Uncategorized – Page 7 – Historical Easter Eggs

March 29, 2017 Vietnam Veteran’s Day

In the end, US public opinion would not sustain what too many saw as an endless war.

Since the late 19th century, the area now known as Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam was governed as a French Colonial territory. “French Indo-China” came to be occupied by the Imperial Japanese after the fall of France, at the onset of WWII. There arose a nationalist-communist army during this period, dedicated to throwing out the Japanese occupier. It called itself the “League for the Independence of Vietnam”, or “Viet Minh”.

France re-occupied the region following the Japanese defeat ending WWII, but soon faced the same opposition from the army of Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. What began as a low level rural insurgency, later became a full-scale modern war when Communist China entered the fray in 1949.

The disastrous defeat of French forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1953 led to French withdrawal from Vietnam, the Geneva Convention partitioning the country into the communist “Democratic Republic of Vietnam” in the north, and the State of Vietnam in the south, led by Emperor Bao Dai and Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem.

Communist forces of the north continued to terrorize Vietnamese patriots in north and south alike, with aid and support from communist China and the Soviet Union.

The student of history understands that nothing happens in a vacuum. US foreign policy is no exception. International Communism had attempted to assert itself since the Paris Commune rebellion of 1871, and found its first major success with the collapse of czarist Russia in 1917.

US policy makers feared a “domino” effect, and with good cause. The 15 core nations of the Soviet bloc were soon followed by Eastern Europe, as Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and Czechoslovakia fell into the Soviet sphere of influence. Germany was partitioned into Communist and free-enterprise spheres after WWII, followed by China, North Korea and on across Southeast Asia.

This is no benign ideology. Current estimates of citizens murdered by Communist ideology in the Soviet Union alone, range from 8 to 61 million during the Stalinist period.

Agree or disagree with policy makers of the time, that’s your business, but they followed a logical thought process. US aid and support for South Vietnam increased as a way to “stem the tide” of international communism, at the same time that French support was pulling back. By the late 50s, the US was sending technical and financial aid in expectation of social and land reform. By 1960, the “National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam” (“NLF”, or “Viet Cong”) had taken to murdering Diem supported village leaders. JFK responded by sending 1,364 American advisers into South Vietnam, in 1961.

The war in Vietnam pitted as many as 1.8 million allied forces from South Vietnam, the United States, Thailand, Australia, the Philippines, Spain, South Korea and New Zealand, against about a half million from North Vietnam, China, the Soviet Union and North Korea. Begun on November 1, 1955, the conflict lasted 19 years, 5 months and a day. On March 29, 1973, two months after signing the Paris Peace accords, the last US combat troops left South Vietnam as Hanoi freed the remaining POWs held in North Vietnam.

Even then it wasn’t over. Communist forces violated cease-fire agreements before they were signed. Some 7,000 US civilian Department of Defense employees stayed behind to aid South Vietnam in conducting an ongoing and ultimately futile war against communist North Vietnam.

The last, humiliating scenes of the war played themselves out on the roof of the US Embassy in Saigon on April 29 – 30, 1975, as those who could boarded helicopters, while communist forces closed around the South Vietnamese capital.

The “Killing Fields” of Cambodia followed between 1975 – ‘79, when the “Khmer Rouge”, self-described as “The one authentic people capable of building true communism”, murdered or caused the deaths of an estimated 1.4 to 2.2 million of their own people, out of a population of 7 million. All to build the perfect, agrarian, “Worker’s Paradise”.

Imagine feeling so desperate, so fearful of this alien ideology invading your country, that you convert all your worldly possessions and those of your family to a single diamond, bite down on that stone so hard it embedded in your shattered teeth, and fled with your family to open ocean in a small boat. All in the faint and desperate hope, of getting out of that place. That is but one story among more than three million “boat people”. Three million from a combined population of 56 million, fleeing the Communist onslaught in hopes of temporary asylum in other countries in Southeast Asia or China.

They were the Sino-Vietnamese Hoa, and Cambodians fleeing the Khmer Rouge. Ethnic Laotians, Iu Mien, Hmong and other highland peoples of Laos. The 30 or so Degar (Montagnard) tribes in the Central Highlands, so many of whom had been our steadfast allies in the late war. Over 2.5 million of them were resettled, more than half to the United States. The other half went mostly to Canada, Europe and South Pacific nations. A half-million were repatriated, voluntarily or involuntarily. Hundreds of thousands vanished in their attempt to flee.

The humanitarian disaster that was the Indochina refugee crisis was particularly acute between 1979 – ’80, but reverberations continued into the 21st century.

Today, we remember John Ogonowski as Senior Captain on American Airlines flight 11, one of thousands killed by Islamist terrorists, on September 11, 2001. When he wasn’t flying jumbo jets, John Ogonowski was a farmer. For years, John mentored Cambodian farmers on his Dracut, Massachusetts “White Gate Farm“, helping them grow familiar crops, in an unfamiliar climate. Just as those old Yankee farmers had mentored his Polish immigrant ancestors, years before.

There were 57,939 names inscribed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall, the day it opened in 1982. Over the years, the names of military personnel who succumbed to wounds sustained in the war, were added to the wall. As of Memorial Day 2015, there are 58,307.

In the end, US public opinion would not sustain what too many saw as an endless war. We continue to feel the political repercussions, to this day. I was ten at the time of the Tet Offensive in 1968. I remember the way some of my fellow Americans conducted themselves, and came to feel as I do to this day, that anyone who has a problem with our country’s war policy, needs to take it up with a politician. Not with a member of the Armed Services.

In 2017, Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) and Joe Donnelly (D-IN) co-sponsored a measure to declare March 29 Vietnam Veterans Day, to honor US service members who served in the war in southeast Asia. The measure passed the House of Representatives on March 21 and the Senate on February 3. President Donald Trump signed the measure into law on March 28, designating the following day, March 29, Vietnam Veteran’s Day.

