I actually know about film.
The scenes they selected took my breath away—I don’t know enough yet to connect the scenes with their films—but I saw an interior scene with both the camera and three characters in constant motion until a lovely young woman suddenly uses a bottle to bludgeon her older lover unconscious. I saw another man die in a rollover car accident shot from both outside and inside the car, punctuated, at its end, by a surviving tire in its rim careening across the road. There were criminal escapes through tunnels and sudden screaming matches between couples who only seemed comfortably married and a Paris street scene with two young women chanting casually amid the sidewalk crowds they pass, while heads turn in their passage. There were exterior scenes, young couples walking beneath trees and holding hands in dappled sunlight, that would’ve made Renoir weep. There was a sudden and violent street robbery, shot in Milan with a hidden camera, in front of a shocked crowd who would learn only much later that they’d been film extras.
There was Belmondo, an ultra-cool alloy of Bogart and Paul Newman.
There were, of course, entire Gauloises assembly lines of cigarettes smoked.
Bertrand Tavernier
I watched all of this without breathing too much. It was a wonderful humbling to realize how much you don’t know.
It was touching to feel your heart melt a little in watching the actress Corinne Marchand, her character doomed by cancer, sing as she descends a staircase in one of Hausmann’s Paris parks in a scene, filmed so gracefully, and sixty years ago, that it makes you fall in love with her.
It was exciting to know that I, even at sixty-eight, have so many films yet to watch, and that they are gifts from the French.
I spent most of my life dismissive of the French, in the American manner, until my students and I, ten years ago, took a trip across northern France where the Americans and Germans had left behind a path of destruction, in 1944 and 1945, from Carentan to Metz. In the ferocity of the fighting, entire towns were reduced to splinters by bombers and shellfire and in Norman pasturelands, GI’s took scant cover in the shelter of dairy cows, their udders still filled with milk, who’d been butchered by machine-gun fire.
We were typical tourists on our trip sixty-five years after that terrible war—in European history, that’s a hiccup— when the Frenchwoman, on discovering that we were Americans, insisted on giving us a tour of St Joan’s cathedral at Reims. She was insistent precisely because we were Americans.
This was the trip when I learned to love France and the French.
This was the trip where we visited the 1916 battlefield at Verdun. Verdun will cure you forever of the myth, broadcast by simpletons, that the French are cowards. The battle lasted nine months. The taking of one fortress—Douaumont—took 100,000 lives.
There is a vast ossuary beneath the Verdun Memorial. You can see, just below plexiglas panels, enormous stacks of the bones of French and German soldiers. These are the macabre remains of a generation of young men who were lost forever to their parents. And to us.
An attendant took me aside as we toured the Memorial. “Your students are so respectful,” she whispered to me.
So that moment, and the visit to Reims, cured me forever of the belief that the French are cold people. The woman who guided us through the cathedral was so immensely proud that she was French and so immensely happy that we were Americans.
My homework, for her, will be watching the French New Wave. Merci, my friend.
When I was in the garage today, I found a stack of my old lesson plan books. These represent about half the books from my teaching career.But planning happens in stages. First, you plan the quarter.And then you plan the month.
And then the unit, in this case, two units from European history, structured around the assigned readings. The lesson will usually augment or expand the homework readings, which they read. Sometimes.Now you’re ready for the weekly plans. These are what you find in the plan book. Each block (the top is vertical; the bottom horizontal) represents a “prep,” or academic class. I usually had two preps at AGHS; at a smaller school, like Mission, I usually had three and once I had four.All that planning has to take into account a multitude of interruptions. This is the schedule for the old state STAR tests, which took up several days. There was also the CAHSEE test in the fall, for sophs (two days), hearing and vision check days, fire drills, accidental fire drills, when the alarm went off by itself (once because of burnt churros in an office microwave), active shooter drills (always depressing) and the never-to-be missed Josten’s Ring Presentation.You always want the lesson’s objectives up on the whiteboard or TV monitor. This was a fun lesson, but right after the socialism review, I introduced them to German Romanticism with the scene from Bambi where Mother is uh…ah…ooh…you know. They Cowboys saved the lesson. Germans love cowboys.
