Today’s Adlai 

Last week we introduced you Adlai Stevenson, grandson of as United States Vice President, two-time presidential candidate, and historic UN representative for our country.  And we said we’d ponder some of the things he says before more of the modest number of readers of these columns were born.  His intelligence and his eloquence are, in some cases (perhaps too many) accurate for our times.  Such is the case of these remarks delivered in 1948, seventy-five years ago, in Springfield, Illinois, when he was the governor of the state:

Ours is a sad, disillusioned world.  Too many people on this blood-soaked, battered globe live in constant fear and dread; fear of hunger and want, dread of oppression and slavery.  Poverty, starvation, disease and repression stalk the world, and over us all hangs the mence of war like a gloomy shroud. But everywhere people cling to their hope and their faith in freedom and justice and peace—though fear, anguish, even death are their daily lot.

The remarks were three years after the end of a worldwide war when Europe was still putting its civilization back together after the scourge of Naziism presumably had been wiped out and only two years after Winston Churchill had warned in Fulton, Missouri that a new war, a Cold War, was underway as the Soviet Union expanded its borders.

Japan was a two-time nuclear victim and the idea that other nations would develop an A-bomb cast a frightening shadow on our futures.  The next year, on August 29, 1949, The Soviet Union conducted its first successful test of a bomb—based on the design of our “Fat Man” A-bomb.

In many ways, we still live in the world of 1948 and 1949.  Millions still live in constant fear; millions seek relief from “fear of hunger and want, dread of oppression and slavery.”

Our world has gotten smaller.  No longer are those living with these fears confined to their faraway continents.

And we have people in this country who seek to stoke fear within all of us of THEM, the people the Greatest Generation wanted to help at home and abroad when Stevenson made his speech.

In another speech we’ll refer to at another time, Stevenson spoke of the need for Christian humility.

Christian humility.

Where is it in our country today?

And why isn’t it more in evidence among those who expect us to let them lead us?

 

 

 

Eggheads, Unite! You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Yolks!”  

I recently came into possession of a little book from 1965 called A Stevenson Sampler, 1945 to 1965,  a compilation of quotations from Adlai E. Stevenson II, the former Governor of Illinois who had the misfortune of running twice as the Democratic Party nominee for President against Dwight D. Eisenhower.  When John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, he made Stevenson the United States Ambassador to the United Nations, where he played a historic public role and a largely unrecognized backroom role in the Cuban Missile Crisis. There are things to be learned from that time.

Stevenson was an unrepentant intellectual, one of several eggheads chosen by Kennedy for key posts in his administration.  When the Cuban Missile Crisis exploded in our headlines, Stevenson was the one who delivered this country’s response in the United Nations to Russia’s installation of guided missiles that could easily reach the United States in Cuba.

Many in my generation felt that we were staring down the deep black barrel of an atomic cannon.  Those days are a couple of generations past and we think it’s time for the young folks to learn about how close we came to a nuclear war, and why it didn’t happen at a time when many of us woke up each day and turned on the radio to see if we had a future.

Stevenson played a major role in keeping the crisis from becoming the war we (as we recall those days) were scared to death would happen.  But his role often is overlooked although it was Stevenson who proposed the ultimate solution.  Peter Kornbluh, writing for Foreign Policy magazine a year ago, says much of the reason for the lack of recognition dates from a Saturday Evening Post article in late 1962 by Stewart Alsop and Charles Bartlett that claimed Kennedy and his associates came up with the solution to the dangerous deadlock. They also claimed that Stevenson was the only one around the strategy table who “preferred political negotiations to the alternative of military action,” as Kornbluh put it.

The article, to use a current phrase, threw Stevenson under the bus when, actually, he was driving it.

A major question for most of the crisis was whether Russia really did have ICBMs in Cuba.

It all became clear on the tenth day when Stevenson, far tougher than he had been credit for being until then, confronted Soviet delegate Valerian Zorin at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council.  It is one of the most dramatic moments in UN history. Here is a long version of that confrontation and a short version of it.  The longer version is good for the background leading up to the event. The shorter one is the denouement only.

Long version of the session and challenge:  (30) Adlai Stevenson and Valerian Zorin on Soviet Missiles in Cuba (1962) – YouTube  (Audio quality varies)

Short version: TWE Remembers: Adlai Stevenson Dresses Down the Soviet Ambassador to the UN (Cuban Missile Crisis, Day Ten) | Council on Foreign Relations (cfr.org)

If you want to follow along, here is a transcript of the confrontation in which Stevenson accused the Soviet Union of being less than honest about its missiles in Cuba:

 I want to say to you, Mr Zorin, that I do not have your talent for obfuscation, for distortion, for confusing language, and for doubletalk. And I must confess to you that I am glad that I do not. But if I understood what you said, you said that my position had changed, that today I was defensive because we did not have the evidence to prove our assertions, that your government had installed long-range missiles in Cuba.

Well, let me say something to you, Mr.  Ambassador: we do have the evidence. We have it, and it is clear and it is incontrovertible. And let me say something else: those weapons must be taken out of Cuba.

Next, let me say to you that, if I understood you, with a trespass on credibility that excels your best, you said that our position had changed since I spoke here the other day because of the pressures of world opinion and the majority of the United Nations. Well, let me say to you, sir, you are wrong again. We have had no pressure from anyone whatsoever. We came in here today to indicate our willingness to discuss Mr U Thant’s proposals, and that is the only change that has taken place.

But let me also say to you, sir, that there has been a change. You, the Soviet Union has sent these weapons to Cuba. You, the Soviet Union has upset the balance of power in the world. You, the Soviet Union has created this new danger, not the United States.

