Dubious Documents: The Case of the Laundered List pt 1

A good many years ago, no matter how many, I was given a book for a birthday or christmas. It was a limited edition reprint of an interesting little booklet by Charles S. Drew, Oregon pioneer and Indian-hater, entitled An Account of the Origin and Early Prosecution of the Indian War in Oregon. The reprint is dated 1973, and that was probably the year I got it; the original booklet was dated 1860.

The story behind the booklet is something like this: In the 1850s settlers had expended money, goods, and services in a series of conflicts with the native peoples. They expected the Federal government to repay them. The Federal government, in response, looked into the legitimacy of the expenses, and not just whether the money had really been spent and on what. No, they also inquired into the origin of the conflict to see whether it had been justified, or if, let us say, a bunch of drunken settlers had shot up a native village while in pursuit of women to rape, and then had the gall to charge the government for it. The trouble is, the financial interest gave investigators the incentive to see the settlers wrong in any conflict. The response from the settlers was simple; they blackened the character of the native peoples indiscriminately, and painted them as the bad guys in every case.

So when The Topographical Memoir and Report of Captain T. J. Cram, relative to the Territories of Oregon and Washington came out, containing a savage criticism of the settlers' role in the conflicts, Drew responded with this booklet. Its modern reprinter says of it:

This Drew booklet is important source material in that it lists rather completely the early pioneers of the area who were murdered by Indians.

This is an overstatement; the list is neither complete, nor is it correct to say that all those on it were in fact murdered by the Indians, or even murdered at all. On investigation this list turns out to be a hodge-podge of fact, fraud, misrepresentation, and error.

Where did Drew get this list? He points us to an earlier similar list by Nathaniel Todd. Clearly Todd was not his only source, however; he left out some of Todd's and added others of his own. Later on Drew issued a second version of his list; this one made still more changes. In 1873, during the Modoc War, the lists were revived again, with the Portland Bulletin printing a list of alleged Modoc atrocities based on Drew's first list, and the San Francisco Evening Bulletin putting one out that is closely related to Drew's second list. Thus I personally have stumbled on five different versions of this list; there are likely many more.

Now as I turned up various versions of this list I got increasingly curious as to what exactly had happened in these reported incidents. I took the time to investigate some, and for others information just fell into my hands. The stories were interesting. So were the systematic distortions of events. Over time I built up quite a collection of information. I'd always intended to do something with it—put out a book or paper, whatever the material justified—but time has gone by and the loss of so much other work has made me nervous. So what follows here is an installment in what may turn out to be a series. This one features three early episodes found only in Todd's list.

For whatever reason the Todd list starts earlier than the others. As Drew had the Todd list in hand as he wrote he must have omitted them deliberately. Perhaps he felt they were too remote in time to be of any service.

Item 1
Captain Smith
(1828)

As far back as 1834, a party of about thirty persons, under the control of Captain Smith, were massacred near the mouth of the Umpqua river. [T]

Although the date and numbers are wrong, this item obviously refers to an attack by Kalawatsets on the Jedediah S. Smith expedition near the Umpqua river on 14 July 1828. According to James A. Crutchfield (It Happened in Oregon) a party of eighteen men, led by Jedediah Smith, camped on the banks of the Umpqua while engaged in trade with the locals. Smith and two other men (Richard Leland and John Turner) were out scouting when a party of apparently friendly Kalawatsets decided to attack the camp. At least eleven men were killed (the skeletons were later observed by John McLaughlin, the father of Oregon country) and one escaped (Arthur Brown). Jedediah Smith and his companions likewise survived, leaving three men unaccounted for. The four known survivors all eventually made it to Fort Vancouver and at least some of the goods were recovered.

As far as we can tell at this distance the attack may well have been unprovoked and was perhaps motivated by a desire to get goods without paying for them. While I don't have the details (and it's unlikely that they survive) John McLoughlin—who was a fair man, respected by the natives of Oregon country—investigated the affair, and he seems to have concluded that the attacking party of Kalawatsets was in the wrong, and ordered them to make restitution to the survivors. On the other hand we have no Kalawatset account at all, and in other incidents of this sort the matter is not nearly as cut-and-dried as it first appears. Still, other than doubling the number of victims and getting the date completely wrong Todd seems to have done fairly well on this one.

Although the Smith party incident didn't happen in 1834, another interesting event is alleged to have occurred about this time. According to the Oregon Statesman (20 June 1851) "It is said that a Mr. Turner of St. Louis, destroyed a portion of [the Rogue River] tribe sixteen or seventeen years since, by allowing them to rob him of a quantity of poisoned provisions." I wonder why Todd left that off the balance sheets.

Item 2
Daniel Miller et al
(June 1835)

In June, 1835, George Gay, Daniel Miller, Edward Barnes, Dr. Bailey, Mr. Sanders, John Turner, John Woodworth, and an Irishman called Tom, were attacked by Rogue River Indians near where Mr. Birdseye now lives in Rogue River valley, and Mr. Miller, Mr. Barnes, Mr. Sanders, and Tom were killed. The other four were badly wounded, but made their escape. [T]

Now the story behind this seems to run something like this: In 1835 John Turner—who was one of the survivors of the 1828 incident just mentioned—led a party of settlers up to Oregon from California. Among them were Dr. William J. Bailey from either England or Ireland, George Gay from England, John Woodworth about whom nothing seems to be known, along with Daniel Miller, Edward Barnes, —— Sanders or Saunders, and a fellow from Ireland known as Big Tom. Turner's Indian wife also accompanied them. They had with them forty-seven horses and the necessary equipment for trapping. One morning, while they were camped along Foot's creek near the Rogue River, members of the Rogue River tribe started showing up. Turner's wife conversed with them through Chinook jargon, the trade language of the Oregon country, and concluded that they meant no harm. More and more Rogue Rivers showed up, and then, without warning, they attacked the small party. While the men attacked the trappers, the women drove off the horses and gear. Two of the settlers, Barnes and Miller, were killed quickly, but the others fought back, Turner seizing a blazing log from the fire and wielding it as a club against the foes. They successfully fought the Rogue Rivers off, or, more likely, the attackers, having got what they came for, made a successful withdrawal. Either way the six survivors [correction: there were actually seven, as Turner's wife also survived the attack] set off nearly destitute, all of them wounded to a greater or lesser extent. Sanders and Big Tom were unable to continue, and were abandoned to die of their wounds. Dr. Bailey, however, even though his jaw was split and never properly healed, survived to make civilization, as did John Turner, George Gay, and John Woodworth. Dr. Bailey, a surgeon, became a man of some importance in the Willamette Valley; George Gay made and lost a fortune in Oregon country, John Turner lived as a recluse, and John Woodworth vanished into obscurity.

Now again with this incident we are hampered by the lack of any sort of check on this account. The Rogue Rivers had a bad reputation; on the other hand there are accounts—or rather rumors—of trappers taking potshots at them during this same time period. While the Rogue Rivers don't seem (on what little evidence there is) to have had any grievance against Turner's party, they may have had reason to be unfriendly to passing Euro-Americans. We're in speculation country here. As it stands, it seems likely that the locals saw an opportunity to gain forty-seven horses with relatively little effort, and took it. (Sources: Transactions of the Tenth Annual Reunion of the Pioneer Society, 1882; Bancroft's History of Oregon.)

Item 3
Cattle Drive
(September 1837)

In August, 1838, as a party of citizens of Oregon were driving the first cattle from California to this Territory, they were attacked near the same spot where the party were attacked in 1835, by the same Indians, and Mr. Gay, who was of the party of 1835, was again wounded. [T]

Walling's* account differs significantly from Todd's: the date was September 1837 rather than August 1838 and the attackers were almost certainly not the same people. Further, and most egregiously, Todd omits the reason for the attack completely.

Walling named a number of the members of this particular expedition. For our purposes I will note only a few of them. The leader was a man named Ewing Young. P. L. Edwards kept a diary of the trip. George Gay and Dr. William J. Bailey, survivors of the previous incident, were also along. [Addition: From Edwards' diary it looks as though John Turner, who survived both previous incidents, was also along on this one.] And there was a man named Tibbetts or Tibbats. There were about twenty in the party in all.

On 14 September 1837 an Indian came into their camp, on what mission we are not told, but he was alone [correction: actually he had a ten-year-old boy (his son?) with him] and not making any trouble. George Gay and Dr. William Bailey, however, were still pissed off about the events of two years before, and wanted revenge on somebody. Keep in mind that both had been injured and Dr. Bailey had been hideously disfigured for life by the blow that had broken his jaw. As Walling notes they were still some distance from the place of the attack two years before, and it is quite possible that this particular individual had never even heard of it. Still, he was an Indian, and that was enough for Gay and Bailey. They shot the poor fellow, and, as Walling puts it, "The act was deeply resented by the Indians throughout the whole section, and the party met with the greatest difficulty in continuing the course."

