Tag: American History

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The “Good Negro” and the Meaning of Freedom

(Sign at parsonage where Vernon Johns lived before Martin Luther King, Jr. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Montgomery, Alabama

Fifteen-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give up her seat on a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama to allow newly-boarded white riders to sit down. The driver called the police, Colvin was handcuffed, and dragged from the bus.  It was Wednesday, March 2, 1955. When leaders of the local NAACP chapter first heard of Colvin’s arrest, they discussed whether it could be used as a test case to challenge Jim Crow laws in the courts.  They decided against it for two reasons.  First, Colvin had fought back against the arresting officers, which resulted in her being charged with assault and battery.  Second, they discovered that she was several months pregnant out of wedlock. They concluded that the appropriate symbol in a case challenging an immoral system would have to be morally beyond reproach.

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Vernon Johns had been pastor at Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for five years when he was dismissed in 1952. He had earned himself a reputation as one of the preeminent preachers of his day.  Brilliant, barrel-chested, highly principled, able to read Hebrew, ancient Greek, and Latin, Johns had also been variously described as “fearless,” “eccentric,” “aggressive,” “irascible,” a man with “strange ways” who employed “dangerous” methods to get his comfortable middle-class congregation to fight the evils of segregation. 

As Dexter’s pastor, Johns was among the first prominent civil rights activists in Montgomery.  But he was no organizer. Once, after he entered a bus and paid his fare, the driver asked him to get off and reboard from the back. He refused and instead took a seat in the front. When the driver refused to drive on, Johns demanded his money back. He got it. But when he called on his fellow black and white passengers to join him in protest, not a soul followed him. 

While more poetic, his exhortations from the pulpit were no more successful.  In one brutal 1948 sermon, Johns denounced his congregation for not doing more to help stop the lynching of African Americans. He told them that their passivity in the face of such violence made them no different than those who stood by while Jesus was being crucified.

Just as irking to the congregation, however, was Johns’ fervent belief in black economic self-sufficiency.  Much to the embarrassment of his urbane congregants, Johns would hawk meat and produce on the street after services. This was no way for the pastor of Montgomery’s elite Baptist church to behave.

More than one historian has credited Johns’ presence at Dexter Avenue for preparing his congregation for the arrival of Martin Luther King, Jr.  King would later thank Johns for “keeping the problem [of racial discrimination] before the conscience” of middle-class blacks who had been indifferent to the push for civil rights.  But the decision to hire King wasn’t driven by any desire to build on Johns’ legacy.  If anything, when the deacons hired the presentable, well-mannered, 25-year-old scion from an elite Atlanta family, they were trying to move their church as far away from John’s off-putting eccentricity as they could. 

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Much has been said and written about the burdens and perils of black excellence.  The drive to work harder and better in the face of white advantage and condescension can come at a personal cost, and can even threaten those whites who’ve never felt the same obligation to work that hard.  

The phenomenon, of course, is not exclusive to African Americans. My own dad, who was not the least bit racially militant, made my burden as a Mexican American clear when Dan Quayle became Vice President of the United States.  “We don’t have the privilege to be that mediocre,” he said, referring to the decidedly unimpressive former congressman from Indiana. “We have to work harder and prove more.”

There’s been considerably less commentary about the burden of minorities to prove their moral righteousness in the face of white fears.  Yes, we’re all familiar with the so-called Sidney Poitier Syndrome. In the 1950s and ‘60s, Poitier was the showcase, non-threatening, one-dimensional leading black man who, in the words of the late New York Times film critic Clifford Mason, was “given a clean suit and a complete purity of motivation so that, like a mistreated puppy, he has all the sympathy on his side and all those mean whites are just so many Simon Legrees.” 

Post-war black civil rights activists felt obliged to perform these theatrics of moral righteousness in real life.  They knew it wasn’t enough to be on the right side of the issue.  Because they sought to leverage guilt to move white opinion, they had to always maintain the moral high ground.  But that, too, had its personal costs.

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Tracey Scott Wilson said she felt guilty writing her 2009 play, The Good Negro. Having grown up a preacher’s child idolizing black civil rights leaders, she struggled to create fictional characters that were more morally complex than the plaster saints we’ve come to memorialize. Based on the heady events in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1962, the play features three flawed black activists who are struggling with the movement’s burden of righteousness. 

