Peace in the longhouse

Many today-in-history sites note that on this date the Iroquois Confederation was established.

Map by R. A. Nonenmacher

Not likely, say the anthropologists – first, it was a League, not a confederation, and in Iroquois history that makes a difference.  Second, archeological evidence suggests that no league could have existed before 1450.

Whichever, it is probably true that a peace pact was made at the instigation of The Great Peacemaker, Deganawidah, and Hiawatha.  As a result, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga. Cayuga and Seneca all agreed to the Great Law of Peace which then ruled the Haudenosaunee – that was the real name of the tribes the French called the Iroquois – until after the American revolution.

It made them stronger and more able to push the Algonquins out of various desirable hunting territories, which they enthusiastically did.  The map shows that the Haudenosaunee pretty much ruled the northeast by the time the Europeans started fighting over the same territory.

Historians are also trying to dispel the myth that the Iroquois style of government had anything to do with the U.S. constitution, asserting that there is no evidence the founding fathers were familiar with Iroquois ways.  (I’ll go with the influence of William Penn – see below – and anyway, it all comes from John Locke.)

And if the Iroquois had had anything to do with the Constitution, things would be very different and that’s really the most interesting thing about them.  Iroquois culture was matrilinear.  Women had property rights equal to men’s, chose the members of the Great Council of sachems, had veto power over council decisions and had their own councils.  If a sachem failed to represent the wishes of his clanswomen, they could demote him.  Likewise, upon marriage, a man moved in with his wife’s family and if things didn’t work out, the wife could order him out of the house, thereby divorcing him.

Good stuff.  Haudenosaunee, btw, means ‘people of the longhouse.’

* * *

Patty Hearst posing in front of the SLA logo.

An event we can verify for this date is the sentencing in 1978 of William and Emily Harris for the kidnapping of Patty Hearst,  the only political kidnapping ever to occur in the United States.

The Harrises were heads of the Symbionese Liberation Army after a great shoot-out in Los Angeles which killed the original leaders and several others.  It was, btw, a fair fight in terms of fire power though a handful of SLA were surrounded by 4oo LAPD, State Police, FBI and the Fire Department.  Thousands of rounds were fired by both sides – one of the largest shoot-outs in history – with more than 9,000 rounds fired.  No police were hit.

And Patty Hearst had already been convicted for her part in an SLA bank robbery.  The jury wasn’t buying that new and novel argument about ‘the Stockholm Syndrome,’ in which the victim, as a result of brainwashing, identifies with the victimizer.  Her sentence was commuted by Jimmy Carter and she was pardoned by Bill Clinton.  All the members of the SLA have died or been released from prison – only founding member Joseph Remiro is still incarcerated.

“Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them.”

William_Penn at 22.

In 1682, on this day William Penn left England to set up his recently acquired colony in the New World.

History tells us that Penn got his charter and set up his halcyon state on good Quaker principles and lived happily ever after.  But his life was, in fact, chaotic, dramatic, intense, uplifting and tragic – and it mirrored in most respects his times.

England during Cromwell and the Restoration was a seething mass of religious and political fervor.  As the government swung back and forth between puritans and royalists, dissenters of every stripe appeared, along with new political movements and philosophies.

Cromwell exiled the Penns to their family estates in Ireland and young William met a Quaker preacher who deeply influenced his thinking about religion.  His attraction to the religion without a hierarchy was part youthful rebellion and part religious fervor, but his convictions ran deep.  With the Restoration, the Penns returned to London and William was sent to Oxford.  There he chafed under the religious restrictions and finally was expelled.  His father was furious – they argued and the enraged senior Penn drove his son from the house.

Lady Penn got them speaking to each other again and it was decided to send William to Paris.  When he came back two years later, he was more of a Quaker (and also apparently a snappy dresser).  He began to attend meetings and at one point preached in the street in order to challenge a law against it.

The Lord Mayor of London was the judge at his trial, refused to let him see the charges against him and ordered the jury to find him guilty.  In fact, that plucky jury found him not guilty, so the Mayor/judge threw them in jail along with Penn, telling them “You shall go together and bring in another verdict, or you shall starve,” an admonition that got the case a lot of attention and resulted in affirmation of writs of habeas corpus and jury nullification.

