“No one man can terrorize a whole nation unless we are all his accomplices.” Edward R. Morrow
Scapegoats are those blamed for the wrongdoings or mistakes of others. According to the Bible, Jewish priests during Yom Kippur sent goats into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people. Leviticus 16:8 states: “And Aaron cast lots upon the two goats: one for the Lord and the other lot for Azazel.” Azazel is evidently a fallen angel, according to Jewish tradition, and there is a Mount Azazel in the Judean Desert where demons of old supposedly dwelled.
In “200: The IU Bicentennial Magazine” is an article by Kelly Kish entitled “Reds among the Cream and Crimson.” Three law professors got in hot water for signing a letter on July 29, 1946, advocating that candidates of the Communist Party be included on the state voting ballot. While the governor and Board of Election Commissioners agreed, with one candidate receiving 900 votes, law professors Bernard Gavit, Fowler Harper, and Howard Mann found themselves Red-baited by the American Legion. Under pressure from IU Board of Trustees president Ora Wildermuth, a rightwing segregationist from Gary, IU president Herman Wells held hearings to determine whether the three law professors or any other faculty were promoting “any communistic, un-American, unpatriotic or subversive philosophy.” During the 30-hour investigation Wells and the Board of Trustees heard from 29 witnesses. Professor Harper’s testimony concluded:
I wish only to affirm that I am not a political sympathizer with the Communist Party nor have I ever been in sympathy with its political philosophy, practices or objectives. I believe with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that the “ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas,”and I support the right of all Americans to use the ballot to express their political convictions.
Most Board members believed the episode to be “a tempest in a teapot.”Its report found no evidence of communism among students or faculty. Regarding Harper, Gavit, and Mann, they noted that all three were war veterans and concluded : “Each earnestly asserted his profound admiration for the Constitution and the American way of life.”
The Postwar Red Scare hysteria died down after Senator Joe McCarthy’s demagoguery was exposed as a fraud in 1954 but remained a tool in reactionary politicians’ arsenals until the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Kelly Kish interviewed me regarding an IUN professor, Saul Maloff, who was terminated during the 1960s due to pressure from Bloomington and an anti-communist IU Trustee and may write about the case in a forthcoming issue. Listening to Professor Abdul Alkalimat quote Karl Marx and openly advocate socialism during the Black History Month celebration, I pondered what his fate might have been had he uttered those words 70 years before, when freedom fighters Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois, whom Abdul Alkalimat praised as Black Studies pioneers, were ostracized as subversives.
IU President Herman Wells meets with SDS students in 1969
Other articles appearing in“200: The IU Bicentennial Magazine” were “IU’s Original Squirrel Colony,” “A Look Inside IU’s Post-WWII Trailer Towns,” “A Big Bang” (about a 1957 chemistry demonstration gone awry, injuring 16), “Protesting the Student Fee Hike of 1969” by former student leader Paul Helmke, who led an 11-day strike, and “Hidden IU: The Scandal that Led to the Resignation of Reverend William M. Daily, IU’s Third President.” After serving for six years beginning in 1853, Daily was accused of lewdness and drunkenness and forced to resign. The Methodist minister went on to serve with distinction as a hospital chaplain during the Civil War.
In the Journal of American History Rien Fertel reviewed “Here I Stand: The Life and Legacy of John Beecher” by Angela J. Smith. A poet and activist who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, Beecher (1904-1980) served in the merchant marines during World War II and in 1948 took a position as a Sociology professor at San Francisco State. Two year later, he was fired for refusing to sign a state-mandated loyalty oath. Blacklisted, he became a civil rights correspondent and activist and founded a publishing house that was the forerunner to Ramparts Press. While Beecher was covering Freedom Summer, Alabama governor George Wallace branded him a communist on NBC’s Today show. He taught at various institutions before finally being reinstated in 1977 by San Francisco State. Calling Beecher a twentieth-century abolitionist, Fertel concluded: “His great-great aunt [Harriet Beecher Stowe] would no doubt be proud.”
