Category Archives: Jefferson City

Premonition

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Your faithful chronicler was invited to speak to a group of freshman, sophomore, and junior State Representatives last week. It turned out they all were Republicans, including some Republican candidates for the House.

If Democrats want to hear the nonpartisan speech, I’d be glad to do it for them.

In fact, the words of a Democrat had a prominent role in the early part of the speech.  I had recited some facts about being raised in a Republican family. But I came of age in the Camelot era, a pedigree that I hope is somewhat behind my efforts as a reporter to harass both parties equally.

As I was researching some of the material for the speech, I came across the speech President Kennedy would have delivered at the Texas Trade Mart. As history records, the world ended for him ten minutes or so before he was to arrive there. The conclusion of the speech reaches across the generations since that day in Dallas.  Here’s the part of that speech that made it into part of my remarks last week:

“In this time of division and hostility, of narrowness and demagoguery often fueled by fear of the different instead of the opportunities presented by the things we have in common, it might be good to reflect on some of President Kennedy’s words again.  The other day I came across some words he would have spoken at the Dallas Trade Mart on November 22, 1963, a day I remember vividly as a young reporter.

Ignorance and misinformation can handicap the progress of a city or a company, but they can, if allowed to prevail in foreign policy, handicap this country’s security. In a world of complex and continuing problems, in a world full of frustrations and irritations, America’s leadership must be guided by the lights of learning and reason or else those who confuse rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain the popular ascendancy with their seemingly swift and simple solutions to every world problem.

There will always be dissident voices heard in the land, expressing opposition without alternatives, finding fault but never favor, perceiving gloom on every side and seeking influence without responsibility. Those voices are inevitable.

But today other voices are heard in the land – voices preaching doctrines wholly unrelated to reality,…doctrines which apparently assume that words will suffice without weapons, that vituperation is as good as victory and that peace is a sign of weakness…

We cannot expect that everyone, to use the phrase of a decade ago, will “talk sense to the American people.” But we can hope that fewer people will listen to nonsense…

We in this country, in this generation, are – by destiny rather than choice – the watchmen on the walls of world freedom. We ask, therefore, that we may be worthy of our power and responsibility, that we may exercise our strength with wisdom and restraint, and that we may achieve in our time and for all time the ancient vision of “peace on earth, good will toward men.” That must always be our goal, and the righteousness of our cause must always underlie our strength. For as was written long ago: “except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.”

It has been too long since we heard that kind of uplifting challenge. And it’s time for leaders with courage to speak that way again.”

The crowd provided a standing ovation at the end of the talk, which was nice. I hope that means they didn’t think they were listening to nonsense.  And that they won’t go out and deliver it.

The Center

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Jefferson City likes to think of itself as the center of the state and it is certainly the POLITICAL center of the state.

But, really, it IS the center of the state according to the census bureau and the post office.

If we could cut Missouri out of the United States (and 161 years ago that was tried unsuccessfully) and balance it on the point of a large pin with all of our people living where they live now and weighing the same, the state would balance on a point just south of Jefferson City.

After the folks at the Census Bureau get done counting national noses they start having fun with the numbers.  Missouri wins twice when they do.

A few weeks ago, the census geeks figured that the national population center is near Hartville, population 594, in southwest Missouri’s Wright County.  Now they’ve figured the population center of each state and Missouri’s balance point is near a bend in the Osage River east of Brazito, an unincorporated community about 12 or 13 miles from Jefferson City.

Brazito is served by the post office in Jefferson City and its street addresses have the Jefferson City zip code of 65109.

So Jefferson City IS the center of the state!  Wink, wink.

The designation as the state’s population center is one of two historical events connected with Brazito. The first is that it was named for a Christmas Day, 1846 battle in the Mexican War by members of the First Regiment Missouri Mounted Volunteers under Alexander Doniphan.

The map is from the book J. T. Hughes wrote about the exploits of the unit, Doniphan’s Expedition, published in 1847, shortly after the group returned from opening central Mexico to American military occupation after the later Battle of Chihuahua. It’s an epic story if you want to learn more about the march from Fort Leavenworth to Santa Fe, the Mexican capital taken without a shot being fired, and then south through the arid country side to the battle site near El Paso and then on to Chihuahua.

The other historical moment happened on August 9, 1974, about 39,000 feet over Brazito when Air Force One pilot, Col. Ralph Albertazzie, radioed Kansas City ground control from his blue and white Boeing 707, “This was Air Force One. Will you change our call sign to Sierra Alpha Mike 27-thousand?”  (That’s military language to make sure the receiving person knows it refers to the letters SAM.)

“Roger, Sierra Alpha Mike 27-thousand. Good luck to the President.”

“Roger.  27-thousand.”

It was three minutes, 25 seconds past noon.  Someone reached down and locked the box containing the secret military codes.

And the Boeing 707 was no longer Air Force One, the designation given to any Air Force plane carrying the President of the United States. It became another Air Force plane, tail number 27000.

The Airline Owners and Pilots Association says SAM27000 has the distinction of making 1,440 takeoffs as Air Force One, but it landed with that designation only 1,439 times.  This was that odd flight—on which Richard Nixon, heading back to California after his resignation in disgrace, officially left the office of President—

—over Brazito, Missouri when word came that Gerald Ford had been inaugurated as Nixon’s successor.

