Retired But Not Shy

The News from Indian Country: The Cherokee Phoenix, 1828-1834, Part II (In Pursuit of Dead Georgians, 9)

Posted on January 8, 2013 by georgelamplugh

[Note: We conclude the story of the Cherokee Phoenix begun in a previous post. Both the passage by Congress of the Indian Removal Act (1830) and President Jackson’s refusal to enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of Worcester v. Georgia (1832) increased pressure on the Cherokees to leave Georgia. Meanwhile, Georgia had extended its laws over the Cherokee territory; white “intruders” were moving into the area in search of land; and President Jackson’s withdrawal of federal troops left maintenance of law and order in the Cherokee territory to a state body, the Georgia Guard.]

The Georgia Guard harassed missionaries working in the Cherokee Nation who refused to take an oath of loyalty to Georgia as required by a recently passed law. Editor Elias Boudinot gave the Guard’s anti-missionary campaign, and the brutal treatment that accompanied it, prominent play in the columns of the Cherokee Phoenix. Naturally, this brought upon him the wrath of the Guard’s commander, Col. Charles Nelson, who threatened to shut down the paper and to chastise Boudinot physically.

More significant than Nelson’s bluster was President Jackson’s order that the Cherokee tribal annuity be paid to individual Cherokees, instead of in a lump sum to the tribal treasury. This move both crippled the Cherokees’ efforts to mount a legal defense of their claims and threatened the future of the Cherokee Phoenix. So, in December 1831, Elias Boudinot set off on another fund-raising tour and was absent from his editorial labors for more than six months. (His brother, Stand Watie, edited the paper in his absence.) Boudinot was joined on this trip by his cousin, John Ridge, who served on the tribal delegation that lobbied on behalf of the Cherokees in Washington.

In recent months, John Ridge had heard from numerous Cherokee supporters in the nation’s capital, including one Supreme Court Justice, that there was no longer any hope the Cherokees could stave off emigration; he also had seen editorials in northern newspapers that had formerly defended the tribe, conceding that the time had come to give up their fight. President Jackson himself had told Ridge that, while the Cherokees were certainly free to remain in the East, the national government could do nothing to aid them. As a result, John Ridge concluded that removal to the West was inevitable, and so the Cherokees must arrange for a treaty on the best possible terms.

The cousins surely discussed this between speaking engagements, and, by the time he returned to Georgia in June of 1832, Elias Boudinot had become a supporter of Indian removal. Boudinot wanted to defend the need for a removal treaty in the columns of the Cherokee Phoenix, but Principal Chief John Ross would have no defeatist talk in the Nation’s newspaper, so Boudinot resigned in August. He was replaced as editor by Ross’s brother-in-law, Elijah Hicks.

The new editor was loyal to Ross, and during his tenure the Phoenix demanded a united front against emigration, in the face of continuing white pressure. At the same time, however, Hicks publicly criticized John Ridge, Ridge’s father Major Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and the other leaders of the so-called “Treaty Party” as traitors to their people.

The Cherokee Phoenix also became more overtly political after Hicks’ arrival, reprinting a raft of anti-Jackson material from the papers of the opposition Whig Party. Only by defeating Jackson’s bid for re-election and choosing Whig presidential candidate Henry Clay could the Cherokees be saved, the new editor contended. Hicks also echoed the charges of hypocrisy aimed at Jackson by the southern state rights press, because the President opposed South Carolina’s effort to nullify the federal tariff law while he supported Georgia’s move to “nullify” the Supreme Court’s Worcester decision.

John Ross and the Cherokee National Council continued to reject all suggestions of removing to the West, even after Jackson was triumphantly re-elected in November 1832. Nevertheless, the handwriting was clearly on the wall, especially once the formation of the Treaty Party gave the Administration a group to work with who supported emigration. On November 23, 1833, Elijah Hicks published pieces on both sides of the question, but this did not mean he was ready to concede. Hicks claimed that last-minute intervention, either by Congress or, failing that, by God Himself, would sustain the Cherokees’ rights.

Georgia’s campaign of harassment against the Phoenix continued unabated. By early 1834, the paper’s white printer had been ordered by Georgia authorities to leave the Nation; mail service was frequently disrupted; Hicks was being sued for libel by a local white sheriff; and the paper was once more in perilous financial straits. On May 17, 1834, the print shop in the all but deserted Cherokee capital of New Echota published what would turn out to be the last issue of the Cherokee Phoenix.

A year later, when it appeared that the Treaty Party would sign a removal treaty, Principal Chief John Ross decided to revive the Cherokee Phoenix in order to continue his fight against emigration. The Georgia Guard heard rumors of Ross’s plan and, aided by Elias Boudinot’s brother Stand Watie, went to New Echota and raided the newspaper office, scattering type, removing the press, and burning the building. The final act of the Cherokee removal crisis would play out with no further commentary from a tribal newspaper.

In December 1835, the Treaty Party signed the Treaty of New Echota, exchanging Cherokee lands in Georgia for new lands west of the Mississippi River. Even though the Treaty Party represented a minority of the Cherokee people, both the Jackson Administration and the government of Georgia accepted the New Echota agreement as legitimate (what a surprise!). Despite further efforts by John Ross either to abort the treaty or to secure better terms, the end finally came in the winter of 1838-1839. Most remaining eastern Cherokees were moved to the West along the infamous “Trail of Tears,” in a process supervised by Chief Ross himself, during which an estimated 4000 to 5000 of them died. And, as a bloody epilogue to the removal drama, on June 22, 1839, several groups of Cherokees, loyal to John Ross but purportedly acting without his knowledge (Can you say “plausible deniability”? Sure you can!), killed (or “executed,” or “assassinated,” take your pick) Major Ridge, John Ridge, and Elias Boudinot for their part in arranging the Treaty of New Echota.

So, what conclusions should we draw about the role of Elias Boudinot and the Cherokee Phoenix in the crisis over Indian removal? In significant ways, the Cherokee Phoenix resembled the newspapers published by and for white Georgians. Those journals, at least since the 1790s, had been vigorously—and sometimes viciously—partisan. By the early nineteenth century, Georgia newspaper editors were no longer simply “ink-stained wretches” skilled at setting type. Increasingly, they were educated, articulate professionals, frequently attorneys, who were adept at interpreting current events through the prism of the views held by a particular political party. Letters, essays, and editorials were printed only if they supported the principles of the political party that controlled the paper.

The same was true of the Cherokee Phoenix. It was launched in 1828 to spread the views of the Cherokee National Council, usually as the tribe’s Principal Chief, John Ross, articulated those views. Ross was only 1/8 Cherokee, fluent in English but not in the Cherokee tongue, yet he served for forty years in his post as the chief defender of the tribe and its traditions. From its inception, the Phoenix opposed the idea of removing to the West. When the paper’s founding editor, Elias Boudinot, decided in the summer of 1832 that emigration was the only way to preserve the Cherokees and their traditions, he had no choice but to resign his post.

At its peak, the Phoenix had a circulation of perhaps two hundred copies a week. Many of those were mailed out of state, either to individual subscribers or to editors who sent copies of their papers in exchange. Boudinot regularly translated New Testament passages and Christian hymns into Cherokee and published them in the Phoenix, along with other items of a religious nature. Apparently he did so in an effort to further the work of Christian missionaries living among the Cherokees. Boudinot was a very devout Christian (only health problems derailed his plan to study for the Christian ministry and become a missionary to the Cherokees), but his approach was misleading, to say the least.

Between 1826 and 1835, the percentage of Cherokees who had converted to Christianity rose from less than 5% to about 9%. (Perdue, ed., Cherokee Editor, p.80, note 9) Likewise, perhaps recognizing the antislavery sensibilities of his northern and mid-western readers, Boudinot recorded, but did not comment on, the number of Negro slaves in the Cherokee Nation (1,217, in a reported Cherokee population of 13,563 in the East in 1825). And, while the regular appearance of columns in Cherokee reinforced the notion of Cherokee “progress,” in 1835 the tribal census revealed that almost 40% of the households in the Cherokee Nation included no literate members. (ibid., p.28)

In other words, it is possible to see Boudinot, for much of his editorial career, as little more than a Cherokee propagandist, trying to put the best face possible on the tribe’s “progress” in order to win white support for their efforts to hold on to their lands in Georgia. This vision of the new, improved Cherokee Nation proved so alluring to Elias Boudinot that he was unable to accept the much less glamorous reality. As one biographer wrote, while “Boudinot hoped to save a Nation,”

his “Nation” of literate industrious farmers, nuclear family homesteads, English schools, Christian churches, and a republican government that would reach all levels of society had little basis in reality. It was a vision, a fantasy, a dream few of his people shared. Elias Boudinot was a tragic figure not just because he made a serious error in judgment or because he paid the ultimate price but because he could not accept his people, his heritage, or himself. (ibid., p. 33)

And yet, there is another way to see him—like his cousin John Ridge, Elias Boudinot became convinced that, in the face of Georgia’s intransigence and the unwillingness of President Andrew Jackson to lift a finger to help the Cherokees, the only realistic chance to preserve the tribe and its traditions lay in moving beyond the Mississippi. Boudinot and the other leaders of the Treaty Party signed the Treaty of New Echota knowing full well that, in doing so, they might also be signing their own death warrants.

Whichever view of Boudinot one accepts, what can be said with certainty about him and the Cherokee Phoenix is that, over the four years of his editorship, the newspaper spoke its version of truth to the power brought against the Cherokees by Georgia and, increasingly, by the federal government as well. It was a valiant effort, in a noble cause, and deserved a better fate.

Sources

Cherokee Phoenix—http://metis.galib.uga.edu/ssp/cgi-bin/ftaccess.cgi?galileo_server=andromeda.galib.usg.edu&galileo_server_port=80&galileo_server_id=8&instcode=publ&instname=Guest&helpuserid=&style=&_id=658361de-8eab224246-7065&dbs=ZLGN

Davis, Kenneth Penn. “Chaos in Indian Country: The Cherokee Nation, 1828-1835,” in Duane H. King, ed., The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History (Knoxville, Tenn., 1979), pp.129-147.

