Harvey Weinstein, Savannah Greywind, Donald Trump, Pocahontas

On November 25, 1960, the women known as the Mariposas - Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa Mirabal - were stopped on a mountain road and assassinated  by leading officers in the Dominican secret police on orders from the dictator, Rafael Trujillo. The sisters had been unable to end Trujillo’s murderous regime in life, but their deaths were too much for the nation and only six months later Trujillo himself was ambushed and killed. Since 1999, that anniversary has been recognized by the United Nations as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.

This fall the #MeToo hashtag spread widely after charges emerged of serial sexual harassment and rape by Miramax Films executive Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein was fired. Other offenders were named, including comedian Louis C.K., Senator Al Franken, TV anchor Matt Lauer, philosopher Tariq Ramadan, writer Leon Wieseltier, journalist Charlie Rose, and many, many others including President Donald Trump who famously boasted of being able to get away with sexual assaults.

But those are all famous people. What about violence against women who are not well known? What about violence against women by men who are not well known? What about the hugely disproportionate levels of violence against Native American women?

This fall, North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp introduced S. 1942, also known as Savannah’s Act to provide protection for missing and murdered Native women. The bill is named for Savannah Greywind, a 22-year old Ojibwe woman who was kidnapped, murdered, and had her fetus stolen this summer by a white couple.

On some reservations the murder rate against women is TEN TIMES the national average. In North Dakota alone, there have been HUNDREDS of disappearances of Native women. The rapes, kidnappings and murders are fed by callous disregard for Native women and by racist sexual fantasies. It is protected by jurisdictional problems preventing Native police departments and courts from arresting and convicting white people for crimes on the reservation or against Native people. And it is multiplied by the presence of man camps serving extractive industries.

In the North Dakota petrostate, tens of thousands of out-of-state men live away from their families in barracks, working in the pipeline and fracking industries. These unconnected men are paid well enough to support flourishing organized crime in narcotics, gambling and prostitution. Prostitution means sex trafficking. Some kidnapped Native women are held by criminals who charge other men to rape them. Other Native women are kidnapped and murdered by men from the camps.

Senator Heitkamp makes none of these connections. She is a prominent supporter of extractive industries, especially oil. She served as a board member for the Dakota Gasification Company, which transforms lignite coal into synthetic natural gas. She supports the Keystone XL pipeline. She describes opposition to fracking as “junk science.” And she was one of only two Democratic senators to support Scott Pruitt, long-time enemy of the EPA, as Administrator for the EPA!

Senator Heitkamp’s connections to the energy industry mean that it doesn’t matter how serious she may be about her commitment “to combat crime, violence & human trafficking in Indian Country” and to the #NotInvisible hashtag. She can denounce violence against women, but cannot even see the man camps that incubate that violence. Nor can she see the underlying, toxic ideology that links extractive industry with rape culture: violence against Mother Earth and violence against women and girls are all features of toxic misogyny.

All this brings us back to President Donald Trump, the Racist/Rapist-in-Chief. This week he chose to wrap up Native Heritage Month by “honoring” Native code talkers in front of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, notorious for his murders of Creeks, Seminoles, Cherokees, Choctaws and Chickasaws! Then he chose the occasion again mock Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas.” The historical Pocahontas was a teen victim of kidnap and rape by British colonists in Virginia. The imagined Pocahontas of US mythology was a beautiful young “princess”, the original model for the sex fantasy that continues today, FOUR HUNDRED YEARS after her abduction.

#EndViolenceAgainstWomenAndGirls has to be more than a  severely-underfunded day on the calendar of the United Nations. It has to be every day. #MeToo has to be more than a campaign exposing celebrity predators in the news and entertainment industries. It has to protect all women in their homes and in their workplaces and on the streets. #NotInvisible has to be more than a way to call attention to the disproportionate levels of violence against Native women. It has to identify the sources of that violence in rape culture, in racism, and in extractive industry. We owe these things to our mothers.  We owe these things to all women.

זיכרונו לברכה

Four weeks ago my mom phoned from her nursing home to tell me that my dad was refusing to eat. I think she wanted me to call him and tell him that he must have his lunch, but -- given his compromised hearing -- I couldn't see any chance of that happening at all, and there had to be a reason for his refusal anyway.  Prophet and I got in the car and drove to New Jersey to see what was going on.

When we got to his room, we found my dad asleep in his chair. He was in the most uncomfortable position imaginable, but I didn't want to awaken him just because I happened to walk in, so I sat down to see what would happen. Prophet had no such qualms. He immediately leaped into my dad's lap and began kissing him, licking his face enthusiastically. You might think that a 90+ pound dog would not be welcome in the lap of a frail 91-year old man. But if you thought that, you didn't know my dad. He woke up with a smile and then began laughing in enjoyment. After Prophet climbed back down, we had a nice visit. My mom came in a minute later and was happy to see his good mood. My dad tried to eat some soup (without much success) and then he went to the gym with the physical therapist.

The next day the home informed my sister that it was time for my dad to move from assisted living to the nursing care floor. We began arranging for him to be my mom's roommate. Before that could happen, though, they determined that he needed an emergency room visit. He was transported by ambulance to the hospital and admitted as an in-patient. He was kind of happy about that. He felt that the doctors could figure out what was wrong with him and make him better. He was joking with the nurses and asking questions about the wiring of his hospital room. That's right. He engineered that entire wing of the hospital.

By Saturday he wasn't speaking. His eyes would open halfway, he would pick up his head as if to say something, then close his eyes and put his head back down.  I held his hand and told him that we had everything under control. I told him he had done everything right, that we were all okay, and that we would take care of my mom. It didn't seem to reassure him. He remained agitated, as if he had something important to say, but that he could get it out.

Sunday he was no longer opening his eyes. It looked to me now as though he was just trying to get a breath of air. It looked as though he was drowning. It occurred to me that this was what was happening the day before, too. My daughter sat with him for hours, telling him what was going on with her and with her family. The hospital staff acknowledged that their treatment was not making him better, only more uncomfortable. They asked if we wanted to switch to "compassionate" care, meaning they would try to ease his discomfort. We agreed.

He left us the next morning. I had asked the rabbi of their synagogue to visit my mom. The rabbi got the word of the changed purpose of his visit just before going into my mom's room. She really appreciated his presence and his words. She was not happy that my dad left before her.

I remember that day as a flurry of minutiae. Phoning the funeral home to figure out if he had prearranged. (He had not.) Phoning multiple cemeteries to figure out the reference to burial plots in his will. Arranging communication between the hospital, undertaker, cemetery and rabbi. In between, though, I had time to look through the autobiographical writing my dad had been busy with the last
few years and sorting through old photos.  I put up a post or two on Facebook to let people know.