Painfully aware of the dangers of using morality as both a weapon and a shield, a charismatic preacher named James Lawrence, who is clearly modeled on Martin Luther King, Jr., frets that whites are “waiting for us to fuck it up. They’re waiting for us to talk wrong, walk wrong, be wrong and then they can say, ‘See? Look at them n******. No better than animals. I told you so.’”

Indeed, just as they did to King in real life, the FBI is recording Lawrence’s illicit sexual escapades and holding the audio tapes over his head.  When another character reminds Lawrence that white people don’t talk or walk any better than blacks, Lawrence agrees but suggests that the burden of their sins doesn’t weigh on them as much, because “they got their rights already.”

In one of the more poignant moments of the play, Lawrence, the King figure, confesses to a fellow preacher that it’s only during his escapades, when he’s not being responsibly righteous, that he feels “free.” “Not a Negro then,” he continues. “Just like everybody else. Feels good to be like everybody else.”

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James Lawrence, of course, was a fictional character just like those Poitier played.  But the struggles of his imperfect character ring truer than the quiet stoicism and preternatural self-control of Mr. Tibbs.  Particularly for black males—or Latinos for that matter, another group that has been cast as savages–assuaging white fear takes a lot of energy.  But so does having to feed their fetish for the ideal “good Negro” who just wants to get into “good trouble.”  After all, fear and fetish are the flip sides of the same coin.  Both sides, however, make it impossible for any complex human being to feel free and just be themselves in the world.

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Booker T. Washington and the True Source of Dignity

(Lifting the Veil of Ignorance, monument to Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee University. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Tuskegee, Alabama

The contemporary language of racial justice tends to focus on external threats to human dignity rather than on what individuals and groups do for themselves to maintain or rebuild a sense of self worth against the odds. The two narratives are not mutually exclusive, of course. But nor are they of equal power. While some forms of justice can be achieved by confronting those who’ve trampled on your rights, individual dignity and self worth can never be granted by a third party. They can only be developed internally, usually through a combination of strong will and hard work.

Yet because of the emphasis on the wound over the healing, minority progress is too often discussed exclusively in terms of the need for recognition from white society or redress from the government. Particularly since the 1960s, minority protest has eclipsed capacity building in the eyes of the intellectual elite. That’s likely because “the experience of rights-assertion,” as critical race theorist Patricia Williams has written, can give individuals the feeling “of empowerment of an internal and very personal sort,” tantamount even to the “process of finding the self.”

While not insignificant, validation only goes far. And it still places the power to validate in the hands of a third party. At the very least, it requires a straw man against whom to define oneself.

Sometimes, the exclusive focus on protest and validation evades the question of rights or even and formulating solutions to any given problem. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, for instance, activists focused on mounting a racial validation campaign rather than directly addressing specific ways to curb police abuse. Almost 3 years later, it’s unclear what that campaign achieved substantively.

It is this narrow focus on protest–whether for rights or validation–that has led to the sidelining of one of the great men of American history, Booker T. Washington.

Washington, who was born into slavery in 1856, founded a teachers college in Tuskegee, Alabama, on July 4, 1881, under a charter granted by the state’s legislature. What started as the Tuskegee Institute grew to become Tuskegee University. The initial emphasis of the institute was to provide students with both academic and vocational training. Its first students built the school’s buildings, grew its food, and generally provided for most of the student body’s necessities. Implicit in these duties was Washington’s belief in the necessity of focusing on the moral, economic and educational development of African Americans. The larger goal was to have Tuskegee-trained teachers take this ethos of self-reliance communities across the South.

Given this extraordinary achievement– a 25-year-old, late-19th century black man building a school of higher learning even during the worst years of racial terror–one would think Washington would be a well revered figure in U.S. history.

Instead, over the course of more than a century, Washington has become a controversial figure, sometimes viciously characterized as the embodiment of “Uncle Tomism,” i.e., being subservient to whites. What earned him that derogatory epithet? He chose the path of self-improvement over protest.

In order to build the Tuskegee Institute, Washington had to appeal to sympathetic whites who had money and power. He found allies –and donors– in men such as Andrew Carnegie and J. Pierpont Morgan, and was consulted by several U.S. presidents. (In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Washington to dinner at the White House.)