And you ask with a fine show of indignation why the President did not tell Mr Gromyko on last Thursday about our evidence, at the very time that Mr Gromyko was blandly denying to the President that the USSR was placing such weapons on sites in the new world.

Well, I will tell you why: because we were assembling the evidence, and perhaps it would be instructive to the world to see how far a Soviet official would go in perfidy. Perhaps we wanted to know if this country faced another example of nuclear deceit like that one a year ago when in stealth, the Soviet Union broke the nuclear test moratorium…

Finally, the other day Mr. Zorin I remind you that you did not deny the existence of these weapons. Instead, we heard that they had suddenly become defensive weapons. But today again if I heard you correctly, you now say that they do not exist, or that we haven’t proved they exist, with another fine flood of rhetorical scorn.

All right, sir, let me ask you one simple question: Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium and intermediate range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no. Don’t wait for the translation, yes or no?

[Zorin] This is not a court of law, I do not need to provide a yes or no answer…

[Stevenson] You can answer yes or no. You have denied they exist. I want to know if I understood you correctly. I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over, if that’s your decision. And I am also prepared to present the evidence in this room.

And he did. Stevenson’s show and tell exposed the Soviet duplicity to the world.  By then, Kennedy had offered to take obsolete United States nuclear missiles out of Turkey bases in exchange for Russia’s withdrawal of its missiles in Cuba. Most tellings of the story do not mention who originated that strategy.  That was Adlai Stevenson.

The possible nuclear war was averted not by threats of attacks on sites in Cuba and deadly confrontations at sea but by Premier Nickolai Khruschev’s acceptance of the base-swapping plan.

Today we have a Russian leader threatening nuclear war and there are those who are suggesting strong military action against Russia.  Kornbluh suggests the not well-known story of how diplomacy, not military confrontation, disarmed a possible Armageddon in 1962, is forgotten by those dealing with events in Ukraine and threats of atomic conflagration.

Kornbluh wrote last year, “Iit would seem prudent to revisit the story of how and why Kennedy sacrificed both Stevenson and the truth about the resolution of the missile crisis and what lessons that history really holds. Documents and transcripts now accessible to the world from government archives allow us to tell the story more fully and accurately than ever before.”

Today, as a Russian leader threatens the use of nuclear weapons in a war of his own making, we edge close to the events we dodged in 1962—-but we are yet a distance from those tense hours before the Soviet ships turned around. You and I are not privy to secret diplomatic discussions while more threatening words are flung into the air evoking frightening possibilities.

Talking is always better than shooting, as Adlai Stevenson and John Kennedy knew.

Some suggest we have no business being involved with Ukraine and the conflict.  Adlai Stevenson, the defender of eggheads that included himself, had an answer for them in a 1954 speech at Harvard:

There was a time, and it was only yesterday, when the United States could and did stand aloof.  In the days of our national youth, Washington warned against “entangling alliances,” John Adams spoke of that “system of neutrality and impartiality” which was to serve us long and well, and Jefferson enumerated among our blessings that we were “kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe.”  But those days are gone forever.”

Unfortunately, almost ninety years after Stevenson’s remarks, far too many reject their reality and want to believe the United States is not separate from the rest of the world and its troubles, challenges, and opportunities.

Adlai E. Stevenson II (1900-1965) was the grandson of Grover Cleveland’s vice-president, and great-grandson of Jesse Fell, the campaign manager for Abraham Lincoln.  I think there will be some days when we offer another comment from A Stevenson Sampler, a collection of excerpts from a man dead for almost sixty years who still has something to say to us.

(Photo credit:  JFK Library)

 

A New County—part II, A New Book

Before hostilities in pre-Civil War Missouri turned deadly with the Camp Jackson incident in St. Louis, Governor Claiborne Jackson and his associates were gathering supplies they would need to repel an “invasion” of Missouri by federal troops if one happened.  A large quantity of gun powder was procured in St. Louis and taken to Jefferson City by two companies of the Missouri Volunteer Militia, one of which was Kelly’s.  From Jefferson City, some 12,000 kegs of powder that had been stored at the fairgrounds about a mile from town were distributed throughout much of the state to be hidden away until needed by Jackson’s forces. Kelly and his unit took about half of the supply to Cooper, Saline and other nearby counties where they were carefully hidden.  The stored powder was a factor in the Confederate victory in the Battle of Lexington.  One of those involved was Michael K. McGrath.

The Irish unit fought at Boonville, Carthage and Wilson’s Creek, where Kelly was wounded in the right hand, (as seen in his picture) and in the Confederate capture of Lexington. The unit also was at the Battle of Pea Ridge, in Arkansas then in 1862, he became part of the regular Confederate army that fought in Mississippi and in the Atlanta campaign against Sherman and his Union troops.

St. Louis researcher Doug Harding indicates that McGrath would have been one of the 23 survivors out of the original 125 members of Kelly’s unit. Kelly surrendered in Louisiana in 1865 and took the oath of allegiance to the Union and was paroled in Shreveport.

It is not clear if McGrath also took the oath there or at some other time and place.  But signing it allowed him to take a bar examination and become a lawyer, paving the way for him to return to public office.

Kelly, his health broken by the war, died in 1870 and is buried in the McGrath family plot in St.  Louis’ Calvary Cemetery.

(Official Manual of the State of Missouri, 1913-14)

McGrath in 1866 became a deputy clerk for the United States district and circuit courts. In 1868 he was elected to the clerkship of the St. Louis City Council.  Two years later he was elected clerk of the criminal court and in 1874 he was elected to the first of his four terms as Secretary of State (his first term under the 1865 Constitution was for only two years; the 1875 constitution established the term at four years.

He decided the State of Missouri government had grown large enough to require some kind of a directory.  He produced the first one in 1878.

