Category Archives: Places

Bob and George, Part II 

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I’ve already admitted that I appear to be woke and unapologetically so.  Now I have revealed that I once was involved with George Soros.

I have some strongly conservative friends but so far none have made the sign of the cross and waved garlic branches to protect themselves as I have drawn near them.  I swear, however, based on some letters to the editor, that there are people who each night pull their Murphy Beds down from the storage space in their bedroom wall and then look under it to see that George isn’t there.

Here’s how George and I got together.

One of the hinge-points in world history occurred on November 9, 1989 when the gates of the Berlin Wall were opened and the destruction of the wall began.  The fall of the Berlin Wall was the symbolic end of the Cold War, confirmed at a summing meeting on December 2-3 ith George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev during which both declared the Cole War was officially, in their opionons at least, finished. German reunification took place the next October.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republicans quickly fell apart.  When Czechslovak President Gustav Husak resigned on December 10, the only hard line Communist government remaining from the Warsaw Pact was in Nicolai Ceaucesecu’s Romania and he was about done.

(He pronounced his last name Chow-CHESS-koo.)

About the time Berlin was celebrating the fall of the wall, the Romanian Communist Party’s Fifteenth Congress  was electing Ceausescu to another five-year term. His speech that day denounced the Peaceful Revolution, as it was called, that was underway throughout Eastern Europe. Violent demonstrations broke out in the Romanian Capital of Bucharest and in Timisoara, considered the cultural and social center of the western part of the country.

Ceausescu held a mass meeting on University Square in Bucharest four days before Christmas that year in which he blamed the riots in Timisoara on “fascist agitators who want to destroy socialism” but the crowd was having none of it. He was booed and heckled and took cover inside the building.  By the next day the revolution was nationwide and the military turned against him. He fled in a helicopter than had landed on the roof of the building, just ahead of demonstrators who had surged inside. The chopper was ordered to land by the army which soon took custody of the president and his wife.

They were tried on Christmas day by a court established by the provisional government, convicted and sentenced to death. It was reported that hundreds of soldiers volunteered to be their firing squad. A firing squad described as “a gathering of soldiers” began shooting as soon as the two were in front of a wall. Their execution was videotaped and shown on Romanian television.

In the months after those events, Marvin Stone, a former deputy director of the United States Information Agency, with support from Secretary of State James Baker, founded the International Media Fund to “help establish non-governmental media across the former Communist bloc.”

In August and September, 1991, I was one of three men sent to Romania and Poland to conduct seminars under the auspices of the International Media Fund and the National Association of Broadcasters. While there we worked with The Soros Foundation for an Open Society, which organized the seminars we conducted.  The foundation told us it was formed “to promote the values of freedom and democracy in Central and Eastern Europe.”

In order to build an open society, one needs education, free communications and the free flow of ideas, and the development of independent, critical thinking at all levels in society. An open society is characterized by a plurality of opinions. There is never only one truth, such dogmatic thinking is the characteristic of closed societies. In an open system ideas, ideals and opinions are constantly challenged, and they enter into competition with each other.  This free, unhindered competition of ideas yields a better system for all.

I was joined by two other men, Bayard “Bud” Walters of Nashville, the owner of several radio stations who would discuss sales—a novel concept in a country that had nothing approaching a capitalist society or a capitalist mindset—and Julian Breen, a former programmer from WABC in New York who had built WABC to having the largest listening audience in America.

Julian died at the age of 63 in 2005. Bud, who is my age, still runs his Cromwell Media expire from Nashville.  When he was asked a couple of years ago about his career highlights, the first one he cited was being “part of a three-person media team that taught how to have a Free Press in Romania and Poland.”  It was eye-opening and rewarding.”

We spent a week in each country and all three of us were impressed by the enthusiasm the young people of Romania and Poland had for free expression.  I talked about the mechanics of covering the news, of who news sources would be—or should be, of the things people needed to know about in a free society (heavy emphasis on telling people what their government was doing for, to, and with them, a unique thing to those folks).  I talked of ethics, a particular interest of our audience.  I talked about the courage it takes to be a reporter, a quality necessary in building free media in a society still mentally adjusted to totalitarianism.

When we came home, we hoped we had planted some seeds of freedom in countries that still had few free radio stations, countries where many people—especially older ones who were accustomed to cradle-to-grave government regulation of their lives—were not sure what this freedom thing was all about and whether it was a good thing.

