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that the statute under which the primary was conducted depended for its authority on a second statute that had been repealed before 1912, making the primary illegal);  in 1913 in a game against the St. Louis Browns, Washington Senators pitcher Walter Johnson threw his 54th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.