(Missouri State Archives)

McGrath wrote in the two-page introduction, “It is a truth that must be admitted, that many outside and some even in it, know but little of the vast resources or of its immense wealth and unexampled prosperity, and when told scarcely believe it, so great is the extent and magnitude thereof…No location in the republic represents a more encouraging field for the honest laborer or the aspiring citizen. The contentions of the war have long since disappeared. Liberalism and tolerance in politics and religion are noted characteristics of her people. They are generous, hospitable and enterprising. Among them poverty and humble birth present no barrier to the attainment of wealth, distinction and honor.

“True merit is the criterion of success, and is fostered by hearty encouragement and profitable recognition. Occupying, as she does already, a front rank among the States of the Union, it is easy to forecast her future as one of glory and renown!”

This first manual was 72 pages long.

His term was the longest in Missouri records until James C. Kirkpatrick served five four-year terms.

He was elected to the Missouri Senate to fill a vacancy and served in the Senate during the 1889 session.

McGrath was never far from the public trough, it appears.  The Columbia Daily Tribune observed upon McGrath’s death that “He has been inspector and attorney in the office of the building commissioner, assistant state examiner of building and loan associations…” He also had a brief and unsuccessful stint as a publisher of a Sedalia newspaper. He was nominated in 1909 to be St. Louis City Register of Deeds and was nominated for another city job in 1911 but lost both times.

In 1912, McGrath was elected to the Missouri House of Representatives. He introduced some bills, including the one to chance St. Louis County to Grant County, but failing health forced  him to go home where heart trouble and bronchitis became too much to overcome and he died on January 28, 1913 at his home in St. Louis.

A resolution of mourning passed by the House of Representatives said, “The House lost a useful, honest, and courageous member, the State a valued and Patriotic citizen, and society an influential and sympathetic member.”

The St. Louis Times wrote, “It is much to say that a man can spend all his mature thought in a lifetime covering seventy-nine years upon the chances and changes of politics and go to his grave ithout surrendering the belief that reform in politics is possible, and that it is worth while to keep on fighting.  Such was the experience of Michael McGrath, of whom men ar easing toda, ‘Yes, he was a politician—but he was square.”

A New County

We’ve commented in the past about whether some of our county names should be changed to honor more contemporary heroes—and maybe reject some scalawags who we learn from history weren’t really worth honoring in the first place.

110 years ago a distinguished Missouri politician introduced a bill to change the name of one of our major counties.

We discovered his suggestion among our clippings.  It’s part of a column from the Taney County Republican, January 30, 1913

The column began, “Until a few years after the war, the city of St. Louis was the seat of St. Louis County. When, by authority of an act of the legislature, the voters of the city and the county adopted the “scheme and charter,” St. Louis became a separate jurisdiction, a county within itself, under the name “The City of St. Louis” and the county became known as “the County of St. Louis.”  The county seat was established at the city of Clayton and a courthouse was erecte don land donated by a citizen of that name. It has never since had any legal connection with the city of St. Louis, although comparatively few of the people of the Stat know yet that St. Louis is not in St. Louis County. Deeds and legal documents intended for county officials and courts and lawyers are often mailed to St. Louis and important legal documents affecting property and persons in the city of St. Louis are often mailed to Clayton. The confusion created by the use of name St. Louis for the county has been a source of annoyance for many years to both city and county.”

It continues:

It was doubted, of course. One reason Michael McGrath’s bill didn’t make it is because Michael McGrath didn’t make it either.  By the time the newspaper published this article, McGrath had been dead for two days.  But it was something of a remarkable gesture—-because Michael McGrath had been a Confederate soldier whose unit took part in important early battles in the Civil War.

His name means nothing to most of those who labor in the halls of the Capitol now.  But in his time, Michael McGrath was a political power.  And his influence is still felt in Missouri government today. In fact, he has a presence in thousands of homes, libraries, offices, and schools.

McGrath was born in 1844 in Ballymartle, County Cork, Ireland and was raised on a farm and educated in a parish school.  He went to the National School in Kinsale, a small village in the southeast corner of Ireland where he studied to be a teacher and became one at age 16 (Kinsale is the home to a lot of famous people we Americans have never heard of except for William Penn, the founder of the colony of Pennsylvania.  Nearby is Old Kinsale Head, a piece of land jutting into the Atlantic that has a lighthouse and the remains of an old castle.  About elven miles out to sea from Kinsale Head, the wreckage of the torpedoed liner Lusitania. sunk in 1915, lies 300 feet down.)

A blight that infected the potato crops throughout Europe, causing “The Great Potato Famine,” led to thousands of deaths and thousands of emigrants fleeing Ireland and other European countries to the United States. McGrath arrived here in 1851. He hung out at the library in New York where his reading of copies of The St. Louis Republic convinced him to come to Missouri in July, 1856.

His good handwriting landed him a job with the St. Louis County Recorder.  He became a deputy clerk in the criminal court in 1861, a position he lost when Radical Republicans in the legislature passed an Ouster Ordinance that declared all offices not held by citizens loyal to the Union to be vacant.

We don’t know how soon McGrath came under the influence of Father John O’Bannon who at that time was raising money for the construction of St. John the Apostle and Evangelist Church, but he soon became involved a local militia unit tied closely to O’Bannon’s Total Abstinence and Benevolence Society. The unit, known as the Washington Blues, was led by Captain Joseph Kelly, another Irish immigrant, who ran a grocery and became McGrath’s father-in-law. A drill by the Blues helped raise money for O’Bannon’s church that later served as the cathedral church of the St. Louis Archdiocese and remains an active congregation today. O’Bannon was a Confederate chaplain in the war.