Meeting with the rabbi was a kind of catharsis. My brother, my sister, my wife, and I all got to share some reminiscences. This rabbi arrived at my parents' synagogue around the time they were no longer strong enough to go to Shabbat service every week, so he didn't really know them (or us) He had heard my mom's reputation as a pillar of the shul, leading the bikkur holim committee and the interracial justice committee,  as well as running the Meals on Wheels program for the entire town. (Which she continued doing until she was older than most of the elderly recipients.) My dad, though, was a stranger to him. We explained that dad - who was never bar mitzvahed - had served for years on the synagogue's ritual committee, probably so that he could be an usher and not have to sit down!
We told him about dad doing the electrical engineering for Newark Airport, the lower level of the George Washington Bridge, the third tube of the Lincoln Tunnel, and the B&O lift bridge over the Arthur Kill. And we told him that dad designed the wiring for the room he died in at St. Barnabas Hospital.

The funeral home was less happy. Most of that visit had to do with reviewing the contract and paying. Somebody had to check my father's body (to see if it was really him?) so my wife and I did that. When I was a boy my dad was six-feet and imposing. Over the last twenty years, he has grown shorter and weaker. In his coffin, he looked smaller than ever. But he didn't show as much pain in his face as he had the last two times I saw him.

Riding in a limousine is not something my family does. We never did it for the funerals of any of my grandparents. My siblings and I never went to a prom. But it occurred to me that transporting my mom from her nursing home to a cemetery in one of our cars was probably a bad idea. So we all drove to the nursing home and then rode down to the cemetery for the graveside service in a limousine with my mom.

The ground was wet. We stayed a distance away while the workers pumped water out of the grave.
During the funeral, the workers kept a carpet suspended over the grave's floor so we wouldn't see it filling back up with water. When my dad was in his seventies, he frequently served in an honor guard for funerals of veterans. Apparently the armed forces were stretched so thin that they couldn't provide active-duty servicemen for the wave of departing World War 2 vets. The US Navy provided an honor guard for dad, though. They read a proclamation, played taps, took the flag from the coffin, and presented it to my mom.

The rabbi's eulogy was thoughtful, reassuring, and showed that he really listened. He told stories about my dad's care for my mom, love of us, professional reputation, and skeptical mind. And he framed these within a story about the questions each of us will be asked when we appear before the Throne. And, of course, he sang El Malei Rahamim.

The crazy part of that day was that we ran back to the Bronx after dropping off my mom and then back out to New Jersey again. Prophet was in his crate all day because a crew of tradespeople were doing work in our house, so we wanted to let him out and feed him before returning to have dinner with friends who couldn't make it to the funeral, and then going to the nightly minyan at my parents' synagogue. Under different circumstances, people come to the home of the mourners to visit, and pray minchah and maariv.  I was certain that my mom would be too tired for all that. But I also knew she would feel better if we - her children - said Kaddish. So my brother, my sister, my brother's wife, Kaddish-sayers. Several of them knew my parents, so that was nice. The service itself? Not so much. Loud-mouthed mavens insisted on racing ahead of the person who they themselves had asked to lead.
my sister's boyfriend, my wife, and I all went to pray with the regular

The next day we had invited people to my mom's room at the nursing home to pay their respects and the rabbi came and led minchah. That was a much better experience. And I wrote the rabbi thanking him for everything:

I may not be able to express my gratitude as clearly as I would like, but I think it’s better if I try while everything is still fresh in my mind:  

You listened to us so carefully and heard us so clearly. You summarized the most important points and folded them by means of stories into the framework of another story about the questions we will be asked before the throne. You understood and conveyed - subtly - the differences between my mother’s commitment to belief and to observance and my father’s. You included everybody. You drew in a secondary motif about the prophetic voice, my father’s name, and the name of our dog.

All this is qualitatively different than my experience with graveside rabbinical talk in my youth. But it is also orders of magnitude deeper and richer than my experience of graveside rabbinical talk today.

I also want to thank you for the suggestion that we attend the regular minyan last night at Temple Beth Shalom. Jon, Hilde, Zaydah, Doug, Judith and I all went.  I think it was reassuring to my mom.

Each time I have made a request of you, you responded immediately. I appreciate that more than I can say.

 We skipped Friday and Saturday in observance of the Sabbath. Sunday the room stayed full with family and with friends of my mother, brother and sister. I led the minchah, which I think went okay. My mom was happy, anyway. She said she was glad I still remembered how to do it.

Several of my friends expressed some disappointment that we hadn't invited them to the funeral or the wake. Explaining how we did things seemed beside the point, so we invited people to our home
the following Thursday. A good number of people showed up, too, including people who traveled from Brooklyn, Manhattan and parts of the Bronx that are inconvenient by bus and train.

I keep looking at old photos that remind me of my dad when he was younger and stronger and a giant to me. I keep reading his self-deprecating stories. I keep discovering myself in tears without any apparent external trigger. I guess this will last a good long time.

לשנה תובה

This morning I am thinking about fire and flood, earthquake and hurricane, war and genocide, impunity and extrajudicial murder.

The new moon rose here in New York at 6:56 this morning. The fall equinox is Friday afternoon at 4:02. Today is the 29th of Elul on the Hebrew calendar, so tonight is Rosh HaShanah: new year 5778.
I take a moment to wish my friends and relations a happy and healthy year, but I am stuck on the horrors facing the people of Burma, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Ukraine, St. Louis, California, Texas, Florida, the Virgin Islands, and so many other places.

On Rosh HaShanah, we recite the liturgical poem Unetanneh Tokef, which says that everyone of us passes before God on this day.  That, like sheep before the shepherd, we are counted and evaluated and our destinies are determined. The poem says our fates are written in a book:

Who will live and who will die? 

Who will live a long life and who will die before their time?

Who will perish by fire and who by water?

Who by sword and who by beast?

Who by famine and who by thirst?

Who by earthquake and who by epidemic?

Who by strangling and who by stoning?

Who will rest and who will wander?

Who will live in harmony and who will be harassed?

Who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer?

The prayer concludes: "But Repentance, Prayer, and Charity Avert the Severe Decree!"

I think not. I think we can resist official impunity and police murder. I think we can resist the selfishness that denies global warming. I think we can resist xenophobia and homophobia and white supremacy and misogyny. I think we can even resist earthquakes by fighting against fracking.