[Update: The Diary of Philip Leget Edwards is actually available online thanks to the California Association of Texas Longhorn Breeders. I had relied on the excerpts in Walling for my version of events, but the account of the murder of a local man is even shabbier than Walling indicated:

About two miles before reaching camp, five or six Indians came to us in a friendly manner, and one, accompanied by a boy about 10 years old, followed us to camp. There had been frequent threats on the way that Indians would be killed as soon as we had crossed Shasta river, and I had heard threats of killing this one while he was following us. It had generally passed as idle braggadocio, and I was hoping that present threats were of the same sort. I, nevertheless, intended telling Mr. Young. In the hurry, however, of unpacking I could not do it unobserved. We had just let loose our horses and sat, when a gun was fired just behind me. Gay and the Indian were sitting within ten feet of each other, when the former shot. The Indian sprang up to run when Bailey also shot at him. The Indian ran about 20 paces and fell dead, down the hill. Some of the scoundrels now hallooed, "Shoot the boy! Shoot the boy!" The little fellow, however, turned a point of rocks, plunged in the brush, and, as he was not pursued, he escaped. They afterwards alleged it was only to prevent his spreading the news. At the sound of the gun, Mr. Young asked vehemently, "What's that?" and began censuring the act. I sprang up, calling it a mean, base, dastardly act, and that such men were not to be depended upon in danger! Bailey retorted, "Are you to be depended upon in danger?" I replied, "Yes." "We'll see," said he. I said, "Yes." Carmichael was one of the first to censure the murder, but he now joined others against me. "We are not missionaries," said he, "we will avenge the death of Americans." Mr. Young and myself soon saw that it was of no use to wrangle. Some of the party were silent—most were in favor of the act. Only one that I recollect spoke against it. Turner, Gay and Bailey were three of four survivors of a party of eight men who had been defeated at the next river, and several of the survivors were much mangled. Turner's wife had also escaped. This they allege as their justification. But the murder was committed four days before reaching the place of their defeat, and the Indians may have been of another tribe. Nor could any consideration of private revenge, allowing its legality in itself, authorize endangering the property of others. We must now prepare ourselves for fighting our way through the hostile Indians. This fool act, as Mr. Young said, "cost us half our animals." One act of barbarity is not to be omitted. Camp and Pat stripped the Indian of his skin clothing, and left him lying naked.

The entire diary is well worth reading; check out the link.]

On 17 September they camped at Foot's creek, where the previous incident had occurred. The next day—well, let's allow P. L. Edwards to tell the story from his diary:

SEPTEMBER 18.—Moved about sunrise. Indians were soon observed running along the mountain on our right. There could be no doubt but that they were intending to attack us at some difficult pass. Our braves occasionally fired on them when there was a mere possibility of doing any execution. About twelve o'clock, while we were in a stony and brushy pass between the river [Rogue river] on our right, and a mountain covered with wood on our left, firing and yelling in front announced an attack. Mr. Young, apprehensive of an attack at this pass, had gone in advance to examine the brush and ravine, and returned without seeing Indians. In making further search he found them posted on each side of the road. After firing of four guns, the forward cattle having halted, and myself having arrived with the rear, I started forward but orders met me from Mr. Young that no one should leave the cattle, he feeling able, with the two or three men already with him, to rout the Indians. In the struggle Gay was wounded in the back by an arrow. Two arrows were shot into the riding horse of Mr. Young, while he was snapping his gun at an Indian not more than ten yards off. To save his horse, he had dismounted and beat him on the head, but he refused to go off, and received two arrows, probably shot at his master. Having another brushy place to pass, four or five of us went in advance, but were not molested. Camped at the spot where Turner and party were attacked two years ago. Soon after the men on day guard said they had seen three Indians in a small grove about three hundred yards from camp. About half of the party went, surrounded the grove, some of them fired into it, others passed through it, but could find no Indians. At night all the horses nearly famished as they were tied up. Night set in dark, cloudy and threatening rain, so that the guard could herdly [sic] have seen an Indian ten paces off, until the moon rose, about ten o’clock. I was on watch the first half of the night.

To sum up, passing through Rogue River country a party of cattle drivers shot a peaceful Indian. His friends retaliated by attacking the party, injuring one of the men who had done the shooting. Nothing of this could have been gathered from the Todd list alone. It's a reminder on the earlier episodes how much we don't know about the events. Gay and Bailey had good reason to be pissed off; they had no reason to attack that particular individual. Conceivably the attackers in the earlier incidents likewise nursed grievances they chose to take out on unoffending third parties. Or, it is quite possible that extant accounts leave out significant incidents (like the shooting of a passing tribesman) that would cast a different light on affairs. But greed and cruelty are also motivating factors in human affairs, and it may well be that the events happened as narrated.

However exaggeration also plays a considerable part in the narrative of events. I mentioned earlier a guy named Tibbetts who was along on this expedition. A few years later he was again in this region, and here's how one of his fellows narrated the story he told them:

The man Tibbats was one of a party of fifteen, which was defeated here by the Indians, some three years before. One of their number was killed, and two died of their wounds on the Umpqua, whither they were obliged to retreat, although they had forced the Indians back with great loss.

Contrast this with the contemporary account given by Edwards and you can see how tall the tales grew in this region. And, to give credit where credit is due, we note that as inaccurate as Todd's version has proved to be here, it could have been worse.

#
A Note or Two
#

The Todd List [T] is found in House Miscellaneous Document No. 47, 35th Congress, second session (running title: Oregon and Washington Volunteers). My photocopy is among my missing files, and unlike many government documents it doesn't seem to be available online. The quotations in this entry are taken from my notes on these incidents, and were transcribed from my lost photocopy. I plan to replace it, time permitting, and (I hope) will post the complete list online at some point.

*One of the books that I will probably be citing often is a little difficult to describe easily. In the 1880s Portland publisher Albert G. Walling put out a series of county histories for the state of Oregon, a different volume for each county. Chapters 1 to 34, covering the exploration of the state and the Indian wars, are identical in all volumes, however. Only the chapters from 35 on differ for each county or region. The useful material in this book, for current purposes, comes in this common section. So while I'm actually quoting from Walling's History of Southern Oregon, the links to the online Illustrated History of Lane County will work just as well. At this point the two are really the same book. Oh, yeah, one more complication—the volume is anonymous. I will refer to it as Walling, after its publisher.

Update: Part two deals mainly with alleged events along the Southern Emigrant Road.

Those Were the Days

Those were the days, my friend,
We thought they'd never end,
We'd sing and dance forever and a day.
We'd live the life we choose,
We'd fight and never lose,
For we were young and sure to have our way.

Believe it or not, my brothers and I used to play in an old stagecoach. Sometimes in our imaginations it was a stagecoach in the Old West; sometimes it was a spaceship on its way to the outer reaches of the galaxy. When it rained, which it often does in the Pacific Northwest, the roof leaked. It was parked in the parking lot behind Vancouver (Washington) radio station KHFS where my father was a DJ. KHFS was a country-western station at that time, and I suppose the stagecoach was suitable decor. It disappeared around 1959 to reappear at the Oregon Centennial Exposition, while KHFS replaced it with a buckboard.

My father's on-air name was Hoot Howard (according to my best memory and some promotional literature I used to have); my brother remembers him as Lonesome (or maybe Mournful) something-or-other. My impression is that listeners sent in names and then voted on them, or maybe they drew the name out of a hat. A ten-gallon hat, presumably. One piece of promotional literature actually showed my father in western attire, complete with cowboy hat. I don't think I ever saw a less convincing cowboy, but who am I to judge?

The other Vancouver radio station, KVAN, was also country-western. (I'm pretty sure of that; this is all coming through a half-century of fog and mist—I know what I remember, but are my memories accurate?) My father's radio-school buddy Bill Howlett was a newscaster there. Their top DJ was a fellow billed as Wee Willie Nelson. I believe Wee Willie's show was quite successful; my father used to say that other DJs looked up to him.

On occasion they, along with a few other people in the Portland area radio scene, would get together at our house to play cards and do whatever adults did in the fifties (smoke cigarettes, or in my father's case cigars, and drink beer at any rate). The gatherings happened late, after my brothers and I had been sent to bed, but when we got up in the morning we could tell there had been a party. My mother always kept the house in perfect order, but on these occasions there would be overflowing ashtrays, glasses left out (sometimes with small amounts of beer still in them), drawings, bits of paper with arcane calculations. At least once there was an amazing clay alien left on the card table, and I remember one drawing with a spaceship landing on a small planet made of polyhedrons.