Lesson plans vary. Sometimes you’ve got it in your head and just need an outline. This one involved quiet individual reading, then group work in analyzing the charts and finally group participation in helping each other to sound “Cockney.” All of this in fifty minutes. I enjoyed this lesson. I think they did, too.Intro every unit an assessment must fall. Sometimes they’re fun, like a performance assessment–I loved the 1920s newspaper they did and Mr. Huss had an oral history assessment that involved an AGHS junior interviewing an older person. I became one of those, eventually. On the left is the review for an American Lit test, from Mission; on the right a Modern World History test, from AGHS. More traditional assessments.
For European History, here’s one version of the First World War test.
Stack of test essays; they usually came in batches of seventy; I could grade about five an hour. Nothing compared to what English teachers have to do, though.
Kids. Charlie and me at graduation (he became a firefighter, which makes me very proud of him); classroom activities. It is NOT true that I referred to them as “varmints.” Okay. Maybe a couple of times.
Arroyo Grande, California; my home town, about 1905.Local rancheros were fundamental to New England’s antebellum shoe industry; cattle were raised for their hides, the raw material that drove shoe factories in Massachusetts.California’s first notorious mass murder was in December 1848 at Mission San Miguel. The man who found the bodies was a mail rider who’d started his route in Nipomo. He reported it to a young army officer in Monterey: Future Civil War general William T. Sherman.Nearly sixty Civil War veterans are buried in our cemetery. This Arroyo Grande farmer was a young soldier in the 95th Ohio Infantry when he seized a Confederate battle flag at the Battle of Nashville.Bela Clinton ide was a gentle man. He built the oldest extant home in Arroyo Grande, on Ide Street, in 1878. Twenty-five years before, 363 of the 496 men in his infantry regiment were killed or wounded in a twenty-minute firefight at Gettysburg.James Dowell was a young cavalryman in a tragicomic expedition to the Powder River Country in the summer and fall of 1865. He somehow survived attacks by Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Roman Nose and Crazy Horse. The expedition made it back to Fort Laramie on foot. They’d survived starvation by eating their mounts.The Meiji Emperor, shown here in the film The Last Samurai, began the modernization of Japan in 1867, at a price: ruinous land taxes. Thousands of Japanese were forced to emigrate; the Saruwatari family, whose home still stands off Halcyon Road, may have been the first to move here.The image on the left shows Al Capone waiting his turn to shoot pool at Pismo Beach’s Waldorf Club in 1927, from Effie McDermott’s history of Pismo Beach. The Central Coast was notorious for Capone’s bootlegging. Today, the Waldorf Club is the Cool Cat Cafe.In her autobiography, aviatrix Harriet Quimby claimed she’d been born and raised in Arroyo Grande. That was a small fib. The other one was her losing a decade in age. She was from Michigan, but her family had lived in Arroyo Grande briefly before she started her journalism career. The first woman to fly across the English channel, her flying career ended tragically with a crash into Boston Harbor in 1912. She had nonetheless inspired a little Iowa girl who wanted to fly: Amelia Earhart is shown visiting Cal Poly in 1936, the year before she disappeared.The head of the New Deal’s Soil Conservation Service said the erosion of the hillsides from Arroyo Grande to Shell Beach was among the worst he’d seen in America. The corrective was the Civilian Conservation Corps, two hundred-plus young men from New York, New Jersey and Delaware, whose barracks stood on the site of today’s Arroyo Grande Women’s Club. The young men, aged 18-25, earned $27 a month. They were expected to send half of that home.Clark Gable and Joan Crawford stayed at this Pismo Beach hotel while filming the 1940 release Strange Cargo. During a break in shooting, Gable played a pickup game of softball on the beach with teens from San Luis Obispo High SchoolWayne Morgan (top) and Jack Scruggs (bottom) as second graders at the Arroyo Grande Grammar School–the site of today’s Mullahey Ford–in 1926. Fifteen years later, the two were shipmates on battleship Arizona, circled in the second photo. This is the moment of Scrugg’s death. A trombonist in the ship’s band, the explosions off the battleship’s stern killed him as he prepared to play the National Anthem. Ten minutes later, Morgan was killed; his father owned an earlier Ford agency in the building now occupied by Doc Burnstein’s.Just before America’s entry into World War II, Nakamura was the sports editor of the Arroyo Grande Union High School Hi-Chatter. Two years after he and his family were interned, the twenty-year-old led an Army Intelligence mission into the mountains of China, where he was to link up with Chinese guerrillas. The Chinese were so taken with young Nakamura that they threw him a 21st birthday party. Somebody had a record player, so there was even a little dance. One of Nakamura’s dance partners was a former Chinese movie star, Jian Qing. We know her better as Madame Mao.Some of the most vicious bigotry I’ve ever encountered came in prewar newspaper columns that condemned Filipino immigrants–called “The Manong Generation.” The young men—almost no Filipinas were allowed to immigrate–found solace in the community center that was Pismo Beach’s P.I. market. They responded to the nation that seemed to hate them by volunteering, in great numbers, to fight the Japanese and help liberate their homes. They were superb soldiers.Heritage Salon on Branch Street in Arroyo Grande was once Buzz’s Barber and Beauty. Buzz gave a stranger a haircut in his #1 chair in 1959. The stranger’s dog, a big handsome poodle, waited in a pickup parked on Branch Street for his boss to finish his haircut. The poodle was named Charley. Buzz’s customer was John Steinbeck.