It’s about time.

March 28, 1918 A White Feather

Gangs of “feather girls” took to the streets, looking for military-age men out of uniform. Frederick Broome was fifteen years old, when “accosted by four girls who gave me three white feathers.”

At different times and places, a white feather has carried different meanings. For those inclined toward New-Age, the presence of a white feather is proof that Guardian Angels are near. For the Viet Cong and NVA Regulars who were his prey, the “Lông Trắng” (“White Feather”) symbolized the deadliest menace of the American war effort in Vietnam, USMC Scout Sniper Carlos Hathcock, who wore one in his bush hat. Following the Battle of Crécy in 1346, Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, plucked three white ostrich feathers from the dead body of the blind King John of Bohemia. To this day, those feathers appear in the coat of arms, of the prince of Wales.

The Edward and John who faced one another over the field at Crécy, could be described in many ways. Cowardice is not one of them. For the men of the WW1 generation, a white feather represented precisely that.

In August 1914, seventy-three year old British Admiral Charles Cooper Penrose-Fitzgerald organized a group of thirty women, to give out white feathers to men not in uniform. The point was clear enough. To gin up enough manpower, to feed the needs of a war so large as to gobble up a generation, and spit out the pieces.

Lord Horatio Kitchener supported the measure, saying “The women could play a great part in the emergency by using their influence with their husbands and sons to take their proper share in the country’s defence, and every girl who had a sweetheart should tell men that she would not walk out with him again until he had done his part in licking the Germans.”

The Guardian newspaper chimed in, breathlessly reporting on the activities of the “Order of the White Feather“, hoping that the gesture “would shame every young slacker” into enlisting.

000simkinJE9 — “The White Feather: A Sketch of English Recruiting”, Collier’s Weekly (1914)

In theory, such an “award” was intended to inspire the dilatory to fulfill his duty to King and country. In practice, such presentations were often mean-spirited and out of line. Sometimes, grotesquely so.

The movement spread across Great Britain and the Commonwealth nations and across Europe, encouraged by suffragettes such as Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, and feminist writers Mary Augusta Ward, founding President of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League, and British-Hungarian novelist and playwright, Emma Orczy.

Distributors of the white feather were almost exclusively female, who frequently misjudged their targets. Stories abound of men on leave, wounded, or in reserved occupations being handed one of the odious symbols.

Seaman George Samson received a white feather on the same day he was awarded the British Commonwealth’s highest military award for gallantry in combat, equivalent to the American Medal of Honor: the Victoria Cross.

The writer Compton Mackenzie, himself a serving soldier, complained that these “idiotic young women were using white feathers to get rid of boyfriends of whom they were tired“.

James Lovegrove was sixteen when he received his first white feather: “On my way to work one morning a group of women surrounded me. They started shouting and yelling at me, calling me all sorts of names for not being a soldier! Do you know what they did? They struck a white feather in my coat, meaning I was a coward. Oh, I did feel dreadful, so ashamed.” Lovegrove went straight to the recruiting office, who tried to send him home for being too young and too small: “You see, I was five foot six inches and only about eight and a half stone. This time he made me out to be about six feet tall and twelve stone, at least, that is what he wrote down. All lies of course – but I was in!”.

James Cutmore attempted to volunteer for the British Army in 1914, but was rejected for being near-sighted. By 1916, the war in Europe was consuming men at a rate unprecedented in history. Governments weren’t nearly so picky. A woman gave Cutmore a white feather as he walked home from work. Humiliated, he enlisted the following day. In the 1980s, Cutmore’s grandchild wrote “By that time, they cared nothing for [near-sightedness]. They just wanted a body to stop a shell, which Rifleman James Cutmore duly did in February 1918, dying of his wounds on March 28. My mother was nine, and never got over it. In her last years, in the 1980s, her once fine brain so crippled by dementia that she could not remember the names of her children, she could still remember his dreadful, lingering, useless death. She could still talk of his last leave, when he was so shell-shocked he could hardly speak and my grandmother ironed his uniform every day in the vain hope of killing the lice.”

Some of these people were not to be put off. One man was confronted by an angry woman in a London park, who demanded to know why he wasn’t in uniform. “Because I’m German“, he said. She gave him a feather anyway.

Some men had no patience for such nonsense. Private Ernest Atkins was one. Atkins was riding in a train car, when the woman seated behind him presented him with a white feather. Striking her across the face with his pay book, Atkins promised “Certainly I’ll take your feather back to the boys at Passchendaele. I’m in civvies because people think my uniform might be lousy, but if I had it on I wouldn’t be half as lousy as you.”

Private Norman Demuth was discharged from the British Army, after being wounded in 1916. A woman on a bus handed Demuth a feather, saying “Here’s a gift for a brave soldier.” Demuth was cooler than I might have been, under the circumstances: “Thank you very much – I wanted one of those.” He used the feather to clean his pipe, handing it back to her with the comment, “You know we didn’t get these in the trenches.”

Inevitably, the white feather became a problem, when civilian government employees began to receive the hated symbol. Home Secretary Reginald McKenna issued lapel badges to employees in state industries, reading “King and Country”, proving that they too, were serving the war effort. Veterans who’d been discharged for wounds or illness were likewise issued such a badge, that they not be accosted in the street.

So it was that the laborer from the small town in Germany was sent to kill the greengrocer from St. Albans, spurred on by their women and the whole sorry mess driven by the politicians who would make war. The white feather campaign was briefly revived during WW2, but never caught on to anything approaching the same degree as the first.

The English poet, writer and soldier Siegfried Loraine Sassoon, CBE, MC, was decorated for bravery on the Western Front. Sassoon would become one of the leading poets of WW1. Let him have the final word.

“If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,
I’d live with scarlet majors at the Base,
And speed glum heroes up the line to death…
And when the war is done and youth stone dead,
I’d toddle safely home and die – in bed.”

