Category: History

George Custer Is Not Politically Correct!

Today is the 136th anniversary of the Battle of the Little Big Horn; alternatively called Custer’s Last Stand or the Battle of Greasy Grass (depending on which side of the bowstring you’re on.)  Just in case you were raised by wolves, the Little Big Horn is a river in Montana.  In June 1876, it was the home of several thousand pissed-off Native Americans (Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho) who were fed up with being pushed around.  On June 25th, General George Custer showed up — with five companies of the 7th Cavalry — to do some major pushing.  It wasn’t the best time to pick a fight; by the end of the day, George and all his soldiers were dead.

The Little Big Horn is a pivotal event in US history.  It almost exactly bisects the timeline of the American expansion west of the Mississippi.  (Mythology aside, the Old West, as it’s called, lasted barely thirty years.)  It also marked a change in the American attitude towards the indigenous populations of the West.  After Custer, the US military was turned loose to settle some scores.  By 1890, the frontier was officially closed, and America, the modern nation, was moving on to bigger and better things.

I realize that writing about Custer and the Little Big Horn is like running with Politically Correct buffalo.  Like buffalo, the politically correct are short-sighted and ill-tempered.  Chances are good that I’m going to get either trampled or gored.  However, I think I speak for all of us when I say Custer is one of the villains of history.  He wasn’t always that way.  For more than half of the last 136 years, he was a hero.  His picture was admired on literally thousands of walls across America, courtesy of Anheuser-Busch’s famous but woefully inaccurate painting of Custer’s Last Stand.  It’s only in my lifetime that the painting was taken down and Custer grew fangs and started spitting green saliva.  That’s the nature of interpretive history, though.  As Mort Sahl once said, “If you keep a consistent political position, you’ll eventually get tried for treason.”  That’s kinda what happened to Custer.  When the political winds began to change, he was too dead to change with them.  You see, history doesn’t change; historians do.

In the last 50 years, Custer has been called everything but nice.  He has been portrayed as a megalomaniac; a glory hound, building his political career on the bodies of dead Cheyenne babies; a walking insane asylum; and everything in between – including a nepotist and an unfaithful husband.  It’s now universally accepted that hell itself couldn’t hold half his nastiness.  He is the poster boy for America’s racist, money-grubbing theft of the continent it now occupies.  Unfortunately, these charges could be directed against any 19th century American who took Horace Greeley’s (John Soule’s, actually) advice to “Go West, young man.”  (The insane asylum crack, however, is just Hollywood’s way of making amends for Errol Flynn’s They Died with Their Boots On.)  Actually, calling Custer a racist is redundant; they all were, including his boss President Ulysses S. Grant — the guy who led the charge when his boss, at the time, Abraham Lincoln, wanted to free the slaves.

I’m not trying to start an “I Love Custer” club, but regurgitating, history half digested, in order to support a moral judgement is how we lose sight of our historical legacy.  In fact, representing Custer as a man with character flaws large enough to drive a stagecoach through is actually postulating that it’s no wonder he got everybody killed at Little Big Horn; the guy was a mess.  This is the soft prejudice that usually accompanies politically correct.  In the end it’s always about us, and everybody else is just a reflection.  The last thing these nouveau historians are willing to admit is that a brilliant military leader named George Custer got out generalled by a guy who didn’t wear pants.

The truth is Custer wasn’t drunk, crazy or incompetent, nor was he morally bankrupt and he didn’t torture kittens on his day off.  He was just a man of his times.  On June 25th, 1876, he planned a classic enveloping maneuver to trap the Sioux and was beaten when Crazy Horse out manoeuvred and outfought him.  Like it or not, Custer was good at what he did.  It just so happened that Crazy Horse was better.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  There don’t have to be mitigating circumstances or moral turpitude to explain the Sioux victory.  The truth is General Custer (like Captain Fetterman* ten years before him) ran into a 19th century military genius named Crazy Horse, who used his limited resources, the terrain and his opponent’s arrogance to win overwhelming victories.  It’s that simple.

Contemporary historians would lead us to believe that, after the Civil War, swarms of snarling swindlers headed west, armed with Winchester rifles and the single evil purpose of destroying everything in their path.  The robbed, raped and pillaged their way to the Pacific because the indigenous peoples were too pastorally ignorant to stop them or even figure out what was going on.  This makes for good reading in sophomore textbooks, but in actual fact, it’s nothing more than another Anheuser-Busch painting with an academic bibliography.