In “Slaughterhouse Five” time traveler Billy Pilgrim is at his son’s Little League banquet. Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “The coach, who had never been married, was speaking. He was all choked up. ‘Honest to God,’ he was saying, ‘I’d consider it an honor just to be water boy for these kids.’” As a former Little League coach, I could identify with the sentiment even as I laughed at the awkward way it was conveyed. Captured by Germans, Billy next traveled ahead 23 years to Ilium, Ohio, where he was an optometrist on the way to a Lions Club luncheon. Vonnegut wrote:
He was stopped by a signal in the middle of Ilium’s black ghetto. The people who lived here hated it so much they had burned down a lot of it a month before. It was all they had, and they’d wrecked it. The neighborhood reminded Billy of some of the towns he had seen in the war. The curbs and sidewalks were crushed in many places, showing where the National Guard tanks and half-tracks had been.
“Blood brother,” said a message written in pink paint on the side of a shattered grocery store.
Trump’s State of the Union address mixed patriotic platitudes with veiled threats should he not get his way regarding funding for his damn wall. Republicans rose to cheer as he praised capitalism and equated socialism with the failed regime in Venezuela. Women legislators were dressed in white, symbolic of women’s suffrage established by the Nineteenth Amendment, passed by Congress 100 years ago, and ratified within a year. Trump got the most applause when he congratulated the record number of women members of Congress. Ironically, the backlash against him motivated many to enter politics. Ray Smock wrote:
A nice tradition was started by Ronald Reagan in 1982, when he had one hero in the gallery, a government worker, Lenny Skutnik, who helped save victims of a plane crash in the icy Potomac River basin. That plane crash was two weeks before Reagan's address. The tragedy was on everyone's mind and Skutnik was a true citizen hero of the moment. Since then every president has had a few “Lenny Skutniks”as the gallery heroes are sometimes referred to by the more cynical types in DC. Trump, in good demagogic style, likes to keep the crowd on its feet applauding, and turning to the gallery for heart rending stories works like magic on TV and Trump knows it. These addresses are high political theater. Trump puts on a show. But this one went overboard in time and in a disjointed presentation.
The speech had all the earmarks of Stephen Miller, the rabid anti-immigrant aid in the White House, and the stuff on foreign policy, including the president's withdrawal from the INF Treaty with Russia smacks of John Bolton. I guess Trump needed to look tough on Russia, but I am sure Putin is laughing once more at how this treaty withdrawal works to his advantage, not to the advantage of the United States. Some of the lines were terribly bad: We should have peace and legislation, not war and investigation. Or if that one didn't inspire you, how about: Greatness or Gridlock or Vision or Vengeance.
Post-Trib columnist Jerry Davich has weighed in on the controversy swirling around Democratic governor of Virginia, who first admitted being in a 25-year-old racist photograph and a day later denied it. He did admit to playing Michael Jackson in black face for a lip synch contest. Davich wrote:
I’ve never dressed in blackface as a prank. I’ve never draped a white sheet over my head to pose as a Ku Klux Klan member. And I’ve never been photographed or video-recorded doing anything in my past with such racist, prejudiced or racially-insensitive intentions. The same can’t be said for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who is clinging to his public office despite nearly unanimous calls for him to resign over a racist photo in his 1984 medical school yearbook. But I’ve done so many other stupid, clueless, regrettable, insensitive things when I was much younger. Nothing with blackface. Yet acts that would leave me red-faced if they were captured on photos or on video and resurrected today
Mary Kate Blake; below, mural by Felix "Flex" Maldonado
Valparaiso University Sociology professor Mary Kate Blake invited me to speak to her students in six weeks on Gary. I gave her copies of my Eighties Steel Shavings(volume 38, 2007) for her students, which contains interviews with laid off steelworkers and the 1986-87 USX lockout. It also includes my oral history of the Richard Hatcher administration during the Mayor’s fourth and fifth terms (1981-1987), as he coped with the effects of deindustrialization and the drying up of federal help during the Ronald Reagan presidency. Blake is assigning several chapters of “Gary’s First Hundred Years” and sought my advice concerning a Gary tour for her 19 students. I suggested visiting the old Union Station (which the Decay Devils spruced up), Gary Library (to see Flex Maldonado’s history of Gary mural), the Progressive Community Church urban gardens at 656 Carolina, across from abandoned Emerson School, and the Aquatorium in Miller. She knew about the Urban Legends exhibit in Munster that will be at the Gardner Center beginning on Friday. Blake is familiar with the VU Welcome Project and has solicited Liz Wuerffel and Allison Schuette’s advice.
