Walking the Berkshires

Latest Nature's Notebook in the LJ

Here is a link to my latest in the Lakeville Journal, readable with free registration.  Fair use excerpt:

"I rise before the sun and come home in darkness. If I am lucky the stars are out and draw me up and out of my hunkered self for a few moments of grace in the driveway. Often, though, the day has passed in gray scale beneath a steel wool sky. Overcast days like these are soft and flat and cool and dull, without contrast or dramatic interest unless there has been a fresh snowfall.

I feel the winter clouds blocking out the sun, thick as laundry lint and hard as lead...."

The Congressional Medal of Honor: Selfless Acts of Courage Have No Gender

Commentator Bryan Fischer's persistent, incendiary remarks about the feminization of the Congressional Medal of Honor are his own deliberate fabrication and not some media distortion.   The backlash they have provoked is likewise his own fault.  He said them without apology and for effect, and is still saying them, even as he tries to frame his message around the point that we need to honor more "take the hill" acts of bravery as well as those who place the lives of their comrades above their own. 

This is disingenuous, to say the least.  In his repetition of "feminization" in the title of his published remarks (now stretched out in a three part series), Fischer unashamedly values "masculine" attributes - those who "kill people and break things" -  at the expense of "feminine" qualities of courage. Extraordinary heroism and uncommon valor does not make this distinction.

He says we have become squeamish about presenting the Medal of Honor to those who kill the enemy, noting there have been no "take the hill" MOH citations in either Iraq or Afghanistan (he could also have added Somalia, for the two special forces members killed in the Black Hawk Down rescue and extraction in 1993). 

There have been four Medal of Honor citations for soldiers serving in Iraq and four in Afghanistan, all of them but the latest for Staff Sergeant Giunta presented posthumously.  We are certainly not squeamish about recognizing those who make the supreme sacrifice defending their comrades. 

This is a very small sample size from which to draw the sort of conclusion that Fischer has made regarding one kind of valor being preferentially recognized over another in contemporary Medal of Honor citations.  He makes very selective and slanted use of history.  From the very beginning, there have been many Medal of Honor recipients  who have been recognized for saving lives, to name just a few:

• [Civil War] "During the attack on Charleston, while serving on board the U.S.S. Keokuk, Q.M. Anderson was stationed at the wheel when shot penetrated the house and, with the scattering of the iron, used his own body as a shield for his commanding officer."

• [Civil War] Seaman Avery and Quarter Gunner Baker "braved the enemy fire which was said by the admiral to be "one of the most galling" he had ever seen, and aided in rescuing from death 10 of the crew of the Tecumseh, eliciting the admiration of both friend and foe."

• [Indian Wars] "At McClellans Creek, Tex., 8 November 1874, Captain Baldwin received his second Medal of Honor citation after he "rescued, with 2 companies, 2 white girls by a voluntary attack upon Indians whose superior numbers and strong position would have warranted delay for reinforcements, but which delay would have permitted the Indians to escape and kill their captives."

• [Spanish American War] At Tayabacoa, Cuba, 30 June 1898. Private Bell, 10th U.S. Cavalry,  "voluntarily went ashore in the face of the enemy and aided in the rescue of his wounded comrades; this after several previous attempts at rescue had been frustrated."

• [WWI] "During an operation against enemy machinegun nests west of Varennes, Cpl. Call was in a tank with an officer when half of the turret was knocked off by a direct artillery hit. Choked by gas from the high-explosive shell, he left the tank and took cover in a shellhole 30 yards away. Seeing that the officer did not follow, and thinking that he might be alive, Cpl. Call returned to the tank under intense machinegun and shell fire and carried the officer over a mile under machinegun and sniper fire to safety."

• [WWII] "For conspicuous devotion to duty, extraordinary courage, and complete disregard of his own life, above and beyond the call of duty, during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor, by Japanese forces on 7 December 1941. As Commanding Officer of the U.S.S. West Virginia, after being mortally wounded, Capt. Bennion evidenced apparent concern only in fighting and saving his ship, and strongly protested against being carried from the bridge." 