Ehle, John. Trail of Tears: The Rise and Fall of the Cherokee Nation (New York, 1988).

Garrison, Tim Alan. The Legal Ideology of Removal: The Southern Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations (Athens, Ga., and London, 2002).

Herschberger, Mary. “Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle Against Indian Removal in the the 1830s,” Journal of American History 86 (June, 1999), 15-40.

Hicks, Brian. Toward the Setting Sun: John Ross, the Cherokees, and the Trail of Tears (New York, 2011).

Lamplugh, George R. Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (Newark, Del., 1986).

______________. In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (Bloomington, Indiana, 2015).

______________. Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (Lanham, Md., and other cities, 2015)

Langguth, A. J. Driven West: Andrew Jackson and the Trail of Tears to the Civil War (New York, 2010).

Perdue, Theda, ed. Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot (Athens, Ga., and London, 1996).

Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Nation and the Trail of Tears (New York, 2007).

Perdue, Theda, and Michael D. Green. The Cherokee Removal: A Brief History with Documents, 2nd Edition (Boston and New York, 2005).

Remini, Robert V. Andrew Jackson and His Indian Wars (New York, 2001).

Smith, Daniel Blake. American Betrayal: Cherokee Patriots and the Trail of Tears (New York, 2011).

Wilkins, Thurman. Cherokee Tragedy: The Ridge Family and the Decimation of a People (Norman, Okla., 1983).

_______________

For those interested in reading more about Georgia History, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

Posted in "Cherokee Phoenix" (newspaper), American History, Cherokee Indians, Chief John Ross (Cherokees), Elias Boudinot, Georgia History, History, Interdisciplinary Work, Nullification, Research, Retirement, Southern (Georgia) History, Southern History, Uncategorized, Wilson Lumpkin | 4 Comments

2012 in Review

Posted on January 1, 2013 by georgelamplugh

[Note: A retrospective look at activity at “Retired But Not Shy” in 2012, courtesy of those wonderful folks at wordpress.com. Enjoy, especially if you’re into statistics!]

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,500 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 6 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

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For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Getting Right With Spielberg’s “Lincoln”

Posted on December 1, 2012 by georgelamplugh

I have never liked the “docudrama,” whether on television or in films–“too much ‘drama,’ not enough ‘docu,'” the historian in me grumped. And yet, without question the modern master of the epic “docudrama”/message movie is Steven Spielberg (“Amistad,” “Saving Private Ryan,” “Schindler’s List”). So, it was with mixed emotions that, on the day after Thanksgiving, we drove to the local multiplex to catch Spielberg’s widely-heralded “Lincoln,” his take on a crucial slice of the great man’s life, set mainly during January 1865, with the War winding down and Congress considering a constitutional amendment that, if ratified, would end slavery in the United States. The lengths to which Lincoln goes to secure passage of the amendment in the House of Representatives, the ways he balances resorting to political sleaze with attempting to maintain his grip on the moral high ground, is the theme of the film.

The movie hardly offers a textbook picture of how the government is supposed to operate, and anyone predisposed to view Abraham Lincoln as “saintly” will probably be shocked–I tell you, shocked!–to watch him finagle, plot, scheme, and twist arms on behalf of what was, in his mind, the only possible moral choice, in ways that might make Lyndon B. Johnson envious were he still with us to see it. Any viewer with even a superficial understanding of the events described will know the outcome, of course, but Spielberg manages nevertheless to generate considerable drama, suspense, and even humor (mostly through the stories Lincoln tells, often at times that will strike some viewers as inappropriate, even incongruous).

Star Daniel Day-Lewis is a marvel as Lincoln. I knew that contemporaries described Lincoln as having a “high-pitched” voice, and that Day-Lewis had done his own research on the man he was to portray, so I wondered how he would translate that to film. Not to worry: Day-Lewis deftly avoids making the President sound like a castrato, creating instead a voice that just rings “right,” whether his Lincoln is speaking to the Cabinet, playing with his young son, appealing to reluctant Republican pols for support on the amendment, trying to jolly his wife out of her melancholia, or giving a pep talk to the crew of political bucaneers Secretary of State William Seward has employed on his behalf to round up votes by hook or by crook. I’ve always admired actor Sam Waterston’s voiceover “performance” of Lincoln in Ken Burns’ epic series, “The Civil War,” but Waterston’s rendering of Lincoln, while certainly moving at times (for example, his reading of the Gettysburg Address), comes across as rather stagy and stilted compared to Day-Lewis’ approach.

And the skill of the makeup artists! Day-Lewis is Lincoln, physically–tall, lanky, shambling in his walk, never seeming to know what to do with his hands (except that he is consistently reluctant to put gloves on them, despite the best efforts of his wife and his valet). The second best makeup job has to be the way David Strathairn was transformed into the compact, natty, energetic, and forceful Secretary Seward.

Although Tommy Lee Jones seems too hulking to be Thaddeus Stevens, he nevertheless owns the character–regardless of the fact that, through Jones, Stevens, a Pennsylvanian, speaks with a definite southwestern twang. Jones steals virtually every scene he’s in, especially one near the end of the film, where director Spielberg cleverly explains why Stevens “borrows” the original copy of the proposed amendment, with the clerk’s tally of the vote on it, to take home with him, providing a sort of cinematic grace note for this most maligned of Radical Republicans. Even those who know enough about Stevens to be one step ahead of the director here still will appreciate Spielberg’s deft approach to this scene.

Like Gore Vidal’s historical novel Lincoln, “Lincoln” is quite “talky.” “The War” itself, or at least its drums, trumpets, and much of its bloodshed, is very much off stage for most of the film, and Spielberg’s focus on the politics of Emancipation means that words matter. Given the nature of the issue selected for emphasis, as beautifully honed by screenwriter Tony Kushner, viewers need to be prepared for lots of conversation–Cabinet discussions, Congressional debates, rumors and gossip relayed by one pol to another. Kushner manages to create dialogue that clearly frames the arguments for and against passage of the amendment abolishing slavery. Those in the audience who do not enter the theatre expecting to see the sequel to “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter” should be able to grasp the terms of the debate, provided they pay attention, especially to the views of Lincoln himself.

The film is not perfect. Sally Field gives her all to her portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln, but Kushner’s script unfortunately reduces her to something of a “Mary One-Note,” a much harried wife pursued by demons, of the mental and political variety, bewailing the tragedies that have befallen the Lincoln family in general and herself in particular. On the other hand, the fact that Field spends most of her screen time in various stages of emotional distress allows Day-Lewis to demonstrate an impressive range of moods as the President tries to calm his spouse, including a powerful scene when, with a storm raging outside their room, Lincoln finally loses patience and unloads on the hapless Mary.

I found the opening scene, where Lincoln is speaking to some soldiers after a battle, to be surprisingly clunky. It seems that four of the troops, two black, two white, earlier had been at Gettysburg to hear him deliver his famous Address, and, without his prompting, they take turns reciting the words he had spoken on that occasion, while the President listens, increasingly bemused. I suppose we are to assume that the soldiers either had been physically near enough to Lincoln to have heard his speech, unlikely in an age before electronic voice amplification; or, that they had spent time between skirmishes memorizing his words, which hardly seems likely. Spielberg seems to be suggesting here that the “common soldier” understood where the President “was coming from” (as opposed to a number of Lincoln’s political foes, who are portrayed as being so tangled in ideology that they badly underestimate both the President’s commitment to Emancipation and his determination to use every weapon at his disposal to bring it about), but there had to have been a more believable way to make the point.

I also wish Spielberg had ended the picture earlier. Despite the fact that the film’s focus is on the process of passing the Thirteenth Amendment, the director evidently felt he had to include Lincoln’s assassination, but the way he does it, while certainly clever enough, is both puzzling and anticlimactic. We are at a theatre, but it quickly becomes clear that the play is not “Our American Cousin,” the play Lincoln was watching at the time of his “rendezvous with destiny” at the hands of John Wilkes Booth. Instead, Tad Lincoln, not his father, is in the audience for this play, whatever it is, when someone comes onstage to announce that the President has been shot, and we watch as young Master Lincoln understandably has a total meltdown. At this point, Spielberg switches to the room where the wounded President has been carried following Booth’s attack, and we hear the physician pronouncing Lincoln dead and Secretary of War Stanton sonorously intoning, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

A better place to have concluded the film, in my view at any rate, came a few minutes earlier, with a lovely shot: The President apologetically leaves a Cabinet meeting in order to take his carriage to Ford’s Theatre. As Lincoln ambles down the hall towards where the carriage awaits, Spielberg switches from shots of the President’s back receding in the distance to close-ups of the face of his free-born black valet. Lincoln’s manservant watches the President depart, and a series of emotions seem to flash across his face–certainly, gratitude for the efforts the President has made in securing the amendment’s passage (though, like most other Americans, he scarcely has a clue about what Lincoln actually did to grease the skids in Congress); maybe, hope for the future; and, perhaps, concern for the President’s well-being, because the valet has every reason to understand how much pressure, political and marital, Lincoln has been under.

Just as the film was starting, I had leaned over to my companion, glowered in the general direction of the screen, and muttered, “Do you realize that, for the next generation, what many Americans ‘know’ about Abraham Lincoln will probably come from this movie?” As we left the multiplex, I repeated that remark, then added, “And, that’s probably not a bad thing.” While Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” could have been improved in a few places, his interpretation of Lincoln, appropriately to the season in which it was released, gives us much for which to be thankful.

Spielberg’s Lincoln is a master political manipulater on behalf of what he believes is a moral question in service to the “common good,” a leader searching for a way to arrive at a satisfactory compromise of a very controversial issue, while all around him, smaller men are clinging to ideological positions that play well with their supporters but ignore the “elephant in the room,” in this case, the abolition of slavery. And if that interpretation has any modern resonance, why, then, color me not at all surprised.