The world is much bigger than we. Hurricanes will continue. So will tectonic movement. But we can look out for each other instead of ignoring each other's suffering.

L'Shanah Tovah.

The Farmer and the Cowman Should Be Friends!

Act II of the Rogers and Hammerstein 1943 classic Oklahoma! opens with the song "The Farmer and the Cowman."  The song highlights the adversarial relations which, in the imaginative Oklahoma of the play, constitute the full spectrum of human difference.  In the universe of this musical, everyone -- with the sole exception of the Syrian pedlar Ali Hakim -- is white.  I wrote in a previous post about the many seemingly exclusive Oklahomas we encounter in art.  John Steinbeck, Ralph Ellison, Woody Guthrie, S.E. Hinton, Lynn Riggs, Fus Fixico, Will Rogers... encountering their works one after another would lead the audience to think Oklahoma is not one place at all.

I remembered the song only last week.  It reminded me again that this monster success (over 2000 Broadway performances) isn't just a story.  It purports to be the story.  Consider these lyrics:

Territory folks should stick together,

Territory folks should all be pals.

Cowboys dance with farmer's daughters,

Farmers dance with the ranchers' gals.

One would be forgiven for thinking these white people were the people of the "territory."

Oklahoma was admitted to statehood in 1907. The play takes place just before that. The first thing to note is that the town of Claremore, where the action takes place, was not in the Oklahoma Territory.  Claremore was in the Indian Territory, which was merged with the Oklahoma Territory to form the state of Oklahoma.  Claremore is the seat of Rogers County, which straddled the line between the Cherokee and Creek Nations. So where are all the Native people in Oklahoma!?

Congress called for a special census for the new state, so we actually have population figures for Claremore, Oklahoma in 1907.  There were 2064 residents, of whom 16% were Native American and 10% were African American.  Where were all the Black people in Oklahoma!?

This is what academics like to call "erasure." It doesn't just take place in imaginative works, either.  Between 1890 and 1907, in the Creek Nation alone, the white population went from 40,674 to 144,457! Overwhelming the Creek people with white emigrants, legislatively privatizing Creek land through individual allotments so that the surplus could be sold, and then stealing the allotments themselves all constitute erasure in fact. By all means, check out Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann or And Still the Waters Run by Angie Debo.

The farmer and the cowman? How about the banker, the real estate dealer and the murderer? They were friends.

Speaker Ryan, do your job!

Sixteen years ago, in the weeks before 9/11, the Dream Act was introduced to give immigrant youth who had grown up in the US the opportunities to pursue higher education and military service without fear of deportation.  From its conception the Dream Act was a bipartisan bill with both Democratic and Republican support.

Why hasn’t Congress passed it? Why isn’t it a law yet? Why are we relying on Donald Trump to renew an executive order by Barack Obama to create the DACA policy in the absence of any activity by Congress on this subject?

Our youth have been held hostage by politics. Nativist senators filibustered, frightened by the possibility that opponents to their right would mount primary challenges, accusing them of giving “amnesty” to “illegals.”* Also, President Obama’s existence on this earth led Republican leadership to follow a policy of opposing everything he favored, often hesitating to express opinions on new issues until he had taken a stand they could disagree with!

Now President Trump is on the verge of setting a six-month deadline for dismantling DACA. This would throw the question of immigrant youth back into Congress where it has always belonged. Speaker Ryan is begging him not to do it.  It would force Speaker Ryan to actually do his job and entertain bipartisan debate on a critical issue of public policy.

I believe the votes exist to pass the Dream Act.  I believe our immigrant youth deserve the opportunity to live their lives in public — outside the shadows — and to contribute to the wellbeing of all of us. I believe our youth shouldn’t have to worry that their careers are dependent on the next shift in the political winds. I believe Congress should do its job and legislate.

Speaker Ryan! Senator McConnell! You wanted the title of leader? Do your jobs and lead.  Stop equivocating about what the president should or should not do. Pass the Dream Act. 

*(The coinage “illegal” as a noun to describe a person has been a particularly effective way to demonize and criminalize immigrants, including those with green cards. But I don’t get how “amnesty,” which was one of the cornerstones of Ronald Reagan’s immigration reform, became such a scary word. Don’t public libraries offer amnesties?)

Twizzlers, Not Red Meat

People sometimes say that Donald Trump’s bluster and bombast is “red meat” for his base. I respectfully disagree. I think a better description would be Twizzlers. 

A quarter pound of Twizzlers (10 sticks, splitting your package four ways) gives you 400 calories, 53 grams of sugar, 230 mg of salt, and only 3 grams of protein. It gives you no vitamins or minerals. By contrast, a quarter-pound beef patty provides 231 calories, no sugar, 84 mg of salt, and 17 grams of protein. It also contains significant amounts of B vitamins and magnesium. So Twizzlers are chewy and addictive. Red meat is food.

Our loud-mouthed forty-fifth president’s loud pronouncements may make his fans feel good, like Twizzlers, but they are equally empty and bad for you. Yesterday he responded to the scary revelation that North Korea can now build nuclear devices small enough to fit on their long-range missiles. He said: “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”

Fire and fury. Like the world has never seen. What does this actually mean? Is he planning to drop multiple nuclear warheads on the Korean Peninsula, murdering our allies along with Kim Jong Un’s people? Is he hoping to taunt Kim into launching a preemptive strike on us? This is either empty bluster or thoughtless provocation or both. Either he is threatening something he won’t do or he is planning the unthinkable.

Empty substitute for a real policy. Twizzlers, not red meat.

More on the Green Corn Rebellion

One hundred years ago today, August 2, 1917, hundreds of men in central Oklahoma -- white, Black and Native American; mostly young, mostly tenant farmers -- took up arms to resist the World War 1 draft.  They chose the old slogan "Rich man's war; poor man's fight."  They gathered on the Sasakwa farm of John Spears, prepared to march on Washington.  Before the next day was over most of them had surrendered to sheriff's posses.  Nigel Sellars, the historian who has done most work on the Green Corn Rebellion, thinks they were willing to fight President Woodrow Wilson, who they called "Big Slick", but unwilling to fight their own neighbors, people whom they knew personally.  Dozens were arrested and many of the leaders served time in Leavenworth Penitentiary for espionage and conspiracy.

Lonnie Spears, son of "Old Man" John Spears, at Leavenworth.

