THE GREAT WAR

by William H. Benson

August 12, 1999 

     It was 1914, and the guns of August exploded that year, sending shock waves that were heard around the world.  The assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austria-Hungary empire, by a Serbian nationalist in the streets of Sarajevo, in Bosnia, just weeks before was the spark that touched off the powderkeg.  Once again, Europe deliberately chose war rather than peace.  We, the living, late in the 20th century, tend to forget how really horrible the Great War was (even though it began in the same place where today’s war is being fought.)

     By the time Armistice Day arrived in November 1918 four years later, more than ten million men had been swallowed up in places like Amiens, Verdun, Flanders Fields, Ardennes, Gallipoli, and Somme.  A whole generation of Europeans were wiped out.  The war was slugged out in mud, in trenches, surrounded by barbed wire, accented by blinding mustard gas.  Like a swirling vortex, those muddy trenches sucked in millions and chewed them into bits.

     Those fortunate enough to live through this meatgrinder and survive strode down different paths after Armistice Day.   

     For example, a 29-year-old corporal in the German army, Adolf Hitler, in the fall of 1918 sitting in the trenches in Belgium suddenly smelled the mustard gas and failed to put on his gas mask quickly.  Blinded, he stumbled up and away from the trenches.  Eventually, he was transported by train to a hospital in Pasewalk, and there he lay blinded in a state bordering on collapse.  His eyes were swollen, his face puffed up.  He irritably rejected the care of the nurses, wanting only to lie still and moan and be delivered from pain, even if by death.

     But the shame of Germany’s surrender on November 11 overwhelmed the young Hitler.  He resolved that if he recovered his sight, he would enter politics, and like Joan of Arc, that night he heard voices asking him to save Germany.  And then the darkness lifted, and again he could see.  Adolf Hitler, the madman, and his crazed drive for power were born that night there in the hospital ward in Pasewalk.

     Another who heard the guns of August was a Missouri farmer, Harry Truman.  He enlisted in the army, served in an ammunition unit, Battery D, and wound up as Captain.  He arrived in France in April of 1918 and left a year later, after the war had ended.  He saw plenty of action, but he and his men lived.  In that year he gained his men’s steadfast respect for his courage and fairness, and they all referred to him as “Captain Truman” from then on.

     Truman enjoyed the Army, the regimentation, the drill, the comradeship, the striving for efficiency in executing orders.  He learned leadership skills on those French and Belgium war fields that he never would have should he have stayed on the farm.  The war redirected him.

     He had left the farmer behind and was returning with a wealth of experience and dozens of friends.  “I’ve always been sorry I did not get a university education in the regular way,” he said later.  “But I got it in the Army the hard way–and it stuck.”

     He returned to Missouri, married, and entered politics, serving first as a county judge, then as a U. S. Senator, Vice-President, and finally President.

     Those guns of August 1914 exploded, and yes, millions of young men, both Europeans and Americans alike, died on the battlefields.  Hitler’s shattering experiences twisted him into a monster, but for Truman it was the genie let out of the bottle who lifted him up and into positions of responsibility.

JOSEPH McCARTHY

by William H. Benson

July 29, 1999

     A dog which decides to bite its own hindquarters runs in a circle until it finally drops exhausted, even though you would think it knows better.  History contains examples of this strange behavior–the Spanish Inquistion, the Salem witch trials, Mao Tse Tung’s Cultural Revolution, and 45 years ago America endured the Wisconsin Senator, Joseph McCarthy.

     To grab headlines, to intimidate both the weak and the powerful, and to deliberately stir up trouble, no one did it better than McCarthy.  The Cold War atmosphere was one of suspicion and of frustration.  In 1949 China fell to the Communists.  The Korean War ended in a stalemate.  Karl Fuchs and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg delivered the Atomic Bomb’s secret to the Soviet Union.  Communism held Eastern Europe in a tight grip.  A preposterus conspiracy theory that the federal government was rife with spies and about to take over the world terrified the citizens.

     Into this fear-filled environment strode Joseph McCarthy.  One of his favorite tactics was to wave a document, announcing “I have in my hand” a list, usually furnished confidentially by some patriot in the government, “whose name I shall never reveal,” containing the name to ten, fifty, or two hundred “card-carrying Communists in the Department of State.”  However, audiences were never given a chance to look at the list.

     He accused by name hundreds of government and college employees, businessmen, and even ministers of being communists or soft on communism, and their characters were tainted.  Samuel Eliot Morrison, the historian, wrote, “Actually, not one of the hundreds of ‘subversives’ accused by McCarthy as being in the state department was found guilty after investigation or trial.”

     McCarthy was cruel.  He was greedy.  He relished the power and the hurt his accusations produced.  People jumped.  He did nothing for his state.  He was one of the most colossal liars in our nation’s history, for he did not believe the things he was saying.  Un-truths and half-truths spread like wildfire about him.  According to Morrison, nobody who did not live through the early 1950’s will ever believe what a storm and a fury McCarthyism unleashed.