Kelly’s Irish Brigade was sent to Missouri’s western border in late 1860 to repel Kansas invaders, part of the infamous Missouri-Kansas border war, and became one of the first units in the Missouri State Guard, a pro-confederate force organized by Governor Claiborne Jackson and former governor Sterling Price.  McGrath was a private in what became a regiment of the Sixth Division of the Missouri State Guard.

Irish Immigrants were more likely to join the Union army but some historians think many of the immigrants in Missouri were felt they were disrespected by the anti-Irish German Unionists in St. Louis, and further identified with the Confederacy because it reminded them of Ireland’s long-standing struggle to become independent of England.

Whatever his personal motivation, Michael K. McGrath was a rebel who apparently spent the entire war fighting against the forces of the man for whom he later wanted to name a county.

Come back next time to see how this Confederate survived the war and became a distinguished political figure in Missouri.

 

 

Angry People Who Will Not Be Slaves Again

Our friends Hugh and Lisa Waggoner took us with them recently to the Fox Theatre production of Les Miz.  Midway through the play I was struck with the thought that we were sitting in our comfortable mezzanine chairs listening to incredible voices sing of fighting for freedom while 5,300 miles to our east thousands of people were huddled in cold and dark shattered buildings while thousands of others were dying, fighting for freedom—for real.

And that’s when the lyrics of the songs began to ring differently in my mind. And the words of two contemporary men began a point-counterpoint.

I had a dream in days gone by                                                                                 So different from this hell I’m living,
So different now from what it seemed…
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed…

Vladimir Putin, February 23, 2022: “We have been left no other option to protect Russia and our people, but for the one that we will be forced to use today. The situation requires us to take decisive and immediate action…Its goal is to protect people who have been subjected to abuse and genocide by the regime in Kyiv for eight years. And for this we will pursue the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, as well as bringing to justice those who committed numerous bloody crimes against civilians, including citizens of the Russian Federation.

Sit yourself down
And meet the best                                                                                                    Innkeeper in town
As for the rest,
All of ’em crooks
Rooking their guests
And cooking the books.
Seldom do you see
Honest men like me
A gent of good intent
Who’s content to be
Master of the house
Doling out the charm
Ready with a handshake
And an open palm…
But nothing gets you nothing
Everything has got a little price!

Volodymyr Zelensky, February 23, 2022: The people of Ukraine and the government of Ukraine want peace. But if we come under attack, if we face an attempt to take away our country, our freedom, our lives and lives of our children, we will defend ourselves. When you attack us, you will see our faces, not our backs.”

Here upon theses stones we will build our barricade
In the heart of the city we claim as our own
Each man to his duty and don’t be afraid

Putin: “What is happening today does not come out of a desire to infringe on the interests of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. It is related to the protection of Russia itself from those who took Ukraine hostage and are trying to use it against our country and its people.”

(Later): what is happening today is unpleasant, to put it mildly, but we would have got the same thing a little later, only in worse conditions for us, that’s that. So, we are acting correctly and in a timely manner.”

We’ll be ready for these
Schoolboys

Zelensky, December 21, 2022, to the American Congress:  The battle continues, and we have to defeat the Kremlin on the battlefield, yes. This battle is not only for the territory, for this or another part of Europe. The battle is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live, and then their children and grandchildren.

And little people know
When little people fight
We may look easy pickings
But we’ve got some bite
So never kick a dog
Because he’s just a pup
We’ll fight like twenty armies
And we won’t give up
So you’d better run for cover
When the pup grows up! Last Update

 Zelensky, to the American Congress: Dear Americans, in all states, cities and communities, all those who value freedom and justice, who cherish it as strongly as we Ukrainians in our cities, in each and every family, I hope my words of respect and gratitude resonate in each American heart.

Freedom is mine. The earth is still.
I feel the wind. I breathe again.
And the sky clears
The world is waking.
Drink from the pool. How clean the taste.
Never forget the years, the waste.
Nor forgive them
For what they’ve done.
They are the guilty – everyone.
The day begins…
And now lets see
What this new world
Will do for me!

Zelensky: It will define whether it will be a democracy of Ukrainians and for Americans — for all. This battle cannot be frozen or postponed. It cannot be ignored, hoping that the ocean or something else will provide a protection. From the United States to China, from Europe to Latin America, and from Africa to Australia, the world is too interconnected and interdependent to allow someone to stay aside and at the same time to feel safe when such a battle continues.

They were schoolboys
Never held a gun…
Fighting for a new world
That would rise up like the sun.

Zelensky: Our two nations are allies in this battle. And next year will be a turning point, I know it, the point when Ukrainian courage and American resolve must guarantee the future of our common freedom, the freedom of people who stand for their values.

It is time for us all
To decide who we are
Do we fight for the right
To a night at the opera now?

Have you asked of yourselves
What’s the price you might pay?
Is it simply a game
For rich young boys to play?
The color of the world
Is changing day by day…

Red – the blood of angry men!
Black – the dark of ages past!
Red – a world about to dawn!
Black – the night that ends at last!

Zelensky: I know that everything depends on us, on Ukrainian armed forces, yet so much depends on the world. So much in the world depends on you.

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see?
Do you hear the people sing?
Say, do you hear the distant drums?
It is the future that they bring when tomorrow comes!

December 25, 2022:

Putin: “I believe that we are acting in the right direction, we are defending our national interests, the interests of our citizens, our people. And we have no other choice but to protect our citizens.”

Zelensky: ““It’s terror, it’s killing for the sake of intimidation and pleasure. The world must see what absolute evil we are fighting against.”

Oh my friends, my friends forgive me
That I live and you are gone.
There’s a grief that can’t be spoken.
There’s a pain goes on and on.

