Category Archives: history

The Sacred Burial Site, and Other Musings 

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I knew a man named Ed Bliss who wrote the news for Ed Murrow and Walter Cronkite.  They wrote their commentaries; he oversaw the writing of their newscasts.  We often had Ed conduct newswriting seminars at our national broadcast journalism convention.  One day I asked him,  “When is a person no longer ‘late,’ but is only ‘dead?’’  Ed didn’t know.

When will we no longer refer to “the late” Queen Elizabeth II?  Why don’t we refer to “the late Harry Truman?”

King Tut is dead, not “late.”

A related issue showed up a few days ago in a news story that salvagers plan to start plucking unattached objects from Titanic despite an international agreement that considers the wreckage “a sacred burial site.”

What is a “sacred burial site” and does it become less sacred after a certain number of years?

RMS Titanic Inc., based in Georgia, has the salvage rights to Titanic. It plans an expedition next May to shoot a new film of the deteriorating ship and recover any unattached artifacts despite an agreement among Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and France that the wreckage is considered a sacred burial site off-limits to looters and salvors. There is a United States law supporting that position.

RMST, on the other hand, reached an agreement in 1994 with the owners of Titanic (Liverpool and London Steamship Protection and Indemnity Association to be considered the exclusive salvor-in-possession of Titanic. It has retrieved many items from the sinking and has put them on display in museums such as the one in Branson and in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.  The place is worth seeing.

Video: (12) Titanic Museum VIP Guided Tour in Branson, Missouri – YouTube

The museums are owned by John Joslyn, who led a 1987 expedition down to the Titanic.  The museums hold artifacts recovered after the sinking but not from the wreck of the ship proper.

Other artifacts are housed in other museums in this country, Canada, and the UK.

(Your correspondent has some of the anthracite coal recovered by RMST from the debris field)

RMST says it does not plan to alter the wreckage.  But deterioration of the hull has opened new ways to get remotely operated vehicles inside. Court documents say the company also would “recover free-standing objects inside the wreck.”  The Associated Press reports that includes items in the Marconi (radio) room that aren’t bolted down.

The telegraph that sent out the distress calls that fateful night is a specific target.  RMST wants to pull it out.  A judge has rejected a federal government challenge to that plan saying the historical and cultural significance of that device should not be lost to decay.

There are fears that the creatures and the elements will leave the wreckage nothing more than a huge pile of rust within another twenty years.

Very large.  A couple of months ago the BBC reported on the completion of the most detailed view of the wreck, shaped from more than 700,000 digital photos that create a 3D rendition.  The network superimposed the image(s) on the stadium used for the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.

Titanic: First ever full-sized scans reveal wreck as never seen before – BBC News

or: Titanic: Scan reveals world’s most famous wreck – BBC Newsround

The concept of the Titanic site as being a sacred gravesite brings us back to the “late/dead” discussion.

We have heard of only one human remain found at the wreck site in the many dives to the site, a finger bone with part of a wedding ring attached that was concreted to the bottom of a soup tureen.  It was retrieved but was returned to the sea floor on a later dive. It is generally concluded that the passengers’ and crews’ bodies have long ago been consumed by various deep sea organisms.

Some have pointed to shoes on the ocean floor as being remnants of the people who wore them.  But that contention is questionable.

Some argue that the Titanic is a graveyard—-an argument heard at the Arizona memorial at Pearl Harbor and for other lost (and many later found) ships.

But if the bodies have long since disappeared, is it valid to consider such sites as sacred graveyards?

And how long must a body be dead before it can be removed from its burial site, perhaps to be studied by various kinds of scientists?

The mummies of Egypt, mummies found high in the Andes mountains, bodies preserved in peat bogs in northern Europe, skeletons excavated at Williamsburg, Virginia—all of these people clearly are not “late” and society does not demand that they stay buried.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990, however, requires that Native American remains that are unearthed or located be transferred to their lineal descendants, for reburial—-the sacred ground philosophy.

And that raises a secondary question.  Is it sacred ground only because it is OUR ancestors, OUR people?

And why shouldn’t the Titanic be explored and artifacts be brought to the surface?  Are we dishonoring the dead by displaying the clothes they were wearing when they died—long after any physical trace of the person who wore those clothes has disappeared?  Or are we instead honoring their memories?

An autoworker in Wichita, Kansas—Joe Combs—was looking for answers when he saw pictures from the titanic debris field of shoes:

Titanic Shoes: Myth & Reality | joeccombs2nd

I think your thoughtful correspondent comes down on Joe’s side—that we honor the victims of the great tragedy—-and those who died less tragically hundreds or thousands of years ago by seeing something tangible about them and in doing that we recognize they were people rather than one of x-number of casualties of a tragedy or citizens of lost civilizations.