Newscaster Bill Howlett was responsible for the clay alien and at least some of the drawings; he had ambitions as a writer and actually wrote a novel (never sold) retelling the Arthurian legend in the modern advertising world. DJ Wee Willie wrote songs and sang in clubs; he even recorded a song that he hawked on his radio program. My father wrote a play, or at least parts of a play (I had it until recently) that showed clearly the influence of George Kaufman and more faintly (I believe) Ring Lardner. These guys had ambitions; they were clearly going places.

Or maybe not. Bill Howlett remained a newscaster, even when KVAN became KISN and turned to rock 'n' roll (a form he detested; he was a Dixieland man from way back). Wee Willie shook the dust from his shoes, split the scene, and never looked back. My father stuck with KHFS as it too went top forty and was reborn as KKEY, but after a couple of years accepted a job as chief engineer at KXL (in Portland) and with considerable relief gave up the DJ business altogether.

Bill Howlett stayed with KISN till the bitter end, when the station died a horrible death. Once one of the Portland area's best-known radio newscasters, he was reduced in the end to taking odd jobs at various area stations. He never sold his novel, but was still working doggedly at it until the day he died unexpectedly of a heart condition he didn't know he had. (At the time he died he was actually living in the room directly above me as I write this, the room that's now my niece's.)

My father's literary ambitions died when I was still a child, and I remember vividly the moment when I showed him a piece of my own work, and he handed me his play and said he was abdicating his position as playwright-in-residence in the family. He moved from radio to television, but stuck with engineering till a bout with giant cell arteritis and a bad reaction to prednisone sent him to his grave.

And Wee Willie—well, now there's the interesting thing. I think it was some time in the 1980s when my father showed me a newspaper item about country singer and songwriter Willie Nelson. "You know," he said, "I'd always wondered about that. It never seemed very likely to me, but—" According to the article American icon Willie Nelson and Vancouver DJ Wee Willie Nelson were one and the same. When I next saw my mother (she and my father had divorced long before this and she was living in Colorado at the time) I asked her about Wee Willie Nelson. She had no trouble remembering him and observed that he used to drop by on occasion. It had never once crossed her mind that he was in any way connected with the country music legend.

Now in all fairness I don't actually know that the Wee Willie Nelson my parents spoke of and the songwriter Willie Nelson had any connection. Wikipedia adds some support:

In 1956, Nelson moved to Vancouver, Washington, to begin a musical career, recording "Lumberjack," which was written by Leon Payne. The single sold fairly well, but did not establish a career. Nelson continued to work as a radio announcer in Vancouver and sing in clubs.

Right time, right place—but it would have been nice if the name of the station he worked for had been given. And the country legend is a bit younger than I pictured the DJ from my father's account—a good seven or eight years younger than my father, rather than being about the same age, as I'd thought. But there really weren't a lot of Vancouver radio stations in the fifties (and still aren't, actually), and it would be a pretty tall coincidence for there to be two Willie Nelsons in the Vancouver radio scene in the late fifties.

There's no point to this story, no moral to be drawn. If country legend Willie Nelson really blazed like a comet through our little backwater we were entirely unaware of it. He was just one of the guys, another young man with ambition and drive and talent—but ambition, drive, and talent are a dime a dozen. My father said he thought Wee Willie Nelson had a great future ahead of him—in radio. The idea of him making it big in country music apparently never crossed his mind. He seemed pleased enough at the idea of Wee Willie's success, that somebody had emerged from the Vancouver radio cocoon to fly to the stars, but that was about it.

Now my function in all this is as a retailer of slightly used memories. If I ever met Wee Willie Nelson it made no impression on me. Mind you, meeting the flesh people behind the disembodied voices of the airwaves was nothing unusual in our world—wasn't everybody's father on the radio? Still, I remember the overflowing ashtrays, the odd mementos of legendary evenings, the sense of wonder of what it must be like to be an adult and to take part in events like these. But by far my strongest memory of the Vancouver radio scene is sitting inside that stagecoach with the leaky roof, our own futures yet unwritten, as imaginary horses took us on our own private journey to the stars.

Who, Exactly, is Anti-Life?

Some days it doesn't pay to put your fingers on the keyboard and start typing. I've started and trashed at least a dozen openings for this current entry, and I still don't know what the topic is supposed to be. Am I gibbering about obscure Portland-area DJ Wee Willie Nelson? or about slogan-stealing? or what? My resources are inadequate to doing justice to the topics that cross my mind at the moment. I had files of documents relating to the history of Portland radio, and copies of books like Summerhill and Catch-22, that might have been helpful in one or the other, but I don't have them any longer, and it feels like part of my brain is missing. I used to know where to go for stuff; one of my most valuable assets in writing was my file of notes taken over the decades on a variety of topics that interested me at one point or another. And just as my memory is increasingly failing me I lose a big chunk of my external memory storage, so to speak. It is goddamn frustrating.

One thing I had notes on was the use of the term "pro-life". I can't find a goddamn thing on the innertubes about it. I know the term was kicking around before the anti-abortion crowd got their hands on it, but I can't find dates or specifics anywhere. As I remember those of us who were interested in the environmental movement before there was an environmental movement used the term "pro-life" to identify our position as protecting and defending all life everywhere, as being opposed to extinction for any species. (I remember concerns whether the "pro-life" movement should support extinction for organisms that cause smallpox or polio—would this not be anti- rather than pro-life?) And earlier than that I seem to recall some D. H. Lawrence types using the expression to mean a healthy open attitude toward sexuality, or something like that.

As I remember it there was a kind of split between those who preferred the save-the-planet sort of rhetoric (probably borrowed from the anti-nuclear folk) on the one hand, and those who focused on the species-in-danger approach on the other. The one direction leads directly to Earth Day, the latter perhaps to the Endangered Species Act. Speaking only for myself, I never cared for the Earth Day type of language; the planet Earth is in no danger—its sister planet Venus gets on just fine without the thin film of life on its surface Earth boasts of. It's living things that are in peril. Hence the designation pro-life.

I do remember being irritated when I first heard the term "pro-life" used to mean "anti-abortion". I regarded it as theft pure and simple, and not even a good theft; pro-life is utterly inadequate as a slogan for their position. It fits them about as well as a Frederick's of Hollywood evening gown fits the average linebacker. "Pro-life?" Don't make me laugh. And don't for God's sake give me that incredibly lame line about being pro-innocent life—the slogan you anti-abortionists stole says nothing whatsoever about innocence, only about life. If you didn't mean it, why steal it? Yeah, I know, you liked the sound of it—never mind that it made no bloody sense at all.

Now somewhere in the vast wilderness of the interwebs I saw some anti-abortion type claiming that pro-life was an accurate description of the movement because it focused attention on the important thing—that the foetus, no matter how undeveloped, is already a separate human individual entitled to all the rights and privileges that come with that status. Now personally I don't get that meaning from pro-life; something more like pro-foetal-personhood would seem to fit the bill. But really, what was wrong with anti-abortion? It's succinct, and it's accurate. Oh, I suppose from the "pro-life" viewpoint it only covers the conclusion, without giving the grounds for it. It's quite conceivable for someone to oppose abortion without believing that the foetus is a separate human individual entitled to life at all costs. Such a person would be anti-abortion but not pro-foetal-personhood—or something like that. I'm not a believer, and I don't play one on the internet either. I'll leave it to them to explain.

The people opposed to the ban on abortion, on the other hand, had a real problem with the movement label. Pro-abortion is only accurate in the sense that supporters were against its prohibition, not in the sense that they were in favor of abortion itself, or even what opponents like to call "abortion on demand." Many felt there should be strict restrictions on the practice, favoring it only in cases of rape, incest, or if the woman's life was in danger. The uneasy compromise in this case was the weasel term pro-choice, which focused on the issue as they saw it, which is that the choice should exist, but leaves wide open the basic question of who should do the choosing, and under what circumstances. Also, like the term pro-life, pro-choice is way over-broad in its implications. Pro-choice in regard to what? Just one narrow issue—whether a woman chooses to bring her foetus to term. And pro-life in regard to what? Again just one narrow issue—whether a woman should be allowed to terminate her pregnancy.

If you didn't already know what these labels applied to you'd have a hell of a time figuring it out. Pro-choice? Choice in regard to what? What profession to go into, what recreational drugs (if any) to enjoy, what church (if any) to attend? And pro-life? What does life mean here? We could be talking anti-war (as I believe Joseph Heller used the term), anti-pesticide, anti-death penalty, or anti-vivisection. Fuzziness seeps in when sloganeering replaces thought.

I suppose they're no more inane than the labels given to groups in the past. Free-soilers, abolitionists, know-nothings, nullifiers, roundheads, levelers, and other extinct forms of life once walked the world stage, and the people then knew what was being abolished, or leveled, or nullified. It's just some of us can't keep from poking the phrases with pointed sticks.