But the young people knew it was.  One of them told me there was a great irony in the advent of freedom in Romania.  In 1966, Ceausescu made abortion illegal. It was an effort to increase the country’s population. Decree 770 provided benefits to mothers of five or more children and those with ten or more children were declared “heroine mothers” by the state. The government all but prohibited divorces.

The ”decree-ites,” our friend told me, the children born because of the ban on abortions, constituted the generation of Romanians that revolted and killed Ceaucescu.  And were learning lessons about a free society from us.

A decade later, I was judging an annual contest for excellence in news reporting for the Radio-Television News Directors Association—an international organizationthat made me the first person to lead it twice—when one of my board members announced that we had our first truly international winner.

A young woman from Romania.

I think she was too young to have been in those seminars in ’91.  But knowing that a seed we had sown in Romania had, indeed, flowered, was a strongly emotional moment.

We were sent there by the IMF and the Media Fund.  The seminars at which we spoke were financed by George Soros.

For those who speak his name because of their ignorance of his belief in an open society, I want you to know that I am proud of my association with him even though it was decades ago.  To those who think we as a nation should be ignorant of our history of prejudice, discrimination, and coercion,  and blindly follow those who demean and insult our intelligence in their efforts to get and maintain self-serving power over us, I want to remind you of the goal of George Soros’ Open Society foundation:

In order to build an open society, one needs education, free communications and the free flow of ideas, and the development of independent, critical thinking at all levels in society. An open society is characterized by a plurality of opinions. There is never only one truth, such dogmatic thinking is the characteristic of closed societies. In an open system ideas, ideals and opinions are constantly challenged, and they enter into competition with each other.  This free, unhindered competition of ideas yields a better system for all.

When it comes to freedom, I’d rather have George Soros on my side.  Because I have seen the other side. Unlike so many of those who have turned his name into an empty-headed epithet, I have been within his circle. And I do not fear him.

Despots should.  And I know why.

George and Bob, Part I

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The far right’s obsession with George Soros as some kind of leftist boogeyman funding every supposedly un-American conspiracy it can think of shows a lack of creativity, reality, and intellect we should expect in discussions of our political system.

To some of these folks, the mention of the words “George” and “Soros” provokes the same reaction that Pavlov got from a dog when he rang a bell.

Soros bashing emerged again last week with the indictment of Donald Trump.  Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, attacking Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as “a Soros-funded prosecutor who refuses to prosecute violent crimes…” A New York Times fact-checker has found no direct Soros funding link to Bragg’s campaign although he did give a million dollars to a political action committee that put a half-million dollars into the Bragg campaign.

Our former Attorney General and Trump acolyte, Eric Schmitt, accuses Bragg of ignoring “violent crime (that) rages on & violent criminals walk free.”  Too bad he never criticized prosecutors here at home where our two biggest cities have had high murder rates for years, including time when Schmitt was AG or was in the legislature making state policy.

Current AG Andrew Bailey accused Bragg of being “another Soros-funded prosecutor with misplaced priorities.

Governor Parson says it’s a matter of “another Soros-backed prosecutor [who] uses the rule of law to serve his own political agenda, not justice.

My defense of Soros should not be unexpected because I have been a beneficiary of Mr. Soros.

Or maybe I was a Soros enabler and others benefitted—-although his critics will say nobody has benefitted from the distribution of his wealth as he sees fit to distribute it—-a reverse reflection of how the people on the Left feel about the Koch brothers and their support of right-wing activities.

In such discussions we should acknowledge some things:

The Golden Rule in politics has been expressed as, “He who has the gold, rules.”

That’s not exactly correct. There are a lot of instances in which wealthy patrons have invested in this or that candidate only to see that candidate lose.  But the super-wealthy can afford to just shrug and see who else or what else they can buy, confident they will prevail eventually—although most of us wonder why the super-rich feel a need to keep prevailing.

Why can’t they just be like Scrooge McDuck and go down in their basement and take a bath in their money?

Why should they?

Soros faced his wealth and the freedom it gives him to be involved not only in politics but in other causes this way in a 2016 essay in The New York Review of Books: “My success in the financial markets has given me a greater degree of independence than most other people. This obliges me to take stands on controversial issues when others cannot, and taking such positions has itself been a source of satisfaction. In short, my philanthropy has made me happy.”