The area along the South Canadian River was a center of radicalism for years before.  Seminole County gave 35% of its votes to the Socialist Party in 1914.  So did Pontotoc County.  Hughes County voted 31% Socialist.  Even in 1916, when Wilson made the issue keeping the US out of the war, 28% of Seminole County voted Socialist.  It was also a region of landless farmers.  Four of five farmers in the three counties were tenants.  And the World War had not made their lives easier.  Cotton prices actually dropped in 1914.

Those high tenancy rates reflect some particularities of eastern Oklahoma, which had been Indian Territory until eleven years earlier.   Consider, for example, the case of Cuffie Harjo, a Seminole Indian participant who pled guilty in the big conspiracy case, US v. Neeley Adams, et. al.   He was sent to Muskogee to serve his sentence, but ended up in the 29th Company, 165th Depot Brigade, of the US Army and being gassed in the fighting in Europe.  Harjo, with his brother-in-law, Josie Marpiyecher, signed a complaint to the Bureau of Indian Affairs earlier that year about "guardians" being assigned to Seminole minors.  These "guardians" were selling off the land of the minors they were allegedly looking out for, ostensibly to cover the costs of their "guardianship."  This was just one way white Oklahoma bankers and attorneys were stealing Native lands in Oklahoma.  (See the recent, frightening book Killers of the Flower Moon: the Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann.  Also, Angie Debo's 1936 And Still the Waters Run.

Seminole Allotment Plat, T6N R6E

The Seminole Nation's land -- like Native land all over the US -- was taken out of tribal ownership and individually distributed to members of the tribe listed in the Dawes Rolls, named after Massachusetts Senator Henry Dawes who wrote the legislation that created this attempted dissolution of Indian identity.  Accessing them and searching them requires no travel to archives and no special research skills.  We can find Cuffie Harjo (although spelled "Cuffee") and we can find his brother-in-law Josie.  We can find the land he was allotted, Township 6 North, Range 6 East, in sections 3 and 10.  Why then, do why find him a landless farmer in the census?  Why do we find the same for his brother-in-law, Josie Marpiyecher?  Why do we find the same for their co-defendant, Caesar Dindy, a Black Choctaw?  Because the land was stolen.

Price Street in Leavenworth

Or consider another co-defendant, Price Street.  Street, like many African Americans, escaped to Indian Territory from the former Confederacy -- in his case Alabama -- seeking relief from the growing white supremacist hegemony of disfranchisement, Jim Crow, and lynch law.  He married a Black Seminole, Missie Davis. Look again at that plat above for her allotment, just east of Cuffie Harjo's in section 10.  So, if his wife was a landowner, why was Price Street a tenant farmer? Do you really have to ask anymore? Price Street was sent to Leavenworth Penitentiary for his part in the rebellion. As a side note, I was sorry to discover that his grandson, Marine PFC Lenard Street, Jr. died in 1968 at Quang Tri.  He was 19 years old and had been in Viet Nam under four months.

Most of the participants in the Green Corn Rebellion were white.  They hadn't stolen the land of their Native and African American neighbors.  That was done by bankers and lawyers.  But they were not great advocates of equality, either.  There are suggestions in the historical record that white rebels refused to listen to Price Street, because he was a Black man.  And that part of Oklahoma became a center of Ku Klux Klan power in the years immediately after the war.  But for a minute in 1917, landless farmers of all races united to oppose militarism and capitalism.  It is worth remembering.

Green Corn Rebellion

I had heard of the Green Corn Rebellion of 1917 before.  It was mentioned in passing in histories of the US labor movement, histories of the radical movement, and histories of Oklahoma.  Right here, in my first paragraph is a logical place for another brief summary or characterization, like those I read in the works above.  But my inability to decide how to summarize or characterize is precisely my point today.

The lists of those arrested for participating includes whites, Natives and African Americans.  What were they fighting about?  Contemporary accounts cite the draft, but also talk about the entire capitalist order.  How did they unify in a state that would soon be a center for the Ku Klux Klan and the site of the Tulsa massacre?  The newspapers of the time mock them as cowardly and comical in the same paragraphs in which they demand harsh punishment.  Who, really, were these people?

During the first World War, our governments filled federal and state prisons with all sorts of dissenters.  They were convicted under a new "Espionage" Act as "enemy agents" for opposing the war or the draft, although some were actually targeted for other reasons entirely, such as advocating unions.  So many of these nonconformists were incarcerated in Leavenworth Penitentiary in particular in those years that some historians have called it a "university of radicalism."  Leavenworth housed Mennonite conscientious objectors, Socialists, IWW's, and AFLers.  There were Mexican revolutionaries like Ricardo Flores Magón.  Members of the US 24th Infantry who fought racist Houston cops were locked up here if they escaped execution.  And there were leaders of Oklahoma's Green Corn Rebellion, too.

These incarcerations in Leavenworth turn out to be a rich resource for readers because the prison authorities kept good records including photos.  And given the paucity of good information about who those "green corn" rebels were, and what they were fighting about, that is a help.  Archivists at the National Archives in Kansas City sent me scans from the jackets of Price Street and Ira Hardy, two of the incarcerated rebels.  They give me the men's infirmary and disciplinary records, their height and weight.

I learn that Price Street spent months working in the prison's brickyard and quarry.  He was disciplined by guards for failing to deliver burlap sacks as ordered and for lying about it.  They

subsequently discovered that he had mistakenly brought them to the wrong cellblock, B instead of D, which is unsurprising when one remembers that he had no schooling whatsoever.  There is also a great deal of correspondence in his jacket between the prison and his draft board.  Apparently the local board of Seminole County wanted to prosecute him for failing to report.  The warden of Leavenworth had to inform them that Mr. Street would not be allowed to report for the draft while incarcerated in his institution.  One letter wasn't enough.

Ira Hardy spent most of his prison time working in the power house, I suspect shoveling coal.  He caught the flu in the big epidemic, but survived.  He was disciplined once for refusing to take several wheelbarrow loads of cinders out of the powerhouse.  He took them out after being written up.

So what do I actually learn from any of this?  After looking through it a few times I noticed the list of correspondents to each man.  And that reminded me about the tools of genealogists: census records, draft records, marriage records, death records.  Because these people who wrote to Mr. Hardy and Mr. Street while they were at Leavenworth might help me put together a picture of their lives.

Think about it.  Google "Price Street" and you will find the addresses of homes for sale all over the country.  Get it? Price St.  Google "Ira Hardy" and you will find social media accounts and doctor's offices.  Even familysearch.org is less helpful than you might think.  Between the challenged spelling skills of the enumerators and the quick readings of the LDS transcribers, Price Street turns into Prise Street and Price Strut in the indices.  I only found those when I searched using his wife's name, Missie Street, and I only found that in his prison records.  And Ira Hardy is invisible in the census until you use the first name "Arie" which I found, again, in the prison records.