Technical Difficulties

We had a small fire here at the house that has left us all a bit on edge, I think. Nobody was hurt; people, dog, cats, and tortoises are all okay. There was no structural damage; merely a lot of smoke and some adrenaline filling up the place.

So I'm behind on everything right now, which is irritating when I've only just relaunched the blog. Still, these things happen, I guess.

Quotation of the Day

...[I]t's too much to ask our pundit class to understand statistics. Actually, it's a miracle they can even dress themselves.

Mike the Mad Biologist

Lemmings Lament

Are you put upon by powers?
Are you restless for release?
Death just might be that final rush you crave.
We all believe in flowers
And we all believe in peace;
There’s endless peace and flowers in the grave.

Freud, Marx, Engles, and Jung

Somewhere during my high school years, the late sixties maybe, I had a vision of a sort of parody pop album, an anthology that would do for the excesses of the day’s music what Rejected Addresses had done for Wordsworth and Walter Scott. I called it something like Plastic Sole in my mind, and I wrote a Bob Dylan parody, a Simon and Garfunkel parody, a Doors parody, and a Rod McKuen parody for it. I think maybe I had a Bobbie Gentry-style ballad planned for it too. The Dylan was particularly mean-spirited, as I recall; I had him attacking a Mr. Jones-like character who (it becomes obvious) the singer is sponging on, the singer finally ordering him to get the hell out—but only after he’s forked over all his spare change.

Of course I never did anything with it; it was just something to occupy my mind when I should have been coloring maps for Contemporary World Problems. I would have loved it if somebody else had done something like that, however, especially if it was done well. But as far as I knew, nobody else even seemed to be thinking in that direction.

Had I but known a group of jokers at the Harvard Lampoon were thinking along the same lines, maybe a bit diagonally from my take. In June of 1969 an album appeared entitled The Surprising Sheep and Other Mind Excursions and it was an album at least superficially matching the general description of my own mind excursion, Plastic Sole. I wonder what I would have thought of it if I’d stumbled on it at the time.

I think I would have liked the Bob Dylan parody, “Seventeen Miles from Waukegan My Cantaloupe Died.” The takeoff focuses on the surreal aspects of Bob Dylan’s imagery; my main objection now would be that while it is surreal enough, it just isn’t that Dylanesque. “In the Palm of My Hand” is a very broad parody of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb,” though taking the imagery in quite another direction. “Little Miss Muffet” reworks the nursery rhyme as a Wilson Pickett track, with a touch of Otis Redding thrown in. (I doubt that this one would have meant anything to me at the time, to be honest—though years later when I first heard it on the National Lampoon Radio Hour box CD set I instantly got it.) “Recipe for Love” targets Dionne Warwick, and I see by it that that same instrumental riff that irritated me also irritated its composer. I might have got a kick out of it.

But the one piece I feel fairly confident I would have liked is something called “Welcome to the Club,” a Lovin’ Spoonful parody written by Christopher Cerf. This one took that ghastly scene that unfolded in 1968 Chicago and turned it into a light-hearted “Daydream” spoof, with pun-filled lyrics:

If your life is a bore
And you’d like to get more
Of a boot out of people you meet,
Well forget your self-pity
And come down to a city
Where the folks will positively knock you off of your feet

With the police riots in Daley’s Chicago fresh in our minds, the clubbings and stompings and gassings and all that, this piece would have had a special poignancy then, or so I imagine now.

On behalf of each judicial
And executive official
We promise you a smashing good time.

On the whole I think I would have been disappointed, though. Too many performers crying out for parody were missing, and the execution was distinctly on the sloppy side. And Bob Dylan—the guy is ripe for parody, and yet till this day the best efforts fall short. Maybe Paul Simon’s “Simple Desultory Philippic,” or John Lennon’s untitled takeoff come the closest, but, well, I’m sure it’s possible to do better. Well, the moment has passed, I suppose.

But Bob Dylan (played by Christopher Guest) was featured on the next major excursion in that direction, a record entitled simply Lemmings, featuring a show put on by the National Lampoon. The first act was a series of sketches somewhat in the style of the future Saturday Night Live, and none of that appeared on the album. But the second act was a stunning parody of Woodstock, complete with takeoffs on Wavy Gravy and Max Yasgur. This is what appeared on the album, slightly abridged. (A Joan Baez parody that had already appeared on the album Radio Dinner was omitted, for example. And later incarnations of the show featured parodies of Donovan and Joni Mitchell that had yet to be created at the time of this recording. Anyway.)

The opening track, “Lemmings Lament,” sets the stage by parodying Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” as performed by CSN&Y. It sets out the theme later made explicit by Farmer Yassir—“This here mass suicide of all you young people may just be the best goddamn thing ever happen to this country.” Next up Bob Dylan casually repudiates the protest movement he helped to launch:

You say I was your leader,
You say I turned you on,
You’re starting to suspect now
That it was all a con.

Then, after an excursion into early 1960s death rock that seems a bit out of place here, there’s the stunning John Denver takeoff, “Colorado.” Chevy Chase did Denver about as well as he did Ford, but the song is funny enough to survive even that, with lines that came back to haunt me when I did spend a winter or two in Colorado:

Oh, Colorado’s calling me
From her hillsides, to her canyons, and her rivers and her trees;
When blizzards snap the power lines, and all the toilets freeze
In December in the Colorado Rockies.

The song has moments of lyric intensity, usually followed by a thumping anticlimax:

The wind sang us a lullaby;
The snow was thick as cream,
And icicles were chandeliers
Like crystals in a dream,
And the streams were strips of diamonds,
And the hills were white as snow
And a bear ate all our soybeans in the night.

The James Taylor parody, “Highway Toes,” had previously appeared, at least as far as the lyrics went, as part of Sean Kelly’s “Swan Song of the Open Road,” which featured takeoffs on Walt Whitman, Richard Brautigan, and Pete Seeger (not “Well-Intentioned Blues”) as well. The music, by Christopher Guest, however, sounds more like Gordon Lightfoot than James Taylor. But the Joe Cocker (John Belushi) parody is dead on, if a little overlong.

The basic idea of linking musical parodies by framing them with a Woodstock satire was absolutely brilliant, and even if the “Festival of Death” thing is a bit over-obvious, the execution is solid. To quote Farmer Yassir again, “Long hair, short hair—what’s the difference once the head’s blowed off.”

If I still had my files and notes I probably would have pulled out my old high-school outline for Plastic Sole (or whatever I really called it) and looked it over one more time. There wasn’t anything in it worth saving, probably, but I did enjoy planning it so many years ago, and I probably would have enjoyed the recollection. The Rod McKuen parody, for example—I remember working on it gleefully (I detested Rod McKuen for whatever reason)—but I don’t remember anything else whatsoever about it. I imagine it was embarrassingly bad—but I don’t know, and now I’ll never know. It’s not important, but it’s irritating.

Bear with me folks; I’m having a difficult time adjusting. But I should be off this black nostalgia kick in a day or so. I hope so, anyway.

Too Depressed to Commit Suicide

But then suicide's a crime
Don't want to waste the police's time
Just quietly do myself in
Like the guy in that book by Solzhenitzyn

The Pee Cees

It's late here, late for me anyway, and it feels like one of those horrible Sundays long ago when KPFM abandoned me at ten and there was nothing to anesthetize me against the hard reality of the new school week beginning inexorably Monday morning. I don't know why Sunday night was so much more bleak than Monday morning—maybe Monday was busier, less time to concentrate on the horror that awaited.

Maybe it was the dread silence from the radio. I had an FM radio in the days when nobody knew what FM was and the entire dial was a wasteland of small-audience stations—religious broadcasts, niche music, public radio, a few simulcasts, and classical music station KPFM. Twenty-four hour broadcasts of music I actually liked, at least till ten on Sunday night. That's when the silence fell. Sometimes I listened to religious shows, just to keep the silence at bay. I'm sure I listened to other things as well, but the pickings were thin, especially as Sunday night turned into Monday morning.

Insomnia was my constant companion in those days. On a good day—or night, rather—I'd drift off early to the sound of Verdi or somebody like that and sleep through the night till the alarm clock went off next morning. More typically I would lie in bed for hours staring at the ceiling, possibly picking up intermittently whatever book I was reading at the time, or writing a few lines of something or other while I waited for sleep to come. Or maybe not. The sleepless nights were probably not as common as I remember them; more likely they just stand out. Even so I remember vividly the cold feeling of looking over at the clock to see that it had turned three, and knowing there was no way I was going to get enough sleep to keep me going the next day. Those hours felt the worst, I think, since my mind was clear and functioning in a way I knew it wouldn't be the next day. It was after a night like that I fell asleep during science class, much to the amusement of my friends and the concern of my science teacher, who asked me several times if I shouldn't maybe see the school nurse.

