Category Archives: military

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.

 

Patriots

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The time between the first Juneteenth National Independence Day and the traditional Independence Day on July 4th provides an opportunity to think about patriots and patriotism. It’s an important discussion to be having this year, as we approach the six-month anniversary of the attack on the national Capitol by many people who think they are patriots.

Their definition of patriotism is repugnant, we hope, to the huge majority of Americans.  We shall not explore that matter specifically today.

Instead, we are going to turn to a study announced the other day by WalletHub, a personal finance website that attracts attention to itself with surveys of public attitudes on this and that. It’s a good gimmick because Americans love two things in particular: surveys and lists.  And WalletHub provides them.

The self-serving nature of the surveys aside, they do often provide food for thought.  So it is with the recent one that ranks Missouri in the top 20 most patriotic states, thanks largely to a number 1 ranking in required civic education.  Otherwise we’re about where we are in so many ratings—middling.  That ranking for civic education boosts us to 18th.

The five most patriotic states according to the WalletHub system of rankings are Montana, Alaska, Maryland, Vermont, and New Hampshire.  The five least patriotic states in this survey are California, Michigan, Connecticut, Florida and New York.

One thing the survey does is debunk any feelings of superiority by Red States.  The survey shows there is little difference between them. The average rank of red, or Republican, states is 25.68.  The average rank of blue, or Democratic, state is 25.32.

It appears the red and blue states, however, are cumulatively much less patriotic than individual states.  Montana, number one, has a rating of 61.91.  New York, at number 50, has a rating of 21.64.  The cumulative ratings of red and blue states as blocs would rank them 49th among the individual states.

How do you measure patriotism?  Patriotism is an abstract term, a personal term, and trying to measure what is in one’s heart is difficult.  But WalletHub tries to use external factors.

While we are first in civic education requirements and 18th in the average number of military enlistees per 100,000 population, we are 23rd in percentage of voters who took part in the 2020 presidential election; 24th in percentage of veterans among adult citizens; 26th in Peace Corps volunteers per capita and volunteer hours per resident; 27th in volunteer rate and AmeriCorps volunteers per capita; 28th in active military personnel per 100,000 people.

WalletHub has a “panel of experts” that define patriotism apart from the statistics. It provided their comments in a news release accompanying the survey:

What are the characteristics of a good patriot? 
“Patriotism is about loyalty – an attachment to a particular place and/or way of life. A good patriot exhibits dedication to that way of life, sacrificing one’s private time and even resources to work on behalf of one’s community. The patriot, however, does not seek to impose that way of life upon others nor to blindly follow without questioning. Like any good relationship, a patriot is committed and generally trusting but also preserves the right to question and exercise healthy skepticism.”
Christie L. Maloyed, Ph.D. – Associate Professor, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

“While some may argue that a good patriot is blindly loyal to their country, in fact, a key characteristic of the good patriot is the willingness to hold their country accountable in terms of living up to the high ideals it professes, or upon which it was founded.”
Sheila Croucher – Distinguished Professor, Miami University

Is there a link between socioeconomic class and level of patriotism?
“Studies suggest schools in places with higher socioeconomic characteristics engage in more critical approaches to history and civics than schools with lower socioeconomic characteristics. These schools are more likely to give students experiences in debate, dialogue, and critique—these concepts are important for healthy patriotism. On the other hand, studies also suggest military recruiters are more likely to seek students from schools in communities with lower socioeconomic characteristics. Having limited economic access to higher education, students in these communities are more likely to serve in the military.”
Benjamin R. Wellenreiter, Ed.D. – Assistant Professor, Illinois State University
“There can be. When there are fewer economic resources in a community, there are often fewer chances to engage in community building as many individuals need to focus on meeting their basic needs, working long hours or multiple jobs, caretaking, and other commitments. Moreover, many areas experience civic deserts, areas where there are fewer opportunities to participate. In these communities, there are fewer organizations to join. This can happen due to depopulation or economic hardship.”
Christie L. Maloyed, Ph.D. – Associate Professor, University of Louisiana at Lafayette

What measures should schools, and local authorities undertake in order to promote patriotism among citizens?
“I would love to see civic education become a larger priority around the country. Most American students learn the history of our founding, but citizenship requires more than historical knowledge: it requires a commitment to active participation in the community and politics (with voting as a minimum), and a willingness to work with fellow citizens to address our shared problems and to advance a common good, along with the media and information literacy to stay informed about one’s community and nation. Civic education requirements vary greatly from state to state, but few have gone far enough.”
Libby Newman – Associate Professor, Rider University
“The measures should come from individual citizens more than schools and authorities. Patriotism is a grass-roots concept. We need citizens to engage in dialogue with one another, work to experience and understand multiple perspectives, volunteer when the need arises—both military and civilian— and be continually committed to societal improvement. Schools and local authorities should be transparent in their work and take stewardship approaches to their responsibilities. Patriotism is taught through action as much as it is through the word.”
Benjamin R. Wellenreiter, Ed.D. – Assistant Professor, Illinois State University.

What makes you a patriot?  Or do you even consider yourself to be one?

What is the difference between patriotism and nationalism—and which poses the greater danger?

These two weeks between the Independence Days are time to weigh those questions.

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Honoring Those Left Behind

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A group of us has been working on building a special monument in Jefferson City. We’re working with a national foundation led by a World War II Medal of Honor winner (The Herschel Woody Williams Medal of Honor Foundation) to put up a memorial honoring Gold Star families. I have had a small role; others have done the real work. But it is an privilege to be part of their effort. I am not a veteran although, as I reminded the group at my first meeting with them, “I have fought many valiant skirmishes at Marine Corps League trivia contests.”

One thing that kind of surprised us is how few people know what a Gold Star Family is.  In some ways that is not surprising. Unfortunate, but not surprising.

We don’t see them often these days. During our World Wars and the Korean and Vietnam conflicts, they were more visible.  Families with members in the military during times of conflict could display a flag in the window of their home with a blue star for each family member in the service.  If a family member died or was killed during honorable service to their country during those times, the family would cover a blue star with a gold one, leaving the blue outline around the gold star.  Anyone going past a home with a flag in the window knew that somebody from that home was doing something special for the nation—or had died doing it.

In these times of limited conflicts with no massive calls to service, these symbols are seldom seen and a broad general public seldom touched by the human costs of defending our freedoms is not familiar with these flags.

But for each soldier killed in those prior wars or who dies in today’s long-ongoing conflcts, there are many broken hearts at home. Our memorial will honor those left behind to carry on in the spirit of their lost loved one.

You might have seen some of the numerous Blue Star Memorial Highway markers that have been erected since 1945 by state or local garden clubs that honor the military generally. This one is at the National Cemetery in Jefferson City.