Following Missie Street allowed me to see why Price, an African American man, was receiving correspondence from Randolph Cudjo, an enrolled Seminole Indian of African descent.  It also showed me why twenty years later Randolph Cudjo was listed on Price Street's World War 2 draft registration as the person always knowing his address.  I realized that Missie Street, née Davis, was also on the Dawes Rolls as a Seminole Indian "freed" person.  Her allotment was adjacent to Randolph's.  I did not learn how she was robbed of her allotment, but her husband Price's status as a tenant farmer -- at the time of both world wars -- tells me that she did indeed lose her land.

There is more.  I found out that one of the Seminoles jailed for the rebellion, "Coffee" Harjo, (a full"blood", not a "freedman) subsequently served in the US Army and was gassed by the Germans.
(And finding him listed as "Guffe", "Cuffy", "Coffey", and "Cuffie" was truly an adventure.)  I found out that he was the brother-in-law of another "blood" Seminole charged for the rebellion, Josie Marpiyecher.  And I found both their signatures on a petition to the Bureau of Indian Affairs asking that underage Seminoles not all be assigned white guardians to "protect" their fiduciary interests, (i.e., steal their land.)  Like the Black Seminoles above, and like the African Americans above, Harjo and Marpiyecher were landless farm laborers, their Dawes allotments notwithstanding.

So I think that most of the participants in the Green Corn Rebellion were tenant farmers.  I think they had different histories of tenancy and different histories of resistance.  For the Natives there was the resistance to allotment of their fathers, associated with the Chitto Harjo Creeks at Hickory Ground.  For the whites there was the Socialist Party, which received 35% of the vote in Seminole County in 1914.  For African Americans there was the move to Oklahoma itself, an attempt to escape the growing white supremacy of the governments of the deep South.  The families of Price Street and Ira Hardy were from Alabama and Texas.

What they all had in common was landlessness (tenancy rates in Seminole County were 83%!) and a reluctance to leave their families to fight in a foreign war.  It was not an antiracist movement.  The whites refused to take any Black leadership, and people seem to have joined as communities rather than as individuals.

I find no evidence that Price Street or Ira Hardy studied in the "university of radicalism" at Leavenworth.  Perhaps that, too, was segregated.  I am awaiting the paperwork from the Green Corn trials and the prison record of Black IWW Ben Fletcher.  Perhaps there will be trails to follow.  Perhaps not.  But I am still reluctant to describe the Green Corn Rebellion in a sentence.

OKLAHOMA!

Last Thursday we went to hear Krista Tippett speak at St. Vladimir's Seminary in Yonkers.  She was her usual eclectic self, drawing thoughts from science and from the arts, from Thich Nhat Han and from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and from Martin Luther King.  She is extremely cosmopolitan while speaking about the very personal: listening, being curious, wondering.  One thing she mentioned only in passing, though, really got my attention.  She said that she is from Oklahoma, and it seemed to me that in this context, "Oklahoma" was shorthand for one thing, parochialism.  And I'm not sure.

I have been thinking about the many Oklahomas that exist in the exact same geographic coordinates, so separated, in fact, that people who are right next to one another actually live in different universes from. The Oklahoma of the imagination only magnifies this.  Consider Merle Haggard's 1969 song, "Okie from Muskogee."  He was turned off by protests against the Viet Nam war and wrote and released what was received as a kind of patriotic redneck anthem.  Weirdly, though, Muskogee is not an especially white place.  It was the capital of the Creek Indian Nation and is still the home of a sizable Native American minority.  Haggard himself grew up in California, although his parents were from Checotah, the part of Oklahoma that used to be the Creek Nation.  Is eastern Oklahoma white, or native?

Oklahoma's most famous native son is easily still the early 20th century humorist, Will Rogers.  Rogers was famously 9/32 Cherokee Indian.  He grew up in Oologah, Indian Territory and his father was a prominent figure in the tribe.  But Clement Rogers was one of those Cherokees who fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War.  He was a delegate to the Oklahoma constitutional convention, which immediately segregated the state.  One variant of the Oklahoma license plate says "Native America."  Are Native Americans like Will Rogers actually people of color?

The first Broadway musical written by the team of Rodgers and Hammerstein was "Oklahoma!"  It takes place in Claremore, in the old Cherokee Nation.  Everybody is white, with the possible

exception of the character called Ali Hakim.  Even the horror of the plot is whitewashed.  Jud Fry attacks the protagonist, Curly McClain with a knife, but then it's Jud who dies...  and he was a moody guy, anyway... and Curly doesn't really kill him, he falls on his own knife...  and the cowboys' impromptu grand jury acquits Curly...  and Curly and Laurey ride happily away in a surrey with a fringe on top.  In the original of the play, Lynn Rigg's "Green Grow the Lilacs," the Jud character is named Jeeter Fry.  The reason why all the white characters are so outraged at Jeeter's romantic interest in Laurey is that he is part Native American.  Curley kills him for it, no ambiguity about it, and the kangaroo court exonerates him anyway.  The climactic scene, then, is the lynching of the lone Native character!  How idyllic.

Another famous Oklahoma of the imagination is John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.  It was the bestselling book of 1939 and won the Pulitzer Prize for best novel.  The film version, starring Henry Fonda, was an even bigger hit and won John Ford the Oscar for best director in 1940.  There are no Natives and no African Americans in The Grapes of Wrath. The conflicts are all matters of social class: the Joads and their fellow Dust Bowl migrants on the one hand; and the bankers, planters and sheriff's posses on the other.  It is worth noting here that the Joad's home in Sallisaw was actually outside the Dust Bowl.  But the Depression hit eastern Oklahoma sharecroppers very hard, financially and emotionally.  White sharecroppers in the old Indian Territory were especially angry at not being landowners, because many of them had Native American landlords, at least earlier in the 20th century.  Sallisaw is roughly one-quarter Native even today, almost 90 years after the events of the story.  It is hard to imagine that the Joads didn't know any Native people.  There are no people of color in the Oklahoma of this movie, or even in California.  The Joads do encounter Indians while driving through New Mexico. But it is hard to believe that real life migrants from Sallisaw, in the Cherokee Nation, don't meet any Indians until they leave home.