There are times in any amateur historian’s research when you’re led in a direction you didn’t expect. If you’re lucky, that new direction will reward you with a lesson in our shared humanity–which, to me, is what history is all about, anyway.
The facts seem basic. Isidor Aron (1853-1909) and Siegfried Alexander (1856-1923), were cousins, from Posen, a province of Prussia until Bismarck completed Germany’s unification in The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in 1871. This was the final act of a victory over Napoleon III’s France that would poison Europe. This moment made Verdun possible—the place where, beneath plexiglas panels in the floor of the battlefield ossuary, the unidentified bones of tens of thousands of French and German boys are stacked, orderly and ghastly.
The two cousins had emigrated to America two years before the Bismarck’s moment in the Hall of Mirrors—that’s good news— but not long after their adoptive nation’s near-annihilation in the Civil War. That’s bad news. German immigrants were not viewed kindly—my grandmother’s people came here from Baden-Wurttemberg—and the war had made them tragicomic. The Army of the Potomac’s XI Corps, after all, made up mostly of German immigrants (“We Fight Mits Sigel,” a popular song was titled, in honor of their commander, Franz Sigel), had collapsed under the weight of Stonewall Jackson’s stunning surprise attack at Chancellorsville in May 1863, in Lee’s greatest victory.
The Confederates had come bursting out of dense woods thought impassable, trilling their Rebel Yell and preceded by panic-stricken jackrabbits, foxes and deer who galloped through the Union soldiers at their suppers. The Germans trailed the animals in their flight, but not by much.
For a time, the only resistance on Hooker’s right seemed to be coming from a single cannon, also in retreat, but manned by a crew that would pause periodically to load and fire a canister charge, essentially, the artillery version of a shotgun shell, loaded with deadly steel balls, into their pursuers. The defiant artillery crew was directed by a German immigrant, Captain Hubert Dilger. A Southern artillerist described Dilger’s actions that day as “superhuman,” and the young Union officer would win the Medal of Honor.
It appears that Dilger was overshadowed by bad generalship and the resultant flight of XI Corps. It would take generations for their descendants—Eisenhower, Eichelberger, Spaatz, Nimitz—to redeem Chancellorsville.
For the rest of the war, XI Corps would be derisively referred to as “The Flying Dutchmen.” Ironically, it was a Confederate state—Texas, of all places—that would welcome German immigrants with open arms. Texas German is still spoken there.
German immigrant Isidor Aron came to California. Here’s a 1905 passport application, preparatory to the great adventure of his life, which includes the record of his immigration and citizenship.
Luckily, Isidor and his cousin Siegfried were far too young for Chancellorsville. They took up clerking in San Francisco, possibly attracted by the reputation of another successful German—another German Jew—the Bavarian-born Levi Strauss.
The cousins came to Arroyo Grande as merchants in the 1880s, setting up a haberdashery and dry-goods store on the corner of Branch and Bridge Streets, on the site of today’s “Something Different” store, which was once the Bank of America.
In August 1897, the cousins took out a rare display ad—they were given to more modest two-line blurbs that typified the advertising columns of small-town Victorian weeklies— in the Arroyo Grande Valley Herald-Recorder.
