Missouri, the Seuss State, and the importance of “no”

Posted on June 19, 2018 by bpriddy

“I call them Thing One and Thing Two… Then those things ran about with big bumps, jumps and kicks and with hops and big thumps and all kinds of…tricks.”

Dr. Seuss’s Cat in the Hat gave us two Things and they have become part of our conversation in various ways through the years. The story comes to mind because history has never given Missouri a Governor-Lieutenant Governor combination with the same first names. Until now. Mike 1 and Mike 2. Governor Mike Parson and Lieutenant Governor Mike Kehoe.

Missouri has had five governors and three lieutenant-governors named John, but the state capitol has never had two Johns at the same time. We’ve had three Josephs as governor and one Joseph as lieutenant-governor. But never together.

But on June 1, 2018, Missouri began to enter the Seussical Era. And now we have a couple of cats wearing a couple of new hats. Mike 1 and Mike 2.

As the good doctor wrote in another of his other best-selling ruminations on life:

“Oh, the places you’ll go! There is fun to be done!
There are points to be scored. There are games to be won…
Fame! You’ll be as famous as famous can be,
with the whole wide world watching you win on TV.

Except when they don’t
Because, sometimes they won’t.”

We wish Mike 1 and Mike 2 a service without big bumps, jumps and kicks or tricks. However:

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There is another issue beyond the legality of the appointment that piques our interest about the twoship of state government.

Article 4, Section 10. There shall be a lieutenant governor who shall have the same qualifications as the governor and shall be ex officio president of the senate. In committee of the whole he may debate all questions, and shall cast the deciding vote on equal division in the senate and on joint vote of both houses.

The Missouri Constitution carries over language written in 1875.

Today we pick a philosophical fight that suggests the lieutenant governor should always break ties in the senate and on those occasions when there is a joint vote by both the House and the Senate (the provision was written at a time when Missouri’s U. S. Senators were elected by the legislature) with a “no.”

Our argument is certainly open to discussion and we would welcome it in the comment area at the end.

Under our Constitution, the lieutenant governor is both fish and fowl, both legislative and executive in nature, the successor to the chief executive if something befalls the chief executive, and the presiding officer in the upper house of the legislative branch.

To test this idea, let’s suggest a circumstance in which the presiding officer in the upper legislative house breaks a tie with a “yes” vote on a bill. Before the bill is truly agreed to and finally passed, the chief executive becomes unable to perform the duties of that office, thus elevating the person who broke a tie on a piece of legislation into a position of signing the bill into law. The situation is at best awkward. Under certain circumstances, signing the bill could create a conflict of interest because a vote cast to keep an issue alive during the legislative process might conflict with a new governor’s obligation to serve all of the people of Missouri.

So, let’s argue, the tie should always be broken in the negative. Why?

Because it is the responsibility of those chosen by the people in the legislative districts to represent those constituents in finding agreement on a proposed law affecting all Missourians. The Executive Branch, which is not chosen to specifically balance the rights of specific constituents, should not take legislators off the hook.

If the legislature, which is entrusted with enacting statutory policy that one should expect to be fair to all, cannot draft a policy that draws majority support, then its failure should not be excused. And the lieutenant governor should not excuse that failure by voting “yes.”

Please note that we began by referring to this as a philosophical fight. In the real world, of course, there is partisanship and special interest favors to be considered, which is why a lieutenant governor who happens to be of the same party as the majority in the state senate is likely to let the majority party off the hook by turning a failure into a partisan success.

A “yes” vote to break a tie dismisses the value of half of the state’s population. A “no” vote recognizes the place of both sides in the system of government, and demands that the people’s representatives work harder on an equitable policy for all.

A “yes” vote is politics. A “no” vote is statesmanship.

Going where the story takes you

Posted on March 21, 2018 by bpriddy

One of the best parts of being a reporter or an author or a historian or a detective (we suppose) is discovering where a story takes you. Sometimes the real story is not the original story.

Such is the story of Daniel M. Grissom of Kirkwood.

Your reporter, author, and historian ran across Daniel in a letter he sent to Governor Arthur Hyde in 1924 saying he was honored to have been invited to the dedication of the Capitol that Daniel described as “one of the most chaste and beautiful structures in the world—equal in the exquisite symetry [sic] of its proportions to the once matchless now dismantled Parthenon at Athens, Greece,” perhaps a reference to the structure’s condition after a 1687 explosion.

He could not attend the dedication because “the infirmities of 94 years debar me” from being there. He concluded, “I send up my faint shout of gladness to join in the glorious and mighty outburst of patriotic joy that bursts from Capitol Hill this day. If it be a cause for pride to be an American, the very next thing to it is being a Missourian.”

The letter was interesting enough to raise a question: “Who was this guy?”

And this is where the story took this author to a completely different place, a completely different time, and to one of Missouri’s most tragic moments.

The first question was how much longer he lasted. He already was 94 but he seemed from his letter still to be at full mental strength. A source for that information is the state death certificates on the Missouri State Archives webpage. And there was Daniel M. Grissom, dead at the age of 101 on May 17, 1930. But the certificate had another piece of information: “retired news paper editor.” Two words.

The Missouri Press Association founded the State Historical Society of Missouri in 1898 and for many years, the society’s magazine, The Missouri Historical Review, carried obituary notices of editors and former editors who had been society members. And sure enough, there was Daniel, in the October, 1930 issue.

Daniel M. Grissom, it said, was twenty-four years old when he arrived in St. Louis from his home state of Kentucky to become a reporter for the St. Louis Evening News. That would have been 1853. He worked for the News for a decade, becoming the editor on a newspaper with a staff of two while still in his twenties. When the News merged with the St. Louis Union, creating the Evening Dispatch, he became the editor-in-chief of the combined papers. The Dispatch eventually merged with Joseph Pulitzer’s Evening Post to create today’s Post-Dispatch, which is probably when he joined the St. Louis Republican which later became just the Republic and lasted until its merger with the Globe-Democrat in 1919.

Then the eyebrows went up when the article reported, “While working on the News he was sent on the famous Pacific Railroad excursion train to Jefferson City, November 1, 1855.”

Suddenly, Daniel becomes even more significant. That train would inaugurate passenger service between St. Louis and Jefferson City. The legislature had put up bonding money for the Pacific Railroad and the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad and was to consider in the upcoming session whether to issue more bonds for more railroads. There was some doubt that it would because construction had been slower than expected and more expensive than expected on both lines. Governor Sterling Price was skeptical. The legislature was to come into session on November 5 so the arrival of the first passenger train at Jefferson City just ahead of the session was considered extremely important for the railroad interests. The capitol had been decorated for a big welcome. A huge banquet was to be held for the passengers.

But a violent and long-lasting rain storm swept in that afternoon. And the train did not arrive. The banquet went ahead solemnly in Jefferson City, attendees fearing something bad had happened. But the storm had knocked out telegraph service and it was not until the next day that word arrived of what had occurred.

A separate locomotive and tender had been sent ahead of the train to make sure the not-quite-compete Gasconade River Bridge about nine miles west of Hermann was strong enough to support the train. The locomotive made it safely across and was waiting on the other side when the passenger train steamed into sight.

The locomotive and a few cars made it across the first segment when, suddenly, that segment collapsed. Some of the cars fell thirty feet into the Gasconade River, pulling the engine and tender back on top of them. Other following cars crashed on top of that wreckage. Only a few cars failed to go into the river. “Mr. Grissom was one of the survivors,” said the Review obituary, “and assisted in the rescue of many persons and became widely known for his reports of the catastrophe.”

Thirty-one people were dead, including two State Representatives. About two-hundred more were injured.

There are three online resources that we use for newspaper accounts of historic events: Newspapers.com, Newspaperarchive.com; and the Smithsonian’s “Chronicling America” webpage. There also are more than fifty-million pages of Missouri newspapers on microfilm at the State Historical Society in Columbia. Newspaperarchive.com produced the Liberty Weekly Tribune for November 16, 1855 and a gripping account of the tragedy.

In those days before wire services as we know them, newspapers exchanged issues with one another, which is how the Liberty newspaper came to have this account more than two weeks after the event. “Yesterday was a sad day for St. Louis—a day whose events have cast a shadow over many a heart and made desolate many a bright hearthstone,” the story began in a manner typical of reporting in those days but far different from our times.

There was no byline. Bylines did not catch on much for another forty years or so after reporters became more popular with the public although correspondents at the time of the disaster sometimes signed their stories, usually with nom de plumes such as “Publius,” the Liberty newspaper’s Jefferson City correspondent who had a brief story about the tragedy on another page.

