Nason McCormick

Herman Cain

2011-12-04T07:43:00.000-08:00

When accusations were first heard from women who accused Herman Cain of sexual harassment, it was possible to pass them off as cultural misunderstandings, perhaps between northern and southern ways of interacting. Because the women were anonymous, one didn’t know anything about their appearance, race or class background.

Then, Sharon Bialek spoke out.

Cain was right. It wasn’t sexual harassment. It was worse. It was abuse of power.

She reported his response to her protests at being groped was “You want a job, right?”

Abuse of power isn’t something most politicians and journalists recognize as a problem. In fact, most don’t recognize it at all. They continued to believe he was a viable candidate for president.

Finally, Ginger White became so disgusted with the way Bialek and others were being treated, she announced she’d had an affair with Cain that lasted for years.

Again, Cain claimed sex wasn’t involved. And, again he was right.

He went on to tell the New Hampshire Union Leader that “She was out of work and had trouble paying her bills, and I had known her as a friend” so he gave her money because "I'm a soft-hearted person when it comes to that stuff.”

He revealed himself to be a predator of an entirely different order, one who feeds off women with financial problems whom he may also suspect are defenseless.

Before he suspended his campaign, rumors were still burbling about other women. Many, if they ever surface, may turn out to be what we first expected, the consequences of a flirtatious nature that occasionally errs from a failure to recognize others don’t see things as he does.

They are not what made people uneasy. It was the nature of the cases that came to light that revealed something more dangerous than sexual harassment was involved.

The media and politicians may tolerate lustful men, but even they get a bit uneasy with more vicious predators.

Notes:
Henderson, Nia-Malika. “ Sharon Bialek Accuses Herman Cain of Sexual Harassment as She Sought Help Getting a Job,” Washington Post, 7 November 2011.

Knickerbocker, Brad. “Herman Cain Admits Payments to Ginger White, Edges Toward Quitting,” Christian Science Monitor, 1 December 2011.

Black Friday

2011-11-27T15:56:00.001-08:00

The holidays of fall have changed since I was a child.

Halloween used to be the time children were allowed to explore their neighborhood and master its intricacies guided by more knowledgeable older kids, accompanied with a frisson of fright from confronting the unknown under the cloak of darkness. Thanksgiving was the time to visit relatives and overeat.

Halloween has been transformed into a dramatization of running from the challenges of community. Parents go with their children in gestures of preemptive defense against potential threats from their neighbors. Teenagers are punished if they go trick or treating. All the sinews that bound together micro-generations and exogamous groups have been broken.

In their place we have the day after Thanksgiving, perhaps rightly called Black Friday. It’s become the day adults can demonstrate their competence in a world that tends to grind them down the rest of the year. It’s the one time they get the best of the merchants and corporations. It’s the one time they successfully plot a strategy to be first in line, to develop an edge that works.

The excesses of pepper spray and tasers, fist fights and shoving matches are less feared, more predictable, than razors in apples or drugs in brownies. Also, the acquisition of goods through competition and survival of the fittest is more important in our society than acquiring them by ritualized begging.

Arthur Upfield

2011-10-23T04:52:00.000-07:00

My last experience reading Tony Hillerman wasn’t simply unpleasant, it was aggressively so. After I finished the fifth chapter of The Dark Wind, I didn’t want to go on. When this happens, I usually put a book in the garage or trash. It’s been a long time since I felt compelled to finish what I began.

In this case, people I liked had made so many positive comments, I really did want to read his books about the southwest. For days, I circled the table where the book was laying telling myself it really couldn’t have been that bad, I must have had a bad day at work or something. When I was finally able to force myself to resume reading it was OK, until the end when my negative reaction was even stronger.

After this unpleasant experience, I reread an Arthur Upfield mystery set in Australia featuring a half-native tracker policeman, Napolean Bonaparte. I’d always found them readable but forgettable, even forgetting the beginnings of books before I finished them. I wondered how Bony compared with Jim Chee, Hillerman’s semi-detribalized Navajo policeman.

I should say I never took Upfield’s books as accurate descriptions of life in the Australian outback. I have no idea what native life was like when he was writing and always suspected his half-breed hero was some white man’s idea of the best way to modernize the natives. I treated the characters as theater set pieces, not as human beings.

Hillerman writes in ways that make you want to take his characters as somehow real. Such an expectation raises the standard for developing motives for villains and secondary characters. If they don’t ring true, then the premise they are true is shaken, and then your willingness to believe Hillerman is lost. When you begin with an assumption of artifice, you’re more forgiving.

The novel I read was selected randomly. The Bushman Who Came Back, published in 1957, happened to be on top of a stack of books in storage. The plot was trivial but something you’d expect in isolated ranch life, a vain ranch hand kills a cook, the only white woman in the area, because she doesn’t take his advances seriously.

No motive was necessary and little time was spent developing one. There were four ranch hands and the ranch owner. In an Agatha Christie novel, any one of them could have been the killer. The isolation would have become oppressive. In this, you know who it is because it’s the only person mentioned more than once.

The point of the book was not “who done it” but finding a child who was taken by a Brit gone native. His motive for taking the girl before she discovered her dead mother was confused by alcohol and deliberate misdirection by the real murderer.

