Samuel Clemens, late in his life, believed that his private thoughts on Christianity and American imperialism were so far out of the mainstream in his place and time that he took them down on paper and took legal action to insure that they would not be presented to the world until a full 100 years after his death. (They subsequently were published, right on time, in 2010.) Yet these opinions can be found, in form, throughout his many works of both fiction and non-fiction.
In a matter of hours this weekend, I read "Roughing It in the Sandwich Islands," travel literature by Clemens that precedes even his first published book. "Roughing It" is actually a collection of 25 articles written in 1866 when Clemens was working as an assignment reporter for the Sacramento Union, then among the most prominent newspapers in the West. Only three years earlier, he had adopted the pen name "Mark Twain."
These dispatches were written during a journey to the Hawaiian Islands (then commonly referred to as the Sandwich Islands in the Anglo world) that seemed to have a most extraordinary impact on his future belief system and writings. When he sat down to write his autobiography years later, around the turn of the 20th Century, the Spanish-American War had been in the recent headlines. It was during this little U.S. military adventure that President William McKinley and Congress annexed Hawaii, not to mention Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and other points South and West that were primarily populated by brown peoples. Twain's exploration of Hawaii a generation earlier definitely served as a starting point for the time when he would expound in print on themes of American (and British) imperialism, and examine the impact of Christian missionaries ceaselessly on the march around the world.
In these self-censored memoirs late in the century, Clemens referred to American soldiers as "uniformed assassins," and described their killing of “six hundred helpless and weaponless savages” in the Philippines as “a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory.”
Reading "Roughing It," which incidentally was not just published in Twain's own time, but very early in his career, you can see the roots of his anti-imperialist and anti-religious attitudes, though they're typically cloaked in Twain's humor and sense of the absurd. It's especially evident when the author is giving historical context to what he calls the "last battle.. for idolatry" between the islanders and their superstitious pagan priests during the late 18th Century. He reports that British Captain James Cook had recently been killed by the islanders when they discovered that the seaman had only been pretending to be the god Lono, and idols were falling all around. The priests, having been removed from "the fattest offices in the land," revolted against the newly-enlightened island royalty.
The battle was long and fierce-- men and women fighting side by side, as was the custom-- and when the day was done the rebels were flying in every direction in hopeless panic, and idolatry and the tabu were dead in the land! The Royalists marched gayly home to Kailua glorifying the new dispensation. "There is no power in the gods," said they; they are a vanity and a lie. The army with idols was weak; the army without idols was strong and victorious!" The nation was without a religion.
The missionary ship arrived in safety shortly afterward, timed by providential exactness to meet the emergency, and the Gospel was planted as in virgin soil.
Mark Twain's attitudes on these subjects were actually very well-known in his time in that he served as president of a prominent anti-imperialist organization, and gently mocked Biblical passions on stage and in print, but his words, we now know, were much harsher on both subjects when he was in private quarters. The public figure, Twain, used humor to convey his feelings. The private man, Clemens, was royally pissed.
This makes the "Roughing It" entries from Hawaii a fun read. Only one year after the Civil War, and at only 30 years of age, Samuel Clemens was already in the process of becoming the character for which he would eventually be legacied, the critical observer of a nation that Faulkner would label during the next century "the father of American literature." Clemens was a satirist and secularist disdainful of religious evangelism, and an outright enemy of the belief in an American or Christian cultural superiority. These attitudes shaped both his sense of comedy and his righteous anger, and they're the reasons he's remembered with almost universal admiration today. He's remarkably a man well ahead of his time, especially when we consider that even prominent academics of the day, and certainly the politicians, believed collectively and wholeheartedly in the concept of white supremacy, and even a scientific justification for it.
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I enjoyed this passage from the book also:
At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen. I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied that they were running some risk. But they were not afraid, and presently went on with their sport.
The true Labor Day across the globe is May 1st, and now that we have a national labor movement alive again in this country called the Occupy Movement, the holiday is being resurrected with a call for a general strike. Alternet's Jacob Remes provides a history...
May Day is a beautifully American holiday, one created by American workers, crushed by the American government, incubated abroad, and returned to the United States by immigrant workers.
In an effort to erase the martyrs of Chicago's Haymarket Square Riot in 1886 from the national consciousness, leaders of almost every generation of capitalism that followed have attempted to re-define the day. Even as International Workers Day, and the anniversary of the deadly fight for the 8-hour work day, is celebrated in nearly every other democratic nation on the planet, U.S. presidents (those bludgeoning instruments of Wall Street) have declared the day officially-- and offensively-- "Americanization Day," "Loyalty Day," and "Law Day."