This concept is brought home strongly at the Titanic museums when entering visitors are given a card with the name of one of the ship’s passengers on it.  At the end of the trip through the museum, the patron can learn if “they” survived or died in the sinking. It’s a good way to humanize the experience.

As for referring to someone as “the late,” maybe we have the answer.  It comes from Robert Hickey, the director of the Protocol School of Washington. In his 550-page book, Honor & Respect: the Official Guide to Names, Titles, and Forms of Address, he writes:

Use ‘the late’ before a name of someone who is deceased – often recently – when one wants to be respectful. For example, on a wedding program:

—-John Smith, the bride’s uncle, will give away the bride in place of her father the late Thomas Smith.

—-The groom is the son of Mrs. James K. Gifford and the late Stephen R. Gifford

Some style guides say a person can only be ‘the late’ if they have been dead less than a decade. 

That sounds like a reasonable guideline.  Even at that, ten years is a long time to be late.

 

JUST DESSERTS

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When I’m in Indianapolis, I stay with my friends, Rick and Karen, who have a condo downtown, a few blocks from Monument Circle.  They know all of the fine downtown restaurants—I think, in fact, that Rick has a couple of places that have tables for him whenever he goes in—and, worse, they know all of the dessert places.

The most recent visit involved three excellent dinners and three visits to dessert places none of us had any business going into.  The last night we went to something called The Sugar Factory.

I should have turned and run as fast as I could the other way.

Of all the items on the menu, I thought the Strawberry Cheesecake Milk Shake sounded the most tasty and probably the simplest of the desserts.  Boy, was I ever wrong.

There was the milk shake in a sugar-topped glass and a straw.  But the straw was there mainly to hold the other elements together. Whipped cream and candy strawberries topped the shake itself, topped by the cheesecake and more whipped cream, a real strawberry, and then a strawberry/chocolate cupcake topped by more whipped cream.

God help me!  I ate and drank it all.  The cupcake was nothing to write a blog about but the cheesecake was pretty good and the strawberry milkshake was just the right thickness and flavor.

The eight-block walk back to the condo was done at a fairly leisurely pace.

I had planned to spend a fourth night, after the race, but I decided to stick around only long enough to take the pictures I wanted and then head home early, listening to the rest of the race on the radio (it is, after all, about a 400-mile drive).  I told Rick I was leaving early because I didn’t think I could survive another dessert.

If my doctors were to look closely at my blood samples, I am sure they would find I don’t have white blood cells.  I have vanilla blood cells.

Once a week Nancy and I get together with a couple friends for game night—dominoes, Rummikub, Five Crown, Swoop, stuff like that.  Halfway through the evening, or when we change games, is dessert time.  No matter what the basic treat is—brownies, cobblers, cake, whatever—ice cream is the vital ingredient.  Always too much ice cream.

On our refrigerator, amidst the numerous pictures of grandchildren, cartoons, the next shopping list and assorted refrigerator magnets, is an advertisement I found in a 1916 Jefferson City newspaper. I look at it the way some people consider their bumper stickers, “He said it. I believe it. So it’s true.”

In 1916 the ad assured buyers that Weber’s ice cream was safe to eat, produced in sanitary surroundings, and was not the impure foods of the time found in grocery stores, themeat sometimes hanging openly in the windows.   Eat our ice cream and you’ll be alive tomorrow to eat more.  That kind of message.

But in today’s FDA-regulated food environment, I am comfortable reading it another way—that ice cream is an essential food group.

I think it is a genetic flaw.

While doing some family research a few years ago, looking for references to my great-grandfather, a Union (with Sherman) Civil War veteran, I uncovered a family secret

A longer article in the Decatur (Ill.) Evening Bulletin from July 6,1896 telling me that Robert Thomas Priddy and his partner, A. A. Cooper, both experienced dairymen, had bought “the milk depot and ice cream business “in the basement of Fay’s meat market on the west side of Lincoln Square.”

A year later:

I inherited my addiction to ice cream from an ancestor who was with Sherman at Vicksburg and later helped capture Little Rock.

He died in 1925.

In the old family photographs, he’s thin. It’s clear he didn’t dip into the inventory as often as he could have.

I wonder what he would have thought of that Strawberry Cheesecake Milkshake at The Sugar Factory.

 

 

 

NOTES FROM A QUIET, HOT, HUMID STREET

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This series of observations began a long, long, time ago as “Notes from a Battered Royal,” which were notes sent out to Missourinet affiliate stations about what we were planning and what they had done to help us.

