Right on cue, huh?
Today, we got a kitty. Or rather, a cat; she's 5 years old. Her name is Mooch, she's as heavy as a cat with that name might suggest, and her hobby in the first hour or so of life in our house seems to be crawling under things.
But this is not a cat blog.
While in Madison to get Mooch, I've added one book to the collection: History Lessons: How Textbooks From Around The World Portray U.S. History, by Dana Lindaman and Kyle Ward.
By 'around the world', the table of contents mentions textbooks from Brazil, Canada, the Caribbean, Costa Rica, Cuba, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Nigeria, North Korea, Norway, the Philippines, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Spain, Syria, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe.
I bought it as it seemed a nice companion to Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen, which examines U.S. textbooks on their knowledge and portrayal of American history. That's the domestic portrayal; here lies the overseas portrayal.
I'm not expecting sunshine and lollipops.
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
Saturday, August 27, 2011
Yes, A Man From Texas Running For President Actually Said This
I won't keep you very long today because I don't want to dilute the point.
Here is Presidential candidate Ron Paul, while in Gilford, New Hampshire, while saying that we shouldn't bother calling in FEMA over Hurricane Irene:
If you didn't just shoot out your screen and aren't quite sure as to why this is the single stupidest thing Ron Paul has ever said in his entire life, head here and find out how Galveston made out in 1900. It comes complete with authorities downplaying the danger of an oncoming hurricane.
BONUS: Thanks to Penny Arcader Tomanta, who dug up the 1940's (1943, specifically, the forecasts for which were actively censored by authorities), 1950's (1957, specifically), and 1960's (1967, specifically, which at least saw evacuation efforts). All of which hit Texas.
Here is Presidential candidate Ron Paul, while in Gilford, New Hampshire, while saying that we shouldn't bother calling in FEMA over Hurricane Irene:
"We should be like 1900; we should be like 1940, 1950, 1960," Paul said. "I live on the Gulf Coast; we deal with hurricanes all the time. Galveston is in my district."
If you didn't just shoot out your screen and aren't quite sure as to why this is the single stupidest thing Ron Paul has ever said in his entire life, head here and find out how Galveston made out in 1900. It comes complete with authorities downplaying the danger of an oncoming hurricane.
BONUS: Thanks to Penny Arcader Tomanta, who dug up the 1940's (1943, specifically, the forecasts for which were actively censored by authorities), 1950's (1957, specifically), and 1960's (1967, specifically, which at least saw evacuation efforts). All of which hit Texas.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Phrases You'll Probably Never Want To Use Again
Have you ever used the phrase "cakewalk"? You probably have, in the context of seeing something very, very easy.
You awful, awful racist, you.
The original cake walk was conducted on plantations in the South, and surely you can already see where this is going. Its original intent- or at least, its stated intent- was to give slaves a temporary chance to get back at their masters. Were they to actually get back at their masters, they likely would have done so through grievous bodily harm, which would be kind of bad for the master, so that wasn't done. Instead, they could just mock him for a little while, parodying overly genteel aristocratic mannerisms. This is something they were already doing in private, only now it was done in front of the master. (That's a $12 article, by the way.)
At the conclusion of this mocking, the slaves would pair up to form couples, and do a high-stepping walk, a promenade. The master would then judge all the walks, and award a cake to the best one. Thus the term.
The issue, of course, is that it's no longer really mocking the master if the master's throwing the party, awarding the prize for the best mocking, and has the last laugh by sending everyone back to work as his slaves afterwards. But that was never brought up much.
In fact, the whites eventually took the cakewalk for their own purposes, using it in minstrel shows by whites in blackface. Some tellings go that the whites didn't know they were being mocked, and maybe some never did, but now it was a moot point. Now the blacks were the ones being mocked, and it wasn't exactly subtle. No longer sending up their masters, now they were portrayed as really, honestly trying to be like their masters. And, of course, the other whites in the audience ate it up. Ha ha, look at those black people that aren't really black people but we'll pretend they are because then that makes it okay!
Eventually, though, the black community managed to take the cakewalk back, using it as something of a forerunner to other dance styles, such as the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. If those whites like the cakewalk, maybe they'll like some other dances of ours.
Over time, the meaning of the word 'cakewalk' shed all connotations except the recreational nature of the original event, and from there changed into a term meaning something easy (even though the dance itself isn't).
The cakewalk still survives to this day, though partially due to its history and partially due to its age, its usage has shrunk drastically. It survives in a very unlikely home: the Highland Dance community, where the high-stepping fits in with the generally athletic, ballet-like nature of the other dances used.
No word on if they bake any cakes for the occasion.
You awful, awful racist, you.
The original cake walk was conducted on plantations in the South, and surely you can already see where this is going. Its original intent- or at least, its stated intent- was to give slaves a temporary chance to get back at their masters. Were they to actually get back at their masters, they likely would have done so through grievous bodily harm, which would be kind of bad for the master, so that wasn't done. Instead, they could just mock him for a little while, parodying overly genteel aristocratic mannerisms. This is something they were already doing in private, only now it was done in front of the master. (That's a $12 article, by the way.)
At the conclusion of this mocking, the slaves would pair up to form couples, and do a high-stepping walk, a promenade. The master would then judge all the walks, and award a cake to the best one. Thus the term.
The issue, of course, is that it's no longer really mocking the master if the master's throwing the party, awarding the prize for the best mocking, and has the last laugh by sending everyone back to work as his slaves afterwards. But that was never brought up much.
In fact, the whites eventually took the cakewalk for their own purposes, using it in minstrel shows by whites in blackface. Some tellings go that the whites didn't know they were being mocked, and maybe some never did, but now it was a moot point. Now the blacks were the ones being mocked, and it wasn't exactly subtle. No longer sending up their masters, now they were portrayed as really, honestly trying to be like their masters. And, of course, the other whites in the audience ate it up. Ha ha, look at those black people that aren't really black people but we'll pretend they are because then that makes it okay!
Eventually, though, the black community managed to take the cakewalk back, using it as something of a forerunner to other dance styles, such as the Charleston and the Lindy Hop. If those whites like the cakewalk, maybe they'll like some other dances of ours.
Over time, the meaning of the word 'cakewalk' shed all connotations except the recreational nature of the original event, and from there changed into a term meaning something easy (even though the dance itself isn't).
The cakewalk still survives to this day, though partially due to its history and partially due to its age, its usage has shrunk drastically. It survives in a very unlikely home: the Highland Dance community, where the high-stepping fits in with the generally athletic, ballet-like nature of the other dances used.
No word on if they bake any cakes for the occasion.
Monday, August 15, 2011
The Worst Presidential Campaign Ever
Among the many things you're going to hear over the course of the 2012 Presidential election is that it's a "big election". Sooner or later, someone is going to tell you that in any Presidential election. Of course it's going to be a big one. It's THE Big One. The one race that everyone employed by any given party is ultimately devoted to. It's the one every party- EVERY party, big, small, fringe and joke parties alike- prep for first, last and foremost. If a party runs no other candidate for no other office, they are at least going to go for the Presidency.
(How wise a strategy this is, as opposed to focusing on state and local races, is another matter entirely.)
The issue we're focusing on today is the relative value of 'big'. In the grand scheme of Presidential elections, where would any given race rank? What is the biggest of the Big Elections? On what race did the most ride on the outcome?
The answer to that is likely 1860, involving Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Incumbent President James Buchanan's administration was completely consumed by the issue of slavery, as was the Lincoln-Douglas election. Douglas pledged during the campaign that a Lincoln win would mean Southern secession. Lincoln won, without a single vote from the South (he was not given ballot access). Douglas' warning quickly came to be.
1864 is likely second place on the list. The Civil War was going badly for the North at the time, and Lincoln was vulnerable because of that. Had his 1864 opponent, George McClellan, won, odds are he would have sought peace with the Confederacy, or at least, the Democrats would have made him do it. The only thing that saved Lincoln was that the tide of the war turned in his favor before Election Day.
We won't get into every election we've had, or even any further into these- though given enough time, knowing myself, I would probably try- but that's the high-water mark. Secession and the outcomes of the Civil War and the slavery issue rode on those two elections.
However, what's also kind of fun to look at is what it looks like at the bottom of the table. Has there ever been a small Big Election? One where both candidates looked so utterly alike, or so utterly subpar, or the stakes were so utterly low, that the outcome really didn't matter?
Yes. Yes, there has. And it came not very long after the two biggest.
Dateline, 1872. The incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, was rather popular nationwide, as the North's victorious general in the Civil War, the one that took Robert E. Lee's surrender and the President most in charge of Reconstruction. He would go on to get hit with multiple corruption scandals in his second term (spoiler alert), scandals that would deeply mar his legacy and his historical ranking but that didn't come into play here. He was popular. The Democrats were still in disarray from the aftermath of the Civil War, with reminders of their secession being all anyone really having to bring up to beat them. So the election ought to be a breeze, right?
Well, it's not like Grant's going to go unopposed. Enter the Liberal Republicans.
...you need a second to get all the laughing out of your system?
...okay, let's continue. Because the Democrats were in such disarray, and because a win over them was such a given, the Republicans began to feud over just how far they should go to the left. Back then, parties didn't exist just to exist, as they basically do today. Parties were created to aim for a specific goal. Once that goal was achieved, the party dissolved and the component people went on to new parties with new goals. Under this system, the Republican Party should have died when slavery did. The problem was, the Republicans couldn't agree on whether it was really dead or not. (PDF file. Or really, less a PDF file than an e-book.) Some- the Liberal Republicans- figured that slavery was dead and wished to move on to new goals. Others figured that slavery was still existent in other forms that just weren't called slavery, and without Reconstruction, outright slavery could very easily resurface.
Within government, Grant also faced pressure from members of Congress trying to take advantage of the spoils system. Also known as patronage. Also known as hiring your friends and major donors to work for you in cushy government jobs as opposed to treating it like any other job with applications and exams and such. This would prove to be one of Grant's corruption scandals, but really, the spoils system had been used and taken as a given for decades beforehand, and people only cried foul about it when Grant tried to slow it down by refusing some of the patronage appointments made by Congressmen. Every time Grant refused to let someone appoint their friend to some post or other, he made a new enemy. Then he made the mistake of partaking in patronage himself, appointing friends and family, and he got hit with the charge by the Liberal Republicans... many of which were trying to take advantage of patronage themselves. (Including, if my fellow Watertown residents will examine page 10 of the PDF file, Carl Schurz.) It was blind leading the blind and hypocrites attacking hypocrites.
It all led to the Liberal Republicans wanting to run someone else in 1872. The man they chose was Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune. You may know him as the 'Go west, young man' guy, whether or not he actually said it first or not. They nominated him in a separate convention, deeming themselves a brand-new party.
To the shock of the Liberal Republicans, who were aiming for Charles Francis Adams and let the convention get away from them. Carl Schurz went to a piano and started playing Chopin's Funeral March. Political boss Thurlow Weed wrote to a friend, "Six weeks ago I did not suppose that any considerable number of men, outside of a Lunatic Asylum, would nominate Greeley for President." Other feelings were similar: they didn't know how things got to the point that Greeley grabbed the nomination, but he did, he was going to be a disaster, they were screwed and they knew it.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were aware that they were still in the national doghouse. They knew they didn't have anyone on their roster that could take out Grant. But they really, really wanted Grant to lose. So they had a brainstorm: they would nominate Greeley as well. Greeley was keen on halting Reconstruction, which was a nice selling point, and besides, nominating Greeley meant that there was only one major Grant opponent instead of two. Two Grant opponents would just split the anti-Grant vote and allow Grant to win. (Some members of the party, the "Straight-Out Democrats", wanted an actual Democrat, and ran Charles O'Conor as their nominee. He didn't want it. They gave it to him anyway. O'Conor didn't campaign.)
Horace Greeley had never successfully run for office before. He had been appointed to serve three months in the House to finish out someone else's term, and had run for office seven times at various levels, but never won. It showed. If a vegetarian atheist socialist who's never won a race for public office sounds like a fringe left candidate now (though there are certainly some who would vote for such a person based on that profile), imagine how it looked when one ran a major-party campaign against an incumbent war hero in 1872. Greeley had no idea what he was doing. The Democrats turned out not to be of very much help, because Greeley had attacked them just as much as Grant and the feeling was mutual. They had no idea how to help each other out and often wondered why they should, but somehow the Democrats still thought they had a chance.
Think if the Greens tried to nominate Ralph Nader, let the convention get away from them and wound up with Cynthia McKinney, and then the modern-day Republicans, concluding their field was terrible, nominated McKinney too and spent the rest of the campaign trying to convince each other that, no, really, we seriously nominated Cynthia McKinney, same as the Greens, and now we're trying to make her President so that we can beat Barack Obama. The Greens would be angry because they didn't get who they really wanted, the Democrats aren't budging from Obama, and the rank-and-file Republicans will be trying to figure out just what the hell is going on here well into the following spring.
It was a loud, boisterous, deeply confusing election, but in the end, Grant easily swept aside the in-way-over-his-head Greeley, who by Election Day just wanted the damn thing to be over. The score was 286 electoral votes to 66. When the results came in, he said, "I am the worst beaten man that ever ran for that high office. And I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly know whether I was running for President or the penitentiary."
"Now, hold on," you may be saying. "You said this was the least consequential of all, didn't you? You've got a dispute here over whether Reconstruction should be continued. Blacks saw their rights rolled back for decades after Reconstruction ended. How is that not consequential?"
Simple. Between the time of the election and the time the Electoral College met, Greeley died. The campaign had drained too much out of him. He lost control of the New York Herald to Whitelaw Reid, his wife died a week prior to the election, and he was getting savaged the whole time as only major-party Presidential candidates can, from three sides, with almost nobody coming to his aid. Not only that, he was in the middle of recovering from getting swindled by a diamond hoax that may very well be covered here in detail in its own right at some point. It was too much for one man to take. With that, the field was essentially reduced from two to one. Greeley's electors were instructed simply to use their own judgment, and they scattered to the four winds. (Had he won, Greeley's running mate was Benjamin Gratz Brown. Whether he would have also ended Reconstruction appears questionable. Back then, Presidents didn't get to choose their own running mates, and while Greeley was sure that Reconstruction should end, Brown was wavering on the issue.)
Historian Eugene H. Roseboom later wrote in the 1957 book A History of Presidential Elections, "Never in American history have two more unfit men been offered to the country for the highest office."
Surely, we can do better than that. It's kind of hard not to.
(How wise a strategy this is, as opposed to focusing on state and local races, is another matter entirely.)
The issue we're focusing on today is the relative value of 'big'. In the grand scheme of Presidential elections, where would any given race rank? What is the biggest of the Big Elections? On what race did the most ride on the outcome?
The answer to that is likely 1860, involving Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Incumbent President James Buchanan's administration was completely consumed by the issue of slavery, as was the Lincoln-Douglas election. Douglas pledged during the campaign that a Lincoln win would mean Southern secession. Lincoln won, without a single vote from the South (he was not given ballot access). Douglas' warning quickly came to be.
1864 is likely second place on the list. The Civil War was going badly for the North at the time, and Lincoln was vulnerable because of that. Had his 1864 opponent, George McClellan, won, odds are he would have sought peace with the Confederacy, or at least, the Democrats would have made him do it. The only thing that saved Lincoln was that the tide of the war turned in his favor before Election Day.
We won't get into every election we've had, or even any further into these- though given enough time, knowing myself, I would probably try- but that's the high-water mark. Secession and the outcomes of the Civil War and the slavery issue rode on those two elections.
However, what's also kind of fun to look at is what it looks like at the bottom of the table. Has there ever been a small Big Election? One where both candidates looked so utterly alike, or so utterly subpar, or the stakes were so utterly low, that the outcome really didn't matter?
Yes. Yes, there has. And it came not very long after the two biggest.
Dateline, 1872. The incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, was rather popular nationwide, as the North's victorious general in the Civil War, the one that took Robert E. Lee's surrender and the President most in charge of Reconstruction. He would go on to get hit with multiple corruption scandals in his second term (spoiler alert), scandals that would deeply mar his legacy and his historical ranking but that didn't come into play here. He was popular. The Democrats were still in disarray from the aftermath of the Civil War, with reminders of their secession being all anyone really having to bring up to beat them. So the election ought to be a breeze, right?
Well, it's not like Grant's going to go unopposed. Enter the Liberal Republicans.
...you need a second to get all the laughing out of your system?
...okay, let's continue. Because the Democrats were in such disarray, and because a win over them was such a given, the Republicans began to feud over just how far they should go to the left. Back then, parties didn't exist just to exist, as they basically do today. Parties were created to aim for a specific goal. Once that goal was achieved, the party dissolved and the component people went on to new parties with new goals. Under this system, the Republican Party should have died when slavery did. The problem was, the Republicans couldn't agree on whether it was really dead or not. (PDF file. Or really, less a PDF file than an e-book.) Some- the Liberal Republicans- figured that slavery was dead and wished to move on to new goals. Others figured that slavery was still existent in other forms that just weren't called slavery, and without Reconstruction, outright slavery could very easily resurface.
Within government, Grant also faced pressure from members of Congress trying to take advantage of the spoils system. Also known as patronage. Also known as hiring your friends and major donors to work for you in cushy government jobs as opposed to treating it like any other job with applications and exams and such. This would prove to be one of Grant's corruption scandals, but really, the spoils system had been used and taken as a given for decades beforehand, and people only cried foul about it when Grant tried to slow it down by refusing some of the patronage appointments made by Congressmen. Every time Grant refused to let someone appoint their friend to some post or other, he made a new enemy. Then he made the mistake of partaking in patronage himself, appointing friends and family, and he got hit with the charge by the Liberal Republicans... many of which were trying to take advantage of patronage themselves. (Including, if my fellow Watertown residents will examine page 10 of the PDF file, Carl Schurz.) It was blind leading the blind and hypocrites attacking hypocrites.