SAM27000 carried more presidents to more countries for more meetings and on more missions than any Air Force One.  Seven presidents beginning with John F. Kennedy, 445 missions. And, says the AOPA, “no luggage was ever lost.”

The airplane remains the property of the Air Force but it is on permanent loan to the Reagan Presidential Library. Should you find yourself there, you can go through the airplane where history was made over Missouri’s new population center 48 years ago.

(photo credit: AOPA)

 

 

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Eyewitness to the end

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Encounter

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It had the elements of a nightmare.

Blackness

growing larger

in the eyepiece of my camera

rushing toward me

engulfing the sky

darkening it

obliterating it

consuming me

with its noise

its speed

its wind

its blast of heat

roaring past.

Bob Priddy met Big Boy

that day

And lived to tell the tale.

The railroad crossing in Osage City was crowded with onlookers a few days ago, all waiting for the largest steam locomotive ever built anywhere in the world to pass through on its way to a stop in Jefferson City.

Union Pacific locomotive 4014, the only Big Boy still running, rounded the curve in the distance, its mighty steam whistle bellowing in full-throated bass, warning those near the crossing to stand away.  Inconceivable power was coming and coming fast.

And then it blew past, faster than I could turn with it, slightly staggering me with its power, force, and the wind it was pushing outward. And briefly, a ripple of heat reaching out from its boiler to brush my face.

https://youtu.be/QweVLPAyDyY

Later, in Jefferson City, as the locomotive rested briefly at the station, too close to the Capitol bluff to be seen from above, I thought it might be visible from the House of Representatives garage, west of the capitol.  And there it was, lurking and breathing. And when it began to move, slowly, there was a feeling of menace, of a great beast stalking creatures protected by the barred garage windows as it slowly passed by, seconds later to ease onto a siding with the muscular attitude that it was going to go where it damn well pleased to go and it would be best not to challenge it.

https://youtu.be/8zmkZ1Ky2hc

We can be grateful such machines are restricted to tracks and that Transformers are not real.

Walt Whitman, the great American poet, long before Big Boy was even lines drawn on a planning page, felt what I felt when he confronted a locomotive, one of the mechanical marvels of his time:

Thee in thy panoply, thy measur’d dual throbbing and thy beat convulsive,                                                                                           Thy black cylindric body, golden brass, and silvery steel,                   Thy ponderous side-bars, parallel and connecting rods, gyrating, shuttling at thy sides,/ Thy metrical, now swelling pant and roar, now tapering in the distance,/ Thy great protruding head-light fix’d in front,     Thy long, pale, floating vapor-pennants, tinged with delicate purple,/              The dense and murky clouds out-belching from thy smoke-stack,/Thy knitted frame, thy springs and valves, the tremulous twinkle of thy wheels,/ Thy train of cars behind, obedient, merrily following,/        Through gale or calm, now swift, now slack,/ yet steadily careering;/ Type of the modern—/emblem of motion and power/—pulse of the continent…/Fierce-throated beauty!/ Roll through my chant with all thy lawless music,/ thy swinging lamps at night,/ Thy madly-whistled laughter,/ echoing, rumbling like an earthquake,/rousing all,/ Law of thyself complete,/ thine own track firmly holding,/(No sweetness debonair of tearful harp or glib piano thine,)/Thy trills of shrieks by rocks and hills return’d,/ Launch’d o’er the prairies wide,/ across the lakes,/      To the free skies unpent/ and glad and strong. 

The older generation can dwell for a short time in nostalgia at the appearance of restored steam locomotives. Children often gaze open-mouthed at this great machine, oozing steam and occasional spurts of hot water, as it dozes in front of them. For some, the graceful dance of the slow-moving side rods as the locomotive heads toward its overnight parking place is endlessly fascinating—-as is the pounding rhythm of the same side roads at speed.

The Big Boy and its few smaller kin who still display railroading’s past are far more exciting and, dare we say, romantic than the sanitary and ungainly diesels of today.  But their constant need for care and cleaning, their relatively short runs before needing more water and more fuel, and their mechanical makeup are reasons they are now curiosities, not commonplace.

In 1976, when I rode the American Freedom Train from Boonville to Jefferson City, I asked engineer Doyle McCormack if he thought he missed anything by not living in the age of steam.  “Yeah,” he said, “a lot of work!”

Let us be glad there are still those willing to do that work.  And to bring these great pieces of fierce-throated beauty to us from time to time, glad and strong.                                                -0-

Michael Collins

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He was the first person who could see where every human in the universe was.

Michael Collins was the Command Module Pilot on the Apollo XI mission that put the first two men on the moon.  For twenty-one hours he was alone in the CMP, Columbia, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Armstrong “were doing their small stepping and giant leaping” on the Moon, as he put it a year later in Jefferson City.  He had watched them leave in the Eagle landing module headed for the surface.  He could look out a window and see the Earth, the only other place with humans.

No man had ever been in such a lonely position as he was in July, 1969. For part of those 21 hours, he was behind the Moon, completely alone with no communications either with earth or with the two men on the surface.