With the coming of the computer, then the internet, and then the requirement that the Missourinet have a blog, it became “Notes From the Front Lines.”  But the author is no longer on the front lines. He lives on a quiet street.  And its getting quieter.  The folks who used to live in the house across the street now are in an assisted care place in Columbia.  One of the houses next to us hasn’t been occupied for more than a  year because the man living there also is in assisted living. Three nuns who lived in a house just across the street and up one driveway have moved out.

It’s been a while since we made some observations that don’t qualify for fully blogness.  Let us proceed.

Saw a letter to the editor in the local paper the other day that said Missouri’s state motto, Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto means “The will of the people is the Supreme Law.”  That’s wrong. And it’s dangerous.  Maybe we’ll go into in more depth later but for now, the correct interpretation is, “The welfare of the people is the Supreme Law.”  For now, just think of how different our freedoms would be if the word “will” actually was the philosophy of our government.  The quote, by the way, is from Marcus Tullius Cicero, who we know by his last name, the author of “On the Law.”

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Is there a more pitiful figure in American politics today than Rudi Giuliani?  Of all the people whose lives and reputations have been destroyed by their association with and defense of Mr. Trump, the wreckage that is Rudi is the most pitiful.

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I have a friend who lives in Tucson, Arizona who comes north for a couple of months every summer to find cooler weather (even 10-15 degrees cooler is significant).  I call her a Sunbird.

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There are certain words that have become so politicized that all of the honor has been crushed out of them.  I recall when words such as “liberal” and “conservative” were not said with a sneer and were not spoken as if they were scarlet letters.

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The latest word that falls into this category is “evangelicals.”  The people I heard described as such while I was growing up—-and the people who had the word on their churches—were perceived as fervent believers in God and Jesus, more fervent than us Disciples, Methodists, Presbyterians and my grandmother’s Baptists.  But then came those who discovered evangelical techniques could be applied to achieving political power, making it a third word that is being abused in “the politics of personal destruction.”

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We were talking recently with some friends about the totally trivial things we remember for decades.  I remarked that I still remembered the Army service number of a high school friend who joined the service shortly after we graduated—RA18541439.

Now there’s a new number that I’d like to remember sixty years later—P01135809.  It has a certain rhythm to it, too.

And to think this person was once known only as 45.

We’ve seen the official portrait of PO-1135809.  We are sure that Fulton County, Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis is soooooooo intimidated.

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This is about the most enthusiastic your correspondent has been for the start of the football season in decades. Maybe it’s because this year, it will bring relief from the near-daily disappointments of baseball.

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Can’t help it.  Everytime I see a major sports team or league sign a deal with a sports-betting company, I start thinking its time to cast Cooperstown plaques for Shoeless Jackson and Pete Rose.

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The Capitol regains its heartbeat for a couple of days soon. The lawmakers will decide whether to override some of Governor Parson’s vetoes.  There’s a lot of money available to pay for the things he differs with the legislature about.

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But having a lot of money now means there’s a cushion for the bad days.

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Or we can forget about the bad days and just blow it all now.

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Or we can enact tax cuts so our tax base is even less able to deal with the eventual downturn.

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Anybody else have deer in the yard that just watch you come home and go in the house without ever getting up?  I think that in our case, they’re just resting while they digest  their latest serving of Hostas from Nancy’s garden a/k/a the deer buffet.

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A longtime friend of mine died a few days ago.  He didn’t want a memorial service.  He was a retired reporter who didn’t want his death reported in the newspaper.  Steve Forsythe, whose byline for United Press International read “A. Stevenson Forsythe” was a helluva reporter. Governor Teasdale blamed us, at least in part, for his failure to win a second term.

We could have thanked him for the compliment but we never did.

 

 

A Record Week; A Weak Record. And Some Speed

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by Bob Priddy, Missourinet contributing editor

(BASEBALL)—Time to play what you’ve been dealt.  Trading deadline has come and gone and so have Cardinals’ and Royals’ players.  Both teams will be playing out the string, seeing who develops, who has possibilities, or showcasing possible trade bait.  Our two teams went different directions last week but they’re really going nowhere for the season.  The Royals won seven in a row and are 7-3 in their last ten.  The Cardinals went 3-7.

(ROYALS)—-About that seven-game winning streak:  It was historic. And there’s a Cardinals angle to it.  It’s another example of how baseball is the playground for the figure filberts of the world.