Penn’s father threw him out of the house again and he found shelter with various Quaker families and traveled frequently with George Fox.  The fact that so many dissenters were filling the jails is thought to be the reason King James agreed to Penn’s plan to get them all out of England.  He granted Penn sole proprietorship of 45,000 square miles of good land in the new world, making Penn the largest private (not royal) landowner in the world.

Before he left, the thoughtful Penn spent months creating a ‘Framework of Government’ for his new colony.  In essence it created a democratic system much like the Quaker meeting and in order to keep it flexible, he introduced the idea of amendments, because, he said, “Governments, like clocks, go from the motion men give them.”

Ben Franklin later read it and used many of Penn’s ideas for the Constitution, singling out the concept of amendments as particularly useful.

So much more to the story – I’m looking for a good biography.  I’d like to know more about how, by signing a paper without reading it, Penn lost the entire state of Pennsylvania to a swindler, and how his children turned out to be such a colossal disappointment and why he died penniless…

The last Yahi

Ishi

On this date in 1911, a starving man wandered into the northern California town of Oroville.  He appeared to speak no English and was taken into protective custody by the sheriff.

It was determined eventually that the man was a Yahi Indian, the last, in fact, of his tribe.

Alfred Kroebel, an anthropologist at UC Berkeley, became the man’s de facto guardian. and took him to San Francisco, where he was housed on the campus.  Kroebel gave the man the name ‘Ishi,’ the Yahi word for man.

Ishi had no name, he later explained, because there was no one left in his tribe to perform a naming ceremony.

The Yahi were part of the Yana group of Native Californians, numbering before Europeans about 1,500 total.  Of Yahi there were an estimated 4oo, until gold was discovered and things went downhill pretty fast from there.  About a hundred survived until the 1860s, when two massacres decimated them even more.  Survivors hid in the canyons of the northeast but gradually died out.

Ishi, made famous by journalists and ultimately written about at length by Kroebel, had hidden from Europeans until starvation drove him into Oroville.  He became an invaluable resource for Kroebel, and for Edward Sapir, a linguist who interviewed him extensively about the Yahi language.  There is no evidence that he was anything but content living at the university, but he contracted tuberculosis and died in 1916.

* * *

Five years ago today the eye of Katrina made its first landfall, hitting Buras-Triumph, Louisiana, a small town in Plaquemines Parish east of New Orleans.  Buras wasn’t much surprised, I imagine.  In the middle of a peninsula that extends into the Gulf, it had been demolished  by hurricanes in  1893, 1901, 1915, by Betsy in 1965 and by Camille in 1969.  Katrina actually did less damage than the last two.  More timid souls might seriously consider moving to higher ground, but the three thousand or so intrepid inhabitants are once again rebuilding – the water tower was one of first structures to be rebuilt.

Bouras-Triumph, LA, after Katrina. Photo from the EPA.

‘The world is watching’

It was a given for a lot of people that after the police riot at the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968, heads would roll, Mayor Richard Daley would spend a lot of time apologizing and things would change.

Chicago, 1968

To those people – many of whom were outside the Hilton Hotel chanting ‘the world is watching!’ – it came as quite a shock that most of the country applauded Daley and his police department.  Somehow, the sight – on live television, mind you – of innocent passersby being tear-gassed in front of the hotel, however unpleasant, was attributed to collateral damage in the righteous effort to teach those damn hippies a lesson.

The riot started when a teen attending the legal demonstration held by the Yippies at Lincoln Park took down an American flag.  The police standing by waded through the crowd of 10,000 and began beating the boy and chaos erupted.  The leaders of the demo told everyone to move out of the park, so that if and when there was tear gas, it would be spread all over the city.

And that’s exactly what happened.  There was so much tear gas that even candidate Hubert Humphrey detected it in his suite at the Hilton.

And most of the country was also on the side of law and order during the trial that followed.  The Chicago Seven were found guilty of crossing state lines to incite a riot after a courtroom drama that read like a movie script – one scene featured defendant Bobby Seale handcuffed, gagged and chained to a chair.  The other defendants – Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Dave Dellinger, Rennie Davis, John Froines and Lee Weiner – were constantly disruptive.  Hoffman and Rubin showed up one day in judicial robes.  Ordered by Judge Julius Hoffman to remove them, the pair shrugged off their robes to reveal police uniforms beneath.

