Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 45

151 Years of the Divisive & Partisan History of “Memorial Day”

MEMORIAL DAY -MONDAY MAY 27, 2019

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (Photo: Arlington National Cemetery) This memorial was created after the great losses of World War I.

(Revise of 2015 post)

It is a well-established fact that Americans like to argue. And we do. Mays or Mantle. A Caddy or a Lincoln. And, of course, abolition, abortion, and guns.

But a debate over Memorial Day –and more specifically where and how it began? America’s most solemn holiday should be free of rancor. But it never has been.

The heated arguments over removing the Confederate flag and monuments to heroes and soldiers of the Confederacy in New Orleans and  provide examples and reminders of the birth of Memorial Day.

In the Korean War, the U.S. military was integrated. (Source: Library of Congress)

Waterloo, New York claimed that the holiday originated there with a parade and decoration of the graves of fallen soldiers in 1866. But according to the Veterans Administration, at least 25 places stake a claim to the birth of Memorial Day. Among the pack are Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, which says it was first in 1864.( “Many Claim to Be Memorial Day Birthplace” )

And Charleston, South Carolina, according to historian David Blight, points to a parade of emancipated children in May 1865 who decorated the graves of fallen Union soldiers whose remains were moved from a racetrack to a proper cemetery.

But the passions cut deeper than pride of place.

Born 151 years ago out of the Civil War’s catastrophic death toll as “Decoration Day,” Memorial Day is a day for honoring our nation’s war dead. A veteran of the Mexican War and the Civil War, John A. Logan, a Congressman and leader of the Grand Army of the Republic,  set the first somber commemoration on May 30, 1868, in Arlington Cemetery, the sacred space wrested from property once belonging to Robert E. Lee’s family.( When Memorial Day was No Picnic by James M. McPherson.) The Grand Army of the Republic was a powerful fraternal organization formed of Civil War Union veterans.

Abraham Lincoln (November 1863) Photo by Alexander Gardner

From its inception, Decoration Day (later Memorial Day) was linked to  “Yankee” losses in the cause of emancipation. Calling for the first formal Decoration Day, Union General John Logan wrote,  “Their soldier lives were the reveille of freedom to a race in chains…”

In other words, Logan’s first Decoration Day was divisive— a partisan affair, organized by northerners.

In 1871, Frederick Douglass gave a Memorial Day speech in Arlington that focused on this division:

We are sometimes asked, in the name of patriotism, to forget the merits of this fearful struggle, and to remember with equal admiration those who struck at the nation’s life and those who struck to save it, those who fought for slavery and those who fought for liberty and justice.

I am no minister of malice. I would not strike the fallen. I would not repel the repentant; but may my “right hand forget her cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth,” if I forget the difference between the parties to that terrible, protracted, and bloody conflict.

But the question remains: what inspired Logan to call for this rite of decorating soldier’s graves with fresh flowers?

The simple answer is—his wife.

While visiting Petersburg, Virginia – which fell to General Grant 150 years ago in 1865 after a year-long, deadly siege – Mary Logan learned about the city’s women who had formed a Ladies’ Memorial Association. Their aim was to show admiration  “…for those who died defending homes and loved ones.”

Choosing June 9th, the anniversary of “The Battle of the Old Men and the Young Boys” in 1864, a teacher had taken her students to the city’s cemetery to decorate the graves of the fallen. General Logan’s wife wrote to him about the practice. Soon after, he ordered a day of remembrance.

The teacher and her students, it is worth noting, had placed flowers and flags on both Union and Confederate graves.

As America wages its partisan wars at full pitch, this may be a lesson for us all.

More resources at the New York Times Topics archive of Memorial Day articles

The story of “The Battle of the Old Men and the Young Boys” is told in  THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR (Now in paperback)

Now In paperback THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR: Untold Tales from Yorktown to Fallujah

Don’t Know Much About® Executive Order 9066

On this date- February 19, 1942 – a different kind of infamy

Dorothea Lange
In this 1942 Dorothea Lange photograph from the book “Impounded,” a family in Hayward, Calif., awaits an evacuation bus.

Franklin D. Roosevelt famously told Americans when he was inaugurated in 1933:

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself

But on February 19, 1942 –a little more than two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor— President Roosevelt allowed America’s fear to provoke him into an action regarded among his worst mistakes. He issued Executive Order 9066.

The result of this Executive Order was the policy of “relocating” some 120,000 Japanese Americans, and a smaller number of German and Italian Americans,  into “internment camps.”

I have written about the subject of the internment of the Japanese American population in the past including one on photojournalist Dorothea Lange,  and Ansel Adams, who also documented the period.

Photo: (National Park Service, Jeffery Burton, photographer

 

Among these resources is a site devoted to the War Relocation Camps –a Teaching With Historic Places Lesson Plan from the National Park Service called “When Fear Was Stronger than Justice.”