(There are conflicting versions of who the original figure filbert was. One version refers to Al Munro Elias who The New York Times once said, “He ate, slept, dreamed and breathed baseball averages and odd records.”  He was the founder of the Elias Sports Bureau, often cited for its collection of arcane records.  The other person who is sometimes considered the original statistics nut is Earnest John Lanigan, a sportswriter and baseball historian who pioneered the gathering of statistics about games and players. He wrote the first encyclopedia on the issue.)

Pete Gratoff of the Wichita Eagle has written that the Royals last week became the first team in Major League history to have a winning percentage of less than .300 to win seven games in a row since the 1907 CARDINALS won nine straight, all against the same team—the Boston Doves, that later became the Boston Braves, the Milwaukee Braves and the present Atlanta Braves.  The Cardinals finished that year 55-101-2 and finished last in the eight-team American League.  The Doves fluttered to a record of 50-90-4, good for seventh.

The Royals now are 36-77, ahead of the A’s who are 32-80.

Who’s hot for the Royals?  Bobby Witt Jr., started this week hiting .336 since the start of July (he was at .244 through June). He has 20 homers and 32 steals, becoming the first player in baseball history to go 20/30 in his first two seasons in the Majors. “It’s just me playing the game,” he says.

Who’s not hot for the Royals?  Zack Greinke, who fell to 1-12 last week, He has given up 23 homeruns, 13 in the last ten starts. He has averaged five innings in his 22 starts. His most recent win was May 2.

(CARDINALS)—You see it happen in all kinds of situations—businesses, churches, sports—

Someone who has become an institution leaves the scene.  The person who comes in next is often unfairly compared to his or her predecessor. Sometimes that person tries to hard to BE that predecessor.  And they don’t stay long.

Wilson Contreras admits he was trying to hard at the start of the season.  Cardinals’ fans, many of them, were quick to judge him based on Yadiair Molina.  He hit .158 in May, .221 in June, and then he says he realized the Cardinals signed him to be himself.  And during the month of July he hit .429. Through the first few days of August he was hitting .313 and his season averages are close to his career averages.

Down on the farm, the ‘Birds’ top prospect, Mason Wynn, had to leave a game this past weekend with a minor glute strain. He’s hitting .284 at Memphis with 17 homers and 59 RBIs.  He’s 17-19 in stolen bases.

Luken Baker is lighting up opposing pitchers at Memphis. He leads the minor leagues with 37 home runs.  He hit .263 during a cup of coffee with the big team earlier this year.  The problem is that he’s a first baseman and the Cardinals are well-positioned (so to speak) there. And the Cardinals have a full arsenal of designated hitters.

(FOOTBALL)—This might be one of those years when there’s less talk about the overlapping seasons of baseball and football and more about how great it will be when the football season starts.  The Chiefs and the Tigers (and other college teams) are in workouts now. High Schools start soon.  Here’s hoping your team takes your mind off of baseball for a while.

ZOOM:

(INDYCAR)—This is turning out to be Kyle Kirkwood’s breakout year.  Kirkwood picked up his second IndyCar win of the year, the second of his career, by holding off Scott McLaughlin on the 2.1-mile street course in downtown Nashville.

He beat pole-sitter McLaughlin to the line by about eight-tenths of a second after a late-race restart with a little more than three laps left. The race had been red-flagged after a three-car crash that left no room for racing through one of the turns. Kirkwood got a good jump on the restart and pulled away to a 1.6-second lead after the first lap. But McLaughlin and series points leader Alex Palou rallied to cut the lead in half with one lap left.

McLaughlin was disappointed to finish second in the race for the second year in a row.

Kirkwood started eighth but team strategy early in the race moved him into contention and eventually put him in front for 34 of the race’s 80 laps.

Palou’s third-place finish upped his points lead over Josef Newgarden, who finished fourth, to 84 points.  Only four races with 216 possible points remain in the IndyCar season.  Next up is a return to the road course at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway next Saturday afternoon.

(NASCAR)—Chris Buescher, who broke a long winless streak at Richmond has made it two in a row, taking the rain-delayed race at Michigan International Speedway.  His wins and strong finishes by teammate and part-owner Brad Keselowski have signalled a return to prominence of the former Roush Racing, now Roush-Fenway-Keselowski racing. Keselowski finished fourth.

The closing laps turned into a fierce chase of Buscher by Martin Truex Jr., for the last ten laps. Truex closed with five laps left but couldn’t find a way around Buescher who took away Truex’s driving line down the stretch.

(Formula 1)—F1 is on break. It takes off most of August each year.

(Photo credit: Kirkwood at Indianapolis: Rick Gevers)

Was it a Lynching?