During summer vacation I would normally stay up till dawn and then sleep till early afternoon. My mind seemed to function best during the hours of darkness. I was told many times that this was all nonsense—that if I simply maintained a regular schedule I would have no difficulty getting to sleep at night. And I could actually make that work sometimes, with a great deal of effort and determination, and frankly, a lot of lying for hours in bed doing nothing but waiting for sleep to come. The only time I really ever managed that schedule thing was for one year at college when I took two morning classes and was determined not to screw things up, but by then I was adult and had learned such tricks as catching sleep during odd hours of the day in case it eluded me at night.

Silence and darkness were the enemies. Silence, with nothing but the inexorable ticking of that damn alarm clock, and darkness, with nothing to see but the shadows, kept sleep away. Hence the damn radio, and that night light my father installed by my bed. The more I think about it, maybe that is why it seemed so goddamn bleak on Sunday night, when the radio station signed off, and I had to face another silent night. No crutch to help me limp into sleep country. Just the ticking of that damn clock, and the luminous dial glowing fitfully in the shadows.

Ah, memories. But here in the real world it's late and I feel half past depressed and lost in the suburbs of suicide city. I know this mood will pass, and maybe by tomorrow, but as my personal eight ball might say, Outlook grim. Give up.

Corrupting the Kids

Although I didn't set out to pick on children it happens that in the course of running down some fake quotations attributed to various founding fathers of the United States I used as my starting-point two pieces allegedly written by schoolkids. One of them was a prize-winning essay written by a junior in high school; the other a prize-winning speech composed by a home-schooled ten-year-old.

The essay, entitled "Time for Change" and written by Lauren Harr, was a response to the question "What do you think needs changing in the world and what can you do to make that change happen?" The speech, which supposedly won first place honors for 6th grade at the 13th Annual Christian Heritage Speech competition, was given by Edward A. Allen and entitled "How the First Great Awakening Influenced Our Founding Fathers" (this was the assigned topic). Harr used quotations from Washington and Patrick Henry to support her point that church-state separation was not envisioned in the Constitution. Allen used quotations from the same two plus Jefferson and Franklin as his main illustrations for ways the First Great Awakening influenced the founding fathers. He also threw in a Madison quotation to show that this influence extended to the Constitution itself.

The trouble with these quotations, which are central to the theses of both pieces, is that all of them are fake. And by fake I don't mean, please note, that they had a word off here and there, or that they were a popular misquoting of something Washington or Franklin actually said or wrote—I mean that they were out-and-out fakes, words put into their mouths by somebody else with an axe to grind. (And even worse—a number of them were actually misquotations of the original fake quotation.) Here are the seven, in all their glory:

It cannot be emphasized too strongly or too often that this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians, not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ! (falsely attributed to Patrick Henry)

It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here. (falsely attributed to Patrick Henry)

He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world. (falsely attributed to Benjamin Franklin)

The reason that Christianity is the best friend of government is because Christianity is the only religion that changes the heart. (falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson)

The future and success of America is not in this Constitution but in the laws of God upon which this Constitution is founded. (falsely attributed to James Madison)

It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible. (falsely attributed to George Washington)

It is impossible to rightly govern a country without God and the Bible. (falsely attributed to George Washington)

The Pseudo-Franklin quotation is the oldest of the bunch, going back to 1793, and was actually written (in French) by Jacques Mallet du Pan as part of a summary of views he attributed to Franklin. The Pseudo-Washington quotation goes back to 1835, and is part of an argument attempting to show the existence of a supreme being which was attributed to Washington on the authority of an anonymous gentleman. (Both kids get this one completely wrong, by the way; the original quotation reads "It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being.") Pseudo-Henry's quotation comes from a 1956 periodical, and was only relatively recently mis-attributed to Patrick Henry. The Pseudo-Jefferson is a very recent concoction, first appearing in print in 2001, and the Pseudo-Madison is merely a clumsy paraphrase of the earlier Pseudo-Madison fake "ten commandments" quotation, to which it is almost always attached. (This one is odd in that Allen's speech was delivered in 2003 while Google books records no earlier appearance in print than 2004.) The fake "ten commandments" quotation can be traced back no further than 1958 and was no doubt concocted at that time.

The thing I'm struck by here is not so much the ignorance of the two kids involved—who expects kids of say 10 and 16 to know anything? No, the thing I'm struck by is the seeming mendacity (or extraordinary ignorance) of their teachers, their parents, and the contest judges, who all rewarded them for behavior that would never fly in a college paper, let alone in the real world. Dress it up as you like, the use of fake quotations is nothing but lying. Had it been merely a matter of illustrating an essay or speech with a lively quotation it wouldn't matter that much, though it's still very bad form. But when the quotation is essential to the thesis being argued, as it is in both cases here, it matters very much indeed. Without the four fake quotations he used to support his point, Allen is left with absolutely nothing to show how the Great Awakening influenced the founding fathers. And this is the central point of his speech. Somebody should have caught this early and sent him back to the drawing board to fix it. And without the two fake quotations used to bolster her untenable claim that church-state separation is not inherent in the first amendment, a key paragraph of Harr's essay is left in ruins, a fact that should have precluded the essay winning any kind of prize at all, unless all the other contestants contributed really crappy stuff. (At least neither of the two honorable mentions used fake quotations to bolster their theses.)

Again, I don't blame the kids half as much as I blame the adults who let them get away with it. Presumably Allen and Harr got these fraudulent quotations from sources they trusted—and apparently nobody around them could be bothered to tell them that a little more research might be in order. How are they going to feel, I wonder, when they realize that these trusted authorities were lying to them?

Quotation of the Day

While flu is unpredictable, the consequences of destroying the public health infrastructure are not. The flu virus doesn't know which of its victims voted to cut taxes and which didn't, but it owes a special debt of gratitude to the former, even as it goes on to infect everyone.

revere

Changing the Face of the World with Dr. Ben Franklin

Today, I took it into my head, for whatever reason, to run down the source (if possible) of a fake Benjamin Franklin quotation: "He who shall introduce into the public affairs the principles of a primitive Christianity, will change the face of the world." At least that was the first version of it that I found. A more usual form is "He who shall introduce into public affairs the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world, or "He who shall carry into politics the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world." In any case the Franklin doppelganger proposes to use the principles of primitive Christianity to change the face of the world somehow.

Now I started off with what proved to be a completely false hypothesis. While the words didn't sound much like Benjamin Franklin, it crossed my mind that they might have come from Dr. Benjamin Rush. Perhaps the less familiar Benjamin had somehow become confused with his more famous contemporary.

Now I don't usually write about the dead ends and wild goose chases I end up following in pursuit of one of these things. This time it seemed like it might be interesting. At least it gives a picture of the irritating things that can send you off on a wrong direction in the search for information.

I quickly found the same quotation actually attributed to Dr. Benjamin Rush in a 1907 book by Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts, Ph.D., called Practical Christian Sociology. Well, that was promising—but the hypothesis failed quite quickly on the delivery front. If Rush had said it, I couldn't find it.

My next approach was more fruitful. I went back to the Franklin hypothesis and tried to strike out on a new trail. One of the place I've seen the alleged quotation before is in the first volume of the Ante-Nicene Christian Fathers, page 552, towards the end of Irenaeus Against Heresies. The editor there gives his source as "Bancroft, Hist. U.S., vol. ix, p. 492." And sure enough, there it is, in the 1866 edition of George Bancroft's History on the United States, exactly as promised.

All right, that gets us a bit further back, but not nearly far enough. What next? In real life I took a break somewhere in here to see whether I could find somebody in the vastness of the world wide web who had already run this quotation down to its lair. I had no more luck this time then on previous attempts, unless you define luck as the absence of success.

I next chanced upon a variation of the quotation in a footnote in an 1866 edition of Martin's History of France, as translated by Mary Louise Booth, volume ii, page 442. Here's what Henri Martin had to say:

The presence of Franklin at Paris, personifying the republic under a form so worthy of respect, exercised a great moral influence. Our philosophers, in discussing with him at Paris the American Constitution, prepared themselves to discuss the future laws of the French Revolution. A royalist publicist, Mallet-Dupan, has preserved for us a great saying, which Franklin, he says, repeated more than once to his pupils at Paris: "He who shall carry into politics the principles of primitive Christianity will change the face of the world."

Now I have to say that the name "Mallet-Dupan" meant nothing to me—less than nothing, actually. But good old Google came to my rescue here; a search on Mallet Dupan immediately brought up several items about Jacques Mallet du Pan, French royalist, journalist, and pamphleteer. A visit to the online Britannica Eleventh edition filled me in a bit on my quarry and I was off again.

