A George Bush speech yesterday in Israel included this statement:

“Some seem to believe we should negotiate with terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: ‘Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all of this might have been avoided.’ We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.”

This was presumably a reference to Barack Obama’s willingness to engage in talks with adversaries (Hillary Clinton and John McCain oppose such negotiations).

After the Bush speech yesterday Chris Matthews had a Los Angeles talk show host named Kevin James on his Hardball program.  James picked right up on the Bush talking points, attacking Obama for proposing negotiations with U.S. adversaries, which James called “appeasement.”

Matthews asked James what, specifically, had been done at Munich that appeased Hitler. Over a period of six or seven minutes, Matthews kept trying to get an answer from James and James kept dodging:

MATTHEWS: You don’t know what you’re talking about, Kevin. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Tell me what Chamberlain did wrong.
JAMES: Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser, Chris. Neville Chamberlain was an appeaser, all right?

Back and forth it went until this final exchange:

MATTHEWS: I’ve been sitting here five minutes asking you to say what the president was referring to in 1938 at Munich.
JAMES: I don’t know.
MATTHEWS: You don’t know, thank you.

James is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma, which perhaps should look into its history instruction.

Like James, Bush wis poorly informed on history. It wasn’t negotiating that earned the 1938 Munich summit its reputation (“It is better to talk jaw to jaw than to have war,” said Winston Churchill), it was the outcome of the negotiations and the willingness to cede land to Hitler for peace.

But Bush is hardly the only one to work the Munich analogy. It has been a staple of U.S. politics since 1938.  There have been speeches, movies, books, public policy debates, and so on dealing with appeasement and the lessons of Munich. To show how deeply it permeated U.S. culture, there is the 1942 Technicolor MGM cartoon, Wolf Blitz, a retelling of the three pigs tale.  In this Tex Avery-directed cartoon, the two indolent pigs accept a Nonaggression Pact that reads, “My dear, sweet, little friendly neighbors: This is the truth for which I stand, I promise not to invade your land.  With your freedom I will not tinker, Signed Adolf Wolf (COLOSSAL STINKER).”  The industrious pig, meanwhile, motivated by a newspaper map showing wolf forces advancing on “Pigmania” (under an emblem of two sausages twisted into a swastika), has converted his home into a fortress surrounded by trenches and howitzers.

The flexibility of the Munich analogy can be seen in the dueling uses of it in the 1950s. In 1954 President Eisenhower wielded the Munich analogy to try to convince the British to join a scheme for a joint effort to take up the role of the French in Vietnam after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. In a message to Winston Churchill, he wrote:

“If I may refer again to history; we failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini, and Hitler by not acting in unit and in time.  That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that lesson?”

From the perspective of the United States, one might have thought the British, of all people, would respond to such a plea.  Instead, Churchill (who might be considered something of an authority on Munich) thought it inappropriate and his foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, later wrote, “I am fairly hardened to crises but I went to bed that night a troubled man.” But the one-size-fits-all limberness of the Munich Analogy was neatly demonstrated when Eden invoked it during the Suez crisis in 1956—and Eisenhower rejected its application then.

What Mark Twain wrote in Following the Equator applies to the Munich analogy: “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it—and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one.” Churchill had, as it happens, anticipated the overuse of the Munich analogy, fearing people would overlearn its lessons, and in 1948 had shown the foresight to write some guidelines for the future:

“It may be well…to set down some principles of morals and action which may be a guide in the future. No case of this kind can be judged apart from its circumstances…Those who are prone by temperament and character to seek sharp and clear-cut solutions of difficult and obscure problems, who are ready to fight whenever some challenge comes from a foreign power, have not always been right. On the other hand, those whose inclination is to bow their heads, to seek patiently and faithfully for peaceful compromise, are not always wrong. On the contrary, in the majority of instances, they may be right, not only morally but from a practical standpoint…How many wars have been precipitated by fire brands!  How many misunderstandings which led to war could have been removed by temporizing! How often have countries fought cruel wars and then after a few years of peace found themselves not only friends but allies!”

But U.S. leaders did not listen and the Munich analogy was one of the principal reasons the U.S. was drawn into Vietnam. Indeed, the use of the analogy was itself out of fashion in Democratic circles until Bill Clinton used it to justify his Kosovo bombing campaign.