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(Before we dive into this story, we ask our readers to please go back to Monday’s entry which required a major correction of information that incorrectly stated the position of a prominent former political leader from Missouri.)

Nancy and I went to Salisbury a few days ago where I had been asked to speak to the Chariton County Historical Society.

What happened during that speech is a reminder of something James Baldwin said: “History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal.”

William Faulkner said in a similar vein, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Those are great quotations in today’s turbulent political times when it seems we have people who want us to ignore some of the lamentable events of years gone by—shadows of some of which remain present among us.

Whenever I speak to a county historical society I like to spend a day at the State Historical Society going through the newspapers that have been published in that county. We have 60-million pages of newspapers on microfilm so a huge amount of local history is within each spool of microfilm.

Folks are regularly surprised when I tell them how many newspapers have been published in their county. In Chariton County’s case, there have been 31.  I pull random reels of microfilm and spool a reel through a reader and start looking for random news accounts or advertisements that are informative and sometimes amusing but say a little something about that particular time and place.

I have wondered if any of the people in my audience are learning something about one of their ancestors—but until the visit to Chariton County I had never heard from anyone connected to one of the stories.

Sometimes, the news article I choose is difficult to hear.  Such is the case of a 1917 article in The Rothville Bee, that began, “The body of a negro, apparently dead about ten to twelve days, with limbs tied and wrapped in barb wire, was found in the Missouri River below Brunswick Sunday of last week. The body was later identified as being that of William Wilson of Brunswick…Examination disclosed a bullet wound through the heart and a scalp wound, indicating that the negro was murdered.”

The historical society had more people watching the presentation on its streaming internet feed than it had room for in the museum (which, by the way, is an outstanding county history museum, and they’re expanding). A few days after the speech I got an email from one of those viewers:

“One of the news articles you read was from the Brunswick newspaper regarding a man found in the river by the name of Bill Wilson, I think this is about my grandfather.  I would love to visit with you about the article and see if we can uncover anything additional regarding his murder.”  

I couldn’t provide him with anything more than I had because the article had been picked randomly but I did give him the names of several newspapers in the county that might have had follow-up articles and several from surrounding counties since the body had been found in the Missouri river.  And I suggested some courthouse records he might check—if they still existed 106 years after the fact.

But I cautioned him he might not find much because Chariton County, just before the Civil War, had a population that was about 25% enslaved.  And 1917 in Missouri was a time when the Klan was active. The murder of a Black man might not have elicited the kind of investigation a white man’s murder might have created.

Last week, I was back at the Center for Missouri Studies for a meeting and I built in some extra time to run down the original newspaper article.  The Rothville Bee had reprinted a story from the Brunswick Brunswicker that I discovered originally had been published in the Salisbury Press-Spectator. Each iteration had a difference of small details.  The the original story concluded with a discouraging but not unexpected comment:

“There seems to be no special interest in the matter as the negro’s reputation was bad.”

So it will, indeed, be surprising if there are any follow-up stories. Why was his reputation bad?  That might be hidden in reports generated by the sheriff or the coroner or the county prosecutor—-if they still exist and if they went into any detail, which seems remote.  Family legend might give some hints.

The State Archives, which has thousands of death certificates from 1910 onward has no death certificate for William Wilson of Chariton County in 1917.  The archives of the state penitentiary show no William Wilson who matches the timeline or the description of this man so we don’t think his “bad reputation” was so bad as to merit prison time.

The Chariton County Prosecuting Attorney at the time was Roy B. McKittrick who later was elected to the Missouri Senate and, with the backing of Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast, was elected Attorney General.  He turned on Pendergast and teamed with Governor Lloyd Stark and with U. S. Attorney Maurice Milligan to break the Pendergast organization. Pendergast eventually went to federal prison for tax evasion. They also broke up a major scandal in the state insurance department and sent Pendergast crony R. Emmett O’Malley, the state insurance superintendent, to federal prison for tax fraud. McKittrick and several other Democrats were involved in an effort to keep Republican Forrest Donnell from assuming the governorship in 1940.  He ran against Donnell in 1944 for the U.S. Senate but lost. He lost a race for governor to Forrest Smith in 1948.  He died in 1961 and the story of the investigation of the murder of William Wilson seems to have died with him.

Harriett C. Frazier, in her book, Lynchings in Missouri 1803-1981,  says there were at least 227 cases of “mob murder’ in Missouri during that time. The Equal Justice Initiative has counted sixty African-Americans who were lynched, 1877-1950  The archives at Tuskeegee Institute says 53 Whites and 69 Blacks were lynched in Missouri between 1882-1968.

