SPORT / Dave Zirin : RGIII Is Trending with Muhammad Ali

Robert Griffin III. Photo courtesy of Muhammad Ali Center. Image from The Nation.

What did RGIII learn at
the Muhammad Ali Center?

The social-media-savvy RGIII tweeted, 'What Ali stood for and the way he expressed it from the boxing ring to the streets of everyday life would have him trending for weeks.'

By Dave Zirin / The Rag Blog / May 6, 2013

See Thorne Dreyer's articles about progressive sportswriter Dave Zirin at The Rag Blog, and at Truthout, and listen to our March 22, 2013, Rag Radio interview with Zirin.

It should be enough that Redskins quarterback Robert Griffin III is the most exciting athlete to enter professional sports since Lionel Messi and has restored the thrill of the possible to our football-obsessed community in Washington, DC.

It should be enough at this moment to learn that RGIII is focused solely upon rehabilitating his knee, torn to shreds in last year's playoffs. But the Heisman Trophy winner, who also found time in college to graduate from Baylor with a degree in political science and a 3.67 GPA, has clearly committed this off-season to exercising his mind as well.

According to his running Twitter commentary, RGIII spent Saturday at the museum that in my view is the Mecca of the intersection of sports and politics: the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville, Kentucky.

The Muhammad Ali Center is a remarkable testament to the courage of an athlete willing to take unpopular stands because of political principle. The fact that Ali took these stands at the height of his athletic powers when he was between the ages of 22 and 26, clearly had an impact on Mr. Griffin. RGIII’s first tweet said simply that “seeing in depth what Ali did and who he was is so inspiring.”

The quarterback then soaked in just how much Ali suffered for his unpopular stands against racism and the war in Vietnam and put himself in the Champ’s shoes. He wrote, “An athlete like Ali would get destroyed in today’s world even more than in his own time.” The social-media-savvy RGIII then tweeted, “What Ali stood for and the way he expressed it from the boxing ring to the streets of everyday life would have him trending for weeks.”

He then retweeted someone who wrote to him, “Ali transcended sports and sacrificed his most productive boxing years to stand for his beliefs. Name a modern athlete that would.”

From left: Muhammad Ali, Buffy St. Marie, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Harold Smith, Stevie Wonder, Marlon Brando, Max Gail, Dick Gregory, Richie Havens, and David Amram at a 1978 concert at the end of the Longest Walk, a 3,600-mile protest march from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., in the name of Native-American self-determination. Image from IndiVisible.

I must say that it's thrilling that Muhammad Ali still has such a strong effect on athletes born a decade after he last set foot in a boxing ring. It’s also quite a statement that Robert Griffin III, who comes from a proud military family, would pay tribute to the most famous war resister in human history. Yes, Ali’s radical stance in 1968 has been smoothed out for mass consumption.

Yes, in today’s myriad Ali tributes, few quote him saying, “I'm not going 10,000 miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over... The real enemy of my people is here.”

But the museum, to its credit, does not engage in a whitewash. RGIII was confronted with the actuality of Ali's ideas and was deeply in awe of his sacrifice.

Lastly, I would point out that in today’s age of social media, an athlete like Ali would get far more support than in 1964. Back then, a small cabal of hard-bitten sportswriters, who were conservative, calloused, and Caucasian, dominated public commentary, and were deeply resentful of the man they called “The Louisville Lip.”

Today, in addition to the hate, there would be a public outpouring of support, which would also shape the coverage. The trend-lines of Ali's resistance would have ample amplification.

There’s another side of this, however, that could not have escaped RGIII’s precise mind as he considered the concepts of sports and sacrifice: There is no way in heaven or hell Muhammad Ali, who is of African, Native American, and Irish ancestry, would have ever accepted being called a Redskin.

RGIII had to notice that the question of names and what we choose to call ourselves figures strongly at the Ali Center. You learn that Muhammad Ali was born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr., named not only after his own father but also a famous 19th Century white abolitionist. The political history of that name didn’t stop him from changing it upon joining the Nation of Islam. As he said, “Cassius Clay was my slave name. I don’t use it because I am no longer a slave.”

The museum speaks about the boxers, reporters, and even members of the draft board who called him “Clay” and how he responded with at different times “say my name,” “what's my name?” and my personal favorite, “what’s my name fool?”

Ali’s belief that a name was something far more precious than just a brand has found echoes across the culture in multiple forms, from Destiny's Child, to Ravens Coach John Harbaugh’s Super Bowl victory speech, to perhaps the most famous scene in the classic television show The Wire. Names matter. What you call yourself and what others choose to call you is a question of respect.

I wonder if RGIII took notice that the Muhammad Ali Center has a proud history of doing traveling exhibits with the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, including one called “IndiVisble: African-Native American Lives in the Americas.”

The 2012 press release for the exhibit reads, “Prejudice, laws and twists of history have often divided them from others, yet African-Native American people were united in the struggle against slavery and dispossession, and then for self-determination and freedom. For African-Native Americans, their double heritage is truly indivisible.”

I wonder if RGIII would ask himself how that heritage is served by the fans in feather headdresses and war paint, and the stained crimson face on the side of his helmet.

There was much made this week about a poll taken by ESPN, which showed that 79 percent of people in the U.S. find nothing wrong with the Redskins name. RGIII -- the athlete, the brand, the corporate pitchman -- is someone who could look at that poll and think, “Great. Now I don’t need to say anything.” RGIII, the human being inspired by Muhammad Ali, has to look at those numbers and think, “Whether it’s 79 percent or 97 percent, right is right.”

The Redskins name is racist as all hell, the creation of a segregationist owner and only possible because the people being insulted were subject to genocide: thinning their ranks, political power, and voice. It’s a name RGIII’s boss Dan Snyder will only defend in the most controlled of public settings. It’s a name that Muhammad Ali would have hated because it’s a damn disgrace.

At the end of his Twitter commentary about The Champ, Robert Griffin III wrote, “The Ali Center confirmed my belief that although we, as people around this world, are different, we can all help & learn from each other.”

He’s correct. But a precondition of helping and learning from one another is respect. RGIII is under no obligation to say anything about the Redskins name. But if he learned nothing else from the Muhammad Ali Center, it should be that sometimes you just have to speak out no matter the risk, no matter the trends or trend-lines.

It's a little known part of The Champ's history, but In 1978, Muhammad Ali joined Buffy St. Marie, Floyd Red Crow Westerman, Stevie Wonder and the recently departed Richie Havens to rally at the end of the Longest Walk, a 3,600-mile protest march from San Francisco to Washington, DC, in the name of Native American self-determination.

That was Muhammad Ali. He was nobody's Redskin.

This article was also posted to The Nation blog.

[Dave Zirin is sports editor at The Nation and the author of the new book, Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down (The New Press). Contact him at edgeofsports@gmail.com. Read more articles by Dave Zirin on The Rag Blog.]

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Johnny Rustywire : The Hitchhiker

Window Rock, Arizona, Navajo Nation. Image from Flickriver.

 The hitchhiker

I thought it must be an old person, since the figure was small in size and wrapped in a blanket head to toe. I could see the person standing in my headlights, wrapped against the blowing crystals of cold snow.

By Johnny Rustywire / The Rag Blog / March 21, 2013

I was on the road near Woodsprings, west of Window Rock, headed toward Ganado. It was cold and the wind was blowing the snow in swirls.

I hadn't seen anyone on the road since I left St. Michaels. I was in a police unit, Navajo PD, headed out to the Joint Use Area, Second Mesa -- Hopiland. Those were the days of border disputes and they were taking Navajo cattle and we were on 24-hour patrol driving the back roads from Jeddito to Pinon then west to Hard Rock, Dinnebito and Big Mountain then South to Sand Springs along the Turquoise Trail then to Coal Mine Mesa, a 48 hour shift, 300-400 miles along dirt roads.

As I was driving along, there was a lone stick figure, a dark shape on the road, someone walking out there late and a long ways from anywhere. I stopped and went back to pick them up.