After Bush’s speech in Israel yesterday, the White House reacted to the angry reaction it drew by backing off it, his press spokesperson Dana Perino denying that it referred to Obama.  She then went on, “This [opposition to negotiating with adversaries] is long-established United States policy, so it should come as no surprise that President Bush suggests that we should not be talking with these people.”

Perino’ history is not much better than her boss’s.  Opposition to negotiating with adversarial nations may be Bush policy, but it’s not U.S. policy.  Indeed, it’s not entirely Bush policy, since the first Bush administration had talks with Saddam Hussein through U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie.

President Clinton approved negotiations by his U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson with Fidel Castro over emigration, drug policy, human rights, extradition of American fugitives.

President Nixon opened negotiations with China, a nation his government did not even recognize.

President Kennedy was seeking talks with Cuba when he was killed.

Presidents Eisenhower and Truman both negotiated with North Korea while the war was ongoing.

Every once in a while there is one of those surveys showing that students are not being well educated in history.  The most recent one was released in February.  The New York Times reported, “Fewer than half of American teenagers who were asked basic history and literature questions in a phone survey knew when the Civil War was fought, and one in four said Columbus sailed to the New World some time after 1750, not in 1492. … About a quarter of the teenagers were unable to correctly identify Hitler as Germany’s chancellor in World War II, instead identifying him as a munitions maker, an Austrian premier and the German kaiser.”

In the public comments under that report was posted this response from “Ffrank” in Cleveland:  “Why bother? Public education from its inception in this country was intended to teach children how to show up on time, follow orders, and just enough math and literacy skills to handle a factory or office job. The sad truth is you don’t need a knowledge of history or literature to succeed in almost all jobs. Haven’t noticed any discussions about the Treaty of Westphalia at my workplace lately, and I work for a university?”

Perhaps the reason to learn history is not to help us in our jobs but in our citizenship, to keep us informed and protect us from being misled by presidents, their spokespeople, and their radio host supporters.

On this date in 1797 President John Adams delivered a message to Congress demonizing France (while tilting in favor of England) that set off the first “wag the dog” war started by a U.S. president, a message described by Thomas Jefferson as “nearly insane” (it elevated national disagreements capable of diplomatic resolution into matters of national pride that led to the French/U.S. naval war of 1798-1800: “Such attempts ought to be repelled with a decision which shall convince France and the world that we are not a degraded people, humiliated under a colonial spirit of fear and sense of inferiority, fitted to be the miserable instruments of foreign influence, and regardless of national honor, character, and interest.”);  in 1939 after a case of short-weighted butter was confiscated from a Reno grocery store, it was given to the county hospital and the Crittenden children’s home to be “destroyed by consumption”;  in 1966 Pet Sounds, which was partly inspired by Rubber Soul and would help to inspire Sgt. Pepper, was released.

 

 

Since Gov. Jim Gibbons’ divorce suit against Dawn Gibbons has broken into the news, there have been a lot of news reports claiming firsts and onlys—benchmarks regarding governors’ divorces. Here are some instances to put the case in perspective:

* Arizona Territorial Governor Anson Safford (previously a prominent Nevada Republican figure) was divorced through the novel procedure of an act passed by the Arizona Legislature signed by Safford himself. The divorce took place after his wife had publicized his alleged infidelities and social diseases.

* Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson was divorced from his wife Ellen on December 12, 1949 during his first year as governor.  Although Ellen Stevenson had encouraged her husband to run for governor, she was not comfortable in the public eye.  She obtained the divorce in Nevada after establishing a divorce residency in Las Vegas.

* In 1961, Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York announced he and his wife Mary had split up. In 1962 she came to Nevada and established a divorce residence at the Donner Trail Guest Ranch in Verdi. The divorce caused fewer political difficulties for Rockefeller’s presidential hopes than his supporters had feared—he won a smashing reelection and he became the GOP presidential frontrunner until he married Margaretta “Happy” Murphy one month after her divorce. This time the reaction was much sharper. “Have we come to the point in our life as a nation where the governor of a great state can desert a good wife, mother of his grown children, divorce her, then persuade a young mother of youngsters to abandon her husband and their four children and marry the governor?” That was U.S. Sen. Prescott Bush, father of George Bush the elder and grandfather of George Bush the younger. Rockefeller’s ensuing plunge in the polls opened the way for Barry Goldwater to win the nomination (though, given the strength of his organization, he might well have won it anyway).

