Gettysburg and Armistice Day

by William H. Benson

November 15, 2018

     At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1, 2, and 3, 1863, the Southern General Robert E. Lee dared to invade the north, in a false hope that President Abraham Lincoln and the Union Army would sue for peace, and recognize the Confederacy, but Union troops held strong at Gettysburg. After the battle, Lee retreated back to the South, and for another two years, he fought only defensive battles.

     The battle at Gettysburg was horrific. Some 5,000 dead horses or mules littered the battlefield, and an estimated 8,900 men fell during the three days’ fight. The Harvard historian, Jill Lepore, said, “They lay in trenches, they lay on hilltops; they lay between trees, they lay atop rocks.”

     Cleanup crews set ablaze piles of horses and mules, and then covered the fallen young men with stones or dirt. One civilian was killed, a girl named Jennie Wade, struck down by a stray bullet.       

     In the autumn of 1863, officials decided to disinter the 3,512 fallen Union soldiers, and rebury them in what became the Gettysburg National Military Park.

     Then, over the next twenty years, officials and families from the South made the journey north to Gettysburg to dig up 3,320 fallen Confederate soldiers and rebury them in cemeteries across the South. Yet, an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 or more Confederate bodies still lay at Gettysburg, never disinterred.

     President Lincoln agreed to give the “Dedicatory Remarks” at the dedication ceremony at the Gettysburg Park, on November 19, 1863, 155 years ago this month. In about two minutes, Lincoln said 272 words. Edward Everett, a renowned orator, gave the Gettysburg Address. He spoke for two hours.

     Lincoln did not mention any individual man, soldier or officer. He did not mention the town of Gettysburg, or the two sides that were fighting, or even the word “slavery.”

     Instead, Lincoln mentions the Founding Fathers of 1776, that they built “a new nation” upon “Liberty. He lifts the words from the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal.”

     Lincoln talks of “a great civil war,” “a great battle-field,” “a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live,” and he says that “the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it.”

     The author Garry Wills said, in his book, Lincoln at Gettysburg, that Lincoln’s speech “hovers above the carnage,” that he wanted to “clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt,” and that the battle is “an experiment testing whether a government can maintain the proposition of equality.”

     Why did the young men at Gettysburg fight with such unswerving ferocity? During and after the war, some argued that Southerners fought for states’ rights, and that Northerners fought to preserve the Union, or for a thousand other reasons. Jill Lepore said, “Soldiers, North and South, knew better.” They fought for slavery, or against it.

     A Confederate soldier said, “Any man who pretends to believe that this is not a war for the emancipation of the blacks is either a fool or a liar.” In 1862, a Wisconsin soldier said, “The fact that slavery is the sole undeniable cause of this infamous rebellion, that it is a war of, by, and for Slavery, is as plain as the noon-day sun.”

     The Northern soldiers fought to uproot and eradicate the business of buying and selling men, women, and children. The Southern soldiers fought for the right to own property, and that included their laborers, their unpaid, held-in-bondage, chained slaves, a most wretched and horrific business.

     Sunday, November 11, 2018, Veterans Day, the 100^th anniversary of Armistice Day, the day when the Great War in Europe ended. As many as nineteen million soldiers lost their lives during that ugly war, and as many as eight million civilians, due to famine, disease, the Spanish flu, or genocide.

     The Great War was fought on a scale far beyond any witnessed before in human history. This was government folly at its worst. There was no moral reason, like slavery, to justify the massive slaughter. There was no speech like the Gettysburg Address, that “hovered above the carnage.” There was no talk of Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom.” There was only four years of slaughter, and then an Armistice.

      Human beings had invented machines that could kill other human beings with deadly efficiency on a battlefield, or from the air, but governments had not learned how to avoid the folly of war and steer the ship of state away from the precipice.

     At Gettysburg, men fought, and men died, and, as Lincoln said, they “gave the last full measure of devotion,” and that the world “can never forget what they did here.”

The New York-Packet and the Constitution

by William H. Benson

November 1, 2018

     Jill Lepore, the Harvard historian, published her newest book a month ago, These Truths: A History of the United States. In a short introduction, she describes in detail the October 30, 1787 edition of a semi-weekly newspaper, The New-York Packet.