Michael Collins died yesterday. He was 90.  Only one man remains alive who shared that experience: Ken Mattingly, now 85, who was the Command Module Pilot on Apollo 16.

Only four of the moonwalkers are still with us: Buzz Aldrin, 91; Dave Scott, 88; and Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmidt, both 85.  Six men who flew to the Moon but did not land are still among us—Mattingly, Tom Stafford, 90; Fred Haise, 87; and all three members of the Apollo 8 crew—Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, both 93, and Bill Anders, who is 87.

We remember Michael Collins for the day we sat about twenty feet from him (and the other two astronauts) at the Capitol on the first anniversary of the Moon landing.  NASA had put the Columbia capsule on a big truck and sent it on a tour of state capitols.  It happened to be in Jefferson City that day.  And the radio station I as working for decided to broadcast the events at the capitol.

One of my most cherished possessions is a photograph showing me at the station table with the three astronauts in the foreground. As I recall it, Governor Hearnes’ press secretary, Jerry Bryan, sent the picture to NASA and the three guys signed it.

All three had remarks that day but I thought Collins’ comments were the most meaningful—and prophetic.

“I was born in 1930 and with luck I expect to see out the end of this century.  And when I am thinking about it in 1999, I expect to remember the 1970s as a time when oddly enough, man was hesitant about pushing his frontiers back. And in 1999 we just simply won’t be able to understand that fact because by then it will have become clearly apparent that man does in fact have the capability to step out and explore his solar system and that is something we definitely should do.”

When Collins made those remarks, Apollo XII already had successfully landed on the moon the previous November. But Apollo XIII had become the program’s most famous failure in April.  The Apollo program was in suspension while the investigation of that flight went on and there would not be another Moon landing until January of ’71, with Apollo XIV.

More ominous, however, had been the announcement in January of 1970 that the twentieth mission had been cancelled. There already had been a decline in public interest in the program, despite the drama of XIII, by the time Michael Collins spoke in Jefferson City.  “Been there, done that,” in the short attention span public mind.

About two months after the astronauts were in Jefferson City, NASA cancelled flights 15-19 and then restructured the crews for what would become the last three flights to the Moon—numbers 15-17.

Those events give a special context to what Collins said on that hot July day at the capitol.

None of the Apollo XI crew ever flew in space again.  NASA wanted Collins to stay in the program but he had decided Apollo XI would be his second, and last, trip to space (he and John Young had flown Gemini 10, practicing maneuvers necessary for a Moon landing). But he left a few months later, with no regrets. He wrote in his first book, Carrying the Fire, “I know that I would be a liar or a fool if I said that I have the best of the three Apollo 11 seats, but I can say with truth and equanimity that I am perfectly satisfied with the one I have. This venture has been structured for three men, and I consider my third to be as necessary as either of the other two.”

He was the Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs for a while but found “long hours…flying a great mahogany desk” was not a fit.  About a year later he became the third director of the National Air and Space Museum. He set a goal of having a building on the National Mall by the time of the national bicentennial, 1976.  The ribbon was cut by President Ford for the building on July 1, 1976.  A museum statement issued upon his death said, “That building and the museum it houses stand as a lasting legacy” to “an astronaut and statesman.”

His support for pushing the frontiers back, as he put it in Jefferson City in 1970 never waivered.  On the tenth anniversary of the first landing, he said, “It’s human nature to stretch, to go, to see, to understand. Exploration is not a choice really—it’s an imperative.”

In these times when we our vision is so often by terrestrial concerns and often-petty bickering about them, we need not forget his belief that within us is the need “to stretch, to go, to see, to understand.”

Perhaps if we look less at one another with suspicion and instead see one another as having those innate desires to achieve, we might find light.

-0-

Hal

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Let me tell you about meeting Mark Twain.

Well—-Hal Holbrook, actually.

He was Mark Twain longer than Mark Twain was Mark Twain. Actor Hal Holbrook died about two weeks ago although word of his death didn’t come out until this week. He was 95.

I saw “Mark Twain Tonight” the first time at the Stephens Playhouse in Columbia, as I recall, in the early 1960s and I think maybe a second time there.  Definitely a third time many years later at Jesse Hall at the University and a final time on May 16, 2014 at the Miller Performing Arts Center here in Jefferson City.  Nancy and I got to be part of the meet-and-greet bunch backstage after the show in Columbia and then again at the Miller Center.

There is an interesting, perhaps remarkable, story about his Jefferson City performance.

Mark Comley, my successor as president of the Community Concert Association, shared my enthusiasm for Holbrook as Twain.  The association decided to go for broke and bring him to the Miller Center even though he cost every penny of our annual budget.  But we thought a sell-out would justify the investment even if it didn’t quite cover the entire cost and we’d gain some recognition for the association that would pay off in the next season. I was disappointed that we didn’t sell every seat in the auditorium.  Big crowd, but it was disappointing to see that so many people in our city passed up a chance to see one of the great acts in the history of the American theatre.

It was the last day of the legislative session and as usual, the last week was exhausting.  I missed most of the first half of the show and didn’t have the energy for an after-show dinner at Madison’s (they kept their back room open so the concert board and guests could dine with Holbrook at midnight).