But don’t take my word for it; please find time to see this film for yourself. I also suggest that, either before or after you see it, you consider views on Spielberg’s “Lincoln” by others who are perhaps better qualified than I to offer guidance on “Lincoln’s” historical accuracy and relevance to modern American political culture:

A varied collection of news items and opinion pieces related to the film can be found at the always interesting History News Network (HNN) website:

http://hnn.us/articles/hnn-hot-topics-lincoln-movie

From opposite ends of the op-ed political spectrum, two of my favorite columnists have had their say on “Lincoln”:

David Brooks, in “Why We Love Politics,” published in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/23/opinion/brooks-why-we-love-politics.html?_r=0

(Note: An interesting response to Brooks’ column by historian Eric Foner, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning 2010 book, The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery, offers a much broader context than the Spielberg film on the topic, is attached to the Brooks op-ed and also included among the HNN pieces cited above.)

And Leonard Pitts, Jr., of the Miami Herald,who puts the film in the context of Lincoln’s proclamation establishing the fourth Thursday in November as a national day of Thanksgiving:

http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/11/21/3106927/after-profound-grief-a-nations.html

Two other takes on the film, by columnist Ross Douthat and historian Philip Zelikow, both from the New York Times, are certainly worth considering:

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/spielbergs-lincoln-and-its-critics/

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/

Finally, a philosopher at Notre Dame tackles the almost existential question of the kinds of supplementary information the viewer of “Lincoln” needs in order to arrive at a sound historical understanding of Lincoln the man and the issue of Emancipation for which he fought:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/learning-history-at-the-movies/?src=rechp

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For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

Posted in "Lincoln"--the movie, Civil War, History, Retirement, Southern (Georgia) History, Southern History, Uncategorized | Tagged "Lincoln" movie, Daniel Day-Lewis, David Strathairn, docudrama, Sally Field, Steven Spielberg, Tommy Lee Jones, WP Longform | 5 Comments

Teaching Prep School With a PhD: Is It For You?

Posted on November 6, 2012 by georgelamplugh

[Note: Several times over the past few years, I’ve been asked by My Old Graduate School (MOGS) to speak to interested students about “prep school” teaching as an alternative to a career in the traditional professoriate (because, of course, those jobs are as scarce as hen’s teeth). Here are remarks from my most recent foray into “career counselling,” mid-October, 2012.]

Almost four decades ago, I was in pretty much the same position a lot of you are now: finishing my dissertation and hoping to find a college or university teaching job, but apparently there were none out there for me.

I still wanted to teach, so I decided to look into doing so on the secondary level. Moreover, because I had no “Education” courses in my resume, I confined my search to private (or independent) schools, figuring that they might not require Ed courses as a condition of employment. (It turned out I was wrong, as you’ll learn shortly.) Anyway, I lucked out: in the Fall of 1973, I began teaching at a prep school, which I’ll call Atlanta’s Finest Prep School (AFPS), across town from MOGS, believing that I’d stay there only until “something better came along.” Well, since I retired from AFPS thirty-seven years later, obviously nothing better came along. Why not? Or, put another way, what was there about teaching at a “prep school” that kept me so interested that I stopped looking for a college teaching position?

Teaching in a prep school is not for everyone. In fact, a friend in grad school once told me over coffee that he’d “rather sell shoes than teach in high school.” (He never had to do either, as it turned out.) What are the positive and negative aspects of this particular career choice? Based on my experience, and bearing in mind that I taught at the secondary level at only one school, though for a very long time, here are some plusses and minuses.

Good points:

1. My students were a very able bunch, on the whole–I did things with them in high school that I had done with freshmen and sophomores here during my years as a TA. All of our prep school History courses, even those for freshmen and sophomores, used college-level texts. Moreover, the department’s Advanced Placement courses were supposed to be taught on the college level, but with this significant difference: because these college-level courses are taught in a secondary school, most of the time there was–ahem!–daily acountability for assignments. (This is a key difference between “professing” and “teaching.”)

2. My prep school faculty colleagues were bright, spirited, interesting people. (And every department eventually had a PhD or two, thanks to the college-teaching job market, or lack thereof.) Moreover, the folks in the History Department got along very well, which was definitely not the case in every department.

3. In History, at any rate, prep schools usually do not want or need narrowly specialized teachers, which is another way of saying that most courses at AFPS are survey-level ones. But, here’s a little secret: curricular fashions change, and, if you stay at a school long enough, you will have the opportunity to design and teach an elective course or two. For instance, over almost forty years, I delved into a number of different areas I might never have looked at otherwise, using skills imparted by my grad school professors. In addition to my “field,” American History, I taught–and in some cases created–courses in Introduction to History, History of the Ancient World, AP European History, Modern European History, History of the Modern World , the Civil Rights Movement, the Modern South, Old Testament, and even, to alumni on our annual “Back-to-School Night,” a series of offerings on the history of the Blues. When I had an itch to study theology, I did so in Education for Ministry (EFM), an extension course in theology offered through the theology school at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and AFPS, believing this program “professional growth” (because AFPS is a self-professed “Christian Preparatory School for Boys and Girls”), picked up the tab.

4. Private schools usually have less paperwork and bureaucracy than public schools, although, over time, my school did become increasingly mired in various sorts of what I refer to as “administrivia,” but, I’m guessing, not nearly to the extent that phenomenon has taken root in the public sector.

5. There is no “publish or perish” requirement at the prep school level! However, if you are a self-disciplined sort (and, if married, have an understanding spouse), you should be able to put into practice the scholarly training skills emphasized by your grad school professors. In my own case, for instance, I continued to do research, gave papers, published articles and book reviews, even converted my dissertation into a book. (And, since the mid-1990s, I’ve been working on a second book, the initial research for which was funded by a three-summer sabbatical from AFPS.)

6. The pay at AFPS was decent, though I certainly did not become rich (and, come to think of it, most people who go into teaching do so for reasons other than amassing material wealth, or so I’ve heard).

7. Our sons attended the school at a discount (a perk no longer offered there, by the way). My wife retired this past June from the AFPS elementary library after a very satisfying career of her own, which meant, among other things, that our family vacation times always coincided.

The Downside:

1. I found that I did have to be “certified” in “Education” by the state of Georgia. Initially, I was issued a “provisional” certificate, with the understanding that I would upgrade it to the next level, which meant taking two Education courses a year for five consecutive years (AFPS paid for this). Eventually, the school stopped requiring its high school teachers to achieve state certification. Instead, AFPS created an “intern program” to certify new teachers according to the standards of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS)–the class met once a month in the evening and had a couple of sessions during the school day.

2. Extracurricular activities–Prep schools like to think they hire “Renaissance men and women” who can teach, of course, but who also are expected to help out the school by coaching athletic teams, advising clubs or publications, counseling students in homerooms or other venues, and handling administrative tasks, sometimes all at once. Over my career, for example, I coached lower-level boys and girls soccer, as well as intramural jogging for students and an afterschool jogging program for interested faculty; advised the student council; served as head of the History Department for a decade; mentored new History teachers in our “intern program”; was one of the senior class advisors; edited an electronic History Department newsletter; and put in time on numerous committees. A word of advice here: if you decide to apply to prep schools, let them know which activities you have experience with and enjoy doing. Cast as broad a net as possible here–you’d be surprised at how varied the needs are that a school is required to fill (inside and outside the classroom) in hiring each year. The more versatile you come across on your application, the better chance you’ll have of being hired.

3. I’m including this item on the “minus” side, not because I view it in a negative light but because I’m just not sure what you might expect in the way of a teaching load. At AFPS, a full-time teacher who did not coach a varsity sport or occupy a major administrative post normally taught five classes per semester, each of which met four times a week, on a rotating schedule, so I never had the same course at the same time each day. My classes were fairly small, a total of between 60 and 70 students over five sections; but, as was the case with red tape and bureaucratization, class sizes have also crept up in recent years, largely for economic reasons.

4. What I learned here at MOGS as a teaching assistant all those years ago was how to “profess”; what I was expected to do at AFPS was to “teach.” Now, don’t get me wrong: the terms are certainly not mutually exclusive; in fact, they are related. Each involves conveying information to students who may or may not be predisposed to enjoy it. On the prep school level, though, the students are younger; student accountability is daily, rather than at mid-semester and semester’s end; and communicating regularly with parents is very much part of the equation. I found the task of morphing from “professor” to “teacher,” which took several years, both very challenging and immensely rewarding. Looking back on it, I would not trade the experience for anything.

* * * * * *

For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

Posted in American History, Current Events, History, Interdisciplinary Work, Research, Retirement, Southern History, Teaching | Tagged education, Graduate Education, history, Prep school teaching with a PhD, WP Longform | 8 Comments

The News from Indian Country–The Cherokee Phoenix, 1828-1834, Part I (In Pursuit of Dead Georgians, 8)

Posted on November 1, 2012 by georgelamplugh

[Note: This began as my contribution to my school’s interdisciplinary examination of Native American culture, but I had another reason for offering to present something on the Cherokee tribal newspaper: the removal of the Cherokees from Georgia was a significant part of my ongoing research project, and, though I had located an online version of the Cherokee Phoenix, I had not yet read through it. Thus, preparing this essay allowed me to kill two scholarly birds at once: participate in another interdisciplinary project; and further my own research agenda. A list of sources for the essay will be appended to Part II.]

In 1802, the state of Georgia ceded its western land claims, comprising the present-day states of Alabama and Mississippi, to the federal government for $1,250,000 and, more importantly to Georgia, for the national government’s promise to extinguish remaining Indian land claims in the state as soon as that could be done on “reasonable and peaceful” terms. This agreement became known as the Compact of 1802.

The federal government did its best to fulfill the terms of the Compact, but Native American land cessions were neither frequent enough nor large enough for land-hungry Georgians; when complaints to federal officials proved unavailing, Georgia struck off on its own. By 1826, using a combination of corruption, state rights rhetoric, and even the threat of civil war, Georgia officials finally secured the ouster of the Creeks.

When it became clear that Georgia had won the tussle over Creek lands, the editor of a Milledgeville newspaper crowed that the time of the Cherokees had come. The Cherokees had made several cessions of land to the federal government since 1802. By 1819, they still had about five million acres left and refused to cede any more, so Georgia authorities called upon the federal government to remove them by force.

Ever since the creation of a new, stronger American government under the Constitution of 1787, the general approach of the United States toward Indians was to encourage “civilization,” that is, to convince Native American tribes to emulate the “superior” culture of the whites. The theory was that, if they became “white” in all but skin color, then they could be assimilated within the larger, white population over time. Of all the native tribes remaining east of the Mississippi River, the Cherokees had taken this “civilization” policy most seriously.