Siegfried Sassoon

March 27, 1912 Cherry Blossoms on the Potomac

On March 27, 1912, the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador to the United States, joined First Lady Helen Taft in planting two Japanese Yoshina cherry trees on the bank of the Potomac River, first of a gift of 3,020 such trees from the people of Japan, to the people of the United States.

Eliza Scidmore was an American journalist, world traveler, author and socialite. The first female board member of the National Geographic Society, her brother was a career diplomat, who served 38 years in the Asian Pacific. Frequent visits led her to a passionate interest in all things Japanese, most especially the ‘Sakura’, the Japanese blossoming cherry tree. She called it “the most beautiful thing in the world”.

In January 1900, Federal judge William Howard Taft was summoned to Washington, to meet with the President. He hoped it was to discuss a Supreme Court appointment, but it wasn’t meant to be. One day judge Taft would get his wish, becoming the only man in United States history to serve both as President, and as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. For now, the American war in the Philippines was ongoing. Taft was directed to head up the commission to organize civilian self-government, on the island nation.

While the future President Taft labored in the Philippines, Helen Herron Taft took up residence in Japan, where she came to appreciate the beauty of the native cherry trees.

Years later, the Japanese Consul in New York learned of the First Lady’s interest in the Sakura, and suggested the city of Tokyo make a gift of Cherry trees, to the government of the United States.

For Eliza Scidmore, it was a dream 34 years in the making. It was she who raised the money to make it happen.

On March 27, 1912, the Viscountess Chinda, wife of the Japanese ambassador to the United States joined First Lady Helen Taft in planting two Japanese Yoshina cherry trees on the bank of the Potomac River. Near the Jefferson memorial. The two were planted in a formal ceremony, the first of 3,020 such trees.

It was the second such effort. 2,000 trees had arrived from Japan two years earlier, in January 1910, but they had fallen prey to disease along their journey. A private Japanese citizen donated the funds to transport a new batch of trees. The 3,020 were taken from the bank of the Arakawa River in the Adachi Ward suburb of Tokyo, to be planted along the Potomac River Basin, East Potomac Park, and the White House grounds.

The blossoming trees were overwhelmingly popular with visitors to the Washington Mall. In 1934, city commissioners sponsored a three-day celebration of the late March blossoming cherry trees, which grew into a national Cherry Blossom Festival.

During WWII, aerial bombardment laid waste to Tokyo and its surrounding suburbs. After the war, cuttings from the cherry trees of Washington were sent back to Japan, to restore the Tokyo collection.

It’s not clear to me, if the trees which line the Arakawa River today are entirely from the Potomac collection, or some combination of American and native stock. After the conflagration that was the war in the Pacific, I’m not sure it matters. It may even be the whole point.

Processed by: Helicon Filter; — Cherry Trees line the Arakawa River, Tokyo, Japan

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March 26, 1937 I Yam What I Yam

Eighty-nine years ago, Popeye the Sailor appeared for the first time in Elzie Segar’s “Thimble Theater”, a newspaper comic strip revolving around the lives of Olive Oyl and her extended family, including her brother Castor and then-boyfriend Harold Hamgravy.

The strip was around for ten years or so, when Olive & co. decided to recruit a sailor to get them to the casino on Dice Island. Approaching a rough looking character on the docks, “Popeye’s” first line was “Ja think I was a cowboy? He was supposed to be an extra, but he became so popular he soon developed into the center of the strip.

Like Olive, who was patterned after the real-life Dora Paskel, the one eyed, fighting, pipe smoking sailor was based on a real man: Chester, Illinois boxer Frank ‘Rocky’ Fiegal. The boxer didn’t mind being associated with a cartoon character. When Fiegal died in 1947, his gravestone was inscribed with the words “inspiration for Popeye.”

Before spinach, Popeye gained his superhuman strength patting the head of a magical “whiffle hen” named “Bernice”.

Back in 1870, a misplaced decimal point in a scientific journal led readers to believe that spinach had ten times the iron than it actually does. Some ideas die hard. Sixty years later, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those people still believed it to be true.

Bluto beat our sailor up in 1932 and tossed him into a spinach field, with predictable results. Following that episode, spinach sales increased by 33%. At one point, children voted spinach their third favorite food, behind turkey and ice cream.

To the everlasting joy of depression-era spinach producers, Popeye found extra muscle in the leafy vegetable, ever since. On March 26, 1937, Crystal City, Texas spinach producers unveiled a statue of Popeye, the first time in history that a statue had been erected in honor of a cartoon character.

Popeye’s pet “Eugene the Jeep” first appeared in a 1936 strip called “Wha’s a Jeep?”. Eugene was sort of magical dog who could go anywhere. Five years later, military contractors worked to develop the iconic off-road vehicle of WWII. Like Popeye’s pet Eugene, the General Purpose GP (“Jeep”) could go anywhere. Eventually, the name stuck.

Jeep isn’t the only word we get from the Popeye cartoon franchise. The inveterate moocher J. Wellington Wimpy, who would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today, gave us the word “wimp” and the burger chain that goes with it. The comic strip introduced a character called “Dufus”. To this day, a Dufus (Doofus) in the American vernacular is a “silly fool, a dimwit, or a stupid person”,

Just about every cartoon character who ever was, appears in the 1988 “Who framed Roger Rabbit”, except for Popeye. Disney didn’t forget him, the problem was that they couldn’t get legal permission to use the character, from Paramount Pictures.

Cartoonist E.C. Segar (rhymes with cigar) passed away back in 1938, but his characters live on. Over the weekend of January 16-18, 2004, the Empire State Building was lit up spinach green, a tribute to the 75th anniversary of Segar’s favorite character. Weight Watchers put out a series of spinach recipes. There was even a ceremonial “official adoption” of the orphan sea waif Swee’ Pea, during National Adoption Month (November).