Much of Upfield’s novel was spent describing the ways Bony learned about a dry lake bed before he began his trek across it to rescue the child under conditions that were deteriorating as water from rains to the north was seeping underground and turning the narrow, solid path into swallowing mud.

In Hillerman, the chase scene involved following the villain to his night meeting with a drug dealer in a Hopi village temporarily deserted by ritual. From there he followed the pair to an area near an arroyo swollen by the first rain after a drought.

I think the reason I preferred Upfield to Hillerman here is that readers in the 1950's accepted a more leisurely pace than do modern ones. This allowed the Australian to spend time describing the weather, and thus build suspense. The American had to focus on people so the gully washer was as much a surprise to the reader as it was the villains.

Reader expectations of pacing also affected the ways the authors could handle a critical problem for their heroes, prying information from suspicious natives. Upfield could spend time showing Bony using increasingly abusive or manipulative techniques to eventually learn something. To speed the narrative, Hillerman bypasses the problem by having Chee use intermediaries, in this case a Hopi policeman.

I’m not sure what role success had in my reaction to the two books. Upfield rescued the girl and her captor before turning the real villain over to the police for public trial. The finale was a wedding scene. Hillerman failed to save anyone. Chee destroyed all the evidence in the final scene so only he and the reader are the ones who know the truth.

In the end, my reasons for preferring one to the other are simply matters of taste and temperament. First, I prefer plots that flow organically from situations rather than ones imposed from outside, even when the situations themselves are highly artificial.

Second, though both are readable, I preferred the way Upfield dramatized tracking and reading signs from nature. While I don’t read novels for information, I also happened to absorb a great deal more information about nature from Upfield than Hillerman. What little I’ve since read on Wikipedia later about Lake Eyre, a real place it turns out, didn’t undermine my trust, my willing suspension of disbelief, the way the burning tumbleweeds made Hillerman suspect.

Realism is a two-edged sword; melodrama carries its own cushion.

Tony Hillerman, Part 2

2011-10-16T07:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve now finished the second Jim Chee novel and can tell you why I don’t like Tony Hillerman novels. This is obviously the place for someone who disagrees or who hasn’t read his books to stop reading.

At the end of The Dark Wind, published in 1982, this is what I understand of the plot. A corrupt DEA agent created a situation in the New Mexico Penitentiary that led someone still unknown to kill the son of Jake West and his first wife. West had later married a Hopi woman who disappeared. The pock marked West remained in Arizona operating a trading post.

A drug deal goes bad when a courier plane crashes in an arroyo because Joseph Musket, the Navajo friend of West’s son, set up landing lights in the wrong location. The pilot and his passenger die. West shoots the man meeting them and hides the body in a vehicle driven up a feeder to the arroyo. He also kills Musket.

There’s never an explanation for why Musket set the lights wrong, if that was the plan of the drug dealers or if he was in some kind of double deal with the powerful cartel and the sorrowing West. Neither makes sense, and mere incompetence doesn’t seem likely either.

When someone representing the next layer of the cartel arranges a meeting to ransom the drugs, West kills him, but not his young assistant. The corrupt DEA agent appears, fatally wounds West who, in turn, kicks him into the now raging arroyo. Chee makes sure all evidence also washes away and that West, no longer able to defend himself, is known to have been guilty of Musket’s death.

Simple tales of vengeance. Except, of course, I can tell you nothing about Tom West or Joseph Musket except their arrest records, nothing that would explain the original incident that sets the plot in motion. Making “some bad friends in El Paso” is not an answer, if those friends are not identified. Reading bits in Wikipedia about the use of snitches to control convicts at the New Mexico penitentiary before the 1980 riots provide background missing from the book, but not a motive.

I also know nothing more about Jake West, beyond more examples of his doing magic tricks to amuse his customers.

Having imagined his “all is revealed” scene, Hillerman was unable to create a narrative that would explain the three men. He wastes no time having Chee talk casually to people who knew the men when they were children or young men, who knew them when they getting sucked into lives of petty crime. He talks to no one who knows any more about Jake, though such people obviously exist. I suspect gossip about strangers is easier to hear than that about the witchcraft Chee’s always hearing.

The excuse: Chee’s not supposed to be investigating the drug case, only a petty theft by Musket reported by Jake West.

Instead of developing motive, Hillerman filled 214 pages with a genuine subplot, one that grew out of conflicting Hopi and BIA solutions to drought in land being transferred from the Navajo to the Hopi in 1974.

He makes sympathetic comments about the uprooted Navajo, but doesn’t mention the leases to Peabody Coal made by Peter McDonald, the later convicted head of the Navajo Nation at the time, or the competing ones made by the Hopi The corruption, known but not proved when he was writing, would have been a more natural source for crime and intimidation than outside drug dealers.

The rest of The Dark Wind is filled with descriptions of the land that are intended to prepare the reader for the suddenly running arroyo, descriptions of Navajo traditions that are supposed to develop Chee as a character to replace the abandoned Joe Leaphorn, and descriptions of Hopi life Hillerman needs to set the scene where West murders the second level drug dealer.