May Day has been suppressed here in concerted fashion, but it lives in the world, and damn it if these immigrants don't keep reviving it. That makes me swell with pride as it was my great-great-grandfather's generation of Midwest-dwelling, first-generation German immigrants that was directly responsible for making the 8-hour work day a reality for much of the world.
One of my favorite stand-up comics is Mike Birbiglia. He's been around quite a while on the fringe of fame, in and out of my purview, but I've never had a problem remembering his (unusual) name. When he debuted on Letterman over a decade ago, he delivered a classic bit that's stayed in my memory.
Birbiglia was riffing on rap stars that insert their name at the end of one of their rhymes-- "Cat in the Hat/And that was that/Busta Rhymes." As a comedian, Mike would like to get away with doing the same thing-- "I like to drink coffee, but if I ever get to the point in my life where the best part of waking up is Folgers in my cup, I'm not sure I want to wake up/Mike Birbiglia."
He dropped another "Mike Birbiglia" as punctuation at the end of his six-minute performance, and all these years later, I haven't forgotten his name. That's a comedy bit that doubles as clever career promotion.
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Donald Trump must be legitimately charismatic in person because that persona is so incredibly reviling. If Trump didn't exist, though, there would just be another one in his place. The national media has to have a rich businessman that personifies New York City.
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I'm not proud of how much I'm enjoying Albert Pujols' early season failure or the on-field woes of his new team. It's hard to type this while holding my side.
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As Bill Maher pointed out on his show tonight, John Edwards is on trial for campaign fraud for spending campaign dollars to cover up a sexual affair, yet Mitt Romney just received a $10 million anonymous campaign donation. Which action deserves to be the bigger scandal?
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This just can't be right, but last night's live episode of "30 Rock" (the second one they've done in two seasons) feels like it might just be the most entertaining piece of television I've ever seen-- exuberant, hilarious, clever, affectionate, tense, filled with surprises at every turn, a rapid-paced TV celebration. Something else it was was an unintentionally damning indictment of Saturday Night Live.
Marvin Miller can put a pretty vicious swing on a cripple pitch. The 95-year-old founding executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, walking stick by his side, was serving up some truth Tuesday night at the NYU School of Law.
In a 68-minute presentation, Miller forcefully challenged the corporate pay structure that gives shareholders little to no say over how much CEO's are being financially compensated. Conversely, he called MLB's pay structure the biggest "win-win" financial arrangement he had ever seen. Since the establishment of the players union in 1966, the average salary for a player has increased from $19,000 to $3.3 million. MLB revenue has climbed from $50 million in '67 to $7.1 billion last year.
Strong unions make even stronger businesses.
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Why do we have only two major political parties in the United States? Here's a possible reason you haven't considered: the citizens of New York state just coughed up $20 million to conduct a Republican Party primary-- that's an amount equal to a $20 bill for every person that actually participated as 96% of eligible voters stayed home. Taxpayers should pay for general elections that involve all political parties, not party primaries for Republicans and Democrats. Until we have full public financing of elections-- which the future health of our union depends upon-- the two parties that have worked tirelessly in cooperation to prevent us from ever having publicly-financed elections should pony up themselves for the free media publicity we call "primaries" and "caucuses."
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When Wilt Chamberlain was traded from the San Francisco Warriors to the Philadelphia 76ers in 1965, the deal went down at Stan (Musial) & Biggie's Restaurant in St. Louis.
I was in middle school when the Fox Television Network debuted in 1987. The network televises a 25th anniversary special tonight. The principal contribution of "Fox attitude" TV has been lifting the lid off comedy programming and taking it to admirably absurd levels, much of it animated, and frankly all of it inspired ultimately by the 1980's irreverence of David Letterman. These are the best 5 Fox shows of all-time in my opinion...
1) The Simpsons (1989-present)
2) King of the Hill (1997-2010)
3) Arrested Development (2003-2006)
4) Family Guy (1999-2003, 2005-present)
5) Get a Life (1990-1992)
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Don't be fooled by the sales campaign yet again from President Obama. This time we're talking about the JOBS bill that was birthed by Republican Eric Cantor, and signed into law by our president. Among other features, this new law attempts to encourage startups by freeing them from the chains of independent accounting requirements for the first five years of business, and also loosens the regulations on the honest representation of stock investments. Why are we bringing "the bubble" back to Wall Street? Well, because the unspoken benefit of the first bubble collapse was just how many insiders in the game got rich off of it. The giants are even "too big-ger to fail" now than they were the last time. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi, again, has the specifics of an Obama betrayal.