I thought it must be an old person, since the figure was small in size and wrapped in a blanket head to toe. I could see the person standing in my headlights, wrapped against the blowing crystals of cold snow.

She stood by the door to the police unit and couldn't open the door. Her fingers were too cold, so I opened the door and said in Navajo: "It is too cold. Get in, Grandmother. I am headed to Dinnebito and can give you a ride."

She didn't say anything. She just got in and we headed down the road. My unit was warm, I had a shotgun mounted in the middle, was wearing my sidearm, had a .223 with a scope in the trunk. The unit was marked and I was in uniform. A green down jacket with good boots. I was warm and ready for anything.

She didn't say anything to me. Sometimes hitchhikers are too tired to talk, and it was cold out so I could see why. She looked from the size of her to be an old woman, but I couldn't see her face.

I drove on down the road, passed Morgan Shell, Ganado, Burnside Junction, and Whipporwill turnoff, Steamboat, Toyei, and Beshbito, passed Jeddito and into Keams Canyon, where I gassed up. I got some strange looks from the Bureau of Indian Affairs cops from North Dakota. They were sent to watch the Navajos and their errant cattle. They watched me as I watched them.

The old woman was asleep. Some of the BIA cops in their blue uniforms were looking inside my unit as I was paying for the gas. They didn't say anything to me when I got outside. Even though we were cops, we were on different sides, in a way. They didn't talk to me. They were looking at the old woman.

I drove off through Hopiland, passed Second and Third Mesas, and then got to Dinnebito turnoff. I stopped by the road and the old hitchhiker just sat there. I said, “I am going to Hard Rocks from here.”

She didn't say anything... just motioned with one arm to go ahead. I left the paved highway and headed north on the bumpy washboard road leading to Big Mountain. I drove 30 miles, went past the boarding school and thought to myself, I wonder if she knows where she is going? Maybe she has no place to go and just wants to ride around in a warm car.

“Where are you going, Grandmother?” She said nothing, just motioned with her covered arm to go forward. Way out in the middle of nowhere, there is a mission surrounded by small houses. It was foggy and dark. There were no lights on in any of the houses.

The only light was from a glowing cross on the church, a green neon cross that seemed to float above the fog; it glowed strangely in the dark. There was a mist on the ground.

There was a pickup that had been following me for some time, and the lights appeared in my rearview mirror. I parked by the mission, turned my lights off, and waited for the pickup.

Who would be following me around this place? I waited with my quiet rider and then I saw it was two BIA cops. They looked lost and so I got out and went to talk to them.

They were surprised to see my flashlight come on as I approached them. They rolled down their windows.

“What's going on, guys?” I had a thermos in one hand and offered them a cup of coffee. They looked at one another, as if wondering whether to take it? If worse came to worse, we could be trying to arrest each other over the JUA. Maybe, maybe not, who knew what was to happen?

“There isn't another cup of hot coffee anywhere for a hundred miles,” I said. They took the thermos and poured themselves a cup.

It broke the ice. We talked a little bit about our work, the cold, and things cops talk about.

I told those two to head east into to the dark. They would pass Wepo Wash of Hillerman fame and then would come across a dirt road headed south that would take them back to Second Mesa. It would take them past Awatovi, the site of a Hopi village massacred by the other villages way back in the 1600s. I told them not to stop there since there were some strange things known to happen to people who went there, especially this time of night. They just looked at one another and I left them there.

I got back to my unit and the old one was gone. The door was left open and she was nowhere to be seen. As I looked around all I saw were the dark shapes of the houses and not one had a light on. A chill went up my spine.

I switched radio channels and called out “820 to Kayenta; 820 to Kayenta.” All I heard was static. “820 to Kayenta,” I called out. After a little bit. I heard Rose, the dispatcher.

“Is that you, Sgt. Rustywire?”

“It's 820.” We were supposed to be professional on the airwaves and, besides, the other guys were listening.

“I'm coming in for a cup. I am at Black Mesa and will see you in an hour.”

“I will brew some up for you.” I thanked her and told her I just dropped off a skinwalker. “Maybe I can find one for you?”

She double clicked the mike, meaning “OK” and I laughed as I drove North through Black Mesa heading toward sunrise.

© Johnny Rustywire, 2013. All rights reserved.

[Johnny Rustywire is Folded Rocks Clan People on his mother's side, and born for Tsinahbiltnii, the Mountain People Clan on his father’s side. He comes from Toadlena-Two Gray Hills, New Mexico, where the mountain is cracked and the water flows. He is a father of six and grandfather of 12. He attended Indian boarding schools and grew up on the Navajo Reservation, and has been married to the same woman for 40 years, a Ute from Fort Duchesne, Utah.]

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Michael James : Pictures from the Long Haul

Menominee Boys at the Battle of Mole Lake Historic Marker Crandon, Wisconsin, 1978. Photo by Michael James from his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James'  Pictures from the Long Haul.

Pictures from the Long Haul:
Duane and the Menominee warriors

Duane was a fast runner, and he was the guy who came through the woods, through the snow, bringing and giving out the word that the Menominee Warrior Society had taken over the Alexian Brother's Abbey.

By Michael James / The Rag Blog / March 20, 2013

[In this series, Michael James is sharing images from his rich past, accompanied by reflections about -- and inspired by -- those images. This photo will be included in his forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.]

Back in the 1970's I founded a newspaper and political organization called Rising Up Angry (1969-1975).

We were part of an inspirational coalition, dubbed the Rainbow Coalition by Black Panther leader Fred Hampton. It initially included the Black Panther Party, Young Lords Organization, Young Patriots, and then Rising Up Angry. We claim the Rainbow Coalition laid the groundwork for the election of the late Chicago Mayor Harold Washington. It was his election, and the coalition he put together, that brought the young Barack Obama to Chicago.

I spent a lot of time selling our newspaper, hanging out in parks, neighborhoods, food joints, bars, and schools. We would talk, we would cool out fights, and we promoted the revolution and all issues before us: police brutality, war, racism, imperialism, sexism, health care, legal rights, etc.

Sometime in the early 1970's I was at the statue-monument in the Logan Square neighborhood where young people would hang out, and it was there I met a Menominee Indian by the name of Daryl. He took me to his house nearby, where I met his brother Duane, who was in the act of butchering a live chicken he found who-knows-where.

I'm not sure if it was because I had helped the farmer down the road as a kid in Connecticut, butchering both cows and pigs, and had also worked in a butcher shop at age 14, but in any event, Duane and I became fast friends. We shared our histories, partied together, and I followed his adventures as he and other young natives toured around the country in those wild days of the American Indian Movement (AIM).

I visited Duane and his extended family on numerous occasions up in Neopit, Wisconsin on the Menominee Reservation. We had some great times living on black coffee, canned vegetables, white bread, and meat, taking sweats, and jumping in the Wolf River. In altered states we climbed the fire towers in the night, and chased porcupines near the garbage dump overrun with deer. I was encouraged to get some porcupine quills by hitting the animal with the swing of a t-shirt, a little scary in that altered state even though I knew then that they do not shoot the quills!

Duane was a fast runner, and he was the guy who came through the woods, through the snow, bringing and giving out the word that the Menominee Warrior Society had taken over the Alexian Brother's Abbey in January 1975. Back in those militant days the MWS claimed the Abbey was on Menominee tribal land. Marlon Brando came to the Abbey to help find a peaceful solution.

A couple of years later Duane got himself in a legal jam over in Shawano County, or maybe in Green Bay, neither place known then for good vibes with their Native American neighbors. Duane was sent on a little vacation to the McNaughton Correctional Center in Lake Tomahawk.

I took a run up to the res and picked up his sister Rory and three of his kids, and we went to the facility near Crandon for a wonderful afternoon visit. En route to or from we stopped at a Wisconsin Historical Marker commemorating the battle for the local rice beds between the local Sokoagon Band of Chippewa and Sioux from the west. Over 500 warriors were killed and are buried there.

Shown above are three of my pal Duane's kids at the marker. The photo is included in my forthcoming book, Michael Gaylord James' Pictures from the Long Haul.