William Wilson’s name is not on any of those lists.  Should he be?  The fact that he was bound in barbed wire, shot, and thrown into the river with a weight tied to him points to a hardly routine killing.

But the event has been lost to history, recorded only (as far as we know) in old small-town newspapers in one of our smallest counties, and barely reported at that, more than a century ago.  Even family memories or family stories have had time to fade in the telling and re-telling.

—and the only thing we know about William Wilson is that he died a terrible death in 1917 and, it seems, nobody cared much about finding his killer(s).

More than a century after his murder, the United States Congress finally got around to declaring lynching a federal crime.  One of these days we’ll tell you about a Missouri Congressman who didn’t live to see the law that he pushed throughout his career finally adopted.

A New County—part II, A New Book

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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

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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.

 

 

Ignorance gone to seed 

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My friend Derry Brownfield had an expression that describes somebody doing something so egregiously stupid that it causes jaws to drop in total disbelief.

A few days ago, a tourist in Rome was accused of carving into the walls of the Coliseum, something such as “Igor+Muffy2023” to show his undying affection for his girlfriend. After he was arrested, the young sculptor/love-struck fool sent a letter of apology to the local prosecutor.  He gave as his excuse, “I admit with the deepest embarrassment that only after what regrettably happened, I learned of the antiquity of the monument,”

The “thud’ you hear is the jaw of your correspondent striking the area carpet covering the hardwood floor under my chair. It has happened every time I have read the account of his apology.

He did not know that he was defacing a structure that was built about 2,000 years ago? Did he spend his entire education playing video games in class?  Did he make it through thirteen grades of school and however many years of college without ever hearing ANYTHING about ancient Rome?

This is one of those times when it is common for millions of people to think, “How could anybody be that stupid!!!!!!” (I probably did not include enough exclamation points, actually).

The Coliseum is only one of the most recognized structures in the entire world. How can somebody NOT know it and the ruins of the Roman Forum and other obviously ancient features in Rome that the city and a lot of its structures dates back to Biblical times?

It’s ROME, for God’s Sake!  The place is old. Could he not tell it’s old just by looking at it?  Did he think it was built like that just last week? 

Why did he go there to begin with?  What was he expecting to see—lots of buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright?  (This assumes he knows what a Frank Lloyd Wright is.)

What did he think went on in the Coliseum?  The Rome Lions versus the Florence Christians in the Chariot Bowl?  He seems to say in his apology, “Golly, I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t thought it was sort of new.” As if there’s nothing wrong with spray-painting anything made or built within his lifetime that sits still long enough to be attacked by a clown with a pressurized can or a chisel.

Somewhere in the last twenty or thirty years, a new culture has been created that says it’s okay to display your decorative skills by spray painting property that does not belong to you and for which you have no permission to paint—or carving your initials in something made of more solid materials twenty centuries ago.  “See how brilliant I am?  I can paint or chisel my name and other names or even paint a suggestive or profane slogan on your property.  You’re welcome. I did it to enhance public appreciation of your property (building, boxcar, subway car, billboard, town sign). And I really like your day-glow red St. Bernard now, by the way.”

Equally troubling is his apparent belief that he can just deface any building he wants to deface.  Places such as this were created, whenever, so people like him can carve away at the stone if they feel romantically or artistically inclined.

Where do these people come from?  The ones who carve their names in the rocks of world monuments and satisfy their personal artistic muses by turning somebody else‘s property into their canvas or carving piece?

Wouldn’t it be interesting to talk to their parents?   And see how proud they are of their children for their overwhelming self-expression and how they want to commemorate their immortal love for one another.  Or until their gap year ends, mom and dad’s money runs out, and they go to separate homes.

There are better ways to make your mark on the world. I wonder if such a thing will occur to those whose ignorance has gone to seed.

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Jefferson City’s first tornado

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The scars of the May 23, 2019 tornado that hit Jefferson City remain fresh—and obvious to many who remember when a house stood here, a big beautiful tree over there, when a fence conceals a vacant lot that once held a gathering place for plays, when broken windows at the state penitentiary continue to stare blankly at passersby.

When city and county officials had time to add things up, they found it had damaged 316 residential buildings, 82 commercial buildings and thirty government structures. It was classed as an EF-3, with winds of 73-112 mph (the scale assigns storms of less than 73 mph as an EF0).

Within hours of that tornado, and continuing today, there are those who speculate about what would have happened if the tornado had followed a path just a few blocks west—-and hit a hospital or the Southside and downtown business district and even the Capitol.

We had a tornado that did.  Hit the Capitol.  And a hospital.  And areas in between.