What is clear from the historical record is the popularity of Aron and Alexander—as men and fellow citizens, and not just as merchants. The venerable local historian Madge Ditmas wrote in one of her 1941 Herald-Recorder columns, just before veering off into one of her typical anti-FDR screeds, that these Germans weren’t seen as foreigners at all.
So the seemingly effortless generosity of the two—which had to have come, in reality, with tremendous effort—endeared them to Arroyo Grande.
Sadly, the cousins would die far from their American home. A stroke killed Aron in 1909 Los Angeles; a heart attack ended Alexander’s life in 1922 San Francisco. But, as Ditmas notes, they loved to travel, and luckily, they managed to take what was called the Grand Tour together in 1905, four years before Aron’s death. Here’s a note from the Herald-Recorder that clearly indicates the presence of an Aron and Alexander Fan Club:
The cousins were eventually buried together. Aron is buried in Plot C8 in the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery; Alexander lies alongside, in C10. Atop their tombstones are the Hebrew letters that tell you
Here lies a son of God.
Of that, I am sure. To have made your way as a foreigner in a place as foreign as Arroyo Grande, on the continent’s edge, to have generated so much good will, speaks unwritten volumes beyond the simple profundity of their tombstones. They were certainly devoted to their business and to each other, but they were devoted—perhaps even more— to my home town. Their lives shaped ours in ways we may never fully understand or appreciate.
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.
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.
A Lakota woman, the Butterfly Dance
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.
* * *
Big Foot in death, Wounded Knee.
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:
Fess Parker. He was later Daniel Boone, which required zero expenses in the wardrobe department.
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.
Dr. von Braun, explains, on the Disney Show, his model of an immense interstellar Space Bagel.
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.
The Scene of the Crime today, which hasn’t changed at all from the Scene of the Crime in 1956 except for twenty-three layers of paint.
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.
In the early 2000s in Vilnius, in Lithuania, when construction workers began unearthing skeletons, they called in the anthropologists. The work these scientists do is familiar in this part of the world. Thanks to Stalin’s NKVD and Hitler’s einsatzgruppen, mass graves that would be a horror anywhere else are common in Eastern Europe.
The only place remotely familiar is Spain, where everyone knows about the mass graves, legacies of the Civil War, but no one speaks about them.
In Vilnius, the skeletons were even older than the ones left behind by Stalin and Hitler and Franco. These were Napoleon’s soldiers.
The Vilnius burials
Nearly four thousand individuals were isolated, only part of the estimated 20,000 soldiers who died here. The numbers are staggering: Napoleon had taken a multinational army of 675,000 men into Russia in 1812. Near the end of his retreat, at Russia’s western frontier, only 40,000 remained. Half of them staggered into Vilnius.
Some of the finds were fascinating. Many individuals had a notch in the front teeth of their lower jaws. This is where the stems of their clay pipes had fit. Bits of uniform cloth and infantry helmets, like this one, allowed archaeologists to match some soldiers with their units in what Napoleon called the Grand Armee.
Chemical analysis of the Vilnius bones hinted, from fragmentary nutritional evidence, at those soldiers who were more likely French and ate a diet based on wheat and those where millet was detected. These were the Italians.
By the end of the retreat, none of the Vilnius survivors was eating much at all. They’d slaughtered the horses that had drawn their baggage and then they’d begged the bewildered townsmen bare. Some starving soldiers broke into a medical office to steal the doctor’s anatomical specimens, suspended in formaldehyde.
Uniform fragments like this one revealed the final killer: The scat left behind that was evidence of typhus, the same opportunistic disease that would kill so many in Ireland’s famine thirty-five years later.
Some of the skeletons would’ve belonged to the military doctors who remained behind in Vilnius. Napoleon didn’t. He abandoned his dying army—just as he had in Egypt fourteen years before—and, wrapped in furs, safe inside a fast sled, he raced in relays of horses, killed in their harnesses, to get back to Paris, where he could minimize the news of this epic disaster, reshape it in the imperial press.
In this, he was spectacularly successful. He would make a comeback and lead let another army to spectacular failure at Waterloo two years later. This army included the troops esteemed more than any others, the Old Guard, his personal bodyguard. Many of them, tall men made taller by their bearskin helmets, were grey-mustached veterans who had been with him since the beginning. By the end, they were ironically the safest soldiers in his army. They were so venerated that they would always make up the emperor’s strategic reserve, to be used only as a last resort.