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This is my new all-time favorite baseball statistic: 49-year-old Jamie Moyer of the Colorado Rockies, who became the oldest person to ever win a Major League Baseball game this week, has pitched to 8.9% of MLB hitters ever.
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Quote of the day: My 7-year-old sister, Katya, visiting me this weekend, "Do you think my reading strategies are improving?"
The New York Times only allows you to view 10 articles a month online without paying a fee, and I'm not sure you'll want to waste one of those on today's Thomas Friedman column, but I want to address it anyway. (I can justify it for me because I get a blog post out of it.) Friedman is lamenting that we don't have "a socially moderate and fiscally conservative" candidate like New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the presidential race. Yes, Tom, that's the problem with this cursed Obama/Romney race: not enough moderates.
Friedman accuses politicians to both the left and the right of not "speaking honestly" because they refuse to acknowledge what the columnist sees as the dire need to both increase taxes and cut entitlement spending. To Beltway brontosauruses like Friedman, the solution to our problems always lie in the political "center"-- the "center" being whatever is the current middle ground position between the two major parties. Forget that taxation is at its lowest percentage of GDP (14.8% in 2011) since Truman was in office, or that corporate federal taxes are at only 12.1% of profits in 2011, the lowest since 1972. Forget that we've payed, or continue to pay, for five different wars against Muslim children over the last 10 years, the one in Iraq famously endorsed by Friedman. No, Friedman believes we also need to slash Medicare, Social Security, and the food stamps program to balance the federal budget deficit. That's called shared sacrifice, people. The rich give up the jacuzzi on the sun deck of the yacht. The poor give up dinner.
Friedman got a bee in his bonnet because his cell phone kept going out on the DC to NYC commuter train and then the escalator at the parking garage was broken. Can we not finally put an end to this madness by raising the eligibility age for Social Security? To the rescue comes the billionaire mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who purchased the office he currently holds and clears the parks of democracy protesters with his army of thugs.
Only three days ago, the editor of Friedman's paper, Bill Keller, also attacked the idea of partisanship. (Oh no, not another Times article. That leaves eight freebies for April. Seriously, fellas, give up the ghost on the pay wall already.) Keller, who criticizes the efforts of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange to wage war on government secrecy, but willingly piggy-backs on the leaks every round in a bid to keep his journalistic enterprise relevant, made the argument Sunday that the swing voters of the "middle" will once again in 2012 be the voice of reason in electoral politics. Of course, throughout his column, Keller never once attempts to assign labels of right or wrong to any political idea. Per his mission, he's being "objective" and his concern is only the horse race. He does manage to sneak in a jab at Obama for bowing to "the orthodox left," calling the president's support for the (wildly sensible) Buffett (tax) Rule a try-out "for the role of Robin Hood." In his rather comical last line, Keller finally and literally attempts to speak for "the middle." "The role the middle really wants (Obama) to play," says Keller, "is that of president." Presumably unlike his left-wing supporters.
The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates has this to say on the subject: "These op-eds bemoaning partisanship, clutching pearls at the radicalism of Rick Santorum, and praying for candidacy in the mold of Mike Bloomberg always seem a little too close to home. Is it a mistake that they tend to reflect the political biases of a news media that is as freaked out by radical pro-lifers as it is by radical anti-war protesters? I allow that that is a subjective observation, it's mostly based on my 15 years in media. But the person Keller describes sounds suspiciously familiar to me. I've usually referred to him (or her) as 'my editor.'"
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What a thrill to tune in to the first episode of HBO's new acclaimed comedy series "Girls" on Sunday night and see Peter Effing Scolari. Nice gig, Michael Harris.
I've been reading David Michaelis' biography of cartoonist Charles Schulz, entitled "Schulz and Peanuts," and a passage has me thinking about modern-day Hollywood. When Schulz was asked once about the simplicity of his animation style, and the fact that his strips were less "busy" than those of his contemporaries, he responded, "the idea is all that matters."
Movies, by and large today, are a waste of time because they have no new ideas. The new ideas are being presented on television while the "reruns," in effect, now air in the movie house. Film producers retread the old and try to cover their lack of imagination by glamming them up. The strategy now is everything except the idea-- the opposite of "Peanuts."
There are 12 pictures playing on 20 screens (2D or 3D) today at the multiplex of Iowa's largest shopping mall. They are...