Holbrook was 89 then and showed plenty of energy in the show and in the post-show meet-and-greet afterward. He had removed his makeup (he told me in an interview in 2016 that he had to use less of it as he aged into the age of Twain, who he portrayed as being 70).

He stopped and spent time with each person. I told him I had hoped we’d be able to get him to the Capitol to see the various tributes to Twain (the Huck Finn art of the Benton mural, the bust of Twain in the rotunda’s Hall of Famous Missourians, and a—in my opinion— fairly undistinguished portrait of him) as well as a painting in the Senate of Francis Preston Blair Junior, the son of the man Holbrook played in the movie, Lincoln.

We took a couple of friends with us, Larry and Peggy Veatch who had lived in Hannibal for many years where Larry was the minister of the First Christian Church for a long time—and Holbrook had spent part of his performance on Twain’s ruminations on religion.  He and Larry had quite a conversation.

Mark (Comley) told me a remarkable story about midnight dinner the next time I saw him. It seems that Mark’s favorite routine is Twain’s recounting of the story of the skipper of little boat impressed of his own self-importance who crosses paths with another ship and its skipper who put him in his place.   Holbrook often used the story, originally told by Twain at a dinner in his honor in Liverpool, England on July 10, 1907 to close his shows. He hadn’t done it at the Miller Center and Mark mentioned it to Holbrook at the dinner.   Holbrook grew quiet for a time–And then did the entire routine. You can see it as Holbrook sometimes did it on stage:

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

Mark figured that Holbrook had gone quiet for a little while because he was sorting through the hundreds or thousands of Twain stories stored in his memory until he found the story of “The Mary Ann.”

The first half of his shows were filled with wry and humorous observation of Twain.  The second half of the show turned serious pretty soon when he did the reading from Huckelberry Finn when the boy has to decide if he’s going to lie to protect his friend Jim, the room was always absolutely still, the audience moving only so much as necessary to breathe.

He spent about an hour with me on the phone in 2004 when he was appearing at then-Central Missouri State, the University of Missouri-Columbia, then at Kansas University. That was his 50th year of being Mark Twain.

Somewhere, in a box of recordings of interviews and events we covered in forty years at the Missourinet is a CD of that interview.  I’ll find it someday and post it.  I do remember that he told me he often updates his show with new Twain material but he never went beyond Twain’s thoughts. He never thought, “What would Twain say” about contemporary issues.  But Twain’s social commentary covered such a wide range of topics that many of his observations of 19th century situations fit contemporary events.

Holbrook didn’t exactly invent the one-man show portraying a historic figure but as Mark Dawidziak at the Center for Mark Twain Studies  put it, “Holbrook not only unleased platoons of Mark Twain impersonators (several in almost every state), he popularized the one man show about American figures. He soon was followed by James Whitmore as Will Rogers, (then as Harry Truman, and Theodore Roosevelt), Henry Fonda as Clarence Darrow, Julie Harris as Emily Dickinson, and Robert Morse as Truman Capote, just to name a few.”

But, in truth, many of the Twain impersonators weren’t really impersonating Twain.  They were impersonating Holbrook.

Samuel Clemens started using the pen name of Mark Twain in 1863. He died in 1910 at the age of 75 after 47 years if being Twain.

Hal Holbrook retired his act, and himself, in 2017, his health no longer strong enough for tours and performances.  He had been Mark Twain (among other characters in numerous movies and TV shows) for seventy years.

The worst in us is never far away

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It’s comfortable to think the virulent racism of long ago is no longer part of our lives.  But it is.  It’s hidden and when it exposes itself it does so with such vengeance that witnesses might be left gasping.

More likely it’s white witnesses who are left gasping by the searing viciousness that is not so surprising to black people, even today in our supposedly accepting society. And I suppose it shouldn’t have been the surprise that it was in this time of increasingly-public white nationalism.

It happened last week at a meeting of a city council committee considering whether to remove a rock with a bronze plaque on it saying Confederate General Sterling Price decided in 1864 not to attack Jefferson City.  I had thought it was a fairly benign thing a few months ago when people asked me about it.  But the more I have looked into it, how it wound up where it is, who Price was, and what his brief siege was about, the more convinced I am that the continued presence of this marker is a blot on my town.

Some brief background: General Sterling Price was a former Missouri governor who had three times sworn loyalty to the United States and vowed to defend it from enemies, foreign and domestic.  But in 1861 he turned his back on those oaths and became one of those enemies who sought to destroy our nation as it then existed. In the fall of 1864 he led a last-gasp effort to recapture Missouri for the South, leading a rag-tag army of 12,000 poorly-equipped soldiers, thinking he might be able to capture St. Louis (impossible because it was full of Union troops), Jefferson City (where Confederate Governor Thomas C. Reynolds who was traveling with him could be sworn in as the legitimate governor of a now-Southern state) and then Westport and in the process turn the tide in the 1864 election and get rid of Lincoln so a truce could be arranged that would preserve the South and its slaves.

The United Daughters of the Confederacy, a group aligned with the Ku Klux Klan at the time the marker was presented in 1933 (its webpage makes it clear it no longer subscribes to its past attitudes), wrote the language on the bronze plaque.