     A reader then could have read: of “a schoolmaster who was offering lessons in reading, writing, arithmetic,” of an estate sale of “a large and General Assortment of Drugs and Medicines,” of a “Scotsman who offered reward for the return of his stolen chestnut-colored mare,” and of a merchant who was selling “dry codfish, molasses, ground ginger, rum, writing paper, and men’s shoes.”

     In addition, that same reader might have glanced at two additional advertisements. The first: “To be sold. A likely young Negro girl, 20 years of age; she is healthy and had the small pox; she has a young male child.” The second: a copy of “the Columbian Almanac, plus, as a bonus, something entirely new, the Constitution of the United States,” on “four pages of parchment.”

     A slave girl that could not expect pay for her hard labor for a white taskmaster, an almanac that predicted the tides and the phases of the moon, and a new Constitution that sought to ensure liberty. The New-York Packet‘s editor mixed the “atrocity of slavery” with the blessings of liberty. 

     Lepore also pointed out that if a reader flipped to page two of that same edition of the New-York Packet, she or he could have read Alexander Hamilton’s words in the first of The Federalist Papers.

     “[I]t seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.”

     Ever since, Americans have had “to decide the important question.” Can the people of this country  govern themselves by “reflection and choice,” or only by “accident and force?” The brash thirty-year-old New York City lawyer named Alexander Hamilton believed that we could.

     Except for Rhode Island, fifty-five representatives from the states assembled in Philadelphia on May 25, 1787. George Washington and James Madison came from Virginia, Alexander Hamilton from New York. Their average age was forty-two, but the oldest by far was Benjamin Franklin, then eighty-one.

     Together they pledged themselves to secrecy, going so far as to nail the windows shut. Stuck inside that Convention hall throughout that hot summer, until September 17, the men sweated, argued, debated, lost their tempers, regained them, and compromised, until they hammered out a Constitution.   

     The 20^th century historian John P. Roche described the Founding Fathers, “[T]hey were first and foremost superb democratic politicians.” Working in their state governments, they had learned the art of argument, of debate, and of agreeing upon a compromise that would more or less satisfy all.

     John Dickinson, a Pennsylvania representative to the Convention, said, “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.” In other words, pure philosophical reason constructed in an ivory tower may falter when tried in a world filled with power-hungry and greedy men and women.

      Of “experience,” the 20^th century historian, Douglas G. Adair, said that, “no other word was used more often; time after time ‘experience’ was appealed to as the clinching argument for an opinion.”

     Jill Lepore describes three founding truths: “the idea of equality came out of a resolute rejection of the idea of inequality; a dedication to liberty emerged out of [the] bitter protest against slavery; and the right to self-government was fought for by sword and by pen.” Equality, liberty, and self-government.

     In August this year, the political columnist, George Will, quoted Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural address of January 1861, when the new president called “the Declaration of Independence the ‘apple of gold’ that is ‘framed’ by something ‘silver,’ the Constitution. Silver is less precious than gold; frames serve what they frame.”

     With Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, plus the 55 representatives’ Constitution, and a Bill of Rights, we Americans, you and I, are a most fortunate and a most blessed people.

     Two interesting points. I met Jill Lepore in April of 2010, when I attended an awards banquet for the History Department at the University of Northern Colorado. She gave a riveting account of the close relationship between Benjamin Franklin and his house-bound sister, Jane Mecham. Also, Ms. Lepore points out in her book that the New-York Packet‘s printing shop was located a mere eight blocks from the World Trade Center.       

Segregation in Oklahoma City

by William H. Benson

October 18, 2018

     In Sam Anderson’s recent book, Boom Town, The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, he mentions three individuals, African-Americans who grew up in OKC, when segregation was enforced: Roscoe Dunjee, Ralph Ellison, and Clara Luper.

     Roscoe Dunjee began the Black Dispatch, in 1915, on the east side of OKC, and dedicated the newspaper to African-American issues. In its pages, he insisted upon racial integration.