EmpireStateBldg.Green_ — “Later that year (2004), the Empire State Building was lit in spinach green to celebrate Popeye’s 75th, and Weight Watchers put out a series of spinach recipes. There was even a ceremonial “official adoption” of the orphan sea waif Swee’ Pea during National Adoption Month (November)”. H/T The Coronado Times

On December 8, 2009, Google featured the character to honor the birth of his creator, Elzie Crisler Segar. Google’s famous Doodle appeared along with the mouseover text, “E.C. Segar’s Birthday.”

If you enjoyed this “Today in History”, please feel free to re-blog, “like” & share on social media, so that others may find and enjoy it as well. Please click the “follow” button on the right, to receive email updates on new articles. Thank you for your interest, in the history we all share.

March 25, 1914 Borlaug

Most of us remember the names, of the great monsters of history. Who remembers the name of the man who saved the lives of seven times the number, of this whole Parade of Horribles, put together?

Too often, history is measured in terms of its monsters.

President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe once orchestrated the murder of 20,000 civilians from a single province, after failing to receive a single vote. Josef Stalin deliberately starved as many as ten million Ukrainians, in a “terror famine” known as Holodomor. Pol Pot and a Communist cadre of nine – the Ang-Ka – killed between 1.7 and 2.5 million fellow citizens of 1970s Cambodia: about a fifth of the population. Mao Tse-Tung’s policies and political purges killed between 49 and 78 million of his own people, between 1949 and 1976.

You’re really playing in the Big Leagues when they can’t get your body count any closer than the nearest twenty-nine million.

From Adolf Hitler to Idi Amin, from Enver Pasha to Hideki Tojo and Leopold II of Belgium, the top ten dictators of the last 150 years account for the loss of nearly 150 million souls. Most of us remember the names, of the great monsters of history. Who remembers the name of the man who saved the lives of seven times the number, of this whole Parade of Horribles, put together?

Today, we live in a time and place where the National Institutes of Health (NIH) writes “The U.S. is one of the wealthiest countries in the world and accordingly has high obesity rates; one-third of the population has obesity plus another third is overweight”.

It wasn’t always so. In 1820, 94% of the world’s population lived in “absolute poverty.” The American economic historian and scientist Robert Fogel, winner (with Douglass North) of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics, wrote that: “Individuals in the bottom 20% of the caloric distributions of France and England near the end of the eighteenth century, lacked the energy for sustained work and were effectively excluded from the labor force.”

It’s hard to get our heads around the notion of “food insecurity”. I’m not talking about what’s in the fridge. This is the problem of acute malnutrition, of epidemic starvation, of cyclical famine and massive increases in mortality due to starvation and hunger-induced disease.

Norman Ernest Borlaug was born this day in 1914, on his grandparents’ farm near Cresco, Iowa. The boy’s grandfather, Nels Olson Borlaug, once told the boy “You’re wiser to fill your head now if you want to fill your belly later on.”

A farm kid educated during the Great Depression, Borlaug periodically put his studies on hold, in order to earn money. As a leader in the Civilian Conservation Corps working with unemployed people on Federal projects, many of his co-workers faced near-catastrophic levels of hunger. He later recalled, “I saw how food changed them … All of this left scars on me”.

Borlaug earned his Bachelor of Science in Forestry, in 1937. Nearing the end of his undergraduate education, he attended a lecture by Professor Elvin Charles Stakman, discussing plant rust disease, a parasitic fungus that feeds on phytonutrients in wheat, oats, and barley crops. Stakman was exploring special breeding methods, resulting in rust-resistant plants. The research greatly interested Borlaug, who later enrolled at the University of Minnesota, to study plant pathology under Stakman. Borlaug earned a Master of Science degree in 1940, and a Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics, in 1942.

Borlaug attempted to enlist in the military following the attack on Pearl Harbor, but his application was rejected under wartime labor regulations. He was put to work in a lab, doing research for the United States armed forces.

Between 1939 and ’41, Mexican farmers suffered major crop failures, due to stem rust. In July 1944, Borlaug declined an offer to double his salary, traveling instead to Mexico City, heading a new program focusing on soil development, maize and wheat production, and plant pathology.

“Pure line” (genotypically identical) plant varieties possess only one to a handful of disease-resistance genes. Random mutations of rusts and other plant diseases overcome pure line survival strategies, resulting in crop failures. “Multi-line” plant breeding involves backcrossing and hybridizing plant varieties, transferring multiple disease-resistance genes into recurrent parents. In the first ten years Borlaug worked for the Mexican agricultural program, he and his team made over 6,000 individual crossings of wheat. Mexico transformed from a net-importer of food, to a net exporter.

In the early sixties, Borlaug’s dwarf spring wheat strains went out for multi-location testing around the world, in a program administered by the US Department of Agriculture. In March 1963, Borlaug himself traveled to India with Dr. Robert Glenn Anderson, along with 220lbs of seed from four of the most promising strains.

The Indian subcontinent experienced minor famine and starvation at this time, limited only by the US shipping 1/5th of its wheat production into the region in 1966 – ’67. Despite resistance from Indian and Pakistani bureaucracies, Borlaug imported 550 tons of seeds.

Biologist Paul Ehrlich wrote in his 1968 bestselling book The Population Bomb, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over … In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” Ehrlich said, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971…India couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980.”

He could not have been more comprehensively wrong.

Borlaug’s initial yields were higher than any other crop, ever harvested in South Asia. Countries from Pakistan to India to Turkey imported 80,000 tons and more of seeds. By the time of Ehrlich’s book release in 1968, William Gaud of the US Agency for International Development was calling Borlaug’s work a “Green Revolution”. Massive crop yields substituted famine and starvation with a host of new problems. There were labor shortages to harvest crops, and insufficient numbers of bullock carts to haul it to the threshing floor. Jute bags were needed, along with trucks, rail cars, and grain storage facilities. Some local governments even closed school buildings, to use them for grain storage.

Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, for his contributions to the world food supply. The man’s name is nearly synonymous with the Green Revolution.

According to former Director General of the International Water Management Institute David Seckler, “The environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa.” The Rockefeller and Ford foundations withdrew funding, along with the World Bank.

Well fed environmentalist types congratulated themselves on their “success”, as the Ethiopian famine of 1984-’85 destroyed over a million lives. Millions more were left destitute, on the brink of starvation.

Borlaug became involved in 1984, at the invitation of Ryoichi Sasakawa, chairman of the Japan Shipbuilding Industry Foundation (now the Nippon Foundation). Sasakawa wondered why methods used so successfully in Asia, were not being employed in Africa. Since that time, the Sasakawa Africa Association (SAA) has trained over 8 million farmers in SAA farming techniques. Maize crops developed in African countries have tripled, along with increased yields of wheat, sorghum, cassava, and cowpeas.

Norman Ernest Borlaug died of Lymphoma in 2009, at the age of 95. Prime Minister of India Manmohan Singh and President Pratibha Patil paid tribute, saying “Borlaug’s life and achievement are testimony to the far-reaching contribution that one man’s towering intellect, persistence and scientific vision can make to human peace and progress”. The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) described Borlaug as “… a towering scientist whose work rivals that of the 20th century’s other great scientific benefactors of humankind”. American author and journalist Gregg Easterbrook wrote in 1997, “[The] form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.”

The world population when Ehrlich released his book in 1968, was about 3.53 billion. Today, that number stands at 7.6 billion and, when we hear about starvation, such events are almost exclusively man-made. The American magician and entertainer Penn Jillette described Norman Borlaug as “The greatest human being who ever lived…and you’ve probably never heard of him.” Let that be the answer to the self-satisfied and well-fed, environmentalist types.

“I now say that the world has the technology—either available or well advanced in the research pipeline—to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called ‘organic’ methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.” – Norman Borlaug, 2000

March 24, 1921 Coughing up Bullets

Twenty-one-year-old Peter Knapp spotted the Confederate sharpshooter, behind the iron plate. He raised his rifle, aimed at the peephole, and fired.

Willis Meadows grasped his throat, as he began to choke. The one-eyed 78-year old couldn’t breathe, as spasms became more violent. Whatever was in there wouldn’t come out. He thought his time had come. That’s when the bullet flew out of his mouth, clattering across the wooden table and onto the kitchen floor. It was March 24, 1921.

Fifty-nine years earlier, nineteen-year-old Willis V. Meadows signed up with his brothers and his cousins, enlisting in Company G of the 37th Alabama Volunteer Infantry.

Meadows was assigned to the western front along the Mississippi River. By the following summer, Company G had joined in defending Vicksburg Mississippi, laid siege by the Union army of Major General Ulysses S Grant.

On July 1, Meadows was positioned just outside of town, firing at the oncoming Yankees through a peephole in an iron boiler plate. Three blue-clad soldiers approached from the east, members of Company H of the Fifth Iowa Volunteer Infantry, with orders to take out enemy snipers.

Twenty-one-year-old Peter Knapp spotted the Confederate sharpshooter, behind the iron plate. He raised his rifle, aimed at the peephole, and fired. It was a perfect shot, the one-ounce slug clearing the small hole and striking the sniper in the right eye.

Willis fell over apparently dead, blood streaming out of his eye with the bullet lodged near his brain. The battle moved on. Vicksburg Mississippi fell to the Union army on July 4, 1863. The “Confederate Gibraltar” wouldn’t celebrate another Independence Day, for 80 years.

Meanwhile, Meadows was found and brought to Union physicians. Surgeons probed for the bullet but were unable to find it, and didn’t feel it was safe to operate. Instead, he was put on a POW ship and brought to a Federal hospital. Meadows was later paroled and brought to a Confederate hospital, there to spend the remainder of the war as a patient and sometime nurse’s aide.

Peter Knapp was captured that November at Missionary Ridge, part of the Chattanooga campaign, and spent the rest of the war in a number of Confederate prisons, including the Hell of Andersonville.

Both went back to civil life after the war. Meadows returned to his farm in Lanett, Alabama, just east of the Georgia state line. He would later marry, but the marriage produced no children. Knapp farmed for a time in Michigan before marrying, later moving to Kelso, in Washington state.

Willis Meadows and Peter Knapp might have walked off the page of their time and on to obscurity, but for a circumstance even more unlikely, than a man holding a bullet in his head for fifty-eight years.

Following Meadows’ coughing episode in 1921, “Coughs Up Bullet” was a newspaper story, all over the country. “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” ran the story eleven years later, published around the world in 42 countries and 17 languages. Even Robert Ripley missed the best part.

Peter Knapp read the story, and realized that that had to have been his bullet. He contacted Meadows a few months later, and the two compared notes. Sure enough. The two had met again.

When politicians make war, it is the young men and sometimes the young women, who do the fighting, and the bleeding, and the dying. Now these two old men, former mortal enemies who had tried their level best to kill one another, became friends. The two old warriors spent the rest of their days, exchanging photographs and wishing each other good health.

The Central Point Oregon newspaper editor who heard the story in 1950, had the final word. “Can you beat that for a story?” he asked. “How small this little old world is, after all.”

Afterward

It’s remarkable enough that Peter Knapp survived the brutality of the notorious Andersonville prison camp, an institution described as the “Auschwitz of the Civil War”. The Union POW camp at Elmira New York might be described as the Andersonville of the North. My own thrice-Great Grandfather went to his final rest there, along with his brother.

A passage from Knapp’s journal written in January 1862 expresses the man’s patriotism: ‘May God give wisdom and strength to our rulers that they counsel wisely, so that this government, which has been the wonder of the world, may triumph over its many enemies, crush treason to the earth never to rise again and proving to the world that republican governments are capable of withstanding any storm which may gather on their political horizon.’