Sentence was passed in February, 1970, but reversed on appeal in 1972 and the Department of Justice declined to retry the seven.

Eight Chicago police officers had been indicted, seven were acquitted and charges against the eighth were dismissed.

The way we were

Sixty years ago today, Jean Muir was fired from the radio show The Aldrich Family.

The Aldrich Family was family entertainment, after all, and General Mills just couldn’t risk having a known Communist sympathizer in the cast.

Jean Muir had been a stage actress, gone to Hollywood for a few disappointing years, then returned to New York and the theater.  How her Communist leanings came to be known isn’t clear, but it was obvious she must be un-American.  It was right there in black and white, after all, in Red Channels.

Jean Muir was listed along with Gypsy Rose Lee and Leonard Bernstein and Orson Welles and about 150 other people who were highly suspect.

The purpose of Red Channels was to expose the plot by the communist party to use radio and television to present ‘commercially sponsored dramatic series [to be] used as sounding boards, particularly with reference to current issues in which the Party is critically interested: “academic freedom,” “civil rights,” “peace,” the H-bomb, etc….’

It’s not often you get to see ‘peace’ in quotes like that.

Red Channels did not present much in the way of evidence, but it also carefully avoided libel.  It merely listed groups and activities it considered subversive that the listees had participated in.  Burgess Meredith, for instance, had been chairman of the Winter Clothing Campaign for the American Committee for Yugoslav Relief.  Well, there you are.

This nasty bit of work was produced by the anti-Communist newsletter Counterattack, a publication funded by a wealthy businessman named Alfred Kohlberg. a supporter of Joe McCarthy and friend of Robert Welch.  Together, Kohlberg and Welch founded the John Birch Society.

Interestingly, another founding member was Fred Koch, head of Koch Industries.  His sons, Charles and David, are also very active politically and were recently profiled in The New Yorker. Full circle, as it were.

None of the blacklisted performers whose names appeared in Red Channels sued the publication, though all suffered real and dramatic loss of income as a result – with the exception of an actor named Joseph Julian. He lost his case.

Jean Muir reportedly spent the next ten years battling a drinking problem , but recovered and returned to the stage in the 60s.  Later, she taught at Stephens College.  She died in Mesa, Arizona in 1996, aged 85.

Like father, like son

On August 26, in 1883, after months of rumbling and small eruptions, the volcano known as Krakatoa erupted.

It was a 200 megaton explosion, 13,000 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. Vesuvius was a hiccup by comparison.

40,000 people along the coasts of Java and Sumatra were killed by the resultant tsunamis.  The sound of the explosion was heard 2,000 miles away in Perth, Australia.  The shockwave traveled the planet seven times.

The plume rose more than 80,000 feet in the air and the dust cloud that circled the world over the next few months resulted in such stunning sunsets that a British artist devoted all his time to painting them.

All of Krakatoa’s statistics are mind-boggling but this tops the list: the next year average temperatures around the world fell in some places as much as 1.2 degrees Celsius – that’s 34 degrees Fahrenheit.

Remnant of Rakata, background, Anak in foreground. Photo courtesy Volcanological Survey of Indonesia, 1979.

Krakatoa is actually the name of the Indonesian island group where the volcano was located – but the volcano on the island of Rakata came to be called Krakatoa.  The explosion consumed half the island, but on the edge of the caldera, a new island was born.  It appeared in 1930 and was named Anak Krakatoa – Child of Krakatoa -and it is now about a mile in diameter, growing at the rate of five meters a year.

Because of Anak, Krakatoa is not exactly history – the new island is also a volcano and erupts continuously. It began a series of major eruptions in the 1990s and last May its threat level was raised to Level Orange by the Indonesian government.  A three kilometer warning zone encircles the island.

The complete story of Krakatoa past and present is available in Simon Winchester’s book of the same name.  To keep up with volcanic activity worldwide on a weekly basis, you can check with the Smithsonian’s volcano project here.

* * *

Of note:  the 19th Amendment giving women the vote was passed on this day in 1920.  In 1899, Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo was born and among others celebrating today are Ben Bradlee and Will Shortz.

