Jim Loewen
Mr. Loewen is a sociologist and historian. He is the author of Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism, and Teaching What Really Happened: How To Avoid the Tyranny of Textbooks and Get Students Excited About Doing History, among other books.
I began writing this piece aboard Amtrak's Acela, the fastest train in North America. It travels from Washington to Boston in 6 hours and 32 minutes. Eventually, we read, despite Republicans, we may have truly high-speed rail, linking those cities and also perhaps speeding through corridors in California, Florida, and the Midwest.
Pardon me, but haven't we been around this track before?
I remember reading the same story back in 1965. Then they called it the Metroliner. It would speed between Boston and Washington at an amazing 115 mph. I remember that story because I remember where I was when I read it. I was on a train. Indeed, I was riding the famous City of New Orleans between Jackson, Mississippi, and Mattoon, Illinois. I got to the Metroliner article as we were passing through the flat corn fields of central Illinois.
The City of New Orleans was then the second fastest train in America, after the Santa Fe Super Chief. It streaked along the Illinois prairie at 81 mpg, including stops. Owing to holiday traffic, we were running late, so between Carbondale and Mattoon the train made up fifteen minutes. A little long division revealed that this accomplishment required that we be traveling at about 115 mph between stops.
So already in 1965 I had a feeling of deja vu, reading about the marvelous new Metroliner. The Metroliner went into service in 1969, the last accomplishment of private passenger rail service in the United States before Amtrak took over in 1971. Owing to design problems with the self-propelled cars, the Metroliner never ventured north of New York City and rarely exceeded 90 mph. It averaged just 75 mph.
Amtrak Metroliner train, 1974
In 2000, Amtrak put its Acela in service between Boston and Washington. The new train was supposed to travel at speeds up to 150 mph and does reach that speed for two short distances. Despite those bursts, on its journey from Boston to D.C.—456 miles—it averages just under 70 mph (78 mph for the old Metroliner part of the run, from New York City to D.C.). If Acela merely went as fast as the Illinois Central's City of New Orleans did in Illinois half a century ago—81 mph with stops — it would reach Washington 5 hours and 40 minutes after leaving Boston, shaving almost an hour off its current schedule. If it went as fast as the City of New Orleans did when I took it, making up time, it would arrive in Washington in just 5 hours.
Nevertheless, Acela is an accomplishment of sorts, because it is so much faster than today's regular passenger service. Amtrak schedules its City of New Orleans at just 64 mph between Carbondale and Mattoon owing to freight traffic and track deterioration on the Illinois Central. From New Orleans to Chicago the fabled train averages less than 48 mph. It went faster in the age of steam, even though it had to stop about every 50 miles for water. The successor to the Super Chief now takes 41.25 hours to trundle from Chicago to Los Angeles, averaging 54 mph. In 1956 it required just 37.5 hours, about 60 mph.
Other trains are even worse. The Vermonter averages just 44 mph and actually runs backward from Palmer, Massachusetts, to its terminus in St. Albans, Vermont, to avoid a bad patch of track. The famed Lake Shore Limited—successor to Cary Grant and Eva Saint Marie’s favorite train, the 20th Century Limited—is limited, all right: Passengers now climb aboard in New York City at 3:45 pm instead of 5:00 pm, and reach Chicago at 9:45 the next morning instead of 7:45. To a business traveler, those differences are huge.
The Lake Shore Limited entering Croton-on-Hudson, NY, 2008
The first point of this commentary, then, is not to argue for high-speed rail (that would be a different article), but simply for a return to the speeds that America's regular passenger railroads achieved at the close of the age of steam. Then we might strive further to ramp up to the speeds of the diesel heyday. I remain suspicious that high speed rail—trains capable of traveling at, say, 200 mph in Japan—...
The Penn State scandal brought forth a thoughtful commentary by Daniel Mendelsohn, Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of Humanities at Bard College. Mendelsohn begins his recent New York Times op-ed, “What if it had been a 10-year-old girl in the Penn State locker room that Friday night in 2002?”
He concludes that then Mike McQueary, the graduate assistant to the football team, would surely have intervened or at least called the police. "But the victim in this case was a boy," Mendelsohn notes. He goes on to speculate that the university, too, would have taken the crime more seriously, had the victim been female.