[Michael James is a former SDS national officer, the founder of Rising Up Angry, co-founder of Chicago's Heartland Café (1976 and still going), and co-host of the Saturday morning (9-10 a.m. CDT) Live from the Heartland Show, here and on YouTube. He is also president of the local progressive 49th Ward Democratic Party, a member of the Screen Actors Guild, a board member of Athletes United for Peace, and on the advisory panel of the organic watchdog organization, The Cornucopia Institute. He is reachable by one and all at michael@heartlandcafe.com. Find more articles by Michael James on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Mariann G. Wizard : Steve Russell's 'Wicked Dew'

A chapbook review:
Steve Russell's 'Wicked Dew'

By Mariann G. Wizard / The Rag Blog / January 9, 2013

[Wicked Dew, by Steve Russell. (2012: Dog Iron Press, Georgetown, TX.); Paperback; 88 pp; $7.75.]

I've known Steve Russell since sometime in 1968 when he started showing up at The Rag office, a tall, gangly, very young Vietnam-era vet going to UT Austin on the GI Bill. Although Steve is incredibly bright and witty, and I've always enjoyed his prose contributions to The Rag and now The Rag Blog, I was nervous about reviewing his first book of poetry, Wicked Dew.

Steve is a Native American writer, and all of the previously published works in this collection have appeared in the Native press, where he is a regular contributor of weighty essays as well as occasional poetry. The book in fact won the 2008 Poetry First Book Award of the Native Writers Circle of the Americas (NWCA), and would have been published as part of the award; unfortunately, NWCA lost publication funding and the book is only now seeing the light of day.

I worried I might not be the right person to review poems that would obviously, just from these facts, be deeply rooted in Steve's experience as a Native American. My mostly Scotch-Irish parentage undeniably has Native ancestors as well, but in my generation, and even in my folks', as Russell writes in "Blood Quantum," the "thin red line" of Native genes became gray oblivion.

My unfamiliarity with contemporary Native American literature (these days, honestly, with literature in general!) added to my concern. Would this blue-eyed daughter of "the flood of European blood" really get it?

I needn't have worried, and neither should other poetry lovers. While a deeper knowledge of Native American literature would no doubt add to the grasp and enjoyment of these 37 poems, most transcend ethnic or tribal viewpoints, offering windows into the transformation of a poor "halfbreed" Oklahoma dropout into a multifaceted human rights activist and whole human being, rooted in and proud of his heritage.

"Heritage" for Steve is, I think, not just who someone's ancestors were or what they did, but what a person makes of it. He writes his own history, and defines his own family, too.

Steve Russell

Here are no paeans to Native purity or essential nobility. Only the lovely "Haiku for Walela" hearkens back before the European flood hit the Western hemisphere. One rather cynical poem, "Teach Me," begins, "Teach me, White Father, so I may understand. I understand slavery..." Slavery -- although not of the lifelong variety -- was commonly practiced among Native tribes long before there was any European contact. Of these critical looks at Native political correctness, the most powerful is "How to Succeed as an Indian Poet":

Don't say 'hunger.'
Write of the plump red strawberries
grown by Cherokees
in the Cookson Hills,
rather than rodents fried in lard,
garnished with herbs from the bar ditch,
government commodities on the side...
In "Probably Wolf Clan," "Indistinguishable Color," "Blood Quantum," and other poems, Russell mourns the ongoing loss of Native identity and weighs his own. The question of who is "red" enough to be a "real Indian" has parallels in other discussions: is Barack Obama a "real black man?" What does it mean to be "Hispanic" or "Latino?" And for goodness sake, what in the world is "white?" "When I'm Old" begins:

And when I am very old
will the drums outrun my feet?
Will the sweetgrass be just another smoke, and the sage a burning weed?
Does White Buffalo Calf Woman return for the civilized Indians?
A few selections distill the "wicked dew" of the title and cover illustration, inking the perfidy of European America in its true colors of bitterness and gall. "Bison Bones" excoriates oblivious conquerors who do not even know what they desecrate:

Were Dallas Texans born with neckties on
to be served in deep carpet
by smiling brown faces
where dishes disappear silently
and condiments come in tiny sealed jars
to dine on bison bones?
In other poems, Russell celebrates Native cultural values. "Disruption, Spring 1997," based on news accounts of an Albuquerque school girl not allowed to graduate wearing a traditional shawl by her grandmother, tells of family pride in the girl's achievement. Poems for two of Steve's (non-simultaneous) wives and one titled "Lust" are lit from within by wise acceptance of what-it-is. Another, "Cherokee Love," begins:

There is no love in Cherokee.
No falling in or falling out,
no marry now or live in doubt,
no changing weather love in Cherokee...
Some selections are rooted in Steve's activism as part of Austin's late 1960s-early 1970s anti-war movement. "Jailpoem 2," from 1970, was clearly written following angry protests of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and massacres of students at Kent State and Jackson State. Steve became a leader in the Austin chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Steve Russell, front with VVAW flag, participates in a demonstration by Vietnam Veterans Against the War on the University of Texas Campus at Austin in the late Sixties. Photo from Mariann Wizard's files.
"At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial" alternates flashbacks of a Southeast Asian village, a horse cavalry massacre in an Arapaho village, and tears for the fallen soldiers memorialized on the Wall. "Seeing Off the Troop Train" contrasts his youthful desire for heroic action with his grandmother's wisdom and his own fears as a father:

Twenty-eight years later, my son is a volunteer soldier.
Nobody elected Bush or his crew of 20th century retreads.
Granma is not here to say 'We got no business over there!'
But I hear her anyway.
Not everything is equally successful. "Not Juan Valdez," a clever idea, is marred by Spanish spelling errors and the misplacement of Colombia's iconic coffee grower to the Mexican state of Chiapas. Not Juan Valdez, indeed; this one confuses the reader and thus loses points.

A few poems with long, complex lines push against the borders of the printed page, seeming to demand spoken performance and perhaps hand drum punctuation, but add to the depth of the collection overall.

Wicked Dew charts a vision of optimism, traditional values, and endurance in selections such as "Indian Lawyer's Creed" and "A Matter of Faith." "To My Grandfather," the initial poem in the collection, is perhaps the most revealing of these:

I told him I wanted to be like Mickey Mantle,
who escaped the poverty of rural Oklahoma,
and appeared to own New York,
a grand place located near Oz...

I left Oklahoma
and as the years accumulate
Oklahoma almost leaves me.
The road home is distant and dusty and even more unlikely
than the road here...

I have seen New York.
And Oz.
And College...
And although I still cannot tie a necktie, Grampa,
I have taken your name...

and I want you to know
I am still playing batter.
Retired from a first career as an Austin and then Travis County, Texas, trial judge, and a second as a professor of criminal justice in San Antonio and later at Indiana University, and with a book of essays also just out (Ceremonies of Innocence: Essays from the Indian Wars, 2012, Dog Iron Press), Steve Russell bats close to a thousand with this collection of verse.

[Mariann G. Wizard, a Sixties radical activist and contributor to The Rag, Austin's underground newspaper from the 60s and 70s, is a poet, a professional science writer specializing in natural health therapies, and a regular contributor to The Rag Blog. Read more poetry and articles by Mariann G. Wizard on The Rag Blog.]

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Steve Russell : Will Rogers and the Jokes of Partisan Politics

Will Rogers. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The jokes of partisan politics:
Will Rogers 'chews to run'

'I’m not a member of any organized political party,' he famously confessed, 'I’m a Democrat.'

By Steve Russell / The Rag Blog / December 7, 2012

Will Rogers, the Paint Clan Cherokee cowboy turned entertainer turned political pundit, used to say he did not make jokes. “I just watch the government and report the facts.” Like any intelligent man, he could be viewed as a bundle of contradictions, but most of his contradictions came from wearing his heart on his sleeve.

From at least 1916, when he faced the reputedly dour and humorless President Woodrow Wilson, nobody was safe from his barbs. Before that performance, his political comments had been topical humor pulled out of the latest newspapers. Having the President in the audience, for Will, took topical comedy to another level bordering on what he never intended, personal attack.