It all led to the Liberal Republicans wanting to run someone else in 1872. The man they chose was Horace Greeley, publisher of the New York Tribune. You may know him as the 'Go west, young man' guy, whether or not he actually said it first or not. They nominated him in a separate convention, deeming themselves a brand-new party.
To the shock of the Liberal Republicans, who were aiming for Charles Francis Adams and let the convention get away from them. Carl Schurz went to a piano and started playing Chopin's Funeral March. Political boss Thurlow Weed wrote to a friend, "Six weeks ago I did not suppose that any considerable number of men, outside of a Lunatic Asylum, would nominate Greeley for President." Other feelings were similar: they didn't know how things got to the point that Greeley grabbed the nomination, but he did, he was going to be a disaster, they were screwed and they knew it.
Meanwhile, the Democrats were aware that they were still in the national doghouse. They knew they didn't have anyone on their roster that could take out Grant. But they really, really wanted Grant to lose. So they had a brainstorm: they would nominate Greeley as well. Greeley was keen on halting Reconstruction, which was a nice selling point, and besides, nominating Greeley meant that there was only one major Grant opponent instead of two. Two Grant opponents would just split the anti-Grant vote and allow Grant to win. (Some members of the party, the "Straight-Out Democrats", wanted an actual Democrat, and ran Charles O'Conor as their nominee. He didn't want it. They gave it to him anyway. O'Conor didn't campaign.)
Horace Greeley had never successfully run for office before. He had been appointed to serve three months in the House to finish out someone else's term, and had run for office seven times at various levels, but never won. It showed. If a vegetarian atheist socialist who's never won a race for public office sounds like a fringe left candidate now (though there are certainly some who would vote for such a person based on that profile), imagine how it looked when one ran a major-party campaign against an incumbent war hero in 1872. Greeley had no idea what he was doing. The Democrats turned out not to be of very much help, because Greeley had attacked them just as much as Grant and the feeling was mutual. They had no idea how to help each other out and often wondered why they should, but somehow the Democrats still thought they had a chance.
Think if the Greens tried to nominate Ralph Nader, let the convention get away from them and wound up with Cynthia McKinney, and then the modern-day Republicans, concluding their field was terrible, nominated McKinney too and spent the rest of the campaign trying to convince each other that, no, really, we seriously nominated Cynthia McKinney, same as the Greens, and now we're trying to make her President so that we can beat Barack Obama. The Greens would be angry because they didn't get who they really wanted, the Democrats aren't budging from Obama, and the rank-and-file Republicans will be trying to figure out just what the hell is going on here well into the following spring.
It was a loud, boisterous, deeply confusing election, but in the end, Grant easily swept aside the in-way-over-his-head Greeley, who by Election Day just wanted the damn thing to be over. The score was 286 electoral votes to 66. When the results came in, he said, "I am the worst beaten man that ever ran for that high office. And I have been assailed so bitterly that I hardly know whether I was running for President or the penitentiary."
"Now, hold on," you may be saying. "You said this was the least consequential of all, didn't you? You've got a dispute here over whether Reconstruction should be continued. Blacks saw their rights rolled back for decades after Reconstruction ended. How is that not consequential?"
Simple. Between the time of the election and the time the Electoral College met, Greeley died. The campaign had drained too much out of him. He lost control of the New York Herald to Whitelaw Reid, his wife died a week prior to the election, and he was getting savaged the whole time as only major-party Presidential candidates can, from three sides, with almost nobody coming to his aid. Not only that, he was in the middle of recovering from getting swindled by a diamond hoax that may very well be covered here in detail in its own right at some point. It was too much for one man to take. With that, the field was essentially reduced from two to one. Greeley's electors were instructed simply to use their own judgment, and they scattered to the four winds. (Had he won, Greeley's running mate was Benjamin Gratz Brown. Whether he would have also ended Reconstruction appears questionable. Back then, Presidents didn't get to choose their own running mates, and while Greeley was sure that Reconstruction should end, Brown was wavering on the issue.)
Historian Eugene H. Roseboom later wrote in the 1957 book A History of Presidential Elections, "Never in American history have two more unfit men been offered to the country for the highest office."
Surely, we can do better than that. It's kind of hard not to.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
It's Just A Fad
In all the hoopla of the credit downgrade, there was a birthday yesterday that we need to mention. ...no, not Lucille Ball, but I grew up partially on old I Love Lucy reruns, so hey, happy birthday, Mrs. Rotted-Out Corpse Unless You Were Cremated.
In fact, we're celebrating here the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web. You know, the 'www' that websites don't even bother making you type out anymore. Yesterday in 1991, the very first website was created. That website is here. The content of the site, back at the start, was to inform visitors how to make text, create their own sites, search the then very very tiny Web for information etc. Today, such information hard-wired into the psyches of the online population, the site tells the story of the Web's invention.
The Web's only 20 years old. For all the ages of things out there that make you feel old... the Web can't even legally drink yet.
In fact, we're celebrating here the 20th birthday of the World Wide Web. You know, the 'www' that websites don't even bother making you type out anymore. Yesterday in 1991, the very first website was created. That website is here. The content of the site, back at the start, was to inform visitors how to make text, create their own sites, search the then very very tiny Web for information etc. Today, such information hard-wired into the psyches of the online population, the site tells the story of the Web's invention.
The Web's only 20 years old. For all the ages of things out there that make you feel old... the Web can't even legally drink yet.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Rapid-Fire Book Club, Toilet Mishap Avoidance Edition
The handle broke on the toilet and I went into Madison while it got fixed. What, you were expecting a geyser of fecal matter to gush forth from the bowl or something?
Anyway. Two books to report today...
Hartston, William- The Encyclopedia of Useless Information
And it's pretty much that. None of the stories are very long, mostly just little factoids, but the thing it has going for it is a lot of stuff my other books don't contain. When I get books like this, I flip through them quick to gauge if there's very much new material in it or just a bunch of stuff that's either in my other books or that I'm already well-aware of. This one passed inspection and I'm likely going to carve it up for prompts that I can expand on here. Just like the other random-trivia books in my arsenal.
Poignant, Roslyn- Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle
In 1882, nonwhite races had a hard time dealing with the Western world. They tended to be regarded as "savages" that needed to be "civilized", something that generally involved one of a couple things:
*Missionaries showing up one day and declaring everything they saw an affront to God and then obliterating entire cultures and replacing them with Bible studies,
*Colonialists showing up one day and declaring everything they saw as property of Europe and then shooting entire cultures until that became true, or...
*The kind of thing that happened to the subjects of this book, a group of Aborigines from North Queensland, Australia. What happened to them was that they were "recruited" by someone from the West, shipped to the West, and paraded around as the "uncivilized" "savages" they, according to the West's sensibilities of the time, were. A lot of the time, the word "cannibal" would be thrown in as well, whether or not that was actually true. Most of the time, a "savage" so "recruited" would never see home again. I mentioned another such instance back during the Vancouver Olympics, that of "Anthropology Days" in the 1904 Games in St. Louis. But a better-detailed story on it can be found at Slate.
Anyway. Two books to report today...
Hartston, William- The Encyclopedia of Useless Information
And it's pretty much that. None of the stories are very long, mostly just little factoids, but the thing it has going for it is a lot of stuff my other books don't contain. When I get books like this, I flip through them quick to gauge if there's very much new material in it or just a bunch of stuff that's either in my other books or that I'm already well-aware of. This one passed inspection and I'm likely going to carve it up for prompts that I can expand on here. Just like the other random-trivia books in my arsenal.
Poignant, Roslyn- Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle
In 1882, nonwhite races had a hard time dealing with the Western world. They tended to be regarded as "savages" that needed to be "civilized", something that generally involved one of a couple things:
*Missionaries showing up one day and declaring everything they saw an affront to God and then obliterating entire cultures and replacing them with Bible studies,
*Colonialists showing up one day and declaring everything they saw as property of Europe and then shooting entire cultures until that became true, or...
*The kind of thing that happened to the subjects of this book, a group of Aborigines from North Queensland, Australia. What happened to them was that they were "recruited" by someone from the West, shipped to the West, and paraded around as the "uncivilized" "savages" they, according to the West's sensibilities of the time, were. A lot of the time, the word "cannibal" would be thrown in as well, whether or not that was actually true. Most of the time, a "savage" so "recruited" would never see home again. I mentioned another such instance back during the Vancouver Olympics, that of "Anthropology Days" in the 1904 Games in St. Louis. But a better-detailed story on it can be found at Slate.
Monday, August 1, 2011
It's Like A 'Participant' Ribbon, But In Statue Form
Early last month, the town of Fushe Kruje, Albania dedicated a statue to George W. Bush. The Americans in the audience will probably wonder why in blazes someone outside of Texas would do that. After all, Bush isn't exactly Mount Rushmore material. Many would argue that Buah was in fact one of the worst Presidents of all time.
There are others that will ignore the 41 men that came before Bush and compare him exclusively to Obama- generally favorably, and while asking the question 'miss him yet?'- but these people aren't even worth the hassle. And I've gone double-barreled on some pretty stupid things in my day.
Anyway. Why Bush? Why Bush of all the Presidents? Long story short, he was the one who showed up. Bush was the one who took time out of his schedule to roll into Fushe Kruje and say hi. Albania, despite everything America has done to go out of its way to inspire people to burn our Presidents in effigy as opposed to making statues of them, has a special affection for the United States for two reasons: first, they credit us with bringing them out of the Cold War era; and second, Albanians in Kosovo were under threat of Slobodan Milosevic and his "ethnic cleansing" campaign, and when we bombed Kosovo, we saved those Albanians.
Of course, all the events of consequence happened in the period between the Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton administrations. All Bush did was go over and say hi as part of a multi-country trip. But since he did and the others didn't, he's the one that got the statue.
Bush's statue joins a rather eclectic list of foreign dedications to American presidents. Three of the others, one of which needs far more explanation than the others:
*Monrovia, Liberia, named for James Monroe in 1824, during his administration, as that is the point the country was "founded" by freed American slaves. As we've stated here, it didn't end well.
*A statue of Abraham Lincoln stands in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on a street also named for him. The statue stands as part of a trade with Mexico made in 1969, which in turn is the reason Washington DC has a statue of Benito Juarez, that city's namesake. The two were the respective heads of state during the Civil War and were on good terms with each other. Juarez is held in similarly high regard in Mexico.
*Rutherford B. Hayes has a Paraguayan soccer club named for him, called Presidente Hayes. Americans know Hayes largely as the guy who stole the Presidency from Samuel Tilden in the 1876 election.
Not long beforehand, Paraguay was being led by a man named Francisco Solano Lopez. Lopez was watching a conflict unfold between Brazil and Uruguay. Since Uruguay's 1830 independence, that nation had been seeing shaky internal relations that would eventually gel into the two major factions at the time, the Colorados and the Blancos. This conflict spilled over into Brazil, damaging Brazilian farmland. In 1864, Brazil demanded restitution. Uruguay refused.
Brazil invaded, on the side of the Colorados. Argentina was unhappy with this and joined in the war; they supported the Blancos. Brazil won and installed a Colorado government, dismaying Lopez. Uruguay was an ally of Paraguay. He at this point requested to move Paraguayan troops through Argentina so he could join in as well. Argentina told him no; the war was over and there wasn't really any point anymore.
He did it anyway. In fact, he attacked Argentina. According to the book Stupid Wars by Ed Strosser and Michael Prince, Paraguay sacked the city of Corrientes without so much as a declaration of war. This got all three countries angry at Paraguay: Argentina for blindingly obvious reasons, Brazil because he was in support of the Blancos, and Uruguay because it was now a Brazilian puppet state. Cue what became known as the War of the Triple Alliance, in which it was Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.
Paraguay, after a couple initial victories against the Argentinians, ran up against the much hardier Brazilian forces. Here, Paraguay's luck turned. It wouldn't stop turning for the next six years. Lopez's forces took battering after battering after battering, but he kept throwing more and more troops into the grinder. At one point in 1865 a draft was held, conscripting boys as young as ten years old and men as old as 60. It wasn't nearly enough to get the troops up to comparable numbers, much less comparable strength. By 1867, troops fought semi-nude for lack of supplies. And lest they not win under these conditions, Lopez would off them himself. "Conquer or die" was the motto, the threat, and the promise.
Meanwhile, what troops remained kept getting pushed north and north and north into the jungle, where in 1870 Brazilian troops finally picked off Lopez. And all it took to reach him was the death of a widely-varying estimate of Paraguay's total population that we'll peg here at 60%. Not just from war, but also food poisoning, poor adaptation to changing climates, and disease (both in general and from all the dead bodies laying around).
Argentina and Brazil spent most of the next decade squabbling over who got what parts of Paraguay. Argentina wanted to annex half of the country, Brazil wanted to leave it in place as a buffer zone and had a second standoff with Argentina to keep them from invading. Eventually, in 1878, they sought a mediator.
Namely, Rutherford B. Hayes. He gave both Argentina and Brazil chunks of land, but he permitted Paraguay to continue to exist. Paraguay was eternally grateful that they had not ceased to exist, and proceeded to plaster Hayes' name all over the country, something they still do today to the utter bewilderment of most Americans who get a good look at how Hayes is honored. As part of Hayes' Fabulous Paraguayan Hero Package, he has a soccer team named for him (which in turn managed to win a top-flight league title in 1952).
It's estimated that Hayes only spent a couple hours of his life on the matter; probably less time than I've spent on this article. The writing and vetting of the treaty were handled on the lower rungs of the diplomatic ladder and Hayes was merely handed something to look over and sign. Which largely, when you get technical, means he did only barely more than Bush did to get his statue. But he still signed a treaty nonetheless.
Either way, sometimes you just can't predict what your legacy's going to be.
There are others that will ignore the 41 men that came before Bush and compare him exclusively to Obama- generally favorably, and while asking the question 'miss him yet?'- but these people aren't even worth the hassle. And I've gone double-barreled on some pretty stupid things in my day.
Anyway. Why Bush? Why Bush of all the Presidents? Long story short, he was the one who showed up. Bush was the one who took time out of his schedule to roll into Fushe Kruje and say hi. Albania, despite everything America has done to go out of its way to inspire people to burn our Presidents in effigy as opposed to making statues of them, has a special affection for the United States for two reasons: first, they credit us with bringing them out of the Cold War era; and second, Albanians in Kosovo were under threat of Slobodan Milosevic and his "ethnic cleansing" campaign, and when we bombed Kosovo, we saved those Albanians.
Of course, all the events of consequence happened in the period between the Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton administrations. All Bush did was go over and say hi as part of a multi-country trip. But since he did and the others didn't, he's the one that got the statue.
Bush's statue joins a rather eclectic list of foreign dedications to American presidents. Three of the others, one of which needs far more explanation than the others:
*Monrovia, Liberia, named for James Monroe in 1824, during his administration, as that is the point the country was "founded" by freed American slaves. As we've stated here, it didn't end well.
*A statue of Abraham Lincoln stands in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, on a street also named for him. The statue stands as part of a trade with Mexico made in 1969, which in turn is the reason Washington DC has a statue of Benito Juarez, that city's namesake. The two were the respective heads of state during the Civil War and were on good terms with each other. Juarez is held in similarly high regard in Mexico.
*Rutherford B. Hayes has a Paraguayan soccer club named for him, called Presidente Hayes. Americans know Hayes largely as the guy who stole the Presidency from Samuel Tilden in the 1876 election.
Not long beforehand, Paraguay was being led by a man named Francisco Solano Lopez. Lopez was watching a conflict unfold between Brazil and Uruguay. Since Uruguay's 1830 independence, that nation had been seeing shaky internal relations that would eventually gel into the two major factions at the time, the Colorados and the Blancos. This conflict spilled over into Brazil, damaging Brazilian farmland. In 1864, Brazil demanded restitution. Uruguay refused.
Brazil invaded, on the side of the Colorados. Argentina was unhappy with this and joined in the war; they supported the Blancos. Brazil won and installed a Colorado government, dismaying Lopez. Uruguay was an ally of Paraguay. He at this point requested to move Paraguayan troops through Argentina so he could join in as well. Argentina told him no; the war was over and there wasn't really any point anymore.
He did it anyway. In fact, he attacked Argentina. According to the book Stupid Wars by Ed Strosser and Michael Prince, Paraguay sacked the city of Corrientes without so much as a declaration of war. This got all three countries angry at Paraguay: Argentina for blindingly obvious reasons, Brazil because he was in support of the Blancos, and Uruguay because it was now a Brazilian puppet state. Cue what became known as the War of the Triple Alliance, in which it was Paraguay against Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.
Paraguay, after a couple initial victories against the Argentinians, ran up against the much hardier Brazilian forces. Here, Paraguay's luck turned. It wouldn't stop turning for the next six years. Lopez's forces took battering after battering after battering, but he kept throwing more and more troops into the grinder. At one point in 1865 a draft was held, conscripting boys as young as ten years old and men as old as 60. It wasn't nearly enough to get the troops up to comparable numbers, much less comparable strength. By 1867, troops fought semi-nude for lack of supplies. And lest they not win under these conditions, Lopez would off them himself. "Conquer or die" was the motto, the threat, and the promise.