The Hunger Games-- adaptation of best-selling book
The Three Stooges-- re-make of previous series of films
American Reunion-- sequel to American Pie
The Cabin in the Woods-- new story
Mirror Mirror-- re-make of Snow White
Lockout-- new story
21 Jump Street-- re-make of '80s TV show
Titanic-- re-release
Wrath of the Titans-- sequel to Clash of the Titans
Dr. Seuss' The Lorax-- adaptation of popular book
The Raid: Redemption-- One in a trilogy
Jeff, Who Lives at Home-- new story
This summer, you can look forward to all of the following: "Men in Black III;" a remake of the "Dark Shadows" TV show; a second Snow White adaptation (in the same year); "Madagascar 3"; a 'prequel' to "Alien"; "G.I. Joe 2"; another Spider-Man movie (not "Spider Man 4"-- I repeat not "Spider-Man 4," but a Spider-Man movie that comes only five years after "Spider-Man 3," and only 10 years after another "Spider-Man 1"); "Ice Age 4"; another fucking "Batman"; a fourth "Bourne" movie; a remake of the film "Total Recall"; and something called "The Expendables 2," which implies that there must have been an "Expendables 1" at some point.
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A generation before fading celebrities had the option of learning to dance or working for Donald Trump to try to stay famous, they had "The Love Boat." IMDB has the full list of 561 guest stars, including five that don't even have IMDB profile pages today.
After the first 9 games of the season, Albert Pujols is batting .243 with no home runs for his new team, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim. He has grounded into as many double plays as he has runs batted in (4). That's one fewer RBI than the Cardinals'backup firstbaseman, Matt Carpenter, had in one game on Sunday. Baseball scribes have it that the "honeymoon" period for Pujols in Southern California may be short, but then remember that the "courtship" consisted of only a couple phone calls. On a related note, Shelly Long was brilliant on "Cheers." She should have never left.
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Speaking of marriages, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are reportedly engaged after seven years together. I don't know, I think he's settling.
Ozzie Guillen is in a pickle. The Miami Marlins manager seemingly praised Cuba's Fidel Castro, a political figure very unpopular in South Florida. The now-very public flap goes like this. Guillen tells Time magazine, "I respect Fidel Castro. You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that son of a bitch is still here."
Such comments, really as tame as can be-- more an expression of marvel than support, required Guillen to leave his team Tuesday in Philadelphia, fly to Miami, and deliver a public apology in a bid to save his job. A group of radical right-wing Cuban dissidents living in the community say they still plan to stage public protests at the ballpark until Guillen is fired. So what has transpired here? Basically, Guillen expressed what most observers the world over have privately thought to themselves a hundred times-- that it's absolutely amazing to consider that a Communist militarist has remained in power for over half a century-- spanning 11 U.S. presidencies-- in a country that rests only 90 miles away from Key West, Florida. Tell the truth just a little: this feat of political and military strength by Cuba's El Comandante doesn't impress you also?
Ozzie Guillen is not a revolutionary. He is not Tommie Smith or John Carlos in cleats. He is not even a sophisticated political thinker. He's a guy who talks a lot without a filter. I am quite sure that, if asked, Castro's choice for an American spokesman would be somebody else. The long-time field manager, and before that, long-time shortstop, who just relocated to Miami this year from the South Side of Chicago, has been alternately critical and complimentary of Hugo Chavez, the democratically-elected president of Guillen's native Venezuela, and Castro's strongest public ally among world leaders. Guillen criticized Sean Penn for meeting publicly with Chavez, sneeringly inviting the activist-actor to move to Venezuela for a year and "see how long you last." Yet when his Chicago White Sox won the 2005 World Series, Guillen shouted "Viva Chavez!" for all to hear during the televised celebration. On Tuesday, he promised the assembled reporters at his news conference that he would now stop talking politics altogether. A few minutes later, he announced that he "would rather be dead than vote for Hugo Chavez."
In Havana, they've been having a lot of fun with this story: a pro-government website suggested that the Miami community had become a "banana republic" in which unpopular opinions were censored. Hmm, hard allegation to dispute all things considered.
Guillen is not really the story here. He is subtext. There are public figures out there-- increasingly rare, though Guillen is one of them-- who simply say what's on their mind, and then consider the personal and economic repercussions of their words at some later point. During this interview, Guillen temporarily forgot that he works for a baffoonish specimen named Jeffrey Loria, who single-handedly destroyed baseball in Montreal, followed that with a commissioner-approved coup upon a second National League franchise half a continent away in Florida, then fleeced taxpayers in that locale for a $2 billion stadium that opened for business only one day before Guillen's comments about Castro hit newsstands. Add to that the fact that, in Florida, there is a large section of the adult population that lives for the very purpose of showing how much they love their freedom by punishing their fellow citizens for their contrary political pronouncements-- one-time wealthy landowners from the island, who want their ancestral land back so they can recolonize it in the spirit of Fulgencio Batista.