There also is a small Gold Star Memorial sign at the west end of the Capitol, a tribute to “all Gold Star families.”

Our new monument to Gold Star Families will be built on city property adjacent to the Veterans Memorial at the Capitol, near the entrance to the Bicentennial Bridge being built to Adrian’s Island.

This is a computer simulation of our proposed monument against a different background than you’ll see when we dedicate it, hopefully in August.  The Capitol will be behind it then.

We want Gold Star Families throughout the state to know about the effort to put this memorial at the State Capitol. Although there has been a lot of publicity about the effort, most of it has been local.

If you are part of a group—veterans, civic, fraternal, church, or other—we would appreciate it if you would spread the word, and perhaps in doing so, learn of the special people in your neighborhood or among you friends who deserve to know there soon will be a monument at the Missouri Capitol honoring their sacrifice and their continued work in carrying on the spirit of those they lost.

(Photo credits: JC Parks, Missouri Capitol Commission, Gold Star Memorial Monument Committee)

A Western Paul Revere

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While looking for something else a few days ago I came across a story in a 1912 edition of the Keokuk Daily Gate City that explained how Union forces won the northernmost battle of the Civil War west of the Mississippi River. The story involves a mad ride through the countryside to warn of impending attack and a small town’s action against a stronger enemy. Unlike the story that turned Paul Revere’s truncated ride into an epic apocryphal poem, this story is a first-hand account of a wild adventure that changed history west of the Mississippi River.

Athens, Missouri (It’s pronounced AY-thens there) was a town of about fifty about the time of the Civil War, backed up against the Des Moines River that forms the notch in our border in the far northeast corner of the state.  It’s pretty much a ghost town now, with a state historic site nearby commemorating the Battle of Athens. Athens doesn’t even show up on the maps anymore (the one above is from Google). Go up to the northeast corner of the notch, just east of Highway 81 about seven miles (as the crow flies) southeast of Farmington, Iowa, where the DesMoines River forms the state boundary and imagine a dot there and you’ll pretty much know where Athens was.

About 2,000 Confederates under Colonel Martin Green tried to capture Athens from the Home Guard Troops under Col. David Moore who occupied the town. Normally he would have had 500 men but he was down to about 330 because some of his troops had been allowed to go to their homes in the area. Green surrounded the town on three sides and attacked on August 5, 1861.

But Moore’s men turned out to be better armed, with rifled muskets and bayonets while Green’s force was poorly equipped and was mostly untrained recruits. When the Confederate attack wavered in the face of better-than-expected defenses, Moore led a bayonet counter-attack that forced the Rebels to flee, never again to threaten an invasion Iowa.

A key part of the story is how the Union forces came to be better armed. And that is where the seldom-related (for many years, apparently) story of General Cyrus Bussey, then a cavalry Lieutenant-Colonel of the Iowa Home Guard begins.  He told it to Phillip Dolan of the New York World and it was reprinted in the Keokuk newspaper on January 1, 1912.

Listen my friends and you shall hear of the daring ride of Cyrus Bussey, and how it changed Civil War history in northeast Missouri and in Iowa.

“Because I was a Democratic member of the Iowa State Senate and supported the measure to appropriate $800,000 to raise troops in Iowa for the preservation of the Union, Governor Kirkwood named me his aide-de-camp on his staff, with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel of Cavalry. That was May, 1861. I was twenty-eight years old with no military education or training.

“I lived in Bloomfield, twelve miles from the Missouri border. My messenger reported to me that the Confederal Gen. Martin Green was organizing a brigade on the border to invade Iowa. I applied to Governor Kirkwood for arms but he had none.  The Battle of Bull Run had given the southerners big encouragement and there was great enlistment in northern Missouri for the Confederate army.

“I went to General Fremont in St. Louis and asked for arms. He had none.  I said, ‘Give me 100,000 rounds of ammunition.

“What will you do with ammunition without guns?”

“I replied ‘I don’t know but I’ll feel better if I have ammunition.’

“He gave me 50,000 rounds and right away it was loaded on a steamboat and sent up the Mississippi River to Keokuk, Iowa.

“The next night about midnight my messenger came to my house in Bloomfield and reported that Gen. Green was shoeing his horses and would start the invasion of Iowa within thirty-six hours with 1,500 cavalry.

“I went at once to a livery stable and asked for a horse and buggy. At 4 o’clock in the morning they brought to my house a rig —a two-wheeled sulky—and in the shafts was a mustang and three men were holding him, for he was really a wild horse just taken from the herd. It was the only horse they could give me.

“I got up in the seat, took the reins, the men let go and the mustang plunged off.  Away I went behind that wild horse toward Keokuk, forty miles to the eastward. For fourteen miles he tore over the road, over the hills, up and down and through streams with never a let up; a hundred escapes from imminent wreck we had.

“We approached the home of Mr. Bloom, a friend of mine. Here the road led down to a ravine and Mr. Bloom’s cattle filled the road, lying down. Straight down the road, galloped the horse, straight at the herd of cattle. One wheel struck a cow, the shock took the horse clean off his feet, threw him into the air and down he landed on his back in a ditch with the sulky on top of him. I was flung twenty feet.

“But good fortune was with me. The sulky was not broken, and better still, the horse was still full of life and his legs uninjured. Swiftly, Mr. Bloom and his hired man helped me to hitch up again, and away we went, the horse wilder than ever. At the Pittsburgh ford he plunged through the Des Moines River, half a mile wide, and a mile and a half further, came to the town of Keosauqua. Here I tried to stop him but he would not stop. I guided him around the square in the center of the town. Round and round he raced three times, and then a crowd of the town’s people stopped him and I got out. I left him there for good. I took the train for Keokuk and reached that place.

“I notified the authorities of Keokuk to barricade their streets against the coming of Martin Green. One of the railroad officials came to me with a bill of lading showing 1,000 guns in transit, shipped by the war department to Col. Grenville M. Dodge at Council Bluffs, for the regiment he was raising there and these guns had just arrived in Keokuk and were about to go out on the west bound train. I felt that Providence was with me. I seized the guns and the train.

“I found the ammunition which General Fremont had sent, and by more wonderful good fortune, the cartridges were exactly right for the caliber of the guns.

“Immediately I gave 100 of the guns to Gen. Belknap, afterwards secretary of war, and 100 to H. J. Sample. I got on the train with 800 guns. At Athens, Mo., Col. David Moore was in camp with 300 loyal Missourians armed with a few shotguns. I gave him 200 rifles. A few miles further up, I left 100 guns with Capt. O. H. P. Scott.  At Keosauqua I left 200 guns. The other 300 guns I took to Ottumwa, hired a wagon, and hauled them to Bloomfield, my home, where three companies were promptly raised, and I immediately started back to Keokuk.