The Cherokees abandoned hunting for farming, and some even began to produce crops for the market, instead of just for subsistence. In the early 1820s, they adopted the syllabary created by Sequoyah (George Guist), which formed the basis for a written language, laws and, eventually, a tribal newspaper. In 1827, a convention created, and the Cherokees adopted, a written, republican constitution modeled on that of the United States. So, the Cherokee Nation did what the federal government expected of them: they became “civilized,” even to the point that the largest Cherokee planters aped neighboring white plantation owners by employing the labor of Negro slaves. Thus, the whites should have been tickled pink, right? Not exactly. . . .

The policy of “civilizing” the “savage” tribes was grounded in the Enlightenment notion of the perfectibility of man. The differences between Indians and whites were believed to be cultural, in other words, and could be eliminated if Native Americans tried hard to adapt to the “superior” white civilization. Unfortunately, by the 1820s, that theory had changed, at least in the South. Southerners had begun to see differences between Indians and whites as racial, not cultural, and to believe those differences could not be eliminated through “civilization” and assimilation.

Moreover, the creation of a republican government in the Cherokee Nation in 1827 outraged Georgians, who saw it as an attempt to create a “state within a state” and therefore as an unacceptable attack on Georgia’s sovereignty. To Georgians, the imperative duty of the federal government was to fulfill the Compact of 1802 by securing Cherokee lands for Georgia, or else the state would be forced to act unilaterally, as it had against the Creeks. Georgia would win this campaign as well, but it would do so in the glare of a spotlight shone on its actions by a tribal newspaper, the Cherokee Phoenix.

In 1828, several events combined to bring into the open the question of Indian removal. One was the discovery of gold in the Cherokee Nation. Another was the election to the presidency of Andrew Jackson, who was known to sympathize with Georgia in the dispute with the Cherokees. Following Jackson’s election, Georgia decided to extend its sovereignty over all Cherokee lands within the state. As one scholar puts it, “Georgia’s legislature added, by fiat, Cherokee lands to the northwestern counties of Georgia, forbade Cherokee gold mining, nullified all Cherokee laws, and prohibited Indians from testifying against whites in court.” (Herschberger, p.21)

The Cherokees protested Georgia’s actions to the federal Indian Agent, who procured a force of U.S. troops to police the Nation. Moreover, in 1829 the Cherokee National Council passed a law making further cessions of tribal land without Council permission a capital offense. In December 1829, Georgia reasserted its sovereignty over Cherokee territory, annexing it; extending Georgia laws over the area; prohibiting the Cherokee National Council from meeting within the boundaries of Georgia (except to cede lands); forbidding Indians from mining gold found on Cherokee lands; and requiring an oath of allegiance to Georgia from all whites living in the Cherokee Nation, in an effort to weaken the influence of Christian missionaries there. These provisions were to go into effect in June 1830. It was against this background of increasing tension between the Cherokees and their white neighbors that, on February 21, 1828, the first issue of the Cherokee Phoenix appeared.

Elias Boudinot, founding editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, could have served as the poster child for the “civilization” policy. He had attended a missionary-run boarding school in Connecticut; converted to Christianity; and, in 1826, married a white woman, Harriet Gold. In the Fall of 1825, the Cherokee National Council authorized Boudinot to embark on a tour to raise funds to establish a Cherokee newspaper. In the speech he delivered at each stop on this tour, Boudinot sketched a glowing vision of what an Indian newspaper could be:

Such a paper, comprising a summary of religious and political events, &c. on the one hand; and on the other, exhibiting the feelings, disposition, improvements, and prospects of the Indians; their traditions, their true character, as it once was and as it now is; the ways and means most likely to throw the mantle of civilization over all tribes; and such other matter as will tend to diffuse proper and correct impressions in regard to their condition—such a paper could not fail to create much interest in the American community, favourable to the aborigines, and to have a powerful influence on the advancement of the Indians themselves. (Perdue, ed., Cherokee Editor, p.76)

In that same speech, Boudinot also hinted at an appropriate name for the paper. If the national government continued to protect Native Americans, he said, and if that policy had the support of the American people, then, Boudinot predicted, “the Indian must rise like the Phoenix after having wallowed for ages in ignorance and barbarity.” (ibid., pp.78-79)

In an editorial in his inaugural issue, Elias Boudinot set forth several editorial principles. (CP,Feb. 21, 1828) First, the purpose of the Phoenix was to inform the Cherokees of their national laws and other public documents, which would be published in English and in Cherokee. Boudinot promised to conduct the paper with civility, though he admitted that the controversy with Georgia would “frequently make our situation trying.” The Cherokee editor also insisted that a large majority of his people opposed removal to the West, and so would the Phoenix. Boudinot asserted that Indians could be “reclaimed from a savage state,” and in the area where they were presently located. Finally, he pleaded with white “friends of the Cherokees,” whose financial assistance had helped establish the paper, to subscribe to it so that it could thrive and, along with it, the Cherokee cause.

On his money-raising foray, Boudinot had found that audiences responded well to specific evidence that the Cherokee had indeed made “progress” on the road to “civilization.” He repeated this tactic in the early issues of the Phoenix, deluging readers with statistics showing the increase since 1810 in the Cherokee Nation of livestock, spinning wheels and looms, plows, saw mills and grist mills, blacksmith shops, cotton gins, schools, and other accoutrements of “civilization.” (Boudinot, “Address to the Whites,” in Perdue, p.72; CP, May 14, June 18, 1828) He also printed, in English and Cherokee, the Cherokee constitution and laws, as well as correspondence and treaties between tribal leaders and federal officials going back forty years. Clearly, Boudinot hoped to demonstrate both Cherokee “progress” and the support offered those efforts by the federal government since the Administration of George Washington.

As Georgia began to tighten the screws on the Cherokees, Elias Boudinot put his faith in the willingness of the national government to defend Cherokee rights. If the federal administration would not protect the tribe’s title to lands guaranteed them by past treaties, the Cherokee editor warned, then the Indians could not trust any promises made by the national government in future treaties. When eager Georgians began moving into Cherokee territory, and the Jackson Administration did nothing to stop them, an angry Boudinot asked editorially whether white Georgians actually believed it was “agreeable to [the Cherokees’] nature to have their rights trampled upon by a horde of robbers and vagabonds (we mean our intruders) and to have every avenue of justice closed against them?” (CP, May 27, 1829)

In an editorial on July 1, 1829, Boudinot took issue with an editor in the Georgia capital of Milledgeville who predicted that, once the state acquired the Cherokee lands, its population would double in ten years and triple in twenty. According to Boudinot, the Cherokee territory was not large enough to sustain such growth, since only about 1/6 of it was fit for cultivation. Moreover, Boudinot added, there was one other major obstacle Georgia would have to overcome if she hoped to develop into a great state, and that was slavery. What Boudinot did not mention was that “The Cherokees also owned slaves, and their legislature passed laws to protect and regulate the institution of slavery.” (Perdue, p.149, note 46)

By the middle of 1829, thanks largely to the documents and editorials published in the Cherokee Phoenix, public opinion outside the South had largely swung against Georgia’s heavy-handed Indian policy and President Jackson’s willingness to support it. This gave Boudinot plenty of fresh ammunition for his columns—accounts of meetings in northern cities to protest Georgia’s treatment of the Cherokees; congressional records highlighting the angry debate over the Indian Removal Bill and the outraged responses of Georgia congressmen to pro-Cherokee petitions; and the long-running “William Penn” essays arguing that “tribal sovereignty was superior to the claims of the states.” (Perdue and Green, The Cherokee Removal, p.103)

Once Congress, at the urging of President Jackson, passed the Indian Removal Act in May 1830, aligning two branches of the national government with Georgia and against the Cherokees, the tribe’s last chance seemed to lie with the judiciary. That hope soon died, however, because Georgia’s governor refused to recognize the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction in the matter and simply ignored the court’s decisions. And, when the Marshall court finally came down on the side of the Cherokees in the 1832 Worcester v. Georgia ruling, President Jackson refused to enforce it.

The movement of what Boudinot called “white intruders” into the Cherokee Nation kept increasing, especially after June 1830, when Georgia’s laws were officially extended over the territory. At the same time, President Jackson ordered U.S. troops withdrawn, leaving to the newly created Georgia Guard the task of keeping order in the Nation. The state legislature also approved a lottery to distribute Cherokee lands to fortunate whites. All this proved too much for Elias Boudinot, who angrily informed his readers that Georgia had taken away their “rights as freemen” and replaced them with “Christian laws, placed before you in a language you cannot understand, and which withhold from you the last particle of right.” (CP, June 26, 1830)

[To Be Continued]

_______________

For those interested in reading more about Georgia History, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

Posted in "Cherokee Phoenix" (newspaper), American History, Cherokee Indians, Chief John Ross (Cherokees), Elias Boudinot, George R. Gilmer, Georgia History, History, Interdisciplinary Work, Nullification, Research, Retirement, Southern (Georgia) History, Southern History, Teaching, Wilson Lumpkin | Leave a comment

Echoes of the Scopes Trial, 1925-2000 (Adventures in Interdisciplinary Land, 2)

Posted on October 1, 2012 by georgelamplugh

[Note: In another “interdisciplinary project,” the school’s drama group presented Lawrence and Lee’s “Inherit The Wind.” We were fortunate to be able to snag as our keynote speaker Dr. Edward J. Larson of the University of Georgia, who had recently published a fine, modern account of the Scopes Trial, Summer for the Gods. Several members of our faculty contributed talks on various facets of the play and its context. What follows is mine.]

* * * * *

Like everyone else who agreed to take part in this year’s “Interdisciplinary Project,” I have inherited a big topic, which I must somehow fit into a brief period of time. So, I’m going to concentrate on two themes: 1) how the version of the Scopes Trial that has entered our culture came to be; and, 2) the continuing battle in the courts and state legislatures over what to teach in–or to keep out of–science classes in America’s public schools, from the Scopes Trial to the present.