     Dunjee’s words stunned his readers. In an article dated September 21, 1917, that he entitled, “The Jolt and Shock We Need,” he wrote,

     “Who is doing our charity work? Nobody. A feeble effort here and a little struggle there, and the rest saddled on the ‘white folks.’ All of this is the result of our lack of a live working usable organization. What shall we do? . . . And here we, at Oklahoma City, lay sleeping, unthoughtful of the moment, unprepared for tomorrow, disorganized, confused. What shall we do, who can say?”

     What Roscoe Dunjee did was begin an OKC chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and served as the organization’s state president for 16 years.

     One of his fiercest battle was the African-American’s “simple right to take up space.” Laws prevented blacks from moving into white areas. Dunjee encouraged his black friends and colleagues to cross the border and buy a house in the white neighborhoods. Once the police arrested the defiant man, “Dunjee bailed them out and sent them back to get arrested again.” A case went to the courts.

     A federal court sided with Dunjee and the blacks’ right to purchase homes outside of the segregated district. “By the tiniest possible increment, OKC’s black world began to expand.”

     Ralph Ellison was born in 1913, and grew up on on OKC’s East First Street. In his teens, he read the Black Dispatch cover to cover. Often he visited Dunjee’s office. He loved jazz, and he loved to read.

     In 1921, Ralph’s mother moved the family out of OKC, to Gary, Indiana. She decided that there was no future in OKC. Lynchings were too common. Anderson wrote, “The place was too brutal. She could not take her boys to the zoo, or to a decent public park. There was not even a proper library for Ralph.”

     On the way north, the family stopped in Tulsa, Oklahoma to visit a cousin, who lived in Greenwood, Tulsa’s segregated community, then considered the wealthiest black community in the United States. The Ellison’s were shocked to see “solid brick homes and shops, lawyers and doctors, wealth from the city’s endless oil booms, luxurious furniture, and in the cousin’s living room a baby grand piano.”   

     The Ellison family struggled in Gary, Indiana. No jobs. No food. Hungry and desperate, Ralph’s mother decided she must return to OKC, where the family would have access to food.

     On the journey back to OKC, they stopped a second time in Tulsa to visit their cousin, and were stunned to see that “Greenwood was gone.” Thirty-five city blocks were “a smoking rubble.”

     On May 31 and June 1, 1921 a race riot had broken out. “For two days, white mobs went to war on Greenwood, burning everything that the Ellisons had admired—its churches, shops, hospitals, and houses. Machine guns mowed down those fleeing the burning buildings, and there were eyewitness reports of airplanes circling and dropping incendiary bombs onto the roofs of buildings.”

     Young Ralph, then only eight, never forgot the sight. When seventeen, he fled OKC, headed north to New York City, where he became an author, publishing Invisible Man, in 1952, a best-selling novel.

     Clara Luper taught American history at Dunjee High School. On Tuesday, August 19, 1958, she, her daughter, her son, and eleven other children, “all members of the NAACP Youth Council,” walked into the Katz Drug Store on Main Street in OKC, sat down at the lunch counter, and ordered Cokes. 

    No waitress would serve them. Clara and “the children sat and waited. This was a test, a deliberate provocation.” The police arrived. TV cameras appeared. Managers told them to leave. Hours passed. Then, they got up and left. The next day they returned and sat down, and ordered Cokes. They waited.

     On the third day, “Katz Drug Store gave in and announced that it would now serve everyone, black and white, at its lunch counters, in OKC, and in all 38 of its drug stores across four states.”

     Luper and the children did not stop with Katz. They sat down in other cafeterias and businesses up and down OKC’s Main Street, asking for service. Luper was arrested 26 times, but she fought back again and again. “Through these sit-in’s, she and the children succeeded in integrating numerous public facilities in OKC and across the state by 1964.”

     Roscoe Dunjee, Ralph Ellison, and Clara Luper. Each understood how segregation led to despair and humiliation. Whereas Ralph fled OKC for a better life elsewhere, Roscoe and Clara stayed to fight. 