“On the way, I received a message from Col. Moore telling me Green’s forces were advancing on him and a battle was momentarily expected. A special train brought a detachment to his aid.

“Moore had barricaded the streets of Athens. Green attacked him but the resistance was so strong that Green retired. For two days my Home Guard continued to arrive at Athens. Then Col. Moore, in command, followed the rebels into Missouri. They never came back to Iowa.

“Having seized the guns without warrant—ordinarily a great offense—I started to get my action legalized. Gen. Fremont said to me, ‘You have rendered a very important service. You have shown fitness for command. Next day he appointed me Colonel and authorized me to raise a regiment of cavalry. In ten days I had 1,100 men in camp, mustered in as the Third Iowa Cavalry.

“But I have never ceased to wonder what would have happened if that wild mustang had not landed on his back in the soft ditch and thus saved his legs to carry me on.”

And that’s how Moore’s men at Athens became better armed than the  much larger force of Confederates and how a little battle in a now-gone northeast Missouri town stopped a Confederate invasion of Iowa.

The battle was the beginning of a distinguished military and civilian life for Bussey. He was Grant’s chief of cavalry at Vicksburg and commanded Sherman’s advance guard at Jackson Mississippi.  He became a wartime Major-General in 1865. For a short time after the war he was a commission merchant in St. Louis and New Orleans before becoming a lawyer. During the Harrison administration (1889-1893) he was Assistant Secretary of the Interior.  At the time of the interview he was described as “a spare, medium-size man, showing few marks of his long life of great activity, he is mentally keen and keeps the dry humor of an Iowa pioneer.”

He died in 1915 at the age of 81.  He and his wife are buried in Arlington National Cemetery under an imposing monument.

The Paul Revere of the west, he was—except that, unlike Revere, he was propelled by a wild mustang and he completed his mission.  And he changed the history of the Civil War west of the Mississippi.

(The picture is from History of Iowa from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century (1903)

People’s Interests Being Dealt a Losing Hand

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Several bills have been introduced to legalize casino wagering on sports in Missouri this year.  Most are versions of bills that have failed to gain passage for the past three years.

None of the bills has a single word protecting the state’s interests in casino gambling.  Not a single word.

What are the state’s interests?

Funding for public schools.

Funding for various veterans’ services.

The National Guard

Funding of a college scholarship program.

Funding for a program to help people who become addicted to the casinos’ products.

Funding for the cities that are hosts for casinos.

The first hearing on one of the bills took place yesterday in a Senate Committee before which I raised this issue last year. In the year since, there has been time to dig deeper into this concern. And the concerns have become deeper.

Yesterday, I talked to the Senate Appropriations Committee about, first, the much-lower tax proposed for sports wagering adjusted gross receipts and, second, about the multi-million dollar damages that tax will cause to elementary and secondary education. Other concerns will be voiced as other bills are brought up for hearings.

None of these bills should be sent out for floor debate until they have been extensively revised to protect the state’s interests.

Please understand that these comments do not oppose casinos or sports wagering. But they do oppose the Missouri General Assembly being skillfully maneuvered into passing new gaming laws that degrade the state’s interests and the interests of the people of Missouri.

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After listening to three years of committee hearings on proposed sports wagering legislation, I am left with the impression that the proposals are being presented as if the issue is unique, separate from other forms of gambling and therefore should be treated as a special category.

It would be erroneous to accept that concept.

The creation of legalized sports wagering can be likened to the addition of a new kind of cheeseburger to the menu at McDonald’s. The biggest difference is that McDonald’s is not lobbying you to lower the sales tax on the cheeseburger while leaving it the same for all of its other products.

Sports wagering is just one more activity in which casino customers can take part. One more item on the gambling menu. But the menu also contains the same products it always has had. Separating one product from the other for taxation purposes makes no sense, whether is a sports bet or a cheeseburger.

This year’s proposed legislation makes it clear that sports wagering will not be done in some other building but will be done on the property of the casino, a phrase that bears scrutiny because it does not specifically say the activity will take place within the wagering area of the casino, a clear position for the state to take. Nonetheless, the assumption seems to be that bets will be accepted within the casino, processed within the casino, and—when necessary—paid within the casino—the same as with bets in all other forms of casino gambling.

Betting on sports is no different than betting on the fall of the cards, the roll of the dice, or the circling of a little white ball.  You will hear me say it many times in these discussions: a bet is a bet is a bet. It’s done in the same facility; the money goes into the same bank account; the taxes are paid on both kinds of money—although the casinos want much less tax charged on proceeds from sports betting by calling for a much lower rate and then by re-defining AGR to make less money taxable by exempting things from the taxable amount in some of the bills.

The proposed legislation accepts that casino winnings on sports bets will be considered part of the casino adjusted gross receipts (AGR) and part of those receipts will be funneled to public education. But the industry claims some of those receipts are not equal to the others for taxation purposes. Once again, a bet is a bet is a bet. That’s the central issue.

Although I have not seen a federal or state income tax form filed by any of our casinos, I doubt that there is one line for taxable income and a second line for taxable sports wagering income on those forms. The federal tax on that income is the same regardless of the source of the income. There is no fair reason why the state tax on AGR should be different from the tax on AGR generated by other forms of gambling.

Sports wagering is NOT something apart from the rest of the casino operations in either space, processing of bets, or in accumulated casino income.

The casinos argued in an earlier hearing that the tax on adjusted gross receipts should be much less than the tax on other forms of gaming because the house advantage on sports wagering is “only five percent.”  That is true. But it’s not the whole truth.

The house advantage of sports wagering is more than the house advantage of several other games offered by the casinos. A study done for the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas indicates the house advantage is lower than five percent for some of the other gambling opportunities in casinos, yet the industry has never sought a lower tax rate on those games.

Because sports wagering is just another gambling opportunity within the casino, the income from which is part of the general profits of the business, there is no reason to grant sports wagering a preferred tax rate or a different definition of AGR than is used for other gambling activities—as is proposed in this year’s sports wagering bills.

Missouri has 28 years of history to support this argument.  For almost three decades the monthly financial reports of the State Gaming Commission have broken out revenues from table games from revenues from slot machines for each of our casinos. Table games contribute about 15% of the revenues; electronic gaming devices, as the category is called, contributes the other 85%.

For almost three decades, the casinos have had no problems with the revenues from those two sources combined into one AGR figure and taxed at 21%.  Now, however, the industry wants you to approve and new, and what is likely to be the second-most lucrative revenue stream, but they want the legislature to approve a far lower tax rate for it—a tax rate that will undermine support from the other two categories for elementary and secondary education.