At the end of the eyewitness account in the Tribune was another surprise. The article originally appeared in the St. Louis News. It was Daniel M. Grissom’s account—which a survey of other newspapers in the “Chronicling America” website shows became THE nationwide story of the event.

Betty Johnson Douglas, writing in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat on March 6, 1927 described him as “a young newspaper man who had come to St. Louis from Kentucky only a few years before and was already editor of a paper which had given much support to railroad building projects in the state… blue-eyed, eager for new experiences and already making a reputation for himself as a writer of strong editorials.’

Climb aboard that ill-fated train and ride into a disaster with 26-year old Daniel M. Grissom:

Yesterday morning, at the seventh street depot of the Pacific railroad, a large crowd of happy persons were gathered, prepared for the excursion to Jefferson City, to celebrate the completion of the road to that point. It was a happy hour. Gay greetings were spoken and congratulations were joyously interchanged between friends who were glad each to find that the other was going. Many who did not go came to wish a pleasant journey and God speed to those who did. Some who could not go then promised to join the excursion to-morrow (today). Two military companies, with stirring music and gay uniforms added to the pageant. At half past eight the train started, freighted with six hundred happy hearts, followed by the good wishes of all whose hearts beat responsively to those “of the parting ones.” All was bright and pleasant, and although the twelve cars constituting the train were crowded to such an extent that many had to stand in the aisle between the seats, and others on the platform outside, yet there was a universal good feeling and “all went merry as a marriage bell.” The people at the stations and villages along the road cheered us onward and shouted and waved hats and hand’cheifs in response to the merry music our Brass Band entertained them with. As we came into Herman, a cannon pealed forth the glad greetings of the hearty citizens. But how soon was the scene destined to be changed! How soon were so many of those founding hearts to be pulseless. No one dreamed that death was near, yet it lurked for us only a few miles further on. At 1 o’clock we left Herman [sic], preceded by a locomotive and tender which had been sent forward, to see what that the way was clear, and no danger impending. Soon we came in sight of the bridge across the Gasconade river, about nine miles from Herman, and thirty-five from Jefferson City. The bridge is approached by an embankment thirty feet high which terminated in a massive stone abutment. Forty yards from the abutment, and just at the edge of the river, stands another staunch pillar, three more of which reach the other side of the stream, and support the bridge. The river is about two hundred and fifty yards wide and the bridge thirty feet high, at least. The Pioneer locomotive had crossed the structure safely and was waiting at the other side to see the result of our attempt. There was no fear of danger, nor thoughts of peril. We slowly moved along the embankment and came on to the bridge. The locomotive had passed the first span and had its forewheels above the first pillar beyond the abutment—there being then rested on the first span, the locomotive, baggage car and two heavily loaded passenger cars. The weight was too much for the long, slender timbers which supported the rails and the enormous load above. Suddenly we heard a horrid crash—it rings in our ears now—and saw a movement amongst those in the car in which we were seated; then there came crash-crashcrash as each car came to the abutment and took the fatal plunge. The affair was but the work of an instant. We were running slowly at the time and the successive crashes came on at intervals of nearly a second. We were seated in the seventh car—there being three behind us—and when we heard the horrid sound that came up, as each car slowly and deliberately took the leap, we hoped that our car might stop before it reached the precipice. But no; it seemed that the spirit of ruin was beneath, determinedly dragging each car to the spot, wrenching it from its fastenings, and hurling it to atoms beneath. Six cars fell in one mass, each on the other, and were shivered into fragments. The seventh fell with its forward end to the ground; but the other end rested on top of the abutment. Those in it were only bruised. The eighth and ninth cars tumbled down the embankment before they reached the abutment. Such a wreck I never saw and hope never again to see. It was one undistinguishable mass of wooded beams, seats, iron wheels and rods, from beneath which came up groans of agony. Those who could, crawled out of the ruin immediately, and either sought to relieve their own wounds or the wounds of their friends. Some wept tears of joy to find their friends alive and others shuddered to find their friends dead, the uninjured organized themselves under the lead of Mr. Pride, the conductor, and endeavored by chopping to extricate those who were yet alive from the wreck. Here a beam was cut into to disengage a broken arm; there an iron axle was pryed up to relieve a mutilated leg. There was no shrieking and screaming, though all begged for the love of heave to be extricated from some mass of iron or beam of wood which pinned them to the earth. All begged for water, drank it when brought and prayed for more. There was hardly an entirely uninjured man to be seen. Most of those who had escaped had streams of blood flowing over their faces from splinter wounds. Others limped and hobbled about, looking for their friends. A board shanty was the only shelter to be had and that was soon filled with the wounded, whose silent speechless agony was enough to make the stoutest heart shudder. Soon after the accident the heavens grew dark and black as though in twain, and from the crevice gleamed the white lightning, and the harsh thunder bellowed its cruel mockings at the woe beneath. It seemed as if the elements were holding high carnival over the scene of slaughter.

Grissom wrote a second version of the story, cited by Douglas in her 1927 article:

Suddenly there was an awful crash, a sickening lurch—another crash—another—another. We were moving forward jerkily, sickeningly.

Horrid sounds came from ahead. We realized in a flash what must have happened—the bridge was gone—we were being pulled into the river by the weight of the cars ahead, which had already crashed over the bank! Then—our car was going too. The violent motion threw us to the floor.

I was the first to gain my feet. I may have been unconscious for a moment, for the movement had stopped. When I got up and looked around not a soul was in sight. I was staggered for another second, but then I called aloud and one by one the passengers began to crawl out from under the seats, behind doors, through the debris of the wreck. No one in my car was seriously hurt, though we were all badly shaken up and some of us were bleeding and so weak from shock that we were hardly able to walk…

When a relief train from St. Louis came to our aid it was a very different kind of crowd which started on the return journey from that which had set out so gaily a few hours before. Hardly a word was spoken as we leaned our heads on our hands, some uttering groans and low cries of despair caused by their own sufferings or by the realization of the loss of a friend or relative in the disaster.

(We pause for a while until the mental images of this extraordinary writing fade enough for us to continue.)

Jen Tebbe wrote on the Missouri Historical Society of St. Louis (not to be confused with the state Historical Society of Missouri that is based in Columbia) last November about some things other survivors had to say. http://mohistory.org/blog/what-survivors-had-to-say/

Grissom built an outstanding career in the years ahead. Historian and journalist Walter Stevens wrote a long time ago that Grissom was “among the foremost editorial writers in the West for a third of a century. He…wrote in a virile, lucid style.”

During the Civil War he and his Evening News were critical of General John Fremont, the commander of the Army of the West at the start of the war. Fremont became so upset at the newspaper’s criticism after the fall of Lexington that he jailed Grissom and fellow editor Charles G. Ramsey. They were released two days later.

The microfilmed old newspapers in Columbia tell us Daniel Grissom was 82 when he moved into the Kirkwood Old Folks Home where, said the St. Louis Globe-Democrat he “delighted to regale willing listeners with tales of the Civil War, the Lincoln-Douglas debate, the capture of Camp Jackson, and other events, the formal accounts of which may only be found in histories.”

When he was in his nineties he wrote a dozen articles for the Missouri Historical Review about the famous people he had known, personal intimate sketches of people such as Senator Thomas Hart Benton, Governors Sterling Price and Claiborne Fox Jackson (who tried to take Missouri South at the start of the Civil War), James S. Rollins, and artist George Caleb Bingham, among others. The last article was published when he was 98.

It was a surprise to him when he turned 100. He thought he was only 99 until a week before the landmark birthday when he got a letter from a relative who had dug into an old family Bible and found that he had been born a year earlier than he thought. So, actually, he was 95 when he wrote to the governor.

The Post-Dispatch reported he carried on a “voluminous correspondence with friends and relatives into his 90s but complained on his 100^th birthday, “My pencil won’t do what I want it to now. It wanders all over the page. I used to walk up and down the corridor here by myself up to the last ten months but I just can’t make it alone any more. I’m getting old and my legs just won’t support me the way they used to. I’m beginning to feel my years.”

More than one-hundred friends and relatives joined him at the home for his next, and last, birthday where he cut a thirty-two pound cake decorated by one candle symbolizing all of the others there wasn’t room for.

He survived one of Missouri’s greatest tragedies to live a long and historic life for another three-quarters of a century. But his tombstone in Kirkwood’s Oak Hill Cemetery says only “Daniel M. Grissom, 1829-1930.”