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If Guillen only gets fired, he might have to consider himself lucky. Salon's Jefferson Morley chronicles the history of violence employed by shadowy anti-Castro figures in South Florida. The journalist surprisingly leaves out the part where the American government attempts to assassinate the Cuban leader.
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Remember when the Baltimore Orioles went to Havana in 1999 to compete against a Cuban All-Star team, and Orioles president Peter Angelos and Commissioner Bud Selig sat next to Fidel Castro enjoying the competition? There's nothing else. I was just curious if anyone remembered that.
Three cheers to superblogger Ken Levine for posting a clip yesterday from "Amos & Andy". This country is normally afflicted with what the late Studs Terkel called "a national Alzheimer's", but especially in respect to things that make us uncomfortable about our own history. Of course, "Amos & Andy" is notorious today for being out of step with modern sensibilities on race. And that it is, but before you can have a Bill Cosby, a Redd Foxx, a Richard Pryor, an Eddie Murphy, a Chris Rock, a Wanda Sykes, or a Donald Glover, there first had to be an "Amos & Andy". This is the reality of living in a country with a long history of oppression-- a national stain of racial bigotry.
Alvin Childress, Spencer Williams, Tim Moore, Ernestine Wade and their cohorts should be revered today as pioneers. The immensely-popular series began in the late '20s on radio, with white performers cast in each of the voice roles, but the move to television in the early '50s necessitated that CBS employ an African-American cast-- and it was an all-African-American cast incidentally. The television version peaked in popularity in those early '50s, but continued to be broadcast all the way until 1966, when pressure from the NAACP forced it from the air.
Did the characters behave in a foolish manner? Yes. Did they possess characteristics that were considered stereotypical negatives for their race by white America (i.e. laziness, uneducated, dishonest)? Also yes. But it was a comedy program. Exaggeration and mockery comes with the territory. A long running joke on both the Jack Benny and Phil Silvers programs was that their main characters were tight with the dollar, and both stars were Jewish. We rarely hear criticism today that Jewish people were being defamed by these portrayals, though the skinflint stereotype is one that Jewish people have been forced to contend with.
Jackie Gleason on "The Honeymooners" and Lucille Ball on "I Love Lucy" also played the fool on their popular '50s-era programs. In fact, it's fair to say, considering the similarities and the timeline, that both of those shows-- as deeply ingrained today as any in the American television lexicon-- owe quite a bit of their brilliance to the groundwork laid by "Amos & Andy." Like the main characters in the older show, Ralph Kramden and Lucy Ricardo are always striving-- and failing-- at bettering their financial situation, overestimating their abilities and being lured into get-rich-quick schemes. "Amos & Andy" also utilized the multi-camera direction technique four months before "Lucy" did. (Also, you can't get stupider than the Three Stooges, as comic creations go, and they return to your local multiplex in a new incarnation just this week.)
All of these dead white entertainers are well-remembered and revered today, honored, for example, with celebrity stars on Hollywood Boulevard. The black cast of "Amos & Andy," conversely, is largely forgotten. In fact, in some cases, these pioneering performers don't even have grave markers.
What makes "Amos & Andy" different than these "white" shows, of course, and this is entirely fair to say, is that, for African-Americans during this time, these were the only representations they had on television? But that means the goal now shouldn't be to bury the cultural contribution of "Amos & Andy" and erase it from our national memory, but to continually ask the question, where were all of the other portrayals during that era? Where was the whole picture? In the late '60s, America's race consciousness grew up, and the Amos & Andy-type portrayals were replaced with ultra-dignified screen performances like those of Sidney Poitier. Now, admittedly, the Alvin Childress and Spencer Williams-style dialects age horrendously, but then I don't think Sidney Poitier's work holds up all that great today either. They were all part of a growth process. And, actually, as comedians, I think the performers on television's "Amos & Andy" are pretty damn good. They give great "reads" and possess terrific timing.
The problem is not that "Amos & Andy" is unfit for our time today. It's that some have conspired to keep today's audiences from seeing the show at all. DVDs of the series are available for purchase online, as the episodes' copyrights have fallen into the public domain, but you won't be seeing the show on television any time soon. If it survives at all, it will always be something that has to be sought out.