I see from my book shelf that his later books get longer. I’ve read in interviews with Hillerman and descriptions of his work that he spends more time creating personal adventures for his two detectives. I suspect these take even larger roles, substituting for the development of suspect character and motive one expects in a traditional, Agatha Christie style mystery.

When one writes in the optimistic American tradition this is what readers expect. They aren’t really interested in exploring evil, are quite happy to accept it in its most stereotypic form. For them the important narrative is the temptation and triumph of the hero, a secular version of John Bunyan or Saint Augustine. They identify with the detective or his lady friends and read the books as a kind of Perils of Pauline, or, if they are women, as more Nancy Drew adventures for their Bess or George selves.

In Hillerman’s early novels, a white crime story is transported to an unusual location, one so far that has changed from novel to novel. An exotic detective is available to help a white lady navigate the difficulties of the terrain without, in any way, compromising her reputation. In this case, the woman is the sister of the dead pilot who has been brought in by the second level drug dealer as a decoy. She gets her dose of adventure when she works a hotel switchboard to overhear the cartel delivering a message. She can then retreat to her room satisfied she has done what she can for her brother.

In contrast, the English writer had to create a world of potential evil that would draw in a reader who would recognize some of the characters, like Jane Marple continually said, as people like his or her neighbors. Detectives were simple conventions that often devolved into mere lists of odd traits in later books, Hercule Poirot’s penchant for straightening objects, Nero Wolfe’s orchards, Albert Campion’s owlish classes. Motive, the incident that pushed one over the edge of civilized behavior, was key.

Anomalies like Chee finding it easy to start tumbleweeds burning were the heart of the traditional mystery, the clues that alerted the reader to possible guilt. Agatha Christie has one story hinge on someone claiming to be scratched by a thornless rose, another dependent on knowing the names of dahlia cultivars. One had to be part of the world to understand its hidden language.

The fact tumbleweeds burn easily once a fire is started, but are difficult to ignite with a match unless they are compacted, is irrelevant to the American reader. He or she treats Chee as a guide who stages events that introduce them to the southwest, and really doesn’t care if things are true so long as they appear true.

It’s a fact tumbleweeds do burn. Anyone who’s driven through northern New Mexico in the fall has seen them burning. Who cares how a fire starts if the plot requires a fire, except, of course, those of us trained by traditional mysteries writers to spot clues who’ve also tried to burn Russian thistles.

Mysteries as Morality Tales

2011-10-09T08:13:00.001-07:00

The oldest division in mysteries is the one between the English cozy, whose audience is supposed to be the older lady of genteel literary interests, and the American adventure story which appeals to the average, book-reading, if that’s not an oxymoron, male. The one goes back to Arthur Conan-Doyle, the other most famously to Dashiell Hammett.

While the usual distinctions are drawn between nationality, gender and class, I suspect they lie much deeper, in the differences between John Calvin and the Episcopal Church of the one hand, and Jacobus Arminius and the evangelizing churches he inspired on the other.

The most important thing about the English mysteries is that they involve someone within a closed society and assume that anyone has the capacity for evil. Calvin may have given the illusion that there were people born in the state of grace, but he also made clear no one knew who they were.

Arminius, on the other hand, argued grace was not the stingy gift God granted to a random few, but could be claimed by anyone who accepted Christ as his or her savior. As an elective status, being saved meant one could associate with only others who were likewise saved, and indeed one’s evidence of salvation became the company one kept. The rest of the world became the arena of great potential evil, xenophobia the natural result.

And so, Agatha Christie isolates members of a family or close circle of friends and leaves it to the spiritual leader, in her case Hercule Poirot, to identify the source of evil within the group. Before he succeeds, everyone is shown to be potentially guilty. However, true to both Calvin and her belief that anyone was capable of murder, she makes even her detective the villain in a book she wrote during World War II, but had published after she was dead.

In a modern American novel, a good person innocently gets mixed up with bad characters and experiences evil vicariously. It’s always another whose guilty, not the good person and his or her group of associates. Mary Roberts Rinehart most famously made the betrayer the outsider given greatest access to an inner circle, the butler.

The assumptions about the distribution of good and evil among people, and the expectation that one can decide conditions how novels end in societies where readers know lawyers can obfuscate the clearest cases of guilt. In the one, the guilty party commits suicide. In the other, especially after Mickey Spillane, the detective arranges for the death of the guilty one. The one still carries the doubt of Calvin, the other the infallibility of Arminius.

The small number of Tony Hillerman novels I’ve now read fall into the Arminian category. The wrongly suspected innocent aren’t actually characters in his book, but readers seeking a way to learn about unknown, potentially dangerous worlds, without becoming socially tainted by their curiosity.

One can quibble about style, plotting, character development, description, point of view, use of conventions, those signifiers we use to discuss literature. However, I suspect they really are only ways of verbalizing discomfort without addressing it.

In the end it’s not the difference between Hillerman’s journalistic description of Jim Chee or Joe Leaphorn and Agatha Christie’s novelistic treatment of Poirot or Jane Marple that matters. It’s the view of the moral world, and, as American Christians have known since the Presbyterians split into the old and new lights early nineteen century, there really is no bridge between Calvin and Arminius.