When he thought he was 94 years old he wrote a letter to the governor of Missouri and another journalist read it after another ninety-four years and wondered, “Who was this guy?” This is where the story took us.

Removal

Posted on February 27, 2018 by bpriddy

It’s important to not get ahead of ourselves at a difficult time like this. But some people who know that we dabble in Missouri history have asked if a Missouri governor has ever been impeached and removed from office.

The answer on impeachment is “no.” The answer to removal is “yes.” Herewith, we tell the tale.

Understand that impeachment is not the same as removal. Impeachment is the filing of charges against an office holder by the legislature. The removal trial is conducted by the Missouri Supreme Court. In the 1930s, under a different State Constitution, the House impeached State Treasurer Larry Brunk. At that time the trial was handled by the Missouri Senate, of which Brunk was a former member. Two-thirds of the senators had to vote to remove him. The Senate failed to get that two-thirds with some people saying it just could not remove a former member from a statewide office. True or not, Brunk completed his term.

That circumstance led to a change in procedure when a new constitution was adopted in 1945. It leaves impeachment to the House but the trial will be conducted by the Missouri Supreme Court. The process has been used only once, in 1994-1995, when Secretary of State Judi Moriarty was removed from office. The Supreme Court had to have a special witness box built for that occasion because the Supreme Court hears arguments only from attorneys. There was no testimony until this case came along.

The only governor removed from office in Missouri was Claiborne Fox Jackson in 1861. Jackson lied during his campaign by pretending to be against secession when actually he was plotting to take Missouri South. When he was sworn in, he immediately asserted that Missouri’s lot was tied to the fate of the seceding states. The legislature refused to vote on secession and instead called for a special convention to be convened to determine the proper course of action. About six weeks after Jackson took office, the convention of ninety-nine men met to chart a course for the state. Jackson had been stunned when he saw no avowed secessionists were in that group, which voted strongly to stay in the Union. He then declared Missouri would be an “armed neutral” if a civil war broke out.

When President Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand troops to defend the Union after the attack on Fort Sumter, Jackson replied, “Your resolution, in my judgment, is illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary in its object, inhuman, and diabolical and cannot be complied with. Not one man will the State of Missouri furnish to carry on any unholy crusade.”

By now, Jackson was clandestinely plotting with Jefferson Davis to move Missouri into the Confederacy. His big target was the St. Louis federal arsenal. He went so far as to ask Davis to send some cannons that could be used to seize it and ship its weapons to the Confederacy. But federal troops moved first.

Then-Captain, later General, Nathaniel Lyon, who was in charge of the arsenal, smelled out the deal and rounded up the troops Jackson was planning to use for the attack. He also rejected Jackson’s efforts to keep federal forces out of Missouri, remarking that he would see every man, woman, and child in the state dead before he would let Jackson and friends cut a deal that would prohibit federal troops from entering the state. Lyon gave Jackson and his military aide, Sterling Price, an hour to get out of town.

In a late-night session at the Capitol, Jackson asked legislators to follow him to Boonville where Missouri volunteers were going to take a stand against the Union Army. A couple of days later, Lyon and the Union Army took Jefferson City, and stabilized the situation by leaving a small unit of troops in charge of the town while Lyon got back on the boat and led his men to Boonville for Missouri’s first out-and-out-battle of the Civil War. Jackson and Price were soundly whipped and headed south to the safety of Arkansas and a link-up with Confederate troops there.

A majority of the Convention of ninety-nine did not join Jackson and Price. Although Jackson would maintain that he was running a government in exile, which soon declared it had seceded, he never had a quorum of the duly-elected legislature.

The Convention, back in Jefferson City, re-assembled in July and declared the office of governor to be vacant. Former Missouri Supreme Court Judge Hamilton Gamble was installed as the Provisional Governor. Other statewide offices were declared vacant, too, and filled with loyal Unionists among whom was the famous artist George Caleb Bingham, who became Treasurer.

The legality of the convention’s actions is not above question. But it was protected by a Union occupational force that wasn’t going to tolerate challenges to the convention’s authority.

We do not know specifically what Jackson swore to when he was sworn in as governor. The 1820 Missouri Constitution, which was still in effect, does not contain any oath language for the governor or for the legislature. Our present Constitution reiterates language from the 1875 Constitution: “I do solemnly swear, or affirm, that I will support the Constitution of the United States and of the state of Missouri, and faithfully perform the duties of my office, and that I will not knowingly receive, directly or indirectly, any money or other valuable thing for the performance or nonperformance of any act or duty pertaining to my office, other than the compensation allowed by law.”

That language only applies—in the Constitution—to members of the General Assembly. It is, however, the same language we have heard on a dozen occasions when governors have been inaugurated. Pretty clearly, Jackson had violated his oath of office to “support the Constitution of the United States and the State of Missouri,” and thus was subject to actions removing him from office. The legal standing of the Convention of 99 to do so has been argued, but wartime expedience prevailed.

Jackson died in 1862 and his elected Lieutenant Governor, Thomas C. Reynolds, became the leader of the self-proclaimed government in exile—which wound up headquartered in Marshall, Texas. He was with Price on the 1864 last-gasp attempt to regain Missouri for the South, hoping that Price’s army could seize Jefferson City and he could be sworn in as the legitimate governor, probably swearing to support the Confederate Constitution. But Price decided not to attack the capital city after surrounding it—he’d already had one catastrophic fight at Pilot Knob—and he moved on. Reynolds was irate but no amount of screaming and cursing could change the course of Price and his increasingly bedraggled troops who went on to a three-day fight at Westport before scrambling back to Arkansas, badly mauled by the Union Army.

And that’s the story of the only time a Missouri Governor was ever removed from office.

The office of Governor of Missouri has not become officially vacant since Mel Carnahan’s plane crash in 2000. What happened then raised some questions about gubernatorial succession that remain unanswered. We’ll have another history lesson next week.

Who is next?

Posted on February 20, 2018 by bpriddy

Your fearful observer awoke one morning last week wondering when it will happen in Missouri.

It was the morning after the latest school shooting, this one in Florida, the seventh school shooting incident in the first forty-five days of the year. As of the morning after the latest shooting, twenty people had been killed and thirty-four others had been wounded in those seven incidents.

Since the pace of school shootings began to pick up nationally in the 1980s there have been more than 350 school shootings in this country.

Three hundred. And fifty. Plus.

The escalation of shootings at schools is stunning. Wikipedia has compiled a list of incidents at schools going back to Greencastle, Pennsylvania’s Enoch Brown School massacre in 1764, although that doesn’t quite fit today’s description of a school shooting because it was part of an Indian uprising against the British. Only one of the ten people killed was shot. The others were killed with “melee weapons,” as they are called.

The chart says there were twenty-eight incidents in the nineteenth century. The number jumped to 226 in the Twentieth Century (141 of them in the last three decades including the first mass shooting, 1999’s Littleton Colorado incident that killed fifteen—including the two suicidal shooters—and wounded twenty-one).

In the first seventeen years and two months of the Twenty-First Century there already have been 212 incidents that have made this list.

The Wikipedia list shows nine such shootings in Missouri since 1980. Eleven deaths, including four of the shooters. Seven injuries. Not all of the incidents are what we might think of as school shootings, namely students killing students. The killing of three monks at Conception Abbey is on the list, for example. Some involved only adults. Missouri’s most recent incident was three years ago when a man was wounded in a school parking lot shooting, apparently by another adult. The most recent student incident was in Joplin in 2006 when a student failed to kill a principal when his gun failed.

We hope we never have one of those horrific incidents in Missouri. But we are sure we are not the only person in Missouri living in dread that it could happen here.

What is there to do about it? Opinions are strong on this issue and we will not wade into it here. Our focus will be on an important factor that can get lost in the discussion of school shootings and what should be done beyond the increasingly stale phrase “thoughts and prayers.”

The Associated Press the morning after the Florida incident described the suspect as, “An orphaned 19-year old with a troubled past and an AR-15 rifle…” and reported, “Students who knew him described him as a volatile teenager whose strange behavior had caused others to end friendships with him.”

Sooner or later someone is going to ask—some probably have by now—“Why didn’t somebody do something to head him off?” And some will wonder why he didn’t get help with mental health issues, sentiments frequently heard after incidents such as these.

Unanswerable questions. A similar question might be, “How many school shooting incidents did NOT take place because our mental health people turned their clients in a better direction?”

Many years ago, one of my sometime-colleagues who sat next to me while we covered the legislature turned out to have murdered his wife a couple of years earlier. Who among us can honestly say that we can determine that the person next to us is so unstable that he or she is or can become a killer?