* Alabama Gov. George Wallace was divorced in 1978 from his second wife Cornelia in a messy public fight that included the discovery of a recording device in their bedroom. That divorce prevented his using her as a proxy to hold onto the governorship for a third term.  (He also divorced his third wife, county singer Lisa Taylor, though that happened after he left the governorship.)

* Louisiana Gov. Buddy Roemer was divorced in 1990 from his wife Patty.

* Oregon Gov. Neil Goldschmidt was divorced from his wife Margaret in 1990. Shortly afterward he announced his retirement from the governorship after only one term. Years later it became known that while mayor of Portland he had sexually abused a 14 year old girl and it was suspected that his surprising retirement as governor was attributable to the threat of exposure.

* During his 1992-2000 terms of office, Gov. Kirk Fordice of Mississippi signed an executive order of dubious legality prohibiting recognition of gay marriages performed in other states. To show how marriage should be conducted, Fordice had an affair with an old high school girl friend, divorced his wife, married the girl friend, then divorced her.

* John Carlin of Kansas divorced his first wife during his first term as governor, divorced his second wife (a Carlin aide) during his second term as governor, and his third wife (another Carlin aide) after leaving office and married a fourth wife while serving as U.S. archivist (he married his deputy’s former wife). During his governorship, there were reportedly Kansas bumper strips reading “Honk if you’ve slept with the governor.”

* The case that comes closest to the Nevada one involves Marvin Mandel, who served as governor of Maryland after Spiro Agnew resigned to become vice president.  Like Jim Gibbons, Marvin Mandel moved out of the governor’s mansion without telling the first lady, then (again like Gibbons) had one of his cronies get the message to her through an announcement to the press of “their” separation.  Bootsie Mandel responded, “I don’t know what everyone’s talking about. The governor left my bed this morning.”  Eventually they were divorced and he married Jeanne Dorsey.  Also like Jim Gibbons, Marvin Mandel was under federal investigation.  He was eventually convicted on 17 counts of mail fraud and one of racketeering and was sent to prison as part of the same investigation that brought down Agnew—whereupon Bootsie Mandel said, “I got the best years of Marvin Mandel, and she [Jeanne] got what’s left.”

* In 2001 one of Mandel’s successors, Gov. Parris Glendening, was divorced from his wife, Federal Election Commission attorney Frances Hughes Glendening. The governor said in a statement, “We wish each other well and each remain dedicated to careers in public service.” He subsequently married his chief of staff.

No claim is made that this list is exhaustive.

One additional item: 
There is no Nevada constitutional requirement that the governor live in the governor’s mansion. There is a statute passed by the legislature that says, “The Governor shall keep his office and reside at the seat of government” but there is substantial question whether the legislative branch can impose such a requirement on an executive official.

On this date in 1880 the Reno Evening Gazette observed, “The opposition to the theory of evolution is gradually dying out. Indeed many scientists look upon evolution no longer as a theory but as a law.”;  in 1944 the NBC Radio series I Love A Mystery began a three-week serial, “You Can’t Pin A Murder On Nevada” about a Nevada prospector falsely accused of murder;   in 1965 a 15-hour national teach-in on the Vietnam war, sponsored by the Inter-University Committee for Public Hearings on Vietnam, was held in Washington, D.C. and carried by closed circuit television to more than a hundred colleges;  in 1966 civil war was threatening in Vietnam after Saigon dictator Nguyen Cao Ky’s dispatch of troops to Da Nang to put down an insurrection and the Associated Press reported that Saigon was preparing for a general strike.

On this date in 1912 the Democratic Party of Nevada, acting under a little known state statute, held Nevada’s first presidential primary election in which U.S. House Speaker Champ Clark of Missouri defeated former U.S. attorney general and Ohio governor Judson Harmon and New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey (in 1958 legislative researchers discovered that the statute under which the primary was conducted depended for its authority on a second statute that had been repealed before 1912, making the primary illegal);  in 1913 in a game against the St. Louis Browns, Washington Senators pitcher Walter Johnson threw his 54th consecutive scoreless inning, a record that stood until broken by Don Drysdale in 1968 (in 1914 Johnson married Hazel Lee Roberts, the daughter of U.S. Representative Edwin Roberts of Nevada);  in 1968 John Lennon and Paul McCartney appeared on the Tonight Show , guest hosted by Joe Garagiola.