It was May 12, 1890, a Monday in the town of about 6,700 residents. “The almost stifling heat during the afternoon indicated that a storm of some kind was brewing and the heavy cloud that rolled up in the southwest about 4:30 indicated further that it was a storm of the business turn of mind, and that it had business in this immediate vicinity” reported the Jefferson City Daily Tribune the next day.  “It came with a roar and a crash that was terrible enough to fill the minds of those who witnessed it with apprehension of dire disaster.”

The Cole County Democrat reported, “The winds rose in a stiff blow, carrying the dark green looking clouds in every direction and threatening destruction to everything.”

And then the cloud split into three segments, “one division striking for the extreme western portion of the city, another traveling up Monroe Street to the river, while the third division took in the southern and eastern portion of the city taking in the penitentiary.”

The Chillicothe Constitution reported, “For half an hour the wind blew a hurricane, driving before it a storm of rain which so enveloped the town that nothing could be seen but the vivid flashes of lightning…At 4:45 o’clock the wind had risen almost to the force of a cyclone, and as it came roaring over the hills it struck the state Capitol with terrific force.

The seven-year old St. Peter Catholic Church was hammered and, “The heavy brick arch on top of the rear wall was blown over on the roof and went crashing through clear to the basement, making a complete wreck of the richly furnished altar and sacristy.”  Fortunately, said the Daily Tribune, “it is understood that a cyclone policy was carried on the church.”

The Capitol was immediately next. “Here the wind got a grip under the cornice of the roof of the old part of the building north of the dome and did not relax its hold until a great section of the roof, tin, timbers and all, had been rolled up, crushed, splintered and scattered…,” said the newspaper.  The Chillicothe paper said the debris was “rolled together like a scroll and carried over the bluff.”

The tornado struck only a few months after a new cornerstone had been laid after two new wings had been added to the Capitol.

“At the same moment, half a dozen trees in the Capitol Park were snapped in twain, and the glass in the dome came tumbling with a crash into the rotunda.”  But, “the building itself stood solid as a rock.”

The eastern division of the storm unroofed the penitentiary hospital but apparently did little damage beyond that.

But the central division, the storm “tore down several chimneys, one off he residence of Postmaster Sample, one off the resident of J. R. Edwards, the smoke stack from the Brton residence and J. T. Craven lost his tin chimney. The shade trees in Mr. R. Dallmeyer’s yard were twisted considerably.  The Democrat building lost a cellar door, it being lifted by the storm from the pavement and carried at least one hundred feet. One window of the building being completely destroyed, the venetian blind being blown clear away with only a small fragment left. The resident of Mr. W. M. Meyer on Adams Street has the bale end blown in, doing some damage to his furniture but fortunately injuring no one.”

The young ladies’ dormitory at Lincoln Institute lost its roof and the heavy rain damaged the interior plastering.

The Daily Tribune cataloged other damage:

“A porch in the rear of the building on High street occupied by Mrs. Robinson and Mr. Schleer was lifted over onto the roof and a big chimney, adding further destruction by tumbling over and making another big hole.  The west wall of the house on McCarty Street, occupied by Mr. W. W. Meyers, was blown in. The children had been playing in this room a few moments before the storm came, but were fortunately in another part of the building when the wall went in with a deafening crash. The cornice on the rear of the Music hall building was damaged. Mrs. Vogt’s residence on Washington street, was unroofed. The Standard Shoe Co.’s building, on Main Street, was dismantled of chimneys, and buildings in all parts of the city had similar experiences.

“The roof of the Neef house was badly wrenched and some of the rooms damaged by water.  At the Central hotel a smokestack on Maj. Lusk’s residence was blown through a window, carrying away the entire sash, and before the aperture could be protected a number of rooms were flooded, doing much damage to furniture and carpets. Shade and fruit trees, shrubbery and fences suffered at Mr. H.W. Ewing’s place, near the city. His stable was also minus the roof when the storm cleared away..”

No casualties were reported.

“Our people were considerably frightened, and well they may be, as no such clouds have ever before been seen in this city.  We are congratulating ourselves that it is no worse, and hope that such an occurrence will not visit us again,” said the Cole County Democrat.

While residents of Jefferson City were pondering the disaster, some people sixty miles away were showing no sympathy.  The booming and ambitious city of Sedalia, with more than 14,000 people, had been trying to wrestle the seat of government away from Jefferson City for more than a decade.  The Sedalia Bazoo commented, “Since the Lord partially ruined the state capitol building at Jefferson City, it is a good time to agitate the removal of the capital to Sedalia.”  The Sedalia Gazette noted, “The roof of part of Missouri’s capitol was blown off this week. This is the same building upon which was squandered a quarter of a million dollars recently” (with the addition of two wings on the north and sound ends of the 1840 Capitol).