It is NOT Presidents Day. Or President’s Day. Or Even Presidents’ Day.

So What Day Is it After All?

Okay. We all do it. It’s printed on calendars and posted in bank windows. We mistakenly call the third Monday in February Presidents Day, in part because of all those commercials in which George Washington swings his legendary ax and “Rail-splitter” Abe Lincoln hoists his ax to chop down prices on everything from mattresses and linens to SUVs.

But, this February holiday is officially still George Washington’s Birthday –federally speaking that is.

The official designation of the federal holiday observed on the third Monday of February was, and still is, Washington’s Birthday.

I wrote My Project About Presidents in 3rd Grade when I was 9. Even then I was asking questions about history and presidents

But Washington’s Birthday has become widely known as Presidents Day (or President’s Day, or Presidents’  Day). The popular usage and confusion resulted from the merging of what had been two widely celebrated Presidential birthdays in February —Lincoln’s on February 12th, which was never a federal holiday– and Washington’s on February 22, which was.

Created under the Uniform Holiday Act of 1968, which gave us three-day weekend Monday holidays, the federal holiday on the third Monday in February is technically still Washington’s Birthday. But here’s the rub: the holiday can never land on Washington’s true birthday because the latest date it can fall is February 21, as it did in 2011.

There is a wealth of information about the First President at his home Mount Vernon.

Washington’s Tomb — Mt. Vernon (Photo credit Kenneth C. Davis 2010)

Read More About the creation of the Presidency, Washington, his life and administration in DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT® THE AMERICAN PRESIDENTS. Washington’s role in the American Revolution is highlighted Chapter One of THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA AT WAR.

And George Washington’s role as a slaveowner is fully explored in IN THE SHADOW OF LIBERTY: The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives.

The Hidden History of America At War (paperback)

 

Don’t Know Much About® History: Anniversary Edition

Don’t Know Much About® the American Presidents (Hyperion paperback-April 15, 2014)

 

Who Said It? (1/30/2019)

Franklin D. Roosevelt, First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1933)

 

I am certain that my fellow Americans expect that on my induction into the Presidency I will address them with a candor and a decision which the present situation of our Nation impels. This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself–nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory. I am convinced that you will again give that support to leadership in these critical days.

Source: Avalon Project

Franklin. D. Roosevelt was both on January 30, 1882. More here

FDR had the Flu

Of the many what-ifs of history, this is a big one.

In September 1918, Franklin D. Roosevelt -then the Assistant Secretary of the Navy- was carried off the troopship Leviathan by stretcher. He had just inspected U.S. troops in Europe and, either before leaving France or on board the transport, he came down with the Spanish Flu –then sweeping the warring world.

Leviathan, a confiscated German ship was converted into a troop carrier during World War I. The largest passenger ship in the world at the time, it was used to transport thousands of troops, many of whom fell sick during the Spanish Flu pandemic.

The fifth cousin of the 26th President, Theodore Roosevelt, FDR was taken to his mother’s Manhattan apartment. He had the flu and was deathly ill.

 

What if… Franklin D. Roosevelt had not survived this bout of the Spanish Flu?

Roosevelt did survive. Previously a New York State senator, he returned to politics and was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for Vice President in 1920.

In August 1921, Roosevelt fell ill with what was thought to be polio, which left his legs crippled. (Recently, it has been suggested he might have had a different illness.) Remaining active in Democratic politics, FDR continued his recuperation, learning to walk with the use of braces and a cane. He made sure that he was not seen using a wheelchair in public.

Despite this disability, Franklin D. Roosevelt went on to be elected Governor of New York in 1928. After the Great Depression began, he ran for a second term and addressed the economic crisis with relief packages which President Hoover resisted on the national level.

So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is…fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.

FDR- First inaugural address, March 4, 1933

In 1932, Roosevelt ran against the incumbent Hoover. With the nation in the depths of the Great Depression crisis, the worst economic downturn in American history. He had promised Americans a “New Deal” and started a series of federal relief programs to get the American economy moving again. Despite the continuing national depression, he was reelected in 1936 by a landslide and again in 1940, becoming the first U.S. President to win a third term in office.

By then his attention had turned to foreign affairs and the threat posed in Europe by Hitler and Mussolini and in Asia by Japan. He led the United States into World War II after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Born on January 30, 1882, Franklin D. Roosvelt died on April 12, 1945. Here is a chronology of FDR’s life as part of his New York Times obituary.

More resources on Roosevelt’s life can be found at his Presidential Library and Museum.

Don’t Know Much About® Edith Wharton

(originally posted on 1/24/2013; revised 1/24/2019)

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A plaque honoring Edith Wharton in Paris (Photo: Courtesy of Radio France International)

 

Born today in New York City in 1862: Edith Newbold Jones, who achieved fame as Edith Wharton, the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921 (for The Age of Innocence).