We won’t go into a lengthy discussion of why some people think the marker should be removed but, in short, the idea is that the values behind its presentation are not the city’s values, does not reflect the true history of what happened here, and it casts a shadow over the lives of many African-Americans who see it as a symbol of a time when black people were told they had a place in this town and it wasn’t where white people were.

A woman named Jackie Coleman, who I did not know about until a couple of weeks ago, was among the list of people who shared with the city council their thoughts about “the rock” as it is called. She said she was “appalled” that the marker was on city property because, “It’s not what Jefferson City is about.”  A little later she told the council, “I know discrimination. If you don’t want to get rid of the rock you are saying you don’t care about me.”  The council took no action but referred the issue to two of its committees.

At the Public Works Committee meeting last Thursday I suggested the council pay more attention to what she and others said about their experiences in Jefferson City—and the experiences of their ancestors—more than the council pays attention to the philosophical arguments about history that people like me were making, valid though they might be.  While most of the argument is about Price, the KKK, the UDC, the proper telling of history, etc., the feelings of Jackie Coleman and others who spoke with her are about LIFE and how the marker casts a shadow over them, even now.

She spoke right after I did last Thursday and I was gratified that she found my remarks good. I hope I was not the only person stunned in the council chamber by what came next.

Before I tell you about it I want you to understand that there are some words that we have become too cautious in using when their use is most valuable in understanding what a circumstance is.  Some words are so brutal and so cruel that referring to them as “the –word” relieves us of confronting the remorseless attitude behind them.  I am going to use one of those words and by now you know what it is.

Jackie read an unsigned letter she received after the City Council meeting saying, “What is wrong with teaching our youth about history, that the Civil War was not fought over slavery but over state rights. People like you are causing a racial divide.”   She said the letter called her a nigger or referred to niggers thirteen times. It concluded, “Why don’t you just move and leave our nice town. I don’t belong to the KKK but you are an example of why it should exist.”  She told the committee the rock created that letter. “This is an offensive rock to me. We have to call it what it is,” and she concluded, “A citizen of Jefferson City getting a letter like this is appalling.”

Of course the letter was unsigned. Flaming bigotry has never counted courage as one of its qualities. If the writer thought he or she could intimidate Jackie Coleman, that person is stupid along with being a coward.

One of the points I hope I made with the committee—and that I will make again at the full council meeting if given a chance to speak—is that the Capital City of Missouri has no business protecting a symbol that excites cowards such as this letter-writer to prove once again that the worst we can be is never far away.

The rock must go. But I’m afraid its shadow will remain, not visible but resentfully lurking beneath the surface waiting to erupt.

And that, to use Jackie’s word, is appalling.

If one of your ancestors owned slaves—

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—should their name be erased from your family tree?

Should Jefferson City and Jefferson County change their names because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves?

Should towns named for the Five Civilized Tribes or their leaders change their names because the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War?

We began thinking of these questions a few days ago when we saw a Kansas City Star comment suggesting a fountain and a parkway named for J. C. Nichols be renamed because he was a racist whose real estate developments defined Kansas City’s history of racism that lingers in the minds of many citizens today, and upon hearing of a petition circulated by a University of Missouri student to remove a statue of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson from Francis Quadrangle (where the columns are in Columbia) and after seeing a news account that protestors in North Portland, Oregon had pulled down a statue of Jefferson at a high school named for him.

New to the discussion is that military bases should no longer be named for Confederate officers such as Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood, Henry Benning Robert E. Lee, and others.

These are troubling issues and troubling questions in troubling times. Today, let’s consider Thomas Jefferson. The military bases will wait for a later posting.

Correcting the historical narrative is better than trying to erase it, for we learn nothing from erased history and we can learn everything from placing history’s people and events in context. Hasty action in emotional days might rob those in the future of needed guidance in shaping their eras.

University of Missouri Curators correctly decided to leave the Jefferson statue on Francis Quadrangle although the petitions had more than two-thousand signatures. University System President Mun Choi said, “We learn from history. We contextualize historical figures with complex legacies. We don’t remove history.”

To remove the statue of Jefferson because he owned slaves would also remove the statue of someone who was the main author of the Declaration of Independence, the creator of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, the founder of the University of Virginia (three things he wanted on his original tombstone that also is at the University of Missouri-Columbia), and the president whose administration added most of the land west of the Mississippi River that made us a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Dr. Choi and the curators had it right.

Here’s a more intimate dimension to this issue:

Several years ago when I was a guest lecturer at Kent State University, I met a sharp, earnest African-American student, Shannon Lanier, and this then-girlfriend (now his wife, Chandra, and mother of their three children). He told me he was the sixth-great grandson of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, whom some identify as the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. Martha Jefferson died at the age of 33 in 1782. Shannon already had co-authored a book about Jefferson’s black descendants. DNA studies indicate Tom and Sally had six children, four of them surviving to adulthood. Many white Jefferson descendants accept the Hemings descendants as part of the Jefferson heritage.

I wonder how those African-American Jefferson descendants would feel if they knew a proposal had been made at the University of Missouri to remove a statue of their most famous ancestor. Would the removal place them in the position of being branded as products of some kind of unforgivable Original Sin? Is their existence the result of some kind of unforgiveable disobedience of widely-accepted contemporary codes against sexual relations between different races (a code often ignored in plantation America, including here in Missouri)?