Given his familiarity with this milieu, it isn’t surprising that Washington was fluent in the language of the marketplace rather than that of morality or justice. Nor is it shocking that Washington thought that integrating blacks into America’s growing industrial economy was the path to betterment—and better treatment—for African Americans.

In his infamous 1895 speech at an economic expo of Southern states held in Atlanta, Georgia, Washington clearly laid out his philosophy to his audience of white businessmen. He emphasized the importance of hard work and steady economic advancement for African Americans. He argued that rather than flee the South or put their hope in politics, blacks should “cast down their buckets” and find work in “agriculture, mechanics, in commerce, in domestic service, and in the professions.” “The wisest among my race,” he insisted, “understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.” Emphasizing the need for African Americans to contribute to the regional economy, he said that, “[n]o race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercises of these privileges.”

At the same time, however, he asked whites to also “cast down their buckets” with black workers rather than hire immigrants, not as an act of charity but as one that furthered their own self-interest. As African Americans made up one third of the region’s population, he argued, “no enterprise seeking the material, civil or moral welfare of this section can disregard this element of our population and reach the highest success.” Conversely, if they did not choose blacks to help themselves, it would be to everyone’s detriment. “We shall contribute one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South,” he warned, “or we shall prove a veritable body of death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic.” Washington believed that only through economic achievement, which required cooperating with those who had the power to hire, could blacks ever achieve political and social equality.

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At first, Washington’s speech was enthusiastically received by both whites and blacks. It was only as the violence and indignities of the Jim Crow era multiplied did he begin to receive criticism from a small cadre of Northern black intellectuals. In the decade after the speech, which his critics dubbed the “Atlanta Compromise,” most southern states disenfranchised black voters and formally established segregation. White racial violence was epidemic. It was then that his critics began to see Washington’s conciliatory Southern strategy as nothing less than cowardice. “Among his black critics,” writes historian Robert J. Norrell, “each denial of a constitutional right, every indignity against a black railroad patron, and every lynching became a mark against Washington’s leadership.”

It wasn’t until the mid-20th century, when activists began to demand more revolutionary change, that Washington would fully become a convenient antihero who symbolized the failed strategies of gradualism and accommodationism. 

But I see no reason why an undoubtedly great man has to symbolize all things to all people. Minority advancement requires more than one strategy, and the ideology of hard work and protest are not mutually exclusive.

It’s entirely understandable why 1960s militants saw rights as being more important than interracial cooperation and economic advancement. But almost 70 years after the dawning of the civil rights era, might it not be time to remind ourselves of the ultimate source of dignity? Rights are critical, as even Washington conceded, but has our near obsession with them allowed us to devalue the need to teach future generations about the importance of developing their own skills and inner fortitude?

Booker T. Washington insisted that, “[n]o race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top. Nor should we permit our grievances to overshadow our opportunities.”

Surely such wise counsel can benefit any young person of any background at any time.

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The Night Jesus Spoke to Martin Luther King, Jr.

(Parsonage, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Montgomery, Alabama

Of the many heroic deeds performed in the name of civil rights in America, perhaps none is more consequential than the epiphany experienced in this house at 309 S Jackson Street in January of 1956. It was here, in the parsonage of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr., spent, in the estimation of biographer David J. Garrow, “the most important night of his life.”

King wrote about that night in his 1958 book Stride for Freedom: The Montgomery Story. The bus boycott—of which King was a reluctant leader—was more than a month old. Montgomery’s white leadership had begun to push back hard.  King, who was only 27 years old, had just been arrested for the first time, and the obscene and threatening phone calls he was receiving at home were beginning to their toll on his confidence as well as on his mental health. Ready to give up, he began to devise ways he could step away without looking like a coward.

King then began to consider how blessed and comfortable his life had been thus far. He thought of his wife, his two-month-old daughter, and his “marvelous” mother and father.  “I was about to conclude that life had been wrapped up for me in a Christmas package,” he wrote.  

But then it occurred to him that the religion he had experienced as a fortunate young man would not help him through this moment. “Now of course, I was religious,” he recalled. “I grew up in the church. I’m the son of a preacher . . . my grandfather was a preacher, my great grandfather was a preacher, my only brother was a preacher, my daddy’s brother is a preacher, so I didn’t have much choice, I guess.  But I had grown up in the church . . . but it was a kind of inherited religion and I had never felt an experience with God in the way that you must, and have it, if you’re walking the lonely paths of this life.”