Romance, scandal and ruin among New York socialites—long before this was the stuff of People, and “Gossip Girl,” it was the subject matter for Edith Wharton’s most famous works. In such novels as The House of Mirth (1905) and The Age of Innocence (1920), Wharton painted detailed, acid portraits of high society life. In doing so, she created heartbreaking conflicts beneath the façade of wealth and manners. Again and again, characters like Newland Archer and Lily Bart were forced to choose between conforming to social expectations and pursuing true love and happiness.

Edith Wharton in France during World War I (Photo: Courtesy The Mount Edith Wharton’s Home)

The other lesser-known aspect of Wharton’s life is her experience in France during World War I, where she founded hospitals and refugee centers for women and children. She also wrote urging the United States to join the war.

 American novelist Edith Wharton set up workshops for women all over Paris, making clothes for hospitals as well as lingerie for a fashionable clientele. She raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for refugees and tuberculosis sufferers and ran a rescue committee for the children of Flanders, whose towns were bombarded by the Germans. Her friend and fellow author Henry James called her the “great generalissima”.

Source: Radio France International: “Edith Wharton-The American novelist who joined France’s WWI effort”

Her most famous work set outside the realm of high-tone New York was Ethan Frome (1911), set in wintry, rural Massachusetts.

Know your Wharton? Try this quick quiz–

TRUE or FALSE (Quiz adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature, written with Jenny Davis-Answers below)

1. Edith Wharton wrote about wealthy New Yorkers to escape the poverty of her own upbringing.

2. Though Edith Wharton was unhappily married, she could not get divorced because it was socially unacceptable.

3. In addition to her fiction, Wharton published several books on interior decorating and landscaping.

 

The Mount is Wharton’s restored home in the Berkshires in Massachusetts.

The Edith Wharton Collection of manuscripts, correspondence and photographs is housed at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

Edith Wharton died in France in August 1937. Here is her New York Times: obituary.

 

Answers

1. FALSE. Wharton was born to wealthy New Yorkers, and summered in Newport, Rhode Island. She grew up traveling through Europe, and was educated by private tutors. After an official debut into society, she married a rich banker twelve years her senior.

2. FALSE. She divorced Teddy Wharton in 1913.

3. TRUE. Her first book was The Decoration of Houses, establishing her fame as a writer. She also wrote about Italian landscaping and architecture in Italian Villas and Their Gardens, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.

Whatever Became of Thomas Paine?

Thomas Paine ©National Portrait Gallery London copy by Auguste Millière, after an engraving by William Sharp, after George Romney oil on canvas, circa 1876

Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God, than all the crowned ruffians that ever lived.

-Thomas Paine Common Sense

One of the most significant pieces of writing in American history was published on January 10, 1776. It was Thomas Paine’s essay Common Sense and is widely credited with helping to rouse Americans to the patriot cause. Its sales were extraordinary at the time; given the American population today, current day sales would amount to some 60 million copies.

 

Common Sense Source: Library of Congress

The pamphleteering Paine is best known for Common Sense and The Crisis, among other works that supported the cause of independence. But after the Revolution, Paine returned to his native England and later went to France, then in the throes of its Revolution. Paine was caught up in the complex politics of the bloody Revolution there, eventually winding up in a French prison cell, facing the prospect of the guillotine.

After eventually being freed, Paine wrote an open letter in 1796 angrily denouncing President George Washington for failing to do enough to secure his release. 

“Monopolies of every kind marked your administration almost in the moment of its commencement. The lands obtained by the Revolution were lavished upon partisans; the interest of the disbanded soldier was sold to the speculator…In what fraudulent light must Mr. Washington’s character appear in the world, when his declarations and his conduct are compared together!”

Source: George Washington’s Mount Vernon

This was a serious case of bridge-burning and Paine swiftly fell from grace in America. But apart from dissing the Father of the Country, Paine had also fallen from favor for his most famous work after Common Sense. In 1794, he had published The Age of Reason (Part I), a deist assault on organized religion and the errors of the Bible.  In it, Paine had written:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

(Source: USHistory.org)

After returning to the United States, which owed so much to him, Paine was regarded as an atheist and was abandoned by most of his friends and former allies. He died in disgrace, an outcast from the United States he had helped create. The Quaker church he had rejected refused to bury him after he died in Greenwich Village (New York) in 1809. He was buried on his farm in New Rochelle, New York. A handful of people attended his funeral.

An admirer brought this remains back to England for reburial there, but they were lost.

You can read more about Thomas Paine, his relationship with Washington and his ultimate fate in Don’t Know Much About History  and Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents.