One either has the pessimistic or optimistic view of basic human nature. One may limit the positive to a small group of one’s friends or assume it can be universalized, but one cannot conceive of evil in oneself. Recognizing an author’s allegiance signals to the reader who the range of villains could be, what tensions will exist, and ultimately what the experience of discovery will be, what view of society will be confirmed and justified.

I think it’s that recognition that makes the books written by one type of writer so difficult for people raised in the other world to read, for they really are as foreign as medieval gestes and Japanese haiku.

Mysteries mentioned above include Agatha Christie, Curtain, 1975; Mary Roberts Rinehart, The Door, 1930; and Mickey Spillane, I, the Jury, 1947.

Tony Hillerman, Part 1

2011-10-02T07:10:00.000-07:00

Mystery books fall into many categories, but the most important are readable and unreadable. The distinction is all a matter of taste, for there are many very popular writers I put in the second group.

There’s a subcategory of the readable I call airport books. They’re the ones that are readable enough not to be rejected out of hand, but not the ones you race home to finish. You keep a mental list, so if you’re ever stuck somewhere with no amusements, you know at least you can buy and read one of them in comfort.

Tony Hillerman fell into this category after I read one of his books sometime in the early 1980's. I don’t remember now why I didn’t much like it. I don’t even remember which book was. All I remember is something hadn’t felt right.

This summer there’ve been evenings when I’ve done little more than watch clouds and smoke patterns across a small section of the Jemez where the Las Conchas fire was burning. I’ve realized many painters who claim to be showing the same place in different conditions really never looked carefully enough to see the many variations that exist in the sky. They show only the extremes, winter, summer, thunderstorm.

For unrelated reasons I read a little about Navajo medicine, enough to realize that it’s a very complicated subject, much more complicated than the ethnobotany of many people because staying well, or perhaps the fear of becoming ill, is a major preoccupation of their communal ceremonial life.

Looking again for something to read, I decided maybe it was time to revisit Hillerman. The Blessing Way was one of the books I’d bought back in the 80's and kept for that proverbial rainy day. From what little I’d read by anthropologists, Navajo rituals could be divided into those that dealt with sickness and those that dealt with other things. Blessing Way was the primary healing group and the most important of their chant ways.

Blessing Way, published in 1970, was Hillerman’s first mystery set among the Navajo. It’s more a book about white men set in an exotic setting than it is about native crime and punishment. It should have been called Enemy Way, for that’s the primary ritual described in the book. It’s the rite that would most attract the interest of outsiders for it’s the one that deals with problems caused by witch craft, rather than more mundane sicknesses.

The hero’s a white anthropologist who’s feeling sorry for himself because his wife had left him years ago for a man with more money and an exciting career. He’s the one who pursues and is pursued, trying to figure out what’s going on, all the time accompanied by a sweet young thing. The Navajo detective, Joe Leaphorn, is simply a tracker who provides information.

The villain is also white, a poor but brilliant young man who must make money before he can marry the sweet young thing.

As a first novel, it shows the mechanics of composition. I’ve since read his book written in 1973, Dance Hall of the Dead, in which his narrative skills had improved tremendously.

In the first, the plot device was an anomaly on Navajo land, an army radar station used to track missiles from Nevada to White Sands. The contrivance was much too complicated to be cleanly explained in the “all is revealed” scene. It was more a fantasy from the cold war or a conspiracy theorist’s view of the mafia, a baroque decoration that added nothing to the story.

The setting was more something seen from the kitchen window augmented by an encyclopedia. Early, before the murder victim dies, he’s looking at a “plateau’s granite cap, its sandstone support eroded away” while that night the “Wind People moved across the reservation” as the “wind pushed out of a high-pressure system centered over the Nevada plateau.”

These are the ways I, an educated Anglo would see these things. Despite the veneer of a phrase or two, I doubt either the perception of changing geology or the weather are terms or concepts for the typical Navajo, anymore than they are the way a fundamental Christian would see them who denies the evidence of evolution and climate change.

The primary Navajo background was provided by the son of a family relocated to California in the 1930's who only knows Navajo tradition second hand. As part of the radar interception conspiracy, he disguises himself as a wolf who turns into a man and slaughters livestock to inspire a fear of witchcraft in the area where they are working. The murder victim is a drunken, half-acculturated Navajo hiding in the area from the law for seriously injuring someone in a fight.

Leaphorn is still undeveloped, a suggestion for a hero being proffered by a hesitant writer for a public that’s never seen an Indian detective. He reminded me of Bony, the Australian aboriginal tracker created by Arthur Upfield, and apparently that was one of Hillerman’s inspirations for the character.

The tracking was perfunctory with most of the hunting being done by the white anthropologist. By 1973, Hillerman was able to use Leaphorn as the hero. The tracking sequences were much more detailed, probably drawing on Hillerman’s own childhood in rural Oklahoma and in the army.

In the second, the realization of the motive for the murder follows from Leaphorn’s experience as a human, not necessarily as an Indian. The writing skills weren’t completely polished enough yet to disguise important clues in unimportant details. Leaphorn’s thoughts seemed so out of character with the rest of the narrative, they made it easy to guess what was going on.