Following his death in 1924 at the age of 81, Peter Knapp’s remains were cremated and, for whatever reason, never claimed by his family. The ‘cremains’ of his wife Georgianna joined those of her husband in 1930, and there they sat, unclaimed.

In 2012, Alice Knapp was researching the genealogical records of her deceased husband Steve, when she came upon the story of his ancestor. Stunned to learn that he had never been buried, Ms. Knapp called the Portland crematorium. ‘Yeah, he’s here’. Alice Knapp got the death certificate in Washington. I “called back and said, ‘By the way, is his wife there?’ and they said, ‘Yeah.’ The shock was that he was not ever buried. That was the surprise to me.”

So it was that Peter Knapp of the 5th Iowa Infantry was laid to rest with his wife at the Willamette National Cemetery in Oregon, with full military honors provided by the Oregon National Guard.

A folded American flag was presented to representatives of the Knapp family, ‘on behalf of a grateful nation’. One-hundred and forty-seven years, after the Civil War.

March 23, 1839 Fads

The tablet turns out to have been written by a father, 5,000 years ago, bitching about his son. The kid won’t work, he’s disrespectful, and he hangs out with the wrong kind of people. If he isn’t borrowing the chariot, all the kid wants to do is drink wine and lie around the house. These kids today.

Two-thousand years before Romulus and Remus founded the Roman Republic, Nomadic bands of hunters and gatherers established the world’s oldest civilization in the fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. They called the place, “Sumeria”.

100 years ago, “Sumerologists” labored to learn the customs and the ways of this ancient civilization. One such team pieced together a stone tablet and, through painstaking years of study, managed to decipher the cuneiform words contained thereon.

download (26) — Pole sitting was a “Thing”, in the 1920s

The random and silly teenage fad of the era went unrecorded. Dad doesn’t mention if the kid was eating goldfish, sagging his toga or doing a Chinese fire drill around the family horse. That particular silliness would wait for another day, but one thing is certain. The random enthusiasms peculiar (though not exclusive) to youth, are as old as history itself.

In the 1830s, long before there were Tide PODS®, it was a favorite practice in younger, more educated (and bored) circles to intentionally misspell words, abbreviating them when talking among themselves. As always, holding the key to the code meant the difference between being one of the “cool kids”, and everyone else. Teenagers today have their own slang, TBH (To Be Honest), based on common terms: “YOLO” (You Only Live Once), “BFF”, (Best Friends Forever), and watch out for “9–Short” – that means A parent is watching!

The in-crowd of the 1830s had a vocabulary all their own. On March 23, 1839, the initials “O.K.” were first published in The Boston Morning Post. This particular term stood for “Orl Korrekt.” All correct. Other popular slang of the era included “KY” for “No use” (“Know Yuse”), “KG” for “No Go” (“Know Go”), and “OW” for all right (“Oll Wright”).

The expression got a boost in the Presidential election of 1840, during the re-election campaign of Democrat Martin van Buren, also known as “Old Kindherhook”, after the village of his birth.

The others dropped from use, probably around the time that parents figured them out, but OK made its way into the speech of ordinary Americans. I found myself texting it, just the other day.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere, IMHO, for the parent trying to keep their kid from doing a “Cinnamon Challenge”. And for the kid who thinks that she/he is the first in all recorded history, to ever (fill in the blank). LOL.

sk-2017_04_article_main_desktop (1) — “Streaker”, University of Missouri, 1973. I do so hope that dog got himself a “piece”.

March 22, 2228 Final Frontier

Kirk was killed in 2329 on the Enterprise (B), after the ship was eaten by a Nexus energy ribbon on its maiden voyage. Only he didn’t die, because Jean-Luc Picard found him alive in the timeless Nexus, negotiating hotel deals for Priceline.com. Or something like that.

On this day in the year 2228, a boy was born to George and Winona Kirk. He would go on to become the youngest captain in Starfleet history but, before he could boldly go where no man has gone before, he had to have a name.

The former WWII fighter pilot and veteran of 89 combat missions Gene Roddenberry had 16 suggestions for a name, among them “Hannibal”, “Timber”, “Flagg”, and “Raintree”. The television screenwriter and producer decided on James T. Kirk, based on a journal entry from the 18th century British explorer, Captain James Cook, who wrote “ambition leads me … farther than any other man has been before me“.

In his 1968 book “Making of Star Trek“, Roddenberry writes that James Kirk was born in a small town in Iowa. Full time “Trekkie” and part time Riverside, Iowa Councilman Steve Miller thought “Why not Riverside”. In 1985, Miller moved that Riverside declare itself the Future Birthplace of James T. Kirk. The motion passed unanimously. Miller poked a stick into the ground behind the barber shop, (good thing he owned the property), declaring that this was the place. An engraved monument was erected, and so it was. Riverside, population 963, became the “Future Birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk. A bench was added later, along with a Shuttlecraft-shaped donation box.

Riverside’s official slogan was changed from “Where the best begins” to “Where the Trek begins,” the annual “River Fest” summer festival, became “Trek Fest”.

Star Trek fans, ever-jealous protectors of series trivia, sometimes wonder why the March 22, 2228 date on the Riverside monument differs from the March 22, 2233 date usually cited as Kirk’s future birthday. The 2233 date didn’t come around until eight years after the monument, with the publication The Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future. 2228 or 2233 you can take your pick, but both agree on March 22, which happens to be William Shatner’s birthday.

In case you ever wondered what the “T” stands for – its “Tiberius”.

The Space Foundation of Colorado Springs bills itself as “the world’s premier organization to inspire, educate, connect, and advocate on behalf of the global space community“. A 2010 survey conducted by the organization found that James Tiberius Kirk was voted the 6th “most inspirational space hero of all time“, tied with Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. Tied for 6th place, with the first human in space. A guy who went there, and came back. A guy who…you know…actually…exists.