One of the things that makes him happy is the project that involved me.

Before I tell the story, let me tell you some things about George Soros that his critics never talk about but they’re things that help understand some of the man.

George, if I may speak of him with a familiarity I have not earned, is about 92, the son of a man who escaped from a Soviet prison camp and made his way back to Nazi-occupied Budapest where his family—Jewish family—was living. He says his father printed fake identity documents for other Jewish families.  Those years living as a Jew in Nazi Hungary shaped his life.

He went to England after escaping from Hungary, studied economics and developed his philosophy of investing. He came to America, became a naturalized citizen in 1961and began a career as a financial analyst before he later moved into hedge fund management and a career that led him to be what he calls a “political philanthropist.”

This article from The Street  includes Soros’s Wall Street Journal article in 2016 explaining, “Why I Support Reform Prosecutors.”

Billionaire George Soros Hits Back at Donald Trump – TheStreet

It might be educational for some of his critics whose knees jerk and whose saliva glands gush at the mere mention of his name to read—-although I doubt that few will.  He seems to be right on the money, however, when he wrote, “Many of the same people who call for more punitive civil justice policies also support looser gun laws.”

As for supporting Bragg, Soros says he has never met him and has never directly contributed to his campaign although his political action committee has constributed money to a group that has given some funds to Bragg’s campaigns.  To assert that Soros owns Bragg is a big leap.

In the early 80s, Soros created the Open Society Foundations to promote democracy and financial prosperity in nations that were falling away from the Soviet Union as the USSR crumbled.

And that is when George Soros and Bob Priddy came together.

Now, to be clear—I have never met George.  But the opportunity he gave me to be part of his program to bring freedom to the newly-independent countries that had been Soviet territories for decades turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my career as a journalist.

George Soros is not always correct in backing the causes he backs. The history of his involvements makes that clear. Some of his assessments of this country’s present and this country’s future anger those on the right who see this country as the world’s dominant nation during a time when there are challenges to that idea and that reality every day.

His wealth and his world life-experience allow him the freedom to challenge those who have trouble thinking outside the box that constitutes the boundaries of the United States. But he does not have a corner on international geopolitical wisdom.  His ideas are open to challenge.  But such challenges are not beneficial if all they do is call him a name or vaguely blame him for everything that is wrong for this country and this world by merely beeathing the word “Soros.”

It is his right, as it is the right of wealthy others on the other side, to use his wealth to disseminate his opinions and to shape societies as he thinks they should be shaped.

The great broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow once said something that brings up a problem with the ability of the super-rich to influence our political system. Murrow told fellow broadcasters, “Just because the microphone in front of you amplifies  your voice around the world is no reason to think we have any more wisdom than we had when our voices could reach only from one of the bar to the other.”

So the super-rich on both sides of the aisle can afford a much bigger microphone than you or I can afford.  Finding a way to equalize the voices of the average American and the billionaire American is an important quest, but one unlikely to succeed in the foreseeable future.

My experience with George Soros leads me to defend him as something other than a leftist boogeyman. And I am naturally inclined against finding validity in those who only parrot cheap-shot party line character assassinations in place of intelligent discussion.

I’ll tell you about George and me in the next entry.

 

We Don’t Want Big Government

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—except we do want it.

I was listening to some debate in the state senate a few days ago during which one senator went off on the idea that government is too big and needs to be shrunk.  This issue has been debate fodder for decades.

Despite many cutbacks—I recall when governors proudly pointed in their State of the State Addresses how many jobs they had eliminated in the past year.

But do we REALLY want smaller government?

The appropriate answer is a familiar one:  Yes, for the other guy.   But don’t touch my programs or my benefits.

There’s an organization called NORC at the University of Chicago.  Although the outfit says, NORC is not an acronym, it is our name,” the letters stand for The National Opinion Research Center, founded in 1941. But it does businesses as NORC, the pronunciation of which always reminds us of a hilarious 1977 outtake from the Carol Burnett show in which Tim Conway, as he often did, ad-libs a story that broke up the cast, including guest star Dick Van Dyke.  Tim Conway elephant story – YouTube.