It was reported once that Bill Cosby tried to buy the rights to the series for the purpose of keeping it from ever being shown again, but it turns out that this was an urban myth. What's interesting about that connection, though, is that Cosby did say extraordinarily negative things about the series in a Playboy Magazine interview in 1968, and when asked in that Q-and-A if there would ever be a series with an all-African-American cast that did not rely on negative stereotypes, he remarked that there likely wouldn't, saying: "If you’re really going to do a series about a black family, you’re going to have to bring out the heavy; and who is the heavy but the white bigot? This would be very painful for most whites to see, a show that talks about the white man and puts him down. It would strike indifferent whites as dangerous; it would be called controversial and they probably wouldn’t want to tune in." Within three years, exactly this type of series debuted on CBS called "All in the Family." It went immediately to #1 in the ratings and stayed there for six years.
Like each of these other series, "Amos & Andy" should be viewed as a record of its time. Like all meaningful art, there is truth to be found in it. We know this because African-American audiences of that time told us there was truth in it. In its time, it was very popular with white and black audiences. Its truth is certainly not the only truth to be found in these lives at that time-- far from it, but what series could provide us with universal truth.
Watch this 45-minute documentary on Hulu. It's called "Amos & Andy: Anatomy of a Controversy." It dates back to the late '70s, but it will give you a great insight into what this series was all about. It's a small glimpse into the lives of the people it attempts to portray, but more importantly, and in a much larger arena, it provides a glimpse at its audience.
I've just finished reading the fine 2011 biography from Doubleday entitled "Clarence Darrow - Attorney for the Damned." Darrow, of course, was the most famous legal defense counsel of the first third of the 20th century, a tremendous small-d democrat in the most genuine sense of the word, as well as an orator of the finest reputation, in court victory or defeat, on the topics of right and human justice. His biographer, John A. Farrell, brings an even-handed approach to bear on his subject, humanistic experience as a long-time journalist and a writer at the Center for Public Integrity.
A study of Darrow's legal cases is a walk through the American Experience (to borrow a PBS series title) from the Gilded Age until the depths of the Great Depression. He made his name first, in 1894, by defending labor titan Eugene Debs, my political hero and a tremendous orator in his own right, in the aftermath of the great workers strike of the Pullman Palace Car Company. Debs, an Indiana native like Darrow, had been charged with contempt of court for "inciting" workers to strike in violation of an injunction ordered by President Grover Cleveland and for interfering with interstate commerce. President Cleveland attacked the reformers with the full arm of the justice department.
Before the U.S. Supreme Court, Darrow argued, "When a body of 100,000 men lay down their implements of labor, not because their own rights have been invaded, but because the bread has been taken from the mouths of their fellows, we have no right to say they are criminals." The appeal had seemingly little effect on the Fuller Court, which ruled on the side of the president, but forever after martyred Debs and his men. Two years later, almost the same group of justices would author the legal decision upholding "separate but equal" segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. This was not a golden era of American jurisprudence.
Darrow represented unpopular and disenfranchised defendants throughout the first years of the new century-- anarchists, gangsters, unionists, "Bolshevik sympathizers," the very poor and hungry, the mentally unstable, and a whole host of teenage criminal perpetrators condemned to die. When a more unpopular figure could not be found anywhere, he defended the engineer of a boat that had capsized on the Chicago River, killing more than 800 people.
In 1907, he defended to successful acquittal the labor militarist "Big Bill" Haywood, who was standing trial for the conspiracy murder of the anti-labor governor of Idaho. After this trial, The Sun paper in New York called Darrow "an infidel, a misanthrope, a revolutionist, a hater of the rich, a condemner of the educated and the polite, a hopeless cynic." He faced charges in the typically-hostile press of hucksterism. In his public pronouncements, he opposed Prohibition, advocated for "free love" and open sexual relationships, agnosticism, and equal rights for blacks. He caused public inflammation once by asking in a civic setting, "Is there any reason why a white girl should not marry a man with African blood in his veins? These lynchings in the South and these burnings in the South are not for the protection of the home and the fireside; they are to keep Negroes in their place." This was in 1901, the year in which violence broke out all across the South because Booker T. Washington had been invited to converse at the White House with President Teddy Roosevelt.
In 1911, he defended two laborists accused of dynamiting the Los Angeles Times building and killing 21 men in the process. Years later, in 1924, he would defend the wealthy, homosexual, University of Chicago students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb for the so-called "thrill" killings of a 14-year-old boy. These two cases, more than a decade apart, were similar in that the pair of defendants were certainly guilty of the accused crimes in both cases, but Darrow accepted the cases with the purpose of saving the men from "the hangman's rope." Darrow was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, and for a time during his professional career-- aided by his public advocacy-- it appeared a distinct possibility that civil punishment by death might become but a footnote in the nation's bloody history text, as it has in the world's more civilized countries.