• [WWII] "During the early part of his imprisonment at Makassar in April 1942, [Navy Lieutenant] Antrim saw a Japanese guard brutally beating a fellow prisoner of war and successfully intervened, at great risk to his own life.  For his conspicuous act of valor, Antrim later received the Medal of Honor."

There are many more citations like these for recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor.  Despite all protestations to the contrary, Fischer's irresponsible use of the term "feminization" is not just insulting to men and women; it dishonors the heroism of these servicemen.

At the heart of Fischer's words, of course, are the culture wars, and a fundamentalist nostalgia for an American values system that predates the 1960s.  America today in fact does value minimizing casualties in modern wars.  Iraq and Afghanistan are very different conflicts than the battlefields of Europe or the atolls of the South Pacific, where territory was conquered at a tremendous cost, as Fischer bluntly puts it, in people killed and things broken.  

There were 16 million American men and women in uniform during World War II.  464 Medals of Honor were presented for actions taken during that war, 266 of them posthumously, and most, it is fair to say, for fearlessness and ferocity in combat, often when on the defensive.  All were for selfless acts, and it is this quality, above all others exhibited by Medal of Honor recipients past and present, that is in keeping with the highest traditions of the service.  Fischer's actions, however, belong in the ash heap of history.

False Lead in Cast Iron

The was a time yesterday when I thought I might by an antique cannon from this guy.  I am alert for field pieces from this era, as part of the effort to identify and bring back a genuine example of one of the guns made in Salisbury, Connecticut during the Revolution. 

I had noticed it out in front of Jimmy D's Antique's Plus, undoubtedly one of the strangest salvage yards you will ever come across, while driving back from a meeting on Thursday.  It was a small piece about three feet in length with visible reinforcing rings and mounted on a iron ceremonial gun carriage.  I had none of my cannon recording forms or other implements of assessment with me, but it seemed to me too good to pass by so I did a U-turn across 4 lanes of traffic and pulled up in the nearly blocked driveway to take a closer look.

My first impression was that it was indeed a cast iron barrel and somewhat roughly made.  It had been cast in two halves and there were pronounced join lines both on the gun tube and on the separately made cascabel.  The bore was rough and pitted, about 2 1/4 inches in diameter.  A very small field piece, perhaps, not much larger than a swivel gun, but these were made n Salisbury as well.

The proprietor told me he had picked up the piece in North Carolina where it had been used ceremonially to fire confetti.  The vent, he told me, had been filled in, though I saw no clear evidence of this. The only identifying marks were "RM 1" on the side of the gun carriage,  I have seen pictures of 18th century cannon mounted on 19th century carriages such as this, and the general design of this gun tube with its muzzle flair and reinforcements was of a type manufactured prior to the Napoleonic Wars.  But was it a genuine field piece?

The cannon was listed for $600, which if genuine would be an absolute steal.  The proprietor immediately knocked it down to $500. I told him I would need to make a phone call and might return with a friend who was more knowledgeable.

In consultation with the chair of the Salisbury Cannon Committee, we agreed that it was worth going back to take a closer look, and that if it was indeed a period cannon we should buy it.  We went back the following day with $500 in twenties and a heathy skepticism, which unfortunately lead us to conclude that what we were viewing was an old non firing replica, perhaps manufactured around the centennial of the Revolution.

The iron was very thin and there was no evidence that it had ever had a vent for firing.  When we shined a light down the barrel, we saw the hollow insides of the reenforces and it appeared that the bore widened along with the gun tube diameter. The trunnions were shaved down to a much narrower diameter to fit the gun carriage, which was not a characteristic associated with period field pieces.  Much as we might have wished it to be otherwise, we concluded that the cannon was merely decorative.

My companion still took pictures and measurements, and we both agreed it was a worthy expedition and that the more of these cannons we are able to study the better we will become in assessing whether something is too good to be true, or a trash heap treasure.

 

Parallax

I am living a life right now of contrasting colors that vibrate where they touch but never truly meet.   Matter here occupies the same space in different planes, moving in and out of phase in the veil of a blinking eye.  