Meanwhile, what troops remained kept getting pushed north and north and north into the jungle, where in 1870 Brazilian troops finally picked off Lopez. And all it took to reach him was the death of a widely-varying estimate of Paraguay's total population that we'll peg here at 60%. Not just from war, but also food poisoning, poor adaptation to changing climates, and disease (both in general and from all the dead bodies laying around).
Argentina and Brazil spent most of the next decade squabbling over who got what parts of Paraguay. Argentina wanted to annex half of the country, Brazil wanted to leave it in place as a buffer zone and had a second standoff with Argentina to keep them from invading. Eventually, in 1878, they sought a mediator.
Namely, Rutherford B. Hayes. He gave both Argentina and Brazil chunks of land, but he permitted Paraguay to continue to exist. Paraguay was eternally grateful that they had not ceased to exist, and proceeded to plaster Hayes' name all over the country, something they still do today to the utter bewilderment of most Americans who get a good look at how Hayes is honored. As part of Hayes' Fabulous Paraguayan Hero Package, he has a soccer team named for him (which in turn managed to win a top-flight league title in 1952).
It's estimated that Hayes only spent a couple hours of his life on the matter; probably less time than I've spent on this article. The writing and vetting of the treaty were handled on the lower rungs of the diplomatic ladder and Hayes was merely handed something to look over and sign. Which largely, when you get technical, means he did only barely more than Bush did to get his statue. But he still signed a treaty nonetheless.
Either way, sometimes you just can't predict what your legacy's going to be.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
Ur Mouth
One of the things we sell at work are those big letter stickers you use on your house or on signs or what have you. Every so often, some customer will come along and rearrange these stickers so as to form words or phrases, their own little unique take on the world and all its foibles.
Last night, one such person used these letters to announce to the world an earth-shattering hypothesis, something that could, if true, very well change everything we know about our civilization. According to this person, this prodigy, and I must take the utmost care in transcribing this theory to the letter, "BALLSACKINURMOUTH."
Now, for those unaware, 'ur' is a German prefix meaning original or primitive. Knowing that, what this theory clearly states is that not only did the first known mouth evolve after the invention of ball-related sports, but that a container for those balls could fit entirely inside this original, proto-mouth.
But like any potentially game-changing hypothesis, we should probably test it before we start throwing the Nobel Prize Minting Machine into overdrive so that we may shower this genius with the accolades befitting of a revelation on the scale of BALLSACKINURMOUTH.
So let's first figure out, when was this Ur Mouth conceived?
As it turns out, the origin of the mouth is caught up in a bit of a chicken-or-egg-type debate in evolutionary circles alongside the origin of the anus. Essentially, the debate is whether the anus came first and, as the gut evolved, it eventually reached the other side of the body to become a mouth; or whether the mouth evolved first and the gut eventually became an anus on the other side.
I'm not the best as deciphering the particulars here, but the focus centers around a certain part of the animal kingdom family tree. First comes bilaterians, which branch off to flatworms on one side of the tree, and protostomes and deuterostomes on the other. If none of these sound familiar except 'flatworm', that's because these aren't species. We're much higher up the classification scale, into the realm of subkingdoms and superphyla. (You were taught that it was just kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, right? Not quite. Biologists have intermediate categories too. Also, there's another category, 'domain', that sits above kingdom as of 1990.)
We're not, however, interested in which came first. What we need is when the mouth showed up. That answer seems to be just as vexing as which came first. The answer is probably somewhere in a 2008 paper in the journal Nature called "Acoel development indicates the independent evolution of the bilaterian mouth and anus", by Andreas Hejnol and Mark Q. Martindale at the University of Hawaii, but the article costs $32 to read. Just in case you have $32 for this, here you go. It, by the way, appears to put together a weird third theory: that the gut came first in two parts- one for the mouth, one for the anus- and the whole mouth-or-anus question is simply a matter of which side the gut, which would of course connect into a single whole, busted through first. What I was able to coax out of the paper without having to hand over $32- which consists of three of the tables- seems to indicate that the paper centers around an acoel flatworm, Convolutriloba longfissura.
Outside of that paper, though, the focus on learning about it appears to center around how we can more effectively murder it (PDF), as it's seen as a pest in larger saltwater aquariums. As a result, we'll need to back up to the larger class, acoela, and go from there. Acoels, as it happens, date back to primitive times. We'll take that rough figure of 'primitive times', which in this context generally means hundreds of millions, potentially billions of years ago, and move to the other end of the equation, ball-based sports.
The question is, did ball-based sports come into existence billions of years ago? If so, we'll have to try and narrow things down further somehow. If not, though, eye-opening as it may seem, the BALLSACKINURMOUTH theory will have to go by the wayside.
Figuring out the ball's invention is murky as well; its creation can't be pinpointed to any one culture in particular. (Lot of definitive answers we're getting today, aren't there?) However, like the mouth, we can pin down a range. While documentation of the usage of balls dates to the Mayan culture, China's Ts'in Dynasty, and the ancient Romans and Greeks, the earliest of the known references to a ball used for sport comes out of ancient Egypt, at around 2500 BCE. Some in the Chinese camp claim as early as 5000 BCE.
The Ts'in Dynasty game vaguely resembles soccer. Two bamboo poles were set up, and a net was strung between them, with a hole cut in the net. In order to score, the ball- made of leather and stuffed with animal fur- had to be kicked through the hole in the net. Players could not use their hands.
The ancient Egyptian game, brought up by Robert W. Henderson at the University of Illinois to dispel myths about Abner Doubleday inventing baseball, maintains that balls were used in a fertility ritual, replacing human heads. Several different makes of ball have been figured upon, including cloth balls filled with seeds, catgut wrapped in leather or deerskin, and one ball made out of linen found in a tomb, visible here. The bocce ball crowd, in an attempt to re-one-up the Chinese, pegs a stone ball as being used in ancient Egypt as early as 5200 BCE, according to hieroglyphics. Naturally, the game resembles bocce ball.
However- tragically as it is- all of these dates are nearly hundreds of millions of years more recent than 'hundreds of millions of years ago', and almost billions of years more recent than 'billions of years ago'. This is to say nothing of the sack the balls need to have been in, or the size of Ur Mouth, which considering the size of acoels is many, many times smaller than these earliest balls, much less their sack.
In fact, the year difference is so far off that it's almost a perversion of intelligence to make claims about BALLSACKINURMOUTH. It's really rather disgusting.
Last night, one such person used these letters to announce to the world an earth-shattering hypothesis, something that could, if true, very well change everything we know about our civilization. According to this person, this prodigy, and I must take the utmost care in transcribing this theory to the letter, "BALLSACKINURMOUTH."
Now, for those unaware, 'ur' is a German prefix meaning original or primitive. Knowing that, what this theory clearly states is that not only did the first known mouth evolve after the invention of ball-related sports, but that a container for those balls could fit entirely inside this original, proto-mouth.
But like any potentially game-changing hypothesis, we should probably test it before we start throwing the Nobel Prize Minting Machine into overdrive so that we may shower this genius with the accolades befitting of a revelation on the scale of BALLSACKINURMOUTH.
So let's first figure out, when was this Ur Mouth conceived?
As it turns out, the origin of the mouth is caught up in a bit of a chicken-or-egg-type debate in evolutionary circles alongside the origin of the anus. Essentially, the debate is whether the anus came first and, as the gut evolved, it eventually reached the other side of the body to become a mouth; or whether the mouth evolved first and the gut eventually became an anus on the other side.
I'm not the best as deciphering the particulars here, but the focus centers around a certain part of the animal kingdom family tree. First comes bilaterians, which branch off to flatworms on one side of the tree, and protostomes and deuterostomes on the other. If none of these sound familiar except 'flatworm', that's because these aren't species. We're much higher up the classification scale, into the realm of subkingdoms and superphyla. (You were taught that it was just kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species, right? Not quite. Biologists have intermediate categories too. Also, there's another category, 'domain', that sits above kingdom as of 1990.)
We're not, however, interested in which came first. What we need is when the mouth showed up. That answer seems to be just as vexing as which came first. The answer is probably somewhere in a 2008 paper in the journal Nature called "Acoel development indicates the independent evolution of the bilaterian mouth and anus", by Andreas Hejnol and Mark Q. Martindale at the University of Hawaii, but the article costs $32 to read. Just in case you have $32 for this, here you go. It, by the way, appears to put together a weird third theory: that the gut came first in two parts- one for the mouth, one for the anus- and the whole mouth-or-anus question is simply a matter of which side the gut, which would of course connect into a single whole, busted through first. What I was able to coax out of the paper without having to hand over $32- which consists of three of the tables- seems to indicate that the paper centers around an acoel flatworm, Convolutriloba longfissura.
Outside of that paper, though, the focus on learning about it appears to center around how we can more effectively murder it (PDF), as it's seen as a pest in larger saltwater aquariums. As a result, we'll need to back up to the larger class, acoela, and go from there. Acoels, as it happens, date back to primitive times. We'll take that rough figure of 'primitive times', which in this context generally means hundreds of millions, potentially billions of years ago, and move to the other end of the equation, ball-based sports.
The question is, did ball-based sports come into existence billions of years ago? If so, we'll have to try and narrow things down further somehow. If not, though, eye-opening as it may seem, the BALLSACKINURMOUTH theory will have to go by the wayside.
Figuring out the ball's invention is murky as well; its creation can't be pinpointed to any one culture in particular. (Lot of definitive answers we're getting today, aren't there?) However, like the mouth, we can pin down a range. While documentation of the usage of balls dates to the Mayan culture, China's Ts'in Dynasty, and the ancient Romans and Greeks, the earliest of the known references to a ball used for sport comes out of ancient Egypt, at around 2500 BCE. Some in the Chinese camp claim as early as 5000 BCE.
The Ts'in Dynasty game vaguely resembles soccer. Two bamboo poles were set up, and a net was strung between them, with a hole cut in the net. In order to score, the ball- made of leather and stuffed with animal fur- had to be kicked through the hole in the net. Players could not use their hands.
The ancient Egyptian game, brought up by Robert W. Henderson at the University of Illinois to dispel myths about Abner Doubleday inventing baseball, maintains that balls were used in a fertility ritual, replacing human heads. Several different makes of ball have been figured upon, including cloth balls filled with seeds, catgut wrapped in leather or deerskin, and one ball made out of linen found in a tomb, visible here. The bocce ball crowd, in an attempt to re-one-up the Chinese, pegs a stone ball as being used in ancient Egypt as early as 5200 BCE, according to hieroglyphics. Naturally, the game resembles bocce ball.
However- tragically as it is- all of these dates are nearly hundreds of millions of years more recent than 'hundreds of millions of years ago', and almost billions of years more recent than 'billions of years ago'. This is to say nothing of the sack the balls need to have been in, or the size of Ur Mouth, which considering the size of acoels is many, many times smaller than these earliest balls, much less their sack.
In fact, the year difference is so far off that it's almost a perversion of intelligence to make claims about BALLSACKINURMOUTH. It's really rather disgusting.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
Apparently, Not Still Dead
During the regime of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, a program was in place in which babies, possibly as many as 300,000, were stolen from their mothers at birth, who were told their babies had died. These were poor mothers, commonly ones who opposed Franco. The babies were then sold to families looking to adopt- some within Spain, some abroad- and all documentation either lost or falsified to make it appear as if the adopting family was the biological family.
Recently, residents of Spain have started to take steps to fix whatever damage they can, as ABC Australia's Philip Williams reports via Journeyman Pictures (which, by the way, yay, an actual name attached to one of these reports!)...
Recently, residents of Spain have started to take steps to fix whatever damage they can, as ABC Australia's Philip Williams reports via Journeyman Pictures (which, by the way, yay, an actual name attached to one of these reports!)...
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
How Bad Would Default Be, Really?
The matter of the debt ceiling crisis has left everybody in America scrambling to try and figure out what, exactly, is going to happen. After all, the United States has never defaulted on a debt.
I'm not going to claim I've got an answer either. But I will say that if there are no suitable analogs in the United States, that doesn't mean we have to run around in general chaos going We Have No Idea. In case anyone's forgotten, there are other countries in the world. And the rest of the world has had money problems too.
So what I'm going to do today is provide a sampling of foreign analogs to the American situation.
*The most commonly-referred to situation, when someone does go foreign, is Greece. Their debt per capita is similar, it's recent, it spawns from the same basic global meltdown, they're also tossing around the word 'austerity'. However, the one thing to keep in mind is the manner in which their austerity is being conducted. Namely, the Greek legislature literally has no choice in the matter. They've taken bailout money from the International Monetary Fund. The EU is more or less dictating to Greece what their remedy will be, on pain of possibly being kicked out of the Eurozone, as there has been discussion of doing. The United States has China as its major creditor, and buys a lot of treasury bonds, but a majority of American debt is internal- Medicare, Social Security, etc. Greece has a formal, explicit obligation to follow the rest of the Eurozone's instructions. Surrender of a degree of sovereignty is a condition of membership. The United States, being so fiercely independent, cannot relate. A bailout of the United States would almost certainly come from the IMF, but as that would entail the IMF imposing solutions of its own, taking a degree of control out of the hands of America, such a bailout seems unlikely, even if the IMF and United States have had historically cozy relations.
*There is a second European nation to considering the same Euro crisis, and that's Belgium. Their main characteristic is their partisanship. As the United States has Democrats and Republicans, the Belgians have ethnic Walloons in the south and Flemish in the north to serve a similar purpose. Flanders has a larger population, but the Belgian legislature is split nearly down the middle. Belgium has a multiparty parliamentary system, which if you're one of those people that wants to bust up the Dems and GOP and go to a multiparty system seems just fine. Belgium, however, shows the downside of a parliamentary system. No matter how you slice the population up, once the elections are over, some combination of people has to form a majority in order for the legislature to function and laws debated and passed.
Belgium has gone for over a year now without finding that majority, a world record. As such, the Belgian interim government is crippled and near-powerless to stop the crisis from reaching them unless they find a majority somewhere in their ranks; elections would leave the country completely government-less at a really bad time. And given that they aren't even speaking to each other, that appears an unlikely ask.
Some Flemish are talking of independence, or at least increased autonomy.
It sounds a fair bit like our situation, only turned up to 11. The problem with using this as an analog, though, is that we don't know how their story ends. The whole point here is to figure out what to do in our situation, and to do that, we need to know how the story ended for others in similar situations. We don't know if they get swept up in the Euro crisis, find common ground at the eleventh hour, or what.
So we have to keep looking.
*The largest pre-recession sovereign default was of Argentina in 1999. Their recession lasted until 2002, and while their economy is now growing more stable by the year, some would say they're still trying to get out from under the fallout. The reason for that is that, upon their default, all of their creditors scrambled to be repaid immediately, and first. Likewise, nobody was about to lend them a dollar more.
The tricky thing about Argentina, though, is in how they valued their currency, the peso. While the dollar is used around the world as a reserve currency- a currency everyone else holds in reserve and measures their own currency against- Argentina, pre-default, tied the peso directly to the dollar. Whatever the dollar was worth, Argentina made the peso worth an equal amount. Once the default hit, Argentina floated the peso- that is, stopped tying it to the dollar. The peso's value promptly went down the toilet.
As a side effect, Argentinian TV stations had to rely heavily on reality shows in order to get by, and cancel the more expensive educational programming.
Argentina would have had to gut their budget, just absolutely gut it, in order to pay the money they owed to everybody. What they ultimately did, though, was stand firm for four years- four years where they were shut out of the international financial market- until they got their creditors to agree to a debt restructuring plan where most of their debt payments were reduced and stretched out until 2006, when an uptick in the economy left Argentina more able to pay debts in full. They have come steadily out of their hole since then; the gap between rich and poor has shrunk. About a quarter of the debt's representatives held out, though. As of 2010, 7.4% of the debt remains unrestructured.
The trouble here is in pre-existing standing: while Argentina was shut out of the financial market, the United States to a large degree IS the financial market. The world could go on without
Argentina's participation, but the United States has too many fingers of too large a size in too many pies to just leave alone like that. Argentina itself had, again, directly tied the peso to the American dollar. America is not currently tying the dollar to the Argentine peso, or any other currency. The dollar is in fact a reserve currency- a currency everyone else holds in reserve, just in case something were to happen with their own.
So three analogs, all with a nagging problem that keeps any of them from being 100% perfect. However, all three, along with other defaults we didn't get into such as Russia in 1998 (PDF), Mexico in 1994, Latin America's "La Decada Perdida"- lost decade- in the 1980's, and anything beyond those listed on the timelines here, have a common thread: pain. Lots and lots of pain. Even getting into the situation in the first place causes pain. Anyone that tells you that an American default would not be painful, one way or another, is stupid and/or lying.
The question is simply, how much pain. Are you hitting your hand with a mallet, putting it on a stove, or shoving it into a wood chipper?
I'm not going to claim I've got an answer either. But I will say that if there are no suitable analogs in the United States, that doesn't mean we have to run around in general chaos going We Have No Idea. In case anyone's forgotten, there are other countries in the world. And the rest of the world has had money problems too.
So what I'm going to do today is provide a sampling of foreign analogs to the American situation.
*The most commonly-referred to situation, when someone does go foreign, is Greece. Their debt per capita is similar, it's recent, it spawns from the same basic global meltdown, they're also tossing around the word 'austerity'. However, the one thing to keep in mind is the manner in which their austerity is being conducted. Namely, the Greek legislature literally has no choice in the matter. They've taken bailout money from the International Monetary Fund. The EU is more or less dictating to Greece what their remedy will be, on pain of possibly being kicked out of the Eurozone, as there has been discussion of doing. The United States has China as its major creditor, and buys a lot of treasury bonds, but a majority of American debt is internal- Medicare, Social Security, etc. Greece has a formal, explicit obligation to follow the rest of the Eurozone's instructions. Surrender of a degree of sovereignty is a condition of membership. The United States, being so fiercely independent, cannot relate. A bailout of the United States would almost certainly come from the IMF, but as that would entail the IMF imposing solutions of its own, taking a degree of control out of the hands of America, such a bailout seems unlikely, even if the IMF and United States have had historically cozy relations.