Can we, however, reduce the chances that something terrible might happen if we put more resources into a system that works to reduce those chances?

We wrote a column last year about a courageous and striking book we had read called, “No One Cares About Crazy People: The Chaos and Heartbreak of Mental Health in America.” I suggested that anyone in the legislature who deals with health and mental health funding should have this book on their must-read list. With the General Assembly in session, now—particularly as we ask questions in the wake of the Florida school shooting—it is time to renew that suggestion, not just for those dealing with mental health funding but for all of our lawmakers.

Discussions are underway at the Capitol of further reductions in the state’s ability to finance vital programs and services at a time when the organization, Mental Health America, has published its 2017 report on the state of mental health in this country. It ranks each state and territory on fifteen categories to arrive at a ranking that “indicates lower prevalence of mental illness and higher access to care.”

Missouri’s overall ranking was 31^st. Seven criteria used to rank services to adults placed Missouri 36^th. We were 24^th in the “youth” category.

The study found that we are 23^rd in the prevalence of mental illness. But when it comes to access to mental health care, we are only 36^th.

If one of these unspeakable tragedies caused by someone of noticeable “strange behavior” happens in our state, as has happened in Florida, how will we think about that 36^th place ranking? And should this situation, this possibility, this circumstance be part of those discussions?

We pray that Missourians never have to confront those questions. Or the people of any other state.

Let all of us pray.

We’ll get around to it eventually. Maybe.

Posted on December 26, 2017 by bpriddy

Let us not cast stones at Jefferson City for being a town that likes to talk about things for a long time before doing them. This is, after all, a government town where many of its citizens spend their days in cubicles, and those citizens are masters at conducting meetings and talking about things and making reports and then putting the reports on shelves until they have another round of meetings. You probably have heard of the new task force that studied state transportation needs and financing of them—five years after another task force studied state transportation needs and financing of them?

While doing some research at the State Historical Society the other day, I came across a newspaper article headlined, “Mrs. Jas. Houchin Starts Movement for $50,000.00 Y. M.C.A. in Jefferson City.” It was October, 1915.

The organization of a Young Men’s Christian Association and the construction of a well-equipped building as its headquarters is the plan which Mrs. James A. Houchin has conceived and will carry out within the next year, probably within the next few months.

She already had put down five-thousand dollars on a lot. “I believe the building should have a gymnasium and a swimming pool. It will maintain a library, reading rooms and a basketball court,” she said. She was impressed with the YMCA in Sedalia which had bedrooms on its third floor to rent to club members.

Mrs. Houchin died in 1924. Jefferson City finally formed its “Y” in 1970.

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We are still waiting on another idea, though. The Daily Capital News on June 7, 1923 carried a letter on the front page from local lawyer and legislator A. T. Dumm saying it was time the people of the capital city built a convention hall. Dumm was the president of the Commercial Club—which later was the Chamber of Commerce—and was a member of the state constitutional convention that had recently met.

Editor Capital News: Responding to your request for a suggestion for the advancement and betterment of Jefferson City, I beg to suggest, for the consideration of your readers and the community, the idea of a convention hall.

I think we have reached a point in our growth and population where we might confidently launch such an enterprise and that it is highly desirable if not absolutely necessary must be evident…

Jefferson City, like every other city of its class and consequence, must be prepared to meet the demands and requirements, not only of its own people, but of those who, through business or pleasure, become our guests.

We pride ourselves on the fact that we are the capital of a great state, but we should have a personality and an individuality of our own and not be dependent upon the state for the means of hospitality and entertainment for our visitors. Outside of the two great cities, we are fast becoming the convention city of the state, and our importance in this respect will increase with every passing year.

A Convention Hall, centrally located, built and paid for by our own people, for the free use of our people and those who come to the capital, would, in my opinion, result in a great increase of our civic pride and advertise us throughout the state more favorably and extensively than any other single factor except good streets in the city and good roads leading to the city.

His friends called him “Tom,” because of his middle name. He died in 1930.

It took fifty-five years for Mrs. Houchin’s dream of a YMCA to materialize. It’s now ninety-four years and still talking since Tom Dumm voiced his hope.

Carol

Posted on December 19, 2017 by bpriddy

It’s not one of the Christmas carols or hymns we are likely to hear in our churches during this holiday season, but it’s one we need to hear in a year when brotherhood has taken a beating throughout the world.

There are thousands of paintings and other depictions of Jesus, the most ubiquitous—probably—being those of Warner Sallman, particularly his “Head of Christ,” which has been reproduced a half-billion times, some say. But Jesus probably didn’t look much like the pretty Aryan Jesus made famous by Sallman. And how he really looked is immaterial anyway. It’s how we see him.

And that brings to Alfred Burt and his wonderful Christmas carol, “Some See Him…”

Alfred Burt was the son of an Episcopal minister in Michigan who began in 1922 the custom of sending special Christmas cards to parishioners that included the words and music for a new Christmas Carol the Reverend Bates Burt had composed. After Alfred graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in music in 1942, “Dad” Burt suggested he take over the Christmas card custom. Alfred’s wife, Ann, asked the organist at the Bates’ church to write the lyrics while Alfred wrote the music.

Alfred Burt and Wihla Hudson created fifteen carols before his death because of lung cancer in 1954 at the age of thirty-three.

Their 1951 composition, Some See Him is a favorite in our household and seems appropriate for this year.

Some children see Him lily white,
the baby Jesus born this night.
Some children see Him lily white,
with tresses soft and fair.
Some children see Him bronzed and brown,
The Lord of heav’n to earth come down.
Some children see Him bronzed and brown,
with dark and heavy hair.

Some children see Him almond-eyed,
this Savior whom we kneel beside.
some children see Him almond-eyed,
with skin of yellow hue.
Some children see Him dark as they,
sweet Mary’s Son to whom we pray.
Some children see him dark as they,
and, ah! they love Him, too!

The children in each different place
will see the baby Jesus’ face
like theirs, but bright with heavenly grace,
and filled with holy light.
O lay aside each earthly thing
and with thy heart as offering,
come worship now the infant King.
‘Tis love that’s born tonight!

In a world that sometimes seems pretty short on love and brotherhood, Alfred Burt’s carol seemed to us pretty important—although we aren’t aware of any service where it will be sung.

If you’d like to hear it, we recommend this performance by Santino Fontana and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v83iNif0hEw

And if you are not familiar with the Alfred Burt carols, we invite you to enjoy this first recording of them, in the year after his death, by the Columbia Choir:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXI6mjujeU8

May we see each other in the spirit of peace this season.

-0-

Notes from the road–November

Posted on December 1, 2017 by bpriddy

(Tick line, Kansas)—Trivia question:

What was the tick line?

Nancy and I crossed it a few days ago on our ten-day excursion to and from Colorado, where we spent Thanksgiving helping our son and his family move into a new house.

Kansas had a tick line.

In the years right after the Civil War, there was a shortage of beef in the northern states. At the same time, Texas had millions of cattle and no significant market for them. But a lot of those cattle were infested with ticks that killed Kansas farmers’ dairy cows, leading the legislature to pass a law basically banning Texas cattle east of Topeka, an area that was filling up with new farmer-settlers.

A nice tourism magazine we picked up in Abilene tells the story of one Joseph G. McCoy, an Illinois fellow who realized Texas’ two-dollar-a head cattle were worth twenty times that much in Chicago and set out to find a place west of the tick line where trains could haul those infested longhorns to Chicago for slaughter, eliminating contact between them and the Kansas dairy cows.

McCoy settled on Abilene, then a place of “about a dozen log cabins and dugouts” where one entrepreneur was trying to solve the community’s prairie dog overpopulation problem by selling pairs of them to tourists for five dollars. The town fathers sold McCoy 480 acres of land that became the destination point for those desperate Texas cattle-raisers. The cattle drives enabled Abilene to flourish—but it did so at the expense of a Missouri city. The unsigned article in the Abilene Chamber of Commerce magazine is a little condescending on this point:

Herds were transported in 1866 to Sedalia, Missouri along the first cattle trail. Why Sedalia isn’t genuinely recognized as the first Cowtown of the West is because very few cattle herds actually made it to their destination. There were a series of hillbillies guarding the Southern border of Missouri to ensure that the Texas Longhorns carrying the deadly tick fever were not going to cross over. Several drovers lost their lives in an attempt to break through the Missouri wall. The Sedalia trail was also a nightmare even without the coonskin-capped border patrol because the path would send the drovers through the Ozark Mountains, which isn’t exactly the Rockies, but it wasn’t the best to run thousands of cattle. Beyond the Ozarks, there was always a possibility of Indian raids in which there were still tribes looking around to establish their dominance in the Wild West even though the government had forced many Native Americans out to unwanted lands.