The Oklahoma City Thunder

by William H. Benson

October 4, 2018

     Early in the twenty-first century, Oklahoma City’s citizens were desperate to bring to their city their first professional sports team. The city’s fathers had already built a downtown arena, hoping to lure a hockey team there perhaps, but sports officials who make those decisions concluded that “OKC’s television market was too small to support a team.”

     Then, in August of 2005, Hurricane Katrina cut a wide and killing swath through New Orleans, and that city’s basketball team, the Hornets, had no place to practice that fall.

     OKC’s city fathers invited the Hornets to move north and play in their arena. The team agreed, and the OKC arena “was almost always sold out, and it became one of the loudest places in the league,” even though the New Orleans / OKC Hornets lost half their games that one season.

     In 2006, the owners of the Seattle SuperSonics put their team up for sale, and the Professional Basketball Club, LLC, a group of OKC investors, led by businessman Clay Bennett, indicated that they would pay the owners’ asking price, $350 million, promising Seattle that the team would stay in Seattle.

     Sam Anderson, sports writer for the New York Times, wrote in his book, Boom Town, “It’s hard to map all the currents and crosscurrents of delusion, collusion, deception, self-deception, naïveté, false consciousness, and magical thinking that must have allowed what happened next to happen.”

     In 2008, Clay Bennett announced he would move the SuperSonics to OKC. Anderson wrote, “This seemed like the world’s most obvious bait and switch, a swindle in broad daylight, for which both sides were partly culpable. Mayhem ensued: lawsuit after lawsuit.”

     Seattle’s fans were outraged. Yet, after the Oklahoma dust and the court cases settled, the team’s players and coaches packed up and moved to OKC. Seattle lost their pro basketball team. OKC won.

     One of the SuperSonics’ players who now put on the OKC Thunder’s blue and orange jersey was Kevin Durant. The SuperSonics had drafted him the year before, in 2007, and now he was ready to play his second season, but in OKC, and for the Thunder.

      Then, in 2008, Thunder’s management drafted an erratic point guard named Russell Westbrook, and in 2009, they drafted James Harden, the guy with a thick black beard. This was deep talent on one team. The stars were now aligned for a possible NBA championship. Another boom in “Boom Town.”

     Sam Anderson calls the six-foot-nine Kevin Durant “Mr. Nice,” a polite guy who, before games, kisses his mother and reads his Bible. His motto is “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.” His OKC fans loved him. “He was the perfect bridge between the NBA and Oklahomans.”

     Some commentators thought, “he was a little too nice, that he wasn’t aggressive enough,” on the court, given his size, and “that too often he failed to use his nuclear skills with maximum violence.”

     Six-foot-three Russell Westbrook was Durant’s polar opposite. Sam Anderson calls Westbrook “a petulant, impulsive, cursing, scowling, unbalanced, bullheaded vortex of doom.”

     Westbrook’s favorite play was the pull-up jumper. He would “charge toward the rim with reckless lunacy,” forcing defenders to backpedal, but then he would stop, “launch himself straight into the air,” shoot, and make basket after basket. After a big play, he “stomped and strutted all over the court.”

     Durant and Westbrook “formed as powerful a duo as you were ever likely to see in sports. It was absurd that one team had both.” These two pros “were a mighty but imperfect fit. They clashed and blended, amplified and diminished each other. KD was civilization; Russ was chaos.”

     Six-foot-five James Harden was the sixth man for the Thunder, the first off the bench and into the game, a left-handed shooter with a bag of tricks: “quick shots, misdirections, sudden shifts in speed, and arm motions that baited defenders into fouls.”

     Durant, Westbrook, and Harden made the playoffs in 2010, but lost in an early round to the Los Angeles Lakers. In 2012, the Thunder made it all the way to the NBA finals, where they met up against the Miami Heat and LeBron James, who proved too much. The Thunder won the first game, but lost the next four. Another bust in Boom Town.

     After the 2012 season, the Thunder traded Harden to the Houston Rockets, and in 2016, Kevin Durant signed with the Golden State Warriors. Only Westbrook remains at OKC.

     Next time in these pages, I will consider Oklahoma’s historical struggles with racial equality, another most interesting part of Sam Anderson’s book Boom Town.