I have been told that casinos say they cannot do sports wagering with a 21% tax on AGR.  That’s THEIR problem.  The legislature has a responsibility and that responsibility is not to solve the casino industry’s problems.  The legislature’s responsibility is to the people back home–the school teachers and children, the veterans, the college kids needing a state scholarship, the home dock citis.

If the casinos “can’t do sports wagering,” there still will be gambling on sports.  It just won’t be legal.  and the casinos won’t make any money from it.  That’s their choice.

DAMAGE TO ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION

Various sports wagering legislation this year proposes tax rates on sports AGR of nine percent, 6.75 percent, 6.25 percent and 6.0 percent. (The particular bill heard yesterday proposes a nine percent rate)

The present tax on AGR from all other forms of gaming is 21 percent.  Ninety percent goes into a fund for elementary and secondary education. Ten percent goes to the home dock cities.

We can explain the problem with a fourth-grade-style arithmetic example.

Johnny’s mother wants to make some apple pies.  She gives him some money and tells him to guy ten apples. There will be enough to buy something for himself if wants it.

Johnny buys ten applies and, seeing plums also on sale, buys a plum to eat on the way home. At the checkout counter, he learns the apples cost $2.10, or 21-cents per apple.  His plum costs 6.75 cents.  The first ten items cost 21-cents each. The last one lowers the average cost of the eleven items to 19.7 cents each.

Using this example, the tax rates proposed for sports wagering could lower the average AGR tax to 19.91% (nine percent rate), 19.70% (the proposed 6.75% rate), and 19.66% (the proposed 6.25 rate, which would establish a new low rate in the nation), and 19.64% (the 6.0% rate proposed in a House bill).

In fiscal year 2018-19—the last full year before the pandemic significantly affected the casino business, the casinos reported to the Missouri Gaming Commission that $15,160,505,906 had been bet in their slot machines.  Table games produced “only” $1,255,959,366 for a total bet in our casinos of $16,416,465,272.  The slot machines had a payout rate of 90.3%.  Table games had a “hold” of 20.8%–meaning table games produced a 79.2% pay out.

The result was an AGR of $1,735,757,881, or 10.57% of the total amount bet and Missouri’s tax on the AGR amounted to 2.2% of all funds bet in slot machines or at gaming tables.

The math shows that a nine percent tax on AGR (the definition used for all other forms of gaming in Missouri) would cost elementary and secondary education about $17 million. The loss to schools would top $21.2 million at the lowest rate proposed.

I don’t know how many members of the General Assembly want to go home and tell their school superintendents they favor legislation that would pump tens of millions of dollars into casino profits while cutting state funding to education by $17-21 million with no realistic hopes of recovery. It will take a lot of PTA chili suppers to make up the difference.

All of this is based on numbers supplied to the Missouri Gaming Commission by the casino industry in Missouri.  We believe it shows the depth of loss the state will incur if the legislature passes these gaming bills without major rewriting.

The extensive homework behind these observations is below.

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All discussion of percentages and holds and payouts aside, here is what the current AGR tax rate produced in that fiscal year and how much the state would have lost if the tax rate were reduced.

21%       $364,509,155    Existing rate

9% (19.91) $345,589,394     Reduction of $18,919,761 ($17,027,785-$1,891,976)

6.75%  (19.7)  $341,944,303     Reduction of $22,564,852 ($20,308,367-$2,256,485)

6.25%  (19.66) $341,249,999     Reduction of $23,259,156 ($20,933,240-$2,325,916)

6.0%   (19.64)  $340,902,848  Reduction of $23,606,307 (21,245,676-2,360,631)

It might be argued that the increased AGR of sports wagering would have offset those losses.  How much betting would have been necessary to bring about that offset?

It would have taken an AGR increase totaling $210 million to produce $18,900,000 at 9%

It would have taken an AGR increase totaling $336 million to produce $22,680,000 at 6.75%

It would have taken an AGR increase totaling $372 million to produce $23,251,000 at 6.25%

It would have taken an AGR increase totaling $ 394 million to produce $23.640,000 at 6.0%

Actually, the AGR increase would have had to be even more substantial because the sports wagering bills re-define AGR through a series of exemptions that would have lowered the amount of money that was taxable.

If, using the 2018-2019 fiscal year as the basis, we calculate how much more would have to be bet on sports to reclaim the lost funds, and understanding that AGR represents 11% of the total amount bet (we’ve rounded up the percent), then the amount bet on sports to recover the lost funds at the four tax rates advocated in this year’s bills would be:

9%—$2,079,000,000

6.75%—$3,326,400,000

6.25%—$3,682,800,000

6.0%—$3,374,938,195

And further, there would have been another loss occurring because of the lower tax rates because the schools and home dock cities would be losing income from the AGR if it had been  taxed at the present 21%.  For example:

$210,000,000 taxed at 21% would have earned $44.1-million.

$336,000,000 taxed at 21% would have earned $70.56 million.

$372,000,000 taxed at 21% would have earned $78.12 million.

$394,000,000 taxed at 21% would have earned $82.74 million

In other words, the schools and home dock cities, while waiting to collect $22,564,853 at 6.75% would have been foregoing $70.56 million that would have reached them at the current 21% rate.

The loss to elementary and secondary education and to the home dock cities, therefore would have been (approximately) $25.2 million, $48 million, $54.8 million, and $59.1 million.

Elementary and Secondary Education (and the home dock cities) will NEVER catch up.

The goal for the casinos in adding sports wagering is to INCREASE their AGR.  This study shows how much the DECREASE in elementary and secondary education and the home dock communities might have been if the average AGR tax had been lowered, that it would have taken hundreds of millions of dollars in wagering to REPLACE the funds lost by elementary and secondary education through the lowering of the average AGR tax rate, and the income loss while waiting to replace lost income through increased wagering would have been an even larger financial setback.

Casinos don’t seem to care about elementary and secondary education, veterans, college kids, problem gamblers, or even their home dock cities.  Somebody has to raise these issues. Perhaps you might ask your legislator about whether he favors passage of legislation that will undermine financing for all of these issues we’ll be raising in subsequent hearings.

I hope legislative committees don’t send any of these bills to the floors for debate without substantially rewriting them to protect the interests of the state.

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A seldom-told story of the end of WWII

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This year has been the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II.  We’ve see a lot of publications about the anniversary, including V-J day, Victory over Japan day.  We have yet to see one that tells you the story we are about to tell you.

Most of us probably have seen photographs of General MacArthur signing the peace treaty with Japan in ceremonies on the deck of the USS Missouri.