We suggest the MISSOURI Chamber of Commerce, or at least the Sedalia Chamber, might find itself sipping from the cup of umbrage at that characterization. Coonskin-capped border patrol? Hillbilly guards? Hmmmmmphhhhhhh!

About three-thousand cattle were being brought into Missouri from Texas in the pre-Civil War years but the Texas ticks were hurting Missouri cattle, leading to a proposal in the 1855 legislature to ban diseased cattle from Missouri.

Sedalia, however, became a point for Texas cattle, particularly after the railroad reached there in 1860. And when the KATY railroad built a line from Sedalia to Texas, the city became a major watering stop for the steam-powered trains that hauled cattle to Chicago in the post-Chisholm Trail days.

But when Joseph McCoy set up shop in Abilene, Sedalia’s development as THE western cattle trail head quickly ended.

The Texas cow boys (it was two separate words in those days) drove a couple million head of cattle up the Chisholm Trail from San Antonio to the railroad at Abilene from about 1867-71. By then, those bothersome Kansas farmers who had learned that winter wheat could flourish in Kansas and argued their land had become too valuable to be tromped on by ticky Texas Cattle, had expanded operations and the tick line kept getting moved farther west and other towns, including rip-roaring Dodge City, had become the cow towns of American West fame. On March 7, 1885, Kansas enacted a strict quarantine banning Texas cattle everywhere except for December, January, and February—the cold weather months when tick-borne diseases were less likely.

By then the cow boys didn’t need to go to Kansas because the railroads had gone to Texas, including the KATY with its links to our own Abilene-maligned Sedalia.

(Concrete, America)—Covered a lot of miles on I-70—a road that makes any state boring except Missouri, where lax billboard standards just make the state look boring AND trashy—on that trip.

Saw a lot of hybrid vehicles on the road with us including a few Teslas and, as frequently happens, wondered about where they go to recharge.

We recalled that one of the diesel cars we owned years ago had a book in the glove compartment listing gas stations with diesel pumps for cars—they were kind of rare in those days—and we wondered if anybody provided a source for electric car owners that listed places where they could plug in.

Turns out there are at least two sources: Ameren.com and solvingev.com. Might be kind of nice in MODOT had a webpage with the same information. But the two sources that we looked at a minute ago show there are a LOT of places to plug in, power up, and go on (kind of a modern Timothy Leary phrase). And the increasing number reflects the changes that are gaining momentum in our transportation system. Doesn’t solve the pothole problems, though. That might be a challenge for the legislature: figure out the equivalent of a gas tax on EV battery fill-ups.

A few years ago we suggested to a national motel chain that it might pick up a lot of customers if it had charging stations for overnight guests. Still a good idea although we have yet to see a motel with a charging station.

(Wakeeny, Kansas)—This. place. is. starting. to. feel. weird. Regular readers might recall that last summer we stopped at a motel in this town of fewer than 1800 people three counties away from the Kansas/Colorado border and ran into someone who recognized us from the time many years ago when he worked at the Capitol while I was scratching for news there. This time we stopped and the young lady behind the desk was from Boonville and used to listen to “Across Our Wide Missouri,” the daily historical program we still do on the Missourinet.

I don’t know, after this, how often we want to stop at Wakeeney in the future. It’s starting to feel a little Twilight Zoneish, like we’ll wake up some morning and be the only people in the town and we won’t be able to get out.

(Mailbox, Mo.)—Stopped at the post office and picked up our mail held for the last ten days. 46 things. Ten were catalogs although we were surprised that only one was from L. L. Bean, which usually seems to send us a new one every three days, or from the Duluth people who are almost as prolific. Of the 46 pieces of mail, only four were personal (cards or letters) unless you count the three bills. Eleven were solicitations, usually reminders that it’s getting late in the year and you better donate to our cause so you can beat the IRS. Eight were non-catalog ads, including one from Barnes and Noble which seems to have forgotten that it closed its store here months ago (we also get a lot of email solicitations from Sears, which took their store away from us months ago, too).

Less than ten percent of our mail was from people contacting people.

(Stamp Counter, Mo.)—Mailed a letter the other day and stuck one of those “Forever” stamps on it—you know, the one that’s good no matter what this month’s postage rate is. (We include this in the “notes from the road” entry because we drove to the nearest postal facility to mail the letter instead of raising the flag on the mailbox on the curb.) The idea came to mind that the postal service should change the image on future “Forever” stamps. It should be a

Snail.

Why I’m thankful today

Posted on November 23, 2017 by bpriddy

It was Thanksgiving Day fifty years ago. It’s Thanksgiving Day today.

I’m giving thanks for lugging a trombone around for many of the years of the past half-century. I’m giving thanks for someone who sees cobwebs where I’d never notice them, for someone who says the yard needs improving when I think mowing is good enough, for someone who forced me to accept broccoli a long time ago, for someone who’s been the reason I’m always glad to walk into the house no matter where in the world I’ve been or what I’ve done.

A long time ago my parents got a letter saying I’d been on a date with a girl named Nancy and saying they might be hearing more about her. I used to carry her trombone to the Missouri Tiger basketball games because she was in Marching Mizzou, which during basketball season was Sitting at the End of the Court Mizzou. It took a while for things to get serious, couple of years maybe, but personal gravity eventually worked its miracle.

I used to do a “good music” show on a radio station in Columbia, “Matinee at Midnight,” from midnight to 4 a.m. It was, in those days, the kind of stuff intended to help fog up the windows of cars parked in secluded spots in the Columbia area. Listeners probably figured something was going on when they started hearing Frank Sinatra sing more frequently than the normal music schedule would suggest:

If I don’t see her each day, I miss her
Gee, what a thrill each time I kiss her
I’ve got a terrible case
On Nancy with the laughin’ face

She takes the winter and makes it summer
But summer could take some lessons from her
Picture a tomboy in lace
That’s Nancy with the laughin’ face

Have you ever heard mission bells ringin’?
Well, she’ll give you the very same glow
When she speaks, you would think it was singin’
Just hear her say hello

I swear to goodness you can’t resist her
Sorry for you, she has no sister
No angel could replace
Nancy with the laughin’ face

Keep Betty Grable, Lamour, and Turner
She makes my heart a charcoal burner
It’s heaven when I embrace
My Nancy with the laughin’ face

I never thought of her as a “tomboy in lace,” and she does have two sisters and the first two lines of the last verse stuff about Grable, Lamour, and Turner doesn’t apply (though they probably did for Frank), but the rest of the song pretty much summed things up. By the time I discovered this song on one of Sinatra’s albums, I was a gone goose.

We got married on Thanksgiving because a college kid and good friend, Jim Pirner, would be home from MU for the long holiday so I could take off four days from the radio station to get married and honeymoon in romantic St. Louis. In November.

The Hanson farmhouse on a hill outside Rolla was a pretty busy that day with my parents, Nancy’s sisters, and members of the small wedding party spending Thanksgiving Day before that evening’s event. That evening we all went to the chapel at the Rolla Presbyterian Church for a modest wedding presided over by the minister there and the minister from our student group at the First Christian Church in Columbia. Nancy wore a white wool suit, which was mentioned in the newspaper write-ups in Rolla and back home (for me) in Sullivan Illinois. I wore a three-piece Montgomery Ward blue suit which got no mention whatever in the newspapers. I think we still have those outfits somewhere but they have shrunk a lot in these five decades.

My mother, who enjoyed wearing formals at Eastern Star ceremonies, was disappointed that we were (as she put it) more interested in getting married than in having a wedding.

I don’t know that we thought much about the future although I did calculate how old we’d be when we had been married fifty years. Nancy and I have ridden the crest of time’s wave and here we are, exactly as old as I calculated we’d be back in 1967. We’ve had our adventures along the way—buying our first house, deciding we had to get out of the old pile because the winter heating bills were bigger than the mortgage and the water and electrical problems were far beyond our income level to fix, producing a couple of children who have grown up to be smart and handsome adults with families of their own, rafting the Colorado River into the Grand Canyon and hiking out from the bottom to the top of a hot July 5^th, finding and mapping ancient pueblos and cliff dwellings in the Four Corners region,

hiking around at Machu Picchu (it’s in the Andes Mountains behind her in the picture), getting face to face with one of the giant tortoises on a Galapagos Island, walking on a glacier at Skagway, following Lewis and Clark’s trail to the Pacific and the Oregon Trail back home, dealing with a ruptured appendix and a broken ankle. And we can hardly wait until next Spring when we head to Africa.