Even though we cannot know for sure without at least interviewing McQueary and Joe Paterno, Graham Spanier, and other Penn State officials, surely Mendelsohn is right. As he puts it,
Does anyone believe that if a burly graduate student had walked in on a 58-year-old man raping a naked little girl in the shower, he would have left without calling the police and without trying to rescue the girl?
However, Mendelsohn mistakes the source of this inequity. He locates it in the shame associated with homosexuality. Since the rape was male on male, he opines, the victims were “somehow untouchable, so fully tainted they couldn't, or shouldn't, be rescued.” He notes that athletics is “the last redoubt of unapologetic anti-gay sentiment.” Of course, he has overlooked many other redoubts, such as religious organizations from Muslims and Orthodox Jews through Mormons and Southern Baptists. But this is a quibble: male athletics is an anti-gay redoubt, if hardly the last one. Mendelsohn goes on to speculate that somehow this anti-gay sentiment prompted denial, converting anal penetration into mere "horsing around," in the now-notorious words of Penn State's athletic director.
Such reasoning falls short. Of course, loyalty to a coach, to a friend, can prompt police avoidance, regardless of the sex of the victim. However, to claim that prejudice against homosexuality promotes winking at homosexual behavior is not logical.
Besides, there's a simpler explanation. Our society does not take violence against males as seriously as violence against females.
Look at what happens in domestic abuse cases. Research shows that, although women are more likely to be killed, men are the victims of domestic violence about half the time. (See, inter alia, Straus and Gelles, The National Family Violence Survey, Philip W. Cook's Abused Men, and copious studies by David Finklehor.) Yet most cities provide many shelters for abused women and none for abused men. The federal government passed a “Violence Against Women Act” but no “Violence Against Men Act.” Imagine a federal law designed to protect white victims of criminal acts while ignoring black victims!
Outside the family, the pattern continues: in the workplace, men are more than a dozen times more likely than women to be killed. To be sure, men also commit more than their share of workplace murders, but 90 percent of deaths on the job are accidental, not purposeful, and women's jobs are statistically much safer than men's. Even God seems to have it in for men: lightning strikes males seven times as often as females.
Lightning, of course, is random, but men are much more likely to be working outside in inclement weather. They are “supposed to”—terms like “telephone lineman” convey this expectation. Men are also more likely to be playing outside in bad weather. It's “not manly” to give up football or even golf just ‘cause of a little thunderstorm. It’s also not manly to seek shelter from domestic violence.
For that matter, it's not manly to see a doctor for “just a little ache or pain.” So it happens that women make 70 percent of all visits to doctors while men die five years earlier than women. This difference is slightly greater than the difference race makes. Like the racial difference, the male/female difference in lifespan largely derives from our culture, not our genes. It has changed over time; a century ago, men lived longer than women. Yet the discipline of sociology, which has taught us that most gender differences stem more from social causes than biological, has mainly ignored perhaps the most basic gender difference of all: in length of life itself.
Mendelsohn's piece about Penn State, reinterpreted, prompts us to notice what we otherwise take for granted:...
Claiming the status of victim has become an effective way to solicit attention on behalf of justice and social change in the United States. Women claim to be victimized by male violence. African Americans claim to be victimized by racism. Gays play the Matthew Shepard card to gain sympathy and a hearing. On October 13, 2011, residents of Martinsville, Indiana, put a new twist on the victim role, claiming to have been "Victimized by Folklore."
The occasion was the 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Folklore Society, hosted by Indiana University in Bloomington. Joanne Stuttgen, long-time resident and president of the local historic preservation society, moderated a session with the above title. Other Martinsville residents spoke as well. Their point was: Martinsville has not been a racist community; that charge amounts to nothing but folklore, by which they meant falsehood.