A couple of months ago, our keynote speaker, Dr. Ed Larson, told you about the differences between the “real” Scopes Trial and the thinly-disguised version of it that appears in Lawrence and Lee’s play, “Inherit the Wind.” (See Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion [New York, 1997]) The playwrights didn’t just make up the idea that the Scopes Trial posed a threat to freedom of speech; that was the generally accepted view of the trial after World War II, the one found in history texts. But how did that version get into those texts?

* * * * *

Most Americans learn their history from textbooks; most textbook writers create their volumes by drawing together information found in more specialized history books. For generations of textbook writers, and the students who read their books, the “reality” of the Scopes Trial was a combination of the views of two historians.

The first of these historians was Frederick Lewis Allen, whose book on the 1920s, Only Yesterday, was published in 1931. At that time, the nation was reeling from the shock of the Great Depression. Its history-minded citizens, searching for a ray of sunshine amid the gloom, made Allen’s book a surprise best-seller. In Only Yesterday, Allen portrayed the decade in a rather light-hearted way, as the “Roaring ’20s,” an era of wonderful nonsense. One of the characteristics of the 1920s, according to Allen, was “ballyhoo”–what today we would call “hype”–the blanket coverage given “a series of tremendous trifles” by the increasingly centralized mass media of magazines, newspapers, movie newsreels, and the radio. (Allen, p.155) The media concentrated on one issue at a time, squeezed all of the public interest from it, and then moved on to another. The most “ballyhooed” event of 1925 was the Scopes Trial.

Allen’s picture of the trial was starkly black and white: it was Fundamentalism v. Modernism; Bryan v. Darrow; rural v. urban; South v. North. This interpretation, simple as it was, became the “true” one and found its way into history texts. Allen’s conclusion, that, despite the fact the trial ended in a “victory” for the Fundamentalists, “really Fundamentalism had lost,” became the accepted verdict. For the next generation or two, most textbook writers, and, one suspects, their readers as well, agreed with Allen that “civilized opinion everywhere had regarded the Dayton trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from Fundamentalism certainly continued.” (Allen, p.171)

This textbook picture was misleading, to say the least. In fact, conservative Christianity continued to grow and thrive in the aftermath of the Scopes Trial, especially in the South and West, where states and localities still imposed restrictions on the teaching of evolution. Yet, this vitality was made possible only because the movement began to look inward, toward their own members, rather than outward, toward the general public. Conservative Christians created a separate subculture of religious, educational, and social institutions, including societies for spreading the theories of “creation science,” which mainstream scientific and religious organizations refused to accept as “scientific.” The American public, or at least that portion of it familiar with the writings of a Northern-based intellectual elite, no longer took Fundamentalists and their ideas seriously, if they ever had. And conservative Christians increasingly talked only to each other, avoiding the broader public arena where “creation science” would have to contend with science generally accepted by mainstream religious groups.

* * * * *

The second historian whose views of the Scopes Trial became “gospel” in American History texts was Richard Hofstadter of Columbia University. Hofstadter’s interpretation of the trial found its way into most major texts used in high school and college American History courses; moreover, two of his own works, The American Political Tradition (1948) and The Age of Reform (1955), were widely used as supplementary texts in college courses (and in some high schools, such as this one). While, to some extent, Hofstadter merely elaborated on Frederick Lewis Allen’s idea that religious Fundamentalism was a prime example of the intolerance of the 1920s, he also reinterpreted the Scopes Trial for Americans living in the Cold War years.

By the time Hofstadter wrote, America’s fear of Communist subversion had touched off an anti-Communist crusade, usually called “McCarthyism,” after Republican Senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, that was wildly popular with conservative Americans. Implicit in Hofstadter’s first two books was the notion that there were parallels between religious Fundamentalism and the anti-Communist excesses of the early Cold War years: both were threats to freedom of expression. Hofstadter went on to make this view explicit in another book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, published in 1963. It was this Allen-Hofstadter view of the Scopes Trial as a media-driven carnival of anti-intellectualism and enforced conformity that Lawrence and Lee incorporated into their play, which made its debut on Broadway in 1955.

* * * * *

In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first man-made satellite, and sent the United States into a panic. The Cold War was raging, and our nation’s leaders interpreted Sputnik as proof that the Soviets were ahead of us in a crucial defense area. As a result, the national government poured lots of money (e.g., National Defense Education Act, 1958) into an effort to regain leadership in science and technology. One project backed by government funds led to the publication in 1963, by the Biological Sciences Curriculum Study (BSCS), of a series of texts that soon exposed nearly half the nation’s science students to a detailed study of evolution. The Fundamentalist Creation Research Society responded in 1970 with a text of its own, Biology: A Search for Order in Complexity.

In recent years, creationists have worked very hard to get their own views into, rather than keep evolution out of, the public school science curriculum. They were forced to adopt this approach, for by the 1960s federal courts had begun to direct their attention to anti-evolution laws that remained on the books in several states. What turned out to be the crucial case arose in Arkansas, where Susan Epperson, a science teacher using the new BSCS curriculum, sued to have that state’s anti-evolution law invalidated. (John T. Scopes emerged from obscurity to support Epperson and other teachers who were trying to overturn the anti-evolution laws.)

In 1968, in this case of Epperson v. Arkansas, the U. S. Supreme Court struck down the 1928 Arkansas anti-evolution law as unconstitutional, arguing that the offending statute “selects from the body of knowledge a particular segment which it proscribes for the sole reason that it is deemed to conflict with a particular religious doctrine; that is, with a particular interpretation of the Book of Genesis by a particular religious group.” The Court added that “it was not prohibiting the study of religions or the Bible from a literary and historic viewpoint, presented objectively as a part of a secular program of education. . . .” (Quoted in Indiana Department of Education Legal Section: Quarterly Report, 1966, p.1–http://ideanet.doe.state.in.us/legal/1996/10-12/01.html)

Although the media interpreted this decision as vindication for Scopes and modern science, some conservative Christians thought that the wording of Epperson left room for them to include “creation science” in public education. Three southern states (Tennessee, Arkansas, and Louisiana) promptly passed laws to require “equal time” for evolution and creationism in schools, only to have the Supreme Court put a stop to that strategy as well. The problem was, at least in the eyes of conservative Christians, that the courts refused to accept what they called “creation science” as “scientific.” For example, a federal appeals court said of the Louisiana law that its “intended effect is to discredit evolution by counterbalancing its teaching at every turn with the teaching of creationism, a religious belief”; this made the law one “respecting a particular religious belief . . . and thus unconstitutional.” (Larson, p.259)

Naturally, the decisions in this and later cases have frustrated and angered conservative Christians. We still see evidence of this, in events like the recent decision by the Kansas State School Board, and the announcement by creationists last month of a new theory that attempts to refute the “Big Bang.” (New York Times, Oct. 10, 1999) This controversy will continue as long as religious Fundamentalists regard the teaching of evolution as an attack on their belief in God and their understanding of the Bible. In other words, these issues endure because “they embody the characteristically American struggle between individual liberty and majoritarian democracy, and cast it in the timeless debate over science and religion.” (Larson, p.265)

* * * * * *

For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

Posted in "Inherit the Wind", American History, Cold War, History, Interdisciplinary Work, Research, Richard Hofstadter, Scopes Trial, Southern History, Teaching, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Assault and Battery on the Mother Tongue–“Business-Speak”

Posted on September 25, 2012 by georgelamplugh

Once upon a time, I wanted to teach English, and, though things didn’t work out that way, I’ve maintained a love affair with the language. Nothing gets me hotter under the collar faster than writing that is sloppy, imprecise, deceptive, or unclear–for example, those well-worn, cliche-filled statements issued every couple of months by the p.r. flacks retained by Big Oil to “explain” the unexplainable, the “reasons” for the latest rise in the price of gas, to those who understand all too well what’s going on–the motoring public is being asked, once again, collectively to lie on its back and think of England.

Well, this morning’s AJC (the local fish wrapper) contained a two-fer in this category of assaulting the intelligence of the American public in pursuit of higher profits:

First, from a story in the Business section headlined “Atlanta high for ATM, overdraft fees,” we find this gem of mindless volubility from a spokesman for a local bank, um, “explaining” his employer’s recent decision to increase the fee for a customer’s first overdraft from $25 to $36: “We are constantly evaluating our product mix and making price adjustments as necessary based on numerous factors including our cost of doing business and the competitive marketplace, balanced with meeting the needs of our clients.” Translation: “Why do we screw the banking public at every opportunity? Because we can. . . .”

The second example of murdering the language in the service of capitalism comes from an ad by a local “memorial park” announcing, in language reeking of what I’ll call “precious-ness,” a new “development”: “a private community area with a botanical garden feel. A custom pavilion surrounded by immaculate landscaping is the focal point of this upscale garden and includes options for cremation, traditional burial and private family areas. Each traditional burial space is inclusive of the necessary outer burial containers and a custom designed granite memorial to minimize the decision making process.” I don’t know about you, but, after reading that, I can hardly wait to go to my reward, especially since these wonderful folks have done their darndest “to minimize the decision making process.”

As more than one observer has noted, you can’t make this stuff up, or, if you did, it wouldn’t be nearly as smarmy as the real thing.

* * * * * *

For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

Posted in "Business-Speak", American History, Current Events, Georgia History, History, Murdering the English Language, Retirement, Southern (Georgia) History, Southern History, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

High School, Now–and Then: Reflections on a 50th Reunion

Posted on September 1, 2012 by georgelamplugh

Unless your formal education terminated with twelfth grade, you probably feel warmer and fuzzier about your college or university than your high school. I’m one of those fortunate enough to have spent time in “higher education,” but, after college and grad school, I returned to “high school,” teaching History at an independent school for almost four decades. Our students were able, and the parent body, comprised of some of the city’s “best and brightest,” supported the school and its mission but also had very high expectations for their children. Of those goals, the Holy Grail was that they would attend a “good college,” which over time came to mean admission to an Ivy League college; or to one of the so-called “public Ivies” (e.g., UVa, UNC, U of Texas–Austin); or to what I’ve seen referred to as the “Kudzu League” (private southern universities like Emory, Duke, Vanderbilt); or to the state’s flagship institutions, the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech.