Phantom faces at the window.
Phantom shadows on the floor.
Empty chairs at empty tables
Where my friends will meet no more.

We gave the players before us a standing ovation, our hearts lifted by the ultimate triumph that had been played out before us.  In cold Ukraine, grim and courageous heroes were standing against great odds, hanging on and praying for help that will keep them free.

Freedom is mine. The earth is still.
I feel the wind. I breathe again.
And the sky clears
The world is waking.
Drink from the pool. How clean the taste.
Never forget the years, the waste.
Nor forgive them
For what they’ve done.
They are the guilty – everyone.

It is a long way from the auditorium in St. Louis to the desperate battlefield that is Ukraine where soon would come another dawn.

Tomorrow we’ll discover
What our God in Heaven has in store!
One more dawn
One more day
One day more! 

Freedom is not won or defended on a fabulous theatre stage. It is defended and won on the world stage one day at a time.

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

We must make sure there always is a tomorrow for Ukraine.

(Les Misėrables is a musical based on the novel by Victor Hugo with music by Claude-Michel Schongberg and lyrics by Herbert Kretzmer.)

The Ring-Tailed Painter Puts a Governor in his Place 

One of the great untapped resources for great stories from Missouri’s earliest days is the county histories that were compiled in the 1870s and ‘80s.

A few days ago, our indefatigable researcher was prowling through one of those old histories to make sure a footnote in the next Capitol book is correct and I came across the story of how Wakenda County became Carroll County.  That led to digging out the 1881 history of Carroll County where I met a fascinating character.  The account concluded with his departure for Texas and that led to an exploration of the early history of Texas. And there was the same guy, with a different name, who was part of the discontented Missourians that lit the fuse for the Texas Revolution.

I’ve written him up for an episode of Across Our Wide Missouri that I’ll record some day for The Missourinet.  The story will be shortened for time constraints.  But I want you to meet one of the many fascinating people whose often-colorful ghosts live in those old books.

The first settler of Carroll County “combined the characters of trapper, Indian skirmisher, and politician….a singular man, eccentric in his habits, and fond of secluding himself in the wilderness beyond the haunts of civilization. He was rough in his manners, but brave, hospitable and daring…He was uneducated, unpolished, profane and pugilistic.”  An 1881 county history says Martin Palmer, at social gatherings “would invariably get half drunk and invariably have a rough and tumble fight.”

He called himself the Ring-Tailed Panther, or as he pronounced it, “the Ring-Tailed Painter” and said he fed his children “on rattlesnake hearts fried in painter’s grease.”  A county in Texas is named for this “half horse and half alligator” of a man.

Martin Palmer was the first state representative from Carroll County in a state legislature that was a mixture of the genteel gentlemen from the city and rough-cut members of the outstate settlements.  During the first legislative session, held in St. Charles, some of the members got into a free-for-all and when Governor Alexander McNair tried to break up what Palmer called “the prettiest kind of fight,” Palmer landed a punch that knocked our first governor to the ground.   He told McNair, as he put it, “upon this principle of democratic liberty and equality,” that “A governor is no more in a fight than any other man.”

Wetmore’s Gazette, published in 1837, recorded that Palmer and his son loaded a small keel boat with salt as they headed for the second legislative session in St. Charles, planning to sell the much-valued mineral when they got there.  But the boat capsized in the dangerous Missouri River. The salt was lost and Palmer and his son survived by climbing on the upside-down boat and riding it until they landed at the now-gone town of Franklin. He remarked, “The river…is no respecter of persons; for, notwithstanding I am the people’s representative, I was cast away with as little ceremony as a stray dog would be turned out of a city church. “

He became a state senator in the third legislative session but left for Texas shortly after, in 1825, as one of the early Missouri residents to move to then-Mexican Texas.

A short time later he was accused of killing a man in an argument. He went to Louisiana and raised a force of men, returned and arrested all of the local Mexican government officials and took control of the area around Nacogdoches. He pronounced himself commander-in-chief of the local government in what became known as the Fredonian Rebellion and ordered all Americans to bear arms. He held “courts martial” for the local officials, convicted them, and sentenced them to death, then commuted the sentences on condition they leave Texas and never return.

Fellow Missourian Stephen F. Austin opposed the rebellion and wrote it was being led by “infatuated madmen.” It ended a month later when the Mexican Army arrived and Palmer went back to Louisiana. But some historians believe it became seed of the later Texas War for Independence.  Palmer later returned to become a key figure in the Texas Revolution.

He was elected a delegate to a convention at Washington-on-the-Brazos. When Sam Houston moved for adoption of the Texas Declaration of Independence, Palmer seconded the motion. He chaired the committee that wrote the Texas Constitution. But he knew it meant war with Mexico. He wrote his wife, “The declaration of our freedom, unless it is sealed with blood, is of no force.”

By now he had changed his last name from Palmer to Parmer. One contemporary observed, “He had a stubborn and determined will and showed impatience of delays…Hewas a unique character but with all he was a man with the best of impulses—honest, brave and heroic.” A fellow delegate called him “a wonderfully fascinating talker…a man absolutely without fear (who) held the Mexicans in contempt.”

After independence was won, Parmer served in the Texas congress and later was appointed Chief Justice of Jasper County, Texas.  He died there at the age of 71. He is buried thirty feet from the grave of Stephen F. Austin, “The Father of Texas,” in the Texas State Cemetery.

In 1876, the Texas Legislature honored a Parmer, “an eccentric Texan of the olden times,” by naming a panhandle county for him.

Missouri’s “Ring-tailed painter,” and fighting Texas pioneer Martin Parmer, born as Martin Palmer died, appropriately, on Texas Independence Day, March 2, 1850.