When we bother to look, history tells us that in the second half of the 19th century, two nations — the United States and the Lakota Sioux — fought it out for supremacy on the northern plains.  Both were a dynamic people.  The outcome was never in doubt: the United States had overwhelming advantages, yet the Lakota Sioux and their allies managed to keep them at bay for a generation.  In the middle of that conflict, on a sunny day in June, the United States 7th cavalry went looking for a fight and got their ass kicked.  That’s what happened 136 years ago; I don’t care how you paint the picture.

 

*Captain William Fetterman may or may not have boasted, “Give me eighty men and I’ll ride through the whole Sioux nation,” but when he did get a crack at it, he got less than 500 yards.  On December 21st, 1866, Fetterman, 79 soldiers and two curious civilians marched out of Fort Phil Kearny to relieve a work party that was under attack.  Taunted by Crazy Horse and a few of his Oglala buddies, they crossed Lodge Trail Ridge and walked into an elaborate ambush.  He and his entire command were killed.

Watergate: The Real Legacy

Despite the fact that literally millions of folks are clamoring to get into the Land of Milk and Money, for the most part, the American timeline is seen as a series of bloodthirsty conflicts, driven in part by a predilection for gunslinger economics.  This is all in the abstract, of course, since most of the world’s knowledge of America is produced in Hollywood and consists of shootouts, car chases and ancient reruns of Baywatch.  The fact is, however, that since its inception, the twists of America history have had an influence far beyond its shores.  They run all the way from a bunch of Virginia farmers inventing a workable democracy in the 18th century to the boys from Compton and East Harlem reinventing music in the 21st.

Over the years, American cultural hegemony has become a catch-all for discontent.  Since anti-Americanism is one of the few prejudices left open to ordinary people, they take full advantage of it.  There are actually folks in this world cheerleading the demise of the American empire as if it were an international sporting event.   More than a little of this myopic thinking can be traced to a pivotal moment in American history — forty years ago, yesterday — June 17th, 1972.  In the lingering twilight of a late June evening, President Richard Nixon sent his minions to play mischief with the National Democratic Headquarters and changed the world forever — at a place called Watergate.

More than the Kennedy assassination, the Moon Landing or the Vietnam War, Watergate is what has defined America in the second half of the 20th century.  The incredible conspiracy that didn’t so much reach into the White House as begin there, soured the prestige of politics so thoroughly it remains rancid even today — and not only in America but around the world.  The months and years of the Watergate scandal eventually devoured all the goodwill accumulated by America during World War II and the postwar generosity of the Marshal Plan.  It confirmed what young people were saying about the industrial military complex, inequality and racism: America was a poisoned apple, rotten at its very core.

Richard Nixon is the natural villain in all this.  Regardless of how many presidents before or since have bent and broken the law to suit their purposes — including lying to a Grand Jury and dronebombing American citizens out of season — Nixon’s utter disregard for the rule of law set the standard by which all other scandals have since been judged.    No political wrongdoing since 1972 has escaped being suffix-Gated in the media and in our minds.  And that’s the worst of it: the unexpected consequences of the felonies of a President.

Watergate was the beginning of Gotcha Journalism.  As the scandal escalated, it became obvious that the conspiracy was real.  Proof was the problem; catching all the president’s men in the lies and half-truths they were spinning to cover things up became the way to get at it.  Journalists began setting traps for Nixon’s boys — and catching them.  It was no longer a question of if somebody was lying; it was only a question of when and to whom.  Ironically, even as Woodward and Bernstein were being lauded as crusading folk heroes (enrollment in journalism schools doubled by 1974) their style of investigative journalism was going out of style.  Headlines were constructed out of zingers shouted at press conferences, and videotaped ambushes became the norm on the nightly news.  Then, as with every witch hunt, things started getting out of hand.  Innuendo was considered corroboration, opinion newsworthy and everyone was conjuring up their own private “Deep Throat.”  By 1974, without Richard Nixon to kick around anymore, the media was already turning its klieg lights on any public servant who didn’t keep his head down.  Suddenly, everybody from Ford’s demoralized White House to the Des Moines dog catcher was guilty.  Malfeasance was everywhere, and anybody with a press card was out to expose it.  There were reputations to be made, bestsellers to write and movie deals to sign.  Journalism was no longer staid and Walter Cronkite-jowled; it was Redford and Hoffman cool — and only one scandal away from greatness.  Forty years later, the media is still at it, hunting conspiracies like French pigs after truffles.