Well, anyway, The Associated Press and NORC have done a new survey.  Sixty percent of Americans think the federal government spends too much money. But 65% want more spending for education (12% want less).  Health care?  More, says 63% of the respondents; 16% want less. Only 7% of those surveyed want less in Social Security.  Sixty-two percent want less. Medicare? 59% more. Ten percent less. Increased border security spending is favored by 53% with 29% favoring less.  Military spending is pretty even—35% want more and 29% want less.

It’s interesting to see how these numbers matter in the partisan deadlock over raising the debt ceiling and/or cutting government spending. Heather Cox Richardson, whose blog is called “Letters from an American,” says Republicans are harping on Biden policies and want to slash the budget, ignoring the fact that spending in the Trump administration increased the national debt by one-fourth.  The GOPers in Congress want a balanced budget in ten years but don’t want to raise taxes or cut defense, Medicare, Social Security, or veterans benefits.  She says that would “require slashing everything else by an impossible 85%, at least (some estimates say even 100% cuts wouldn’t do it.”

She cites David Firestone, a New York Times editorial board member, who has written, “Cutting spending…might sound attractive to many voters until you explain what you’re actually cutting and what effect it would have.” Firestone asserts that Republicans cut taxes and then complain about deficits “but don’t want to discuss how many veterans won’t get care or whose damaged homes won’t get rebuilt or which dangerous products won’t get recalled.”

He opines that difference of opinion and philosophy is why Republicans in the U.S. House haven’t come up with a budget.  He says, “its easier to just issue a fiery news release” instead of dealing with the unpopularity of austerity.

What makes things harder for our people in Washington is that we want things.  And we expect them to get those things for us.  That’s why we’ve never heard a member of Congress come home and tell constituents, “I didn’t introduce the bill that would have built a new post office,” or “I didn’t work for a federal grant for the local hospital,” because the congress person didn’t want to increase the national debt.

And here’s another recent example:

Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who made a lot of political hay in her campaign by saying Arkansawyers should not allow the feds to become involved in state and local issues and who tweeted earlier this year that “As long as I am your governor, the meddling hand of big government creeping down from Washington, DC will be stopped cold at the Mississippi River,” has toured the areas of death and destruction from the tornados this week. Afterwards she said, “The federal government is currently paying 75% of all costs incurred during our recovery process, but that arrangement must go further to help Akansans in need…I am asking the federal government to cover 100% of all our recovery expenses during the first 30 days after the storm.”

She seems to be asking, “Where is big government when we want it?”

The other person is always the greedy one who wants the government to do everything for him or her until WE are that other person.

And that’s why we don’t trust politicians.  They give us what we want.  Then they argue about who is responsible for the debt.

At the basic level, folks, it’s not them. It’s us. We’re responsible for this situation.  They can’t argue with us so they argue with each other.

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Us vs. It—part XIII, Empathetic edition 

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We began this series in the early days of the pandemic. It’s been a long time since the twelfth chapter that likened what we have been going through, or went through, and yesterday.

An odd thing sometimes happens to the historical researcher.  Names and addresses become more than words and numbers on a printed page.  Something empathetic happens sometimes.  I like to say that ghosts live in those boxes of letters and journals or in the stories on the pages of microfilmed newspapers that make yesterday immediate.

Maybe it’s because the address is a place the researcher has driven past many times without a thought.  But now, knowing something that happened at that address produces a peculiar personal tie to the place. These are some of the Jefferson City Sites of Sadness during the great Spanish Flu expidemic of 1918.

1022 West McCarty

1029 West Main

1303 Monroe Street

708 East Miller Street

804 Broadway

Particularly, in this case, is this note in the newspaper from December 10, 1918:

Mrs. Fred Landwehr died at her home east of the city.

The house was east of the city in 1918. It’s well within the city in 2022.  I used to drive past this house almost every time I went to my home on Landwehr Hills Road where we lived for twenty years.  Mrs. Landwehr was one of the victims of the Spanish Influenza pandemic.  One of her descendants is a former Mayor of my town.

In most instances, the people who now live at the addresses above where part of that terrible history happened in 1918-19 have no knowledge of the small but enormously tragic event that enveloped their home so many years ago. They don’t know that the living room of their home might have held the coffin of a loved one who died in that pandemic—funerals often were held in homes in those pre-funeral home days.