Around midnight of January 27, 1956, King picked up a phone call that shook him to his core. An angry voice said, “Listen, n*****, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out and blow up your house.”

It was in the wake of that call that religion became “real” to him, when he knew that he “had to know God for [himself].”  And then he bowed over his cup of coffee. “I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, ‘Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.”

It was then, King recalled, that he heard the voice of Jesus telling him to continue the fight.  “He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.”

For the remainder of his life, he would look back on that night whenever the obstacles before him seemed too big to handle. 

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Fear and Loathing in South Carolina

(Denmark Vesey Memorial, Hampton Park, Charleston, SC. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Charleston, South Carolina

My first stop in Charleston was to pay my respects to Denmark Vesey—a formerly enslaved carpenter who had bought his own freedom in 1799 with the winnings from a lucky lottery ticket. He was hanged in 1822—along with 34 other accused men—for his role in planning a revolt that prosecutors claimed was to involved the raping of white women and the execution of white enslavers. Though it never came to pass, the plot haunted slave holders for decades.

Americans talk way too much about hatred—or love—when discussing the history of this country’s race relations. However, fear and greed have always been more critical determinants of how whites have treated blacks throughout U.S history. Greed is what created slavery and subsequent forms of economic subordination. Then came the fear. Whites feared the wrath of those they subordinated. The extent of their fear was often determined by demographics. During and after slavery, regions with black majorities—like the Mississippi Delta—were generally the places where whites were most fearful of black revolt, which therefore justified—in their minds—the more brutal treatment of African Americans.

Charleston, the capital of American slavery, was another such place. From the early 18th to the mid-19th-century, African Americans made up the majority of Charleston residents. The social hierarchy was pyramid-shaped with a thin layer of high-living whites at the top, a free black community in the middle, and a broad base of enslaved blacks at the base.

Those facts alone help explain the hysteria that whipped through Charleston when Vesey’s rebellion was revealed. It also sheds light on white South Carolinians’ hysterical response to John Brown’s raid and why the Palmetto State was the first state to secede after Abraham Lincoln was elected.

But there was something more intimate occurring beneath the numbers. Slaveholding was so widespread in Charleston by the mid-19th century that 3 out of 4 white households owned at least one slave. That meant, as historians Ethan J. Kytle and Blain Roberts elegantly put it, “that most white residents interacted on a daily basis with someone who had every reason to despise them or even wish them dead.”

Vesey was a sixty-year-old carpenter when he was executed for plotting an insurrection. News of the foiled plot led whites to tighten slave supervision and further limit whatever meager liberties free blacks had enjoyed. In short: Subordination led to anger, which led to fear, which led to insurrection, which led to fear, and even more cruel subordination, which led to fear.

According to one contemporary observer, after Vesey’s execution Charleston “seemed to be in a permanent state of siege.” Less than forty years later, the start of the Civil War further heightened fears of slave insurrections.

But there’s a wrinkle in this story. In 2020, historian Michael P. Johnson, a professor emeritus at Johns Hopkins University, published a paper questioning whether the insurrection wasn’t a fantasy concocted by Charleston’s ambitious mayor, who became quite the hero for conducting what Johnson calls ‘the deadliest civilian judicial proceedings in American history.”

Whatever the truth, it wouldn’t have been the first or last time whites projected their own sins onto African Americans and conjured up hypothetical black revenge to justify the further tightening of their control.

Erected in 2014, the statue of Vesey, which was vandalized in 2021, now stands in the middle of a park named after a Confederate general.

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America’s Other Founding Father

(The Parish of Saint Bartholomew, Groton, Sussex. Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Groton, Sussex, England

The United States was founded twice, first by 17th-century Puritans and again by 18th-century revolutionaries. The Puritans bequeathed us their concept of the covenant, their apocalyptic moralism, and their unique form of hierarchical communalism. The Revolutionaries gave us our system of divided government, phobia of all forms of tyranny, and the vocabulary out of which Americans would later create a democracy. 

When politicians want Americans to come together and do great things, they generally borrow words and concepts from the Puritans rather than from the revolutionary generation.  They use their prophetic, Biblical language that’s not found in either the the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence.  They speak of destinies, missions, chosen people, and dreams that must be fulfilled.  They talk about “a city on the hill,” a phrase uttered in 1630 by John Winthrop, the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Winthrop used the phrase in his lay sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in which he challenged his fellow migrants to create a pious New World community that would serve as an inspiration to the world. It’s a sermon modern presidents love to quote.  Starting with John F. Kennedy, five of the last eight U.S. commanders in chief have lifted that phrase.