Characteristically, he started with the truth: “I am kinder nervous here tonight.” Writing years later, he admitted, “that is not an especially bright remark, ...but it was so apparent to the audience that I was speaking the truth that they laughed heartily at it.”

Encouraged, Rogers let fly with his usual routine, and the President wound up laughing at himself. According to Rogers biographer Ben Yagoda, Will was invited into the presidential box after the show. Still a bit nervous, he parked his omnipresent wad of chewing gum in his hat, forgot he had done so, and suffered the consequences when he put the hat back on later. (His chewing gum habit would come up again in his choice of slogans for his Anti-Bunk Party, “He chews to run!” This was a gentle parody of Calvin Coolidge, who did not “choose” to run.)

Wilson, a Democrat, was the first President to be roasted face to face by Will Rogers, but hardly the last. There was plenty to go around for both parties. Will never hid his biases. He was more worried about the welfare of farmers than that of city folks, and working stiffs more than bankers. “I’m not a member of any organized political party,” he famously confessed, “I’m a Democrat.”

Of course, in our time we can laugh at that remark as ancient history... unless we think about the 1968 Democratic Convention, when the delegates pledged to the anti-Vietnam War candidate Eugene McCarthy were physically ejected, adding to the chaos in the streets of Chicago that year. Or the 1972 Democratic Convention, when the anti-war outsiders became insiders and spent so much time wrangling among themselves that George McGovern gave the speech that was supposed to end the war at a time when the television audience had gone to bed.

Having admitted to identifying with the disorganized party of the workingman, he still seldom bestirred himself to vote. It’s not clear that he ever voted. It’s safe to say, though, that he would be disgusted with the wave of voter suppression laws and would have had plenty to say about the Republican Party pushing them.

Rogers himself would not be allowed to vote under many of these laws. He wrote of his difficulties getting a passport for lack of a birth certificate:

In the early days of Indian Territory, where I was born there was no such things as birth certificates. You being there was certificate enough. We generally took it for granted that if you were there, you must have at some time been born... Having a certificate of being born was like wearing a raincoat in the water over a bathing suit.

Informed in the passport office that they knew him, but still needed proof he was an American citizen, Rogers was still puzzled:

That was the first time I had ever been called on to prove that. Here my Father and Mother were both ….Cherokee Indians and I have been on the Cherokee rolls since I was named, and my family had lived on one ranch for 75 years.

The argument that you have to have a picture identification to get on an airplane would not have impressed this early and enthusiastic endorser of civil aviation, because the voter suppression laws are not aimed at people who normally get on airplanes.

Rogers was plain about his working class bias, but in the world of electoral politics, he practiced equal opportunity ridicule. “Both parties have their good and bad times,” he observed, “only they have them at different times. They are each good when they are out, and each bad when they are in.”

His personal friendships, like his jokes, were bipartisan. Among presidents, he was probably closest to the Roosevelts, the Republican Teddy and the Democrat Franklin D. “America,” he claimed, “has the best politicians money can buy.”

It’s not hard to picture what he might have said about the tradition of presidential candidates releasing multiple years of tax returns begun by the Republican George Romney and ended by the Republican Mitt Romney. We would be hearing a lot about Swiss bank accounts, in between wisecracks about President Obama’s adventures with the Chicago political machines.

Will Rogers reported for both parties’ nominating conventions starting in 1920 and ending in 1932. Like most of Rogers’ career moves, his convention coverage started out slow, because he did not in fact attend the 1920 conventions. His reportage was disrupted by the tragic death of his son Freddie in June of 1920, the very month both conventions were scheduled. Characteristically, the grieving Rogers honored his contract, taking newspapers as his information, the same information his readers had.

The Democratic Convention was held in San Francisco, where Rogers was when he heard that his children’s “sore throats” were in fact diphtheria. He drove all night to get home, but Freddie died at 4 a.m. on June 17. His first comment on the convention was dated the same day.

“Our National Conventions,” Rogers observed, “are nothing but glorified Mickey Mouse cartoons, and are solely for amusement purposes.” Will was writing about the tendency for the real business of the conventions to be settled in back room horse-trading rather than in public.

In fact, the “cartoons” were not as scripted in advance as they are in our times. The last time a candidate was “drafted” at a convention was the Democrat Adlai Stevenson in 1952. The last “floor fight” for a major party nomination was in 1976, between Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan for the Republican nod. It was not that long ago that the political parties did real business at their conventions, although Rogers was correct to be skeptical how much of it happened in public.

Will Rogers practiced "equal opportunity ridicule." Image from New Hampshire Commentary.

1920 Democratic Convention, San Francisco 

In the 1920 Democratic Convention, for example, there were 1,092 delegates and only 336 of them were “pledged,” meaning that they had promised their vote to a candidate on the first ballot. Of those 336, most were pledged to “favorite sons,” a mechanism for party bosses in a state to capture the delegation after the first ballot, since a “favorite son” was not going to win the first ballot.

There were, of course, no “favorite daughters,” since women only got the vote nationwide with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in August of 1920, although they had the franchise in most western states much earlier.

The wide-open nature of the race for the Democratic nomination was a result of the country in general being ignorant of President Woodrow Wilson’s health problems, and as a result uncertain whether he would stand for re-election. In fact, Wilson had been incapacitated beginning in 1919 -- the government effectively run by his wife and the cabinet -- because there was no 25th Amendment providing for disability of the president until 1967.

The only candidate in 1920 who had dared to enter primaries while his party held the White House was Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, whose legacy in history is primarily the “Palmer raids,” roundups of immigrants thought to harbor radical ideas. Neither the Palmer raids nor his run for the Democratic nomination produced any lasting results, although Palmer’s name comes to mind more easily than that of the man actually nominated, Gov. James Cox of Ohio.


1920 Republican Convention, Chicago

The 1920 Republican Convention was held in Chicago, which, Rogers reported, “holds the record for murders and robberies and Republican conventions.” He alleged, “California’s 26 delegates to the Chicago convention were accompanied by 60 bootleggers.”

Will Rogers, bylined as “Famous Oklahoma Cowboy Wit and Goldwyn Motion Picture Star,” did his best from a distance to report the convention that launched the ill-fated presidency of Warren G. Harding. It was Harding’s selection by party bosses behind closed doors in the Blackstone Hotel that contributed the phrase “smoke-filled room” to our political lexicon.

Rogers “reported” an imagined dialogue between himself and one of the party bosses, Pennsylvania Sen. Boies Penrose, who, in spite of serious illness, kept his hand in from Philadelphia with both telephone and telegraph wires in his sick room. Rogers asked “Penrose":

“What makes the delegates change? Don’t they stay with their man?”

“The delegates vote the way their people told them the first ballot. But after that they sell to the highest bidder.”

“But that’s not honest, is it?”

“No, just politics.”

While Harding went on to be elected, his administration was quickly engulfed by the Teapot Dome Scandal, in which Secretary of the Interior (and political Indian fighter) Albert Fall went to prison for bribery and against which all other political scandals were measured before the Watergate scandal.

Harding was saved from further humiliation by his death in 1923, but since the incumbent President Calvin Coolidge was untainted by Teapot Dome, all the drama was gone from the 1924 Republican Convention. The slogan “Keep Cool with Coolidge” said it all.

This time, Rogers reported the conventions on the scenes. By 1924, Rogers was better known than most of the people who were the subjects of his dispatches. His byline had become, simply, “Will Rogers.”


1924 Republican Convention, Cleveland

Admitting to the cut and dry nature of the Coolidge nomination, Rogers reported, “This is the first Vice Presidential convention ever held in the history of politics.”

“The city is opening up the churches now... so the delegates and visitors can go and hear... excitement of some kind.”

“Now I want this distinctly understood, that I have nothing against Cleveland. I love Cleveland because I knew them before this catastrophe struck them. She will arise... and some day be greater than ever.”


1924 Democratic Convention, New York City

The Democrats had a more exciting show at Madison Square Garden. Rogers had progressed from the one-liners that dominated his reportage in 1920. It was a measure of the relative excitement that he produced five articles on the Republicans keeping cool with Coolidge and 18 on the Democratic Party’s circus. By the end of the Democratic Convention, he was reporting as “Will Rogers, Jr.,” because it had lasted so long that his son had supposedly taken over the task.