On this date in 1968 after students at Creighton University in Nebraska told him they supported student draft deferments and felt the draft was a good way for African Americans to get out of the ghetto, Robert Kennedy chastised them: “Here at a Catholic university, how can you say that we can deal with the problems of the poor by sending them to Vietnam?” (see below);  in 1969 Oscar Dan Boydston of Las Vegas died in Thua Thien province, Vietnam (panel 25w, row 95 of the Vietnam wall).

U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy/Creighton University/May 13 1968:  Here at a Catholic university, how can you say that we can deal with the problems of the poor by sending them to Vietnam?  There is a great moral force in the United States about the wrongs of the federal government and all the mistakes Lyndon Johnson has made, and how Congress has failed to pass legislation dealing with civil rights.  And yet, when it comes down to you yourselves and your own individual lives, then you say students should be draft deferred. … How can you possibly say—look around you.  How many black faces do you see here, how many American Indians, how many Mexican Americans? … How can you accept this?  What I don’t understand is that you don’t even debate these things among yourselves.  You’re the most exclusive minority in the world.  Are you just going to sit on your duffs and do nothing, or just carry signs and protest?

A good deal of attention has been paid to the Democratic presidential campaign’s latest mini-dispute, Hillary Clinton’s USA Today interview (undated on the USA Today site, as usual, but found here: http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-05-07-clintoninterview_N.htm).

Rush Limbaugh said, “Well, continued shock and dismay were on display on the weekend news shows following Senator Clinton’s USA Today interview.” In fact, a lot of the shock and dismay came from those on the right. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan said, “If John McCain said, ‘I got the white vote, baby!’ his candidacy would be over. And rising in highest indignation against him would be the old Democratic Party. To play the race card as Mrs. Clinton has, to highlight and encourage a sense that we are crudely divided as a nation, to make your argument a brute and cynical ‘the black guy can’t win but the white girl can’ is—well, so vulgar, so cynical, so cold, that once again a Clinton is making us turn off the television in case the children walk by.”

The comic site IMAO reported, “After Hillary Clinton claimed in a USA Today interview that Obama’s ‘support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening’, Senator Obama declared that he was proud be the candidate of choice for ‘lazy whites across the nation’.”

One of the things that jumped out at me in the interview was the education aspect of Clinton’s comment about an Associated Press report “that found how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Compare that to a comment made in 1968 by Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy about competitor Robert Kennedy during the Oregon primary campaign: “I want you to remember when you go to the polls that the more educated, more intelligent people vote for me, and the less educated people vote for my opponent.” (RFK himself bemoaned the fact that, as he put it, the A and B students tended to go with McCarthy while the C and D students supported him.)

I don’t know what this means, other than that we have gone from a candidate being elitist about the advanced education of his supporters to a candidate being elitist about her supporters being less educated. If one has to choose a side, I suppose it’s better that Clinton identifies with those who are more likely to be within the ranks of the working poor, if that’s what it means. However, the comment doesn’t necessarily reflect her voting record—she has shown little economic populism during her career, until this year when she campaigned in economically depressed states like Ohio.

Still, it seems to me to be a striking pair of quotations separated by 40 years in a political party that during those four decades left behind its role as a champion of the working poor to become a vehicle for corporate power.

Historian James Hulse on the Pyramid Lake War:  In many cases the “soldiers” were simply ovezealous young men, ready to steal horses and kidnap women.

On this date in 1765 in his journal, George Washington recorded starting two days of planting marijuana “at Muddy hole” at Mount Vernon;   in 1860 a group of white settlers led by William Ormsby launched the Pyramid Lake War to defend the right of white sexual predators to rape young Native American girls, marching on Pyramid where they were annihilated by Paiute tribal warriors led by Chief Numaga (to tie everything together neatly, the “soldiers” were probably attacking the wrong tribe);  in 2007 Anthony Schober of Reno died in Al Taqa, Iraq.

U.S. Rep Jon Porter of Nevada has voted against motherhood.

Scratch that: He actually voted against it after he voted for it.

The vote came Wednesday on the annual ceremonial resolution (see text below) praising mothers just before Mother’s Day.  The measure passed by its usual overwhelming margin (412 to 0 this year) and then Rep. Todd Tiahrt of Kansas, a Republican, moved to reconsider the resolution. Rep. Kathy Castor, a Florida Democrat, moved to table Tiahrt’s motion.  That set up the second vote, with 178 Republicans voting against motherhood. Standing by mom were 224 Democrats and 13 Republicans, so she got her resolution.

Porter, a Clark County Republican, was deserted by fellow Republican Dean Heller of northern Nevada. Democrat Shelley Berkley of Clark County voted with her fellow Democrats.