*There is a second European nation to considering the same Euro crisis, and that's Belgium. Their main characteristic is their partisanship. As the United States has Democrats and Republicans, the Belgians have ethnic Walloons in the south and Flemish in the north to serve a similar purpose. Flanders has a larger population, but the Belgian legislature is split nearly down the middle. Belgium has a multiparty parliamentary system, which if you're one of those people that wants to bust up the Dems and GOP and go to a multiparty system seems just fine. Belgium, however, shows the downside of a parliamentary system. No matter how you slice the population up, once the elections are over, some combination of people has to form a majority in order for the legislature to function and laws debated and passed.
Belgium has gone for over a year now without finding that majority, a world record. As such, the Belgian interim government is crippled and near-powerless to stop the crisis from reaching them unless they find a majority somewhere in their ranks; elections would leave the country completely government-less at a really bad time. And given that they aren't even speaking to each other, that appears an unlikely ask.
Some Flemish are talking of independence, or at least increased autonomy.
It sounds a fair bit like our situation, only turned up to 11. The problem with using this as an analog, though, is that we don't know how their story ends. The whole point here is to figure out what to do in our situation, and to do that, we need to know how the story ended for others in similar situations. We don't know if they get swept up in the Euro crisis, find common ground at the eleventh hour, or what.
So we have to keep looking.
*The largest pre-recession sovereign default was of Argentina in 1999. Their recession lasted until 2002, and while their economy is now growing more stable by the year, some would say they're still trying to get out from under the fallout. The reason for that is that, upon their default, all of their creditors scrambled to be repaid immediately, and first. Likewise, nobody was about to lend them a dollar more.
The tricky thing about Argentina, though, is in how they valued their currency, the peso. While the dollar is used around the world as a reserve currency- a currency everyone else holds in reserve and measures their own currency against- Argentina, pre-default, tied the peso directly to the dollar. Whatever the dollar was worth, Argentina made the peso worth an equal amount. Once the default hit, Argentina floated the peso- that is, stopped tying it to the dollar. The peso's value promptly went down the toilet.
As a side effect, Argentinian TV stations had to rely heavily on reality shows in order to get by, and cancel the more expensive educational programming.
Argentina would have had to gut their budget, just absolutely gut it, in order to pay the money they owed to everybody. What they ultimately did, though, was stand firm for four years- four years where they were shut out of the international financial market- until they got their creditors to agree to a debt restructuring plan where most of their debt payments were reduced and stretched out until 2006, when an uptick in the economy left Argentina more able to pay debts in full. They have come steadily out of their hole since then; the gap between rich and poor has shrunk. About a quarter of the debt's representatives held out, though. As of 2010, 7.4% of the debt remains unrestructured.
The trouble here is in pre-existing standing: while Argentina was shut out of the financial market, the United States to a large degree IS the financial market. The world could go on without
Argentina's participation, but the United States has too many fingers of too large a size in too many pies to just leave alone like that. Argentina itself had, again, directly tied the peso to the American dollar. America is not currently tying the dollar to the Argentine peso, or any other currency. The dollar is in fact a reserve currency- a currency everyone else holds in reserve, just in case something were to happen with their own.
So three analogs, all with a nagging problem that keeps any of them from being 100% perfect. However, all three, along with other defaults we didn't get into such as Russia in 1998 (PDF), Mexico in 1994, Latin America's "La Decada Perdida"- lost decade- in the 1980's, and anything beyond those listed on the timelines here, have a common thread: pain. Lots and lots of pain. Even getting into the situation in the first place causes pain. Anyone that tells you that an American default would not be painful, one way or another, is stupid and/or lying.
The question is simply, how much pain. Are you hitting your hand with a mallet, putting it on a stove, or shoving it into a wood chipper?
Monday, July 4, 2011
Four For Fighting
It's the Fourth of July. Independence Day in the United States.
I suppose some of you are expecting me to make some high-minded speech where I once again decry the toxic political discourse in this country. Which, don't get me wrong, is completely unacceptable for a nation that has any right to call itself a moral compass or global authority. You're probably looking at me, on this day, to reach back to the Founding Fathers and talk about what they'd think of us were they to see how we lay into each other on this most patriotic of days.
I can do that for you. But you may not like what you hear.
First, let's cover the revolution itself. The revolution was not a united group of colonists against the British; let's make that clear. Some of the colonists were loyal to the British crown. What's not as cut-and-dried is the exact split of loyalists to patriots, and how many people were undecided, as it were. The long-standing conventional wisdom on the topic was that it was an even three-way split. More recently, though, the split's been refigured more like 15-20% loyalist, 40-45% patriot or patriot-sympathetic, and the rest neutral. A little more in favor of the patriots than before.
And, of course, as things progressed, the patriots pressed their numbers. Much of the war revolved around trying to win the hearts and minds of the undecideds. This was accomplished partially through persuasive argument and, eventually, partially through forcing the loyalists to shut up via lootings, beatings, harassment and various other indignities. After the war, some of the loyalists got out of Dodge. Just like Liberia was "founded" by Americans leaving America, Sierra Leone was "founded" by black loyalists who had fled to Nova Scotia and discovered that life wasn't much fun there either.
Most of the loyalists, however, stayed put. However, they continued to harbor loyalist feelings for the remainder of their days. Sentiments you went to war over die hard, win or lose. In the end, when the first political parties in America were formed, one, the Federalist Party, took a decidedly more pro-British tack. It's not hard to figure out where the loyalists went.
This would come into play over the Fourth of July.
If you happened to be perusing the Daily Beast last year, you'll have noticed Sean Wilentz talk about exactly what the Founding Fathers were up to on Independence Day: sniping at each other. The two parties of the time, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, wouldn't even hold events with each other.
The Democratic-Republicans would spend the day attacking the Federalists over the Sedition Act, which made it illegal to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government or officials within. In practice, the law basically made it illegal to criticize then-President John Adams, especially since the law had an expiration date that just so happened to also be Adams' last day in office.
In turn, the Federalists spent the day attacking Thomas Jefferson and downplaying his role in writing the Declaration of Independence. A few scattered loyalists were still around, and they had huddled with the Federalists. One, Timothy Pickering, called the Declaration "high-wrought Philippic against Great Britain and her King.”
Albert B. Southwick of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette recalls here how things went down in Worcester in 1808. The ill will harbored by each party in that story was repeated nationwide; the book Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic by Len Travers tells about how that same year in Philadelphia, Federalists aimed to "excite hostility even to blood," with both parties threatening each other, each attempting to goad the other into throwing the first punch so they would have an excuse to fight.
So what happened to calm things down on the Fourth? Simple: the Federalists died off as a party. When Jefferson became the third President in the 1800 election, the Federalists found themselves on their back heel. Accustomed to an upper-class lifestyle, they found themselves out of touch. And when Jefferson's handpicked successor, James Madison, was elected to two terms of his own, they found themselves near death. (Opposing the War of 1812 didn't help their case any.) By the time James Monroe came along in 1816, they barely had enough power left to even field a candidate to oppose him. They would informally send twice-defeated vice-presidential candidate Rufus King to oppose Monroe, and when that failed, by 1820, the Federalists were left fielding only a candidate for Vice President, Richard Stockton, without a Presidential candidate for him to run with. It was the last gasp before the party dissolved entirely. And without two parties that could attack each other on the Fourth, and without a party sympathetic to the British, Independence Day became a day of unified patriotism.
The immediate post-Federalist era was known as the Era of Good Feelings. It wasn't entirely good feelings; the issues that would later result in the Civil War were beginning to take root. But for one day a year, at least, it was an improvement.
I suppose some of you are expecting me to make some high-minded speech where I once again decry the toxic political discourse in this country. Which, don't get me wrong, is completely unacceptable for a nation that has any right to call itself a moral compass or global authority. You're probably looking at me, on this day, to reach back to the Founding Fathers and talk about what they'd think of us were they to see how we lay into each other on this most patriotic of days.
I can do that for you. But you may not like what you hear.
First, let's cover the revolution itself. The revolution was not a united group of colonists against the British; let's make that clear. Some of the colonists were loyal to the British crown. What's not as cut-and-dried is the exact split of loyalists to patriots, and how many people were undecided, as it were. The long-standing conventional wisdom on the topic was that it was an even three-way split. More recently, though, the split's been refigured more like 15-20% loyalist, 40-45% patriot or patriot-sympathetic, and the rest neutral. A little more in favor of the patriots than before.
And, of course, as things progressed, the patriots pressed their numbers. Much of the war revolved around trying to win the hearts and minds of the undecideds. This was accomplished partially through persuasive argument and, eventually, partially through forcing the loyalists to shut up via lootings, beatings, harassment and various other indignities. After the war, some of the loyalists got out of Dodge. Just like Liberia was "founded" by Americans leaving America, Sierra Leone was "founded" by black loyalists who had fled to Nova Scotia and discovered that life wasn't much fun there either.
Most of the loyalists, however, stayed put. However, they continued to harbor loyalist feelings for the remainder of their days. Sentiments you went to war over die hard, win or lose. In the end, when the first political parties in America were formed, one, the Federalist Party, took a decidedly more pro-British tack. It's not hard to figure out where the loyalists went.
This would come into play over the Fourth of July.
If you happened to be perusing the Daily Beast last year, you'll have noticed Sean Wilentz talk about exactly what the Founding Fathers were up to on Independence Day: sniping at each other. The two parties of the time, the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans, wouldn't even hold events with each other.
The Democratic-Republicans would spend the day attacking the Federalists over the Sedition Act, which made it illegal to publish "false, scandalous, and malicious writing" against the government or officials within. In practice, the law basically made it illegal to criticize then-President John Adams, especially since the law had an expiration date that just so happened to also be Adams' last day in office.
In turn, the Federalists spent the day attacking Thomas Jefferson and downplaying his role in writing the Declaration of Independence. A few scattered loyalists were still around, and they had huddled with the Federalists. One, Timothy Pickering, called the Declaration "high-wrought Philippic against Great Britain and her King.”
Albert B. Southwick of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette recalls here how things went down in Worcester in 1808. The ill will harbored by each party in that story was repeated nationwide; the book Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic by Len Travers tells about how that same year in Philadelphia, Federalists aimed to "excite hostility even to blood," with both parties threatening each other, each attempting to goad the other into throwing the first punch so they would have an excuse to fight.
So what happened to calm things down on the Fourth? Simple: the Federalists died off as a party. When Jefferson became the third President in the 1800 election, the Federalists found themselves on their back heel. Accustomed to an upper-class lifestyle, they found themselves out of touch. And when Jefferson's handpicked successor, James Madison, was elected to two terms of his own, they found themselves near death. (Opposing the War of 1812 didn't help their case any.) By the time James Monroe came along in 1816, they barely had enough power left to even field a candidate to oppose him. They would informally send twice-defeated vice-presidential candidate Rufus King to oppose Monroe, and when that failed, by 1820, the Federalists were left fielding only a candidate for Vice President, Richard Stockton, without a Presidential candidate for him to run with. It was the last gasp before the party dissolved entirely. And without two parties that could attack each other on the Fourth, and without a party sympathetic to the British, Independence Day became a day of unified patriotism.
The immediate post-Federalist era was known as the Era of Good Feelings. It wasn't entirely good feelings; the issues that would later result in the Civil War were beginning to take root. But for one day a year, at least, it was an improvement.
Friday, July 1, 2011
The First Professional Wrestler
Let's begin with a question. Without looking it up, who was the first person we would recognize today as a professional wrestler?
"Hulk Hogan?"
...hoo boy. Either you have never paid any attention to professional wrestling, or you are incredibly ignorant of what you've been watching. Even in the era since Hulk arrived on the scene, took the spotlight from the likes of Bruno Sammartino, and repeatedly took wrestling by storm, names from long before had been placed on screen and even in the ring, like Bob Backlund (who debuted in 1973), Gorilla Monsoon (who debuted in 1959), and Mae Young (who debuted in 1939.) Young to this day still recalls her having been wrestling in Memphis the day of the Pearl Harbor bombing.
Hulk Hogan, meanwhile, debuted in 1977.
"You mentioned Bruno Sammartino. What about him? Who's he?"
Sammartino debuted in 1959, same as Monsoon. He holds the all-time record for longest reign as champion of what was then the WWWF (World Wide Wrestling Federation), or for that matter any other pro wrestling world title belt. That reign lasted from 1963- a defeat of "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers"- to 1971- a loss to Ivan Koloff. He left the promotion on poor terms, and has since grown to hate what pro wrestling has become, but since Vince McMahon is the one with the bully pulpit, you don't hear from Sammartino much these days.
"Oh, geez, who's that one guy, the pretty boy. First one with a gimmick."
You mean Gorgeous George?
"Yeah, him! That's the guy."
He debuted in 1932, earlier than anyone we've mentioned so far. He was in fact the first to have a gimmick that really, truly went over with the crowd: the aforementioned pretty-boy image. He dyed his hair blonde, wore perfume and bobby pins, used Pomp and Circumstance as theme music decades before Randy Savage did, had a valet named Jeffries who laid out a red carpet and threw rose petals, the works.
It should go without saying that George cheated and cried like a baby every time he got beat up. The whole act, combined with the earliest days of television, caused people- and by people we are referring to World War 2 veterans who saw George's manhood fairly lacking- to pay top dollar for the privilege of hating him in person. Prior to George, you could get away with being a straight-laced gimmickless grappler. After George, it was all about the showmanship from then on.
But he's not who we're looking for. There were some before him. And there were gimmicks before him as well.
"Well, who, then?"
What must first be made clear is that professional wrestling was borne out of true, non-kayfabe, we-don't-know-the-winner-in-advance wrestling. This type of wrestling, borne out of Lancashire, England, was known as 'catch' wrestling- short for catch-as-catch-can- and one melded slowly into the other. Here's a clip from 1903 of what catch-as-catch-can looks like, unearthed by HBO.
The melding was smooth enough that the question of who should be called the first true pro wrestler can be a slightly maddening thing to answer. However, one place can help out: the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame and Museum in Amsterdam, New York. Unlike WWE's in-house Hall of Fame, which inducts based on who happens to be in good standing with WWE at the time, the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame is not affiliated with any one promotion, and thus has a purer interest in chronicling the sport's true history. Even so, the question of who is pro and who is not proves a matter of interpretation. Do you count the first with a gimmick? The first to accept money? The first to wrestle a match whose outcome was decided in advance?
Ultimately, I opted to go with the earliest-debuting wrestler the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame had inducted. This was Martin "Farmer" Burns, who debuted in 1869 and is today known as "The Grandmaster of American Wrestling". Back then, wrestling was the realm of traveling carnivals and take-on-all-comers contests. The latter was a format in which cash was awarded to any man that could throw, defeat, or sometimes merely survive against a featured wrestler. At age 8, Burns claimed one such prize, worth 15 cents, and was on his way.
Burns was born in a log cabin in Cedar County, Iowa. As the nickname suggests, he was raised on a farm. His father died when he was age 11, and to help support the family, Burns went to work. Burns went to a lot of work. He would farm; he would log; he would chop wood. He would also carry his work ethic into the gym, or at least what passed for a gym back then.
The most imposing feature of Burns was his neck, which he built up to a 20 inch diameter after losing a match early in 1886 to a stranglehold applied by Evan "Strangler" Lewis. (For reference, Shaquille O'Neal's neck also measures 20 inches. But while Shaq weighs around 325 pounds, Burns came in at a mere 160.) Once developed, he demonstrated the strength of his neck by having himself hanged.
Yes. With a noose. He did this regularly, often several times a day. For good measure, while he was up there, he would whistle "Yankee Doodle Dandy".
In 1889, Burns made his big break at an event in Chicago. At this event, $25 was offered to anyone that could avoid being thrown for 15 minutes each by Jack Carkeek and, as fate would have it, Evan "Strangler" Lewis.
Carkeek, for one, had heard of Burns, who aside from the loss to Lewis had run roughshod over the Iowa wrestling circuit, and wanted no part of him. Carkeek asked the booker to call the whole thing off as soon as he knew of Burns' intentions, but Burns, who had come into town in the first place to deliver hogs, said he was there for the next ten days, and anytime Carkeek was ready would be fine.
Carkeek's fears turned out to be well-founded. Despite Burns showing up in his farmer's overalls (and picking up his nickname in the process), underneath those overalls was a very strong, very scary man. Carkeek never had a prayer. Instead of throwing Burns, Burns threw him around for the 15 minutes. Lewis was next, and he knew Burns from before. But Burns had built his neck up because of Lewis, and this time Lewis had no answer. Burns took the $25, and space in the Chicago papers.
Aside from his conditioning, Burns benefited from having a well-rounded wrestling style. In those days, the rules were far from uniform, with the legality of various moves altering from match to match. One-dimensional wrestlers were in big trouble if they found themselves in a match where their signature move was banned. Burns had many moves to fall back on- the full-nelson, the half-nelson, the chicken wing, the double wrist lock, the hammerlock, several kinds of toe holds.