A shot in the arm

Microorganisms growing on agar plate

The Black Death – bubonic plague – which killed one-quarter of the population of Europe in the 14th century, faded away, but never quite died out.  It returned in the middle of the 19th century in the Third Pandemic, which began in China, spread to India and killed 12 million people in those countries before it began to decline.

In 1894, Dr. Shibasaburo Kitasato was called on to tackle the problem of plague.

Kitasato had already made history as the first person to grow tetanus bacillus in a pure culture.  He was studying with Dr. Robert Koch in Berlin and soon he and Emil von Behring had developed a serum therapy for tetanus.  They did pioneering work in the field of antitoxins and passive immunity, but it was von Behring who was awarded the first Nobel prize for medicine in 1901.

Dr. Shibasaburo Kitasato

Kitasato had returned to Japan in 1891 to found the Institute of Infectious Diseases in Tokyo where he continued to work on such scourges as dysentery and tuberculosis.  In 1894, the government asked him to go to Hong Kong to help with an epidemic of bubonic plague.  Working in a makeshift hut, he succeeded  - on this date reportedly – in isolating the infectious agent in the plague.

Next door, Alexandre Yersin of the Pasteur Institute was also working on the problem.  Their results were almost simultaneous, but it was Yersin that got the credit and the bacterium is named for him.

Four years after his work on the plague, Kitasato and one of his students were able to isolate the bacteria that causes dysentery.  In his lifetime, he made substantial, sometimes seminal contributions to the eradication or amelioration of major causes of human misery with his work on tetanus, tuberculosis, plague, dysentery and anthrax.  His work on antitoxins helped speed the creation of effective vaccines.

Kitasato, who never received a Nobel or had a bacillus named for him, was one of the pioneers of microbiology  - he just happened to live out of the mainstream of European medical circles and at a time when information traveled slowly if at all.  Nonetheless, he should be right there in the pantheon that includes Pasteur, Wasserman, Ehrlich and others.

* * *

This was the date on which the British destroyed the Library of Congress, setting fire to more than 3,000 books.  Such a nasty little war, the War of 1812 – the British really were just plain malicious, burning the White House and all the town halls they could find.  Still smarting from the Revolution, I guess.

Uh-oh

Oskar Werner and Julie Christie in 'Fahrenheit 451'

Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.  Sunday marked a highly significant anniversary which I somehow overlooked – it was Ray Bradbury’s 90th birthday!  Fortunately it is being celebrated for the entire week here in Los Angeles – Bradbury lives in Pasadena – and readings are being held at a number of different venues, all gratis.

My favorite Bradbury work is Fahrenheit 451, a perfect small story that was made into an excellent film, something that rarely happens.  Something Wicked This Way Comes is also wonderful…if you’d like to see a complete list of his oeuvre, look here.

Here’s wishing Ray Bradbury – a great American cultural icon who has given joy to millions -many, many happy returns.

It must have been the alignment of the planets, but this date in the middle of the 19th century was loaded with important stuff, beginning with the publication of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre on 1847. In 1853, this was the day that chef Charles Crum created the first potato chip. (Who can claim that Jane Eyre has meant more to them than potato chips?) Since he worked at a posh hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, the chips were initially referred to as Saratoga chips.

Illustration from 'The banks of New York' by J. S. Gibbons

But one of the biggest pre-Civil War events was the Panic of 1857.  It began with the collapse of the Ohio Life and Trust on August 24.  The cause was embezzlement, but banks suddenly imposed so many restrictions on loans and deposits that people started worrying about the entire financial system.  Then, in mid-September, a ship carrying more than $1 million in commercial gold and 15 tons of federal gold sank in a hurricane on its way from the new San Francisco mint to banks on the east coast.

By October the stock market was collapsing, there was a run on the banks and almost two years of rising unemployment began that only ended with the Civil War.

The panic spread to Europe, Asia and South America, making it the first ever world-wide financial crisis.  Harper’s Weekly blamed it on greedy stockbrokers and land speculators. Sounds familiar.

Founders’ day

In the gym at Mt. Holyoke ca. 1912. LoC, PPD

This was graduation day for the first class at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, which had opened its doors  the previous year.  Holyoke was the dream of Mary Lyon, a Massachusetts farm girl who worked and studied and managed to get the money together to start her institution for the higher education of women.