If you enjoyed this “Today in History”, please feel free to re-blog, “like” & share on social media, so that others may find and enjoy it as well. Please click the “follow” button on the right, to receive email updates on new articles. Thank you for your interest, in the history we all share.

March 21, 1905 Better Babies

By the height of the eugenics movement, some 30 states had passed legislation, legalizing the involuntary sterilization of individuals considered “unfit” for reproduction. All told, some 60,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized in state-sanctioned procedures.

In 380BC, Plato described a system of state-controlled human breeding in his Socratic dialogue “The Republic”, introducing a “guardian class” to watch over over his ideal society.

In the 19th century, Francis Galton studied the theories of his cousin Charles Darwin on the evolution of species, applying them to a system of selective breeding intended to bring “better” human beings into the world. He called it his theory of “Eugenics”.

Eugenics gained worldwide respectability in the early 20th century, when countries from Brazil to Japan adopted policies regarding the involuntary sterilization of certain mental patients.

“Better Babies” competitions sprang up at state fairs across the United States, where babies were measured, weighed, and “judged”. Like livestock. By the 20s, these events had evolved into “Fitter Family” competitions.

One of the leaders of the eugenics movement was the pacifist and Stanford University professor, David Starr Jordan. After writing several books on the subject, Jordan became a founding member of the Eugenics Committee of the American Breeders Association. The higher classes of American society were being eroded by the lower class, he argued. Careful, selective breeding would be required to preserve the nation’s “upper crust”.

Margaret Higgins Sanger believed that birth control should be compulsory for “unfit” women, who “recklessly perpetuated their damaged genetic stock by irresponsibly breeding more children in an already overpopulated world.”

An early advocate for birth control, Sanger has her supporters to this day, including former Presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously”, Clinton said. “Her courage, her tenacity, her vision…” Time Magazine points out that “Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States”, describing her as “An advocate for women’s reproductive rights who was also a vocal eugenics enthusiast…”

Detractors have described Sanger as a “thoroughgoing racist”, citing her own words in What Every Girl Should Know, published in 1910: “In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets”.

Admire or detest the woman as you choose, Sanger’s work established organizations which later evolved into the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Around the world, eugenics policies took the form of involuntarily terminated pregnancies, compulsory sterilization, euthanasia, and even mass extermination.

Madison Grant, the New York lawyer best known for his work in developing the discipline of wildlife management, was a leader in the eugenics movement, once receiving an approving fan letter from none other than Adolf Hitler.

Public policy and academic types conducted three international eugenics conferences to discuss the application of programs to improve human bloodlines. The first such symposium convened in London in 1912, discussing papers on “racial suicide” and similar topics. Presiding over the conference was none other than Major Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin, with Harvard president emeritus Charles William Eliot serving as vice President.

The 1912 conference was followed by two more in 1921 and 1932, both held in New York City. Colleges and universities delved into eugenics as academic discipline, with courses exploring the ethical and public policy considerations of eliminating the “degenerate” and “unfit”.

In Pennsylvania, 270 involuntary sterilizations were performed without benefit of law, between 1892 and 1931. On March 21, 1905, the Pennsylvania legislature passed “An Act for the Prevention of Idiocy”, requiring that every institution in the state entrusted with the care of “ idiots and imbecile children”, be staffed by at least one skilled surgeon, whose duty it was to perform surgical sterilization. The bill was vetoed by then-Governor Samuel Pennypacker, only to return in 1911, ’13, ’15, ’17, ’19, and again in 1921.

By the height of the eugenics movement, some 30 states had passed legislation, legalizing the involuntary sterilization of individuals considered “unfit” for reproduction. All told, some 60,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized in state-sanctioned procedures.

California forced Charlie Follett to undergo a vasectomy in 1945 at the age of 15, when Follett found himself abandoned by alcoholic parents. He was only one of some 20,000 Californians forced to undergo such a procedure.

images (36) — Roadside Marker, Raleigh, NC

Vermont passed a sterilization law in 1931, aimed at what then-University of Vermont zoology professor Henry Perkins called the “rural degeneracy problem.” An untold number of “defectives” were forced to undergo involuntary sterilization, including Abenaki Indians and French-Canadian immigrants.

Indiana passed the first eugenic sterilization law in 1907, but the measure was legally flawed. To remedy the situation, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), founded in 1910 by the the former Harvard University Zoology Professor Charles Benedict Davenport, Ph.D., crafted a statute, which was later adopted by the Commonwealth of Virginia as state law in 1924.

That September, Superintendent of the ‘Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded’ Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, filed a petition to sterilize one Carrie Elizabeth Buck, an 18-year-old patient at the institution whom Priddy claimed to be “incorrigible”. A “genetic threat to society”. Buck’s 52-year-old mother had a record of prostitution and immorality, Priddy claimed, and the child to whom Buck gave birth in the institution only proved the point.

carriebuck2 — Carrie Elizabeth Buck was born into poverty in Charlottesville, Virginia, the first of three children born to Emma Buck. Carrie’s father Frederick Buck abandoned the family, shortly after the marriage. Emma was committed to the “Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded” following accusations of immorality, prostitution, and having syphilis.

Buck’s guardian brought her case to court, arguing that compulsory sterilization violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. After losing in district court, the case was appealed to the Amherst County Circuit Court, the Virginia Supreme Court, and finally the United States Supreme Court.

Dr. Priddy died along the way, Dr. John Hendren Bell taking his place. SCOTUS decided the “Buck vs Bell” case on May 2, 1927, ruling in an 8–1 decision that Carrie Buck, her mother, and her perfectly normal infant daughter, were all “feeble-minded” and “promiscuous.”