Surprisingly, most historians don’t think the sermon was all that remarkable for its time.  “City on a hill” was a term frequently used in Puritan sermons across East Anglia, the region from which upwards of 60% of Puritan migrants hailed. 

What was remarkable, however —both for its time and today—was the profile of the migrants Winthrop led over the Atlantic. They were highly skilled, literate, principled, and, unlike so many immigrants to the New World, travelled in family units.  These are the people who gave New England its distinctive culture. 

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Having learned all this, of course I wanted to see the place where it all started, the region Archbishop William Laud, the Puritan’s archenemy, pointed to as being the center of heresy in England.  But that required me to drive on the left side of the road, which was a spectacular drag, particularly in those horrible roundabouts. But fortunately my wife was there to guide me across the lanes.  

After chipping some paint off my left side rear view mirror on the first day’s drive from London to Cambridge, I figured that the second day through Essex and Suffolk would be a breeze. I was wrong.  I innocently thought that forty miles would take us about 40 minutes. Wrong again. I had clearly never driven on English country roads where what appeared to be a one-lane road–flanked by high hedges or stone walls–are also meant to accommodate oncoming traffic. And all that in the rain. It was terrifying.

Before arriving in Groton, where John Winthrop had been lord of the manor, we drove through towns like Haverhill, Sudbury, Newton, each of which have counterparts in Massachusetts. In Groton, we had lunch at the Fox and Hounds pub, and there we imagined how empty the countryside must have felt after this 17th-century exodus.  More than 70 people from tiny Groton and nearby villages emigrated with Winthrop. More would follow in the coming years. Nearly 200 of the original 700 emigrants came from Suffolk and neighboring Essex county.

I didn’t know much about Winthrop himself when I walked through the graveyard where his parents are buried and visited St. Bartholomew’s Church, where he once worshipped.  But I’ve since read Francis J. Bremer’s sympathetic biography of the man he calls “America’s forgotten founding father.”  Emphasizing the multiplicity of views that existed within the Protestant religious movement that came to be known as Puritanism, Bremer credits Winthrop with keeping together a headstrong group of believers and for trying to build a “radically better world while insisting on moderate and traditional measures.” Winthrop, Bremer concludes, was “zealous but not a zealot,” a leader who tried hard to teach the members of his community to love one another.  

After Groton, we drove on to Norwich (not the one in Massachusetts) and ended the day in Harwich (no, not the one on Cape Cod), which claims to be the town where the Mayflower was built. But that’s the story of a different Protestant sect, the one that founded Plymouth, Massachusetts, a decade before the Puritans set sail.  

As we walked along the promenade by Dovercourt Bay the next morning, the winds were pulling me in two directions. Part of me wanted to take a ferry to Holland, less than 140 miles across the North Sea, where some of the Pilgrims lived for over a decade before sailing to America.  The other part of me  knew I needed to head to Rhode Island to learn and ponder the story of Anne Hutchinson.

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Home Is Where the Heart Is

(Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Atchison, Kansas

My wife carries a now dog-eared copy of this photo of Amelia Earhart in her pocketbook. She was given it at the Amelia Earhart Birthplace Museum in Atchison, Kansas, which is in the Gothic Revival house that belonged to Earhart’s maternal grandparents. Perched high on a bluff on the west bank of the Missouri River, it’s where the pioneering aviator was born at the end of the 19th-century.  

Earhart lived here off and on between the ages of three and twelve. Her father, who was a lawyer for the railroad, moved the family around a lot. The poor man also suffered from alcoholism, which would challenge the family’s well-being in all ways, including financially. 

In an otherwise troubled childhood, Earhart clung to her fond memories of her time here. Though she lived in many places, she always considered Atchison her hometown. It’s here, writes biographer Susan Butler, that Earhart felt “secure of her family’s position, nurtured by tradition and surrounded by friends.”  The friends she met here as a child would remain her best friends for the rest of her life. 

We stopped here on a drive from Kansas City to Omaha.  And as tempting as it is to say that Earhart came from the middle of nowhere, Atchison–like so many Midwestern towns–once boomed because it was in the middle of everything or at the very least conveniently located along a popular path between East and West.