The next step: a quick search of any available works by Jacques Mallet Du Pan. Even back when I still had my library I am quite positive that it didn't include anything by this royalist propagandist, but fortunately several of his books have been posted online, either in the original French or in English translation. And in one of the latter, Considerations on the Nature of the French Revolution, I found the following passage:

Franklin often told his disciples in Paris, that whoever would introduce the principles of primitive Christianity, into the political state, would change the whole order of society. An absolute equality of condition; a community of goods; a Republic of the poor and of brethren; associations without a Government; enthusiasm for dogmas, and submission to chiefs to be elected from their equals,—this is the state to which the Presbyterian of Philadelphia reduced the Christian Religion.

Now this is from a 1793 English translation of a French original, and the French original doesn't seem to be posted anywhere online. (But the Web is huge, and my French is small, and I may have managed to miss it all.) There are several things worth noting here—

• This passage is not a quotation; it is somebody's summary or paraphrase of something Franklin is alleged to have said.
• The saying is at least third-hand. As Mallet du Pan was not one of Franklin's "disciples in Paris" it follows that he either has to have received the alleged statement from a disciple, or from somebody even further down the transmission chain.
• The material in question cannot be separated from the rest of the mishmash attributed to Franklin—the ranting about "absolute equality of condition; a community of goods" and so on. This stuff doesn't sound like Franklin, and does sound like a hostile caricature of the movement he represented. Similar sorts of stuff turned up in the Anti-Jacobin.
• The passage is a translation.

In other words, this is not even as good as one of those quotations attributed to a man long dead by an anonymous gentleman in a letter written many decades after the alleged event. This is a translation of a paraphrase of something Franklin is supposed to have told somebody else as alleged by an opponent of his views.

Historical scholarship has adopted rules to keep the process honest. One of these is that you don't put words into somebody else's mouth. If you quote somebody as having said something, you need to be able to show exactly where and when he said it. (And by the way, this is not some new standard, as I saw David Barton claim in a video. It could be considered a "new" standard only if you think the bicycle and electricity are new-fangled inventions.) Sometimes it is appropriate to use material that comes from further afield. When a popular story about a historical figure is especially striking, and the views that figure allegedly expressed in it are congruent with his known speeches or writing, it may be appropriate to use it for color, with an appropriate caveat. If a particular author has left us nothing in her own words on a topic of interest in her day, what her family or friends or colleagues say she said about it may be our best source of information—though again, such data must be used with caution. But something like this, so far removed from Franklin himself, is really only suitable as evidence for what his opponents said about him. It can tell us nothing, by itself, about the man, or his beliefs.

So to sum up:

1. This passage was written by Jacques Mallet du Pan, not by Benjamin Franklin.
2. It is a hostile paraphrase of something other people allege that Franklin said.
3. It first appeared after Franklin had died and so was no longer in a position to dispute it.
4. This passage should not be cited as a Franklin quotation (which it is not) ever, and probably should not be used as a representation of his views—certainly not without additional support.
   

Addendum: I wrote most of this entry yesterday, but another blow-up here at the house kept me from finishing it until today. So the "today" at the beginning of the entry is now actually yesterday. 10 June 2009

Flogging a Dead Horse Department

I notice that somebody signing himself "mandible claw" commenting at the aptly named Moonbattery website managed to get things doubly wrong in a single post. Not only does he quote the often-debunked fake Patrick Henry "religionists" claim (as part of the familiar Christian Nationite notion), but he attributes it to "Patrick Henry, Ratifier of the U.S. Constitution", as though Patrick Henry had supported rather than opposed ratification. "I am sure Barack Obama could set Patrick Henry straight as to the real nature of America, though," mandible claw adds as a parting shot.

Well, here's what Patrick Henry thought of the Constitution:

This Constitution is said to have beautiful features, but when I come to examine these features, sir, they appear to me horribly frightful; among other deformities, it has an awful squinting—it squints towards monarchy; and does not this raise indignation in the breast of every true American?

Undone Homework: A New Sighting of Old Fake Quotations

While randomly lurking about the intertubes—I've been looking for online resources for Benjamin Rush, actually—I stumbled upon a prize-winning essay by Lauren Harr, a junior at Sullivan Central High School in Blountville, Tennessee. While the article covering this is, rather irritatingly, undated, the essay was for the 2008-2009 High School Writing Contest described as occurring "[e]arlier this spring," so I will assume, provisionally, that this is current.

The main point of her essay seems to be that "Students would better benefit if God was recognized in public schools." "If we recognized God in schools," Lauren Harr argues, "students would improve morally and academically because they would learn to follow God’s plan for success." She suggests that more people would believe in "creation" (whatever she means by that) if it were taught in science classes as though it were, well, science—and seems to suggest that this dumbing down of the curriculum would somehow be a good thing. She argues that students should be allowed to pray openly in school—an odd thing to say, since of course under American law governed by the Constitution students are allowed to pray openly in public school right now, so long as they don't disrupt class. After a David Bartonesque passage about separation of church and state not being part of the Constitution, she concludes by claiming that ending global warming, working for world peace, or fighting hunger are not nearly as important as praying, reading the Bible, and campaigning to use the power of the government to enforce Christianity. (At least I assume that's what she has in mind, since she's already free to worship in whatever manner she likes as things stand, without the need for any political action.) "By inviting Him [God, apparently, though she doesn't say which god she has in mind] back into our families, our schools and our world, I believe we can solve any crisis big or small."

That's more of a summary than this essay really deserves—not that it's actually a bad essay, as high school essays go. The organization is sloppy, it's short on facts and long on opinion, but hey—that's a consequence of being sixteen or so. Still, there is such a thing as research, and a little research—very little, actually, in this age of Google—would have saved her from making a humiliating error—or, rather, two humiliating errors, actually.

In her Christian Nationite passage she cites two American founding fathers—George Washington and Patrick Henry—in support of her position, attributing to both words they never said or wrote. Both are familiar misquotations I've dealt with before on this site.

First, she puts the words "It is impossible to rightly govern a country without God and the Bible" in George Washington's mouth. This is a misquotation of a misquotation—a more common version (though equally bogus) is "It is impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible." This in turn is a misquotation of words attributed to George Washington in an 1867 tract: "It is impossible to govern the world without God." (For the benefit of today's historically challenged high school students, let me observe that George Washington died in 1799, nearly seventy years before this tract appeared.) This may well be a distorted reflection of something attributed to George Washington (without authority) by James Kirke Paulding in his 1835 book A Life of Washington. "He was not accustomed to argue points of faith," Paulding wrote, "but on one occasion, in reply to a gentleman who expressed doubts on the subject, thus gave his sentiments:—'It is impossible to account for the creation of the universe without the agency of a Supreme Being. It is impossible to govern the universe without the aid of a Supreme Being. It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being.'" And so on and so forth. It should be noted that Paulding's source—the unsupported recollection of an unnamed gentleman, apparently—is no source at all. And nothing resembling this, or any of its permutations, has ever turned up among Washington's papers. So what we have here is a misquotation of a misquotation of a misquotation of a recollection by an anonymous gentleman more than three decades after Washington died. Real convincing stuff.

The other quotation—the words she puts into the mouth of Patrick Henry—has been debunked many times (Snopes, Ed Brayton, Rational Rant). It runs:

It cannot be emphasized too clearly and too often that this nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religion, but on the gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here.

Okay, once again I'm going to amuse myself, if nobody else, by comparing this with the genuine quote, which was not by Patrick Henry, but by an anonymous writer for The Virginian in 1956 (omitted material in bold; added material struck out):

It cannot be emphasized too clearly and strongly or too often that this great nation was founded not by 'religionists' but by Christians—not on religion but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity and freedom of worship here. In the spoken and written words of our noble founders and forefathers, we find symbolic expressions of their Christian faith. The above quotation from the will of Patrick Henry is a notable example.

In other words the very next sentence—the one Lauren Harr conveniently leaves out—makes it clear that this quotation cannot be by Patrick Henry, who is hardly likely to have referred to himself in the third person as a "forefather" of the nation. Of course as I said the source of this 1956 quotation is known. If it makes Lauren Harr feel any better, she can take comfort in the "above quotation" from Henry's will, which does say something nice about Christianity:

This is all the inheritance I can give to my dear family. The religion of Christ can give them one which will make them rich indeed.

This is the version in William Wirt Henry's Patrick Henry: Life, Correspondence, and Speeches volume 2, p. 631. The author of the "religionists" quotation prefers a more florid version that does go back at least to 1820:

I have now disposed of all my property to my family. There is one thing more which I wish I could give them, and that is, the Christian Religion. If they have that, and I had not given them one shilling they would be rich; and if they had not that, and I had given them all this world, they would be poor.