Five years later, Sedalia interests stormed Jefferson City with a one-day lobbying blitz that led the legislature to put a proposition on the 1896 ballot to pull state government out of Jefferson City.

But that’s another story.

 

July 4th came on July 3rd this year  

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Cartoonist Walt Kelly years ago had a popular cartoon strip called “Pogo,” about a possum and his animal friends who lived in a Georgia swamp.  Every now and then, one of them would proclaim, “Friday the 13th came on Wednesday this month!” or whatever day was appropriate.

So today we celebrate Independence Day. We can’t say we’re celebrating the fourth of July because that’s not util tomorrow.  And actually, there are several dates we can observe because the Declaration was a work in progress for almot a month before Congress adopted it.

John Adams thought July 2nd would be the day to be remembered. He wrote to wife Abigail 247 years ago today, “The second day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the history of America…It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forever more.”

Why July 2ns?

Let’s go back to June 7th when delegate Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a resolution “that these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States, that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.”

Four days later a committee of five—Adams, Roger Sherman, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and Thomas Jefferson—was appointed to write a document expressing those views. Congress recessed until July 1 while the document was written.

Jefferson reluctantly took the job of writing the first draft.  But he alone did not write the Declaration.  Adams and Franklin were his chief editors.  His first draft contained about 1850 words.

The five-member committee made about four dozen changes. Other committees of the Continental Congress made 39 more. Jefferson made five.  In the end of the document was reduced by about 25 percent, to 1,337 words.

One immediate change was made by Benjamin Franklin in the most-cited part of the document—“all men are created equal”

The idea is not Jefferson’s alone.  He borrowed the sentiment from fellow Virginian George Mason, the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights that had been adopted a month earlier, saying, “all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.”

Jefferson re-wrote that idea:

“We hold these truths to be sacred & undeniable; that all men are created equal & independent, that from that equal creation they derive rights inherent & inalienable, among which are the preservation of life, & liberty,& the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government shall become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, & to institute new government, laying it’s foundation on such principles & organizing it’s powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety & happiness.”

Jefferson took an already wordy sentiment and made it even more wordy.

And this is where Franklin made a significant change.  He immediately removed “sacred and undeniable” and inserted “self evident.”  Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson says Franklin argued that the new nation was to be one in which rights come from rational thinking and the consent of the governed, not from the dictates or dogmas of religion.

The document mentions God or substitute names for God several times but it does so in neutral phrasing.  This is not a Catholic God.  This is not a Christian God—in those days there were plenty of people who believed Catholics weren’t Christians and Protestant belief organizations were actively splintering into different denominations with differing interpretations of God and the Scriptures.

The God in the Declaration is nature’s God, not a denominational God for a reason.

In Jefferson’s state of Virginia, between 1768 and 1774, about half of the Baptist ministers were jailed for preaching.  In Northampton, Massachusetts—Adams’ state—eighteen Baptist ministers were jailed in one year for refusing to pay taxes to support the Congregational minister in the town.

The sentiment about God had been voiced in the very first sentence of the Declaration that asserted that the colonies are separate from England and as a unified entity assume “among the powers of the earth and the separate and equal stations to which “the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them.”

The Congress resumed its session on July 2 and the Lee Resolution was adopted and debate on the Declaration began immediately.  For the next two days, Congress made changes—the most significant one being the removal of a section that attacked slavery.

It was late in the morning of July 4 when the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration and the handwritten original with all of its changes was given to printer John Dunlap.  But until August 2, the only signature on the document was that of convention president John Hancock.

The document was not signed July 4th—the famous painting by John Trumbull showing the five-man committee turning in the document with other members seated behind them.

Most members of the Continental Congress did not sign the Declaration until August 27.  And there were stragglers: Richard Henry Lee, Elbridge Gerry (of gerrymander infamy), and Oliver Walcott did not sign until November 19.  And it was not until 1781 that Thomas McKean added his signature.

McKean had left Congress a few days after adoption of the Declaration to become a colonel in the Pennsylvania Association, a military unit despite its name created by Franklin.

They promised their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor when they signed the document.  Several, tragically, kept that promise.

Five of them were captured by the British, branded as traitors, and died after being tortured. A dozen saw their homes burned.  The sons of two of them were killed in the war. Nine of them fought in the war and died of their wounds or the hardships of the war.

Lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.  Those words and the passionate commitments behind them meant something in 1776.

As we honor them today, we should be haunted by those words and wonder what place they have in our political world today.