Housekeeper to her brother at the age of 13, Mary left the farm four years later to study at Byfield Academy.  Mentored by its headmaster, Joseph Emerson, she graduated, taught and by the time she was in her thirties she was active in the founding of Wheaton Female Seminary, now Wheaton College.

Somehow – details are sadly lacking – she managed to raise $15,000 for the founding of Mount Holyoke by the time she was forty.  The school was known from its inception for high standards and rigorous program – unusually for the time, students were required to complete seven courses in math and science and for the first time were taught  laboratory methods and encouraged to perform experiments themselves. All this in the early nineteenth century, when women’s brains were thought to be unsuited to such pursuits.

Mary Lyon died  in 1850, leaving behind a great monument in a short life.  Holyoke was chartered as a college in 1888.

* * *

Theodore Herzl came to the 6th Zionist Congress on this date in 1903 with two items on his agenda: the situation of Russian Jews and a proposal from the British Government.

Theodore Herzl in Basel, 1897. Bettman Archive.

Herzl, the father of Zionism, had started the Congress five years earlier, after reaching the conclusion that fighting anti-semitism was a pointless effort and that what the Jewish people needed was their own state.  The son of assimilated Serbian Jews who had emigrated first to Budapest , then to Vienna, Herzl had come to his conclusions fairly late – he was in his thirties when he gave up on assimilation and wrote Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State)  in 1895, proposing instead a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It would be a place, he wrote in a later book, “founded on the ideas which are a common product of all civilized nations… It would be immoral if we would exclude anyone, whatever his origin, his descent, or his religion, from participating in our achievements. For we stand on the shoulders of other civilized peoples. … What we own we owe to the preparatory work of other peoples. Therefore, we have to repay our debt.”

The British proposal, known as the ‘ Uganda Project,’ was an offer from the British government of  5,000 square miles of land in British East Africa straddling what are now Kenya and Uganda.

Herzl was willing to consider it and urged the congress to explore the possibility.  He got a majority in favor, but the next year the Uganda Project was summarily rejected by the 7th Congress in favor of a focus on Palestine.  In the meantime, Herzl had died, never having seen Israel; he is buried outside Jerusalem.

A good Scrabble word

Cryptid – a creature whose existence is reputed, but which has not been verified scientifically. Examples include Big Foot, the Yeti and the creature first sighted in Scotland on this date.

Nessie

The Loch Ness monster was described by an Irish monk in the seventh century as having attacked a group of Picts before it was miraculously dispatched by Colum Cille, better known as St. Columba.  The incident was recorded by the Bishop of Iona in his life of the saint, although it happened in the Ness River rather than the loch.

The amount of time, energy and money devoted to the legend of the monster is staggering.  Nearly every bit of documented evidence has been debunked, including the 1934 picture shown.  It was the gold standard until the perpetrators confessed that it was actually a toy submarine with some plasticine attached.

* * *

Sometime in 1912 or 1913, a young Vietnamese man got work as a waiter at the Parker House in Boston.  From there, he moved to Brooklyn, where he worked as a domestic and spent his free time studying the ideas of Marcus Garvey.  His name then was Nguyễn Ái Quốc (“Nguyen the Patriot”), though he had been born  Nguyễn Sinh Cung and at the age of ten became Nguyễn Tất Thành (“Nguyen the Accomplished”).

Ho Chi Minh in 1946.

He spent the 1920′s in Europe, the Soviet Union and China, eventually becoming an advisor to the Chinese army.  He returned to Vietnam at the beginning of World War II as leader of the Viet Minh nationalist party.  By then, he had become Ho Chi Minh, “bringer of light.”

The August Revolution against the French occupation began (approximately) on August 22, with the previous occupying force – the Japanese army – standing aside to let nationalists take over public buildings from the French.  The Republic of Vietnam was declared on September 2.

But the French soon reasserted their control of Indochina,  and a year later Vietnam reverted to its status as a colony.  The struggle against France continued until 1954, when it was agreed that the Viet Minh would be the government of the north, centered in Hanoi.

A north-south struggle continued and included the Chinese, the French and finally, of course, the United States.  North and south came close to a negotiated peace in 1963, but the U.S. engineered the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and took over France’s role.  Ho Chi Minh did not live to see the outcome, dying at the age of 79 in 1969.

The photo shown here could not be more in the public domain – it appears on all Vietnamese currency.