In cases involving labor violence, crimes committed by the underprivileged, or victims of abuse (Leopold and Loeb, the latter), Darrow always advocated compassion for perpetrators due to the social circumstances that had contributed to the crimes. He said of one of these last such defendants, "This boy is not to blame. Organized society had its chance to keep him off the streets, and failed to do so. He was just a young animal, turned loose on the streets in the shape of a boy." At the time, Darrow's opinions on the psychology of the criminal were seen as revolutionary, and in this respect, he was linked often pejoratively with "godless, soulless, anti-Christian, anti-individualist" thinkers like Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
Each of his most well-known cases have relevancy that stretch to today, but none more than two of his last. Easily the most famous is the Scopes "Monkey Trial" of 1925, in which he defended a high school biology teacher in Tennessee named John Scopes of teaching the theory of evolution in violation of a state law. This public battle between science and superstition, which was broadcast at the time to a national radio audience, is still being waged in various forms by the party of the defeated in school board libraries from coast to coast. During that sweltering summer in Dayton, Tennessee, alternately in a county courthouse and, at times, in a nearby public park to allow for larger audiences and relief from inside temperatures, Darrow defended the teacher against the law that had been drawn by Christian Creationists.
The trial culminated with 65-year-old fundamentalist preacher, opponent of "the Menace of Darwinism," former U.S. Secretary of State and three-time Democratic Party presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan agreeing to be cross-examined by Darrow on the witness stand about his religious beliefs. Proverbially speaking, Darrow tore him apart on the stage, ridiculing his hypotheses of Divine Creation of a timeline that was inconsistent with modern scientific study in every field from biology to geology to astronomy to physics to chemistry. It was "darkness vs. light," says Farrell, "modernity on trial."
In a memorable sequence from the court record, Bryan remarked that he believed "everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there," clarifying that he believed in the literal Old Testament translation of Jonah being swallowed whole by a whale, living inside the belly for three days and three nights before being excised (for what it's worth, this whopper also appears in similar form in the Koran).
"Do you believe Joshua made the sun stand still?" his examiner then asked. "I accept the Bible absolutely," the famously-pious Bryan responded, promoting the idea that the Book of Joshua was divinely inspired. But Darrow got Bryan to admit that the deity "had used language that could be understood at the time" to explain why the author of this ancient text seemed to believe that the sun revolved around the Earth, and not vice-versa. Then, when questioned about the Great Flood that purportedly caused Noah to hit the high seas accompanied by a male and female version of each of the planet's animal types, Bryan was forced to explain why that long ago flood was only 4000 years before the birth of Jesus, based on the biblical-defined generational timeline...
Darrow, said mockingly: "When was that flood... about 4004 B.C.?"
Bryan: "That has been the estimate. I never made a calculation."
Darrow: "A calculation from what?"
Bryan: "I could not say."
Darrow: "From the generations of man?"
Bryan: "I would not want to say that."
Darrow: "What do you think?"
Bryan: "I do not think about things I don't think about."
Darrow: "Do you think about things you do think about?"
Bryan: "Well, sometimes."
The examination continued in earnest-- with additional questioning from Darrow about the evidence of older civilizations in the Far East, and the theoretical female siblings (and wives?) of Cain and Abel-- but with that previous exchange, just like that, an elder statesman of the United States, a great American spiritualist, had been exposed for all of his ignorance and superstition. Indeed, a pitiful Bryan would drop dead in his sleep within five days of the end of the trial. When asked by a reporter if Bryan died of a broken heart, Darrow, in his inimitable fashion of reasoning scientifically, replied, "Busted heart, nothing; he died of an overstuffed belly." The verbal sparring between the pair in this small Southern town would go down in history, being further popularized in 1955 by a fictional play entitled "Inherit the Wind," which has been performed countless times since by professional companies, and by high school and collegiate drama departments, also becoming a movie in 1960 starring Spencer Tracy as the Darrow-esque attorney Henry Drummond, and Fredric March as the Bryan-esque Matthew Harrison Brady.
Within a year of Scopes, Clarence Darrow would participate in yet another sensational trial that has just as much resonance in America these days. Darrow went to Detroit to defend an African-American physician named Ossian Sweet, who had purchased a home for his family in an all-white middle-class section of the city. Only two summers earlier, thousands of the Ku Klux Klan's rank-and-file, hooded and gowned, marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington D.C. (you gotta love this country). The Klan had come up from underground and was putting up candidates in general elections all across the nation, including Detroit's mayoral race, and when a white mob numbering in the hundreds started gathering daily outside the Sweet's house on the city's near-east side, little time passed before Sweet and a few of his relatives and friends had armed themselves. The second evening, after rocks had been thrown at the house windows, shots rang out from one of the upstairs windows, into the crowd, and a white man lay dead with another one wounded nearby.