Why Hasn’t Ukraine Lost?

Ukraine’s counterattack against Russian invaders appears to have stunned a lot of Russian soldiers and their commanders—and a growing number of influential people in Moscow who are starting to openly criticize Vladimir Putin for his unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.

Putin expected a quick conquest.  Why didn’t he get it?  And why is he, as of this writing, getting his butt kicked by a supposedly smaller, inferior, force?

You might find it interesting to explore a book that explains why.  It’s the same reason Hitler didn’t conquer England, why the United States fled from Vietnam, and probably why the Taliban controls Afghanistan.

The book is Malcom Gladwell’s David and Goliath, a study of why bigger is not always best, why stronger does not always prevail, and why—believe it or not—the underdog wins so often.

While most analyses of military actions focus on military capabilities and/or failures, Gladwell focuses on people and what happens when their country is attacked by a seemingly overwhelming force.

He writes that the British government was worried as Europe sank into World War II that there was no way to stop a German air offensive against the country. The country’s leading military theorists feared devastating attacks on London would 600,000 dead, 1.2-million people wounded and mass panic among the survivors, leaving the Army unable to fight invaders because it would be trying to keep order among the civilians.

The eight-month blitzkrieg began in the latter part of 1940 and included fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing.

But the people did not panic.  Military leaders were surprised to see courage and almost indifference.  The reaction puzzled them as well as psychiatric workers expecting the worst.

And they discovered the same things were happening in other countries under attack.

What was going on?

Gladwell writes that a Canadian psychiatrist, J. T.MacCurdy, determined that the bombings divided the populace into three categories: the people killed, the people who were considered near misses—the people who survived the bombs, and the remote misses—people not in the bombed areas.  MacCurdy said the people in the third category developed “a feeling of excitement with a flavour of invulnerability.”

While the toll in the London bombings was, indeed, great (40,000 dead and 46,000 injured), those casualties were small in a community of eight-million people, leaving hundreds of thousands of “emboldened” near misses, people that MacCurdy said became “afraid of being afraid,” a feeling that produced exhilaration and led them to conquering fear and developing self-confidence “that is the very father and mother of courage.”

Hitler, like the British military command, had assumed that a populace that had never been bombed before would be terrified. It wasn’t. Instead, it was emboldened.

“Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the touch times start,” writes Gladwell. “Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.”   He maintains that the German expectations that the bombings would terrorize the people and destroyed their courage was a “catastrophic error” because it produced the opposite result. He concludes the Germans “would have been better off not bombing London at all.”

Gladwell explores the “catastrophic error” this country made in Viet Nam when its political and military leaders believed they could bomb the Viet Cong into submission.  Thousands of pages of interviews of Viet Cong prisoners indicated the result instead was that the bombings made people “hate you so much that they never stop fighting.”

Many of the prisoners maintained no thoughts of winning but they didn’t think the Americans would win either.  Nor did they think they would lose. “An enemy indifferent to the outcome of a battle is the most dangerous enemy of all,” Gladwell writes, and leads to a shift in advantage and power to the underdog.

His thoughts might help us understand why, after 30 years, the Gulf War has failed to install democracy in that area and instead has left Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan far from what we dreamed they would become.

We hope the ideas are not tested on Taiwan.

Those who go to war expecting to win through might and power alone are Goliaths. And, as Gladwell sees it, all they’re doing is creating a lot of Davids.  And—although Russia’s invasion is not mentioned—in Ukraine, the shepherds with slings are swarming.

(The book is David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, New York, Little Brown and Company, 2013 (with a revised paperback edition by Back Bay Books, 2015. His thought-challenging musings also cover such topics as class size, prestigious colleges, art, dyslexia, and crime.  If you want a sample of his perceptive interpretation of how underdogs so often prevail, go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ziGD7vQOwl8 and if you want more on other topics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RGB78oREhM)

(Photo credit: youtube Ted Talk)

 

A Reason to Still Like Ike

Here’s a piece of trivia for you that we learned years ago while touring the boyhood home of Dwight D. Eisenhower in Abilene, Kansas:

He was born David Dwight Eisenhower.  His father’s name was David, too, so his mother reversed the first two names to avoid having two Davids in the family.

At the end of World War II, President Truman told him, “General, there is nothing that you may want that I won’t try to help you get. That definitely and specifically includes the presidency in 1948.”  Eisenhower called the idea “an astounding proposition”   that he treated as a “splendid joke, which I hoped it was.”  He laughed it off and told Truman that he would not run for president in ’48.

The incident is recounted in Eisenhower’s 1948 book, Crusade in Europe, his view of the European War.  You might find his last few paragraphs something to reflect on in our current times:

Volumes have been, and more volumes will be, written on the collapse of world co-operation and the true significance of the events that accompanied the tragedy.  For us, all their words will amplify one simple truth.  Freedom from fear and injustice and oppression will be ours only in the measure that men who value such freedom are ready to sustain its possession—to defend it against every thrust from within or without.

Eisenhower warned against any signs of military weakness (as Churchill did in Fulton in 1946) but he felt “Military preparedness alone is an inadequate answer to the problem.” And nationalism isn’t either.  In a time long before Russian hacking, Eisenhower wrote:

Communism inspires and enables its militant preachers to exploit injustices and inequity among men. This ideology appeals, not to the Italian or Frenchman or South Americans as such, but to men as human beings who become desperate in the attempt to satisfy common human needs. Therein it possesses a profound power for expansion. Wherever popular discontent is founded on group oppression or mass poverty or the hunger of children, there Communism may stage an offensive that arms cannot counter.  Discontent can be fanned into revolution, and revolution into social chaos. The sequel is dictatorial rule. Against such tactics exclusive reliance on military might is vain.