Either way, places are created by the meaning people attach to them. And Earhart viewed her grandparents’ home in the northeast corner of Kansas as the perfect place to take off from. 

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Easy Like Sunday Morning

(Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Tuskegee, Alabama

I’ve been searching for America and all variety of Americana for decades now. But this building has already climbed to the top of my charts. This is where the Commodores, who first met as freshmen at Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute in 1968, recorded “Brick House” and other classics like “Easy” and–my favorite–“Zoom.” The early members bought the building and used it to rehearse and record for much of the 1970s and early 1980s. In 2015, one of the group’s former body guards turned it into a charming museum.

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America Ignored Jimmy Carter at its Own Peril

From an exhibit at the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library and Museum (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Atlanta, Georgia

One of the many flaws in American governance is that the president is expected to be both chief executive and head of state.  There is no division of duties as in Britain between the monarch and the prime minister, or as in Germany, with its chancellor and president.  The U.S. president is expected to fill both the executive role of making hard decisions and the ceremonial role of making the public feel they’re part of a cohesive nation.  Except perhaps in times of war, it’s virtually impossible for a political figure whose job it is to win at the dirty game of politics to project those qualities of a nation that transcend mere politics.  Jimmy Carter, who entered home hospice care this past weekend, was a far better symbol than he was an executive. It’s a shame that he wasn’t the symbol this gold medal obsessed nation wanted.

On July 15, 1979, in a televised address ostensibly about the energy crisis, Carter uttered words that a head of state needed to tell his people. But because they were too honest and challenging, they were also words no elected official could get away with saying. 

That night, the peanut farmer from Georgia didn’t talk about unhappiness in the land or of a momentary spell of anxiety. He warned that too many Americans had traded a sense of purpose and community for “self indulgence” and a growing belief in “consumption.” Sounding like the Sunday school teacher he was, he said that Americans’ identities were becoming more defined by what they owned rather than by how they made a living. But he reminded us that “material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives” without purpose.  Yes. An American president spoke to Americans from the Oval Office and told them that they needed to find meaning and purpose in their lives.

Perhaps even more striking is that he didn’t propose a governmental solution to this problem. In fact, he confessed, “that all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America.” Americans had to do it by and for themselves.

Carter feared that Americans would choose the path that led “to fragmentation and self-interest.”  “Down that road,” he warned, “lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.”

Materialism, pessimism, a “growing disrespect” for government, churches, and other essential institutions, Carter saw the “symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us.” And he was well aware that this message was not one of “happiness or reassurance.” But he knew it was true, and said it anyways.   Though the speech did not use the word “malaise,” the press labeled it his “malaise speech.” That alone suggests that they didn’t understand the depth of Carter’s assessment of the state of the union. 

Despite its brilliance, Carter’s infamous speech is most often remembered as another example of a “tone-deaf” one-term president. A year later, an aggressively optimistic former actor, who insisted that it was still “morning in America,” defeated him in a landslide.

Because we willfully misinterpreted and then ignored him, America has become the nation Carter feared it would. Humble, anti-elitist, the only Democratic former president in my memory who didn’t become filthy rich after leaving the White House, Carter was too straight an arrow to  be an effective president. But he was also one of the very, very few national political figures who had the courage to tell the truth about the state of American culture. 

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What Marx — Harpo not Karl — Understood about Diversity

179 East 93rd Street, New York, New York (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Upper East Side, Manhattan, New York

It was a beautiful—almost spring—morning in Manhattan, a perfect day for an excursion.  So I hopped on the Lexington Avenue line to head uptown to see the apartment building where the Marx Brothers–Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo and Zeppo (who was born there)–called home between 1895 and 1910.  Harpo called the apartment on the fourth floor of  179 East 93rd Street (between Lexington and Third) the “first real home” he could remember.  

That’s because, according to Harpo, the Marxes were “poor, very poor,” and there were ten mouths to feed. In addition to the five brothers, there were Minnie and Frenchie, the boys’ parents, Minnie’s parents, Fanny and Lafe Schönberg, and cousin Polly, who the Marxes had adopted. Before finding the flat on 93rd Street, the family had moved around a lot, always keeping one step ahead of their debts. But they always preferred to live in and around the German-speaking neighborhoods of the Upper East Side. Minnie had been born in a small village in Lower Saxony, while Frenchie came from a French Alsatian town (hence his nickname) that had remained loyal to Germany.  They both spoke the same German dialect and gravitated toward other immigrants who shared their mother tongue. 