11255 — “This photograph was taken on the eve of the initial trial of Buck v Bell in Virginia. Mrs. Dobbs appear to be holding a coin believed to be used as a test for alertness or mental acuity. Vivian appears to be looking elsewhere. It may have ben on the strength of this test that Arthur Estabrook concluded that she “showed backwardness.” H/T DNA Learning Center, dnalc.org

In the majority ruling, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., did more than just greenlight the Virginia statute. He urged the nation as a whole to get serious about eugenics, and to prevent large numbers of “unfit” from breeding: “”It is better for all the world“, Holmes wrote, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind“. In writing about Carrie Buck herself, her mother and infant daughter Vivian, Holmes delivered one of the most brutal pronouncements in all American jurisprudence: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

It was later revealed that Carrie Buck had been raped by a member of the Dobbs family, the foster family who had taken her in and later had her committed. To save the family “honor”. No matter. Buck was compelled to undergo tubal ligation, later paroled from the institution to become a domestic worker with a family in Bland, Virginia. Buck’s daughter Vivian was adopted by the Dobbs family.

In a later examination of the child, ERO field worker Dr. Arthur Estabrook pronounced her “feeble minded” saying that she “showed backwardness”, supporting the “three generations” theory expressed in the SCOTUS opinion.

Vivian died from complications of measles in 1932, after only two years in school. Dr. Estabrook failed to explain in his report, how she seemed to do well for those two years, nor did doctor Estabrook reveal how she came to be listed on her school’s honor roll, in April, 1931.

March 20 1870 The Lion of Africa

With a force never exceeding 14,000 (3,000 Germans and 11,000 Askari warriors), “Der Löwe von Afrika” tied up as many as 300,000 British, Belgian and Portuguese troops, wearing them out in the pursuit.

When war broke out in 1914, a map of Africa looked nothing like it does today. From the Belgian Congo to Italian Somaliland, most of the continent was carved into colonies of the various European powers. France, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium, Germany and Spain. All administered parts of the African continent.

Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck was born into minor Prussian Nobility on this day, in 1870. Joining the Corps of Cadets as a teenager, Lettow-Vorbeck worked his way up the German Imperial Army chain of command, becoming a general by the time of WWI.

Stationed in Deutsch-Ostafrika (German East Africa) and knowing that his sector would be little more than a side show to the greater war effort, Lettow-Vorbeck determined to tie up as many of his adversaries as possible.

Like the much better-known Lawrence of Arabia, Lettow-Vorbeck became a master of guerilla warfare. He never lost a single battle, though it was not unheard of for combatants to break and flee a charging elephant or rhinoceros.

To his adversaries, disease and parasites were often more dangerous than enemy action. In July 1916, Allied non-battle casualties ran 31 to 1, compared with battle casualties.

In 1956, Brazilian scientists attempted to cross African honey bees with indigenous varieties, to produce an insect better suited to the South American tropics. Today, we call the results of these failed experiments “Africanized” or “Killer” bees.

At one point in the Battle of Tanga (November 7-8, 1914), a British landing force and their Sepoy allies were routed and driven back to the sea by millions of African bees, disturbed by rifle and machine gun fire. There’s a story about a British radioman, I don’t know if it’s true, who held to his station, directing the beach evacuation while being stung to death by thousands of angry bees. He was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for “gallantry under aerial attack”.

“Der Löwe von Afrika” – the Lion of Africa – returned to Germany a conquering hero. Of all German commanders in WWI, Lettow-Vorbeck alone was undefeated in the field. The only German commander to successfully invade imperial British soil, during the Great War.

Lettow-Vorbeck developed a deep distrust of the upstart Adolf Hitler, and attempted to establish a conservative opposition to the Nazi party. When then-Chancellor Hitler offered him an ambassadorship to the Court of St. James in 1935, Lettow-Vorbeck told Hitler to “go f**k” yourself. Describing the interview afterward, Vorbeck’s nephew explained “That’s right, except that I don’t think he put it that politely.”

Such a blunt refusal was guaranteed to bring unwanted attention from the Nazi regime. Vorbeck’s home and office were searched, his person subject to constant harassment and surveillance. By the end of WWII, the Lion of Africa was destitute. Both of his sons were killed serving in the Wehrmacht, his home in Bremen destroyed by Allied bombs.

For a time, Vorbeck lived on food sent from British Intelligence Officer Richard Meinertzhagen and South African Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts, two of his former adversaries in the East Africa campaign. It was a token of the respect these two had, for a man who had once been their enemy.

The old General never forgot his Ascaris, returning to East Africa in 1953, to the tears of his former warriors. Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck died in 1964, at the age of 93. A few months later, the Bundestag voted to give back pay to the African warriors who had fought with German forces in WWI. Some 350 elderly Ascaris showed up. A few could produce certificates given them back in 1918, some had scraps of old uniforms. Precious few could prove their former service to the German Empire.

The German banker who brought the money had an idea. As each man stepped forward, he was handed a broom and ordered to perform the German manual of arms. Not one man failed the test.

Lettow-Vorbeck formed a lifelong friendship during his time in Africa, with the Danish author Karen Blixen, best known by her pen name Isak Dinesen, author of “Out of Africa”. Years later, Blixen recalled, “He belonged to the olden days, and I have never met another German who has given me so strong an impression of what Imperial Germany was and stood for”.

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Afterward

Following his death in 1924 at the age of 81, Peter Knapp’s remains were cremated and, for whatever reason, never claimed by his family. The ‘cremains’ of his wife Georgianna joined those of her husband in 1930, and there they sat, unclaimed.

So it was that Peter Knapp of the 5th Iowa Infantry was laid to rest with his wife at the Willamette National Cemetery in Oregon, with full military honors provided by the Oregon National Guard.

A folded American flag was presented to representatives of the Knapp family, ‘on behalf of a grateful nation’. One-hundred and forty-seven years, after the Civil War.

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