 

IN THE SHADOW OF LIBERTY-now in paperback

While waiting for the arrival of More Deadly Than War (May 15) do check out In The Shadow Of Liberty: The Hidden History of Slavery, Four Presidents, and Five Black Lives

NOW AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK 

•Notable Children’s Books-2017 ALSC/ALA

•A FINALIST for 2017 Award for Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction by YALSA — the Young Adult Library Services Association of the American Library Association.

•A selection of the 2018 Tayshas Reading List/Texas Library Association

 

•Named one of the BEST CHILDREN’S AND YOUNG ADULT BOOKS OF 2016 (Washington Post)

Did you know that many of America’s Founding Fathers—who fought for liberty and justice for all—were slave owners?

Through the powerful stories of five enslaved people who were “owned” by four of our greatest presidents, this book helps set the record straight about the role slavery played in the founding of America. These dramatic narratives explore our country’s great tragedy—that a nation “conceived in liberty” was also born in shackles.

BILLY LEE, who became George Washington’s valet and fought in the American Revolution alongside him.
ONA JUDGE, who escaped from Washington’s Philadelphia household—only to be tracked down by the president’s men.
ISAAC GRANGER, who survived the devastation of Yorktown before returning to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello.
PAUL JENNINGS, who was present at the burning of James Madison’s White House during the War of 1812.
ALFRED JACKSON, who was born into slavery at Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage, survived the Civil War, and lived at the plantation into the 20th century.

These stories help us know the real people who were essential to the birth of this nation but traditionally have been left out of the history books. Their stories are true—and they should be heard.

Some of the hidden history from IN THE SHADOW OF LIBERTY

Five of the first seven presidents, and ten of the first fifteen, were slaveholders or raised in a slaveholding household.
George Washington once bought teeth from enslaved people to be used in his dentures.
For seven years as President Washington knowingly broke a Pennsylvania that freed enslaved people who lived in the state for more than six months.
Dozens of enslaved people from Jefferson’s Monticello, along with seventeen from Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation, were among thousands of African American refugees with the British in Yorktown, Virginia when American and French forces won the last battle in the Revolution.
The first man to write a memoir of working in the White House was formerly the enslaved valet of James Madison who witnessed the burning of the White House during the War of 1812.
Andrew Jackson went into debt to pay for the legal defense of four enslaved men from his Hermitage plantation who were tried for murder.

IN THE SHADOW OF LIBERTY Published by Henry Holt & Co. | On sale September 20, 2016 ISBN: 978-1-62779-311-7 | Hardcover | Ages 10 and up | 304 pages | $17.99

Available in Audio from Penguin Random House

 

Who Said It? (1/8/2019)

George Washington, First Annual Address to Congress (January 8, 1790)

Nor am I less persuaded that you will agree with me in opinion that there is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impressions so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours it is proportionably essential.

Complete Text and Source: The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara

Under the terms of the Constitution, Washington delivered this message to Congress in person. It would later be called the State of the Union address.

Read more from Washington’s Mount Vernon Plantation.

Who Said It? (5/19/2014)

 

Lyndon B. Johnson (March 1964)
(Photo: Arnold Newman, WHite House Press Office)

 

(Revised January 4, 2019)

Johnson’s “Great Society” idea was also presented in his State of the Union Address on January 4, 1965.

New York Times report on the speech.

Video and Transcript of the Johnson’s State of the Union address

President Lyndon B. Johnson, “The Great Society” Speech (University of Michigan, May 22. 1964)

Each year more than 100,000 high school graduates with proved ability do not enter college because they cannot afford it. And if we cannot educate today’s youth, what will we do in 1970 when elementary school enrollment will be five million greater than 1960? And high school enrollment will rise by five million. And college enrollment will increase by more than three million.

In many places, classrooms are overcrowded and curricula are outdated. Most of our qualified teachers are underpaid, and many of our paid teachers are unqualified. So we must give every child a place to sit and a teacher to learn from. Poverty must not be a bar to learning, and learning must offer an escape from poverty.

But more classrooms and more teachers are not enough. We must seek an educational system which grows in excellence as it grows in size. And this means better training for our teachers. It means preparing youth to enjoy their hours of leisure, as well as their hours of labor. It means exploring new techniques of teaching, to find new ways to stimulate the love of learning and the capacity for creation.

Source: American Experience-PBS:  “LBJ”

A few months after declaring a “War on Poverty,” President Lyndon B. Johnson outlined his ambitious domestic agenda to end poverty, improve the status of African Americans and create a more equal and just American society. In the speech Johnson said,

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The range of programs that were introduced fifty years ago included Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Head Start, and the Job Corps.

In April 2014, New York Times reporter Trip Gabriel assessed the War on Poverty half a century later in “Fifty Years Into the War on Poverty, Hardship Hits Back.”

President Johnson was a schoolteacher in a poor, rural district in Texas before entering politics. Read more about his life, administration and legacy in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents and Don’t Know Much About History.