Boom Town

by William H. Benson

September 20, 2018

     Before Federal government officials granted Oklahoma statehood in 1907, people called it the “Indian Territory,” a reserve between Texas and Kansas that the Federal government had granted to certain Native American tribes decades before.

     After the Civil War, both whites and blacks requested that the Federal government allow them to settle on certain “Unassigned Lands,” within the “Indian Territory.” By the Homestead Act of 1862, settlers could claim 160 acres of land for free, if they settled there first.

     On March 23, 1889, President Benjamin Harrison gave in and signed legislation that opened up two million acres for homesteading on the “Unassigned Lands,” within the “Indian Territory.” The legislation set the date of April 22, 1889, as the day when “Boomers” could rush in and stake claims.

     At noon that day, bugles blared, and cannons blasted, and the great Oklahoma Land Run of 1889 began. Men on wagons whipped their horses into a frenzy and raced toward the center, the point where the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railroad met the Northern Canadian River.

     On that spot, Oklahoma City was born. Its population exploded from 0 to 10,000, in a single day .

     The “Boomers” then looked and discovered that others had not waited for the bugles and cannons, but had “jumped the gun” days before. These “Sooners” had already claimed certain prime areas.

     In Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical, Oklahoma, the cowboy Curly sings, “Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweepin’ down the plain, and the wavin’ wheat, can sure smell sweet, when the wind comes right behind the rain.”

     The constant, strong, and red dust-filled wind in Oklahoma though does not blow mainly from the north or northwest, as it does here, and as the word “down” in the lyrics would indicate. Instead, the wind blows “up” from Texas, from a south / southeast direction, causing trees to lean to the north.

     A new book came out early in September. Sam Anderson, a sports writer who now works for the New York Times, has written, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World Class Metropolis. That long title describes the book best.

     Anderson writes about Oklahoma City’s beginning and its subsequent history, but he then intersperses that history with tales of the city’s well-loved basketball team, the Thunder, and its current and former star players, Russell Westbrook, Kevin Durant, and James Harden, the guy with the beard.

     Anderson also mentions the strong prevailing wind, the devastating tornadoes, and the hot summers.

     Anderson’s motif is “boom.” The city has endured a succession of economic booms, as well as its unwelcome sister, the busts. For example, wildcatters discovered oil under the city in 1928, and its residents have enjoyed numerous booms, followed by the busts whenever a barrel of oil’s price drops.

     Another type of boom Anderson mentions is the sonic boom. On February 3, 1964, a fighter jet, flying faster than the speed of sound, soared over the city, causing a series of loud booms. Eight times a day, for the next six months, the jets roared overhead, generating 1253 sonic booms. Windows broke, residents complained, but the Federal Aviation Authority refused to address the complaints.

     The city’s Chamber of Commerce had applied for and won Operation Bongo II, a Federal government study to quantify the effects of transcontinental supersonic transport on a city. The project measured the booms’ effects on buildings and houses, as well as the public responses. The study’s results caused the FAA in 1971 to withdraw from supersonic transport plans.

     Another boom was Oklahoma City’s land grab. In the mid-twentieth century, the city’s fathers gobbled up huge swaths of adjacent lands, incorporating them into the city, until it was one of the biggest cities in the world, in terms of land area. Today it sprawls over 620.34 square miles.

     Philadelphia, Boston, Washington D.C., Pittsburgh, Manhattan, San Francisco, and Miami could fit inside Oklahoma City, with extra space remaining. Los Angeles covers 502.7 square miles.

     The biggest boom ever to occur in the city was the home-built bomb that Timothy McVeigh exploded next to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal building on April 19, 1995, causing “a fiery 7,000-mile-per-hour wind and the deaths of 168 citizens,” a ghastly and most unfortunate event in the city’s past. 

     One glaring thing though that Anderson fails to include in his book is the citizen’s overwhelming devotion to Fundamentalist religion. After all, Oklahoma City lies in the very heart of the Bible Belt.

     Next time in these pages, I will consider Oklahoma City’s basketball team, the Thunder, a most interesting part of Sam Anderson’s book.