I suggested to them that if I was them I would adjourn before they nominated somebody and spoiled it all.

We heard nothing from 10 o’clock in the morning until six at night but "The man I am going to name." Then they talk for another thirty minutes and then, "The man I am going to name." There have been guys going to name men all day, and all we ever got named were about six out of a possible 200.

They all kept the names until the last word. It was safer.

Safety was indeed an issue at this convention, where the Democratic Party split wide open over the influence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the number of cross-burnings and hooded marches outside the proceedings led some wags to refer to 1924 as the “Klanbake.”

Inside Madison Square Garden, the main issue became a choice in the platform between a vague call for religious toleration and racial harmony versus a full-throated denunciation of lynchings in general and the KKK in particular.

“They have been five days working on a plank on the Ku Klux and finally brought in the same one the Republicans used,” observed Rogers.

Some guy from Maine offered an amendment naming the Klan... There were 12,000 civilians and at least a hundred thousand cops in and around the building. There were 10 policemen standing in the aisle by the side of each Texas delegate.

Will’s description was comic hyperbole, but the debate did rend the party.

When North Carolina announced to the Chairman that three and eighty-five one-hundredths of a delegate were in favor of the Klan amendment, and that twenty and fifteen one-hundredths of a delegate were against it, why, there was a round of laughter that broke up what was the most tense moment ever witnessed in a convention hall.

Rogers went on at length about the anatomical improbability of fractional delegates. “If a delegate is three-seventeenths of one vote, what would that make an alternate?” The silliness subsided but the KKK prevailed in the floor fight.

Today they start balloting, and I suppose some man will win the nomination by the narrow margin of a left forearm of a North Carolinian.

After a record 103 ballots, the Democrats finally settled on John W. Davis for president. Davis comes down to us in history as the lawyer who argued the segregationist and losing side of Brown v. Board of Education.


1928 Republican Convention, Kansas City

One of the things Will Rogers’ biographers cannot agree upon is how many airplane crashes he survived before the one that took his life. Because of his devotion to the cause of civil aviation (and military aviation before that), Will always minimized mishaps and covered them up when he could.

Flying from his home in California to the Republican Convention in Kansas City, Rogers survived two of what he called “incidents, not accidents.” The first was a wheel breaking on landing in Las Vegas, which ended with the plane on its back. Just a few hours later, in a different plane, Rogers survived a hard emergency landing in Cherokee, Wyoming. He complained that he had lost his overcoat in the confusion around the “incidents,” but vowed to keep his bloodstained shirt for a souvenir.

Once more in 1928, the Republicans put up no serious fights. Herbert Hoover, in a workmanlike march toward nomination, had done enough advance work to be nominated on the first ballot. “The whole show,” Will complained, “has degenerated into nothing but a dog fight for Vice President.”

Rogers did note one thing that has changed in our time, when no Democrat holds statewide office in Texas:

They had a time seating the Texas delegation, as there was no law in Texas to apply to a Republican primary. Texas never thought they would come to a point where there would ever be any Republicans there. They also have no laws against the shooting out of season of reindeers or musk ox.

There was a rare hint of foreign policy debate when one of the speakers alluded to U.S. intervention in Nicaragua, where the U.S. had sent Marines in 1926. The U.S. had pressured the Nicaraguan congress to elect Adolfo Diaz president, something that Will commented on at the time:

We say that Diaz is the properly elected president of Nicaragua, but Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Chile, Mexico, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia, Uruguay, Paraguay -- all those say that the other fellow is the properly elected president. It’s funny how we are the only ones that get everything right. I’d rather be right than Republican.

Two years later, Will had not changed his mind:

[The speaker] brought up Nicaragua, but he left the marines down there. He said that he would protect American lives down there, even if we had to send some there to protect.

This was vintage Will Rogers, who never hid his opinion that other countries in general, and Latin American countries in particular, ought to be allowed to govern themselves without U.S. meddling.

Rogers could not let the convention pass without ribbing the first American Indian to appear on a presidential ticket, Charles Curtis. While he was also Osage and Potawatomi by blood, Curtis was enrolled Kaw and grew up on the Kaw Reservation in Kansas Territory. Curtis was, like Will Rogers, a pre-statehood Indian who had watched Indian governments get shoved aside.

Rogers said of Curtis getting the nod for Vice President:

The Republican Party owed him something, but I didn’t think they would be so low down as to pay him that way.

1928 Democratic Convention, Houston

From Houston, Rogers anticipated the major issue of the Convention:

Since prohibition was unearthed nine years ago, there has only been one argument invented that a politician when he is cornered can duck behind... "I am for law enforcement." It don’t mean anything, never meant anything, and never will mean anything.

It would take practically a lunatic to announce: "I am against law enforcement."

Now the Republicans held their convention first, and naturally they grabbed this lone tree to hide behind. Now that leaves the Democrats out in the open.

Days later, he continued:

The whole talk down here is wet and dry; the delegates just can’t wait till the next bottle is opened to discuss it. Prohibition is running about a quart to the argument here now.

It was plain that the Democrats would “straddle,” as Will put it, with a “balanced ticket,” which in the context of the times meant a wet and a dry. When the convention settled on a wet, and the first Catholic, Alfred E. Smith, to lead the ticket, the way was open to put the first Southerner on a major party ticket since the Civil War.

This was critical because Smith (and Catholics generally) had been subject to almost as much animosity from the Ku Klux Klan as African-Americans and Jews. This was the very next convention after the one that splintered over the KKK.

The second spot on the ticket went to Arkansas Sen. Joseph Robinson, about whom Will Rogers opined:

They got a great fellow in Joe. He is a real, two-fisted he-candidate. He comes from the wilds of Arkansaw, where they are hard to tame. I have had one in my house for 20 years and there is just no managing ‘em.

Will was referring to his wife, Betty Blake, whom he had courted across the Arkansas line from Indian Territory.

The Smith-Robinson ticket was decisively defeated by Hoover-Curtis, but within a year the “Roaring Twenties” would quit roaring.

Will Rogers: "Never a slave to objectivity." Image from MovieFanFare.

1932 Republican and Democratic Conventions, Chicago

In retrospect, it’s fitting that both parties convened in the same city in the depths of the Great Depression, since neither party had done much to prevent it. The Progressive reforms championed by Will Rogers’ friend Theodore Roosevelt were a distant memory, and the anti-trust laws Roosevelt pioneered were honored in the breech.

Wall Street speculation was rampant at a time when the margin requirement was only 10%. That is, to buy $1,000 worth of stock, a trader only needed $100 in his account. The common belief was that the stock market would always rise, and a rising tide would lift all boats. Politicians were either unaware of or ignored a degree of income inequality in the U.S. that would not be seen again until current times, when we once more choose to assume that the key to prosperity is that the rich do well.

The conventional wisdom came crashing down on Black Tuesday: October 29, 1929. A stock market that had been volatile for some time took a dive. Thirty billion dollars in paper wealth disappeared in two days.

When a similar crash began in September of 2008, the Federal Reserve Bank responded with major liquidity injections, “loose money.” This could not happen in 1929, when the Federal Reserve was bound by the gold standard and private gold hoarding was common.

Speculation in a perpetually rising stock market was not anything that appeared to need regulating in 1929, so when investment banking collapsed, so did commercial banking. Crop loans and inventory loans dried up. When banks failed in those times, the depositors simply lost their money. A rumor became enough to set off a “run” on a bank.

President Hoover’s major policy response was the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act. Will Rogers was opposed to tariffs in general and that bill in particular, because he felt that it hurt farmers and helped bankers, a view that may have sounded simplistic but was vindicated by events.

Rogers steadfastly refused to kick Hoover while he was down or encourage those who did. When asked by Hoover to write something to discourage hoarding, Will complied by claiming that

A Jewish farmer at Claremore named Morris Haas hid $500 in bills in a barrel of bran and a cow ate it up. He has just been able to get $18 of it back, up to now.