Martinsville lies twenty miles north of Bloomington, about halfway to Indianapolis. It used to straddle the four-lane highway that connects the university to the largest single source of its students. It is a city of 12,000. In 1890 the town had 53 African Americans; by 1930 it had four. In the fall of 1943, apple farmers in the county faced a dilemma: hire migrant workers or lose their crops. When a few apple pickers from Jamaica arrived in Martinsville, "local citizens gathered in the town square to protest, only to be dispersed by the news that the state police were on the way," according to anthropologist Kellie Hogue. By 1970 the black population was down to just one. The 1990 census showed none, but in fact one African American woman did live in Martinsville. According to Stephen Stuebner at the Southern Poverty Law Center, "She was so terrified of harm from racists who might try to track her down that she marked 'other.'" The 2010 census lists 24 African Americans but does not yet tell how many live in households.
In becoming all-white during the nadir of race relations—that terrible period between 1890 and 1940 when the U.S. went more racist in its ideology than at any other point in our past—Martinsville did nothing unusual. In Sundown Towns, I show that about 70 percent of all towns in neighboring Illinois went sundown by 1940, including the Martinsville in neighboring Illinois. A similar ratio probably obtained in Indiana. By the 1950s, the state had so many sundown towns that folklore in the black community held that whites had developed a secret code: any town or county with a color in its name kept out African Americans. The notion of a code was nonsense, of course, but the evidence seemed to point that way: all these "color-coded" communities in Indiana probably kept out African Americans:
Auburn
Brown County
Brownsburg
Brownstown
Greendale
Greene County
Greenfield
Greensburg
Greentown
Greenwood
Lake County
Silver Lake
Vermillion County
White County
Whiteland
Whitestown
Whiting
However, so did at least 250 other counties and towns in Indiana. Sundown towns were simply so common that all towns with color in their names happened to be all-white on purpose. Martinsville was a Ku Klux Klan hotbed in the 1920s, but again, so was most of Indiana.
In the late 1950s, Martinsville High School played basketball against Crispus Attucks, Indianapolis's de jure segregated black high school, without incident. By 1967, however, when Martinsville played Rushville in football and Rushville's star running back was African American Larry Davis, Martinsville fans were yelling "Get that nigger!" Then, on September 16, 1968, something happened in Martinsville to separate it from the hundreds of other sundown towns in Indiana. On a late summer evening, Carol Jenkins, a 21-year-old African American from Rushville, walked along Morgan Street. She was selling encyclopedias door to door. (1) Unfortunately, the sun was going down. A white supremacist chose to enforce Martinsville's sundown rule by stabbing her to death with a screwdriver. It was her first evening in the city, so she knew no one; thus no one had any conceivable personal motive for killing her. At about 7:30 pm, she had gone to a house briefly, seeking refuge from a car with two white men in it who had been shouting racial slurs at her. So most people (correctly) assumed the motive to be rage at Jenkins as a black person for being in the city after dark, according to reporter Mark Singer....
Just now, your local post office—easier to find than it will be next year, when the Postal Service plans to close as many as 3,600—features a stamp of Owney, a dog. He appeared in the Albany, NY, post office in 1888, where "clerks took a liking to him," according to the history that the USPS supplies on the back of each sheet of Owney stamps.
Owney followed mailbags onto trains, where Railway Mail Service employees considered him their good-luck charm. As Owney traveled the country, clerks affixed medals and tags to his collar to document his travels.
The Postal Service goes on to tell how the Postmaster General John Wanamaker gave Owney "a special dog-sized jacket to help him display them all." He wound up with between 400 and 1,000 tags, far more than could fit on the jacket. Later, Owney "toured the world by steamer and became an icon of American postal lore." The account on the stamps ends with this happy conclusion: "Today he enjoys a place of honor at the Smithsonian Institution's National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C."
Such a cheerful story. In those years (and for decades thereafter), clerks rode the rails, sorting the mail in special cars while the train was moving. Trains picked up more mail without even stopping from trackside poles. The system was very efficient. And the story gets even happier: in an era when train wrecks were all too common, no train Owney rode was ever in a wreck. Postal workers came to see him as a good luck charm. During his tour around the world in 1895, he met the emperor of Japan among other notables. Briefly, he was the most famous dog in the world and lent his charisma to dog shows by making guest appearances.
But that's not the full story.
In April 1897, the Superintendent of the Chicago mail district forbade Owney from riding the rails any more. His edict was unkind:
If the dog were in any wise remarkable for his intelligence, there might be some reason for paying attention to him. He is only a mongrel cur, which has been petted until the thing has become disgusting. His riding around on the postal cars distracts the attention of the clerks, takes up the time of employees at stations in showing him around, and it is about time he is kicked out.