But few of us probably have seen these pictures:

A few weeks ago my long-time friend, Hugh David Waggoner, called to see if I would be interested in an old trunk full of pictures from World War II that had belonged to a man named R. Sheldon Gentry (his first name was Rusaw, which might explain why he used “R” so he wouldn’t have to explain or repeat “Rusaw.”)  The name rang a faint bell with me but I have not been able to pin down who he was.

The pictures you see above are from the trunk.  The photographs and some 70-plus years old newspaper clippings tell the story behind the famous pictures of the surrender on the Missouri.  This story from that trunk is a story not often told, one I had not heard. So we’re going to tell it today because we doubt many of you have heard it, either.

One of the people in the third picture above is of extremely special interest because without him the war might have gone on longer than it did with consequences of immensely tragic proportions beyond the tragedies that had been occurring since Japan invaded China in 1931, the real beginning of the war.

A word, first, about Gentry, who went into the Army as a Second Lieutenant and came out a Major. He was a decorated photo intelligence officer who wound up with two Presidential Citations and two Legions of Merit among his medals because of his expertise in advising bomber crews about their targets. In fact, he went on several missions and helped guide crews to their targets in the southwest Pacific Theatre as the allies closed the noose around Japan.

Three days after the second Atomic Bomb was dropped, Gentry was in an American bomber fifty feet over Nagasaki assessing the damage.  A few days after that, Japan accepted the surrender terms laid down at the Potsdam Conference by the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union. The notification was announced on August 15 by President Truman, the same day the Emperor dramatically announced to his nation that he had ordered all Japanese military forces to stop fighting. It also was the day General McArthur was designated the Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers.

MacArthur immediately ordered the Japanese Imperial Government to send envoys to Manila on the 17th to put the surrender into effect. The delegation was to travel from Japan in a white airplane with green crosses on the fuselage and wings to the island of Ieshima where they would transfer to an American plane that would take them to Manila. The Japanese were granted some extra time to make preparations for the flight—painting an airplane, for example.  On the morning of August 19, the sixteen-member delegation boarded two re-painted Mitsubishi G4M “Betty” bombers and flew to IeShima (the Japanese called it IeJima or Iye Jima), an island in the Okinawa Prefecture.

The Betty was the main bomber used by Japan, often as a torpedo bomber—as it was at Pearl Harbor. It was fast, 265 mph, could fly 3,250 miles. One of its most notable accomplishments was the shocking sinking of the British battleships, Prince of Wales and Repulse during the earliest days of the war, the first battleships sunk in a wartime air attack. But the plane had no armor and no self-sealing fuel tanks, making it vulnerable to a few well-placed shots.  Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of the Japanese Navy at Pearl Harbor and Midway, was sought out and shot down in a Betty over Bougainville in 1943.

But that’s straying from our story.

The pictures at the top of this entry were in Gentry’s trunk.  They show the two disarmed Betty bombers, as the Americans called them—Americans gave male names to Japanese fighter planes and female names to the bombers—being escorted by two Army Air Force B-25s.  The second pictures shows one of them landing.

The delegation was met by American officers who escorted them to one of our C-54s for the flight to Manila.   Notice, in the third picture, the man in the white suit, in the center, wearing glasses. He was the only civilian among the seven men who sat at the negotiating table in Manila, across from seven American military representatives who worked out the final agreement in two sessions the evening of the 19th and the morning of the 20th.

In the trunk is the first teletype message that negotiations for Japanese surrender had been completed and Japanese negotiators would arrive later on the 20th in Tokyo.

But things almost did not turn out well.

The man in the white suit at the negotiations was Katsuo Okazaki, a 5,000 meter runner at the Paris Olympics of 1924.  Although MacArthur’s directive was for negotiators only from the Army and the Navy, the Japanese government decided to have a representative of its own with the group and selected Okazaki, the former second secretary of the Japanese Embassy in Washington and then the director of the research bureau of the foreign office.

The surrender flight to Ie Jima had been a nervous trip for those aboard the two bombers. “At that time the Kamikaze corps was still strong.  We had to make our preparations in secret lest the Kamikazes attack us on the way.  It took longer than we expected…

“We flew from Kisarazu airbase,” he recalled in a late 1947 interview with Ray Falk of the North American Newspaper Alliance. “A little after noon we were off Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost island, where we were met by American planes. We had been given the call signal, ’Bataan.’”

(The Battle of Bataan in the Japanese Philippine campaign of 1942 ended with a 65-mile forced march of 75,000 captured American and Filipino troops to concentration camps. The march was infamous for the brutality of the Japanese, who beat bayonetted the starved and weak prisoners who were too weak to walk. Thousands of them died on the march or in the camps.)

“When we called, ‘Bataan! Bataan!’ the American pilots answered, ‘Yes, we are Bataan’s watchdog—follow us…’”

The group returned to IeShima after the Manila conference to find one of their planes was undergoing repairs and split up, with half of the group going back to Japan and the other half waiting to fly back later.

“Half an hour before our expected landing time in Japan, the pilot came back and said, ‘I am sorry but we found our gasoline tank is leaking, and we have very little gas left.’ We were flying over water. We didn’t know whether we could reach land. We knew the bomber would not float more than one or two minutes.  Come what may, I was entrusted with all the documents.”

“Fifteen minutes later, the plane crashed, and I made a compete somersault. A second crash and another tumble followed.  I was ready to jump out when the pilot came back and said, ‘Please remain calm and swim ashore.’  We had landed in shallow coastal water.”

The pilot had managed to land the plane near a beach at Hamamatsu, about 285 miles south of Tokyo.

Okazaki went into the water and swam ashore, holding the vital documents above his head. “We couldn’t see where we were for it was so dark,” he continued. “Eventually a full moon rose and we went ashore. Two fishermen from Hamamatsu helped us to get to the Hamamatsu airbase.  The villagers had been reluctant to help us when they saw the plane crash because they thought I was a B-29. We were lucky not to have been attacked as enemies.

“Anyway, we reached Prime Minister Prince Higashi Kuni’s office at 9 o’clock the following morning, only seven hours late.  The cabinet had waited for us all night.

“I can’t imagine what would have happened if I had drowned. General headquarters already was mistrusting us because we were two days late in getting to Manila. What measures the allied armies might have taken are pure conjecture. But they would have been unpleasant. It might have caused the war to continue in view of the fact that our party had to escape from the anti-surrender Kamikaze corps which wanted to continue the war.”

There might have been conjecture on Okazaki’s part in 1947 but there was no conjecture on the part of the allies of 1945 who already had been planning one of the largest amphibious operations in history, Operation Downfall, to start in November.  The second phase would have been launched in early ’46 near Tokyo. Japan knew the invasions were coming but hoped the cost to the allies would be so great that the war would end with an armistice, not a defeat.