In this place, converging lines repel like magnets when they show the same face.  Visual and verbal cues are often distorted and dissonant.  Those objects in the mirror, whether near or far, are elusive and hard to pin down.  

Time moves differently here as well.  It eddies and swirls, revealing much that has not yet taken place, or indeed never was, and may never be. 

The inner eye is my point of view.  I have taken on faith that the spinning world truly carries me onward though I appear to stand still.   The mast dips below the curve of the Earth while the ship sails on.  There is no fixed point at the vanishing point.

If this bears all the hallmarks of a classic existential crisis, then it also leaves me with the option to find my own meaning even in this strange place, where joy and grief, fear and love, thinking and feeling still cling to their unalloyed identities.  My brain wants to think its way out of these cluttered boxes.  My heart knows different, and this last year has been all about giving the heart its head.

My greatest challenge is while turning inward not to turn on myself.  My greatest hope is that I have already gained more than I fear to lose and have much still to hope for. 

I want to slide my hand in the spaces between spaces.  I want to feel the crackle at the edge of the color wheel.  Above the winter clouds the sun still shines.  It is all right here, in the light of those I love, rolling in the leaf pile, laughing.

 

 

Going the Extra Mile Too Far

I am researching a feature story for my local paper about an historic wildfire that blackened more than twenty square miles in three adjoining states in our region back in 1930.  It is the sort of project I might easily have decided to publish here at Walking the Berkshires rather than in the Lakeville Journal, although I will certainly link to it here once it comes out at the end of December.

I am intrigued by the choice of the newspaper over the blog, and by the choices I continue to make in the course of my research about the associated costs and benefits of following various leads.   These choices impact the kind of story and the version of history I will ultimately produce, so I choose to make them explicit here (even those that make me uncomfortable).

The primary reason for researching and writing the story itself is that it has engaged my curiosity.  The great wildfire was a momentous occurrence in its day that has all but faded from modern memory.  And yet there is fertile ground here for an historian to synthesize events that took place, and the choices made by participants in the context of their own time, that still inform the patterns and processes that shape the landscape of our communities today. 

Clearly this is too long a research topic for a single blog post. As often happens with my research, I can envision at least one road not taken that could lead to a book, or more graduate school. For now, serializing the story in blog format feels like a constraint that weighs against the challenge of crafting a full-length newspaper feature, especially when my editor has embraced the project. It lends itself to some boots on the ground reportage as well as electronic data mining.  There is certainly a local audience for what I will write, and for personal recognition, which I readily admit is balm for a battered ego.

My reasons are certainly not pecuniary.  I do this as an amateur and on my own time, and for this am compensated by the paper at a rate of $2/column inch.  Being thorough is very important to me as a writer and researcher, yet the cost of doing the research itself, both in terms of time and money, does come into play and will ultimately shape the direction of the story and availability of sources.  The challenge is to do enough research, and follow enough leads, to produce good and accurate work that adds insight and does not perpetuate errors.  That is a pretty high bar, even for a piece in a local paper.

I have decided to let the needs of a 1500 word story define the research questions.  I want to provide a perspective on the fire as it was experienced in all three states, where it is known by different names.  I want to place these events within the larger context of the environmental and social conditions of the day.  I want to be able to determine what parts of the mountain forest burned, and how this may affect their condition today.  And I want to make the past come alive for residents today, to reawaken interest in the narrative and stir latent memory.

There are two research avenues open to me.   I can search for archival material online, some of which is only available for a fee or through an institutional affiliation.   I can search the microfilm records of the local print media that covered the story, and interview residents who may still remember those times of the stories of those who were there.  Good reporting, let alone good history, requires that I follow leads in both these areas.  Indeed, the Lakeville Journal archives for this period are available on microfilm in a local library, and the opportunity costs to me in consulting them are very slight.  Following the local angle of the story in adjoining states, however, takes a greater commitment in time and money.