Nevertheless, Owney took one final ride. On June 11, 1897, now perhaps seveenteen years old, Owney took the rails to Toledo. While he was there, a postal clerk tried to chain him for a photo opportunity, and Owney bit him. The postmaster had a local gendarme shoot him, still chained.
The postal service knows the full story, of course. So does the Smithsonian, which now displays Owney at its Postal Museum. But apparently the stamp-buying public does not need to know. Neither does the museum-going public. The museum displays Owney in a prime location, near the entrance, where no visitor can easily miss him. It used a $10,300 grant and additional donations to pay for his makeover, just in time for the new stamp. He got a new hand-sculpted snout, new eyes and claws, and pieces of coyote pelt to patch up some bald spots. He gets a case all his own, next to a railway mail car, and a total of three different labels—but none tell anything bad. Nor does "Owney the Railway Mail Service Mascot"—Owney's main page at the Postal Museum website — say a thing about his unfortunate demise (http://postalmuseum.si.edu/owney/index.html). In an obscure corner of its website (http://postalmuseum.si.edu/owney/Postmasters_Advocate_Owney_article-2011-04.pdf, 9/2011), Nancy A. Pope, Postal Museum historian, tells all, although her account of Owney's demise differs from mine in a few details. But there is no way to get from Owney’s page to Pope's article.
"Relax, Loewen," some folks may say. "You’re going postal. It's just a dog, for heaven’s sake!" Indeed, Owney was "just a dog"—and now just a stuffed dog. But where do we draw the line? Do we tell the unpleasant truths about, say, Woodrow Wilson? He's long been a favorite of historians: when Arthur M. Schlesinger asked 75 leading historians to rank the presidents in 1962, they listed Wilson fourth, ahead of Jefferson. So let's write postal history about...
On Sunday, October 2, a front page story in the Washington Post told of Gov. Rick Perry's hunting camp, a place known as "Niggerhead." For many years a large flat rock stood upright at its gates, announcing the name in painted letters. That rock is still at the entrance, now lying on its back, parts of the name still visible, painted over ineffectually.
The camp has been important to Perry's political career. Perry often hosted friends and supporters and fellow legislators there for turkey shoots and other outings. Now Perry implies that he first saw the rock with its offensive name only in 1983 and immediately got his parents to paint over the letters. As Post reporter Stephanie McCrummen delicately phrases it, Perry's version
differs in many respects from the recollections of seven people ... who spoke in detail of ... seeing the rock with the name at various points during the years that Perry was associated with the property.
The seven saw the sign in place and unpainted much later, even as late as 2008.
The name predates the Perrys' ownership. Apparently it refers to the larger pasture area. The sign at his hunting camp isn't the only racist sign in Throckmorton County, where the camp is located, however. Throckmorton, the county seat, reportedly posted a sign at least as late as the 1950s that said, "Nigger, don't let the sun set on you in this town," according to a person who went to high school in Throckmorton at that time. In 2006, another Throckmorton native emailed me, "It was common knowledge throughout that part of Texas that African Americans were not welcome in Throckmorton County." In 1953, a nearby white high school football team played Throckmorton High School, but because it employed a black trainer, the team and its trainer had to have a police escort to and from the stadium. The county did not have a single black household in it from 1930 into the new millennium.
In short, Throckmorton County was a "sundown county." The term is common in Texas and the Midwest and some other parts of the country. Except in Texas, the Ozarks, Appalachia, and along the "outside" of Florida, sundown towns are rare in the South. Sundown towns and counties are much more common in the Midwest, Oregon, and other parts of the North. In some parts of the country, such as Oregon and Pennsylvania, towns that were all-white on purpose were many but the term "sundown town" was not used.
The key questions to put to Governor Rick Perry are two: When did you learn that your camp was in a sundown county? What did you do about it?
Every sundown town or county needs to take a three-step program to get over it:
— Admit it. We did this. We kept out African Americans (and/or Jews, Chinese Americans, Native Americans, etc.).
— Apologize. We did it, and it was wrong, and we're sorry.