Why? you ask.  Well, the two parties have been wrangling this week about the proper procedure for voting on a pending war spending bill. Yes, to thee and me that would occasion a meeting to work out the differences, but in Congress they handle these things differently.  I guess.  The Republicans have been staging little floor fights to slow business down.  (How that solves the dispute over the war bill is anyone’s guess.)   So the Democrats threw the Mother’s Day resolution into the mix to force the Republicans to come out against motherhood.

For information on the resolution, go to
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d110:h.res.01113:

House Resolution 1113

In the House of Representatives, U. S., May 7, 2008 [date of introduction].

Whereas Mother’s Day is celebrated on the second Sunday of each May;
Whereas the first official Mother’s Day was observed on May 10, 1908, in Grafton, West Virginia, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania;
Whereas 2008 is the 100th anniversary of the first official Mother’s Day observation;
Whereas in 1908, Elmer Burkett, a U.S. senator from Nebraska, proposed making Mother’s Day a national holiday;
Whereas in 1914, Congress passed a resolution designating the second Sunday of May as Mother’s Day;
Whereas it is estimated that there are more than 82,000,000 mothers in the United States;
Whereas mothers have made immeasurable contributions toward building strong families, thriving communities, and ultimately a strong Nation;
Whereas the services rendered to the children of the United States by their mothers have strengthened and inspired the Nation throughout its history;
Whereas we honor ourselves and mothers in the United States when we revere and emphasize the importance of the role of the home and family as the true foundation of the Nation;
Whereas mothers continue to rise to the challenge of raising their families with love, understanding, and compassion, while overcoming the challenges of modern society; and
Whereas May 11, 2008 is recognized as Mother’s Day: Now, therefore, be it
Resolved, That the House of Representatives celebrates the role of mothers in the United States and supports the goals and ideals of Mother’s Day.

Attest:
Clerk.

Nevada State Journal/May 9 1880:  A painful rumor was extant yesterday that a Reno man had $50 in his pocket.  Crowds flocked to try and find him.  Success indifferent. 

On this date in 1868 the town of Reno, Nevada was established with the auction of 400 lots;   in 1942 the University of Nevada Regents adopted a regulation that “no further matriculation be permitted of persons of Japanese birth or ancestry, unless born in the State of Nevada”;   in 1970 H. James Shea, Jr., a Massachusetts state legislator who sponsored the state law that said no citizen of the state could be forced to fight in an undeclared war and sent the Massachusetts attorney general into court to defend any soldier who refused to serve in Vietnam, killed himself in despair over the widening of the war into Cambodia and the resulting tumult across the U.S.;  in 1974 nine months after the Nixon administration engineered the September 11 overthrow of the democratic government of Chile, Phil Ochs, Pete Seeger, Melanie, Larry Estridge, Bob Dylan, and Dave Van Ronk performed in concert in New York to raise money for victims of the Chilean junta.

258 days remaining in the current presidential term of office
 
On this date in 1860 white men at Williams Station on the Carson River kidnapped Native American girls, provoking an attack by tribal members who burned the station to the ground, whereupon a white force attacked the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe (they were probably attacking the wrong tribe, since the attack on Williams Station was likely made by the Bannocks);  in 1955 in a track meet at Mackay Stadium in Reno, San Francisco State’s John Mathis—later famous as a singer—broke a stadium high jump record (breaking at 6 feet, 5½ inches) that had been set the previous year at Mackay by Bill Russell, later the basketball great;  in 1966 Del Shannon’s “The Big Hurt” and Simon and Garfunkel’s “I Am A Rock” entered Billboard’s top 100.

On this date in 1880 Storey County’s Virginia Evening Chronicle offered Democrats a subscription through the November election for $5, and the newspaper’s ad assured prospective subscribers that it “advocates Democratic principles because it believes that the fundamental doctrines of that party for the life and essence of the American system of government, while those of the Republic party aim to the overthrow of popular government”;  in 1970 reaction to the invasion of Cambodia continued to build, fueled by the killings at Kent State, and classes were boycotted at 300 campuses, another 536 campuses shut down altogether, and faculties, staffs and administrators made common cause with students.

Albert Hoffman, the chemist who discovered lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938, died last week in Burg in his native Switzerland.

For years after the discovery of LSD’s hallucinogenic properties, it was used without problems or even much attention. Then in the mid-1960s there was a lot of news coverage about the drug being used by the young and causing birth defects, and a wave of prohibition laws were enacted.