The amazing thing about this essay is that, according to the article about the contest, five judges looked this over and apparently were so historically ignorant that they failed to notice either of these fake quotations. So low has this nation sunk, apparently. Too many seem no longer to have any sense of history, of what a particular historical figure is likely to have said in his or her particular time and place. This can't be entirely attributed to wingnut history memes—at least, I don't think so. It seems to me to be something more than that—some fundamental failure to transmit either the facts or the methods of history to the next generation—whether the adults of today, or the kids they're influencing. And the victims of this failure are the Lauren Harrs of this world, who end up shortchanged on all fronts.

A Terrorist Strikes in Wichita

Dr. George Tiller, a man described by an associate as "a quiet, persistent, capable visionary," was shot while attending church today in Wichita, Kansas. He was 67.

According to witnesses the killer, a white male, left the scene in a 1993 blue Ford Taurus (Kansas license plate 225 BAB). A suspect, Scott Roeder, 51, has been detained by the police.

The motive for the killing is thought to be political. Dr. George Tiller has been repeatedly threatened by terrorists in the past for performing medical procedures involving pregnancy termination many politicians have sought to ban. Recently the state of Kansas brought charges against him for allegedly violating the law in regard to getting second opinions; this apparently politically-motivated attack failed when the jury took less than an hour to acquit him on all charges. More recently terrorists attacked his clinic, causing thousands of dollars worth of damage.

Self-described "pro-life" groups, many of whom have savagely denigrated the doctor in print in the past, were quick to distance themselves from the murder. The state executive director for Kansans For Life said, "Kansans for Life deplores the murder of Dr. George Tiller ... We value life, completely deplore violence, and are shocked and very upset by what happened in Wichita today." Troy Newman of Operation Rescue observed, "We are shocked at this morning's disturbing news that Mr. Tiller was gunned down. ... We denounce vigilantism and the cowardly act that took place this morning." (Apparently Troy Newman couldn't resist getting a plug in for his cult, as he added inappropriately, "We pray for [Dr.] Tiller's family that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.") Phill Kline, the former Kansas Attorney-General responsible for the baseless charges brought against the doctor said, "I am stunned by this lawless and violent act which must be condemned and should be met with the full force of law. We join in lifting prayer that God's grace and presence rest with Dr. Tiller's family and friends." (Another inappropriate bit of product-placement for religion, by the by.)

I personally would like to believe that this is the true face of the so-called "pro-life" movement. However, comments like the following give one pause:

here is a man who made his living off of murdering innocent children. he made his living off of undermining the value of life. with that being said, it seems like they sure are making a big deal about this kansas man dying. sorta seems more like equality to me than anything. at least dr. killer, i mean dr. tiller, had a chance to live life. unlike all of the innocent children that he robbed that from. obviously not a very convicted Bible believing man. i doubt he was involved in his church for any other reason than being able to pull a "good guy" political card.

And then there's

This guy wasn't pro-life. He was pro-choose to kill. Than again Mr. Tiller knew he was being stalked by someone, I read that on a few articles. Tragic it had to end before he repented for killing the sons and daughters of others. My heart grieves, another lost without knowing Christ, because someone thought they had the right to take it.

And

Tiller the Killer will not kill one more baby.

Ah, yes, naked hatred directed against anybody who would actually dare help people in need—that's the face of the "pro-life" movement I've seen and come to know and detest.

But I prefer to remember a man who "dedicated his life to providing women with high-quality health care despite frequent threats and violence," as a statement from his family put it. In the face of not just threats, but actual physical attacks (a "pro-life" terrorist shot him in an earlier attack, and his clinic was bombed) most people would have given up and gone into a safer line of work. Dr. Tiller stayed the course, fought the good fight, and ultimately paid for doing what is right with his life. He will be missed—which is a lot more than I can say for his detractors.

Sources for this piece include The Los Angeles Times, MSNBC, KSHB-TV, and The Questionable Authority.

Update: Mike Dunsford at The Questionable Authority has "A few more measured thoughts on Dr. Tiller's life, career, and death" up. He says what I was attempting to say, but he says it better. Damn, I hate it when people do that.

Update: See also entries on the subject from Evolving Thoughts (great title), Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge ("pre-born children"? Does that make Newman a pre-dead corpse?), Adventures in Ethics and Science (raw thoughts indeed), and Greg Laden's Blog (Eleanor Smeal writes about the doctor).

Brian Switek's Series on the History of Science

Brian Switek at Laelaps has done some outstanding pieces on incidents in the history of science. For my own amusement, and I hope yours as well, I'm noting some of them here.

To start with, Brian Switek offers an argument for understanding the history of science in "Who Needs History? [I do]".

I first read about the barnacle goose in a piece by Willy Ley when I was a teenager. (The piece probably appeared in his For Your Information series in Galaxy, but as I've permanently lost my collection, as well as the index I made when I was much younger, I have to rely on my aging memory alone, and I'm just not sure.) This goose was once believed to develop from barnacles, a fact that might have exempted it from the no-meat-on-Friday church prohibition, or something like that. Brian Switek writes an interesting piece ("Geese from Barnacles") on the subject, about a certain John Hill to took objection to the claim. Comments by Lars Dietz enliven the account.

Perhaps of especial interest to me, given my enthusiasm for Thomas Jefferson, is this piece on Jefferson and the mastodon. (May we hope for a companion piece some time on Jefferson and the giant ground sloth?) Jefferson of course was a man of many interests—political theory, theology, linguistics—and here we see him in his guise as a scientist.

I mentioned Nebraska Man in an earlier entry. This obscure event in the history of science involved the mis-identification of a pig tooth as a tooth of an unknown North American primate. The backstory is fascinating, and Brian Switek covers it nicely in two separate entries: "The Truth about 'Nebraska Man'," and "The 'Million Dollar Pig's-Tooth Mystery'" This is science writing at its best.

A fellow named Albert Koch may have made an extremely interesting discovery about 1839—the remains of a giant ground sloth associated with human artifacts. Of course we'll never know, thanks to Koch's Barnum-like proclivities. Read about it in "Koch's 'Mammoth' and Human Antiquity".

When did the last mammoth die? You might be surprised by this tale of "Killing the Last Mammoth".

Attempts to reconcile science with the histories narrated in the Bible have been many and varied, and I've waded through a number of them myself over the years. (I'm not sure why they fascinate me; they just do.) While not up there with Gosse's Omphalos, Isabella Duncan's 1860 Pre-Adamite Man is an interesting attempt to find a compromise that doesn't involve throwing out scripture along with the bathwater of tradition. Brian Switek reviews it here.

"Sideshow Bob Was Here" covers some 19th century human footprints carved into ancient rocks—a kind of fraud that continues till this day, alas.

One of the blog entries I lost with the death of my laptop almost a year ago was one about the fake letters attributed to Ignatius of Antioch. One of the heroes in separating the true letters from the false was the archbishop James Ussher, best remembered today for his calculation that the universe was created in 4004 BCE. This brilliant scholar deserves better, and Brian Switek gives him some acknowledgment in "Return to the Work of Ussher".

Possibly the outstanding entry in the series is "The Tragedy of Saartje Baartman", an account of a woman known as the "Hottentot Venus" who was exhibited as a sort of sideshow curiosity in early nineteenth century Europe. This is a story I knew nothing about until I read Brian Switek's piece on her. "The Sad Tale of Julia Pastrana" might be profitably read alongside this one.

I'm sure I've left out a number of great entries in this series, but let me conclude anyway with a few more miscellaneous links:

Weirdly cool: "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Goat"; "A Bad Bit of Stone"; "Devilution"; "The Problem with Shermer's Endorsement"; "The Sputnik Fable"

And here's a neat list of 19th century science books available at Google Books, including Chambers and Lyell.

Seriously, if you haven't already seen them, check these out.

Looking Around, Cautiously

Hibernation ends, and I poke my head up above ground to see if things have changed since I bedded down for the winter. Not really, I guess—George W. Bush is still president, the Republicans are still running roughshod over traditional American values, and the world continues to deteriorate. Give up.

I still don't have a reliable connection with the internet, by the way, but I guess I'm going to try to resurrect this blog, despite horrendous setbacks. Readers may remember my griping about my notes and library being in storage. I'd like to report that I've successfully recovered them and am ready to get down to some serious work—but alas, that's not true, and the news is bad. Very bad.

All my decades of work on various projects—the Dubious Documents book for one—are irretrievably lost. The same goes for the bulk of my library—my encyclopedias, reference works, and small specialized collections on subjects that interested me. My shelf of writings by the American founding fathers. All gone. I'm still frankly in a state of shock over it. Some of the older and rarer items, ironically, are relatively easily replaced, thanks to being able to download PDFs from Google Books and Archive.org. Some items I'd only recently acquired and was looking forward to enjoying when I could retrieve them are particularly galling—my 1950 edition of Max Beerbohm's A Christmas Garland, for example. And I was really looking forward to spending time with some of my old sf favorites—I had a complete collection of Galaxy and ASFs going back to 1941.