— And state: "but we don't do it any more." That last step needs to have teeth: We now have a racial ombudsperson, or a civil rights commission. We are hiring affirmatively for our K-12 teaching staff, our police force, our trash collectors.
Absent these steps, African Americans have no reason to believe they can prudently move to Throckmorton County. In the distant past, perhaps in the late 1920s, whites are said to have lynched an African American who had allegedly killed a white person and were never brought to justice. As recently as 1995, several African Americans came to a funeral, causing a stir among the "keepers of the flame," as a Throckmorton native termed them — without even staying the night. The 2010 census shows eleven African Americans, so the county may have "broken," but household data do not seem readily available yet. Absent the three steps, the small thug minority that exists almost every place in the world can think it their business to make life unpleasant for the few African Americans who may have ventured in.
Did Rick Perry, before or after becoming governor, try to get Throckmorton County to take any of the three steps? As governor, he oversees the distribution of state funds and programs to Throckmorton County. Tax dollars from African Americans as well as non blacks make these programs possible — yet they go to locales that have had a policy of forbidding...
The AASLH (American Association for State and Local History) just concluded its annual meeting, held in Richmond, VA. Signs of "new beginnings" in local history—a phrase used in the conference title, abounded, both at AASLH and in Richmond. Just in time, too!
My book Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong has at least one entry for every state. Virginia received eight, more than any other state, and Richmond supplied four of those. I visited the city several times in the late 1990s and found it overrun by a neo-Confederate interpretation of its past. Since then, new voices have been raised that famously contest Richmond's past. Arthur Ashe got added to Monument Row. A good historical marker went up, telling the story of Elizabeth Van Lew, spy for the Union. An amazing monument telling about Virginia's massive resistance to school desegregation and the courage of black students in bringing the case now stands on the Capitol grounds. A statue of Lincoln and his son Tad, commemorating their bold walk through Richmond shortly after its surrender, drew protests from the Sons of Confederate Veterans but remains on the landscape at Tredegar Ironworks. Tredegar also boasts a new Civil War museum, telling the story from three viewpoints: Confederate, Union, and African American.
AASLH is also changing. I was the AASLH banquet speaker last year in Oklahoma City and found that almost 80 percent of that national audience believed the Southern states had seceded "for states' rights." That kind of traditional thinking seemed missing in Richmond.
AASLH built Richmond's sites into its program. For example, on the first day of the conference, Richmond natives Sylvester Turner and Cricket White led a tour titled "Walking Through History, Honoring Sacred Stories." We began at a landing point on the James River where ships disembarked enslaved Africans. Turner minced no words, reminding us of the literally putrid condition we would have been in as we made our way to the shore. Then we walked perhaps half a mile holding hands, simulating a coffle, stepping slowly to accommodate our slowest member, likely a child. Mosquitoes attacked us, requiring us to cooperate to brush them off or to drop character and hands and swat them; either response helped us feel the discomfort members of the coffle would have experienced.
Hope in the Cities organizes these walking tours at least twice a month, usually for school groups, but also for as many as 150 adults. Individuals can also walk the trail, however, owing to about sixteen historical markers with extensive text and illustrations. Again, these are hard-hitting; one heading, for example, was "Despair." Cricket White's husband Ralph White, who runs the James River Park System, wrote a booklet, "Seeing the Scars of Slavery in the Natural Environment: An Interpretive Guide to the Manchester Slave Trail Along the James River in Richmond," that the Park System put out in 2002.
At a turn-around point, Turner noted that coffles sometimes had to walk from Richmond all the way to Natchez, MS. Our destination, which we reached by bus, was Robert Lumpkin's slave yard and jail near Richmond's Main St. railroad station. Lies Across America told the story of Lumpkin, one of the biggest slave dealers in the U.S., and lamented that nothing on the Richmond landscape memorialized any form of the slave trade. In 2008, Richmond hired archaeologists to explore Lumpkin's property, called by African Americans in 1850 the "Devil's Half Acre." They unearthed many objects, a beautifully paved yard, and foundations of the jail and other buildings. To preserve it, they covered it all back up, but three historical markers tell its story. Nearby is one of the few manifestations anywhere in the world of the triangular trade, from West Africa to the U.S. (and the Caribbean) and the United Kingdom. This is a sculpture, "Reconciliation," unveiled in 2007 before a crowd of 5,000 people. Also spearheaded by Hope in the Cities, similar monuments stand in Benin and Liverpool.