On May 24, 1966 Gov. Grant Sawyer expanded the agenda of that year’s special session of the Nevada Legislature to include legislation “to assist in control of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and other hallucinatory drugs…”

The new laws spawned more publicity for the drugs, generating heavier use.  Somehow, though, the expected flood of birth defects never materialized.  A 1971 study found the scare had been based on bad information and that “pure LSD in moderate doses does not damage chromosomes … [and] does not cause detectable genetic damage.”

The Reno Gazette Journal yesterday carried a story about the cemetery at the Nevada Mental Health Institute. http://rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080504/NEWS18/80504028&OAS_sitepage=news.rgj.com%2Fbreakingnews
 
This graveyard dates back to—well, no one is sure, given the uncertain record keeping.
 
A decade or so ago, I did a story on it for KOLO News at a time when the Institute was planning to move it or part of it to make way for new construction. I reported that it was believed that most of the people buried there had died without known family members.  I later learned that there was at least one other reason, too.
 
Not long after that story was broadcast, I heard from a woman in Lovelock who said that a member of her family—I believe it was her father—was buried at the Institute. At the time of his death, the stigma of mental illness was still such that the family was unwilling to claim the body. So the years passed and now the woman wanted to claim the body and have it buried with the rest of the family members.  I gave her names at the Institute and later called to make sure she had made contact, but I never learned the final resolution of the matter. The important thing was that she felt free to make the request and identify herself with her father’s problems.
 
There are times when we think that attitudes never change, that we are in a Sisyphus-like battle against prejudice. But sometimes we can actually see within the span of our own lifetimes that feelings do change.

On this date in 1862 four thousand Mexican soldiers defeated a French and collaborationist Mexican army of 8,000 at La Puebla de los Ángeles, Mexico, showing the nation’s ability to defend its sovereignty against an army feared throughout Europe, a notable victory that for some reason has become widely celebrated in the United States (Mexican independence day is September 15 or 16 1810);  in 1866 the second of three enlargements of Nevada’s original territory occurred when 18,325 square miles were detached from the Territory of Utah and added to the State of Nevada;  in 1967 “San Francisco” by Scott McKenzie, the anthem of the flower children, first appeared on the music charts;  in 1970 Lloyd Willner Jackson, a 22 year old Native American from Austin, Nevada, died in Thua Thien province, Vietnam (panel 11w line 124 of the Vietnam wall);  in 2000 the earth shifted 90 degrees on its axis, causing crustal plates to shift, setting off earthquakes, tidal waves, flooding, volcanic eruptions (or so author Richard Noone predicted for this date in his 1997 book 5/5/2000 Ice: The Ultimate Disaster).

On this date in 1931 “God Dies”, an award winning essay written by West Seattle High School senior Frances Farmer, later the movie star, was published in the Scholastic, arousing alarm among red-baiters about atheism in the schools (see below);   in 1957 Elvis recorded “Jailhouse Rock”;  in 1957 hit man Vincent Gigante shot gangster Frank Costello in the lobby of an apartment building on Central Park West (a slip of paper with the figure $651,284 on it was found in Costello’s pocket, and the figure turned out to be the gross profit for the Las Vegas Tropicana Casino’s first 24 days of business);  in 1980 South Africa banned Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall (Part II)” with its chant of “We Don’t Need No Education”, which Bantu children had adopted as a protest against inadequate schooling for blacks

 

“God Dies”
by Frances Farmer 

No one ever came to me and said, “You’re a fool. There isn’t such a thing as God. Somebody’s been stuffing you.”  It wasn’t a murder.  I think God just died of old age.  And when I realized that he wasn’t any more, it didn’t shock me.  It seemed natural and right. 

Maybe it was because I was never properly impressed with a religion.  I went to Sunday school and liked the stories about Christ and the Christmas star.  They were beautiful. T hey made you warm and happy to think about.  But I didn’t believe them.  The Sunday School teacher talked too much in the way our grade school teacher used to when she told us about George Washington.  Pleasant, pretty stories, but not true. 

Religion was too vague.  God was different.  He was something real, something I could feel.  But there were only certain times when I could feel it.  I used to lie between cool, clean sheets at night after I’d had a bath, after I had washed my hair and scrubbed my knuckles and finger nails and teeth.  Then I could lie quite still in the dark with my face to the window with the trees in it, and talk to God.  “I am clean, now.  I’ve never been as clean. I’ll never be cleaner.”  And somehow, it was God.  I wasn’t sure that it was … just something cool and dark and clean. 