In many ways the later book is a rewrite of the first. The villain is another poor, bright white man who needs to make money to marry the sweet young thing, who this time accompanies Leaphorn on the chase. The anthropologists are present again as is another fantasy from thriller novels of the time, this time drug dealers who lurk in the wilderness.

The setting is the border between the Navajo and Zuñi. The murder victim is another lonely son of a drunken Navajo father, this time a teenager who wants to become a Zuñi. The real ritual here is the Zuñi Shalaka. The false is a subversion by an outsider of the kachinas used to scare the young boy. The descriptions of the land and weather are no better than lists of place names.

In the first book Hillerman got some things right. As a journalist he knows something about interviewing people. Getting information as quickly as his hero was simply the necessity of plot development. The scene in Shoemaker’s store feels right, and indeed, Hillerman says he spent a great deal of time in such places gathering information.

In the second novel I read, he got many more things right. It’s a book that makes you want to read more, though with a fear for that point when the books become too influenced by the marketing feedback and reader adulation that seem to destroy so many modern mystery writers after the fifth or sixth book.

Note: Biographical information from Wikipedia entry on Hillerman.

Of Guns and Men

2011-09-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

Recently, the husband of a customer went after our foreman with a loaded gun.

It would be amusing if this were some kind of soap opera and he believed his wife had been fooling around and assumed the good looking Argentinian who parked his painter’s truck in the drive was the villain.

But it was no such thing. My boss had come back from meeting the interior decorator and told me to tell the foreman to go pick up a cupboard door to make a paint sample. I thought it a bit strange, but assumed my boss and the designer had made arrangements. I told the foreman to check the details with the boss, but that man is sometimes difficult to talk to.

The foreman assumed it was a house under construction and was surprised to find himself in a neighborhood. He called to confirm the address. At the time I was watching torrential rain send water over the curb to within 6" inches of the building I was in. I was wondering how I would know if our carpet was flooded.

He pulled into the drive to wait out the storm.

The people inside weren’t expecting him, and started imagining the worst. When the rain finally stopped, the man of the house went out with the gun and aimed it through the window at the foreman’s head.

The foreman called asking for the number of security. I gave him the one for the development home owners, rather than the county sheriff. I figured they really needed to know about his man.

According to my boss, who got called over, the security person had to treat the residents as the aggrieved party, but he felt she really thought it was all way over the top. As he said later, what kind of thief is the one who calls the police?

I suspect it was a case of an isolated man in his 50's who listens too much to scare media because he believes it’s a dangerous world, but doesn’t know the threats. Illegal immigrants are everywhere the bogeyman.

He and his wife recently moved from the city of Santa Fe to one of the exurban developments that advertise one acre rural estates. Like many such places, it’s been hard hit by the real estate crisis. Many houses are vacant, many more are for sale. Problems with break-ins at night are common. They, no doubt, got their house at a good price.

I recently talked to another resident there who had just spent the morning out with her dog looking around the owl nests for a missing puppy. When she got back, the seriously traumatized puppy was home.

We continued to talk about the dangers of living on the edge of wilderness here in the southwest where no one lets a small animal out unsupervised. Hawks are the worst problem.

She said she never goes out without a large stick. She said one time a pack of coyotes came at her and her dog. She was lucky to find a broken juniper limb which she swished at them until they left.

More recently I talked with another customer who lives in a slightly less isolated exurban area and installs electronics. He’s been experimenting with surveillance cameras. He put one in his yard to see which neighbor’s dog was messing with his trash.

The first time he caught a coyote. The second time he filmed a fox in his yard. The last time a bear was tearing into the garbage.

And this man’s worried about someone who parks a truck in the drive in daylight.

I live in rural strip development where my property abuts unsettled reservation land. I hear coyotes at night and once came upon a rattle snake in my neighbor’s yard. My neighbor’s dogs bark all night at wandering threats.

When I see someone suspicious I watch and try to remember the vehicle description. If I ever felt threatened I’d call a neighbor or 911. If I felt even more threatened I would try to find a way out of the house and onto the reservation behind the wood fence where I could walk away unseen. Or maybe I’d just try to get into the car, lock the doors, and lay on the horn.

These are things you do consider when you live in these kinds of places

I do know, even if I had gun, I certainly wouldn’t go out to confront a stranger with it.

And, I would never, ever go out at night to see what was disturbing the dogs. It’s been a dry year and food must be scarce.

This man has a lot to learn about real life.

Mission Accomplished

2011-09-22T08:00:00.001-07:00

I assume the Las Conchas fire is finally out. Of course, I don't really know, and because I don't know I’ve begun to understand people’s loss of faith in government and contempt for experts.

Given the nature of the fire and the constraints of money, I believe the fire fighters did all that could be done. The problem is the way their managers presented themselves. They showed the effects of years of budget cutting and politics that drives away all but the most malleable.

The lack of money is most pernicious. It has converted the discovery that fire is part of the natural cycle of prairies and forests into a rationale for not doing things unless capital assets are threatened. Last year’s South Fork Fire was in rugged territory northwest of Española, and, once the perimeters were contained, it was left to burn itself out. Later, the Forest Service claimed it as a success because prior controlled burns stopped the fire from reaching the FAA control towers on Cerro Pelon Hill.