Watergate, like Gettysburg or Elvis, was a watershed in American history.  It was a point in time when the past was swept away — and just like Gettysburg and Elvis — it not only changed America but the entire world.  Richard Nixon’s presidency was never really the spawn of Satan that many people claim.  His administration was corrupt, without doubt, but history tells us that many administrations have been corrupt — in Washington and around the world.  No, Richard Nixon’s legacy will forever be that he could not protect the prestige of his office nor his country from the ambitions of his own ego.  As a result, he unleashed a media storm that has lasted nearly a half a century.  Most importantly, though, he destroyed the carte blanche of good will America once enjoyed at home and around the world.

Father’s Day: A Brief History

Contrary to popular belief, Father’s Day was not created by an international tie and socks conspiracy.  I’ll grant you, retail advertising had a lot to do with keeping the day going during the lean years, but it’s still a standalone holiday.  It has all the rights and privileges afforded any other “It’s a holiday, but you can’t take the day off work” day, just like St. Valentine’s or St. Patrick’s.  The only difference is that, because it’s dad, it gets shuffled along to the last minute.  Somewhere around mid-morning on the third Saturday in June, getting creative is no longer an option, so most people just head for the haberdasher.  Dads really don’t mind, though; they figure they’re lucky to have a day at all.

To keep the family metaphor going, Father’s Day has always been the poor cousin of Mother’s Day.  Mother’s Day was founded first, in 1908, and it was an instant hit.  Between the newly-minted Hallmark Cards (Hall Brothers, at that time) and the flower power of the florist industry, Mother’s Day went 20th century viral almost immediately.  In fact, Mother’s Day became so commercially successful that its founder, Anna Jarvis, disowned the holiday she had created and was once even arrested for demonstrating against it.  Father’s Day never had it so good.

There are several claimants to the title “Mother of Father’s Day.”  However, it’s generally accepted that Father’s Day was created in Spokane, Washington, by Sonora Dodd, for her father, William Smart, a single dad who raised six kids.  She wanted to celebrate it on his birthday, June 5th, but due to the church schedule, the first Father’s Day ceremony was held on June 19th, 1910 (the third Sunday in June of that year.)  At first, Father’s Day mucked along with some limited success (in 1916, it was recognized by President Woodrow Wilson) but in those days, dad was kinda the silent partner in the family unit, and the holiday fell into disuse.  It wasn’t until the Great Depression was slappin’ the economic crap out of everybody that we rediscovered Father’s Day.  It was a simple case of two ideas coming together at the same time.  While retailers were grasping at advertising straws to promote sales, the rest of us were more than willing to accept any excuse to brighten up the daily grind (which, by all accounts, was pretty grinding.)  Father’s Day came back into vogue – somewhat.  It still didn’t have the cachet Mother’s Day did, but at least dad could read the newspaper undisturbed one Sunday morning a year — if he so chose.

By the 1950s Father’s Day was fairly well established in North America.  However, in the United States, Congress still didn’t think that the American people needed a day to honour dad.  It wasn’t until Lyndon Johnson issued a presidential proclamation in 1966 that Father’s Day had any official status, at all.  Six years later, in 1972, President Nixon signed Father’s Day into law.  In actually fact, Father’s Day, in the US, is not a national holiday.  It’s something called a “Federal Observance,” which, as I’ve already stated, basically means dad doesn’t get the day off.

These days, Father’s Day is big business, but it doesn’t hold a candle to the other big hitters: Mother’s Day, Valentine’s and St. Paddy’s.  Dad isn’t being ignored anymore — most baseball teams try to get a home game on Father’s Day — but he’s still just dad, the guy you go looking for when it snows.  For example, Father’s Day is head and shoulders above any other day of the year for collect telephone calls.  Besides, we all know, from bitter experience, that most dads are tough to buy for.

This year, however, let me help you out.  Instead of stretching your brain all out of shape and ending up with the World’s Greatest Dad barbeque apron, give it a rest.  Jump in the car or get on your bike, wheel on over and spend some time just hanging with the old man.  It’ll do you both good.