The NAACP called upon Darrow to join the Sweet defense team. The case raised issues of racial suspicion, neighborhood integration, and individual self-defense that can be just as uniquely felt today in the aftermath of the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida. During court proceedings, under harsh examination by Darrow, it was discovered that white witnesses had been encouraged by investigators to lie, both in their verbal accounts about the size of the crowd, as well as the crowd's intent and the lengths of its instigation to violence. All-white juries would find the 12 black defendants not guilty. Darrow had not held back during closing argument. He attacked the establishment justice system of the nation, and the original sin of its white citizens, with animus, challenging jury members to confront their prejudices head-on...
"Every one of them (the witnesses)... perjured themselves over and over and over again to send twelve black people to prison for life. The almost instinctive hatred of the white for anything that approaches social equality is so deep and so abiding in the hearts of most white people that they are willing to perjure themselves on behalf of what they think is their noble, Nordic race... I don't need to take any pains to prove to you what was the cause of this trouble down at Charlevoix and Garland (street corner), do I? If you don't know it, you are stupider than any people I have ever seen in the jury box yet, and I have seen some daisies in my time."
In his book, Farrell describes a man who was capable at times of crass opportunism, hypocrisy, or mean-spiritedness. He was charged with, but ultimately acquitted of, bribing a juror during his defense of the LA Times bombers. He would remark on occasion that such actions were justified when operating under a system in which competing powers were unequal, or when done to save a man's life. Like many of our geniuses, he invested money poorly (see Sam Clemens as another example), and was often taking legal cases with at least the partial motivation of rescuing his finances.
On a much-larger scale, however, Clarence Darrow is generally considered to be the best friend that a defendant in the American criminal justice system ever had. And in a nation of unequal justice, religious and racial hysteria, not-fully-fathomable financial disparity, yet fully-formed national bloodlust, and one that is, itself, an all-powerful state, a man that can be that best friend with compassion, intellect, and foresight, and one that believes people are more intelligent, understanding, and liberal than they believe themselves, has no small or unimportant legacy to leave to us.
Near the end of his book, Farrell reprints an enlightening quote from the occasion of Darrow's death in 1938, one that reveals to a person all you need to know about the Bizarro-existence of living a life of morality in a nation that is simultaneously too Christian and insufficiently Christian. A lady that had lived near him during his final days in the small town of Kinsman, Illinois, told the papers of Darrow after he was gone: "He was a good man, I reckon, but folks didn't like the way he believed. Myself, I never could see how he could plead for all those murderers."
The St. Louis Cardinals begin the defense of their 11th World Championship tonight in Miami. Before we start, lets take one last moment to recall the greatest story in Major League Baseball history-- the Hard Cards' epic 10 1/2 game rebound against the Braves with 31 games left to play, their come-from-behind five-game Division Series victory against the Phillies, their six-game tussle with the Brewers for the National League Pennant, and the epic 7-game World Series win against the Texas Rangers, which included a Game 6 that was the single most extraordinary game of baseball played at any level in the 172-year history of the sport.
Jayson Stark recapped the whole journey on the ESPN site during the holidays. Reflect on these favorite "Strange But True Feats of the 2011 Post-season" as the new season begins...
* As late as 102 games into the season, the Cardinals had a worse record than the Pittsburgh Pirates.
* They were 8 1/2 games out in the month of September.
* They lost 25 games in their last at-bat.
* They blew more saves than all but one other Major League team.
* In W.S. Game 6, they were one strike away from losing the Series in twice as many innings (2) as all previous 106 World Series champions in history put together.
* More Game 6: The Cardinals had played 19,387 regular-season games in their history, and had never before won a game in which they were behind five times, and they chose to do it first in a World Series elimination game.
* In the 1,329 game history of postseason baseball, a team had never before scored runs in the 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th innings.
* The Rangers blew only two saves in their last 41 regular-season games combined, but blew three in the last six innings of Game 6.
* And only one team in history had ever won an elimination game after being down to their last strike. (the 1986 Mets). Move over, Bill Buckner. The Cardinals did it in the ninth inning of Game 6. Then did it AGAIN in the tenth inning.
How will the Cardinals top it? HOW WILL THE CARDINALS TOP IT?
Let's take a look-see, shall we? Opening Day is here. 2012 Cardinals fans, This Bud's For You. Maestro, if you please...
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From Lulu Publishing, March 2018, "Lies My Blogger Told Me: The Best of the Chris Moeller Blog 2004-2017." Visit Lulu.com, search "Chris Moeller," or contact us directly to secure a copy.