The forecasts for casualties varied widely. One estimate from Secretary of War Henry Stimson forecast 400,000 to 800,000 fatalities and as many as four-million total casualties, not counting the 100,000 allied prisoners of war who were to be executed if Japan was invaded.

But for Russia’s late-war invasion from the north and the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with threats of more such attacks—and a swimmer named Katzuo Okazaki—history might have been a great deal more “unpleasant” as Okazaki put it in 1947.

The first advance party of American soldiers arrived in Japan on August 26 with greater numbers arriving two days later, with the surrender ceremonies taking place on an American battleship in Tokyo Bay September 2. Okazaki was part of the Japanese delegation on the Missouri that day.

And what became of him?

The man in the white suit was elected to the Japanese House of Representatives in 1949. Two years later, Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida name him Chief Cabinet Secretary and state minister without portfolio. He became Foreign Minister in 1952 and during his three years in that office, signed a Mutual Security Assistance Agreement with American Ambassador John Allison. He retired but was called back to service to be Japan’s delegate to the United Nations from April, 1961 to July, 1963.  He died two years later at the age of 68.

And the Betty bomber, the Mitsubishi G4M1 that carried Okazaki and the others on those historic surrender flights? The Japanese called it the Hamaki, meaning “cigar,” a reference to its shape. Wrecked remains of hundreds of them are scattered throughout Southeast Asia and in the Southwest Pacific. The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum has pieces of one it is slowly restoring. A wrecked one is on display at an air museum in Chino, California.  Two years ago Warbird Digest reported two of the bombers had been recovered from the Solomon Islands for possible restoration. There are no flyable Bettys in existence.

There are more stories in that old trunk, It now resides at the Museum of Missouri Military History at the Ike Skelton Training Center near Jefferson City. We might tell more about Gentry in some later entry.  We haven’t learned much about his post-war years, but his trunk sure has some interesting things about that part of his life and the war he saw and helped fight. Now his trunk and the stories in it are at a place where they will be cared for and appreciated.

 

Better names

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If we are to remove the names of traitors from our military bases—and we should—whose names deserve to replace them? The issue requires some thought and some understanding of the purposes of the bases.

Rudi Keller is a longtime friend whose company I used to enjoy during my days as an active member of the Capitol press corps. Not only is he a fine reporter, but he is an excellent historian. During the Civil War Bicentennial, Rudi wrote hundreds of columns about life in central Missouri during the war. The columns were turned into two books, one covering 1861 and the other 1862. I hope that someday, somehow, his work covering other three years of the war are published.

Rudi is now the news editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune. He still finds time to write news stories and some opinion pieces published in the Tribune and in other Gatehouse-owned newspapers. A couple of weeks ago he offered some “humble suggestions for new base names,” a response to suggestions our military bases named for Confederate officers should get new, more honorable names. His ideas are worthy of consideration by the people who have the power to make changes.

Last Thursday, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley voted against an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act directing that new names be chosen for bases honoring Confederate military heroes. The amendment targets 10 military bases — all in states that initiated a war to preserve the right to own another human being.

In a statement to reporters, Hawley played the history card. We’ve seen it before, used to defend everything from flying the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina capitol to keeping statues of violent racists in places of honor.

“I just don’t think that Congress mandating that these be renamed and attempting to erase that part of our history is a way that you deal with that history,” Hawley said.

Well, as the Tribune’s resident expert on the Civil War, I would recommend that Hawley ask his colleague, U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, for some books on the generals whose names adorn some of the nation’s most important military installations. Blunt, you see, was once a high school history teacher and is a trustee of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

Blunt is not advocating for the names to remain on the bases. In fact, he suggested to reporters that renaming some or all would be appropriate.

“If you want to continue to name forts after soldiers, there have been a lot of great soldiers who have come along since the Civil War,” Blunt said, according to CNN.

Blunt noted that Braxton Bragg, whose name is on the largest military base in the world, was “probably the worst commanding general in the entire Confederate Army. He’s an interesting guy to name a fort after.”

But in case Hawley is too busy to read some books, here’s a short list of reasons why renaming those bases is a good idea. As Blunt noted, some of them have less-than-inspiring records of military achievement.

FORT LEE

We’ll start with Fort Lee in Virginia, named for Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Lee was an audacious, enormously successful commander and an inspiration to his troops. He was scrupulously honest, a brilliant engineer and he had a lasting impact on higher education after the war with his reorganization of what is now Washington and Lee University.

But instead of fighting for the nation that had given him an education, employed him and made him prosperous, he took up arms against it. That, in the Constitution, is the definition of treason.

Lee’s greatest military achievements were as an enemy of the United States. If he had been any more successful, the property occupied by Fort Lee would not be in the United States.

Fort Lee is a training center. How about Fort Steuben, for Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben? A Prussian officer, he served in the Revolutionary War teaching basic military drill, tactics and discipline.

FORT HOOD

Fort Hood, in Texas, is named after John Bell Hood, an aggressive commander who destroyed through incompetence the last effective Confederate Army fighting west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Fort Hood is the army’s base for deploying heavy armored forces. How about renaming it Fort Patton, after the aggressive World War II Gen. George Patton? At a crucial moment of the war, he spearheaded an armored drive to defeat the last Nazi offensive in western Europe.

FORT BENNING

Fort Benning in Georgia is named for Henry L. Benning, a competent fighter who served under Hood. Benning was never a grand strategist and never held an independent command.

Fort Benning is where the U.S. Army trains its airborne troops and is the home of its infantry school. How about renaming it for Gen. Anthony “Nuts” McAuliffe? He was the commander of the 101st Airborne Division when it was surrounded at Bastogne, Belgium and acquired his nickname from the one-word answer he gave when Germans demanded his surrender.

FORT GORDON

Fort Gordon in Georgia is named for Gen. John Brown Gordon, who was an aggressive and audacious commander but who, after the war, opposed the Reconstruction policies that gave civil, social and economic rights to freed slaves. He is believed by many to have been the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, although he is also on the record as having made some statements of benevolence to the people freed by the South’s defeat in the war to preserve slavery.

Fort Gordon is the Army’s center for signal and cyber security. Perhaps a better name would be Fort Lowe, for Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, who organized the Union Army Balloon Corps, which provided aerial reconnaissance of Confederate positions reported by a telegraph wire from a platform tethered up to 500 feet above the ground.

FORT BRAGG

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is named after Braxton Bragg, as Blunt noted, one of the South’s least successful generals. On two separate occasions, Bragg had major strategic victories within his grasp but failed at the moment of execution.