Here’s another example of how special our lives together are. We often have driven across Kansas, and do it at least a couple of times a year now that our son lives with his family in Longmont, Colorado, a half-hour north of Denver. Neither of us minds driving across Kansas. We swap off every couple of hours which keeps things from being monotonous. But we’ve decided there must be a mutual genetic disposition toward Kansas. One side of Nancy’s family has farmed near Larned for more than a hundred years—there are even buffalo wallow in the pastures. Both sides of my family were from northern Kansas, near Beloit and both of our families were living out there before the Indians were gone.

When navigation systems became options for automobiles, I told dealers I didn’t need one because I had one sitting in the passenger seat with a map in her lap. We have navigation systems in our cars now. But Nancy still has a map. Even on I-70 going across Kansas when getting lost is not an option. She’s kept me on course in more ways than one and not always on trips.

Seven or eight years ago Nancy heard a city concert band was being formed for people who used to enjoy being in a band in high school or college. So I’m still carrying her trombone and she is having a good time playing in a band again. And it’s a good band.

No, it has not just sped by. It’s been fifty years. This is our 18,264^th day since we put gold rings on each other’s third fingers, left hands (counting leap days). When we think of all the times we’ve lived through, all the things we’ve done, all the places we’ve been, the children we’ve seen become great grownups, we know that fifty years has been, well, fifty years—a not insignificant length of time.

We don’t mind being as old as we are—although it does give us pause to realize our daughter and our son are plunging toward middle age, which signifies that we must be old, whatever that means.

There have been a lot of those 18,000-some nights when one of my last thoughts has been a little prayer of thanks that we are ending the day beside each other, as we have been beside each other for these fifty years.

Some of you who check in on these entries know how blessed I have been. A girl named Nancy who spent the first 13 years of her life on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and thinks cold weather is pretty good and Missouri Augusts are insufferable has stayed married to an Illinois boy who loved baling hay on the hottest days of summer and despises winter (although not so much since retirement means staying out of it a lot of the time) for half a century.

Before our household went from two to four, we had season tickets for a few years to the American Theatre in St. Louis, a place now gone but a place where we saw the touring companies of Broadway plays. One of our favorites was, and is, I Do! I Do! The musical was based on Jan deHartog’s play, The Fourposter. Tom Jones wrote the book and lyrics and Harvey Schmidt wrote the music. We sat in the fifth row to watch the original cast members—Mary Martin and Robert Preston—portray a fifty-year marriage.

Broadway musicals had hit songs that made the popular music charts in those days. Ed Ames hit the Billboard charts with the song Robert Preston sang:

Sometimes in the morning when shadows are deep
I lie here beside you just watching you sleep
And sometimes I whisper what I’m thinking of
My cup runneth over with love

Sometimes in the evening when you do not see
I study the small things you do constantly
I memorize moments that I’m fondest of
My cup runneth over with love

In only a moment we both will be old
We won’t even notice the world turning cold
And so, in these moments with sunlight above
My cup runneth over with love
My cup runneth over with love
With love

Toward the end of the play the characters, Michael and Agnes, look back on their marriage and then look ahead in a tune called “Roll Up the Ribbons.”

Michael-Roll up the ribbons, fold up the papers
Stow all these things away!
This day is done, and another is on its way.
Agnes-Pack up the present; look to the future.
One thing I know is true.
The best day of all is the day that is on its way.
Both-Waiting for you.
The best day of all is the day that is on its way.
Agnes-Waiting for you.
Michael-Waiting for you.
Both-Waiting for you.

So here we are, two Thanksgivings half a century apart.

Forget the Thanksgiving Pilgrim stories. Nancy and I have lived our own story for fifty years now and it has been good. And I cannot tell you how thankful I am that I will wake up next to her on the day that is on its way knowing that my cup still runneth over.

Now, if I can get her attention, I’d like a little more gravy.

U. S. Grant and Jeff Davis together at the state capital. During the war

Posted on October 16, 2017 by bpriddy

U. S. Grant was in Jefferson City. So was Jefferson Davis. Davis gave Grant orders to get out of town. Grant was on a train about an hour later.

Swear to God, it’s true.

If you know a little bit about Missouri’s Civil War history, you know that U. S. Grant’s first command was as a Colonel in charge of the 21^st Illinois Infantry dispatched to rescue another Illinois unit surrounded by Confederate forces on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad near Palmyra, Missouri. His unit arrived after the attack, stopped in Palmyra for a few days before moving to guard the reconstruction of a destroyed bridge over the Salt River. A couple of weeks later, Grant was ordered to attack a Rebel unit encamped near the small town of Florida. Grant didn’t find Harris and went back to the bridge after overnighting in the small town.

Grant was named commander of a sub-district and ordered to headquarters in Mexico. It was there, several weeks later that he learned—by reading it in a newspaper—that he had been promoted to Brigadier General and had been ordered to take command of the southeast Missouri district. Upon arrival in Ironton, he met Colonel B. Gratz Brown whose troops’ ninety-day enlistments were running out or had run out. “Brown himself was gladder to see me on that occasion than he ever has been since,” wrote Grant later, undoubtedly reflecting on Brown’s post-war rise to the governorship and his vice-presidential candidacy against Grant’s effort to win a second term as President.

Within ten days, however, he was ordered to St. Louis where he was told to take command of the northwest district, including Union forces occupying Jefferson City. He succeeded Colonel James Mulligan and found the troops “in the greatest confusion, and no one person knew where they all were.” Plus, the town “was filled with Union fugitives who had been driven by guerilla bands to take refuge with the National troops.” He was ordered to organize an expedition to remove money from banks in Boonville, Chillicothe, and Lexington before rebels could get it.

But about a week after his arrival, he looked through his office door and saw Jefferson Davis striding toward him. Davis handed him an order relieving him from command in Jefferson City and ordering him to St. Louis without delay. There undoubtedly were some people in the presumably southern-leaning town of 3,100 who enjoyed the irony of Jeff Davis replacing the commander of the occupying federal force.

Colonel Jefferson C. Davis was an Indiana native. He inherited a force of about 12,000 soldiers in northeast Missouri. By late September he had as many as 20,000 troops under his command, a buildup in response to reports General Sterling Price had about 16,000 men south of the Osage River and was thinking about attacks on Jefferson City, Boonville, or Lexington. One of the first things Davis did was organize his troops in and near the town to build fortifications. While they proved unnecessary in 1861, their strengthened presence was important three years later when Price did move on Jefferson City.

Davis developed a plan to move against Price’s forces and state commander John Fremont approved them. But Fremont never provided boats or teams necessary to launch the offensive. He was frustrated when Price took Lexington and Mulligan’s 3,500-man force shortly afterwards because he thought the results would have been different if Fremont had given him the means to attack Price first.

About then Fremont ordered a reorganization of the southwest department and ordered Davis to the Springfield area where the next March, the Union Army moved south and defeated the South at the Battle of Pea Ridge, ending Confederate hopes of holding Missouri.

By then U. S. Grant had moved to Cape Girardeau and had started building the reputation that put him in charge of operations at Vicksburg in 1863, eventually to his command of the Army in the East, the surrender of Lee and the end of the war in that theatre, and, ultimately, the Presidency. The war limped on for several more weeks in the West and, some say, is still being waged socially today. The other Jefferson Davis did not dissolve the Confederate government until almost a month after Appomattox.

Now-General Jefferson C. Davis operated in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee after leaving Missouri. While in Kentucky, he shot and killed another general in a dispute. No charges were filed. He became part of Sherman’s March to the Sea. After the war, He became the first commander of the Department of Alaska after our purchase of it from the Russians in 1867. He established a fort at Sitka and ordered all Russian residents to leave their homes so Americans could move in. He commanded forces in Oregon and California where his campaign against the Modocs forced their surrender.

Davis was back in Missouri where he helped keep the 1877 Railroad Strike in St. Louis from turning violent. He died two years later in Chicago, a year before Grant lost a bid for the nomination for a third term as President.

Grant died in 1885, the year his family’s financial future was secured by the publication of his memoirs by Charles L. Webster & Company, an arrangement brokered for Grant by former (briefly) Confederate soldier Samuel Clemens, who had been born in the small town of Florida that had been, for one day, the headquarters of Grant’s first command.