The fact that lingering smoke and ash could affect the lives of people 15 miles away in the valley was not a quantified into a metric. When questions are raised about monitoring air and water quality, they’re perceived as public relations problems for Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has an already existing audience of skeptics. If any monitoring gets done, it must establish that nothing dangerous escaped from the hill. That really isn’t the question. Most of us aren’t that paranoid about the lab. The question has been and remains, what’s coming from the fire.

The fact LANL was involved distorted many priorities, because people in Los Alamos never feel enough resources are devoted to their security. It meant the first day, when the fire spread towards Cochiti, bureaucrats were concerned with the safety of lab property. It meant a few days later, when the fire escaped to the north, bureaucrats were too involved assuring lab executives and city officials to listen to Santa Clara.

There was always the feeling there wasn’t enough money, that decisions were being made within constraints. It’s unfortunate the Willow fire was still threatening southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico when our fire began. Fatigue coupled with the already mentioned hope this wasn’t another Cerro Grande didn’t help. On June 30, the southern fire was 95% contained and still required 991 people. Our fire was only 3% contained, but only had 210 more people.

While the number rose well over 2,000 in July, after the fire was out of control in the northern canyons, there never were the numbers here, when other fires were also burning, as there had been in Arizona, early in the season, when John McCain and other politicians were making highly publicized visits.

Honesty would have helped. No matter how much money is available, there’s a limit to how many highly trained, seasonal workers should exist. It can never be enough for the worst case. But such realistic appraisals are never made public. The pretense that everything possible is being done breeds more anger than the truth would have. However the first is hidden even if malignant, while the second can be public and volatile.

While timidity and the hope this wasn’t another bad fire characterized the first responses, the serious problems in credibility began when senior managers arrived. Every institution has a gap between the skills needed to carry out day to day operations, and those needed to deal with outside decision makers, bankers and Wall Street analysts for corporations, Congress for government agencies. The difference can only be more extreme with a group like the Forest Service where the basic mission requires leaving home for extended periods to work out doors in dangerous conditions, but managers must be desk people.

There was a marked change in the reports posted on the local web site before and after the fire status was elevated. Before, the reports focused on the fire, and what people had done to combat it. We were told if crowning was occurring or if fire behavior was extreme. We were able to understand the red lines at sunset and smoke.

After senior managers arrived, the focus became the daily action plans for the management team, especially the public meetings they were holding in Cochiti and Los Alamos. The audience became the people who controlled money and promotions, and secondarily reporters for Albuquerque television stations who didn’t need to drive farther north than Los Alamos. This became a story about the Dixon Apple Orchard whose customers live in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

One small example of the use of officially important facts instead of useful information is the way the Forest Service website identified the materials that were fueling the fire. For the South Fork Fire, it had said it was Ponderosa pine; for the Donaldson Fire, that broke out while this fire was active, it said it was Jjuniper-Piñon grasslands. For this one, it said: “10 Timber (litter and understory) FM8 and FM10."

These terms are the ones used by fire fighters to assess the potential dangers a fire poses, and only have meaning to supervisors releasing resources. Certain codes no doubt justify more danger and, therefore, more money. They mean nothing to the rest of us.

While fighting the fire requires highly skilled individuals usually from native, rural or working class backgrounds, much of the support work can be done by the educated. While local men were hired to run the dozers that created the fire lines, archaeologists were hired to direct them away from important sites. It took time for the fire service to allow representatives from the pueblos to advise them. The outside experts and the locals had different interests, the one in the past, the other the present.

Whenever opportunities exist for someone other than emergency workers, avenues for corruption and political influence follow. Remediation after the fire is ripe for exploitation. While the Cerro Grande fire publicized its attempts to give school children native seeds to plant near town, this time aerial crews are spreading cereal barley, slender wheatgrass and little blue stem.

According to William Dick-Peddie, little bluestem is widespread in Juniper-Piñon woodlands and savannahs, but it’s western wheatgrass that’s found in this area, not slender. Barley isn’t mentioned. Likewise, little bluestem is found in various lower montane Ponderosa pine environments, but not wheatgrass or barley.

There have been many failures here and in Europe with attempts to immediately sow indigenous seeds. Barley may in fact grow more quickly than other plants, and thereby anchor the soil so nature can replace it in time. To one who doesn’t know, this list suggests the influence of those who want to sell what’s available for a wide range of situations, not what’s appropriate for this particular one. It’s those kind of suspicions, which develop when useful information like the nature of the fire fuel is not made available, that lead to distrust and the leap to conspiratorial thinking.

More interesting, the Burned Area Emergency Response team can only work with federal land. They can only hope their activities will “positively influence adjacent lands under private, state, tribal, pueblo and government ownership.” Fortunately, the fire fighters have no such constraint, although I wonder how much that also influenced their prioritizing the lab over the pueblos.

So, those of us who are staring at Santa Clara land are condemned to see burned out mountains for decades, for it will take that long for nature to fully recover. There will be no reforestation or other remedial efforts unless the pueblo diverts money intended to expand the casinos that support its people.