We don’t know if such information would be particularly meaningful to the way the current inhabitants live their lives.  But these houses remain memorials to the citizens whose name mean little or nothing to most of us but who were part of the fear and the sadness that was there in that awful historic time.

And in the past three-plus years some modern addresses have been added that were the homes of victims of the worst pandemic since the Spanish Flu of 1918-19.

History is more immediate and more valuable than you might think if you know you are in a place where life and death happened or if you know as you drive past what circumstance of life was played out behind those windows.

Angry People Who Will Not Be Slaves Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ll be ready for these
Schoolboys

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

December 25, 2022:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Ring-Tailed Painter Puts a Governor in his Place 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The last man

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We have enjoyed some of the images sent back to earth from the Artemis spacecraft and its crew of three mannequins as it made its first rehearsal for a trip to the Moon.

We suspect an 87-year old man in Albuquerque, New Mexico has noticed them, too.

Harrison Schmidt not only saw the Moon from that perspective; he walked on the moon.

He is one of four surviving Moonwalkers. He is the only survivor of the last manned landing. Harrison Schmitt, Gene Cernan, and Ronald Evans were crewmates on Apollo 17 which lifted off from Cape Kennedy at 12:33 a.m., Eastern Standard Time.

Cernan, the mission commander, climbed back into the Challenger moon lander after Schmitt went up.  He signed a piece of artwork for me shortly before he died five years ago.  The third member of the crew, Ronald Evans, stayed in the command module while Cernan and Schmitt explored the surface.

Schmitt is the only scientist to have walked on the moon. He was a geologist who made one of the more startling discoveries in the Taurus-Littrow region where they landed. On their second excursion outside the Challenger, Schmitt excitedly proclaimed, “There is orange soil!” Cernan assured listeners back on earth, “He’s not going out of his wits. It really is.”

Fifty years ago, in the early morning hours of today, I watched the Saturn V rocket begin taking these three men to the moon.  To say that it “lifted off” is a gross   misunderstanding of what those of us at the press site witnessed that night. It was, simply, the most awesome thing I have ever seen.  Or heard.  Or felt.

The press site was three miles away from Launch Pad 39A. The flames from the rocket were so bright that the camera’s exposure setting barely captured the rocket as it broke ground.  The colors have faded but the memory remains vivid.

We were three miles away but I still was about 100 yards closer than Walter Cronkite and the other broadcasters describing the event.

Imagine a rocket so tall that if it was on the railroad tracks below the capitol would be as high as the statue of Ceres on the dome.  It had to carry so many tons of fuel that the flames and the smoke seemed to boil about it for several seconds as the engines built up the thrust to push all of that weight toward the sky.

For several seconds, night became day for miles up and down that part of the Atlantic coast.

The roar drowned out my voice as I tried to record what I was seeing and what I was seeing was beyond my powers of description.  The ground shook so much that an alligator in the swampy area between us and the Launchpad was startled and crawled up on the shore, causing some of the reporters to scatter.

If you have ever been close to a cannon going off, you probably have felt a concussion against your chest from the explosion of the shot. Imagine feeling that same concussion constantly, powerfully, during that slow climb that soon took the great rocket past the tower and into the darkness of that early December morning. And the roar could still be heard minutes later as the fire of the engines merged into a single distant dot.

My God!

Three men were on top of that thing!  And

They

Were

Going

To

The

Moon.

We knew they were the last, for now.  We had no idea it would be fifty years before another spacecraft capable of carrying humans to the Moon would do it again.

They were 28,000 miles out when one of the astronauts—history has lost which one—turned a 70-millimeter Hasselblad camera back toward where they had started.

It’s called “The Blue Marble” photograph.  It, and Apollo 8’s “Earthrise,” are two of the most widely produced images in photographic history.

No human eyes have seen us this way since Cernan, Schmitt, and Evans saw us a half-century ago.

The Artemis spacecraft is headed back to earth now. It’s to splashdown on Sunday. It will be two or three years yet before another Artemis capsule carries people back to the Moon.

I wonder if any of the twelve men who walked on the moon will be around to greet the next people to go there.

Schmitt is 87.  Buzz Aldrin, the second man to leave footprints there, will be 93 next month. Apollo 15’s Dave Scott, the seventh man to do it, is 90. Apollo 16’s Charlie Duke, the tenth man and the youngest Moonwalker, is 87. Schmitt, the 12th man to touch the moon—although Cernan was the last man to be on the Moon—is the second-youngest.