This hoarding don’t pay.

In a speech titled “Bacon, Beans, and Limousines,” Will cut though the rhetorical smoke about the need to balance the budget and the transgressions of other countries:

There’s not really but one problem before the whole country at this time. It’s not the balancing of Mr. Mellon’s budget. That’s his worry. That ain’t ours. And it’s not the League of Nations that we read so much about. It’s not the silver question. The only problem that confronts this country today is at least 7,000,000 people are out of work. That’s our only problem. There is no other one before us at all. It’s to see that every man that wants to is able to work, and also to arrange some way of getting more equal distribution of the wealth in the country.

In those dark days, the two major parties met in Chicago to debate how to get out of the hole and who would be put forward to lead the country out.

The Republicans met first, and started a little slow, according to Will:

I couldn’t find out a thing about politics, and I guess that’s just about the way the whole country looks at it. Nobody here knows they are holding a convention. There is lots of flags out, but Tuesday is Al Capone’s birthday, so who knows?

The next day, Rogers found a political story he cared about:

Well, got some scandal for you today, for it wouldn’t be a Republican convention without some sort of undercover "finagling." They are out now to throw poor old Injun Charley Curtis off and get another Vice President... Their alibi is that he is too old... Well, they knew a few months ago how old he would be about now.

Will went on to suggest that the people out for Curtis’ head say it this way:

We are in the hole and we got to try and dig up somebody that will help us swing some votes. It’s not your age, Charley... You got to be the goat, not us. So any one we can think of that can carry the most votes we are going to nominate ‘em, be it Charley Chaplin or Amelia Earhart. You been a good Injun, but its votes not sentiment we are after this year. So long, Charley, take care of yourself.

Two days later, Will complained again “Poor Charley is to be tomahawked in the back... just like they took the country from the Indians...” When the movement to dump Curtis failed, Rogers claimed credit, probably correctly:

I saved my "Injun" Charley Curtis for vice presidency. The rascals was just ready to stab him when we caught ‘em.

So it’s the same old vaudeville team of Hoover and Curtis.

When the Democrats came to town, Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to replicate Hoover’s first nomination battle. He had entered and won every primary where he would not offend a local “favorite son.” This being the Democratic Party, it was not that simple.

Al Smith was nominated again, as was the Speaker of the House, John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner. There was even a boomlet for Oklahoma Gov. William “Alfalfa Bill” Murray. Will Rogers was friendly with all the contenders. Never a slave to objectivity, Will actually addressed the crowd during a recess:

Now, you rascals, I want you to promise me one thing. No matter who is nominated, and of course some of you are going home disappointed that it was not your man, no matter who is nominated, don’t go home and act like Democrats. Go home and act like he was the man you came to see nominated. Don’t say he is the weakest man you could have nominated; don’t say he can’t win. You don’t know what he can do, or how weak he is until next November. I don’t see how he could ever be weak enough not to win. If he lives until November he’s in.

This time, the Democratic platform managed to advocate repeal of Prohibition, to Will’s delight:

Did the Democrats go wet? No, they just layed right down and wallowed in it. They left all their clothes on the bank and dived in without even a bathing suit. They are wetter than an organdie dress at a rainy day picnic.

Will went on to lament that the Democratic platform had no plan “to get some bread with the beer.” The truth was nobody in either party had a clue. The economist John Maynard Keynes was an academic in Great Britain and Roosevelt would find the magic of the aggregate demand curve by trial and error.

When Alfalfa Bill Murray’s candidacy did not catch fire, Oklahoma’s favorite son votes went to Will Rogers, a development Will took in good humor.

Roosevelt broke though by offering the vice presidency to Cactus Jack Garner, who accepted for reasons unclear in light of his later comment that the office was not worth “a bucket of warm piss."

The Great Depression had, as Rogers predicted, set the stage for a rout of the Hoover administration. It’s hard now, even in economic times challenging by the standards we know, to picture the situation President Roosevelt would face. Unemployment was over twice what it is now, without unemployment insurance or Social Security or Medicaid. Armies of unemployed lived in shantytowns, dubbed “Hoovervilles” by the Democrats.

Will Rogers wrote from Claremore, Oklahoma, on July 4, 1932, looking back on what would be his last convention coverage and, characteristically, forward:

Heard a mule braying a while ago at the farm and for a minute I couldn’t tell who he was nominating.

Steve Russell gratefully acknowledges the research assistance of Steve Gragert, Director of the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma. A shorter version of this article appeared in Indian Country Today. 

[Steve Russell lives in Sun City, Texas, near Austin. He is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and associate professor emeritus of criminal justice at Indiana University-Bloomington. Steve was an activist in Austin in the sixties and seventies, and wrote for Austin’s underground paper, The Rag. Steve, who belongs to the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is also a columnist for Indian Country Today. He can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu. Read more articles by Steve Russell on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / C.E. McAuley : Jonah Raskin's Bio of 'Pedagogical Pilgrim' James McGrath

Jonah Raskin's biography of artist/teacher James McGrath was designed by Rag Blog art director James Retherford.
Pedagogical pilgrim:
Jonah Raskin's new bio of
artist/teacher James McGrath

Raskin's new biography is no simple valentine from one teacher to another. It is an in-depth and compelling look, not only about McGrath’s life journey, but also the sacrifices he made along the way.

By C.E. McAuley / The Rag Blog / December 7, 2012

[James McGrath: In A Class By Himself by Jonah Raskin. Preface by Bill Ayers; book design by James Retherford. (2012: Santa Rosa, CA: McCaa Books); Paperback; $18.]

Teaching, when done correctly, is an all-consuming passion. There is a popular saying from a popular book: “Teach like your hair’s on fire.” In author Jonah Raskin’s new biography, James McGrath: In A Class By Himself, he writes about a teacher who taught like his life was on fire.

Raskin should know. Beyond being a prolific author, poet, and journalist -- Raskin, a regular contributor to The Rag Blog, has also written biographies of Jack London, Allen Ginsberg, and Abbie Hoffman -- he was a professor for over 30 years, teaching topics ranging from literature to media law and everything in between.

He himself has a cadre of dedicated former students whom he has mentored over the years and he recently became the first ever Professor Emeritus in the history of the Communication Studies Department at Sonoma State University. But his new biography is no simple valentine from one teacher to another. It is an in-depth and compelling look, not only about McGrath’s life journey, but also the sacrifices he made along the way.

Early on McGrath discovers himself as an artist and finds that his creative spark lights up not only his life but what would become his teaching as well. It would be a spark that would become an all-consuming flame, though. One that would destroy his relationship with his wife and strain his relationship with his children.

Some of the relationships are now under repair. It’s something McGrath doesn’t like to talk much about -- but his absence of words speaks volumes about the sacrifices that many teachers and artists have to make for their teaching and art and for teaching as an art.

McGrath grew up in Depression-era Tacoma, Washington. Though he first considered life as a geologist and studied at the Central Washington College of Education, a poor algebra grade led him to reassess and a $1,500 scholarship to the University of Oregon at Eugene helped McGrath find his true artistic path. While getting his M.F.A. from the University of Washington McGrath began teaching at Columbia High School and his legendary journey began.

And when teaching and art fused together McGrath found his life’s purpose. Raskin deftly captures McGrath’s journeys around the globe in what he calls “the life and times of an extraordinary American teacher, mentor, cultural ambassador, and Pedagogical pilgrim.”

McGrath with students at Hopitutuqaki (the Hopi School), Hotevilla, Arizona. Image from James McGrath: In a Class By Himself.
Traveling the world teaching art, making art, and mentoring generations of students may sound inspiring to some -- and it is -- but Raskin does not shy away from describing McGrath’s intensity, toil, and sacrifice as he struggles to bring art and the ways of creativity to students from Asia to Europe and the American Southwest where he became a leader in the Institute of American Indian Arts.

McGrath found himself working across cultures and finding a place where cultures can be shared and honored, and he was also a teacher and administrator at U.S. Army bases across the world.