The effects of this are already evident. Dixon’s Apple Orchard has been the most vocal about having to fight the ash polluted runoff by itself, as it negotiates its way through government agreements. It’s planted on state trust land leased from the State Land Office.

Less publicity is given to run off elsewhere which is just as visible when you drive north out of Española.

Even in areas that are blocked by ridges from the direct run off air born ash fell.

On my side of the river, August rains revealed soot had also fallen here and suggested my concerns about air quality had been legitimate.

When conscientious people are faced with impossible situations, they’re told to break problems into smaller units which can be solved. So instead of putting out a fire, they can contain it and stage a “Mission Accomplished” event and go on, leaving the base problem unsolved.

So, as high level managers were looking for an exit strategy for themselves from a difficult wildfire, they said the fire was 100% contained and that “transition to the local agency is scheduled for August 3.”

In the fine print they added, “This will be the last report on this fire until the fire is declared controlled.” Now, what in Orwellian bureaucratese is the difference between contained and controlled?

Are we controlled yet? Is the fire out? There are have been no further postings.

I know because I looked when steam was rising from the canyons after we finally got some rain.

When I asked neighbors or people in Santa Fe if the fire was finally extinguished, they shrugged and said “I thought it was out months ago.”

Mission Accomplished

...if the mission was to isolate the curious and leave them questioning the role of government, even when it was as successful as it could be.

Pictures were all were taken after August 3 when senior managers declared the fire 100% contained.

Picture 1. 11 August 2011, about 6:45pm, ash, smoke or steam rising from the canyons between the ridges as warm air meets cooling air before sun down.

Picture 2. 20 August 2011, about 7am, bare area within the green dotted mountains behind the badlands.

Picture 3. 28 August 2011, about 4:10pm, arroyo north of Española, possibly Rio de Oso, looking upstream at bottom land mud stained by soot and ash.

Picture 4. 31 August 2011, about 9:15am, arroyo on main road through San Ildefonso land, possibly Garcia Canyon, looking downstream at grey bottom land.

Picture 5. 5 September 2011, about 9:25am, road towards the local arroyo where soot amassed into rivulets during a serious rain.

Picture 6. 3 September 2011, about 5:30pm, smoke or steam rising after a storm.

Notes:
Dick-Peddie, William A. New Mexico Vegetation, 1993.

Dyson, Stuart. “Flooding Becomes Real at Fire-Scarred Apple Orchard,” KOB website, 29 July 2011.

Florida Forest Service. Fire Risk Assessment System (FRAS) Training Student Reference Text, prepared by Space Imaging Solutions, 2002.

United States Department of Agriculture. Forest Service. Las Conchas BAER Treatment Update, 24 July 2011.

_____. Las Conchas Fire Update, 3 August 2011.

_____. “USDA Forest Service Wildfire Risk Reduction Success Stories: South Fork Fire.”

Flight

2011-07-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

The Las Conchas fire has moved on. It’s still active to the north and they’ve been doing proactive burns to the south, but it’s no longer visible here.

The smoke cleared enough that it was possible, for the first time, to see the damage. On the large mountain that seems due west of my back porch, there’s a large triangle of furrowed grey.

The only time I know I saw the fire itself, and not it’s reflection in the smoke, was on July 4 when an orange line appeared, soon followed by another. They expanded into a triangle, then into a cave that began to resemble a snow globe as smoke swirled above.

I don’t know if that particular episode caused the damage I see now, or not. It’s nearly impossible to see the same thing day and night when the only landmarks are utility wires and uniquely shaped trees.

The fire may have moved on, but the conditions that made it so serious linger. Normally it snows several times. Each time, the snow would have stayed in the shadows for several days while it seeped into the ground. There would have been rains in early spring and a hurricane in the Gulf that sent us a long soaking rain in late June or early July. Then we would have settled into a period of dry air, broken by occasional storms, until fall.

We’re in the period of dry air when everything becomes hazy. Only this year, neither of the two snow storms left more than two inches in my yard and that melted immediately. There was no spring rain. There’s been no hurricane. The drought gets worse when the humidity falls to 17% like it did yesterday in Los Alamos. Any benefits we had of the few short rains evaporated immediately.

With our drought, the first storm of the season would be threatening regardless of the fire. However, the local Forest Service is warning us the rains could be catastrophic on those heat baked soils. They were working in the Santa Clara canyon this week trying to save the fish before draining a pond when some rains came and caused a mud slide. They had to destroy a bridge that had become a dam. Their road is now under five feet of mud.

Since carmine lines are no longer visible in the hour after the sun sets, it’s possible to believe the worst is over. The smoke blends into white clouds during the day and in the night when the sky overhead is clear. It’s only at sundown and sunrise that the tricks of light turn the smoke dark grey and reveal clouds that could have come from Pittsburgh or the McConnellsville coke basin where they burned coal day and night in the 1940's to send fuel to those blast furnaces.

Even though it’s invisible, debris from the smoke is felt through the day. My eyes burn, my nose itches and runs, I’m breathless from the slightest exertion. I talked to a local woman who had a serious asthma attack when she took her son to softball practice and to a deliveryman who’s now taking inhaled steroids after three days on a route that went from Los Alamos to Angel Fire.