That wasn’t religion, though.  There was too much of the physical about it.  I couldn’t get that same feeling during the day, with my hands in dirty dish water and the hard sun showing up the dirtiness on the roof-tops.  And after a time, even at night, the feeling of God didn’t last.  I began to wonder what the minister meant when he said, “God, the father, sees even the smallest sparrow fall.  He watches over all his children.”  That jumbled it all up for me.  But I was sure of one thing.  If God were a father, with children, that cleanliness I had been feeling wasn’t God.  So at night, when I went to bed, I would think, “I am clean. I am sleepy.”  And then I went to sleep.  It didn’t keep me from enjoying the cleanness any less.  I just knew that God wasn’t there.  He was a man on a throne in Heaven, so he was easy to forget. 

Sometimes I found he was useful to remember; especially when I lost things that were important.  After slamming through the house, panicky and breathless from searching, I could stop in the middle of a room and shut my eyes.  “Please God, let me find my red hat with the blue trimmings.”  It usually worked.  God became a super-father that couldn’t spank me.  But if I wanted a thing badly enough, he arranged it. 

That satisfied me until I began to figure that if God loved all his children equally, why did he bother about my red hat and let other people lose their fathers and mothers for always?  I began to see that he didn’t have much to do about hats, people dying or anything.  They happened whether he wanted them to or not, and he stayed in heaven and pretended not to notice.  I wondered a little why God was such a useless thing.  It seemed a waste of time to have him.  After that he became less and less, until he was…nothingness.

I felt rather proud to think that I had found the truth myself, without help from any one.  It puzzled me that other people hadn’t found out, too.  God was gone.  We were younger.  We had reached past him.  Why couldn’t they see it?  It still puzzles me.

On this date in 1886 a strike in Chicago for an eight hour day was begun, a challenge to economic power that later became International Workers Day and gave May Day its name, and it took place in a period of economic brutality and robber barons, and on the same day Boston plumbers and carpenters issued a strike treat against the Master Building Association unless an eight hour day was allowed, brewers at a Philadelphia firm struck, a building trades strike was scheduled in the District of Columbia, a labor mass meeting was held in San Francisco, furniture makers and cigar makers unions in San Francisco imposed an eight hour day without bothering to ask employers, the Baltimore Sun agreed to an eight hour day for carpenters it employed, St. Louis carpentry employers agreed to an eight hour day, and business and journalism throughout the country tried to play workers off against each other, particularly against Chinese workers (two days after the first May Day, Chicago police fired into a crowd of strikers, killing four people and wounding many more);  in 1945 for actions beginning on May 1 and continuing through the month that resulted in his being hospitalized for six years, conscientious objector Desmond Doss received the Medal of Honor (see citation below);  in 1968 Michael Kenneth Hastings of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 42e line 18on the Vietnam wall).

Desmond Doss
Citation
Private First Class, U.S. Army, Medical Detachment, 307th Infantry, 77th Infantry Division. He was a company aid man when the lst Battalion assaulted a jagged escarpment 400 feet high. As our troops gained the summit, a heavy concentration of artillery, mortar and machinegun fire crashed into them, inflicting approximately 75 casualties and driving the others back. Pfc. Doss refused to seek cover and remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying them 1 by 1 to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands. On 2 May, he exposed himself to heavy rifle and mortar fire in rescuing a wounded man 200 yards forward of the lines on the same escarpment; and 2 days later he treated 4 men who had been cut down while assaulting a strongly defended cave, advancing through a shower of grenades to within 8 yards of enemy forces in a cave’s mouth, where he dressed his comrades’ wounds before making 4 separate trips under fire to evacuate them to safety. On 5 May, he unhesitatingly braved enemy shelling and small arms fire to assist an artillery officer. He applied bandages, moved his patient to a spot that offered protection from small arms fire and, while artillery and mortar shells fell close by, painstakingly administered plasma. Later that day, when an American was severely wounded by fire from a cave, Pfc. Doss crawled to him where he had fallen 25 feet from the enemy position, rendered aid, and carried him 100 yards to safety while continually exposed to enemy fire. On 21 May, in a night attack on high ground near Shuri, he remained in exposed territory while the rest of his company took cover, fearlessly risking the chance that he would be mistaken for an infiltrating Japanese and giving aid to the injured until he was himself seriously wounded in the legs by the explosion of a grenade. Rather than call another aid man from cover, he cared for his own injuries and waited 5 hours before litter bearers reached him and started carrying him to cover. The trio was caught in an enemy tank attack and Pfc. Doss, seeing a more critically wounded man nearby, crawled off the litter; and directed the bearers to give their first attention to the other man. Awaiting the litter bearers’ return, he was again struck, this time suffering a compound fracture of 1 arm. With magnificent fortitude he bound a rifle stock to his shattered arm as a splint and then crawled 300 yards over rough terrain to the aid station. Through his outstanding bravery and unflinching determination in the face of desperately dangerous conditions Pfc. Doss saved the lives of many soldiers. His name became a symbol throughout the 77th Infantry Division for outstanding gallantry far above and beyond the call of duty.