Most importantly to wrestling, Burns popularized the concept of the pinfall. In the days of catch wrestling, it was more common to win a match by throwing your opponent to the ground, with pinfalls only coming into play if nobody had made a throw after a certain timeframe. (Matches sometimes had a time limit. Sometimes they didn't. When they didn't, bouts could potentially last for hours. Nine-hour fights were not unheard of.) Burns milked the art of the pinfall for all it was worth. If it was too early in the match for a pin to decide things, Burns didn't care. He would pin just to set up one of his holds. Nobody else was giving the pin nearly as much attention to such great effect. It was like Notre Dame popularizing the forward pass in football.
Over the years, Burns would claim to have wrestled thousands of matches, only losing six or seven. The exact numbers seem as academic as any other win-loss record in the sport that isn't the Undertaker's Wrestlemania winning streak. The point is made.
By 1893, Burns had advanced to the role of teacher. He would never really stop wrestling, but now he was training as well. In that year, he opened his first gym in Rock Island, Illinois; later, he would open another in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1914, he published a mail-order, 12-month wrestling course called 'Lessons in Wrestling and Physical Culture', which, true to Burns' nature, emphasized hard work, holds, and devoted one lesson to building up the neck.
One of Burns' many, many students was fellow Iowan Frank Gotch, another Hall of Famer who claimed a world title in 1908, and whom some consider to be the greatest wrestler of the era, if not of all time. In fact, another of Burns' lessons concerned a move called the "Gotch Toe Hold". Burns acted as coach for Iowa's first state wrestling champion, Cedar Rapids Washington, in 1921. To this day, the hotbed of collegiate wrestling continues to be the Plains states, ranging from North Dakota and Minnesota to Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma. Iowa remains the capital of wrestling in America, chiefly due to Burns' lessons and Gotch's testimonial performances.
Burns lived long enough to see Gorgeous George begin his career, but not long enough to see the persona debut; the man behind it, George Wagner, would not adopt the Gorgeous George persona until 1941, and Burns died in 1937. So it's possible that Burns died not quite realizing the direction his sport would ultimately take.
Meanwhile, while all that is seen today in the sport can ultimately trace back to the roots Burns had laid, today's competitors and especially fans are in all likelihood not aware of just who started them down the path they now tread.
But while neither end of professional wrestling's timeline may be able to quite see the other, they in at least one sense remain kindred spirits.
After all, if someone came out and hanged himself every week as part of his entrance, you'd notice.
"Hulk Hogan?"
...hoo boy. Either you have never paid any attention to professional wrestling, or you are incredibly ignorant of what you've been watching. Even in the era since Hulk arrived on the scene, took the spotlight from the likes of Bruno Sammartino, and repeatedly took wrestling by storm, names from long before had been placed on screen and even in the ring, like Bob Backlund (who debuted in 1973), Gorilla Monsoon (who debuted in 1959), and Mae Young (who debuted in 1939.) Young to this day still recalls her having been wrestling in Memphis the day of the Pearl Harbor bombing.
Hulk Hogan, meanwhile, debuted in 1977.
"You mentioned Bruno Sammartino. What about him? Who's he?"
Sammartino debuted in 1959, same as Monsoon. He holds the all-time record for longest reign as champion of what was then the WWWF (World Wide Wrestling Federation), or for that matter any other pro wrestling world title belt. That reign lasted from 1963- a defeat of "Nature Boy" Buddy Rogers"- to 1971- a loss to Ivan Koloff. He left the promotion on poor terms, and has since grown to hate what pro wrestling has become, but since Vince McMahon is the one with the bully pulpit, you don't hear from Sammartino much these days.
"Oh, geez, who's that one guy, the pretty boy. First one with a gimmick."
You mean Gorgeous George?
"Yeah, him! That's the guy."
He debuted in 1932, earlier than anyone we've mentioned so far. He was in fact the first to have a gimmick that really, truly went over with the crowd: the aforementioned pretty-boy image. He dyed his hair blonde, wore perfume and bobby pins, used Pomp and Circumstance as theme music decades before Randy Savage did, had a valet named Jeffries who laid out a red carpet and threw rose petals, the works.
It should go without saying that George cheated and cried like a baby every time he got beat up. The whole act, combined with the earliest days of television, caused people- and by people we are referring to World War 2 veterans who saw George's manhood fairly lacking- to pay top dollar for the privilege of hating him in person. Prior to George, you could get away with being a straight-laced gimmickless grappler. After George, it was all about the showmanship from then on.
But he's not who we're looking for. There were some before him. And there were gimmicks before him as well.
"Well, who, then?"
What must first be made clear is that professional wrestling was borne out of true, non-kayfabe, we-don't-know-the-winner-in-advance wrestling. This type of wrestling, borne out of Lancashire, England, was known as 'catch' wrestling- short for catch-as-catch-can- and one melded slowly into the other. Here's a clip from 1903 of what catch-as-catch-can looks like, unearthed by HBO.
The melding was smooth enough that the question of who should be called the first true pro wrestler can be a slightly maddening thing to answer. However, one place can help out: the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame and Museum in Amsterdam, New York. Unlike WWE's in-house Hall of Fame, which inducts based on who happens to be in good standing with WWE at the time, the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame is not affiliated with any one promotion, and thus has a purer interest in chronicling the sport's true history. Even so, the question of who is pro and who is not proves a matter of interpretation. Do you count the first with a gimmick? The first to accept money? The first to wrestle a match whose outcome was decided in advance?
Ultimately, I opted to go with the earliest-debuting wrestler the Professional Wrestling Hall of Fame had inducted. This was Martin "Farmer" Burns, who debuted in 1869 and is today known as "The Grandmaster of American Wrestling". Back then, wrestling was the realm of traveling carnivals and take-on-all-comers contests. The latter was a format in which cash was awarded to any man that could throw, defeat, or sometimes merely survive against a featured wrestler. At age 8, Burns claimed one such prize, worth 15 cents, and was on his way.
Burns was born in a log cabin in Cedar County, Iowa. As the nickname suggests, he was raised on a farm. His father died when he was age 11, and to help support the family, Burns went to work. Burns went to a lot of work. He would farm; he would log; he would chop wood. He would also carry his work ethic into the gym, or at least what passed for a gym back then.
The most imposing feature of Burns was his neck, which he built up to a 20 inch diameter after losing a match early in 1886 to a stranglehold applied by Evan "Strangler" Lewis. (For reference, Shaquille O'Neal's neck also measures 20 inches. But while Shaq weighs around 325 pounds, Burns came in at a mere 160.) Once developed, he demonstrated the strength of his neck by having himself hanged.
Yes. With a noose. He did this regularly, often several times a day. For good measure, while he was up there, he would whistle "Yankee Doodle Dandy".
In 1889, Burns made his big break at an event in Chicago. At this event, $25 was offered to anyone that could avoid being thrown for 15 minutes each by Jack Carkeek and, as fate would have it, Evan "Strangler" Lewis.
Carkeek, for one, had heard of Burns, who aside from the loss to Lewis had run roughshod over the Iowa wrestling circuit, and wanted no part of him. Carkeek asked the booker to call the whole thing off as soon as he knew of Burns' intentions, but Burns, who had come into town in the first place to deliver hogs, said he was there for the next ten days, and anytime Carkeek was ready would be fine.
Carkeek's fears turned out to be well-founded. Despite Burns showing up in his farmer's overalls (and picking up his nickname in the process), underneath those overalls was a very strong, very scary man. Carkeek never had a prayer. Instead of throwing Burns, Burns threw him around for the 15 minutes. Lewis was next, and he knew Burns from before. But Burns had built his neck up because of Lewis, and this time Lewis had no answer. Burns took the $25, and space in the Chicago papers.
Aside from his conditioning, Burns benefited from having a well-rounded wrestling style. In those days, the rules were far from uniform, with the legality of various moves altering from match to match. One-dimensional wrestlers were in big trouble if they found themselves in a match where their signature move was banned. Burns had many moves to fall back on- the full-nelson, the half-nelson, the chicken wing, the double wrist lock, the hammerlock, several kinds of toe holds.
Most importantly to wrestling, Burns popularized the concept of the pinfall. In the days of catch wrestling, it was more common to win a match by throwing your opponent to the ground, with pinfalls only coming into play if nobody had made a throw after a certain timeframe. (Matches sometimes had a time limit. Sometimes they didn't. When they didn't, bouts could potentially last for hours. Nine-hour fights were not unheard of.) Burns milked the art of the pinfall for all it was worth. If it was too early in the match for a pin to decide things, Burns didn't care. He would pin just to set up one of his holds. Nobody else was giving the pin nearly as much attention to such great effect. It was like Notre Dame popularizing the forward pass in football.
Over the years, Burns would claim to have wrestled thousands of matches, only losing six or seven. The exact numbers seem as academic as any other win-loss record in the sport that isn't the Undertaker's Wrestlemania winning streak. The point is made.
By 1893, Burns had advanced to the role of teacher. He would never really stop wrestling, but now he was training as well. In that year, he opened his first gym in Rock Island, Illinois; later, he would open another in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1914, he published a mail-order, 12-month wrestling course called 'Lessons in Wrestling and Physical Culture', which, true to Burns' nature, emphasized hard work, holds, and devoted one lesson to building up the neck.
One of Burns' many, many students was fellow Iowan Frank Gotch, another Hall of Famer who claimed a world title in 1908, and whom some consider to be the greatest wrestler of the era, if not of all time. In fact, another of Burns' lessons concerned a move called the "Gotch Toe Hold". Burns acted as coach for Iowa's first state wrestling champion, Cedar Rapids Washington, in 1921. To this day, the hotbed of collegiate wrestling continues to be the Plains states, ranging from North Dakota and Minnesota to Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma. Iowa remains the capital of wrestling in America, chiefly due to Burns' lessons and Gotch's testimonial performances.
Burns lived long enough to see Gorgeous George begin his career, but not long enough to see the persona debut; the man behind it, George Wagner, would not adopt the Gorgeous George persona until 1941, and Burns died in 1937. So it's possible that Burns died not quite realizing the direction his sport would ultimately take.
Meanwhile, while all that is seen today in the sport can ultimately trace back to the roots Burns had laid, today's competitors and especially fans are in all likelihood not aware of just who started them down the path they now tread.
But while neither end of professional wrestling's timeline may be able to quite see the other, they in at least one sense remain kindred spirits.
After all, if someone came out and hanged himself every week as part of his entrance, you'd notice.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
You've Got It Soft
So you think television's going downhill. You think reality TV is rotting America's brain. You think our society couldn't possibly come up with anything worse than Teen Mom or 19 Kids and Counting or anything involving a Kardashian.
Uh uh. Fellow children of the 90's, let me lay out to you what our moms and dads, grandparents as well, went through. And be glad you're not them.
First off, you complain about reality overtaking all several hundred of the channels you've got. Here's the thing, though: you have several hundred channels. You only have to find something halfway watchable on one of them at a time. I can manage that much; i don't know about you. I have two 'default' channels alone- MLB Network and CNN International- that I go to in an emergency if nothing else is on. In our parents' day, that would be unthinkable. Laughable. Cable simply didn't exist. You had three channels, maybe four (ABC, NBC, CBS, and the now-long-deceased DuMont), back at the start of the TV era. If there's garbage on four channels now, you've got hundreds of others. If there's garbage on four channels then, you're watching garbage or you're watching nothing.
But more importantly, back then, shows were just as dumb as they are now. You could argue that they were even dumber, because a) the networks were still just feeling their way out from radio and had no idea what worked yet, b) a lot of shows were just straight carryovers from radio, and c) audiences simply weren't as sophisticated as they are now. The 50's were the era of pies in the face and not being able to say the word 'pregnant' because it would be too shocking. Laugh tracks had a long way to go before audiences realized they were being treated as too dumb to know for themselves when to laugh.
You have TV Tropes. Your parents, to say the least, did not.
In addition, any show format that survived was likely to be in its absolute most primitive form. So if a TV executive wanted to tug at your heartstrings, odds are you weren't getting a subtle, well-crafted, well-edited tear jerker. No, no. They were just going to shove melodrama right down your throat.
Enter Queen For A Day.
Now, you might have heard of Queen For A Day offhand at some point, and it's likely you heard of the show's gist as: housewives took turns giving the biggest sob stories they could come up with, and the one who gave the best sob story won enough prizes to open their own shopping mall, which they would also win. And then the winner would cry a bunch more in the process.
Yeah, pretty much.
Please excuse the static- this obviously came off a tape- as you see what your parents and grandparents had to watch in the 50's. Women in the audience, it is at this time that the management asks you to please put down any large, blunt Mack trucks you may have on hand, as your electronic device of choice may end up crushed underneath them otherwise..
Aren't you glad you don't have to watch that?
I mean, again?
Uh uh. Fellow children of the 90's, let me lay out to you what our moms and dads, grandparents as well, went through. And be glad you're not them.
First off, you complain about reality overtaking all several hundred of the channels you've got. Here's the thing, though: you have several hundred channels. You only have to find something halfway watchable on one of them at a time. I can manage that much; i don't know about you. I have two 'default' channels alone- MLB Network and CNN International- that I go to in an emergency if nothing else is on. In our parents' day, that would be unthinkable. Laughable. Cable simply didn't exist. You had three channels, maybe four (ABC, NBC, CBS, and the now-long-deceased DuMont), back at the start of the TV era. If there's garbage on four channels now, you've got hundreds of others. If there's garbage on four channels then, you're watching garbage or you're watching nothing.
But more importantly, back then, shows were just as dumb as they are now. You could argue that they were even dumber, because a) the networks were still just feeling their way out from radio and had no idea what worked yet, b) a lot of shows were just straight carryovers from radio, and c) audiences simply weren't as sophisticated as they are now. The 50's were the era of pies in the face and not being able to say the word 'pregnant' because it would be too shocking. Laugh tracks had a long way to go before audiences realized they were being treated as too dumb to know for themselves when to laugh.
You have TV Tropes. Your parents, to say the least, did not.
In addition, any show format that survived was likely to be in its absolute most primitive form. So if a TV executive wanted to tug at your heartstrings, odds are you weren't getting a subtle, well-crafted, well-edited tear jerker. No, no. They were just going to shove melodrama right down your throat.
Enter Queen For A Day.
Now, you might have heard of Queen For A Day offhand at some point, and it's likely you heard of the show's gist as: housewives took turns giving the biggest sob stories they could come up with, and the one who gave the best sob story won enough prizes to open their own shopping mall, which they would also win. And then the winner would cry a bunch more in the process.
Yeah, pretty much.
Please excuse the static- this obviously came off a tape- as you see what your parents and grandparents had to watch in the 50's. Women in the audience, it is at this time that the management asks you to please put down any large, blunt Mack trucks you may have on hand, as your electronic device of choice may end up crushed underneath them otherwise..
Aren't you glad you don't have to watch that?
I mean, again?
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Capped
The Chicago Cubs are not having a good season. Their record, as of today, is third-worst in baseball; the injury bug has not been kind; bad multiyear contracts abound; the players in the bad contracts aren't good trade bait; they're owed too much money to release; you can't very well send them to the minors and bring up someone else, so all you can do is watch bad players lose again and again. Manager Mike Quade and general manager Jim Hendry are both on the hot seat. I have contemplated wearing a paper bag over my head.
But I'm a Cubs fan. It could be worse.
MLB Network likes to do what they call a Prime 9 list- a top-ten list, but with nine items. "Why nine? That's baseball. Nine players, nine innings, Prime 9." With apologies to them, here's my Prime 9- or Subprime 9, more to the point- of the darkest hours in Chicago Cubs history...
9. Sammy Sosa's role in the steroid era
8. The June Swoon, 1977-79
7. The College of Coaches
6. Ball goes through Leon Durham's legs in 1984 NLCS
5. The black cat at Shea Stadium heralding the collapse of 1969
4. Trading Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio
3. Curse of the Billy Goat placed
2. Steve Bartman's foul ball in 2003 NLCS
1. Cap Anson
Cap Anson was one of baseball's first all-time greats. He was the first man to reach 3,000 hits (though the exact number has long been in dispute), played a still-record 27 consecutive seasons (and was the only player to do so at all until Nolan Ryan), and pioneered such things as the third-base coach, spring training, the hit-and-run, and the pitching rotation. His name is still, to this day, featured prominently in the Cubs' record book.
Because of his skill, he was also a very influential racist.
In the 1880's, Reconstruction was on the ropes, as ex-Confederates in the south took any means they deemed necessary to restore their pre-Civil War way of life. And, of course, the pre-Civil War way of life entailed treating blacks as subhuman, and treating people who gave blacks basic humanity as an enemy to be dealt with harshly. The period was rapidly approaching, 1890-1940, that historian Rayford Logan described first as "the nadir of American race relations", a period that might make one wonder if the Civil War had actually settled anything at all.
It is in this environment that the first black player in major league history took the field. It wasn't Jackie Robinson; he would not break through until 1947, after the nadir had passed. In order for Robinson to break through the color barrier, someone had to have put it up.
And so we return to the 1880's. In 1883, Moses Fleetwood Walker signed as a catcher with the Toledo Blue Stockings. It should be noted that catchers did not have any of the equipment back then that they do today. There was no catcher's mask, no pads, not even a glove. Nobody had a glove. You were catching everything the pitcher threw barehanded. Catchers as a result proved a perpetually-endangered species by default. (Here is an 1889 photo of the hands of catcher Doug Allison. Either that year or the year after, Allison would become the first known catcher to don a glove.) Despite several prior years of strong play, Walker was subjected several times to opponents who refused to play if he was permitted on the field. Sometimes he was allowed to play. Sometimes he wasn't.