Only six others who saw the moon up close but never landed are still with us. Frank Borman, who commanded the stirring Christmas visit to the Moon on Apollo 8, is 94.

One of his crewmates, Jim Lovell, who later commanded the most successful failure of the space program on Apollo 13, is the same age. Bill Anders, the third member of that crew, is 89.  Apollo 10’s Tom Stafford is 92.  Apollo 13’s Fred Haise is 89, and Ken Mattingly from Apollo 16 is 86.

My brother-in-law, Curt Carley, who went with me on that trip and who shot the launch image with my camera while I was off trying to verbalize the impossible, and I went to our motel, finally, had a good morning’s sleep, then headed back to his home in San Antonio.  It took a couple of days.  We stopped in Houston at the Johnson Space Center and watched television screens showing us that the men of Apollo 17 were seeing.  In the time it took us to drive to Houston, they had reached the Moon.

There were supposed to be three more Apollo missions but they were cancelled because of shrinking budgets and shrinking public interest.  Short-attention span Americans and their “been there, done that” nature, had other things to do.

It was a time when nothing seemed impossible.

Fifty years have passed.  And I can still feel the pounding against my chest and see with my mind’s eye the moments when night became day at 12:33 a.m., December 7, 1972.

 

Tomorrow is Utopian Community Day

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Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day. Many of us will simulate a day in Plymouth Colony more than four centuries ago although the way we do it will be a far cry from what really happened.  Often not acknowledged by those who cling to that idea is that the colony we celebrate today was an experiment in socialism and that experiment was repeated several times in Missouri.

Plymouth is an early example of the human search for Utopia, a place defined by British social philosopher Sir Thomas More a century earlier as a place of a perfect social and political system. California historian Robert V. Hine defined such a community as “a group of people who are attempting to establish a new social pattern based upon a vision of the ideal society and who have withdrawn themselves from the community at large…”

Plymouth began as a socialist utopia not by the wishes of the religious group seeking to escape the oppression of the Church of England but by the demands of the businessmen who allowed them aboard the Mayflower.

The Council of New England created a contract that was signed by the church separatists we now call Pilgrims in the summer of 1620. The new colony would be jointly owned for seven years. But the separatists, not having funds to invest in the colony, would have to work off their debt. Profits would go into one pot with expenses paid from that fund. After seven years the profits would be divided according to the number of shares that each settler held.  Land and houses would be jointly owned and the separatists were required to work seven days a week. When several of the group dropped out, the organizers of the expedition recruited other adventurers to take their place.

So the Pilgrims became, in effect, indentured servants in a socialist colony.  Their debt was not fully paid off for 28 years. By then the Puritans, who had first arrived in 1629, far overshadowed the Plymouth Colony. John Butman and Simon Targett in New World, Inc., record that Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay merged along with the islands of Martha’s Vineyard, Nantucket, and the provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to become the Province of Massachusetts Bay.

By then, the leaders of the socialist colony of Plymouth had realized communal ownership and communal sharing was not working.  Colony leader William Bradford and his supporters decided to allow private ownership of the land. Each family was given a parcel. “God in his wisdom saw another course fitter for them,” he wrote.

The search for a utopian community in America did not end with Bradford’s pilgrims giving up on communal living. And in some places, it still goes on.

Roger Grant wrote in the Missouri Historical Review in 1971, “Missouri’s Utopian movement, which became one of the largest in the country in terms of number of colonies established, followed the national pattern of having communities that were both religious and secular, communistic and cooperative.”

The first group of utopians to come to Missouri, he says, were Joseph Smith’s Mormons in 1831 who arrived in Jackson County, planning to establish a “New Jerusalem,” a communistic religious community, near Independence.  But Missourians felt Freedom of Religion did not include Mormons—much as the Puritans of New England felt that those who did not follow their strict Puritan policies had to be expelled—thus leading Baptists Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson to found Rhode Island.

German mystic William Keil created the towns of Bethel and Nineveh in northeast Missouri after becoming dissatisfied with the Methodist Church. As he was forming his movement, some dissatisfied followers of “Father” George Rapp joined up, bringing with them Rapp’s communistic ideas but not bringing with them his ideas about celibacy. But he became worried that the outside world was encroaching on his kingdom, so he took his followers to Oregon, where the movement died when he died.  Bethel still exists as a community.