I mention the phrase "Dust Bowl" so I am duty bound to segue into Woody Guthrie, the Dust Bowl

Balladeer.  He is most famous for the song "This Land is Your Land."  Like Merle Haggard a generation later, Woody got into country music radio in California, but unlike Merle, Woody was born and grew up in Oklahoma.  Woody was from Okemah, in the old Creek Nation.  His father Charles was most probably a Klansman and a member of the lynch mob that killed Laura and Lawrence Nelson in that town.  Woody himself did nothing to hide that, and wrote multiple songs condemning racism (including that of his Brooklyn landlord, Fred Trump) but there is something about the imagined Woody that papers this over.  Instead he is remembered as a troubadour of the working class, a working class as narrowly imagined as that of Tom Joad.

The last white Oklahoma I want to cite is that of Susan Hinton's 1967 young adult novel The Outsiders.  She wrote this when she was 15 and 16 years old and the world of the story is the world of teens in 1960's Tulsa.  The book is still widely read and received further notice from Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 movie version.  Which young 80's star wasn't in it?  The cast included Rob Lowe, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macho, Patrick Swayze, Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, and (the well-known at that time) teen idol Leif Garrett.  Like several of the places named above, Tulsa was a part of the Creek Nation.  Even today its population is 20% African American and 5% Native American.  The Tulsa of The Outsiders, though, seems to be all white, and the social conflict is between the children of the country club set, called "socs," and the poorer teens known as "greasers."  This should be no surprise.  Susan Hinton wrote the book when she was a fifteen-year old junior at Will Rogers (who else?) High School.  And Rogers HS wasn't integrated until 1973, almost twenty years after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education!  So in the 1965 of The Outsiders, all the African American teens in Tulsa would have attended Booker T. Washington (who else?) high school... another universe.

How about the universe, imagined and otherwise, of other Oklahomans?  Well, Ralph Ellison was from Oklahoma City and they are proud to claim him as an Oklahoman now.  In his posthumous work, Juneteenth, Ellison did address the simultaneously segregated and integrated worlds of Black,

white, and Native Oklahoma.  At one point the Reverend Daddy Hickman reminds his adopted white son, Bliss, how many white souls he saved with the hymn "Let Us Break Bread Together on Our Knees."  But Bliss has become the white-supremacist US Senator Adam Sunraider.  Hickman remembers moments of unity:

That scar on my skull to this day from going to the polls with ax handles and pistols, some whites and Indians with us, and battling for the right. Long back, now Oklahoma’s just a song, but they don’t sing about that.

He directly addresses the white-washed Oklahoma of the Broadway show. So Ellison knows "Oklahoma!" but does "Oklahoma!" know Ellison?   Ellison's Invisible Man won the National Book Award for 1953 and it is on most lists of the best English-language novels of the 20th century.  But how many people have actually read it? When it was published, the New York Times critic greeted Invisible Man with the oddly-ambiguous "praise" that it was "the most impressive work of fiction by an American Negro which I have ever read."  Wow.

Twenty years ago, Toni Morrison wrote Paradise.  That seems like a really strange title for a novel that takes place in an all-Black Oklahoma town, but which opens with the line, "They kill the white girl first."  I don't know what tiny proportion of Americans even knows about the existence of all-Black towns.  Many of them were in Oklahoma, both because of the large number of Black folks who were members of the Creek, Seminole, Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee tribes; and because of the large numbers of Black folks who moved to Indian Territory after the post-Civil War rise of the Klan in the old Confederate states.   Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer in 1988 for Beloved.  She won the Nobel in 1993.  But despite her brilliance (and the lasting brilliance of her work) she is probably more famous for Oprah asking her viewers to read the books than she is for the books themselves.  

Oprah made a beautiful, critically-acclaimed film out of Beloved, but it bombed at the box office, taking in a grand total of $22 million on a budget of $88 million.  The movie "Beloved" was beaten on its opening weekend by "Bride of Chucky."  Then theaters decided to stop showing it to make room for Adam Sandler's "Waterboy."  I have no words.  But there is no better way to explain why (white) people don't get Paradise.  Even its inclusion in the Oprah Winfrey Book Club didn't stop readers, including literary critics, from being confused.  The social conflicts in Paradise are between men and women and between the richer (and lighter-skinned) people of Haven and those of the novel's setting, the town of Ruby.  What were white people to make of this?  

The only film I can compare it to is John Singleton's (also 1997) "Rosewood."  The all-black town in this story is in Florida instead of Oklahoma, but still.  Starring Jon Voight and Ving Rhames, Don Cheadle and Bruce McGill, it had enough white characters for success, even if Bruce McGill did play a white supremacist murderer.  And it was about white folks attacking Black folks, which is -- at least -- a familiar story line.   There is plenty of fighting back, but the Black folks are defeated and their town is destroyed.  This is a narrative that people understand better than an all-Black town still extant after the Viet Nam war, as in Paradise.

I also want to mention John Hope Franklin, born in the all-Black town of Rentiesville, Oklahoma and raised in Tulsa.  He graduated from (of course) Booker T. Washington High School, and received his PhD in history from Harvard in 1941.  Both his parents were Black Choctaws.  His best-known work is From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans.  If you don't know it, you should.  Dr. Franklin is important to understanding Oklahoma, too.  Not only was he from a Black Native family, but he lived with the "state Negroes," those who moved to Indian Territory from the states.  He moved to Tulsa just before the 1921 pogroms in which the African American neighborhoods were burned -- both from the ground and in aerial incendiary attacks! -- and armed white mobs moved into the streets shooting and lynching the

occupants.  Franklin's dad, BC (Buck) Franklin was an attorney, and he saw his father mount the legal cases that allowed some Black Tulsans get their property deeds when it seemed that the Klan wanted to permanently purge them from the city after burning them out.  I believe that Professor Franklin is largely responsible for preserving the memory of the "Black Wall Street" in Tulsa and of the the attacks that left it a smoking ruin.

What of Native Oklahoma?  Nowadays few people still read the Creek Indian poet Alexander Posey unless they are taking a course in Native literature.  He was the editor of the daily newspaper Eufaula Indian Journal.  He was secretary to the constitutional convention for the proposed Indian state of Sequoyah, a proposal which Congress ignored when it merged Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory into the new state of Oklahoma in 1907.  Posey may have been best known for his Fus Fixico letters.  They were dialect humor, published as letters to the editor in the voice of a Creek full-blood.  Much of this humor was so topical that -- unless you study the politics of the Creek Nation in the first decade of the last century: Crazy Snakes, Legus Perryman, Chief Porter -- it is impenetrable.  Some of it, though, alludes to issues that people today will understand.  In April 1903 "Fus" wrote:

Well, so Big Man at Washington was made another rule like that one about making the Injin cut his hair off short like a prize fighter or saloon keeper. Big Man he was say this time the Injin was had to change his name just like if the marshal was had a writ for him. So, if the Injin’s name is Wolf Warrior, he was had to call himself John Smith, or maybe so Bill Jones, so nobody else could get his mail out of the post office. Big Man say Injin name like Sitting Bull or Tecumseh was too hard to remember and don’t sound civilized, like General Cussed Her or old Grand Pa Harry’s Son.