As a teacher and advisor in the Institute of American Indian Arts, McGrath, the program, and its students rose to national prominence -- garnering the attention of presidents and the national press of the 1960s and 1970s. It was a time when the American Indian Rights movement held the national attention, a time of social foment and revolutionary ideas and ideals.

But even this, perhaps McGrath’s crowning achievement, was not without controversy as he was a Caucasian teaching and helping to bring American Indian art to the forefront. Despite that, his students considered him to be the same as them -- just as his students in Asia and Europe did. It was in that sense that McGrath’s philosophy of creating -- from the center out and expressing oneself genuinely whatever the cost -- transcended racial and ethnic boundaries.

And, as he aged, it also transcended the boundaries of time as his students became artists and teachers themselves. It is not too much to say that McGrath, who is still creating today, is revered as a friend and legend among those who have been a part of his teaching -- and it is a testament to the man’s personal philosophy of art as life and teaching art as life.

Raskin has done an assiduous job researching McGrath and interviewing McGrath and those who have been in his sphere of influence for decades. His compelling writing style brings readers into a book about someone they, likely, have never heard of but need to hear about. As such, this book is a must read for teachers and students.

The world is filled with bad teachers. And good teachers. But, it’s not filled with many extraordinary teachers or extraordinary biographers. And I believe a book about an extraordinary teacher, such as this one, could only be written by another extraordinary teacher and extraordinary writer. Raskin fills both roles with aplomb.

Far too often people want to read biographies about people they’re already familiar with. Most often political figures like Churchill or Kennedy and entertainers or Nobel laureates. And something can be learned from doing that.

But it’s in hearing the stories of the unsung greats -- such as James McGrath -- that people can come to learn the power of one individual, one regular man who became an extraordinary teacher, and who has made a positive difference in the world.

This is an all-true-tale of a teacher who is still teaching after 60 years and continuing to inspire generations. Jonah Raskin has given us a special gift by telling us the story of James McGrath. And I hope one day someone will tell his story just as well.

[Charles “Chip” McAuley is an instructor in the Communication Studies department at Sonoma State University and adviser to the STAR, Sonoma State University’s award-winning student newspaper. He is also a widely-published freelance writer.

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Tony Platt : California Dreamin'

The Bloody Island Massacre of 1850 at the north end of Clear Lake, Lake County, California. Art from Manataka American Indian Council.  
California Dreamin'

California’s public history mostly erases its tragic past, turning profound injustices, such as the genocide of native peoples, into a narrative of Progress.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / July 12, 2012

“The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.” -- Joan Didion

BERKELEY, California -- A couple of weeks ago I attended the 3rd Global Conference on Genocide in San Francisco. The conference, organized by the International Network of Genocide Scholars, covered genocides, past and present, in many parts of the world. Just about everywhere, except here. In three days of panels and presentations, I could find only one discussion of California as a site of genocide, and it was in my paper.

California can hold its own with other regions of the world regarding human-made tragedies -- genocide, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, lynching, racial segregation, eugenics, imprisonment without trial, and torture. We know this from the accounts of witnesses and survivors, and from richly descriptive social histories written during the last 30 years.

Yet, California’s public history mostly erases its tragic past, turning profound injustices, such as the genocide of native peoples, into a narrative of Progress. The upbeat version of The California Story as a place of entrepreneurial ingenuity and cutting-edge modernity has served as a cultural firewall, numbing and cutting us off from the state’s bloody history.

It is rare to find in our textbooks, classrooms, and public places a reckoning with our nineteenth century catastrophe: dispossession and massacres of native communities; break up of native families, including a commercial trade in women and children; organized efforts to erase thousands of years of cultural experience; and systematic looting of native graves and artifacts to the benefit of collectors, museums, and universities.

It is even more rare to find accounts of local native resistance, from guerilla warfare during the Gold Rush to battles over land and repatriation in the twentieth century. Crude and racist representations of acquiescent native peoples dominated public space in California for over a century, making it easier to frame their near extermination in the imagery of natural history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as a result of human intervention -- a genocide.

Eugenic legacies persist today in the state’s 4th grade curriculum that transforms the colonial, racist imperatives of the Spanish mission system into a romantic origins story of uplift and civilization. And in the 7th grade, when The Diary of Anne Frank is typically taught, it is the rare teacher who makes a connection to California’s catastrophe.

There are so few public acknowledgements of California’s history of atrocities against native peoples that I can list them here:

• In 2005, the state erected a historical marker on Highway 20 in recognition of a massacre by soldiers of Pomo women and children on Bloody Island in 1850.
• In 2006, Eureka City Council returned 60 acres of Indian Island (the site of another massacre) to the Wiyot Tribe as a gesture of reparations.
• In 2007, Bishop Francis A. Quinn in a public speech acknowledged the “past mistakes and serious misdeeds” of the Catholic Church during the Mission period. “The Church apologizes for trying to take Indian out of the Indian. Let the Miwok be Miwok.”

California does not have any monumental, officially endorsed, civic memorials to victims of mass injustice, such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the Shoah Memorial in Paris, Memory Park in Buenos Aires, or the African Burial Ground National Monument in New York. Nor do we have any educational and cultural institutions devoted to learning about the motivation, psychology, and organization of perpetrators, such as the Topography of Terror in Berlin or Nazi Documentation Center in Nuremberg.

There is nothing in California comparable to the federal memorial on Bainbridge Island, Washington, that commemorates how the first town under Roosevelt’s 1942 order removed all citizens of Japanese origins; or to Reconciliation Park in Tacoma, an ongoing private-public initiative to remember how the port city ethnically cleansed hundreds of Chinese in 1885.

Due to lack of public funding, California also has a weak public arts presence in memorial culture. By contrast, Berlin's artistic projects are so embedded in daily life that you literally bump into reminders of Nazism at the top of subway exits, or walk past them on the way to work, or see them next to ads in neighborhoods, or stumble over them on the way into a café. For example, hovering in the shadows of the gigantic Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in a nearby park is a kiosk that seductively invites you to look through a peephole at two men or two women kissing, and to imagine their fate under the Nazis.

I understand the political importance of creating large-scale monuments in publicly visible sites, but personally I appreciate memorials that catch you off guard, make you figure out something for yourself, and are part of the everyday landscape. Smaller is not necessarily better than bigger, but often has a wider impact and may last longer.

Coming to terms with this region’s long record of social injustices is necessary in order to chip away at chauvinist notions of the United States as destined by providence and militarism to lead the world, and of the mythic Golden State as a model of multiculturalism. Addressing our history in all its contradictions helps us to guard against hubris and to recognize our modest place in an interdependent world.

We’ll know we’re making progress when we teach the Mission system as part of colonial history, when the genocide of native peoples in the northwest is taught alongside The Diary of Anne Frank, and when a genocide conference held in San Francisco pays serious attention to the region’s sorrowful past.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. Platt taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). He is a Visiting Professor in Department of Justice Studies, San José State University. His publications have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. His latest book -- Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past -- was recently published by Heyday. He lives in Berkeley and Big Lagoon, California, and serves as secretary of the Coalition to Protect Yurok Cultural Legacies at O-pyuweg (Big Lagoon). He blogs on history and memory at GoodToGo. Find more articles by Tony Platt on The Rag Blog]

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Tony Platt : Justice for the Living Dead

A graduate student at an anthropology museum at Berkeley uses a craniometer to measure an ancient Indian skull. This collection alone contained more than 10,000 Indian skeletons. Photo from Life magazine, October 25, 1948. Image from The Buffalo Post.
Death's double standard:
Justice for the living dead

It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult.

By Tony Platt / The Rag Blog / May 22, 2012

It’s good news that the United Nations has authorized University of Arizona professor James Anaya, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to carry out its first investigation into the status of Native Americans in the United States, with a particular focus on American compliance with standards embodied in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, to which the U.S. became a signatory in 2010.

The focus of Anaya’s scrutiny no doubt will be on today’s inequalities and injustices that deeply impact 2.7 million Native Americans throughout the country. But let’s not forget the inequities of death.