Sorry to bore you all with my problems. I'm trying to count my blessings. I still have my family, and my dog, and the remnants of my library (my Western Americana collection and my ancient religions stuff are still mainly intact, for example). But I'm having a hard time of it, and I'm not sure how I'm going to start over.

A Fake Khrushchev Quotation Resurfaces

I see that somebody or other has resurrected on old fake quotation attributed to Nikita Khrushchev, former premier of the Soviet Union:

We cannot expect the Americans to jump from capitalism to Communism, but we can assist their elected leaders in giving Americans small doses of socialism until they suddenly awake to find they have Communism.

This one is being dragged out by the usual scumbuckets as an anti-Obama line. I found it in a comment thread here, for example.

It is, of course, completely bogus. It is one of many "quotations" manufactured by the far right during the Cold War and first turned up in John Birch society circles in 1960. See They Never Said It, p. 59 (page image here).

Please Stand By...

I have been knocked offline in much the same way that a radio station gets struck down by a bolt of lightning hitting its tower; in this case I've lost my computer, and with it all contact with the internet. My various projected posts are also lost at the moment, unless some computer guru figures out a way of conjuring up the data from a defective hard drive.

After much trauma and many difficulties I've finally acquired a "new" desktop computer; this one runs on Ubuntu rather than Windows and I'm still getting the hang of it.

I hope to be back up soon.

General Craziness

Apparently I am a Working Class Warrior; not bad for a registered Republican.

My Liberal Identity:

You are a Working Class Warrior, also known as a blue-collar Democrat. You believe that the little guy is getting screwed by conservative greed-mongers and corporate criminals, and you’re not going to take it anymore.

Take the quiz at www.FightConservatives.com

More Christian Nationitis

Some poor fellow, apparently suffering in the throes of Christian Nationitis, recently added his two cents to an old blog entry (Fighting History Hoaxes) at Millard Fillmore's Bathtub recommending Chris Rodda's work. He was ably answered by Ed Darrell, who began: "If you’re gonna swallow cyanide-tainted Kool-Aid, swallow it all and swallow it fast, no?" But one quotation Ed Darrell seems to have missed:

Had the people, during the Revolution, had a suspicion to attempt any war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in it cradle. At the time of the adoption of the constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged — not any one sect [of Christianity]. Any attempt to level and discard all religion, would have been viewed with universal indignation.

The Christian Nation guy claimed this came from “Report of the Committees of the House of Representatives …” (1854), page 6. Ed Darrell suspects that this quotation is a hoax. In fact the quotation is almost genuine, being taken from HR 124, 33d Cong. 1st Sess., p. 6. It is part of a report from James Meacham, from the Committee on the Judiciary, on the subject of chaplains in Congress and in the army and navy. With some adjacent context it read (omitted material in bold, added material struck out):

The sentiment of the whole body of American Christians is against a union with the State. A great change has been wrought in this respect. At the adoption of the constitution, we believe every State—certainly ten of the thirteen—provided as regularly for the support of the church, as for the support of the government: one, Virginia, had the system of tithes. Down to the Revolution, every colony did sustain religion in some form. It was deemed peculiarly proper that the religion of liberty should be upheld by a free people. Had the people, during the Revolution, had a suspicion to of any attempt any to war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in its cradle. At the time of the adoption of the constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged—not any one sect. Any attempt to level and discard all religion, would have been viewed with universal indignation. The object was not to substitute Judaism, or Mahomedanism, or infidelity, but to prevent rivalry among sects to the exclusion of others. The result of the change above named is, that now there is not a single State that, as a State, supports the gospel.

This is a point urged in favor of continuing the practice of having chaplains in Congress and the armed forces regardless of "the danger of a union of church and State. If the danger were real," Meacham wrote, "we should be disposed to take the most prompt and decided measures to forestall the evil, because one of the worst for the religious and political interests of this nation that could possibly overtake us. But we deem this apprehension entirely imaginary; and we think any one of the petitioners must be convinced of this on examination of the facts." Meacham pointed out that there was no single religion that commanded the majority, so that two or three would have to get together to form a national church. This wasn't likely to happen, as they had tenets that conflicted with one another, and the situation was even more extreme for smaller religious bodies. As a result, "there can be no union of church and State. Your committee know of no denomination of Christians who wish for such union. They have had their existence in the voluntary system, and wish it to continue. The sentiment of the whole body of American Christians is against a union with the State." This is where the quotation as I gave it above began. Meacham went on "From this it will be seen that the tendency of the times is not to a union of church and State, but is decidedly and strongly bearing in an opposite direction. Every tie is sundered; and there is no wish on either side to have the bond renewed. It seems to us that the men who would raise the cry of danger in this state of things, would cry fire on the thirty-ninth day of a general deluge."

The argument continues by noting that the financial burden on the taxpayer is minute, that chaplains are as necessary to the health of the soul as physicians to the health of the body, and so on. I've posted the relevant paragraph here. Meacham's overall point is that the appointment of chaplains is harmless, as there is no danger any longer that religion and government would not remain separate. There is nothing in the piece to support the peculiar doctrines of Christian Nationism. Meacham thinks (wrongly) that society is dependent on supernatural sanctions, and that Christianity provides such sanctions for the American republic, but he is quite firm on the wall of separation between civil and ecclesiastical authorities (something modern-day Christian Nationites abhor). I'll leave him to speak for himself with his final paragraph:

While your committee believe that neither Congress nor the army or navy should be deprived of the service of chaplains, they freely concede; that the ecclesiastical and civil powers have been, and should continue to be, entirely divorced from each other. But we beg leave to rescue ourselves from the imputation of asserting that religion is not needed to the safety of civil society. It must be considered as the foundation on which the whole structure rests. Laws will not have permanence or power without the sanction of religious sentiment—without a firm belief that there is a Power above us that will reward our virtues and punish our vices. In this age there can be no substitute for Christianity; that, in its general principles, is the great conservative element on which we must rely for the purity and permanence of free institutions. That was the religion of the founders of the republic, and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants. There is a great and very prevalent error on this subject in the opinion that those who organized this government did not legislate on religion. They did legislate on it by making it free to all, "to the Jew and the Greek, to the learned and unlearned." The error has risen from the belief that there is no legislation unless in permissive or restricting enactments. But making a thing free is as truly a part of legislation as confining it by limitations; and what the government has made free, it is bound to keep free.

Another Book Meme

This one I picked up Jessica Palmer's Bioephemera. These are a hundred books (the definition of "book" seems rather loose here) that somebody or other has selected using unknown criteria. Books read are in bold; books started in italics.

1 *Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 *The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 *To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 *The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 *Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 *Complete Works of Shakespeare -
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 †Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald~
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 *Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 *Emma - Jane Austen~
35 *Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 †Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 *Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 *Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 *Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I placed a star in front of the books I particularly enjoyed, or at least have reread frequently; I placed a dagger by two that particularly annoyed me. Jessica Palmer placed a tilde (~) by those read for a class; in my case only one of these works (Lord of the Flies) was something I read for a class; I may have read others for some class or another (in fact I know I've read certain plays of Shakespeare and books of the Bible for specific classes), but none of the rest were something I specially read for a class, so I haven't bothered to make that distinction.

Colossal Gall Department

You've got to admire the sheer chutzpah of it. Chris Mill, the attorney for two of the Camrose cat killers—those were the little psychopaths who tortured a cat to death in a microwave oven and left messages boasting about it for the owners to return to—actually asked for the court to expedite his clients' sentencing so they could achieve "closure" before returning to school this fall. Words absolutely fail me. This guy is complaining, on behalf of his clients, about the need for them to undergo a psychiatric examination—because they want to get this whole thing over with.

I'm sure they do. Most of us, when caught in a crime, just want the prosecution to go the fuck away. There's nothing new or amazing about that. Why that should be grounds a judge could act upon is totally beyond me. What the judge ought to be primarily concerned about is the issue of protecting the community from these creeps. The last thing on her mind should be whether the kids get to start school this year with a "clean slate".

At least Chris Mill's job is being the spokesmen for this pair of psychopaths. I don't know what Camrose resident Linda Hugo's excuse is. "It’s a terrible thing that they did," she admits, claiming "but it’s now water under the bridge." Nice of her to be so forgiving of a "terrible" crime committed against somebody else. She weeps for the poor persecuted torturers. "...the mental torment that they’ve gone through is enough" she feels. Wise up, lady. The next time these young Torquemadas decide to go on the prowl, you may well be their victim. When you embrace a scorpion, expect to get stung.

Campaign Panel Art

Then:

(George Wallace, Alabama Governor's campaign, 1960)

and now:

(Brent Rinehart, Oklahoma County District 2 County Commissioner's campaign, 2008)

Sources: George Wallace page from Comics with Problems; Brent Rinehart page from Tulsa World (PDF).