     Truman fought back when accused of hiring communists.  Young politicians like JFK hedged.  But President Eisenhower wavered saying, “I won’t get in the gutter with that guy!”  Truman later criticized Ike when he wrote, “I think the ugliest and dumbest thing that Eisenhower did . . . was the cowardly way he ducked the whole question of McCarthyism even when good, decent people around him were being hurt more and more by that awful and horrible man.”

     Finally, McCarthy accused the Army of communist infiltration, and the Army fought back.  The Senate hearings in April, May, and June of 1954 were televised, and McCarthy came across as an ignorant bully.  At one point he even accused the Army’s legal team of hiring communists.  The Army’s attorney asked, “Senator, have you no decency?”  Public support for McCarthy’s purge and his spectacular demagoguery melted away.

     On July 30, 1954 the Senate introduced a resolution against Senator McCarthy for conduct unbecoming a Senator, and in December the Senate voted to condemn the Wisconsin Senator.  With his power stripped from him and thoroughly discredited, his witch hunt ended.

      But what about all those he had ruined–what of their lives and careers?  I am sure they never forgot McCarthy’s stinging accusation, for emotion is the glue that causes memory to stick.  As for McCarthy, three years after the Army hearings in 1957 at the age of 48, like a tragic Shakespearean character, he dropped dead.  The dog released its bite on its own haunches and it dropped exhausted by the wasted effort.

THE BATTLE AT SUMMIT SPRINGS        

by William H. Benson   

July 15, 1999 

      All of the great conflicts fought on North American soil hold a certain fascination and enchantment, but the Indian Wars are especially appealing, even though only a few hundred people were ever killed in all the Indian battles combined.  But it was a winner-takes-all kind of conflict, each side, brave and courageous, fighting for what they knew and believed was right.  Places like Sand Creek, Beecher Island, Rosebud, and the Little Big Horn still enthrall even the most casual student.

      Probably the Battle at Summit Springs is the least well known, but the consequences for the Native North American after this battle were most gloomy; it effectively crushed his way of life on the High Plains and relegated him and his families permanently to the reservation.  All that remains today at Summit Springs 130 years later is a handful of markers hidden among the sagebrush and grasses, all surrounded by green steel posts and barbed wire.  It lies on the Logan/Washington county line about ten miles east of Atwood, Colorado. 

     May 30, 1869 was a pleasant Sunday that turned very ugly when Tall Bull and his band of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers attacked the German and Danish settlements along the Spillman Creek in central Kansas.  Maria Weichel, a 20-year-old recent German immigrant, watched terror-stricken as her husband George was killed and then mutilated.  Susanna Alderice, 28 years old, also watched in horror as the savages executed her three oldest children: 7-year-old John, 4-year-old Willis, and 2-year-old Frank.  The Dog Soldiers then put both women on horses, thus beginning their ride through hell that ended forty-two days, exactly six weeks, later at Summit Springs.

     The women were repeatedly violated.  They were abused, tortured, whipped, beaten.  They were forced to put up and tear down the lodges.  They cooked.  Tall Bull’s squaw made Susanna her personal slave. Life reverted into an ugliness that was unbearable.

     Tall Bull and his band of 84 lodges and about 500 people escaped west but held up at Summit Springs because it was surrounded on three sides by sandy hills.  The spring provided water.  There, the Cavalry, led by Brevet Major General Eugene Carr, found them on a hot Sunday, July 11.  Astride exhausted and thirsty horses, the armed soldiers swept through the camp at about three o’clock.  The battle was one-sided.  Fifty-two Indians were killed that afternoon, including Tall Bull, but only two white people suffered injuries.  Maria Weichel was shot, but a rib deflected the bullet.  She lived.  But when Tall Bull’s squaw discovered they were being attacked, she tomahawked Susanna Alderice in the forehead.  She died.

     Later that afternoon a summer thunderstorm mixed with hail pounded the battle site and the fleeing Cheyenne Indians.  Inside one of the lodges out of the storm, the cavalry’s physician, Dr. Louis Tesson, examined and found both women in pitiful condition–pregnant, scratched, scraped, burnt, and emaciated.  Carefully, he bandaged Maria’s breast wound and then turned his attention to Susanna.  He dressed Susanna’s deadly head wound, bathed her body, brushed her hair, and layed her in a clean buffalo robe.  Soldiers stood guard all that night outside while she lay inside, at last in peace.

     Col. Ray G. Sparks, the army historian, wrote, “An officer read the burial service in a broken voice–in a silence that could be felt.  Susanna in her warm buffalo robe, was tenderly wrapped about with a new lodge skin, then gently lowered into her grave.

     “Full traditional military honors were accorded her.  Three volleys were fired over her grave, then the sad, haunting notes of taps sang clear and distinct over the wind-swept prairie, to be lost, finally to all but God, as is Susanna’s lonely grave.”

     That same morning the torch was put to the lodges, and then the cavalry unit headed north to Fort Sedgwick.  There, Maria Weichel married her hospital steward and was released from the hospital on August 4.  All trace of her whereabouts afterwards was lost.