On August 10, 1883, the then-Chicago White Stockings, led by Anson, arrived in Toledo for an exhibition game. Anson, like the others before him, refused to play with Walker on the field.
Or, as Anson put it that day, "Get that n****r off the field!"
Anson relented only when told that the White Stockings would forfeit unless Walker was allowed to play-- "We'll play this game here, but we won't play never no more with the n****r in." The irony here is that Walker was scheduled to take an off day anyway, but after Anson spoke up, Walker was inserted. Not to make a statement, but rather to see if Anson would forfeit, and therefore, give up his share of the gate receipts.
Walker, who was suffering injury, played in right field. Chicago won 7-6; (PDF) Walker was the only Toledo player without a hit. He did, however, reach base on an error, scored a run, and was serviceable in right due to having a much better glove (so to speak) than bat.
The following year, Toledo had joined the professional ranks of the American Association, and would see the White Stockings again on July 25, but this time, Anson had procured an agreement in writing that Walker would not play. (Chicago won that game 10-8. Anson had a home run in the 4th.)
Walker was not in much of a position to perform in any case. His batterymate, pitcher Tony Mullane, also harbored racist tendencies. According to Mullane, "[Walker] was the best catcher I ever worked with, but I disliked a Negro and whenever I had to pitch to him I used anything I wanted without looking at his signals." As a result, Walker- the unpadded, ungloved catcher- was bombarded all season long with pitches he was not ready for, suffering a series of injuries, and ultimately being limited to 42 games. He batted .263 with 23 runs, two doubles and three triples. RBI's were not recorded. Despite the game limitation, Mullane's deliberate failures in communication caused Walker to lead the league in passed balls.
Walker would not get another chance for Toledo. While he could, with great difficulty, handle the prejudice of other players, Anson's influence was simply too strong. Even for the era, Anson's racism was, for lack of a better word, pioneering. People followed his example. There is dispute as to whether Walker's release at the end of the season was due to his injuries or due to the color barrier being put into place by the American Association.
Walker had not seen the last of Anson, though. He continued his career in the minor leagues, and in 1887, he turned up with the International League's Newark Little Giants, and drew a much friendlier arm: George Stovey, a fellow black player. They formed the first black battery in baseball history.
Stovey had had his own run-in with Anson during the offseason. The New York Giants made an attempt to sign Stovey for 1887. However, after Anson, who shared a league with the Giants, protested vehemently, the Giants relented. Newark claimed Stovey instead.
A few months of harsh treatment from fans later, the White Stockings arrived on July 11. Walker was off that day, but Stovey was set to pitch. Once again, upon seeing a black in uniform, Anson screamed "Get that n****r off the field!" But unlike in 1883, this time he would not back down for anything. Stovey, not wishing to embarrass Newark's management, faked an injury and was forced to the bench.
Cap Anson is not the only racist element in the formation of baseball's color barrier. That has already been shown, and ultimately, the owners could have signed whoever they wanted whether Anson liked it or not. But he was the opinion-driving straw that broke the camel's back. On the same day as Anson's forcing Stovey from the diamond, the International League voted 6-4 to institute what was in the day called the "gentleman's agreement" to not sign any new black players from their rosters. Over the next decade, all other professional leagues would do likewise. Despite winning 33 games, Stovey was released from Newark at the end of the season. (So was everyone else; Newark went bust in 1888.)
Anson was still not done with Walker. In 1888 and 1889, Walker, not a new black player, had found himself with the International League's Syracuse Stars. Anson's White Stockings turned up again in September 1888, and again Walker was forced to the bench.
Walker, for his part, was a shattered man after being so forcibly separated from baseball. He had been born on the Underground Railroad, and now he had been driven back from whence he came. He would try to find other pursuits- he obtained US Patent 458026 (PDF) in 1891 for an exploding artillery shell, applied for other patents on motion-picture equipment, even published a weekly newspaper- but ultimately, he could not escape the nadir of race relations. In April 1891, Walker was confronted and attacked by a group of whites in Syracuse. In self-defense, Walker pulled a knife and stabbed one of his assailants, Patrick Murray. The knife wound, entering Murray's groin, proved fatal. Now the whites wanted to kill Walker. He escaped, but was later arrested and charged with second-degree murder. In the nadir of race relations, especially in the South, a black could expect to be convicted, but in Syracuse, Walker was acquitted. Amazingly, the jury that acquitted him was all-white.
Walker, however, over the years would turn to the bottle, and as race relations deteriorated further, he abandoned all hope of integration. In 1908, Walker, fully embittered by a nation that had repeatedly wronged him, published a pamphlet (47 pages was considered a pamphlet back then) titled Our Home Colony: A Treatise on the Past, Present, and Future of the Negro Race in America. In the pamphlet, Walker advocated that blacks return to Africa, feeling that "separation of the races is the only true solution."
Meanwhile, in 1907, Anson created a semipro team called Anson's Colts. One theory goes that Anson, being the best player in his day, was concerned about black talent potentially overshadowing him, and that part of his campaign against integration was a desire to shrink the talent pool so that he might maintain his status at the top. This may explain why, after his prime had passed and he was relegated to the semipro ranks, Anson was willing to take the field against black players. In fact, in 1908, the same year Walker released Our Home Colony, Anson's Colts played against an all-black team, Leland's Giants. Anson would even consent to a photo with black manager Rube Foster.
But it no longer mattered what Anson thought of black baseball players. The damage he had contributed to, caused and inspired had been done. Foster had no alternative but to found the Negro Leagues, and all other black players had no alternative but to bide their time until 1947.
Were Walker to gaze upon Wrigley Field today, the home of the Cubs, he would see something that would please him, and something that would not. The names of six players fly from the foul poles at Wrigley, their names honored and their numbers retired. Two commentators, Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray, are also honored, albeit not with flags. The bad news for Walker is that Jackie Robinson, the man whose number 42 was retired across Major League Baseball in 1997, is not among those names.
The good news for Walker is that Anson, a future Hall of Famer, is not honored at Wrigley either.
But I'm a Cubs fan. It could be worse.
MLB Network likes to do what they call a Prime 9 list- a top-ten list, but with nine items. "Why nine? That's baseball. Nine players, nine innings, Prime 9." With apologies to them, here's my Prime 9- or Subprime 9, more to the point- of the darkest hours in Chicago Cubs history...
9. Sammy Sosa's role in the steroid era
8. The June Swoon, 1977-79
7. The College of Coaches
6. Ball goes through Leon Durham's legs in 1984 NLCS
5. The black cat at Shea Stadium heralding the collapse of 1969
4. Trading Lou Brock for Ernie Broglio
3. Curse of the Billy Goat placed
2. Steve Bartman's foul ball in 2003 NLCS
1. Cap Anson
Cap Anson was one of baseball's first all-time greats. He was the first man to reach 3,000 hits (though the exact number has long been in dispute), played a still-record 27 consecutive seasons (and was the only player to do so at all until Nolan Ryan), and pioneered such things as the third-base coach, spring training, the hit-and-run, and the pitching rotation. His name is still, to this day, featured prominently in the Cubs' record book.
Because of his skill, he was also a very influential racist.
In the 1880's, Reconstruction was on the ropes, as ex-Confederates in the south took any means they deemed necessary to restore their pre-Civil War way of life. And, of course, the pre-Civil War way of life entailed treating blacks as subhuman, and treating people who gave blacks basic humanity as an enemy to be dealt with harshly. The period was rapidly approaching, 1890-1940, that historian Rayford Logan described first as "the nadir of American race relations", a period that might make one wonder if the Civil War had actually settled anything at all.
It is in this environment that the first black player in major league history took the field. It wasn't Jackie Robinson; he would not break through until 1947, after the nadir had passed. In order for Robinson to break through the color barrier, someone had to have put it up.
And so we return to the 1880's. In 1883, Moses Fleetwood Walker signed as a catcher with the Toledo Blue Stockings. It should be noted that catchers did not have any of the equipment back then that they do today. There was no catcher's mask, no pads, not even a glove. Nobody had a glove. You were catching everything the pitcher threw barehanded. Catchers as a result proved a perpetually-endangered species by default. (Here is an 1889 photo of the hands of catcher Doug Allison. Either that year or the year after, Allison would become the first known catcher to don a glove.) Despite several prior years of strong play, Walker was subjected several times to opponents who refused to play if he was permitted on the field. Sometimes he was allowed to play. Sometimes he wasn't.
On August 10, 1883, the then-Chicago White Stockings, led by Anson, arrived in Toledo for an exhibition game. Anson, like the others before him, refused to play with Walker on the field.
Or, as Anson put it that day, "Get that n****r off the field!"
Anson relented only when told that the White Stockings would forfeit unless Walker was allowed to play-- "We'll play this game here, but we won't play never no more with the n****r in." The irony here is that Walker was scheduled to take an off day anyway, but after Anson spoke up, Walker was inserted. Not to make a statement, but rather to see if Anson would forfeit, and therefore, give up his share of the gate receipts.
Walker, who was suffering injury, played in right field. Chicago won 7-6; (PDF) Walker was the only Toledo player without a hit. He did, however, reach base on an error, scored a run, and was serviceable in right due to having a much better glove (so to speak) than bat.
The following year, Toledo had joined the professional ranks of the American Association, and would see the White Stockings again on July 25, but this time, Anson had procured an agreement in writing that Walker would not play. (Chicago won that game 10-8. Anson had a home run in the 4th.)
Walker was not in much of a position to perform in any case. His batterymate, pitcher Tony Mullane, also harbored racist tendencies. According to Mullane, "[Walker] was the best catcher I ever worked with, but I disliked a Negro and whenever I had to pitch to him I used anything I wanted without looking at his signals." As a result, Walker- the unpadded, ungloved catcher- was bombarded all season long with pitches he was not ready for, suffering a series of injuries, and ultimately being limited to 42 games. He batted .263 with 23 runs, two doubles and three triples. RBI's were not recorded. Despite the game limitation, Mullane's deliberate failures in communication caused Walker to lead the league in passed balls.
Walker would not get another chance for Toledo. While he could, with great difficulty, handle the prejudice of other players, Anson's influence was simply too strong. Even for the era, Anson's racism was, for lack of a better word, pioneering. People followed his example. There is dispute as to whether Walker's release at the end of the season was due to his injuries or due to the color barrier being put into place by the American Association.
Walker had not seen the last of Anson, though. He continued his career in the minor leagues, and in 1887, he turned up with the International League's Newark Little Giants, and drew a much friendlier arm: George Stovey, a fellow black player. They formed the first black battery in baseball history.
Stovey had had his own run-in with Anson during the offseason. The New York Giants made an attempt to sign Stovey for 1887. However, after Anson, who shared a league with the Giants, protested vehemently, the Giants relented. Newark claimed Stovey instead.
A few months of harsh treatment from fans later, the White Stockings arrived on July 11. Walker was off that day, but Stovey was set to pitch. Once again, upon seeing a black in uniform, Anson screamed "Get that n****r off the field!" But unlike in 1883, this time he would not back down for anything. Stovey, not wishing to embarrass Newark's management, faked an injury and was forced to the bench.
Cap Anson is not the only racist element in the formation of baseball's color barrier. That has already been shown, and ultimately, the owners could have signed whoever they wanted whether Anson liked it or not. But he was the opinion-driving straw that broke the camel's back. On the same day as Anson's forcing Stovey from the diamond, the International League voted 6-4 to institute what was in the day called the "gentleman's agreement" to not sign any new black players from their rosters. Over the next decade, all other professional leagues would do likewise. Despite winning 33 games, Stovey was released from Newark at the end of the season. (So was everyone else; Newark went bust in 1888.)
Anson was still not done with Walker. In 1888 and 1889, Walker, not a new black player, had found himself with the International League's Syracuse Stars. Anson's White Stockings turned up again in September 1888, and again Walker was forced to the bench.
Walker, for his part, was a shattered man after being so forcibly separated from baseball. He had been born on the Underground Railroad, and now he had been driven back from whence he came. He would try to find other pursuits- he obtained US Patent 458026 (PDF) in 1891 for an exploding artillery shell, applied for other patents on motion-picture equipment, even published a weekly newspaper- but ultimately, he could not escape the nadir of race relations. In April 1891, Walker was confronted and attacked by a group of whites in Syracuse. In self-defense, Walker pulled a knife and stabbed one of his assailants, Patrick Murray. The knife wound, entering Murray's groin, proved fatal. Now the whites wanted to kill Walker. He escaped, but was later arrested and charged with second-degree murder. In the nadir of race relations, especially in the South, a black could expect to be convicted, but in Syracuse, Walker was acquitted. Amazingly, the jury that acquitted him was all-white.
Walker, however, over the years would turn to the bottle, and as race relations deteriorated further, he abandoned all hope of integration. In 1908, Walker, fully embittered by a nation that had repeatedly wronged him, published a pamphlet (47 pages was considered a pamphlet back then) titled Our Home Colony: A Treatise on the Past, Present, and Future of the Negro Race in America. In the pamphlet, Walker advocated that blacks return to Africa, feeling that "separation of the races is the only true solution."
Meanwhile, in 1907, Anson created a semipro team called Anson's Colts. One theory goes that Anson, being the best player in his day, was concerned about black talent potentially overshadowing him, and that part of his campaign against integration was a desire to shrink the talent pool so that he might maintain his status at the top. This may explain why, after his prime had passed and he was relegated to the semipro ranks, Anson was willing to take the field against black players. In fact, in 1908, the same year Walker released Our Home Colony, Anson's Colts played against an all-black team, Leland's Giants. Anson would even consent to a photo with black manager Rube Foster.
But it no longer mattered what Anson thought of black baseball players. The damage he had contributed to, caused and inspired had been done. Foster had no alternative but to found the Negro Leagues, and all other black players had no alternative but to bide their time until 1947.
Were Walker to gaze upon Wrigley Field today, the home of the Cubs, he would see something that would please him, and something that would not. The names of six players fly from the foul poles at Wrigley, their names honored and their numbers retired. Two commentators, Jack Brickhouse and Harry Caray, are also honored, albeit not with flags. The bad news for Walker is that Jackie Robinson, the man whose number 42 was retired across Major League Baseball in 1997, is not among those names.
The good news for Walker is that Anson, a future Hall of Famer, is not honored at Wrigley either.
Monday, June 6, 2011
Bring Me My Hasenpfeffer
The Looney Tunes gang is enjoying a rebirth as of late on Cartoon Network, with not only a new program, 'The Looney Tunes Show', but also the airing of the old classic shorts.
The thing is, though, the old classic shorts are, well, old. Some of the references made in the old cartoons may be downright incomprehensible to modern eyes and ears. The "newer" of the classics aren't any newer than the 1960's.
So, for the benefit of those just growing up with Looney Tunes now, let's go over a couple of them.
*Alum
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Fed to Sylvester, causing his mouth to pucker up. Also fed to an opera singer, causing his head to shrink.
The Straight Dope explained alum back in 1999. Alum is used for these gags because it's an astringent- that is to say, it shrinks tissue. Because it's Looney Tunes, though, you don't see alum's alternative effect as an emetic. What's an emetic? Something that induces vomiting. Also, despite being an ingredient in cooking and pickling, you don't want it on the final product, not only because of the vomiting, but because an ounce of the stuff constitutes a lethal dose.
Sylvester and the opera singer got way more than an ounce.
*Figaro
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Sung by the opera singer while his head shrinks. Also in a couple other cartoons that are basically music videos for classical numbers you mostly don't hear outside of those cartoons.
Obviously, it's an opera reference. Figaro is the name of the main character in a series of three plays by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais: The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Guilty Mother. The Barber of Seville would go on to be covered by Giovanni Paisiello and Gioachino Rossini; The Marriage of Figaro would be covered by Mozart. Figaro was the namesake barber.
*Come with me to the casbah
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Said by Pepe le Pew while he's being horny again.
Pepe uses it in reference to a 1938 film called Algiers, the first American film featuring Hedy Lamarr. Pepe himself took his name from the film's main character, Pepe Le Moko. It took four Oscar nominations, though it didn't win any of them. The 'casbah' is the citadel of Algiers and the surrounding area. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, though degrading because of neglect and due to being a popular terrorist hideout. If someone offers today to come with them to the Casbah, run. Just run. Run far, far away in the opposite direction.
The film's in the public domain, so have a ball.
*Gas House Gorillas
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: The baseball team Bugs beats all by himself in the 1946 short 'Baseball Bugs'.
This is a play on the 'Gas House Gang', a nickname given to the 1934 champion St. Louis Cardinals. Leo Durocher coined the term, saying of the American League "They think we're just a bunch of gas housers." This was in reference to, well, gas houses, factories that produced coal gas, the forerunner to natural gas. They were dirty and smelled bad, much like the Cardinals' uniforms, which didn't go in the wash very often.
*A-card
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: When Bugs Bunny and a gremlin are in a plane that is about to crash and suddenly stops because it ran out of gas.
This was 'Falling Hare', made in 1943, during World War 2. At that point in time, fuel rationing was in effect. Cards- or stickers, really- were issued to American vehicles permitting them to buy certain amounts of gas. An A sticker was the most common and lowest-grade. It entitled the driver to 3-4 gallons of gas a week and that was it. A B sticker was for people whose driving was deemed essential to the war effort; they could get eight gallons a week. Further up the ladder, C stickers went to more critical people such as doctors and mailmen, T stickers were for truckers, and finally, there was the X sticker, meaning you were so important- police, fire, civil defense, a member of Congress- that it was essential that you get unlimited supplies.