People can still relate to the name changes and the hair cuts that were meant to end one's Native identity.  And I love the subtle joke alluding to hiding that identity "if the marshal was had a writ."  But I am endlessly repelled by Posey's racism against both African Americans and Black Creek Indians.  Here is a sample from January of that same year:

So I was to Eufaula last week and stay all night in wagon yard with white folks and Arkansawyers that was come to town to get in debt for sowbelly and tobacco and molasses and things like that. We was walk 'round and see everything.  We was go to depot and look at trains, but we was see nothing but lots a niggers.  Maybe so they was fixing to go to Africa, or maybe so Muskogee or Wildcat.

 Wildcat was an all-Black town and Muskogee, the Creek capital, had a large Black population, too.  There is so much of that stuff in Posey's comedy that it becomes nearly impossible to read without concluding that he thinks he it white.  But he also talks about why the white papers love stories about Indians that strike oil on their land, while somehow never hearing about people "behind the hills" who lose their corn patch because somebody else files for an allotment on their land.  So, again, another Oklahoma.

The history of that Oklahoma of stolen allotments was written by Angie Debo in her book And Still the Waters Run in 1936.  White Oklahoma was still so hostile to allowing this story to be told that the University of Oklahoma withdrew its offer to publish and the book only came out four years later, from Princeton University Press.  Debo herself, a white woman, never received an academic appointment, despite having received the prestigious Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association for her first book.  For years she was barred from teaching in Oklahoma in any capacity.

Just last month David Grann released Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI which tells the story of rampant conspiracy against Native oil lease holders, including being courted and married by conspirators who later murdered them and their kin.  This is all part of the Oklahoma story.  Those white Oklahomans definitely knew there were Natives among them.  When they covered up their crimes, though, they were also erasing the very existence of the people they robbed and killed.

Today when you visit the state of Oklahoma some of the important places in its history are ghost towns.  Others have been swallowed by the growth of metropolitan Tulsa and Oklahoma City.  But some have been simply plowed under, not returned to prairie and forest, but hidden under crops of soy and cotton and wheat.  Other historic towns and ranches are underwater, flooded by dams on the Arkansas and Canadian and Deep Fork Rivers.  The bankers and oilmen who won the battles for the identity of Oklahoma have obscured even the existence of its previous iterations, before the arrival of the Five Tribes on the Trail of Tears, before the arrival of the Boomers and Sooners, before the arrival of the oil companies.  But the people are still with us.  Some of them may be in California or Texas or New York, but they are still people.  Some of them may now be African American instead of Black Indians.  Some may be white instead of Native.  But the stories shouldn't die.  I think they are equally compelling as stories about the Dalai Lama.  This is what I wanted to say last Thursday to Krista Tippett.

Donald Trump's firing of FBI Director James Comey on Tuesday had so many resonances with Richard Nixon's firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox on October 20, 1973.  At the heart of the similarities is a President under investigation removing the chief investigator.  The differences are important, too, the biggest being that back then, Nixon's own Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his Deputy William Ruckelshaus both refused to carry out the order to fire Cox.  I cannot imagine Jeff Sessions insisting on an impartial investigation.

But I will allow other people to explore all that.  In October of 1973 my political circle had been following the Watergate investigations -- by the press, by the special prosecutor, by House and Senate committees -- very closely.  We saw the extrajudicial robberies and "dirty tricks" of the Nixon White House against the Democratic National Committee as part of something larger: secret, massive aerial bombing of neutral countries; illegal campaigns against Black, Latino and Native American movements; enemies' lists of journalists; as well as cultural phenomena of the time such as the vigilante fantasies of "Dirty Harry," "Death Wish," and "Joe."  All of these looked to us like the beginning of a protofascist moment.

In our studies, this interest in fascism led us to read the works of the Bulgarian Marxist, Georgi Dimitrov, on the United Front Against Fascism of the 1930's.  In our mass practice, this interest led us to organize a city-wide conference to see how community-based organizations were dealing with the public concern about street crime.  In our literature, we published short broadsides looking at the latest developments in the Watergate investigation from (we hoped) a working-class perspective.

When Nixon fired Cox, everything switched into a different gear.  Nixon's Chief of Staff, General Alexander Haig actually had the offices of Cox, Richardson and Ruckelshaus sealed!  The Chief Judge of the US District Court described it as a coup.  The London Times smelled "the whiff of fascism."  At Columbia University a group of law students reserved an auditorium so they could discuss a legal response, but somebody announced it on WBAI radio and they were swamped with members of the public who wanted a mass response.  And we were there.

There was general agreement on the need for a large march on demonstration, calling for impeachment.  A continuations committee was selected to plan that, with the provision that meetings continue to be open.  There were, of course, members of other circles at those meetings.  I remember the Workers World Party in particular.  After the first meeting, people requested that I chair those meetings, because of my insistence that all voices be heard and because I was able to cut through a lot of confusion and clearly identify the different viewpoints so that people could make informed choices and not get lost in a fog.  At the time, I ascribed my willingness to do this to our views about a united front.  Over the course of the last forty-four years I have come to realize that these are my personal skills and preferences.  We were able to make a plan, do publicity, secure the necessary permits and PA's and the march and demonstration took place  

I dearly wish I could find our list of speakers and performers for the demonstration.  I remember Congresswoman Bella Abzug and longtime pacifist Dave Dellinger.  The only news article I have been able to find now is from the Columbia Daily Spectator.  The author quotes Abzug as saying "we don't want a President who has made the Justice Department a private office for large corporations" which fit our view that this impeachment should not be a legalistic response to a President who had attempted to cover up what he called a "third-rate burglary" but a larger political movement for democracy.  That article quotes Dellinger reminding people that injustices are built into the system and that "shifting people around" wouldn't solve much.  Again, this was the view that we espoused, too.

We had lots of participants who disagreed with using the word "impeach" at all, arguing that it endorsed the authority of the larger system.  Friends of ours in the Attica Brigade put up a counter-slogan: "Throw the Bum Out, Organize to Fight."  This had the benefit of sounding (at least the first part) like something somebody would yell at Ebbets Field in the late forties, i.e. workerish.  Their rivals in the October League said, instead, "Dump Nixon, Stem the Fascist Tide."  So they shared our concern with incipient fascism but also shared the Attica Brigade's unwillingness to even mention a Constitutional remedy for a felonious President.