Perhaps a fitting name would be Fort Washington, in recognition of the fact that George Washington led a meager, ill-fed and ill-clad force in the Revolution. The name applied to the world’s largest base would celebrate the power of what Washington started.

FORT POLK

Fort Polk, Louisiana, a joint readiness and training center, is named for Gen. Leonidas Polk, who did not survive the Civil War. As a military leader, he made a major strategic blunder early in the war that cost the Confederacy the chance to turn Kentucky to its side.

As a readiness center, perhaps it would be better named for Gen. George Thomas, who held his command in readiness at Nashville during an ice storm and struck at Hood when the weather warmed, scattering the rebel army and ending any substantial resistance in the war’s western theater.

FORT PICKETT

Fort Pickett, a Virginia Army National Guard installation, is named for George Pickett, who gave his name to the famously futile Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. If the military wants a symbol of bravery in the name of a forlorn hope, perhaps it could remain Fort Pickett.

I offer the name Fort Johnson-Brown, for Gen. Hazel Johnson-Brown, the first black woman to become a general in the U.S. Army and, in retirement, a professor of nursing at George Mason University in Virginia.

FORT A.P. HILL

Fort A.P. Hill, an Army training and maneuver center in Virginia, is named for Gen. A.P. Hill, who died in the last days of the war after a distinguished battle record. Like Lee, Hill was educated by the United States at West Point and turned on the loyalties of a 14-year U.S. Army career to take up arms against his country.

It could be renamed Fort Sherman, for Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. While Gen. Ulysses Grant was piling up casualties in Virginia in 1864, Sherman mainly used flanking maneuvers to drive Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston back almost 100 miles to Atlanta.

FORT RUCKER

Fort Rucker, Alabama, is named after Gen. Edmund Rucker. A cavalry leader, Rucker was a competent commander and after the war, a business partner of Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Fort Rucker bills itself as the home of Army aviation. How about naming it Fort Doolittle, for Jimmy Doolittle, who commanded the daring raid in which B-25 bombers launched from an aircraft carrier to bomb the home islands of Japan in early 1942? The raid did little damage but it did bring a big morale boost to a nation reeling from the Pearl Harbor attack and notified the Japanese that the U.S. had immense power to strike out.

If anyone is squeamish about the name Doolittle because it sounds like the camp for slackers, it could be Fort Wright, for the Wright Brothers, who built the first successful airplane and sold the Army its first air machine.

CAMP BEAUREGARD

And we come to Camp Beauregard, established as a training base during World War I and now operated by the Louisiana National Guard. It is named for Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, commander of the forces that opened the war with the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

Beauregard won the First Battle of Bull Run, a battle he easily could have lost, but had few additional successes. His forté was dreaming up grandiose plans for a vast, strategic move with himself in command.

The camp is one of the oldest ones in existence from World War I. Might I suggest to the fine state of Louisiana one of their own, Natalie Scott, as the new namesake?

Known to be one of only three Red Cross workers to serve in World War I and II, Scott returned home from World War I a heroine. She was the only American woman to earn France’s highest medal for courage, the Croix de Guerre.

The current names are legacies of a time when racism turned those men’s traitorous conduct into a romantic legend of an honorable defense of home against invaders.

Time has consigned that legend to the ash heap of history and the base names should go with it.

Thanks, Rudi.

 

Why not Benedict Arnold Army Base?

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One of the issues growing out of the protests after the death of George Floyd is whether military bases named for Confederate Civil War figures should be re-named.

Their cases are different from discussions of whether Thomas Jefferson’s statue should remain at the University of Missouri or whether statues of other historical figures should be taken down because they were slaveholders in a time and in places where slavery was considered a normal part of culture.

Let’s consider Fort Lee, Virginia, originally named Camp Lee in 1917 to honor Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States Army, a hero of the Mexican War. The camp became a permanent military outpost, Ford Lee, in 1950.

Robert E. Lee might be the poster child for the movement to sanitize our history. Boston College historian Michael McLean has written, “Robert Lee was the nation’s most notable traitor since Benedict Arnold.” He was a hero of the Mexican-American War that brought us California and the states of the Southwest. “But when he was called on to serve again—this time against violent rebels who were occupying and attacking federal forts—Lee failed to honor his oath to defend the Constitution. He resigned from the United States Army and quickly accepted a commission in a rebel army…”

Did he ever show any remorse about his choice?

General Armistead Long, who wrote The Memoirs of Robert E. Lee in 1886, quoted Lee saying shortly before his surrender in 1865, “We had, I was satisfied, sacred principles to maintain and rights to defend, for which we were in duty bound to do our best, even if we perished in the endeavour.”

This great-grandson of one of Sherman’s soldiers at Vicksburg sees Lee—and other Confederates whose names are on current military bases—through eyes that are distinctly different from the great-grandsons of Lee’s soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia and leans toward a harsher assessment of Lee and the others than do some friends who admire him.

NPR’s Scott Simon commented on June 13, “Those bases were not founded in the wake of the Civil War, when President Lincoln encouraged national conciliation.” They weren’t opened until the nation geared up for World War I. Simon cited Civil War historian Harold Holzer saying the Army gave states “naming rights” to the bases in exchange for states giving the land to the federal government.

Simon went on, “Brigadier General Henry L. Benning was acclaimed as ‘Old Rock’ by his men. He once had two horses shot out from under him in battle. Harold Holzer calls him ‘a pretty formidable military commander. That is, effective in the war to perpetuate slavery. More to the point, he was a virulent white supremacist who issued incendiary warnings about the so-called dangers of having free black men outnumbering white men and threatening the purity of lily-white womanhood.’

“Harold Holzer says Braxton Bragg, ‘may have been the worst commanding general in the Confederacy. He was a bad strategist, an inept tactician whose usual order was to charge straight ahead…He did absolutely nothing to establish a claim to a place in national or even Southern memory…I just find it mystifying,’ he says, ‘that two iconic American army installations should have been named in honor of a racist and a screw-up.’ Braxton Bragg, we’ll add, may have qualified as both.”

He also cited English Professor Elizabeth Samet, who teaches at West Point and who favors re-naming the bases because they originally were named “to erase the true history, that the Confederacy fought the war to retain slavery.” She thinks the bases should be re-named to honor true heroes of various races who have fought for and died for our country.

President Trump seemed to miss the point when he said the bases “have become part of a Great American Heritage…The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds…” The grounds of those bases, however, are hallowed because of the heroes who trained there, not because of the names on the base entrance signs. The “heroes” he vows to protect took an oath upon their enlistment to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same…”

It’s basically the same oath created in 1789 and taken by other people such as Braxton Bragg, Henry Benning, Robert E. Lee and about a half-dozen others—all of whom deserted that oath and waged war against the constitutional system they had promised to protect.