The problem wasn't that we were short on gas. We were short on rubber. The Japanese had seized land in Southeast Asia that had served as our main rubber supply. More driving means more wear on tires means more strain on the rubber supply. Since driving faster also wore tires down, a blanket speed limit of 35 miles per hour was put into play for the duration. Also, you were not allowed to own more than five tires; any excess was confiscated for the war effort.
*Was this trip really necessary?
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Right after someone crashes into a wall.
The fuel rationing again. You were not supposed to be using the fuel you did get to take leisure drives.
*Wendell Willkie
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Whem Bugs wonders if that's a gremlin, the gremlin screams in his ear 'IT AIN'T VENDELL VILLKIE!'
Wendell Willkie was the Republican candidate for President in 1940- at the time of the cartoon, the most recent election. He was the guy standing in the way of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's unprecedented third term, and was steamrolled 449 electoral votes to 82. Were a similar joke made today, the gremlin would just plug in John McCain's name instead. Or, actually, as Willkie had never held political office before or since, and McCain has been a long-timer in the Senate, he might reference Sarah Palin, or maybe Donald Trump.
Willkie never really had a chance. His campaign was built on Roosevelt breaking the two-term tradition (and warning that Roosevelt would lead the country into war), but given the alternative of the party many still blamed for the Great Depression, the effects of which had not yet fully been shaken, voters were more than willing to try something different. According to his 1971 biography, Wendell Willkie: Fighter for Freedom, Willkie was met with people who threw rotten fruit at him. At one point in Pontiac, Michigan, someone connected with an egg, and the media gleefully splashed across the front page the image of an egg-stained Willkie, or at least his wife. At Grand Rapids, someone chucked a rock through his train car. Both images are shown in an issue of LIFE dated October 14, 1940, respectively on pages 25 and 24. (With bonus picture on page 23 of what someone who's just been skulled by a 5-pound metal wastebasket might look like.)
As for it being pronounced "Vendell Villkie" by the gremlin, that calls back to an incident at the Republican convention where the North Dakota delegate spoke with a Scandinavian accent. His accented pronunciation of Willkie's name went viral (or the 1940 equivalent of viral). As told in Boxing the Kangaroo: A Reporter's Memoir by Robert J. Donovan, the delegate said "North Dakota casts four votes for Senator Taft and four votes for Vendell Villkie." The speaker asked "For who?" The delegate repeated "For Vendell Villkie." The speaker told him to spell it. The joke evidently had enough legs to still be around three years later.
At the 71-year mark, though, it gets a bit stale.
The thing is, though, the old classic shorts are, well, old. Some of the references made in the old cartoons may be downright incomprehensible to modern eyes and ears. The "newer" of the classics aren't any newer than the 1960's.
So, for the benefit of those just growing up with Looney Tunes now, let's go over a couple of them.
*Alum
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Fed to Sylvester, causing his mouth to pucker up. Also fed to an opera singer, causing his head to shrink.
The Straight Dope explained alum back in 1999. Alum is used for these gags because it's an astringent- that is to say, it shrinks tissue. Because it's Looney Tunes, though, you don't see alum's alternative effect as an emetic. What's an emetic? Something that induces vomiting. Also, despite being an ingredient in cooking and pickling, you don't want it on the final product, not only because of the vomiting, but because an ounce of the stuff constitutes a lethal dose.
Sylvester and the opera singer got way more than an ounce.
*Figaro
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Sung by the opera singer while his head shrinks. Also in a couple other cartoons that are basically music videos for classical numbers you mostly don't hear outside of those cartoons.
Obviously, it's an opera reference. Figaro is the name of the main character in a series of three plays by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais: The Barber of Seville, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Guilty Mother. The Barber of Seville would go on to be covered by Giovanni Paisiello and Gioachino Rossini; The Marriage of Figaro would be covered by Mozart. Figaro was the namesake barber.
*Come with me to the casbah
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Said by Pepe le Pew while he's being horny again.
Pepe uses it in reference to a 1938 film called Algiers, the first American film featuring Hedy Lamarr. Pepe himself took his name from the film's main character, Pepe Le Moko. It took four Oscar nominations, though it didn't win any of them. The 'casbah' is the citadel of Algiers and the surrounding area. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, though degrading because of neglect and due to being a popular terrorist hideout. If someone offers today to come with them to the Casbah, run. Just run. Run far, far away in the opposite direction.
The film's in the public domain, so have a ball.
*Gas House Gorillas
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: The baseball team Bugs beats all by himself in the 1946 short 'Baseball Bugs'.
This is a play on the 'Gas House Gang', a nickname given to the 1934 champion St. Louis Cardinals. Leo Durocher coined the term, saying of the American League "They think we're just a bunch of gas housers." This was in reference to, well, gas houses, factories that produced coal gas, the forerunner to natural gas. They were dirty and smelled bad, much like the Cardinals' uniforms, which didn't go in the wash very often.
*A-card
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: When Bugs Bunny and a gremlin are in a plane that is about to crash and suddenly stops because it ran out of gas.
This was 'Falling Hare', made in 1943, during World War 2. At that point in time, fuel rationing was in effect. Cards- or stickers, really- were issued to American vehicles permitting them to buy certain amounts of gas. An A sticker was the most common and lowest-grade. It entitled the driver to 3-4 gallons of gas a week and that was it. A B sticker was for people whose driving was deemed essential to the war effort; they could get eight gallons a week. Further up the ladder, C stickers went to more critical people such as doctors and mailmen, T stickers were for truckers, and finally, there was the X sticker, meaning you were so important- police, fire, civil defense, a member of Congress- that it was essential that you get unlimited supplies.
The problem wasn't that we were short on gas. We were short on rubber. The Japanese had seized land in Southeast Asia that had served as our main rubber supply. More driving means more wear on tires means more strain on the rubber supply. Since driving faster also wore tires down, a blanket speed limit of 35 miles per hour was put into play for the duration. Also, you were not allowed to own more than five tires; any excess was confiscated for the war effort.
*Was this trip really necessary?
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Right after someone crashes into a wall.
The fuel rationing again. You were not supposed to be using the fuel you did get to take leisure drives.
*Wendell Willkie
WHERE YOU'VE SEEN IT: Whem Bugs wonders if that's a gremlin, the gremlin screams in his ear 'IT AIN'T VENDELL VILLKIE!'
Wendell Willkie was the Republican candidate for President in 1940- at the time of the cartoon, the most recent election. He was the guy standing in the way of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's unprecedented third term, and was steamrolled 449 electoral votes to 82. Were a similar joke made today, the gremlin would just plug in John McCain's name instead. Or, actually, as Willkie had never held political office before or since, and McCain has been a long-timer in the Senate, he might reference Sarah Palin, or maybe Donald Trump.
Willkie never really had a chance. His campaign was built on Roosevelt breaking the two-term tradition (and warning that Roosevelt would lead the country into war), but given the alternative of the party many still blamed for the Great Depression, the effects of which had not yet fully been shaken, voters were more than willing to try something different. According to his 1971 biography, Wendell Willkie: Fighter for Freedom, Willkie was met with people who threw rotten fruit at him. At one point in Pontiac, Michigan, someone connected with an egg, and the media gleefully splashed across the front page the image of an egg-stained Willkie, or at least his wife. At Grand Rapids, someone chucked a rock through his train car. Both images are shown in an issue of LIFE dated October 14, 1940, respectively on pages 25 and 24. (With bonus picture on page 23 of what someone who's just been skulled by a 5-pound metal wastebasket might look like.)
As for it being pronounced "Vendell Villkie" by the gremlin, that calls back to an incident at the Republican convention where the North Dakota delegate spoke with a Scandinavian accent. His accented pronunciation of Willkie's name went viral (or the 1940 equivalent of viral). As told in Boxing the Kangaroo: A Reporter's Memoir by Robert J. Donovan, the delegate said "North Dakota casts four votes for Senator Taft and four votes for Vendell Villkie." The speaker asked "For who?" The delegate repeated "For Vendell Villkie." The speaker told him to spell it. The joke evidently had enough legs to still be around three years later.
At the 71-year mark, though, it gets a bit stale.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
RNG Week- Liberia
TODAY: Liberia
THURSDAY: Gibraltar
FRIDAY: Turkey
SATURDAY: Congo-Brazzaville
Liberia's history has been mired in violence and bloodshed, dating back to when the country was first christened as such. When slaves in the United States were freed in the wake of the Civil War, some crossed the Atlantic to settle in Africa and declare the foundation of Liberia. They called themselves Americo-Liberians.
Two problems emerged, though. First, these particular people arriving in Africa had never seen Africa before. Slavery had gone on long enough to where everybody had been born on the American side of the Atlantic. Second, nobody told the actual locals that the people just off the boat were their new rulers.
And the Americo-Liberians ruled the only way they knew: total domination. The Americo-Liberians comprised 5% of the population of Liberia, yet were the only people with voting rights. They built residences that resembled Southern plantations. In 1878, they instituted one-party rule.
Eventually, slavery itself would take hold. The very thing Liberia was created to celebrate against. It continues to this day.
The native Liberians would not wait nearly as long as the Americo-Liberians had to start rebelling. Riots, uprisings and wars would be repeatedly waged until 1980, when the Americo-Liberians were dislodged.
This did not quell the violence even a little bit. By 1989, civil war had kicked off once again; two consecutive wars would take the country into 2003. Only since then has the country even begun to move away from its unending cycle of bloodshed, though the fundamental issue of slavery persists.
Part of the recovery process involves how to account for all those wounded by war, including those who have lost limbs.
This brings us to the Cup of African Nations for Amputee Football, the third edition, which Liberia is scheduled to participate in during October. They are the defending champions, having won on home soil in 2008. This year's tournament, back after a two-year hiatus, is slated for Ghana, who won the inaugural 2007 tournament in Sierra Leone by beating Liberia in the final. Aside from Liberia and Ghana, Angola, Niger, Nigeria and Sierra Leone have confirmed their intent to participate. The organizers expect to also see Algeria, DR Congo, Kenya, Mali and South Africa in the field.
How does amputee soccer work? If you have one leg, you play in the field. If you have one arm, you play goalkeeper. The ball cannot touch an outfield player's crutch (no prosthetic limbs allowed) or a goalkeeper's arm stump. The goal is shrunk by half. More detailed rules are here.
Soccer gives the players hope. Employment in Liberia, as in many, many other developing countries, is difficult-to-impossible to find for people with missing limbs. A soccer tournament set aside specifically for amputees gives them a purpose. It gives them recognition. It also gives them a measure of needed respect. Amputees in Liberia, prior to the 2008 victory, were shunned. An amputee was, in the eyes of non-disabled Liberians, a former soldier, and therefore to blame for the nation's many years of misery and for all the people that died. If they suffered, they were seen to have deserved it. Amputees could not so much as get a taxi. With the prominence of the amputee soccer team, though, Liberia's amputees have slowly begun to be treated as people deserving of compassion as opposed to scorn.
How much prominence? In the Guardian article above, in January 2010, the amputee team was scrimmaging next to the club Invincible Eleven, a 13-time Liberian league champion and 15-time winner of the national cup competition. The amputees were drawing the larger crowd.
In addition to being inspiring, with the main Liberian league (in which Invincible Eleven currently lie 7th out of 20) trying to haphazardly sort out a 15-month league schedule this season, following the amputee team more closely may be the logical thing to do anyway.
THURSDAY: Gibraltar
FRIDAY: Turkey
SATURDAY: Congo-Brazzaville
Liberia's history has been mired in violence and bloodshed, dating back to when the country was first christened as such. When slaves in the United States were freed in the wake of the Civil War, some crossed the Atlantic to settle in Africa and declare the foundation of Liberia. They called themselves Americo-Liberians.
Two problems emerged, though. First, these particular people arriving in Africa had never seen Africa before. Slavery had gone on long enough to where everybody had been born on the American side of the Atlantic. Second, nobody told the actual locals that the people just off the boat were their new rulers.
And the Americo-Liberians ruled the only way they knew: total domination. The Americo-Liberians comprised 5% of the population of Liberia, yet were the only people with voting rights. They built residences that resembled Southern plantations. In 1878, they instituted one-party rule.
Eventually, slavery itself would take hold. The very thing Liberia was created to celebrate against. It continues to this day.
The native Liberians would not wait nearly as long as the Americo-Liberians had to start rebelling. Riots, uprisings and wars would be repeatedly waged until 1980, when the Americo-Liberians were dislodged.
This did not quell the violence even a little bit. By 1989, civil war had kicked off once again; two consecutive wars would take the country into 2003. Only since then has the country even begun to move away from its unending cycle of bloodshed, though the fundamental issue of slavery persists.
Part of the recovery process involves how to account for all those wounded by war, including those who have lost limbs.
This brings us to the Cup of African Nations for Amputee Football, the third edition, which Liberia is scheduled to participate in during October. They are the defending champions, having won on home soil in 2008. This year's tournament, back after a two-year hiatus, is slated for Ghana, who won the inaugural 2007 tournament in Sierra Leone by beating Liberia in the final. Aside from Liberia and Ghana, Angola, Niger, Nigeria and Sierra Leone have confirmed their intent to participate. The organizers expect to also see Algeria, DR Congo, Kenya, Mali and South Africa in the field.
How does amputee soccer work? If you have one leg, you play in the field. If you have one arm, you play goalkeeper. The ball cannot touch an outfield player's crutch (no prosthetic limbs allowed) or a goalkeeper's arm stump. The goal is shrunk by half. More detailed rules are here.
Soccer gives the players hope. Employment in Liberia, as in many, many other developing countries, is difficult-to-impossible to find for people with missing limbs. A soccer tournament set aside specifically for amputees gives them a purpose. It gives them recognition. It also gives them a measure of needed respect. Amputees in Liberia, prior to the 2008 victory, were shunned. An amputee was, in the eyes of non-disabled Liberians, a former soldier, and therefore to blame for the nation's many years of misery and for all the people that died. If they suffered, they were seen to have deserved it. Amputees could not so much as get a taxi. With the prominence of the amputee soccer team, though, Liberia's amputees have slowly begun to be treated as people deserving of compassion as opposed to scorn.
How much prominence? In the Guardian article above, in January 2010, the amputee team was scrimmaging next to the club Invincible Eleven, a 13-time Liberian league champion and 15-time winner of the national cup competition. The amputees were drawing the larger crowd.
In addition to being inspiring, with the main Liberian league (in which Invincible Eleven currently lie 7th out of 20) trying to haphazardly sort out a 15-month league schedule this season, following the amputee team more closely may be the logical thing to do anyway.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Against The County Judge, They Held A Grudge, But Not Forevermore
In order to have something named after you, usually it takes you having done something that someone finds worthy. Unless you name stuff after yourself. Hi, Donald Trump. Hi. Robert Byrd. Or unless someone does it as an insult. Hi. Dave Barry. But we're getting away from the point. Generally, if you have something named for you, it's an honor.
And the bigger the thing named after you, the more of an honor it is. There are plenty of buildings to go around, plenty of streets to go around. After that, though, scarcity starts to take hold, and for cities and up, not only are there only so many places, it gets progressively more difficult to rename something. So when you get up into counties, states, and especially countries, you want to be very careful in who you choose to honor.
States and countries are too easy to look up. So we'll do counties.
Plenty of counties have been named for Presidents. 24 Presidents have counties; the leader is George Washington with 31, followed by Thomas Jefferson with 24 (one of them encompassing the bulk of my hometown), and Andrew Jackson with 21. Why only 24? Note once again the difficulty and inertia in renaming something this large. The most recent President to carry a county name is Warren Harding. That means nothing for Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 or Obama.
Here are three of the others...
BREMER COUNTY, IOWA
Bremer County, county seat Waverly, is named for Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer. She was raised to be a member of the Swedish aristocracy; however, she found this too patronizing and too unfair to women that were not as fortunate. This actually included herself; for all the money that surrounded her, the only money she controlled was the money she made from her writing. One of her books, Hertha (an excerpt here), written in 1856, was so highlighting of the lack of women's rights, including her own lack of control over money, that it caused a debate on the floor of parliament, and served as such a sparkplug to a Swedish feminist movement that the Swedish women's movement named its journal Hertha.
FORREST COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI
Forrest County, county seat Hattiesburg, is named for Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, which is just about the last guy an American county ought to be named after, seeing as he was, among other things including the previous, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
I should not have to go any further about him, his history as a slave trader, or his actions at the Fort Pillow Massacre, because we already did that here last year. Suffice to say, Hattiesburg and the state of Mississippi ought to be embarrassed.
CHARLES COUNTY, MARYLAND
Charles County, county seat La Plata, is named For Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore. The now-defunct title refers to Baltimore Manor in Ireland. The 2nd Baron, Cecilius, is where the city of Baltimore got its name; the manor is deeply entrenched in Maryland etymology and a descendant, Charles Benedict Calvert, was elected to one term in the House of Representatives. But we're here for the 5th Baron, Charles.
State pride being what it is, though, you wonder why Maryland is here for him. For a short time from 1732-1733, he took charge of the then-colony, which was then undergoing a border dispute with Pennsylvania. William Penn had made a surveying error in 1682 that, among other things, put Philadelphia in Maryland. Philadelphia was too valuable to shrug off, and hostilities commenced largely due to the instigation of Thomas Cresap, dispatched by Maryland in 1730 to settle in the disputed region and prevent Pennsylvania from doing the same. The dispute would take his name, Cresap's War. In 1732, using a map which was, to not mince words, a piece of garbage, with measurements that were missing and wrong anyway, Charles reached a settlement with Pennsylvania. The settlement was in Pennsylvania's favor, with Maryland ceding 1,000 square miles of territory including Philadelphia. And, while we're at it, Gettysburg. The rest of Maryland would try to invalidate his blunder in court, but to no avail. An English court ruled that Charles' agreement counted, and the border was set in 1867 upon the completion of the work of two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. (Hence the name, Mason-Dixon Line.)