At Waterloo, that last resort came when the Guard was called on to cover the flight of the Emperor as his carriage sped, again at a horse-killing pace, toward Paris. The Old Guard would die, abandoned on the field in the moment that their emperor realized that the weight of late-arriving Prussian troops was more than his empire could bear. He realized, too, in the same moment and with perfect clarity, that his life was far more valuable than the lives of the veteran warriors who loved him the most.
The Old Guard at Waterloo
This week the president announced that “we are all warriors.” Here are warriors in New York City in a grave different only from the grave in Vilnius for the decency of its caskets and the symmetry of its trench.
But this grave, like the Vilnius grave, demonstrates some of the similarities between the emperor and the president. Like Napoleon, Trump has demonstrated a perverse genius for altering reality.
The president and his people are preparing to magically reduce the casualties of the last two months. They will claim that hospitals, eager for the Medicare money that comes with treating coronavirus patients, are inflating the numbers of admissions and, of course, the numbers of dead—the ones who lie unburied in a fleet of refrigerated trucks in Brooklyn, the trucks organized in neat rows where, in the distance, you can see the Statue of Liberty.
The president has blamed one of his more vivid leadership failures on hospitals, too. He obliquely and darkly implied that the lack of personal protective equipment was traceable to doctors, nurses and respiratory therapists who were selling the gear on some kind of coronavirus black market.
Yesterday, in the Oval Office, he quickly and sharply contradicted a nurse he was supposed to honoring when she revealed that the supplies of PPE were still sporadic and unreliable.
Trump prepares to humiliate an honored nurse.
“That’s not what I hear,” he said, without revealing, as he never does, where he’d heard it. “Many people tell me” is the closest we get to attribution from a president who constantly excoriates the background sources from the reportage of the New York Times or the Washington Post.
He was far more obvious in his repeated references to “The China Virus,” the one he claimed to have quashed at American ports of entry. But the tragic numbers in New York City came from Europe, from Heathrow and Orly and da Vinci-Fiumicino, as passengers made their transit through JFK and Newark.
When he did respond to the East Coast threat, he did so with his customary incompetence, announcing “enhanced screenings” that left hundreds funneled into Customs hallways where they had far less freedom to move than the virus did.
But these were warriors, weren’t they?
JFK International, March 2020
Trump’s ignorance of history remains his greatest and most enduring personal virtue. He knows nothing about Napoleon and Russia and does not care. He refers repeatedly to “the 1917” flu. You could see his restlessness on a visit to Gettysburg, early on in what he called, early on, his “reign.” (Someone in the West Wing got him stop using this term, one he used for previous presidents, as well.) Later he passed on a visit to Belleau Wood because it was raining. He did speak, to his credit, at Normandy on the same trip, but it was transparently empty because he spoke in the same uncomprehending monotone that he reserves especially for the dead. The words written for him meant nothing to him. He was, as someone so aptly pointed out, like a sixth-grader delivering a book report about a book he hadn’t read.
And he did speak, to be fair, in the rain. In a July 4 speech, he praised the Continental Army for seizing airports from the British during the American Revolution.
And so the ignorance he so carefully cultivates—the coronavirus deaths are fake news, after all—will shield him until, God willing, he leaves office. The man who has called himself “a wartime president” will be whisked away from the battlefield.
He’ll be flown home to Mar-a-Lago where he will finally be alone with the thing he loves the most: A New York steak, very well-done, with a a side of fries and plenty of ketchup. And then there will be a thick slice of chocolate cake with two scoops of ice cream.
All he will have left behind are trenches filled with warriors. But the country will be opened again. We will have that much. And, in truth, when the trenches are covered over, the scars they leave behind will grow over and so fade away.
When the Vilnius warriors were finally unearthed, the scars there reopened. You can see it in the scowling face of the Lithuanian anthropologist. You can see it in the compassionate face of the young woman field technician as she reveals a young man who’d died nearly two centuries before she was born. What you see in both images, in both expressions, are human beings registering their humanity.
A little humanity is not too much to ask for. Unless you ask for it from the misshapen man who claims to leads us.
A Work in Progress 