To our seniors, their peers, and/or their parents, not to secure admission to such fine institutions could be seen as failure. To help our charges along this yellow-brick road of educational excellence, the school hired a high-powered faculty; made use of seemingly every standardized test; was a regional pioneer in the Advanced Placement (AP) Program; and eventually employed a veritable platoon of college counselors comfortably ensconced in their own wing. (And, for the tuition they paid, our parents had every right to expect such a “full-service” approach to ensuring their kids’ futures, or at least that was the “company line.”)

When I began teaching there, the school was so different from the high school I had attended that I felt I had landed on Mars. But I adjusted, and came to like my job, my students, and the school very much–its ways became my ways, at least most of the time. One of my favorite events each year was the annual “reunion weekend,” when alums were invited back to campus for a lavish celebration, of the school in general and their classes in particular, to reconnect with classmates and faculty, dispose them favorably towards the school’s Annual Fund, and, some day (if they stayed in Atlanta), towards the idea of enrolling their children.

During all that time, I seldom thought of my own high school, which I had not visited since graduation. (Though I attended a reunion in the 1980s, we did not set foot in the school.) Then, earlier this year, I learned that my class was planning a 50th reunion. Would I be interested in attending? Yes, but. . . . Newark (Delaware) High School was notwhere I had labored between 1973 and 2010, and I couldn’t help but wonder how that long work experience might color my memories of what “high school” had been, or was supposed to be, like.

* * * * *

In 1962, Newark High School was the “only game in town,” educationally speaking. Because it was the senior high school, in the state’s third-largest city, NHS had to be all things to all people. We had college prep classes, but we also had business, typing, and shop classes, among others. The school NHS was “prepping” most of its college-bound students for was the University of Delaware, also located in Newark, a couple of miles from NHS. Our faculty was a good one, by the standards of the era, and, like the place I later worked, included quite a few teachers who had been at the school for decades, including a handfull who had taught my mother. I had some of the best teachers I’ve ever encountered while attending NHS, as well as a couple of the worst.

The Class of 1962 was, according to social scientists, one of the last to graduate before the “Baby Boomers” began leaving high school, to shape (or warp?) our nation and its culture. We didn’t have many standardized tests, at least in part because the expectations of our Depression-scarred parents were very different from later ones. One of my classmates told me that he remembered a talk by our principal, emphasizing how “exceptional” the Class of 1962 was, because a quarter (or a third–I don’t remember the exact figure, but it was low) of our 262 members planned to attend college. To help in that quest, we had one part-time “college counsellor,” whose primary job was to be the school’s “guidance counsellor.”

In the private high school where I spent my career, on the other hand, we had, in addition to the aforementioned gaggle of “college counselors,” two full-time “guidance counselors,” one “class advisor”for boys and one for girls in each high school grade, and “homeroom teachers,” all of whom were supposed to have their fingers on the pulse of a segment of the roughly 800-member student body, including about 200 seniors.

Following graduation, the members of the Class of 1962 went their separate ways: some to college (the U. of D. for most), where they graduated (eventually); others to college but without graduating, despite several attempts to do so; many, with no plans to attend college, got on with their lives, working in the “real world,” marrying, having children. But, whatever their future plans, the males in the Class of 1962 confronted the looming shadow of military service, and this was the era of the Vietnam War. Some entered the service upon graduation from high school, while others were able to postpone the (almost) inevitable (remember compulsory military service via the draft? anyone?) until after college, provided that they kept their GPAs high enough to maintain their deferments. This was “real life” in the America of the early 1960s.

* * * * *

Perhaps one-third of the surviving members of NHS’s Class of 1962 attended our 50th reunion. The day began with a tour of the school, followed by lunch in the same cafeteria where we had eaten “back in the day,” though it has been replaced as the primary lunch spot since we graduated. During the tour, I only vaguely remembered the cafeteria, and even the auditorium where graduation was held seemed unfamiliar. However, simply stepping into the “old” gym (like the 1962 cafeteria, retained, but superceded by a more modern facility) conjured up a series of unhappy memories, because, for me, P.E. class was a constant source of frustration and embarrassment.

In general, though, there have been so many changes since we left that the school I attended between 1958 and 1962 was almost unrecognizable. Yet, change was limited by the relatively small size of the lot on which the school is located. Expansion for Newark High meant construction of new rooms (large, medium, small) embedded within the existing structure, including a library that “floated” between two floors. And, when those alterations proved inadequate for the growing student body, the school district built new high schools.

Our banquet was held in the Newark Volunteer Fire Department’s social hall. The reunion committee had put up a display of teachers who have passed away, and there were few surprises there, because many had seemed ancient when we were at NHS. Another display revealed that about 10% of of our classmates have died. Their pictures were their yearbook photos–no matter when they died, they were preserved for us in black and white, as they looked at about age 18. Among the departed was my old P.E. wrestling buddy (because we each weighed in at 200 pounds or so, and matches were arranged by weight). He died at about 25, of a congenital heart defect that evidently buckled under the strain of working two jobs, the night shift at an auto plant and on a sanitation truck during the day. Another feature of the dinner was an illustrated presentation showing what Main Street in Newark had been like in 1962 (yes, we did have one, and, yes, it was the “main” street in the town).

I enjoyed seeing so many classmates again, including some I had not set eyes on for half a century. I ran across one who insisted that the cliques that had made the shoals of social life in our high school so difficult to navigate had finally disappeared, and I had to agree. I saw no evidence of cliques that night. Instead, we seemed to be a bunch of older folks enjoying each other’s company. I detected no feeling of, “look what I’ve done since 1962″; instead, the vibe was more like, “isn’t it great that we’ve all made it to 2012, in one piece, more or less?” There was life after high school, and most of us seemed to think that it had been worth living and that NHS had played a significant role in getting us ready for the post-high school world.

What made this event possible was the work and dedication of a cadre of classmates who remained in the “greater Newark” area (no snickering, now) after graduation. They organized the reunion and pelted us with e-mails lining up attendees. Without these dedicated members of the NHS Class of 1962, the reunion would not have occurred, and I thank them for their work.

* * * * *

In a sense, looking at Newark High School in 1962 and the school where I spent my teaching career is like comparing apples and oranges. Fifty years ago, NHS was a decent public school at a time when parental and student expectations were limited. Its mission was to prepare all of us, regardless of our–or our parents’–aspirations, for the “real world.” For only a minority of our class did that world involve attending college, or even thinking about doing so. For most of my classmates, the “real world” started with getting a job, getting married, serving in the military.

The “prep school” where I worked has grown impressively over the sixty years of its existence, though without outlandishly increasing the size of the student body. Rather, it has constructed buildings–a new elementary school, junior high, gymnasium, arts center, science building, and so forth, because it had the space–and the money–to do so. The end result was not so much a “school” as a “campus,” one which blew the minds even of visitors who worked in colleges or universities. The school became one of the best day schools in the nation.

Especially early in my tenure, I remember thinking that our academic standards were so high, the curriculum so challenging, that I would not have done well there academically. Every member of a graduating class is expected to attend college, and virtually all of them do, even if they don’t always graduate from the “perfect college” at which they started. Thanks to events over which they had no control, graduates of my school no longer have to worry, as NHS’s Class of 1962 did, about military service–unless they choose to attend, say, West Point, the Naval Academy, or the Air Force Academy. Otherwise, in the brave new world of the all-volunteer military, it’s on to college and then the civilian “fast track” for most of our alums.

What the two high schools of my acquaintance have in common is that they did yeoman work preparing their graduates for the world beyond twelfth grade. What’s changed, of course, is what that post-high school world looks like and how schools now go about preparing for it. NHS readied me for college, laying a foundation that ultimately enabled me to teach at a very different high school, in a vastly changed “real world” from the one my classmates and I had entered back in 1962.

I am grateful to Newark High School for the education I received–for that series of elderly English teachers who taught me about language and how to write, lessons seldom improved upon in later years; for that History teacher who became a role model when I began developing my classroom persona; for that Chemistry teacher who actually made the subject fun. And I’ll be forever thankful for the opportunity afforded by that other, more recent “high school, ” which allowed me to help prepare several generations of the city’s young people for the world outside our gates.

* * * * * *

For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

Posted in American History, Civil Rights Movement, Cold War, Current Events, History, Newark (Del.) High School Class of 1962, Retirement, Teaching | Tagged Newark (Del.) High School Class of 1962 50th Reunion, Prep school teaching with a PhD, Teaching, WP Longform | 2 Comments

The Uses of History in Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” (Adventures in Interdisciplinary Land, 1)

Posted on August 1, 2012 by georgelamplugh

[Note: Of one thing I am convinced: There is nothing new in the world of “Education.” Rather, the same ideas, usually with different names and/or ever greater reliance on technology, keep coming ’round, like some sort of bizarre, quasi-“intellectual” carousel on which all teachers are supposed to ride, until told by those above them in the administrative food chain that the time has come to dismount and try a different horse, or another merry-go-round. As that sterling academician, Lawrence Peter (“Yogi”) Berra, liked to say, “It’s deja vu all over again.” In my school we had a traditional curriculum when I arrived in the 1970s, then went heavily into electives, followed by “back to basics,” after which we developed a rather awkward modus vivendi featuring survey courses but with just enough electives to complicate almost beyond belief scheduling classes, especially for juniors and seniors.

A hardy perennial in this game of educational musical chairs, arriving like clockwork on the curriculum carousel every decade or so–and greeted each time, by Those Who Made The Bigger Bucks at any rate, with dewy-eyed enthusiasm–stressed “interdisciplinary” learning. We might select an important current event and present it to our students in an “interdisciplinary” fashion, for example. Another approach was to select a play for presentation to the school community, then ask representatives of several academic departments to use their special skills to help throw light on the dramatic production. For a while we also had an “Explore” program, in which we introduced a different culture or civilization to our students annually, looking in an interdisciplinary way at customs, language, music, dance, food, geography, history, and government.