The censuring of Jefferson as a slave-owner could be seen as a disparagement of hundreds of his descendants, a continuation of the idea that any child born out of wedlock—let alone also born of an interracial relationship—should bear a mark of historic illegitimacy.

And what difference does it make in the long run? The importance of a life is not how it begins but how it is lived. That is why a rush to judgment in emotionally-charged times can be perilous.

As Shannon put it on CBS This Morning, on February 14, 2019, “Sometimes, I’m proud of his accomplishments and sometimes I hate him for not doing more…We can’t necessarily judge history with contemporary eyes but we can learn from history and the mistakes that our past leaders have made.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTC_UFAhrvA)

The PBS Newshour ran an extended piece that featured other descendants of Sally and Tom commenting on a Monticello exhibit about Sally. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gm3HtijrMQ)

The New York Times ran a Farah Stockman’s story on June 16, 2018 (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/jefferson-sally-hemings-descendants.html) about the feelings of Hemings descendants about the exhibit. One of those descendants, former employee of the National Archives in Washington, D. C., Julius “Calvin” Jefferson, took pride in his slave ancestors: “They were there at the beginning of the country. When you are of African descent, you are told that we had nothing to do with that. I’ve realized that members of my family had a lot to do with that. The contributions that the slave community did at this one plantation afforded Thomas Jefferson the leisure to be the genius that he became.”

Additionally, how, if we are to follow the wishes of those advocating removing monuments of racists and slave-holders, should we treat the thirty-nine men who signed the United States Constitution in 1787? Or the 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence? Some of them were slave-holders yet they gave us the Declaration that declared we were a nation on equal standing with other nations and asserted the immortal line we are fond of quoting today despite the times in which it originated—All men are created equal—and then produced a Constitution that, with its Bill of Rights, defines our country as the republic that it is.

There is danger in applying a moral standard of our time to punish our ancestors for the values they held in morally different societies. To brand them for being part of an acceptable culture that would not be acceptable today runs the risk of diminishing our opportunities to learn from them. Failing to remember our past with its disgraceful as well as its noble moments is to risk an ignorance that could produce regrettable repetitions.

Thomas Jefferson, J. C. Nichols and all of those in our pasts whose flaws we recognize because of our contemporary values give us important context as we correct today’s shortcomings.

Tomorrow is more important than yesterday. But knowing about yesterday is vitally important in helping us shape that tomorrow. Ignorance of history is more dangerous than knowledge of it. Historic events and historical figures are products of their times. Placing people and events within the standards of their eras gives them a reality that we cannot ignore as we consider who we are today and who we will seem to be when we join them as history.

Our presence in these times is a history lesson for tomorrow whether we like it or not or whether those who come after like us or not.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham a few days ago on MSNBC discussed how he evaluates historical figures:

Was the person or the institution being memorialized ultimately devoted to the pursuit of a more perfect union or were they for ending the constitutional experiment altogether. And by that test, even the most flawed white Americans—Andrew Jackson, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, could be memorialized and understood as imperfect people who nevertheless were about defending a system that ultimately gave us the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that ultimately gave us the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Woman Suffrage. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, the story of the country has been one of all-too-gradual liberation and we should build our monuments; we should focus our collective commemorative memory around those moments.

Taken as a whole, was Jefferson’s life a quest for that “more perfect union?” Yes, it was and is the reason his statues should remain in Columbia and elsewhere, a representation of a man who—as is true of all of us—is greater than his shortcomings.

Jefferson City vs. the Pandemic, 1918—II

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A look back at the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 might help us understand how the Coronavirus could run its course in 2020. There are some important things to remember, however. First, Jefferson City, a town of about 14,500 people, had one hospital, St. Mary’s, which was adequate under normal circumstances but faced the same issues today’s hospitals are facing. The other thing to remember is that in 1918 there were no vaccines available or on the horizon. Quinine, which gained popularity in the 1830s thanks largely to Arrow Rock Dr. John Sappington, was tried as a medicine in 1918 but showed no indication that it helped.

In many cases, what happened then is happening now. But in many other ways, today’s conditions, cures, and treatments are a far cry from what our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents faced.

In recounting these sad and tragic days in 2020’s nervous and uncertain days, we hope we are not leaving the impression that the Coronavirus will have the same course or the same deadly results. Although health officials are struggling to find a cure, medical care is more than a century advanced from the days of the Spanish influenza. It is obvious now that it is likely to be with us for a while and we are likely to lose some people. But we are better prepared today because we know what happened long ago.

It was a bittersweet time. The Great War was ending about the time the Spanish Influenza was at its peak.

A new concern entered Jefferson City discussions in mid-November, 1918 when the National Tuberculosis Association voiced fears the flu epidemic could lead to substantial increases in tuberculosis, perhaps as much as ten percent for the next two years. The NTA said the influenza “weakens a person’s physical vitality and lowers a person’s resistance to the disease.”

The first case of the flu in the penitentiary led to an immediate quarantine reported by the local press on November 17. The first inmate death was reported.