If we evaluate prominent figures as historian Jon Meacham suggested in our last post, on the basis of whether their lives’ goal was to “form a more perfect union,” these figures fail badly.

…They were devoted to ending the constitutional experiment in the idea of Jeffersonian, however imperfect, however incomplete, idea of equality. And if anyone doubts—and there may be a few and they’re probably sitting there seething right now—if you doubt what we’re saying about what the Confederacy was about, go to your—what George W. Busch used to call “the Google machine” and look up the Cornerstone Speech by Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederate States of America. It is a speech that he gave in Savannah, Georgia that says, “The cornerstone of the Confederacy is the preservation of slavery.”

And once the battle against slavery was lost, then the cause of white supremacy took over. So those figures are part of that…History is history. That is what they were about. So why should we commemorate that? That has nothing to do with the sacrifices and the grace and grit of the men and women who have trained at those facilities. Nothing whatever.

They should remain on pages of our history books, not on the entrance signs at places where we train soldiers to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” a sacred promise these men broke.

Next week: A friend with good ideas about better names.

Us vs. Us

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A fearful old man sat down at my computer yesterday and began to type.

The son of Kansas Baptist/Methodist Republicans—Landon, anybody-but-Roosevelt, Dewey, Eisenhower, Nixon Republicans—earlier in the year fearful of a spreading plague but now fearful of something more dangerous.

Fearful that he might soon see an American Tiananmen Square, the violent and deadly pro-democracy protests that are remembered because of the image of one man blocking a military tank on its way to put down the demonstrations.

Fearful that a desperate effort to project and protect personal power without limits, unchallenged by timid participants from his own party intimidated by his presence and his loud loyalist legion will leave a legacy of distrust in a system of government created long ago by men whose ideals ultimately far overshadowed their ideology.

Fearful of a force that sees a crisis as a political opportunity rather than as a cause demanding responsibility and as an opportunity for creating a united spirit to reach an inclusive goal.

Fearful of a climate being expanded that encourages citizens to feel they are victims of government rather than responsible participants in it.

The old man at the keyboard remembers other bad times and other missed opportunities to heal the national spirit, other days of burnings and of lootings, other days when the peaceful expression of grief and of hope growing from it was overshadowed by uncaring opportunistic violence that diverted actions and intentions to create a better community and a better nation to overshadowing relief that the burnings and lootings finally were over.

The old man, having seen many things in a long life, is fearful, fearful that the democratic republic that he and his Kansas Republican parents have loved and believed in has been pushed to the edge of its existence by repeated missed opportunities and now by leadership that cares about plagues and public tragedy and disruption only to the degree that it can turn them to perceived personal advantage.

The old man is fearful when those within a leader’s orbit lack the bravery to advocate compassion that transcends perpetuating personal political power and the will to work for reason in unreasonable times. He worries at the loss of common integrity and the lack of diverse voices demanding it from those in the most powerful positions, and the refusal of those in those positions to display it.

His mind is often drawn to a poem called “Talk” by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko from many years ago that ends:

How sharply our children will be ashamed

Taking at last their vengeance for these horrors

Remembering how in so strange a time

common integrity could look like courage.

Integrity. Courage. The old man seeks them from those reluctant or afraid to display them. And in times like these when integrity and courage are most needed, he is fearful.

Dr. Crane on TR

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(A little more than five years ago, I landed on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt. This week’s news of the firing of the ship’s commander because he sought help he felt he wasn’t getting to combat an outbreak of the Coronavirus on his ship brought back memories of a mammoth ship with a crew half-again as large as the Illinois town in which I grew up, and visions of what could happen to the population of a city-ship whose people had nowhere to flee and nowhere to seek medical help except in the small part of the ship that is its hospital. The commander left the ship in Guam to rousing cheers of the large crew he sought to protect. The San Francisco Chronicle called it a “hero’s sendoff.” He was removed because he violated the chain of command and in the process showed a negative light on the Navy. He was a man who cared about his people. Dr. Frank Crane wrote about the man for whom the ship was named when Theodore Roosevelt died in 1919. What he wrote leads me to think he and Captain Brett Crozier have some things in common. It also leads me to wonder what will be written of today’s leaders sometime in their futures.)

THEODORE ROOSEVELT

Theodore Roosevelt is dead.

He has stepped from the midst of controversy and taken his place among the immortals, against whom no man can speak.

For the moment, the conflict ceases, friend and foe stand with bared heads to do homage to a great and valiant soul.

There is a sudden and loyal silence throughout all the hosts. For no man has ever been more a part of every man in the United States than Theodore Roosevelt.

His friends will rush no more quickly to speak his praise than his enemies.

For he was a man’s man, and it was a joy to fight him, as well as to agree with him.

His spirit was a fierce and beautiful flame.

His opinions were simple, and always avowed with the wholeness and self-abandon of a true believer.

He would have made a wonderful knight in the days of Charlemagne, a fair and worthy companion to Roland.

He conceived of life, of duty, and even of love in terms of conflict. His make-up was militant. But his conceptions were always sincere.

His chief characteristic was courage. Whatever may have been charged against him in the extravagances of dispute, his bitterest foe must concede that he was to the last a warrior unafraid.

And that quality of fearlessness, that indomitable bravery, when lodged in this weak humanity, is always a thing of beauty, a little spark of God. We love it. We respect it just for itself. It is the great worthwhile thing in an immortal soul.

So he was a friend, conceived of as a friend, in a passionate and personal way, as no other statesman of American history, except Lincoln.

He was very near to the American heart. And even in the stormy days of these vast issues that have beyond him, the tribute of respect that this people pays to him will be honest and profound.

He had a public mind and gave himself to the service of the people with a singleness of purpose that will be an inspiration to American youth.

He was thoroughly human. He was frank, overfrank sometimes, but we love the man whose heart outruns him.

Kings may pass and be followed to their graves with “the boast of heraldry, the pomp of power.” Presidents and premiers may die and their statues be set up in halls of fame; but none will go from the midst of the living and leave a sense of deep personal loss than this splendid man, this impetuous companion, who has been snatched by death from the intimate affection of a great people.

The Bull Moose has made his last charge.

The Rough Rider has led his last assault.

Bwana Tumbo, the mighty hunter, is back from this perilous expedition we call Life, and is gone home.

Friends and opponents, with equal earnestness, cry out, “God rest his soul!”

Upon his tomb there can be inscribed an epitaph, than which there can be no nobler, no prouder, no truer tribute:

“Here lies a real American.”