For a time, we actually offered (for seniors) two interdisciplinary courses involving History, one stressing community service and Christian ethics, the other American Studies, but these perished when the economy tanked and “interdisciplinary learning,” at least of that sort, became too costly. And then there was an English/History semester elective on Shakespeare’s “history plays” and the History behind them. I was a sucker for these cooperative endeavors and did my bit, when asked, to try to make the study of History more “relevant,” as we used to say in the ’60s, by putting it into a broader, interdisciplinary, context. Here is an instance, a look at the role played by the discipline of History in Tom Stoppard’s play, “Arcadia.”]

* * * * *

George III, the last king of America, was on the throne of Great Britain for sixty years (1760-1820). Beginning in 1765, he suffered bouts of temporary insanity. Things got so bad that in 1788 Parliament passed a regency act empowering the king’s son, the Prince of Wales, to take over the throne while his father was incapacitated, but George III recovered within a year. Nevertheless, the mere possibility that a “Prince Regent” might occupy the throne again before his father died affected political alignments in England for the next thirty years. George III became blind in 1809 and hopelessly insane in 1811, so his son ruled as Prince Regent from the latter date until the King’s death in 1820, at which time he ascended the throne as George IV.

As Prince of Wales, the future George IV was known for profligacy and extravagance. In 1785, he secretly married a Catholic, but two years later, in order to get money to pay his debts, he allowed Parliament to declare the marriage illegal, which it was anyway under laws going back at least to the Glorious Revolution. The Prince needed money again by 1795, so he agreed to marry his German cousin, only to become estranged from her a year later, after the birth of their daughter. The Prince Regent’s conduct alienated many “average Britons,” but well-born Englishmen may have modeled their less than stellar moral conduct on that of the Prince Regent, which gave to the period of the Regency a well-earned reputation for sexual license and immorality.

Still, all of this “real history” has little bearing on Tom Stoppard’s play, nor do the great political issues of the time, such as the long war with Napoleonic France, repressive laws passed by Parliament to keep commoners in their place, or the position of Catholics in England and the related issue of the future of Ireland. There are, however, a couple of broader trends that find their way into “Arcadia”: the most obvious is the sometimes bizarre cultural movement known as Romanticism; another is the Industrial Revolution, symbolized in the play by the chugging steam engine heard offstage.

There are two characters “doing history” in Stoppard’s play. Hannah Jarvis qualifies as a historian, but, according to Bernard Nightingale, just barely, for, as he reminds her early on, she writes “popular history,” books that large numbers of people actually buy and read, as opposed to dull academic tomes of interest only to other specialists. The author of a widely-reviewed book on Lady Caroline Lamb and Lord Byron, Hannah is spending time at Sidley Park trying to unravel the mystery of the “hermit,” whom she sees as a kind of living metaphor for the transition from the Enlightenment to the Age of Romanticism.

Bernard Nightingale, on the other hand, is a professor, or “don,” at a college in Sussex. In the best tradition of such “academics,” Bernard does not take his teaching responsibilities all that seriously. Rather, he is searching for the elusive break that will give his career a much-needed jolt, bring him his “fifteen minutes of fame,” and he thinks he’s found it in the copy of Ezra Chater’s poem, Couch of Eros, with three mysterious letters inside, that he carries with him to Sidley Park. Make no mistake about it: Bernard has a definite agenda when he arrives. He hopes to find at the Coverly estate proof that Lord Byron fought a duel there in 1809 and fled the country as a result.

So, because he’s interested in what he thinks is a hitherto undiscovered aspect of Byron’s life, rather than in his poetry, Bernard is also “doing history,” whether he admits it or not. The problem, as we soon learn, is that Bernard has already committed the cardinal sin of the feckless historian: he has become convinced that his hypothesis, that Byron killed the poet Chater in a duel, is true, and he is only prepared to find and use evidence that will confirm it.

Playwright Tom Stoppard manipulates the sources, the raw material of the historian, very cleverly indeed in “Arcadia.” The ones he introduces are mostly primary: letters; the Couch of Eros; game books; garden books; Thomasina’s math primer and drawings; even an article from Cornhill Magazine in 1860 that refers briefly to the hermit. Stoppard’s handling of the three letters hidden in Chater’s poem is particularly deft. Because Septimus Hodge discarded the “covers” (early 19th-century equivalents of envelopes), there is no way to be sure for whom the missives were intended (unless, like Bernard, the investigator already has made up his mind). Moreover, in Scene Six (pp.70-72), Stoppard has Septimus burn a letter to himself from Byron, and he has Lady Croom destroy two letters from Septimus, one to herself and the other to Thomasina. If these three letters had been preserved, they might have saved Bernard a lot of embarrassment.

The main problem I have with Stoppard’s handling of the sources is that it’s all just a little too neat. By the final scene, Bernard has of course gotten his comeuppance, and then, after he leaves, Stoppard has the mute (perhaps idiot savant?) Gus Coverly give Hannah the last piece of evidence she needs to identify the hermit, Thomasina’s drawing of Septimus and Plautus. My experience with historical research is that questions we ask of the distant past are seldom answered so fully.

In a sense, what Stoppard does here is to validate Bernard’s early claim, which Hannah seems to share with regard to her own research: the elusive “smoking gun” exists; all he and Hannah must do is find it. Well, Bernard clearly stopped looking too soon, satisfied that he had all the evidence he needed, largely because he could shape (or warp) the documents that had come to light so that they validated his sensational hypothesis. Now, there comes a time in every research project when the historian realizes that he has exhausted all of the sources he knows about. It’s at that point that the researcher puts his conclusions–and any remaining questions–in writing. Sometimes this process works well enough to make a worthwhile book or article, but at other times the gaps between what the historian can actually know or reasonably assume are too wide. When that happens, the historian has several options:

1. He or she can of course give up, which most are reluctant to do. This is probably what Bernard should have done, but that would have removed much of the humor from the play. Many years ago, I was in roughly the same position as Bernard. I was determined to prove that a certain person was the author of a pamphlet published anonymously in 1784. Unfortunately, all the evidence I found was circumstantial; moreover, I kept tripping over hints that inclined me to think that the author of the piece could be a different person. So, I gave up, but I still have all my notes. Maybe someday. . . .

2. The historian can continue the search for evidence. Sometimes this quest is rewarded, but at other times this, in a way, is the same as giving up. A historian I admire very much retired without publishing a book he’d been working on for much of his career. The reason: he was a perfectionist, and he refused to publish so long as there might be letters out there he hadn’t yet seen. This was the course Hannah pursued, but, unlike my friend, her patience eventually was rewarded, thanks to Gus.

3. The historian can look at the material he has from a different angle and try to reshape it into something more plausible. This is what Bernard briefly considers doing after he is, um, “screwed” by a dahlia. I found myself in this position while working on an article about one of Georgia’s first U.S. Senators. I intended to make his election to the Senate the climax of the piece, but the sources were remarkably silent on exactly how he’d managed to secure his victory. So, instead, I decided to focus on why his major opponent lost the race (which is hardly the same thing as explaining why my guy won, but, hey, it worked, and the article was published).

4. Finally, the historian can publish the work as is, hoping of course that nothing turns up later to make him or her look foolish. This is the course the ambitious Bernard took, but, it is important to note, he did so because he thought he had “proved,” to his own satisfaction at least, what he had been determined to show from the outset, and he paid the price for his obtuseness.

I believe one could assemble quite a workable approach to the study of History from Stoppard’s play. For example, I’ve never seen a better description of the sometimes haphazard way in which primary sources are preserved than Septimus’s line on p.38: “We shed as we pick up, like travellers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.” As a teacher of history, and a historian, I share Valentine Coverly’s view (on p.47) that “The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.” I also think that Bernard is onto something when (on p.50) he describes the “gut instinct” that is part of every historian’s makeup, as “The certainty for which there is no back-reference. Because time is reversed. Tock, tick goes the universe and then recovers itself, but it was enough, you were in there and you bloody know.” And, finally, every historian worth his or her salt must agree with Hannah (p.75) that “Comparing what we’re looking for misses the point. It’s wanting to know that makes us matter.”

* * * * * *

For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

Posted in History, Interdisciplinary Work, Research, Teaching, Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" | 3 Comments

The Mississippi Delta and the Blues (Blues Stories, 6)

Posted on July 9, 2012 by georgelamplugh

Geographers define a “delta” as the triangular-shaped fertile area created by siltation at the mouth of a river. But, when Blues fans refer to “the Delta,” “the land where the Blues began,” we mean “the fertile alluvial plain shared by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers,” rather than the area farther south at New Orleans. That Delta is about 160 miles long and 50 miles wide at its widest, encompassing all of 10 Mississippi counties and parts of 8 others. (Encyc. Of S. Culture, p.571) Greenville, Miss., native and journalist David Cohn once wrote: “The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg.” (Cohn, Mississippi Delta and The World, p.x)

Mississippi Delta

Both extremely flat and incredibly fertile, the Delta was sparsely settled when the Civil War began and was little better than a frontier region in 1880, mostly devoted to timberland. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, an extensive network of levees and a modern railway system “opened the plantation South’s last frontier for full scale settlement and development.” (Encyc. Of S. Culture, p.571) Naturally, the Delta attracted ambitious, hard-bitten whites who developed vast cotton plantations, established the business and professional infrastructures in Delta towns, and supervised work on the levees and the railroads. For our purposes, though, the most important thing about the opening of the Delta was that it attracted throngs of young African American males in search of economic opportunity. As one woman told an interviewer in the early 1940s, “The cause of my father and my relatives coming here was the talk of people who came down here and returned with big money.” (Wald, Escaping the Delta, p.87)

What these newcomers found was hard labor and some economic opportunity at first, but as the whites tightened their grip on the region’s economic and social systems, the reality of life for Delta Blacks changed for the worst, as Elijah Wald explains:

What Mississippi was to the rest of the country, the Delta was to Mississippi. Though it makes up less than a sixth of the state’s area, the Delta accounted for over a third of the lynchings reported between 1900 and 1930, and was legendary for towns with signposts warning black people not to be caught within their borders after sundown. By the 1920s, the region was ruled by a sharecropping system that tied black farmers to the land in a form of economic bondage that at times seemed little different from slavery. (Wald, Escaping The Delta, p.84)