When Mrs. Will Ruprecht died November 20th, the funeral at her home was private “on account of influenza restrictions.”   Home funerals were common in those days before Jefferson City had its first funeral home.

Thirty-nine new cases in two days in the city was considered a “slight falling off” from the previous week but there had been four deaths in the last four days.

The State Board of Health sent around word on November 21 that it would be okay for cities to remove the “more or less drastic measures” intended to limit the disease’s spread. The next day the city had 25 new cases of the influenza.

The day the controls were lifted in Jefferson City, a two year old boy died. The next day, “a beautiful young life went out” when a popular 24-year old woman “just budding into sweet womanhood” died at her home. Robert F. Mueller, “an excellent harness maker,” died the next day and police posted ten more placards on the doors of home signifying they were quarantined. The week ending November 22 saw 173 new cases. The next week the total dropped to 109. People were dying daily and the Federal Public Health Service reported the number of cases nationally was approaching 350,000. The Missouri Capitol was fumigated a second time.

It was December now, likely the longest six weeks in city history.

Community Nurse Ruth Porter, now recovered from her bout with the flu, said her case load had was double what it was in October. Fortunately, the Council of Clubs had bought a car for her to use in her home visits. She had 34 people under her care as of December 13.

The State Prison Board reluctantly admitted more than 100 flu cases behind the walls. State Health Board Secretary George H. Jones reported the state’s October death total of 3,145 represented half of all deaths in Missouri.

The Red Cross was looking for a building that could accommodate patients when St. Mary’s Hospital couldn’t handle any more. The hospital’s own annex became the spill-over building, capable of holding 25 additional patients.

“I am astounded at the death rate of this epidemic,” said the former Assistant State Highway Engineer J. P. Davis, an experienced sanitary engineer who believed in disinfectants. He suggested all of the back yards in town be cleaned up and disinfected. He also suggested the city use a flushing tank filled with a germicide “rather than men with brooms” to clean the streets.

The penitentiary got a gallon of pneumonia serum from the Mayo Sanitarium in Rochester, Minnesota, and quickly inoculated all of the convicts. It was too late for seven of them. Three days later the total was 13 inmate deaths.

But there seemed to be a glimmer of good news when the city’s doctors reported new cases were down fifty percent although the death of Oscar Walther at St. Mary’s Hospital put the city death total into the thirties.

The Daily Capital News asked, “Isn’t it time the state of Missouri was giving some attention to the health of its citizens? It is a sad commentary upon our humanity that we give more thought and spend more money on the health of hogs and cattle than we do upon men and women. The Board of Health has no power to do anything and no money to do anything with.” It was a valid point, but a state health department was not created until a new constitution was adopted almost thirty years later.

Four days before Christmas, the prison announced the deaths of three more inmates raised the total dead there to 22. A study of the fatalities showed 17 of those inmates had been in the prison for less than a year. The penitentiary blamed local jails because, “Many of the prisoners come to the penitentiary run-down physically and are in no condition to have the influenza.” The seriousness of the situation in the prison became apparent with the prison doctor’s end-of-the year report. The prison hospital usually had 20-30 admissions a month and a total of only 32 in October and November. In December it was 459. The final death toll was 26 inmates from pneumonia resulting from the flu.

An important sign that the flu was abating came when the school board decided to reopen schools on December 31. They’d been closed since October 10 and the school days would be lengthened by 45 minutes in an effort to catch up the students on their learning before graduation in late May.

St. Mary’s Hospital reported at the end of the year it had handled 154 flu cases. Forty-one patients had died during the year, “25 were brought in in a dying condition,” most likely influenza victims, many with flu-caused pneumonia.

By the end of January the city death toll was at least 34, fifteen of them people who died at home, plus the 26 prison inmates. Many other deaths were reported throughout the county.

On February 20, 1919, St. Mary’s Hospital caught fire. All 35 patients were removed safely, some taken to the top floor of the Governor’s Mansion and the rest housed in the 14-room vacant mansion of the late Jacob F. Moerschel a Jefferson City brewer who donated the land on which the hospital was built. The fourth floor of the hospital was destroyed, as was the roof, and the rest of the building was heavily damaged by water. A $75,000 fund-raising effort was started to rebuild the hospital, which served the city until 2014 when a new St. Mary’s opened.

The flu made a small comeback in March but by early June, Community Nurse Ruth Porter was reporting “General health conditions have never been half as good as they are now.”

Except—-

Tuberculosis cases resulting from the influenza epidemic were increasing in “staggering” proportions.

The city, the state, the nation survived the worst epidemic in American history up to that time in 1918-19. Most of the great-great-grandchildren of those who were victims of and survivors of the great Spanish flu epidemic will survive the Coronavirus epidemic in 2020. But we know from history that we might be facing a weeks-long struggle. Many will be sick. Some will die.

And then life will go on—as it did after the great pandemic of 1918-1919.

Jefferson City vs. the Pandemic, 1918—I

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We are facing weeks of uncertainty, nobody knows how many, as we are stalked by a dark shadow that threatens to envelop us with the scariest health challenge in more than a century. We are taking the Coronavirus seriously because our ancestors throughout the world were devastated by a virus known as the “Spanish Influenza”—-although it didn’t start in Spain—and the terrible outcome has remained a specter within our culture. Now it is here and many find themselves trying not to think of their mortality.