THOMAS PAINE

by William H. Benson

July 1, 1999 

     A revolt against the existing government done with the hope of a new and potentially better government defines a revolution.  The English Colonists on the Atlantic seaboard of the North American continent in the mid-18th century were the pioneers in the business of revolution.  Up to that time virtually no colony had successfully revolted against a European power, and the consequences for a failed revolution against Great Britain’s King was death.  Revolution was treason.

     But the Colonists were weary of dealing with King George III who was separated from the colonies by an ocean.  Virginia and Massachusetts especially, but also the other eleven colonies, had relished colonial self-rule for two and a half centuries with a minimum of interference from the King’s reach.  However, by 1776 King George’s rules and edicts had frustrated and even angered these proud colonial Englishmen who only incidentally happened to live in an American colony.  They believed that they knew best how to govern themselves.

      What should they do?  To revolt was criminal, and they certainly did not have sufficient power to change the King nor his policies.  War seemed imminent.  It was in the midst of this indecisive moment that the final break with England came.  In January of 1776 an Englishman, who had arrived in America only a year before, published his thoughts on what should be done.  Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense.  About 150,000 copies were sold in a few months, arousing the Colonists.

      Paine was one of those rare individuals who thought deeply about the issues and then said what he though without regard for the way things actually were.  At this time he said that the Colonists did not need a king, that they were Americans first and not Englishmen.  They should revolt.  He called George III a “royal brute” and declared, “Of more worth is one honest man to society and in the sight of God than all the crowned ruffians who ever lived.”  Respect for the king had been bred into most Americans almost as strongly as respect for God, but now Paine, an eloquent propagandist, called for the abolishment of all royalty.

      He wrote, “These are the times that try men’s souls.  The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.  Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.  What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”

      The Colonists read Paine’s words and rightfully concluded that they should revolt and construct a new American government.  Whispered in secret before, the idea of Independence was now openly discussed.  And so they did revolt, and they declared their independence from King George III eight months later.

       Thomas Paine’s words captured the Colonists’ minds and every American generation since then.  It was he who struck the match and ignited the fuse of a firecracker (the idea that people should rule themselves and not be ruled) that still lights up the night sky across the globe for all to see– the Fourth of July or America’s Day of Independence.

WATERGATE

by William H. Benson

June 17, 1999 

     The “long national nightmare” began on June 17, 1972 as a bungled third-rate burglary into the Democratic National Party’s sixth floor suite at the Watergate Hotel in Washington D.C.  Captured in the act was the Plumbers Gang–James McCord and four others who were following  orders given by White House aides, E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy.  Eventually, Liddy, Hunt, and McCord went to prison, and a spokesman for the White House said there “was absolutely no evidence that others were involved” in either the break-in or the coverup.

     How much did President Nixon and his White House staff really know about the break-in, and more importantly, the coverup?  That became the question asked by Congress and the American public for months.  Nixon lied repeatedly.  (The words still sound today so cruel, and yet it accurately described his actions.)  He claimed he knew nothing of the break-in nor of the coverup until many months afterwords.  But two reporters, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post with Ben Bradlee’s and Katherine Graham’s approval kept “following the money” and listening to an unidentified White House source, code named “Deep Throat”, and finally the truth came out.

     On June 25, 1973, one year after the break-in, John Dean, a former White House counsel, testified to the Senate Committee that President Nixon had participated in the Watergate coverup for as long as eight months, and he had warned Nixon that covering up the truth was “a cancer growing on the Presidency.”  Dean implicated Haldeman and Ehrlichman, Nixon’s righthand men, as the two prime orchestrators of the coverup.  Three weeks later Alexander Butterfield revealed to the Senate that Nixon had secretly recorded conversations in the Oval Office.  Congress suspected that those tapes would constitute incriminating evidence, ie. a “smoking gun.”

     For a year Nixon stubbornly refused to surrender the actual tapes, choosing instead to submit an edited version without the missing 18 1/2 minutes of a key conversation Nixon had had with Haldeman.  In a session with reporters, Nixon lashed out, “People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook.  Well, I’m not a crook!”  On July 30, 1974 the Supreme Court by an 8 to 0 vote said Nixon must turn over the actual tapes.

     He did so, and the tapes proved that six days after the break-in he had ordered a halt to the investigation–an act constituting obstruction of justice.  Knowing that he had no support in either the House nor in the Senate to avoid impeachment, on the evening of August 8, he resigned the Presidency, and six weeks later President Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon, a highly debatable act.

     The Founding Fathers in the Constitution stated that “high crimes and misdemeanors” were impeachable offenses by a President, and it was around this phrase that much of Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999 revolved.  Unfortunately, the Founding Fathers failed to clearly define those terms.  However, Congress believed in 1974 that what Nixon and his collegues had done fell within that category.  But what really disgusted the American public was Watergate’s shabbiness: leaving payoff money in phone booths, the filthy language Nixon used in the Oval Office, the stonewalling, the hypocritical lying, and the bullheaded refusal to release the tapes. 

     Will there be other Watergates?  There have been, and there will be.  Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  If freedom and the Bill of Rights are to have any meaning and be retained by this nation’s citizenry, the public must continually prepare themselves to face with resolve and willpower repeated Watergates–“long national nighmares”.