At bowling I rolled a 465 series with a high game of 178. Dick Maloney, carrying a 136 average, had a 200 game despite being unable to see the pins. We started the afternoon tied with Pin Chasers and won 5 of 7 points, same as they did. George Leach saw our old auto mechanic Frank Renner’s name in the Steel Shavings I gave him and said he worked at Frank’s garage during the 1970s. Frank and wife Peggy probably averaged close to 70 hours a week at his shop and gave his regular customers special treatment. When our Mercury Comet was getting old, I’d ask him to alert me if a job was going to cost much more than $200; otherwise we’d get a new one. He’d keep the bill to $200 no matter how long he worked on it. He kept that car on the road until it finally rusted out. Frank’s one passion outside work was snowmobiling in Michigan on winter weekends. After his first heart attack, Frank was unable to obtain decent insurance, and when he suffered another one, Peg was afraid he’d lose his business, such was the sad state of health care in the country he put such faith in.
This from Ray Gapinski:
A kindergarten student was having trouble putting on his boots, and asked his teacher for help. Even with her pulling and him pushing, the boots still didn't want to go on. Finally they got both boots on. She grimaced when the little boy said, “They're on the wrong feet.”
Sure enough, they were. The teacher kept her cool as together they worked to get the boots back on - this time on the correct feet. The little boy then announced, “These aren't my boots.”
The teacher sighed and pulled the boots off.
The boy then said, “They're my brother's boots. My Mom made me wear them.”
The boy then said, “They're my brother's boots. My Mom made me wear them.”
The teacher felt like crying, but she mustered up the strength to wrestle the boots back onto his feet. “Now,”she said, “where are your mittens?”
The boy replied, “I stuffed them in my boots.”
Here is Jim Spicer’s witticism of the week:
This guy goes to his barber, and he’s all excited. He says, “I’m going to go to Rome. I’m flying on Alitalia and staying at the Rome Hilton, and I’m going to see the Pope.” The barber says, “Ha! Alitalia is a terrible airline, the Rome Hilton is a dump, and when you see the Pope, you’ll probably be standing in back of about 10,000 people.”
So the guy goes to Rome and comes back. His barber asks, “How was it?”
“Great,”he says. “Alitalia was a wonderful airline. The hotel was great. And I got to meet the Pope.”
“You met the Pope?”said the barber.
“I bent down to kiss the Pope’s ring.”
“And what did he say?”
He said, “Where did you get that crummy haircut?”
So the guy goes to Rome and comes back. His barber asks, “How was it?”
“Great,”he says. “Alitalia was a wonderful airline. The hotel was great. And I got to meet the Pope.”
“You met the Pope?”said the barber.
“I bent down to kiss the Pope’s ring.”
“And what did he say?”
He said, “Where did you get that crummy haircut?”
Baseball great Frank Robinson passed away at age 83. Growing up in Oakland, he was a high school classmate of Bill Russell, outscoring him in basketball. He was National League MVP in 1961 while playing for the Cincinnati Reds and then American League MVP in 1966 with the Baltimore Orioles, leading the league in batting average, RBIs, and home runs and elevating the Orioles to their first World Series championship. Robinson became the first African-American baseball manager, first with Cleveland and then with four other teams, including the Orioles.
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