The Poughkeepsie Journal archives are available on microfilm at the Adriance Memorial Library: an hour's drive to the west.  For the Berkshire Eagle I would need to travel north about the same distance to Pittsfield's Berkshire Athenaeum.  The New York Times and Hartford Currant both make their archived articles available online but for a fee.  In the case of the NYT this has become frustrating for me because judging from the first paragraph of the stories that I can view without payment, there are at least a couple of articles that contain information about the topic not available in other print media.  Is it worth it to me and to my research for this project to shell out $3.95 per article, or buy a bundle of 10 at a reduced rate but perhaps more than the story requires? 

For now, I have resisted.  Instead, I am engaging local contacts in the communities that experienced the fire in New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut to see what leads they can provide.  Already an elderly resident of Mt. Washington, MA, has been in touch and recalls that several annual town meeting reports from the years after the fire included payments to those who helped to fight the flames.  I have spoken with the forester responsible today for the core area in CT that was burned in 1930 who says that there is still evidence of natural disturbance from around that time in certain forest stands and species composition in these woodlands.  I have found a number of AP stories online about the fire and the many other blazes that raged across the Northeast during that dry spring in 1930.    At least for Connecticut, there are historic 1934 aerial photographs of the affected landscape, though whether of not the path of the fire can be discerned from them is still an open question to me.  .

My graduate thesis adviser gave me some very good advice about research; you will never be fully finished with it, but there comes a time when you have done all that it requires of you.  If the story cannot be told or understood without my going the extra mile and paying the NYT the equivalent of 4 column inches of my compensation, then so be it.  If not, then I will leave that for other researchers.

 

The Annual Armistice Day Post: The Final Three

There are just three confirmed veterans of the Great War still living on this Veterans Day.  The status of one of these, Florence Beatrice Green (née Patterson), was rediscovered just this year and she joins Royal Navy veteran Claude Choules and American Frank Buckles as the final representatives of those who served in the War to end all Wars. Buckles supports a national WWI memorial in Washington, while Choules who lives in Australia does not wish to glorify war.

Purple like a Bruise in Western Connecticut

As the election dust settles, at first blush Connecticut seems bluer than ever.  The open race for Governor has tilted toward the Democrat by a slim 5,000 vote margin, which would give that party the executive branch for the first time since 1995.  An open senate seat remains in Democratic control with the defeat of Linda McMahon by Richard Blumenthal.  And all five Democrats in Congress kept their seats (as long as redistricting does not ultimately reduce the number of representatives we get to send to Washington).

But looks can be deceiving.  Litchfield County, geographically if not in terms of population density the greater part of Chris Murphy's 5th Congressional District, went heavily for the Republican candidate for Senate, as did Fairfield County to a lessor extent.  Likewise, by the widest margin in Connecticut, 58% of Litchfield County voters went with the Republican candidate for governor:   Chris Murphy would not have been reelected if his district did not include the urban centers of Meriden, New Britain and Waterbury.

From where I am sitting, the western parts of Connecticut after this election looks more purple than blue: purple like a bruise.  Just across the state line in New York, two congressional seats that had been recent gains for Democrats flipped back to the GOP. What accounts for this voting pattern?

One clue may come from a The Washington Post initiative to canvass the Tea Party movement nationwide.  The Post has posted its findings here.  Respondents said they were motivated most of all by concern about the economy (closely followed by mistrust of government in general and dislike of Obama and his policies in particular).  Their top issue was not, however, the economy and unemployment - only 5% said this was their single most important issue.  Instead, Tea Party supporters felt the most important issue was tackling government spending / the deficit and limiting the size of government.

Those Tea Party supporters polled in the Post survey self identify as fiscally conservative and libertarian more than as social values voters.  That accurately describes qualities that were once typical of values held by rural New Englanders.  There has been a significant demographic shift, however, in the rural communities of the Hudson Valley and Northwest Connecticut, heavily influenced by proximity to Manhattan, a conversion of the second homes of New Yorkers to primary residences, and an aging population.  They are also, on average, wealthier. 

Those who voted their economic self interest and those who voted their anger combined to bring Republicans back into control of the House of Representatives and increased the number of GOP governors across the country.  In western Connecticut, though, these two groups of voters may have much less in common on the social agenda, and it was not enough of a groundswell to add their candidates to the Republican wave.