More traditional conference fare was a panel the next day, "Interpreting Divergent Voices and Challenging Narratives." Although traditional in form, it was innovative in content. One speaker told how an upper-class home in Richmond, complete with gold faucets and silk wallpaper, now narrates the story of "the help" — years before the recent bestselling novel. Another told of Colonial Williamsburg's tentative beginnings toward interpreting Native Americans, surely overdue, since Native tribes from as far away as present-day Pennsylvania and Ohio came to the town to treat with the English. The room was full. Other conference panels had titles like "...
Living in Washington, D.C., I attended three civic remembrances on September 11, 2011. The first was held at "Freedom Plaza," a triangular paved space on Pennsylvania Avenue midway between the Capitol and the White House. The premiere D.C. remembrance event, it featured the mayor, D.C.'s non-voting "congresswoman" Eleanor Holmes Norton, and other officials. The second took place in the Kogod Courtyard, the beautiful indoor/outdoor space that connects the National Portrait Gallery and National Museum of American Art. It featured a "Burden Boat," built by Kurt Steger. In the words of the museum's announcement,
The public is invited to place messages into the boat as part of the event. At 4pm the artist will pour water over the messages left in the boat so the burdens receive cleansing, healing and release.
Later that evening, the National Portrait Gallery presented the D.C. premiere of Rebirth, a feature-length documentary following five persons with close ties to the attacks.
Most notable was the lack of public participation. Although booths set up by community organizations hoping to recruit members rimmed Freedom Plaza, the crowd was so slim as not to constitute a crowd at all. Most onlookers were food vendors and people connected with the booths. At the museum, as Steger placed a printout of the names of the dead into the Burden Boat and then poured water on the paper, only forty people looked on, and most were idly curious passers-by. The movie audience filled perhaps a quarter of the theater.
Does this mean we're over it?
In a sense, yes. Lynn Steuerle Schofield, who lost her mother at the Pentagon, noted in the Washington Post this year, "Sometimes I feel I am asked to attend my mother's funeral again and again, year after year." The five people chronicled in Rebirth have similarly moved on, in a way. The beautiful young woman whose fiancée died has married, for example, given birth, and is now helping to raise their two children. Those of us who did not lose anyone we knew personally continue to feel for others' losses, but time, like physical distance, lessens this emotion. An old newspaper adage holds that one death in one's home town equals 100 in one's country and 1,000 on the other side of the world. The same is true about time. Death does lose its immediacy.
The problem is, our public history has not done justice to the event. Our public ceremonies emphasize only the persons killed. So does the new memorial at the site of the carnage in New York City, attractive as it may be. No one who goes to that site, or to the Pentagon, or the Pennsylvania crash scene, learns any real history beyond the basics of what happened. Who attacked us? (Not by name, of course, but nationality, background, occupation, ideology.) Why did they do it? How did the U.S. respond? Why? What resulted? These are among the important questions not asked and not answered, in stone or speech, ten years on.
The bipartisan and "safe" response to 9/11 was ascendant on its tenth anniversary. Speech after speech bemoaned the loss of life, especially of innocent life, that took place on that day. On the surface, nothing is wrong with that. Americans did lose family members, friends, loved ones. From my city, Washington, three award-winning middle-school children were passengers on the plane that took off from Dulles and wound up crashed into the Pentagon. Of course, they had done nothing whatsoever to merit their deaths.
This safe response is shallow, however. It is almost as shallow as President Bush's "explanation" for the attacks in his speech to Congress on September 20th:
Americans are asking, why do they hate us? They hate what we see right here in this chamber—a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms—our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.
What a rosy analysis! They hate us because we are good!
Bush repeated variants on that paragraph throughout the next year. He knew better, of course. Michael Scheuer, first chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, corrected him:
Bin Laden has been precise in telling America the reasons he is waging war on us. None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world.
Rather than ask Americans to pursue a vision of shared sacrifice to overcome an ideological, implacable, and stateless foe, Bush then implored us all to go shopping...