The areas in which freedom flourishes will continue to shrink unless the supporters of democracy match Communist fanaticism with clear and common understanding that the freedom of men is at stake; meet Communist-regimented unity with the voluntary unity of common purpose, even though this may mean a sacrifice of some measure of nationalistic pretensions; and above all, annul Communist appeals to the hungry, the poor, the oppressed, with practical measures untiringly prosecuted for the elimination of social and economic evils that set men against men.

As a world force, democracy is supported by nations that too much and too often act alone, each for itself alone. Nowhere perfect, in many regions democracy is pitifully weak because the separation of national sovereignty uselessly prevents the logical pooling of resources, which would produce greater material prosperity within and multiplied strength for defense..

The democracies must learn that the world is too small for the rigid concepts of national sovereignty that developed in a time when the nations were self-sufficient and self-dependent for their own well-being and safety. None of them today can stand alone. No radical surrender of national sovereignty is required—only a firm agreement that in disputes between nations a central and joint agency, after examination of the facts, shall decide the justice of the case by majority decision. This is a slight restriction indeed on nationalism and a small price to pay if thereby the people who stand for human liberty are better fitted to settle dissension with their own ranks or to meeting attack from within.

We believe individual liberty, rooted in human dignity, is man’s greatest treasure. We believe that men, given free expression of their will, prefer freedom and self-dependence to dictatorship and collectivism.  From the evidence, it would appear that the Communistic leaders also believe this; else why do they attack and attempt to destroy the practice of these concepts…

If the men and women of America face this issue as squarely and bravely as their soldiers faced the terrors of battle in World War II, we would have no fear of the outcome. If they will unite themselves as firmly as they did when they provided, with their Allies in Europe, the mightiest fighting force of all time, there is no temporal power that can dare challenge them.  If they can retain the moral integrity, the clarity of comprehension, and the readiness to sacrifice that finally crushed the Axis, then the free world will live and prosper, and all peoples, eventually, will reach a level of culture, contentment, and security that has never before been achieved.

It might seem to some that Eisenhower’s seventy-year old message today would be “Make the WORLD great again.”

Eyewitness to the end

Every war has its “last” events and on this 103rd anniversary of the end of The Great War, we have one for you, with the account of a former Jefferson City resident who was part of what arguably was the final American artillery attack on German positions.

Missouri’s own John J. Pershing found Private Henry N. Gunther of Baltimore, Maryland, died at 10:59 a.m. on November 11, 1918 in an unnecessary one-man attack on a German machine gun emplacement.

But another Missourian was involved in another “last,” or at least a “last of the last.”

Germany surrendered at 5 a.m. that day but French General Ferdinand Foch demanded the shooting stop six hours later so the message of the surrender could be distributed to the front lines on both sides.  Author Joseph Persico in his book, Eleventh Month, Eleventh Day, Eleventh Hour, calculated there were 11,000 casualties in those last six hours, including the deaths of 3,000 soldiers.

Former Jefferson City resident Charles D. Capelle, was with the American Red Cross.  He sent a letter home describing his day, the last day of the war.  The Daily Capital News published it on Christmas Eve.

I was sleeping in a dugout several miles beyond Verdun, with the commanding officer of an ambulance train. At eight o’clock, when we were still in bed, the telephone rang. The captain answered and the operator said, “I am asked to tell you that the armistice has been signed and that hostilities will cease at eleven this morning.”  We told all the soldiers nearby, who at once set up a great yell and then refused the good news.  After breakfast alI went up to a battery of 155’s nearby, knowing that if the news were true, the battery would cease firing at eleven o’clock.  About ten they began firing all the guns regularly and sure enough, at five minutes before eleven they prepared to fire the last shot.  The full gun crew at each gun took hold of hands and they put in the line on one gun, and with watch in hand all awaited the hour.  “Then all pulled the lanyard together. “One last can for Jerry,” said the gunners, and then howled and skipped in their glee like a crowd of Indians.  You may be sure, too, that I was as happy as they were. 

            For a long time none could realize that the whole thing was over. Out of the mud and cold, out of the holes in the ground, out of the shrapnel and machine-gun fire, and back to the real bed without “cooties”—finally—and that thought was in everybody’s mind—back in the U. S. A.

His letter continued for several paragraphs, describing pulling back to “shell-torn” Verdun, then farther to “a considerable town” where there were “all sorts of civilization” including an officer’s club where there was “wonder of wonders—a chance to take a bath.”

Capelle, a Jackson County native, had lived in Jefferson City while he was an assistant reporter for the Missouri Supreme Court, 1909-1915 and then a member of the State Board of Pardons and Paroles until 1917. He was about 35 when he went to France with the Red Cross and was attached to the 26th Infantry (Yankee) Division from Massachusetts (which included the 51st Field Artillery Brigade), where he witnessed the last shot of the war.  He returned to Jackson County after the war, served as Mayor of Independence, 1922-24 and was elected in 1932 to a term in the Missouri House.  He died at the age of 56 in 1939.

National Museum of the United States Army credits the final round of the war being fired by Battery E of the 11th Field Artillery, which fired a round from its 155 mm artillery piece, nicknamed Calamity Jane at exactly 11 a.m. on November 11, one minute after Capelle’s unit fired its last shot. We suppose there could be some discussion of whether a round fired at the precise second the armistice went into effect was fired during the war. The shot from the 11th FA landed after the war.  The shot fired by the 56th FA probably landed before the official time of the Armistice.  We’ll let World War One historians argue that.  From a parochial standpoint, we come down in favor of Capelle’s account.