After all these years it is hard for me to take sides on this, even with my younger self.  All of these slogans worked because nobody was confused by what they meant.  Making these slogans a point of division, on the other hand, still strikes me as bizarre.  All of us wanted Nixon out.  We all wanted to participate in the popular surge against Nixon and we all wanted to raise our concerns about war, imperialism, racism and attacks on the people's movements.

What does any of this have to do with the current outrage over Trump firing Comey?  Lots of things, I think.  First, Comey may have been independent of both parties and tried to investigate both Trump and Clinton during the election, but he was FBI director and nobody's idea of the people's red hero.  Second, the Senators and Representatives of today, both Democrat and Republican, are staking out their ever-shifting positions primarily in order to save themselves and their parties... just like in 1973. Sorry, but that accounts for every bit of difference between a Democratic Congress then and a Republican Congress, now.  All the Facebook "petitions" and "surveys" posted by these people are for fundraising purposes.  These Democrats are not part of any resistance.

Trump is outrageous.  He has no fixed positions on any question of principle.  He is unprepared to hold elected office.  He doesn't even have a nodding acquaintance with the truth.  I would rather have spent these four years fighting with Hillary Clinton's repellent neoliberalism.  But we have Trump.  He is clearly attempting to squash an investigation of criminal conspiracy with a foreign adversary.  That is on top of his xenophobia, racism and misogyny.  Obstruction of justice is a felony in this country, and hate is not.  I am capable of holding more than one thought in my mind at a time.  I think we can demand that our Congress and Justice Department do their job without giving Republicans or Democrats a pass on their other attacks on us.

Twitter and Facebook have been abuzz for two days about Donald Trump's latest encomiums to Andrew Jackson.  Orange Hitler looks at Jackson and sees a "swashbuckler."  Presumably he thinks that he, too, is a "swashbuckler."  The key sentences in the offending interview were:

“I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War.  He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart. He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War; he said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’”
“People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”

So people got all caught up in the statement "He saw what was happening" and reacted quickly by mocking Trump's apparent ignorance of the fact that Jackson was dead fifteen years before the secession crisis in the winter of 1860-61.  But Trump's awkward attempt later in the day to cover that error up actually doubles down on the most outrageous parts of his thinking.  When he tweeted the claim that Jackson "would never have let it [the Civil War] happen, Orange Hitler reveals his white supremacist thinking.

Anybody who says that the Civil War was "unnecessary" or a "tragedy" is saying that ending slavery was not important.  Throughout the first half of the 20th century a popular historiography saw the war as a failure of compromise.  Compromise on whose backs?  That view said that slavery would have wound itself down within twenty or thirty years anyway.  There is no evidence for that belief, but even if there were, it looks only at the tragedy of white war casualties on both sides and completely fails to look at African-American casualties in the concentration camps that white people picturesquely renamed "plantations."  It fails to look at the daily violence of slavery.  It fails to consider Black people as Americans, or even humans.  "Why could that one not have been worked out?" means that Trump thinks there should have been some sort of "deal" with enslavement.

Shortly before his execution, John Brown wrote: "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done."  By his second inauguration, even President Lincoln apparently understood this, saying:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

Andrew Jackson was a man of great violence, as were all those who succeeded in whipping others to clear land and plant and harvest cotton for their enrichment.  In his 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptist calls American slavery a "whipping machine" that yielded inhuman levels of production... literally, because those levels were only finally matched when cotton culture was eventually mechanized.  Today's Washington Post contains a reference to an advertisement that Andrew Jackson placed in the newspaper offering a $50 reward for the apprehension of one of his captives, a mixed-race man, who had escaped.  Jackson added: "- and ten dollars extra, for ever hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred."  Three hundred.  This is the daily violence of Orange Hitler's hero and of the slave power with which he thinks a compromise was desirable.

Jackson's violence -- and the violence of slavery -- wasn't only directed at Black people.  The forced removal west of the Mississippi of the tribes of the southeast was a massive land theft, but the Trail of Tears was also a death march.  Roughly half of the Cherokees that Jackson forced out died on the way.  Half.  And then there was Jackson's violence against other white men.  He was lionized by a certain class for threatening a steamboat pilot with a rifle because it got too close to the steamboat on which Jackson was a pilot.

In The Half Has Never Been Told, Edward Baptist uses a North Carolina politician named Robert Potter as a paradigm for the violence of white supremacy, a violence of men terrified of being reduced to the status of women or Black people.  Potter castrated two men because he believed they might have had sex with his wife.  This was especially true on the frontier, as Baptist writes:

One North Carolina migrant wrote back home that in his new Alabama community, “no man [is] safe from violence, unless a weapon is conspicuously displayed on his person.” In North Carolina, he continued, “it is considered disreputable to carry a dirk or a pistol. [But] in Alabama, it is considered singularity and imprudence to be without one: in fact, nine persons in ten . . . you will see with the dirk handle projecting from their bosoms.”

And Baptist quotes the language of a former Black captive to clarify the psychology of this violence:

“They’re mighty free with pistols down there,” an escaped slave told an audience in 1842. “If a man don’t resent anything that’s put upon him, they call him ‘Poke-easy.’” The way white men saw it, being poke-easy was for men toiling in the field, and for the women out there, too— people either forced or willing to be the helpless target. Dirks, pistols, and physical assault asserted that one was un-poke-able.

So Trump reveals more about himself than he intends with his hero worship, whether of Vladimir Putin, or Kim Jong Un, or Rodrigo Duterte.  His reveling in bomb dropping is of a piece with his boasting about sexual abuse.  And he reveals more than he intends with his "Why the Civil War?" He clearly thinks that compromising on continuing slavery would have been a good idea.

But there is one more question about that compromise and he himself asks it: "Why could that not have been worked out?"  The answer is there in the history books and it is the utter and complete intransigence of the owners of those concentration camps who styled themselves "masters."  They insisted on voting secession and seizing military posts before Lincoln was even inaugurated.  They insisted on a Fugitive Slave Law that turned every police agency in every part of the country into slave patrols and refused due process to accused "runaways."  They insisted on a Dred Scott decision that made slavery the law everywhere and that denied Constitutional rights to any African American person.  They insisted on war.

Trump is an easy target for his lack of knowledge of the basics of history.  But I think we should be looking closely at his views of history as well.