The 1918-18 influenza epidemic might have started right next door to us. In Kansas, not Spain. Its first major flare-up was at Camp Funston, a World War One training camp at Fort Riley, Kansas. In March, 1918, five-hundred soldiers got sick. The outbreak quickly waned, perhaps because many of the Funston soldiers headed to Europe after war was declared in April.

The flu spread from there throughout the world, mutated, and eventually came back to the States.

By the time it had run its course, the worldwide death total was at least 50-million people, maybe 100-million. In this country, 670,000 deaths were attributed to it, more than the combined death counts in both world wars, Korea and Vietnam.   Missouri’s total was 12,250.   To put that in some context, the population of Jefferson City at the time was a little less than 14,500.

In those days there were two primary information sources: the newspapers and the telephone. The newspapers brought our ancestors news about the slow course of the disaster. The speculation (“analysis” if you will) of the day was two people on the telephone talking to one another.

Missouri had no cases of Spanish Influenza when St. Louis Health Commissioner Max Starkloff issued three “don’ts” to fight the spread of the disease “if it reaches here.”

—Don’t cough or sneeze unless your mouth is protected by a handkerchief.                                 —Don’t, if you can avoid it, sleep in the same room with another person if you have influenza.   —Don’t fail to call a doctor when the first symptoms are felt.

Less than three weeks later, on October 8, the Jefferson City Daily Capital News reported the Secretary of the State Council of Defense, Frank Robinson, had been sent to the “quarantine hospital” suffering from apparent Spanish Influenza. “Local physicians are not alarmed over the prospect in any way, but they are ready to take all precautions necessary,” aid the paper.

The very next day the newspaper reported the city had fifteen cases of the flu. The mayor called a meeting of physicians, ministers, and heads of the city schools to decide if schools, churches, and theatres should be closed. The state prison was under quarantine.

On October 10, the schools were closed, churches cancelled services indefinitely, students at Lincoln Institute were forbidden to leave the campus, gatherings of more than fifteen people were prohibited, and streets were to be flushed each morning. “These precautions are deemed sufficient to prevent the spread of the influenza epidemic in the city,” said the newspaper.

The next day city had “no fewer than 50 cases.” By October 15th, there were 65 and former Madison Hotel clerk Raymond Smith had become the city’s first fatality. Among the newly-infected people: City Physician, Dr. Edward Mansur, who was in bed with a “mild form.”

The next day, another man died, Missouri Pacific engineer Charles Alcorn, whose flu degenerated into a fatal pneumonia.

On October 17th, the city had 150 cases and a day later the number topped 185. The city already had a serious shortage of nurses and by the 22nd, Community Nurse Ruth Porter had taken to her bed with the flu.

Churches were allowed to have services for the first time in two weeks but the theatres remained closed. So were schools.

Forty-two new cases were recorded October 23-26. Dr. Mansur was able to visit some ill folks that day but was back in bed the next day. The number of cases passed 300 by the end of October.

About a dozen people had died by November 14 when the newspaper published a large public notice on the front page citing “Unusual measures” that were to be taken to “remove the influenza from our city.” Some of them sound familiar today. Others tell us about some of the sanitation issues of the day:

—Spend a lot of time out of doors but away from crowds.

—Open doors and windows of your homes, especially in the bedrooms, for a few hours each day and clean out dirty corners.

—If anyone in your home has had a cold or even felt bad fumigate their bedrooms at least if not the entire house. Fumigation can be done by anyone in three or four hours with Sulphur or formaldehyde candles which can be purchased at any drug store at small cost.

—It is the duty as well as a law that every contagious disease be reported to the City Physician for the protection of yourself as well as your neighbor.

—Business houses are urged to at least fumigate their stores one night this week. Formaldehyde is inexpensive and harmless, also there is no fire hazard. Those businesses serving other than alcoholic beverages must wash glasses and china used by patrons in hot water and with soap. Saloons must wash glasses used by patrons more thoroughly than usual. Water basins used for the washing must be emptied and refilled at least four times a day. And care must be exercised to keep large numbers of people from gathering in those businesses. Even small groups must be made to spread out. Any business allowing more than 15 people to assemble or enter the place at one time could be closed.

—All business places must have prominent signs asking people not to cough or sneeze in their places. Such signs will cause people to cough or sneeze into their handkerchief.

—Factory superintendents must take the temperature of all employees at least once a day and anyone who is 99 or more must be sent home and not allowed to return until he has a doctor’s certification that he is not affected with a contagious disease, particularly the flu. Each factory must be fumigated at least once a week.

The city board of health agreed a couple of days later to delay any closings for four days. If, on November 22, “there is not a decreased number of influenza cases reported daily in the city, the businesses houses will be closing tight for four days in an effort to stamp out the disease.”

The Miller and Weiss Pool Hall on Madison Street was closed for a week after a policeman found thirty-one people inside.

But people kept getting sick. And people kept dying. The Capital City—as well as all of Missouri and the nation—was fighting a plague with no medicine that could stop it.

We’ll have more next week.