Despite popular images of tribal members getting rich from gaming pay-offs, the overwhelming majority of Native Americans remain mired in poverty, the victims of structural unemployment and racial exclusion, compounded by devastating rates of diabetes, suicide, infant mortality, and cardiovascular and alcohol-related diseases.

There is a long way to go before, in the words of the Declaration, “indigenous peoples are equal to all other peoples” entitled to the right to “self-determination” and to “be free from discrimination of any kind.”

Inequality is a problem for the dead as well as the living. According to Article 12 of the UN Declaration, native peoples have a right to “the use and control of their ceremonial objects, and the repatriation of their human remains.” Repatriation as a central demand of Native American movements in the United States speaks to the long history of plunder of native artifacts and bodies.

Over a period of some two hundred years, from Thomas Jefferson’s exploration of a Native American barrow near his home in Virginia, to passage of the federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in 1990, several hundred thousand native grave sites -- maybe as many as one million -- were dug up in the name of science, recreation, and commerce.

There was a brisk trade in native body parts and funerary artifacts, propelled by the popularity of commercial and recreational “collecting,” scientific curiosity, and the heritage industry. The artifacts removed from graves ended up in private collections and public display cases around the world, including the Smithsonian, Royal Museum of Ethnology in Berlin, the British Museum in London, and museums in Prague, Zurich, Vienna, and Moscow.

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, scientists in universities and museums engaged in a frenzy of acquisition in the hope that native bodies would shed light on the origins of the species or on racial typologies of human difference. They were particularly interested in the bodies of Indians, who, it was believed, had been frozen in time since the Stone Age, and whose remains therefore were thought to hold the key to “secrets of human origins,” as well as provide physical evidence for claims about European superiority and native degeneracy.

This science made it easier to frame the near extermination of native peoples in the imagery of natural rather than social history, subject to inevitable processes of erosion and decline, rather than as the result of human intervention and -- in the case of California -- genocide.

In widely read treatises -- such as Samuel Morton’s Crania America (1839), Ales Hrdlicka’s Directions for Collecting Information and Specimens for Physical Anthropology (1904), and Edward Gifford’s Californian Anthropometry (1926) -- the measurement of brain cavities, nostrils, and degree of slope in foreheads generated all kinds of scientific quackery to justify the civilizational superiority of white Europeans and innate inferiority of native peoples.

Aside from the racist assumptions that guided research on native bodies, the science was also flawed because documentation of provenience of bones and artifacts found in graves was often nonexistent. Moreover, scientists harvested far more corpses than they could ever study. Tens of thousands of native dead were stashed in boxes, cellars, and personal collections, only to be resurrected for display in cabinets of curiosities, museums, schools, and international expositions.

A skull collected on Santa Rosa Island was included in the U.S. exhibition at the Columbian Historical Exposition in Madrid in 1892. In the 1920s and 1930s, a self-styled amateur archaeologist dug up hundreds of dead Tongva Indians and used their bones to decorate his Catalina Museum of Island Indians. To this day, the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon, proudly displays native artifacts looted from graves.

With passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990, the practice of widespread grave looting was officially stopped. Moreover, NAGPRA requires federally funded institutions to publish their holdings of native body parts, as well as artifacts taken from graves, and to facilitate their return to tribes that are able to make a case for genealogical or cultural connection.

NAGPRA was as significant a piece of legislation for Native Americans as the Civil Rights Act was for African Americans. And, similarly, it represents an unfinished revolution. The pace of repatriating human remains is glacially slow: by 2009, less than five percent nationwide had been returned to tribes. By 2010, the University of California at Berkeley had repatriated only 179 of its 10,000 native body parts.


There is nothing inherently wrong with using the dead to reconstruct the past. With the help of new developments in chemistry, DNA analysis and dating methods, we can learn a great deal from human remains about how our ancestors lived, worked, and died. Respectful collaboration between community groups, advocacy organizations, politicians, and scientists in New York in the 1990s, for example, made it possible to excavate what had been the Negros Buriel Ground, resulting in a detailed portrait of the daily lives of Africans in colonial New Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

A similar collaboration between the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe, archaeologists, and Pacific Gas and Electric Company -- following the inadvertent exposure of native burials in Santa Clara, California, in 2008 -- produced a great deal of information about the lives and deaths of Ohlone neophytes buried in the mission at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries.

For most twentieth century archaeology, however, the decision to excavate and exhume native remains was typically made unilaterally and imposed by fiat. The problem is not with the search for knowledge, but rather the unequal relations of power between investigator and subject, collector and collected; the lack of consultation and permission, the arrogance run wild; and how the products of knowledge are misused.

It’s not only the unauthorized digging up of ancestors that haunts the memory of native peoples, it’s also the blatant double standard that adds indignity to insult. Remembrance and treatment of the dead is a highly selective political project. Some of our collective dead are respected, others humiliated. Consider some examples:

• The priests who worked at Mission Carmel in California from 1771 to 1833 are buried in solid tombs and named in headstones. Junipero Serra, architect of the mission system, is interred in an ornate crypt. The thousands of Ohlones, whose slave labor built and ran the mission, are buried anonymously in mass pits. When I visited Mission Carmel in February with Louise J. Miranda Ramirez, tribal chairwoman of the Ohlone/Costanoan-Esselen Nation, she picked up several items from the ground. “Look,” she showed me, “these are human bones dug up by gophers. I’ve asked the authorities to bring in soil and cover the graves with some protection, but they don’t do anything.”


• In the second half of the 19th century, while scientists and collectors raided native cemeteries for booty and bodies, the nation made amends for the Civil War by creating a system of national cemeteries and making a conscientious effort to preserve the names and identities of those killed. Today, a Defense Department unit with an annual budget of $55 million searches the world for unaccounted soldiers killed in the line of duty. No comparable effort is put into retrieving thousands of native remains unceremoniously stored in university, military, and museum basements.


• An expensive effort, led by the FBI, is currently under way to find the remains of a six-year old boy killed in New York more than 30 years ago. Recently, a national scandal erupted when it was revealed that the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware dumped in a landfill the body parts of some victims of the September 11, 2001, tragedy. Similarly, the Pentagon expressed strong condemnation of the Los Angeles Times for publishing photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of dead Afghan insurgents. No such objections were made when museums and newspapers throughout most of the 20th century displayed native skeletons as objects of curiosity and entertainment.


• A debate is under way today about the propriety of excavating the wreck of the Titanic when it may contain corpses that, say Federal officials, should be accorded the respect of a graveyard and shielded from “looters and artifact hunters.” In contrast, the University of California, Berkeley, is closing the Hearst Museum for two years in order to “renovate and transform its public spaces.” There are no plans, apparently, to give 10,000 native remains stacked in a dank basement a respectful burial or commemorate their theft from native graveyards.

Federal policies of repatriation are a step in the right direction. But most native remains are unclaimed or unknown. What should be a national ritual of remembrance and mourning has become a technical, bureaucratic process. In addition to tribal claims for the return of their dead, there is also a need for public commemoration that speaks to a national tragedy.

Throughout much of the 20th century, while the government built memorials to the victims of world wars and now, as it continues to make efforts to account for every person missing from the Vietnam War, hundreds of thousands of native bones and skulls have been stored anonymously in basements and boxes, and their burial goods displayed as mementos of a “vanishing race” or as freak show curiosities.

However much we have tried to assiduously forget this sorrowful history, the past continues to reverberate in the here and now. It is time to do justice to our living dead.

[Tony Platt is the author of 10 books and 150 essays and articles dealing with issues of race, inequality, and social justice in American history. Platt taught at the University of Chicago, University of California (Berkeley), and California State University (Sacramento). He is a Visiting Professor in Department of Justice Studies, San José State University. His publications have been translated into German, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese. His latest book -- Grave Matters: Excavating California’s Buried Past -- was recently published by Heyday. He lives in Berkeley and Big Lagoon, California, and serves as secretary of the Coalition to Protect Yurok Cultural Legacies at O-pyuweg (Big Lagoon). He blogs on history and memory at GoodToGo. Find more articles by Tony Platt on The Rag Blog]

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