Oh, how Tom Benton would love to wade into this!

Posted on October 6, 2017 by bpriddy

Indiana University has decided that its students should no longer be forced to attend classes in a room that contains part of a large mural painted by Missouri’s Thomas Hart Benton in 1933, three years before he painted the mural at the Missouri Capitol.

An online petition had demanded removal from a classroom of the offensive section of the mural, which shows, amidst a lot of other things, a Ku Klux Klan rally with a burning cross. The university won’t remove it. But the chancellor has decided the university won’t “force” students to see it—and, of course, ponder what it’s about.

The mural was created for the Indiana building at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, billed as “The Century of Progress.” The entire mural is 230 feet long and fourteen feet high. It’s so big, much bigger than our capitol mural, that it is housed in three buildings on the campus at Bloomington, Indiana.

IU’s Provost, Lauren Robel, says in part of a 1,902 word statement, “While I believe that we can and should educate the public and our community about the murals, that intellectual work can and should take place in a context that does not involve the captive audience of classes devoted to other subjects.” So, starting with the next semester, Room 100 in Woodburn Hall will be put to “other uses.”

The Indiana mural generated a certain amount of controversy from the start. Lawrence County (Indiana) Historical Society President Zora Askew said the mural “should offend the sensibilities of every Hoosier who has resect for the hardy pioneers from the East, West, North, and South that came to form the melting pot now known as Indiana.” State conservation director Richard Lieber, who supervised the mural’s creation, claimed the Klan had no significance in the state. Benton wrote in his first autobiography, An Artist in America, that he arranged a happy hour with some legislators and invited Lieber, rigging the meeting so someone would ask if he thought the Klan was important to Indiana history. Benton responded that he was doubtful but appealed to the legislators. “They being newly-elected Democratic politicians, while the Klan business occurred under Republican auspices, promptly informed me that it was of immense importance and had nearly ruined the state,” Benton wrote. “When they got through airing the importance of the Klan, I shouldn’t have dared to leave the organization out of the factual history of Indiana.”

This writer would like to see Ms. Robel discuss the shutdown of the room as a classroom with Mr. Benton who has, fortunately for her perhaps, been dead since 1975. But when he finished his Missouri mural in December, 1936, he faced severe criticism from people who didn’t like some of the things in it–a baby’s naked bottom, a depiction of bank and train robber Jesse James, an illustration of the violence of Missouri’s guerilla warfare (including a lynching) during the Civil War, the portrayal of a slave sale, and particularly a depiction of Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast.

His critics felt the unsanitary parts of history had no business being on display in our state capitol that is otherwise decorated with depictions of Missouri’s more noble or victorious moments.

He didn’t give an inch to them.

The House Lounge for many years was a place where captive audiences often met. The House Appropriations Committee, particularly, used to hold its hearings there. State department representatives were forced to sit in a room surrounded by images that might make them “uncomfortable” and justify their budget requests, a process we guarantee you was much more uncomfortable than the images on the walls. The use of the room for hearings was abandoned in 1980 not because anybody was traumatized or might have been traumatized in some way, but because smoking was banned in the room because of the damage and potential damage to the mural.

Discomfort is a big reason for the decision, however, at Indiana University. The university apparently doesn’t want any of its students in these post-Charlottesville days to be discomfited by a mural showing a part of Indiana’s history.

Indiana University historian James Capshaw is discomfited by those who try to link the panel to Charlottesville. He told the Star, “It’s not like a Confederate monument that was erected in the 19-teens or ‘20s that was specifically to enforce Jim Crow practices and basically put blacks in their place again…It’s very different from what’s going on in Charlottesville and other places.”

Roble seems to sympathize somewhat with Capshaw’s view that the mural should be discussed in the proper context but she says teachers don’t like time to be taken away from their courses to explain the significance of the mural segment. Furthermore, she maintains, such sessions haven’t worked.

The Indianapolis Star has reported a petition campaign was started by a 32-year old former IU student now living in Florida who said the school “has a responsibility to do something to address student and faculty discomfort,” although the newspaper reports she didn’t recall hearing much about the mural when she was a student in Bloomington. But now she has referred to the mural segment as “a symbol of hate” and worried that “something as simple as a picture can sometimes, to some people, be justification for those kind of acts.” She wanted to have the panel taken down. In fact, she suggested the entire mural be removed from the campus and put in a museum “for educational purposes,” a place where it could become “a learning opportunity” instead of just “sitting in a classroom” (where, we note, educational purposes are practiced and learning opportunities are a constant).

A petition reflecting her concerns was circulated on campus in August. It got more than one-thousand signatures.

—on a campus that had more than 43,000 students for the start of the 2016-17 school year, with record numbers of minorities.

We haven’t seen the 2017-18 final fall enrollment figures. We also haven’t seen any breakouts of those thousand-or-so students showing how many of them have or have had classes in that room and how many of those who did were so distracted by Benton’s reference to the era when the Klan was a powerful political force in Indiana—as it was a force in 1920s Missouri—that it disrupted their school work.

Apparently the school’s VP for Diversity, Equity and Multicultural Affairs carried no weight in the discussion. James Wimbush, reports the newspaper, said the panel does not violate the university’s diversity statement: “It does not glorify or celebrate this particular dark episode of the KKK in Indiana, but instead shows that the state’s past has shameful moments the likes of which we do not want to see again, ever.”

And Benton, who believed history had to be taken “warts and all,” would probably appreciate his comment that, “It’s important to understand the state’s history—the good and the bad.” Wimbush said the mural segment offered a teachable moment.

But instead of using it to teach, the university is going to shield its students from the opportunity to learn a lesson available for eighty years from Benton’s painting.

Roble, by the way, ruled out covering the panel with cloth because would amount to censorship. Apparently making sure students are not exposed to it during their classes is not.

We do not intend to try to get inside Benton’s head and divine today what he would argue specifically with Roble’s decision. He did, after all, defend the rights of institutions to do with their public art what they wished. He went in 1954 to Lincoln University in Jefferson City for a meeting of the National Conference of Teachers of Art in Negro Colleges where he was asked, “Does the public have the right to criticize the symbols of a mural or maybe erase it off the wall?” He responded:

It boils down to whether the public has the right to destroy the work of an artist…It was never, in ancient times or medieval times, believed that an institution which didn’t like a picture didn’t also have the right to get it out of the way…The question of the property value in works of art is a difficult one to decide even today. Current educated sentiment seems to be with the artist—that is, if the artist puts his soul into a thing, it is believed the average buyer hasn’t the right to destroy it…Certainly, if the majority of the people in a community object to a mural, I really don’t see what the artist can legally do to keep them from boarding it up, or tearing it down, or doing whatever they want with it…Has the community the right to get rid of something it doesn’t like? Well, generally, even in the most liberal society, I’d say the answer would be “Yes.”

Benton’s 1954 response would seem to support Roble’s 2017 decision. But, based on his defenses of his Missouri mural, he might question whether the rationale behind letting a few petition-signers representing only a small, small part of the student body make the entire university overly sensitive when public dialogue is so badly needed in the face of events in Charlottesville and elsewhere.

“The purpose of a work of art is not so much to tell what the artist’s thoughts were as to stimulate thoughts in those who view it,” Benton wrote in 1940. “A cartoon tells a specific story and lasts a day—a work of art tells as many stories as there are people to see it. It lasts by that power to continually stimulate…”

We are left to wonder how putting Benton’s painting out of sight and out of mind for young people whose lives going forward desperately need the stimulation of history, “warts and all,” serves education’s oft-stated goal of creating a thinking, responsible society.

(The writer of this entry is the author of Only the Rivers are Peaceful: Thomas Hart Benton’s Missouri Mural, published in 1989. The photograph of the classroom is from the Indiana Daily Student newspaper. Benton is from Angiesdiay.com.)

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We do not intend with this entry to diminish the extensive thought process behind Provost Robel’s decision, but only to question the decision—as Benton questioned the inclinations of those who sought to keep the public from thinking about the issues raised in his Missouri Capitol mural. In fairness to her, we offer from the September 29, 2017 edition of The Indianapolis Star her entire memo:

Dear IU Bloomington Community,

I write to discuss the Benton Murals. In 1933, Thomas Hart Benton was commissioned by the State of Indiana to create the Indiana Murals for the Chicago World’s Fair. This work, which has become Benton’s most enduring artistic accomplishment, contains a self-portrait embedded in the panel entitled “Indiana Puts Her Trust in Thought.” Some eight decades after their creation, the murals serve as a vivid reminder of the strength and resiliency of a community that puts its trust in thoughtful reflection and dialogue about its past, present, and future.