A constant factor in Delta life was the Mississippi River. As David Cohn noted, “The People of the Delta fear God and the Mississippi River, for God and the river are immortal and immemorial.” (Cohn, Mississippi Delta and The World, p.92) Planter William Alexander Percy added that, “With us when you speak of ‘the river,’ though there are many, you mean always the same one, the great river, the shifting unappeasable god of the country, feared and lovely, the Mississippi.” (Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, p.4) The great river and its weather shaped life in the cotton fields and along the levees and railroad lines. David Cohn remembered:

The earth of the Delta in which I lived is a violent earth. Its fields are fecund to the touch of the plow. They seem to cry out for fulfillment of life under the blazing suns of summer. Heat then stands upon the Delta during long days and nights. It stings the flesh. It opens cracks in the fields. It drains men’s minds and wearies their bodies. A clear sky suddenly blackens with cloud, rolls with thunder, crackles with lightning, and tumultuous rains flood the steaming earth. Then they are gone. Now the trees shine richly green, the dust-gray mules gleam black, the ditches gurgle with water. Soon the soil is dry again, white clouds float high in the sky, jaybirds shriek from thorn trees, buzzards circle loftily against the blue, and men once more walk the endless cotton rows of the Delta. (Cohn, The Mississippi Delta and The World, p.5)

David Cohn

The Delta also had a significant impact on the music we know as the Blues. A lot of Blues songs concern hard work, weather, and other challenges posed by life there. Listen, for example, to Son House, “Dry Spell Blues,” or to Charley Patton, “Mississippi Boll Weavil Blues.” According to historian James C. Cobb,

In many ways the image of the bluesman was comparable to that of the boll weevil, a destructive little bug who brought ruin to many cotton-growing areas of the South and set off near-panic among planters in the Delta. The popularity of songs such as Charley Patton’s “Mississippi Bo Weavil [sic] Blues” suggested that, despite its potential for destroying them along with whites, the boll weevil’s capacity to bring ruin to the white man won it the admiration of blacks, while its endless wandering in search of a home struck a familiar chord as well. (Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, p. 291)

Boll Weevil

Blues man Son House’s “Levee Camp Moan” graphically describes life in one of the levee camps, whose workers were charged with limiting the power of the Mississippi to flood the countryside.

Levee Camp

Yet, despite the levee system, flooding often wreaked havoc on the lives and livelihoods of Delta residents. This was especially true of the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. William Alexander Percy, who lived through that flood and helped direct efforts in Greenville to contain it, remembered it this way:

The 1927 flood was a torrent ten feet deep the size of Rhode Island; it was thirty-six hours coming and four months going; it was deep enough to drown a man, swift enough to upset a boat, and lasting enough to cancel a crop year. The only islands in it were eight or ten tiny Indian mounds and the narrow spoil-banks of a few drainage canals. Between the torrent and the river ran the levee, dry on the land side and on the top. The south Delta became seventy-five hundred square miles of mill-race in which one hundred and twenty thousand human beings and one hundred thousand animals squirmed and bobbed. (Percy, Lanterns on the Levee, p.249)

Another person who survived the Great Flood was Blues man Charley Patton, who sang about it in “High Water Everywhere.”

Great Flood of 1927

Life for black residents of the Delta also presented a host of other challenges, which can be grouped under the general heading of “Dealing with The Man.” As Blues historian Elijah Wald described it:

Once in debt, [Blacks] could be bound to work off the money owed, and the legal system often functioned as an adjunct to the labor system. . . . And that is not to mention all the labor done by convicts, who built much of the levee and railroad system, and were also sometimes leased out to plantations as unpaid farmhands. It is often suggested that it was this vicious oppression, and the misery that went along with it, that fueled the deep emotional power of the area’s great blues singers. (Wald, Escaping The Delta, pp.84-85)

Once again, Blues singers were ahead of modern scholars, writing and performing songs about law enforcement officials and prisons in the Delta. Consider, for example, Charley Patton, “High Sheriff Blues”; and Bukka White, “District Attorney Blues” and “Parchman Farm Blues.” White had done time in the Delta’s Parchman Farm, a 20,000 acre prison complex opened in 1905. It was created as a “reform” during the administration of Governor James K. Vardaman, a notorious racist whose nickname was the “White Chief.” Parchman Farm earned a profit for the state—the convicts were provided with a bare subsistence; they raised cotton for sale; and the guards cost practically nothing—they were “trusties,” or armed convicts put in charge of the other convicts. By the early twentieth century, the corruption and brutality of the convict-leasing system had become too much even for hardened Mississippi whites to stomach. (This description of Parchman is based on David Oshinsky’s fine book, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice.)

Parchman Farm

Blues singers were the chief entertainers for African Americans in the Delta. Some of these performers possessed ferocious talent that they and their fans attributed to a bargain made with the Devil, while “standin’ at the crossroads.” According to Delta Blues man Tommy Johnson:

If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to . . . where the crossroad is. . . . Be sure to get there, just a little ‘fore twelve o’clock that night. . . . You have to go by yourself and be sitting there playing a piece. A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned how to play everything I want. (Quoted in Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, p.288)

Blues man Robert Johnson sang about his encounter with the Devil in his most famous song, “Cross Road Blues.” And, speaking of roads, there were two very important ones in the Delta, Highways 49 and 61, for they, along with the railroads, led out of the Delta to Chicago, where many Blues performers would eventually find the opportunities that had eluded them in Mississippi. Mississippi Fred McDowell recorded an homage to one of these escape routes, “61 Highway,” while Howlin’ Wolf immortalized the other in “Highway 49.”

The stereotypical venue for a Blues performer in the Delta was a roadside “juke joint,” a very primitive black club where anything could happen and usually did. As Son House recalled:

“Them country balls were rough!. . . They were critical, man! They’d start off good, you know. Everybody happy, dancing, and then they’d start to getting louder and louder. The women would be dipping that snuff and swallowing that snuff spit along with that corn whiskey; and they’d start to mixing fast, and oh, brother! They’d start something then.” (Quoted in Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, p.282)

Juke Joint

And just what did the music sound like in such a setting? Well, use your imagination, and Son House’s description, while listening to “Ramblin’ Kid Blues,” by a group called the Son Simms Four, featuring Muddy Waters on guitar, recorded by John Lomax at the Stovall Plantation in the Delta in late July 1942.

In addition to these specific references to how life in the Delta shaped the Blues, an occasional performer waxed philosophical, trying to capture the nature of existence in the worst area of the Jim Crow South. One such performer was Willie Brown. In his song, “Future Blues,” Brown suggests, according to Blues historian Robert Palmer, “the atmosphere of existential extremity and free-floating dread that seems so prevalent in Delta blues.” (Booklet accompanying Blues Masters, Vol.8: Mississippi Delta Blues, pp.1-2) Listen especially for the chilling lines “Can’t tell my future, I can’t tell my past/Lord, it seems like every minute sure gonna be my last.”

DISCOGRAHY

Son House, “Dry Spell Blues, Part 2,” Masters of the Delta Blues: The Friends of Charlie Patton. (Yazoo 2002)

Charley Patton, “Mississippi Boll Weavil Blues”; “High Water Everywhere”; “High Sheriff Blues,” Charlie Patton: Father of the Delta Blues. (Yazoo 2010)

Son House, “Levee Camp Moan,” Son House, Father of the Delta Blues: The Complete 1966 Sessions. (Columbia C2K 48867)

Bukka White, “District Attorney Blues”; “Parchman Farm Blues,” The Complete Bukka White. (Columbia CK 52782)

Robert Johnson, “Cross Road Blues,” Blues Masters, Vol. 8: Mississippi Delta Blues. (Rhino R2 71130)

Mississippi Fred McDowell, “61 Highway,” I do not play no rock ‘n’ roll. (Fuel 2000: 302 061 158 2)

Howlin’ Wolf, “Highway 49,” The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions. (Chess/MCA CHD-9297)

Son Simms Four, “Rambling Kid Blues,” Muddy Waters: The Complete Plantation Recordings. (Chess CHD-9344)

Willie Brown, “Future Blues,” Blues Masters, Vol. 8: Mississippi Delta Blues. (Rhino R2 71130)

RECOMMENDED READING

Barry, John M. Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America. (Touchstone, 1998)

Cobb, James C., editor. The Mississippi Delta and the World: The Memoirs of David C. Cohn. (LSU Press, 1995)

Cobb, James C. The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity. (Oxford UP, 1994)

Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. (Pantheon, 1993)

Oshinsky, David M. “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. (Free Press, 1997)

Percy, William Alexander. Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son. (LSU Press, 1998)

Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. (Amistad, 2004)

Wilson, Charles Reagan, and William Ferriss, coeditors. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. (University of North Carolina Press, 1989)

Woodruff, Nan Elizabeth. American Congo: The African American Freedom Struggle in the Delta. (Harvard UP, 2003)

* * * * * *

For those interested in reading more of my reflections on history, here are links to my books on the subject:

Rancorous Enmities and Blind Partialities: Parties and Factions in Georgia, 1807-1845 (University Press of America, 2015)

In Pursuit of Dead Georgians: One Historian’s Excursions into the History of His Adopted State (iUniverse, 2015)

Politics on the Periphery: Factions and Parties in Georgia, 1783-1806 (University of Delaware Press, 1986)

Posted in "Charley Patton", Alan Lomax, American History, Delta Blues, History, Muddy Waters, Research, Robert Johnson, Son House, Southern (Georgia) History, Southern History, The Blues | 4 Comments

Retired But Not Shy

The News from Indian Country: The Cherokee Phoenix, 1828-1834, Part II (In Pursuit of Dead Georgians, 9)

2012 in Review

Getting Right With Spielberg’s “Lincoln”

Teaching Prep School With a PhD: Is It For You?

The News from Indian Country–The Cherokee Phoenix, 1828-1834, Part I (In Pursuit of Dead Georgians, 8)

Echoes of the Scopes Trial, 1925-2000 (Adventures in Interdisciplinary Land, 2)

Assault and Battery on the Mother Tongue–“Business-Speak”

High School, Now–and Then: Reflections on a 50th Reunion

The Uses of History in Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia” (Adventures in Interdisciplinary Land, 1)

The Mississippi Delta and the Blues (Blues Stories, 6)

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