 

Tar and Feathering Their Nest

Historian Jill Lepore has turned her eye to the modern Tea Party movement:

Like many observers interested in the Tea Party — though unlike many Harvard historians — Lepore sat in on meetings; attended rallies, including Sarah Palin’s visit to Boston; observed how local elementary teachers taught the Revolution; and explored the historical tourism industry, especially the Boston Tea Party Ship, a replica currently sitting in Gloucester and in serious disrepair. What the Tea Party was marshaling, she found, wasn’t patriotic spirit, and it certainly wasn’t history. It was, in her term, “antihistory.”

Two things separate antihistory from its prefix-less sibling. First, and most obvious, antihistory gets stuff wrong...The second — and, for Lepore, more serious — problem with antihistory is that it hijacks history’s raw materials. It takes a messy tumble of personalities and events and quotations and molds them into a static picture, a picture that happens to line up with current policy goals...

...These twinned ideas, Lepore writes, add up to a form of “historical fundamentalism, which is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry.” And that’s what makes antihistory more troubling than a simple partisan interpretation of history, which is something we’ve been indulging in for a long time.

The Boston Globe article cited above also includes a rebuttal of Lepore's charge of antihistory by some of those Tea party supporters she interviewed for her book, including President Christian Varley of the Greater Boston Tea Party:

They aren’t claiming to be historians and say they shouldn’t be held to that standard: Their focus is on political change. When they deploy the Founding Fathers, Varley says, they do so because “it’s a tool we can use — personalizing the ideas about the way government should be. I admit it’s a little contrived, but it’s no different than campaigning for a candidate or marketing a movie star.”

I care deeply about history, and in particular that period in America's past that has been appropriated by the Tea Party for its particular use.  Nonetheless I do believe in my populist heart that history should not be the sole province of historians, any more than poetry or art or science are only intended for academics and specialists with the training to divine meaning and wield whatever power comes with such knowledge. I am with e.e. cummings to the extent that

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

To every thing there is a season, and the political season is not one that lends itself to good history.  With the Tea Party phenomenon, however, we are not just speaking only of over the top campaign materials and statements by candidates who display a disturbing lack of historical understanding.  We are talking about strongly held conservative beliefs about change, and power, and the role of government reenforced by clever manipulation of powerful symbols and the imagined past. 

Such views are not sympathetic to academic discourse.  Decontructing the flimsy historical underpinings of Tea Party propaganda may be good fun for the historian - heaven knows it comes easily enough for me - but it is not where the real argument is taking place.  It is the wrong tool for the job.  The quill gets obliterated by tar and feathers.

When fringe candidates like Carl Paladino or Christine O'donnell (or Sarah Palin) ride a backlash to primary victories, they tend to wither in the harsh light of scrutiny when their fitness to lead comes into question. Even so, there are plenty of Tea party candidates on ballots across the country today with better qualifications than these, if not a better grasp of history. Conventional wisdom has many of these winning election to statewide and national office this year.

The real impact on today's elections comes not from soldiers in the Tea Party movement but the massive financial resources from outside groups unleased by the Citizen's United ruling which in this political season has disproportionately favored Republican candidates.  It is that version of history which bombards the electorate.  And it is coming from very well established - if undisclosed -  sources.

This, too, is nothing new. The colonial press was filled with anonymous screeds.  General Washington was vilified in an anonymous letter written by his enemies in Congress on the eve of Valley Forge.  In fact, the Washington parallel is striking, when one considers that the Tea Party is at its heart a reaction to Obama and what he represents, much akin to the criticism of Washington's personality cult during the dark hours of the Revolution.  

The American Revolution was a war of words as well as blood. The sound bytes of Samuel Adams and his influence over the waterfront mobs were incendiary in revolutionary Boston.  Yet he remained a destructive rather than constructive politician, better at riling a hornet's nest than at beekeeping (or brewing, for that matter). 

Congresman Sam Rayburn famously observed after a Democratic defeat in 1953;  "[Republicans] are going to learn the difference between construction and obstruction... Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it took a carpenter to build it."   Good carpenters, like good historians, are in short supply this year.