On this date in 1886 a strike in Chicago for an eight hour day was begun, a challenge to economic power that later became International Workers Day and gave May Day its name, and it took place in a period of economic brutality and robber barons, and on the same day Boston plumbers and carpenters issued a strike treat against the Master Building Association unless an eight hour day was allowed, brewers at a Philadelphia firm struck, a building trades strike was scheduled in the District of Columbia, a labor mass meeting was held in San Francisco, furniture makers and cigar makers unions in San Francisco imposed an eight hour day without bothering to ask employers, the Baltimore Sun agreed to an eight hour day for carpenters it employed, St. Louis carpentry employers agreed to an eight hour day, and business and journalism throughout the country tried to play workers off against each other, particularly against Chinese workers (two days after the first May Day, Chicago police fired into a crowd of strikers, killing four people and wounding many more);  in 1945 for actions beginning on May 1 and continuing through the month that resulted in his being hospitalized for six years, conscientious objector Desmond Doss received the Medal of Honor (see citation below);  in 1968 Michael Kenneth Hastings of Las Vegas, Nevada, died in Quang Tri province, Vietnam (panel 42e line 18on the Vietnam wall).

Desmond Doss
Citation
Private First Class, U.S. Army, Medical Detachment, 307th Infantry, 77th Infantry Division. He was a company aid man when the lst Battalion assaulted a jagged escarpment 400 feet high. As our troops gained the summit, a heavy concentration of artillery, mortar and machinegun fire crashed into them, inflicting approximately 75 casualties and driving the others back. Pfc. Doss refused to seek cover and remained in the fire-swept area with the many stricken, carrying them 1 by 1 to the edge of the escarpment and there lowering them on a rope-supported litter down the face of a cliff to friendly hands. On 2 May, he exposed himself to heavy rifle and mortar fire in rescuing a wounded man 200 yards forward of the lines on the same escarpment; and 2 days later he treated 4 men who had been cut down while assaulting a strongly defended cave, advancing through a shower of grenades to within 8 yards of enemy forces in a cave’s mouth, where he dressed his comrades’ wounds before making 4 separate trips under fire to evacuate them to safety. On 5 May, he unhesitatingly braved enemy shelling and small arms fire to assist an artillery officer. He applied bandages, moved his patient to a spot that offered protection from small arms fire and, while artillery and mortar shells fell close by, painstakingly administered plasma. Later that day, when an American was severely wounded by fire from a cave, Pfc. Doss crawled to him where he had fallen 25 feet from the enemy position, rendered aid, and carried him 100 yards to safety while continually exposed to enemy fire. On 21 May, in a night attack on high ground near Shuri, he remained in exposed territory while the rest of his company took cover, fearlessly risking the chance that he would be mistaken for an infiltrating Japanese and giving aid to the injured until he was himself seriously wounded in the legs by the explosion of a grenade. Rather than call another aid man from cover, he cared for his own injuries and waited 5 hours before litter bearers reached him and started carrying him to cover. The trio was caught in an enemy tank attack and Pfc. Doss, seeing a more critically wounded man nearby, crawled off the litter; and directed the bearers to give their first attention to the other man. Awaiting the litter bearers’ return, he was again struck, this time suffering a compound fracture of 1 arm. With magnificent fortitude he bound a rifle stock to his shattered arm as a splint and then crawled 300 yards over rough terrain to the aid station. Through his outstanding bravery and unflinching determination in the face of desperately dangerous conditions Pfc. Doss saved the lives of many soldiers. His name became a symbol throughout the 77th Infantry Division for outstanding gallantry far above and beyond the call of duty.