I apologize in advance for the length of this communication, but the subject is complicated, the history is long, and the factors to be balanced are many. I therefore put my trust, as always, in your willingness to think carefully with me, and look forward to the discussion and ideas I am sure this letter will spark.

Herman B Wells brought the Benton Murals to the Bloomington campus several years after the World’s Fair. At the time, the IU Auditorium and several other buildings around the Fine Arts Plaza were under construction, and Wells saw the murals as ideal centerpieces for a burgeoning campus arts district. As a result, Indiana University is now steward to this astonishing and celebrated work of art, a 22-panel mural sequence displayed in three separate venues on the campus. Two of those spaces, the IU Auditorium and the IU Cinema, are performance and artistic venues. One, Woodburn Hall 100, is currently used as a large classroom.

The classroom contains a panel of the murals that has repeatedly sparked controversy, as it includes a depiction of a Ku Klux Klan rally and a burning cross. The imagery in that panel, entitled “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press,” has been controversial since its creation. Benton’s intent was to show the role that the press had played in battling the Klan through exposing the Klan’s corruption of and infiltration into all levels of Indiana government in the 1920s. At the time of the mural’s creation, many opposed Benton’s decision to include the Klan, because they did not want to portray Indiana in a negative light, and the memories of the Klan’s political influence were still raw. Benton, however, overcame this opposition, and maintained artistic control. He believed that his murals needed to show all aspects of the state’s history, even the ugly and discomfiting parts, so we could confront the mistakes of the past.

Understood in the light of all its imagery and its intent, Benton’s mural is unquestionably an anti-Klan work. Unlike statues at the heart of current controversies, Benton’s depiction was intended to expose the Klan’s history in Indiana as hateful and corrupt; it does not honor or even memorialize individuals or the organization as a whole. Everything about its imagery—the depiction of the Klan between firefighters and a circus; the racially integrated hospital ward depicted in the foreground suggesting a different future ahead—speaks to Benton’s views. Every society that has gone through divisive trauma of any kind has learned the bitter lesson of suppressing memories and discussion of its past; Benton’s murals are intended to provoke thought.

Throughout history, art has served many purposes, often to lift up and honor a subject but also at times to call attention to something that is deserving of our condemnation. It is a mistake, therefore, to assume that a depiction of an historical event is the same as honoring it. Picasso, for example, depicted the horrible bombing and destruction of the village of Guernica in one of his most famous and admired paintings. It shows the consequences of the fascist bombings of a Basque village not to glorify that tragedy but to condemn it. That painting now serves as a powerful anti-war and anti-fascist work of art. It does so by depicting and calling our attention not to what we are honoring but to what we are condemning. I believe the same can be said for the Benton murals.

Nevertheless, the imagery in this panel of the murals is vivid, startling, and disturbing; and to reach the conclusion I just stated about the meaning of the mural requires work and time studying the mural and its interrelated images. Like most great art, Benton’s murals require context and history. Many well-meaning people, without having the opportunity to do that work, wrongly condemn the mural as racist simply because it depicts a racist organization and a hateful symbol.

However, even with the proper information and education, many students still feel strongly that a Klan rally and burning cross looming over their classes seriously impedes their learning. For some of our students, the burning cross is a symbol of terror that has haunted their families for generations. For others, the robed Klansman has figured in personal family or community tragedies and anguish. These reactions are absolutely reasonable on their face, and as Charlottesville shows, they are not ancient history. They have to be reckoned with, but it is far from clear that the reckoning should be an inevitable part of a class in finite mathematics, macroeconomics, organic chemistry, or gross anatomy and physiology—all classes taught regularly in this space—particularly since the burden of that reckoning inevitably falls more heavily on students whose race or religion have made their families the historical targets of the Klan.

Every few years, since at least the 1980s, the campus has grappled with the presence of the Benton Murals in Woodburn. We are entrusted with the preservation of this important work of art, yet we must also do everything possible to promote a civil and inclusive campus that provides equal opportunity for all to learn. What to do?

This question becomes especially urgent whenever events such as the march of white supremacist groups in Charlottesville and the current national debate over Confederate monuments occur. These broader conversations become deeply local, and we must come to a decision as a community on how to handle public art and memory as it pertains to the Benton Murals on our campus. On at least eight occasions since the 1980s, diverse committees of faculty, students, and staff have considered the issues raised by the controversial panel. Our campus has held town halls, symposia, and conferences to discuss the panel and its impact, including just this week a faculty-led discussion organized by PACE on “Art, Public Memory & Racial Justice.” Such efforts have consistently led to the conclusion that we need to do what Indiana University does best: educate. We have called on our community to educate through discussions of history, art history, African American and African Diaspora Studies, American Studies, and every discipline that touches on how a controversial and anti-racist piece of art should be contextualized and understood.

I agree that the proper response to the Benton Murals is education, and I have been the beneficiary of a review of the work of all of these previous efforts. However, most committees have concluded that this education needs to be done in every class taught in Woodburn 100. As a result, well-intentioned efforts to require ameliorating discussion of the murals there have foundered, and ultimately been abandoned, multiple times. Instructors without appropriate academic backgrounds feel unprepared for the discussion that should surround such a sensitive set of issues, and unhappy to be taking class time for discussions that have nothing to do with the subject of the class and everything to do with the room it is in. Students are captive audiences in Woodburn 100, and those with repeated classes there resent the repeated discussions related to the classroom art, as opposed to the subject-matter of their classes.

The murals cannot be moved. Benton painted them using egg tempera paint, which has become extremely fragile over time. Moreover, the space in Woodburn 100 was designed specifically to house the two panels that now hang there, and they were installed in such a way that moving them would almost certainly cause irreparable damage. Nor does the notion of covering them with a curtain accord with our responsibility as stewards of this precious art. Covering the murals feels like censorship and runs counter to the expressed intent of the artist to make visible moments in history that some would rather forget. Furthermore, covering the murals during class periods would leave them hidden for the vast majority of time and create a situation in which the decision to uncover them could be used by some as a symbolic act in support of the very ideology the murals are intended to criticize.

However, there is nothing sacrosanct about using Woodburn 100 as a classroom. While I believe that we can and should educate the public and our community about the murals, that intellectual work can and should take place in a context that does not involve the captive audience of classes devoted to other subjects. Therefore, Woodburn 100 will convert to other uses beginning in the spring semester 2018.

We have determined that we can accommodate almost all (and perhaps all) the classes typically taught there as early as this spring in other locations without a loss of classroom capacity, and we will certainly be able to accommodate them all elsewhere by summer. Like the other two venues in which the murals are displayed, Woodburn 100 can usefully serve other purposes, such as a gallery space and public lecture space, that are more conducive to teaching about the mural. Indeed, many departments and faculty members have expressed a need for more such spaces on campus, and Woodburn 100 offers a ready-made solution. Its adjacency to the arts corridor makes it particularly conducive to these purposes and will also allow us to install interactive media that can educate those who come for the gallery space or for other events. We could also put this art in conversation with other pieces of art the campus owns or could borrow, which would allow us to much better use the murals’ potential for education and engagement than the current configuration allows. I believe that repurposing the room is the best accommodation of the multiple factors that the murals raise: our obligation to be a welcoming community to all of our students and facilitate their learning; our stewardship of this priceless art; and our obligation to stand firm in defense of artistic expression. I invite community members to think creatively about how best to use this repurposed space to engage with the issues the murals present.

The Benton Murals are a national treasure. They depict the social progression of Indiana history—including, explicitly, the promise and hope of racial integration and a free press arising out of the fight against the political influence of the Klan—through the visceral and powerful vision of one of the most significant artists of the period. Indiana University is the steward of this incredible public art, we are bound to protect it and educate the world about it, and we will do so in ways that are pedagogically appropriate. Our primary mission is to teach students to think critically and deeply about the world, and great art is an important route to that end. We will continue to strive for this ideal, and challenge each other to think intensively and critically about art, history, diversity, and inclusion, and what it means to be a citizen of this university, state, and the world. Benton’s work deserves no less.”

— Lauren Robel, executive vice president and provost

Bob Priddy

A journalist's random observations

Category Archives: events

Missouri, the Seuss State, and the importance of “no”

Going where the story takes you

Removal

Who is next?

We’ll get around to it eventually. Maybe.

Carol

Notes from the road–November

Why I’m thankful today

U. S. Grant and Jeff Davis together at the state capital. During the war

Oh, how Tom Benton would love to wade into this!

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