But while shared language and ethnicity was a source of comfort and community for many, the cliquishness of the Upper East Side was also a dangerous obstacle course for kids. One could read tomes of ethnic American history and sociology and find no more brilliant, poetic, and succinct description of the story of American diversity than Harpo’s recollections of his childhood neighborhood.

In his 1961 memoir Harpo Speaks!, the actor-comedian whose given name was Adolph, described the Upper East Side as being “subdivided” into German blocks, Irish blocks, a few Jewish blocks, and “a couple of Independent Italian states thrown in for good measure.” The north-and-south avenues meanwhile—First, Second, Third and Lexington—were “neutral zones” that “belonged more to the city than the neighborhood.” Four blocks to the west, Central Park was a “friendly foreign country,” where it was “safe territory for lone wolves.”  But on the cross streets, it was “open season” on the kids whose ethnic group didn’t dominate any given block.  

When a kid’s ethnicity was unclear–which was not uncommon–the toughs would ask him to identify what block he lived on.  To save time and any more trouble than he was already in, Harpo decided early on to answer such questions honestly.   So, when a group of Irish or German street kids asked him what street he was from, he’d say 93rd Street. And when they asked which block of 93rd Street—between Third and Lex, “that pinned me down,” he wrote, “I was a Jew.” 

Even though Harpo was small, he wasn’t flat footed.  He learned that the worst thing he could do was not have anything to “fork over for ransom.” To keep himself from being beaten to a pulp, he never left his block “without some kind of boodle in [his] pocket—a dead tennis ball, an empty thread spool, a penny, anything. It didn’t cost much to buy your freedom; the gesture was the important thing.”

Decades later Harpo waxed philosophical about this urban obstacle course. “Every Irish kid who made a Jewish kid knuckle under was made to say ‘Uncle!’ by an Italian, who got his lumps from a German kid, who got his insides kicked out by his old man for street fighting and then went out and beat up an Irish kid to heal his wounds.  ‘I’ll teach you!’ was the threat they passed along, Irisher to Jew to Italian to German. Everybody was trying to teach everybody else, all down the line.” 

In the end, he concluded, “It was all part of the endless fight for recognition of foreigners in the process of becoming America.”

While few would characterize that brand of multicultural education as ideal, Harpo’s honesty about inevitable interethnic tensions and competition is nonetheless refreshing.

Mosaic, melting pot, salad bowl.  These are terms that have been used to describe America’s demographic diversity. But they’re all pretty inaccurate, as they make no reference to the competition and conflict among ethnic–as well as racial groups–that have always characterized American life.

Now that today’s post-civil rights social mandate requires us all to pretend to love one another (or else!), we no longer properly acknowledge the grittier side of group behavior–and human nature–that cannot be banished by either slogans or legislation. 

The marvelous Encyclopedia of New York City says the Marx Brothers’ brand of “anarchic comedy” came to be “strongly associated” with ethnic New York.  It’s hard not to conclude that the neighborhood conflict they endured as children didn’t play a critical role in forging what the Encyclopedia calls the unique mix of verbal repartee, rapid timing, and physicality that defined their humor.

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Visiting Thomas Merton

The Abbey of Gethsemani, Trappist, Kentucky (Photo by Gregory Rodriguez)

Trappist, Kentucky

Someone had placed a chair next to Thomas Merton’s grave, but I would have felt way too presumptuous to sit on it. (No, no, I didn’t want to talk to him. I just wanted to quickly come by and say thanks.) Also, I felt guilty only acknowledging the celebrated writer in a graveyard full of Trappist monks.  Merton himself felt conflicted and embarrassed by his fame. He longed to transcend any craving for it.  

Not so long ago, when I had zero money to my name, I bought a used copy of A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily Meditations from his Journals.  The book became a talisman for me, a lifeline.  I have begun many days reading snippets of his words to help me focus on the things that matter.  

So, yes, I am grateful to Merton and to his spiritual genius, but for the reasons mentioned, I rushed through the cemetery as if through a duty free store at an airport.  I did, however, manage to snap the above photo. 

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