The man that single-handedly lost Philadelphia for Maryland has a county named for him by Maryland. Go figure.
And the bigger the thing named after you, the more of an honor it is. There are plenty of buildings to go around, plenty of streets to go around. After that, though, scarcity starts to take hold, and for cities and up, not only are there only so many places, it gets progressively more difficult to rename something. So when you get up into counties, states, and especially countries, you want to be very careful in who you choose to honor.
States and countries are too easy to look up. So we'll do counties.
Plenty of counties have been named for Presidents. 24 Presidents have counties; the leader is George Washington with 31, followed by Thomas Jefferson with 24 (one of them encompassing the bulk of my hometown), and Andrew Jackson with 21. Why only 24? Note once again the difficulty and inertia in renaming something this large. The most recent President to carry a county name is Warren Harding. That means nothing for Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43 or Obama.
Here are three of the others...
BREMER COUNTY, IOWA
Bremer County, county seat Waverly, is named for Swedish novelist Fredrika Bremer. She was raised to be a member of the Swedish aristocracy; however, she found this too patronizing and too unfair to women that were not as fortunate. This actually included herself; for all the money that surrounded her, the only money she controlled was the money she made from her writing. One of her books, Hertha (an excerpt here), written in 1856, was so highlighting of the lack of women's rights, including her own lack of control over money, that it caused a debate on the floor of parliament, and served as such a sparkplug to a Swedish feminist movement that the Swedish women's movement named its journal Hertha.
FORREST COUNTY, MISSISSIPPI
Forrest County, county seat Hattiesburg, is named for Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest, which is just about the last guy an American county ought to be named after, seeing as he was, among other things including the previous, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
I should not have to go any further about him, his history as a slave trader, or his actions at the Fort Pillow Massacre, because we already did that here last year. Suffice to say, Hattiesburg and the state of Mississippi ought to be embarrassed.
CHARLES COUNTY, MARYLAND
Charles County, county seat La Plata, is named For Charles Calvert, 5th Baron Baltimore. The now-defunct title refers to Baltimore Manor in Ireland. The 2nd Baron, Cecilius, is where the city of Baltimore got its name; the manor is deeply entrenched in Maryland etymology and a descendant, Charles Benedict Calvert, was elected to one term in the House of Representatives. But we're here for the 5th Baron, Charles.
State pride being what it is, though, you wonder why Maryland is here for him. For a short time from 1732-1733, he took charge of the then-colony, which was then undergoing a border dispute with Pennsylvania. William Penn had made a surveying error in 1682 that, among other things, put Philadelphia in Maryland. Philadelphia was too valuable to shrug off, and hostilities commenced largely due to the instigation of Thomas Cresap, dispatched by Maryland in 1730 to settle in the disputed region and prevent Pennsylvania from doing the same. The dispute would take his name, Cresap's War. In 1732, using a map which was, to not mince words, a piece of garbage, with measurements that were missing and wrong anyway, Charles reached a settlement with Pennsylvania. The settlement was in Pennsylvania's favor, with Maryland ceding 1,000 square miles of territory including Philadelphia. And, while we're at it, Gettysburg. The rest of Maryland would try to invalidate his blunder in court, but to no avail. An English court ruled that Charles' agreement counted, and the border was set in 1867 upon the completion of the work of two English surveyors, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon. (Hence the name, Mason-Dixon Line.)
The man that single-handedly lost Philadelphia for Maryland has a county named for him by Maryland. Go figure.
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Today's Episode of 'You Can't Win'
On May 14, 1896, Nicholas II was crowned the tsar of Russia; as it would turn out, he'd be the last tsar. We're not interested today in the end of his reign. We're interested in his coronation.
A celebration of his coronation was held at Khodynka Field in northwest Moscow (now the site of an airport) four days later, to be attended by anyone that wanted to show up. It was to be followed by a ball at the French embassy; that was for the diplomats and aristocracy. The people attending the celebration at Khodynka were informed that there would be free stuff at this celebration. And there was. Everyone was to get a sausage, some gingerbread, some pretzels, a bread roll, and a beer mug. For free. What a deal. Estimates are that half a million people showed up. (To compare, remember that Obama's inauguration drew about half that.)
During the celebration, though, a rumor began to make its way through the crowd. A shocking rumor. A rumor that would rock the Russian people to their core.
There might not be enough free beer or pretzels for everybody. (There is also the account that the people were simply told of 'expensive gifts' and they thought 'the gifts' would soon run out. We're going here with the version that contends they knew what the gifts were.)
Now, let us reiterate, in case it hasn't drilled into your head yet, that this beer, these pretzels that the people MIGHT not get- that there's a CHANCE they won't get- is free. A normal person might respond 'Aw, man, that sucks. But it is a huge crowd, and hey, I'm still getting free sausage and gingerbread and a bread roll and perhaps still the mug even if there isn't any beer in it. So I'm still making out pretty well.' And even in the 'expensive gifts' version of the story, and they worried they might not get anything at all... free. That's the worry no matter what the story is. That there might- MIGHT- not be enough free stuff to accommodate half a million people.
But that is why you were not a Russian on May 18, 1896. The correct response to this rumor of a minor inconvenience is as follows:
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I WANT MY FREE BEEEEEEER! AND THE PRETZELS I GUESS! BRAIN! SHUTTING DOWN! ACTIVATING STAMPEDE MODE!"
There were about 1,800 policemen on hand. But there were 500,000 people to corral. 500,000 people rushing to the free beer are too many for 1,800 to handle. The exact number of dead varies, but seems to settle at 1,389, with 1,300 more injured.
Nicholas was shocked at the news. And not just because he had learned how nuts his people would go to make sure they got every single bit of the free stuff that was offered. He wanted to forget the rest of the ceremonies and head to the hospital to meet with some of the victims. He certainly didn't feel like attending the ball at the French embassy. However, the younger brothers of the previous tsar, Alexander III, basically forced him to go, because they figured not going would be an insult to France, and that would be even worse than ignoring the death of nearly 1,400 people.
Ultimately, Nicholas went to the ball. Wrong move. Even though he made sure to follow it up with plenty of aid to the victims and their families, not only did Nicholas catch harsh criticism for attending the ball, the disaster itself was enough to cripple Nicholas' approval rating right out of the gate. Some mystics took Khodynka as a bad omen for the rest of his reign. (Mystics were a thing back then; remember that Rasputin arrived later in Nicholas' reign.) It wouldn't have mattered if he had attended or not, but Nicholas didn't improve his image any.
All for having the audacity to maybe not provide enough free stuff.
A celebration of his coronation was held at Khodynka Field in northwest Moscow (now the site of an airport) four days later, to be attended by anyone that wanted to show up. It was to be followed by a ball at the French embassy; that was for the diplomats and aristocracy. The people attending the celebration at Khodynka were informed that there would be free stuff at this celebration. And there was. Everyone was to get a sausage, some gingerbread, some pretzels, a bread roll, and a beer mug. For free. What a deal. Estimates are that half a million people showed up. (To compare, remember that Obama's inauguration drew about half that.)
During the celebration, though, a rumor began to make its way through the crowd. A shocking rumor. A rumor that would rock the Russian people to their core.
There might not be enough free beer or pretzels for everybody. (There is also the account that the people were simply told of 'expensive gifts' and they thought 'the gifts' would soon run out. We're going here with the version that contends they knew what the gifts were.)
Now, let us reiterate, in case it hasn't drilled into your head yet, that this beer, these pretzels that the people MIGHT not get- that there's a CHANCE they won't get- is free. A normal person might respond 'Aw, man, that sucks. But it is a huge crowd, and hey, I'm still getting free sausage and gingerbread and a bread roll and perhaps still the mug even if there isn't any beer in it. So I'm still making out pretty well.' And even in the 'expensive gifts' version of the story, and they worried they might not get anything at all... free. That's the worry no matter what the story is. That there might- MIGHT- not be enough free stuff to accommodate half a million people.
But that is why you were not a Russian on May 18, 1896. The correct response to this rumor of a minor inconvenience is as follows:
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I WANT MY FREE BEEEEEEER! AND THE PRETZELS I GUESS! BRAIN! SHUTTING DOWN! ACTIVATING STAMPEDE MODE!"
There were about 1,800 policemen on hand. But there were 500,000 people to corral. 500,000 people rushing to the free beer are too many for 1,800 to handle. The exact number of dead varies, but seems to settle at 1,389, with 1,300 more injured.
Nicholas was shocked at the news. And not just because he had learned how nuts his people would go to make sure they got every single bit of the free stuff that was offered. He wanted to forget the rest of the ceremonies and head to the hospital to meet with some of the victims. He certainly didn't feel like attending the ball at the French embassy. However, the younger brothers of the previous tsar, Alexander III, basically forced him to go, because they figured not going would be an insult to France, and that would be even worse than ignoring the death of nearly 1,400 people.
Ultimately, Nicholas went to the ball. Wrong move. Even though he made sure to follow it up with plenty of aid to the victims and their families, not only did Nicholas catch harsh criticism for attending the ball, the disaster itself was enough to cripple Nicholas' approval rating right out of the gate. Some mystics took Khodynka as a bad omen for the rest of his reign. (Mystics were a thing back then; remember that Rasputin arrived later in Nicholas' reign.) It wouldn't have mattered if he had attended or not, but Nicholas didn't improve his image any.
All for having the audacity to maybe not provide enough free stuff.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Trade Me, Will You?!
When the story of Hernan Cortes is told, it usually follows a certain path: Cortes lands in Mexico at such a time in the Aztecs' calendar and looks enough like their god, Quetzalcoatl, that they mistake him for that god, and he proceeds to conquer Mexico and effectively wipe out their entire race.
When hearing the story, one might respond 'oh, that evil Cortes' or the less-defensible 'oh, those stupid Aztecs'. But here's another way to look at it:
'Well, that's what you get for keeping and selling slaves.'
Meet Malinali. Her pre-Cortes background is cloudy, but we know she was born somewhere in the neighborhood of the year 1500, as a member of the nobility. Her father died when she was a child, then her mother remarried and gave birth to a son. Royal families being royal families, men took precedence, and with a son now in the picture, there wasn't any more political use for Malinali. She was handed off to a Mayan slave trader and forgotten about.
Enter Cortes. Malinali met the Spanish in April of 1519; given the uncertain date of birth, she was either in her late teens or her early 20's. Whatever her age was, she was presented to the Spanish as one of 20 slaves offered as part of the housewarming package. She stood out from the other 19 because of her beauty, and as it turned out, she was also valuable as an interpreter; being sold from Aztecs to Mayans gave her a degree of understanding of both linguistic families (the specific languages were Maya and Nahuatl). Cortes originally gave her to a top lieutenant, Alonzo Hernando Puertocarrero, and then later took her as his own mistress. She was given a Christian name, Dona Marina, and paired with a Spanish priest, Geronimo de Aguilar, who knew Maya. Dona Marina would hear Nahuatl speech, give it to de Aguilar in Maya, and then Aguilar would give the message to Cortes in Spanish.
This did not last as an arrangement. Being now handed off to the Spaniards, Dona Marina would learn Spanish as well. Having done this, she managed to cut de Aguilar out of the equation, and became the sole nexus of communication between the Aztecs and Spaniards. She played this for everything it was worth. 'Dona' was a title of respect in Spanish, which was nice, but nice as it was, it was still a slave name. Slaves don't like slave names. As close as Dona Marina was to Cortes- the two are often depicted together- and in the position of power she had worked herself into, she was going to get her old name back. And not just any old name. She was going to upgrade her old name. She demanded the Aztecs henceforth call her Malintzin, '-tzin' being a title held by nobility- the nobility she used to be before being sold into slavery.
At this point, we should get into her place in history as viewed today. Malintzin is variously interpreted as a traitor, a schemer, a survivalist, a victim, the start of a new Mexican people (she had a son with Cortes in 1522, Don Mahin Cortes), but my reading is this. From her perspective, the Aztecs turned her from a noble to a slave and sold her to the Mayans. The Mayans kept her as a slave and gave her to the Spanish. The Spanish, meanwhile, wined and dined her from day one and placed into her hands more power and influence than she had ever had before. As far as she was concerned, she was just paying back everyone for how they respectively treated her. She was Spanish now.
(Malintzin's story depends heavily on context, and as such lends itself to an endless amount of interpretation; mine is only one possible reading. Some believe she betrayed her own people; some believe she did what she had to do to survive alongside Cortes; some believe she was drunk on power; some think the son she had was the beginning of a new civilization. To get a better picture of her and to draw your own conclusions, the book Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico by Camilla Townsend should provide an excellent starting point.)
And as a Spaniard, she helped bring down the Aztecs. She knew their language. When they made plans against Cortes, Cortes couldn't understand what they were saying, but Malintzin could. Any plans she overheard were relayed to Cortes and promptly squashed; this happened at least twice, once in Cholula and once in Honduras.
After her part in bringing down the Aztecs, Malintzin receded back into the mists, such that her year of death is even more uncertain than her year of birth. Estimates range the year from 1527 all the way to 1551. A move to Spain is placed between the two ends of the spectrum, as Cortes returned to Spain in 1529, and dispute exists as to whether she went to Spain with Cortes to live out her life, or whether she died around the time Cortes left.
What is known is that he built her a house not far south of Tenochtitlan, making sure that however many years she had left, she was well taken care of. It's not certain what exactly she had, though, beyond the house. There is dispute, for example, as to whether she was given slaves.
If she knew her own history, the smart move would have been not to have them. You never know how they might respond if you lose track of them.
When hearing the story, one might respond 'oh, that evil Cortes' or the less-defensible 'oh, those stupid Aztecs'. But here's another way to look at it:
'Well, that's what you get for keeping and selling slaves.'
Meet Malinali. Her pre-Cortes background is cloudy, but we know she was born somewhere in the neighborhood of the year 1500, as a member of the nobility. Her father died when she was a child, then her mother remarried and gave birth to a son. Royal families being royal families, men took precedence, and with a son now in the picture, there wasn't any more political use for Malinali. She was handed off to a Mayan slave trader and forgotten about.
Enter Cortes. Malinali met the Spanish in April of 1519; given the uncertain date of birth, she was either in her late teens or her early 20's. Whatever her age was, she was presented to the Spanish as one of 20 slaves offered as part of the housewarming package. She stood out from the other 19 because of her beauty, and as it turned out, she was also valuable as an interpreter; being sold from Aztecs to Mayans gave her a degree of understanding of both linguistic families (the specific languages were Maya and Nahuatl). Cortes originally gave her to a top lieutenant, Alonzo Hernando Puertocarrero, and then later took her as his own mistress. She was given a Christian name, Dona Marina, and paired with a Spanish priest, Geronimo de Aguilar, who knew Maya. Dona Marina would hear Nahuatl speech, give it to de Aguilar in Maya, and then Aguilar would give the message to Cortes in Spanish.
This did not last as an arrangement. Being now handed off to the Spaniards, Dona Marina would learn Spanish as well. Having done this, she managed to cut de Aguilar out of the equation, and became the sole nexus of communication between the Aztecs and Spaniards. She played this for everything it was worth. 'Dona' was a title of respect in Spanish, which was nice, but nice as it was, it was still a slave name. Slaves don't like slave names. As close as Dona Marina was to Cortes- the two are often depicted together- and in the position of power she had worked herself into, she was going to get her old name back. And not just any old name. She was going to upgrade her old name. She demanded the Aztecs henceforth call her Malintzin, '-tzin' being a title held by nobility- the nobility she used to be before being sold into slavery.
At this point, we should get into her place in history as viewed today. Malintzin is variously interpreted as a traitor, a schemer, a survivalist, a victim, the start of a new Mexican people (she had a son with Cortes in 1522, Don Mahin Cortes), but my reading is this. From her perspective, the Aztecs turned her from a noble to a slave and sold her to the Mayans. The Mayans kept her as a slave and gave her to the Spanish. The Spanish, meanwhile, wined and dined her from day one and placed into her hands more power and influence than she had ever had before. As far as she was concerned, she was just paying back everyone for how they respectively treated her. She was Spanish now.
(Malintzin's story depends heavily on context, and as such lends itself to an endless amount of interpretation; mine is only one possible reading. Some believe she betrayed her own people; some believe she did what she had to do to survive alongside Cortes; some believe she was drunk on power; some think the son she had was the beginning of a new civilization. To get a better picture of her and to draw your own conclusions, the book Malintzin's Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico by Camilla Townsend should provide an excellent starting point.)
And as a Spaniard, she helped bring down the Aztecs. She knew their language. When they made plans against Cortes, Cortes couldn't understand what they were saying, but Malintzin could. Any plans she overheard were relayed to Cortes and promptly squashed; this happened at least twice, once in Cholula and once in Honduras.
After her part in bringing down the Aztecs, Malintzin receded back into the mists, such that her year of death is even more uncertain than her year of birth. Estimates range the year from 1527 all the way to 1551. A move to Spain is placed between the two ends of the spectrum, as Cortes returned to Spain in 1529, and dispute exists as to whether she went to Spain with Cortes to live out her life, or whether she died around the time Cortes left.
What is known is that he built her a house not far south of Tenochtitlan, making sure that however many years she had left, she was well taken care of. It's not certain what exactly she had, though, beyond the house. There is dispute, for example, as to whether she was given slaves.
If she knew her own history, the smart move would have been not to have them. You never know how they might respond if you lose track of them.
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