 

How a Possum Stopped Radicalization 

We’ve seen something such as this before:

A political party seized by a charismatic leader with radicalized followers at a time of national division sees voter suppression as one of the keys to maintaining its power and threatens to drive the other party into oblivion.  But the party develops an internal fracture between the radical wing and the more traditional element and there are fears that IT will be the party going into oblivion.

From this contentious time there emerges a possum and over time, it rescues both parties.

This was the political situation in Missouri fifteen decades ago.

During the Civil War, the interim government—Governor Price and several members of the legislature had fled to Arkansas to set up a government in exile that finished the war headquartered in Texas—Radical Republicans left in control in Missouri adopted a loyalty oath to make sure Missouri would have only Union-loyal officials in charge.  The Radical movement had begun about the time the Republican Party began in the mid-1850s, their name coming from their demand for immediate end to slavery. During the war, they were opposed by the moderate wing of the party led by Abraham Lincoln, who had run fourth in the 1860 election in this state, as well as by Democrats, who were more oriented toward southern sympathies.

The Radicals confirmed their control of Missouri government with the election of Governor Thomas Fletcher in 1864, thanks in part to the organizational skills of St. Louis lawyer Charles D. Drake who in 1863 argued for a new state constitution and disenfranchisement of all Confederate sympathizers. Carl Schurz, a future U.S. Senator and a leader of Missouri’s German citizens, called him “inexorable” and said Republicans “especially in the country districts, stood much in awe of him,” which might sound familiar today.

Radical Republicans pushed through The Drake Constitution, named because of his influence, in 1865. It contained a harsh loyalty oath that basically denied citizenship rights to anyone who would not pledge that they had given no support to the rebellion. Regardless of loyalty during the war, even if a person were a Union General, citizens could not vote, practice a profession, or serve in positions of public trust unless they swore to that oath. Drake and his Radical Republicans produced a list of 81 actions that defined disloyalty. For six years the Drake-led Radicals controlled politics in Missouri and Drake became a United States Senator.

Missouri’s moderate Republicans were reeling during those years and Democrats feared for their own party’s existence.  And this is when the possum was born that saved both political groups.

Drake’s Radicals began to see rising opposition from those who called themselves Liberal Republicans—remember this was 1870 and the two words, “liberal” and “Republican” were not an oxymoron.

The Liberals had had enough of Drake and his Radicals by the time the State Republican Convention was held in Jefferson City on August 31, 1870.  The Committee on Platforms filed two reports, a majority report from the Liberals favored immediate re-enfranchisement of former Confederates.  The Radical, minority, report favored a statewide vote on the question. With former Confederate supporters banned from voting, the outcome of the election pretty clearly would have maintained Radical Control.  When the convention adopted the Radical position, about 250 Liberals walked out and nominated their own ticket with Benjamin Gratz Brown its candidate for Governor.  The Radicals nominated Joseph McClurg for a second two-year term.

Democrats, still weak shortly after the U. S. Supreme Court threw out part of the loyalty oath, decided not to put up a statewide ticket.  William Hyde, the editor of The St. Louis Republican, a Democratic newspaper despite its name, is credited with creating what became known as “The Possum Policy.”  Instead of running its own slate, the Democrats threw their support behind the Liberal Republican candidate, Brown.

Walter B. Stevens, in Missouri, the Center State, 1821-1915, records an exchange of telegrams after the State Democratic Convention decided to support Liberal Republicans in which former U. S. Senator John Brooks Henderson—who did not run for re-election after voting against convicting President Johnson of impeachment charges—told Brown, “The negroes of this state are free. White men only are now enslaved. The people look to you and your friends to deliver them from this great wrong. Shall they look in vain?”

Brown wired back, “The confidence of the people of this State shall not be disappointed. I will carry out this canvass to its ultimate consequence so that no freeman not convicted of crime shall   henceforth be deprived on an equal voice in our government.”

The Democrats’ “Possum Policy” helped Brown defeated McClurg by about 40,000 votes, effectively ending the Radical Republican reign in Missouri.

The Liberal Republicans, created for the sole purpose of ending radicalism within the party, could not survive on their own. Governor Brown’s Secretary, Frederick N. Judson, reflected, “A party based upon a single issue, called into being to meet a single emergency, could not in the nature of things become permanent…and though its party life was short, it is entitled to the imperishable glory of having destroyed the last vestige of the Civil War in Missouri. A nobler record no party could have.”

National Democrats failed to follow the Missouri party’s “Possum Policy” and in 1872 nominated a presidential ticket of Horace Greeley, the New York newspaper publisher then in failing physical and mental health, and Benjamin Brown of Missouri—-a move that antagonized the national Liberal Republican movement and led to a crushing defeat for Democrats as Liberal Republicans opposed to the Grant administration had no place to go and so supported it anyway. With that, Liberal Republican movement died nationally.

In Missouri, the re-enfranchised Democrats elected Silas Woodson to succeed Brown as Governor, beginning Democratic control of the governorship until Republican Herbert Hadley was elected in 1908.

Missourians adopted a new constitution in 1875, throwing out the punitive Drake Constitution.  It lasted until our present State Constitution was adopted in 1945, the longest-standing constitution in state history.

Republicans paid a price to overcome the radicalization of their party 150 years ago but paying that price made sure that the rights of thousands of people were no longer endangered or no longer remained limited.

Being out of power did not and does not mean being without influence. History tells us we became a better nation because political courage manifested itself at the right time within the Republican Party.  In the long term both parties saved themselves.

We are not advocating that the Republican National Committee adopt a “possum policy” in 2022 or in 2024 to stamp out radicalization within the party nor are we saying splitting the party will be the solution now that it was then. But history reminds us of the dangers of radical politics and the sacrifices that have to be made, sometimes on both sides of the aisle, to make sure it does not overwhelm us.