Others tried to form utopian communities as years went by. Andreas Dietsch founded New Helvetia in Osage County. He believed agriculture was the key to a good life, that all property had to be community property because, as Grant wrote, such an arrangement would prevent “man’s greed from destroying the good life.” But he died before his community could be established.

Cheltenham, a secular community, was founded in 1856 by French communist Etienne Cabet, floundered early and his flock moved to Nauvoo, Illinois after the Mormons abandoned it for Salt Lake City. This movement also died when its founder died. Cheltenham is now a neighborhood in St. Louis.

Alcander Longley created several communal colonies, beginning with Reunion, in Jasper County in 1868, Friendship in Dallas County in 1872 and another Friendship Community in Bollinger County in 1879, Principia in Polk County in 1881, Jefferson County’s Altruistic Society in 1886 and others in other years in other places, and Altro in 1898.  Lack of Capital doomed all of these places within a short time.

Agnostic George H. Walser founded Liberal, in Barton County, as a town that restricted religious buildings and saloons and tried to replace religion with intellectual organizations.  He built a fence to keep churches out but Christians moved inside the fence and held services over Walser’s objection. Liberal survives but not as the isolated intellectual utopia Walser hoped for.

So tomorrow, we celebrate socialism in Plymouth, throughout this country, and in Missouri.  And we celebrate the triumph of capitalism over socialism, as happened in so many utopian communities in our nation’s and our state’s histories.

“Socialism” has lost its meaning as an effort for all to share equally in the bounty of our nation and has become a political epithet spoken largely from one side of the political aisle.

Perhaps there’s room to give thanks tomorrow for the things that have been branded as “socialism” in our history— “every advance the people have made,” as our own Harry Truman put it. “Socialism is what they called public power…social security, bank deposit insurance…free and independent labor organizations…anything that helps all the people.”

The Pilgrims, and people such as Walser, Longley, Kiel, Cabet, Dietsch, and others here and elsewhere show us how Socialism does not work.  But when a farmer is able to turn on an electric light, when the retired person gets a social security check, when our money is safe if the bank is not, a little socialism sure is nice.

The Pilgrims never found the utopia they came here to enjoy.  All these years later, we’re still looking for it, too.

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The Colonies and the Mother Country

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The coverage of the change in the British monarchy has rekindled some interest in the comparisons of the United Kingdom with the United States.

Oscar Wilde, the 19th Century wit and playwright had a British character in The Canterville Ghost comment, “We have really everything I common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.”

Through the years, George Bernard Shaw has been credited with turning that comment into, “England and America are two countries separated by the same language!”

The other day, we came across a newspaper column written by former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, whose column, My Day, was syndicated in newspapers by United Features Syndicate nationwide.  She wrote on August 17, 1946 that the relationship between this country and the United Kingdom is “a little like a family relationship where the younger generation breaks completely away from the older generation with the result that relations for a time are very strained.

In most families, however, when either the younger or the older generation is threatened by real disaster, they come together and present a solid front. That doesn’t mean that they will see things in the same light in the future, and it does not necessarily mean approval on either side of the actions of the other—nor even that they might not quarrel again. But it makes future quarreling less probable. It is a kind of “blood is thicker than water” attitude which makes them stand together when a crisis occurs and, year by year, brings better mutual understanding.

She contrasted the characters of our peoples—Americans being people of light exaggeration and the British being people of understatement. Americans are more “dashing and perhaps more volatile” while the British are “more stolid and tenacious”

Remember this was just after World War Two. She recalled a British soldier who said the Americans did not enter the war until they developed an interest in winning, at which point they capitalized on “the hard work and the losses which we have sustained.”

And while Americans might not approve of many things important to the British, she write, there is a belief that we can find ways to live and work together.

In fact, she thought, that attitude is basic to our foreign policy—that “we can find ways to live and work together.”

The Colonies, us, are the kids who leave home.  But when there’s a family crisis, we get together.

Even in today’s world, three-quarters of a century later, she seems to have identified us.

 

Why Hasn’t Ukraine Lost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was going on?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We hope the ideas are not tested on Taiwan.

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

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

(Photo credit: youtube Ted Talk)