Last Sunday I realized the reason I was so tired wasn’t just because I was sleeping badly in the heat. My already weak lungs simply weren’t getting enough oxygen. I got into the car, cranked up the air conditioner, then wondered where I could go. Certainly not west.

I didn’t want to go south: the pollution is always worse in Pojoaque where the road comes down from Los Alamos and bad in Santa Fe where the smoke mixes with exhaust fumes. I didn’t want to go to Chimayó because the narrow, winding road is dangerous when there’s as much traffic as there would be on a Sunday afternoon.

That left the road north to Taos.

As I drove out, I could still see the smoke over the mountains when I got to Alcalde. It only disappeared as I entered the lava fields north of Velarde. When I got to the Taos plateau, everything was dry, dead looking scrub steppe broken by a few junipers. It looked like the most severely overgrazed land in the valley.

I remembered nature may need fire, but trees are not the first plants back. It sometimes takes thirty years for piñon to start growing under the protection of shrubs that have had to reach maturity. That bare spot will not be reforested for some time, unless trees are deliberately planted and nurtured. It’s hard to safely irrigate a slope.

Yesterday, I fled again, but I didn’t want to repeat that drive through the scrub. I turned off the northbound road at Dixon. The road rose high into pine forests, until it curved and dead trees were visible to the north. Signs along the side warned of flash floods. A fire had burned that part of the Carson National Forest on June 1.

There is no escape until it rains enough to extinguish the fire and drown the smoke. To me, the most frightening thing is not that we’ll have those destructive rains, but that we won’t.

Notes: Nichols, Jay. “Update 7/15 for Las Conchas Burn Area Emergency Response,” NMFireInfo website 15 July 15 2011.

Picture 1. 4 July 2011 about 8:40pm, just before it resembled a cave.

Picture 2. 16 July 2011 about 8:20am.

Picture 3. 15 July 2011, about 5:04am.

Picture 4. 15 July 2011, about 6:08pm

Picture 5. 15 July 2011, about 7:56pm, after smoke from the deliberately set fires to the south have settled into a caricature of the original fire.

Picture 6. 17 July 2011, about 1:32am when a full moon it the white clouds.

Of Fires and Wars

2011-07-10T10:00:00.000-07:00

Images of war have replaced metaphors of a great hunt as the figurative language to describe the Las Conchas fire.

Any war, all wars, jumbled together. But especially the trenches of World War I and the eastern front in World War II where neighbors fought one another to settle old scores while matters were being decided elsewhere.

There’s the unremitting greyness when smoke obliterates the landscape, a greyness that resembles grainy newspaper photographs from the 1940's.

Also from World War II are the exotic names that taught many their European and Asian geography. The Jemez has always been a western flat behind the proscenium arch of everyday life, an undulating shadow of dark forms that stretched from the Black Mesa to the raised triangle in the north. Now there are names, Guaje, Chicoma, Polvadera.

On Jan Studebaker’s map for the Los Alamos Mountaineers, the peaks are a concave ring of teeth circling the great caldera. From a car they change location each time the road shifts to pick its way through the ridges and mounds of the lowlands. From my back porch, the Jemez are part of a great convex rotunda that surrounds me. They have no set form.

Finally, like young boys from many wars who finally seek the great atlases in public libraries to see where their fathers are stationed, I started pulling the USGS maps of the area. I found my location and moved west and found absolutely nothing. Lots of contour lines indicating changes in elevation, but no place names.

If there’s no reports from officials on what I see each evening, it’s partly because there really are no words for it. It’s in canyons and drainages that have not been tamed for human use. I begin to understand the necessity of names like Porkchop Hill.

There’s the sound of aircraft that disturbs the quiet of the countryside. When the helicopters are visible, they recall footage of the Korean mountains in M*A*S*H. Once in a while, for no obvious reason, they fly quite close and drop ammunition on areas that seem removed from the front.

As the days warms and smoke begins to tickle my nose and burn my eyes, there’s the recollection from the Hundred Year’s War that peasants far from the centers of action are often the greatest victims. When it mingles with car exhaust to make me light headed or turns brown from the maneuvers of the planes, I try not to think about what war did to civilians in Vietnam.

When my lungs are finally so full of smoke particles I no longer have the energy to stay awake, I flee for Taos in my air conditioned car and ponder the meanings of collateral damage.

Many afternoons bring false rumors of liberation like those that sent slaves fleeing plantations to find refuge with the Union army in the Civil War. Clouds gather to the north and east, sometimes thunder is heard. A couple times actual rain has materialized, but not enough. The heat and drought continue.

And then there’s the evening when the planes return to roost and trucks return from the mountains. Men foregather to assess the day’s progress, issue their press releases that focus on containment, that great metric of the Cold War. Then, victory was declared when communist armies didn’t attack Greece. The fate of the peoples in the Balkans, who had fought so hard for one side or other in the 1940's, were mere hot spots within the perimeter.

And so, each night we’re given the containment percentage for the war. We’re given insights into the strategies of this war, and how well we’re progressing. Dramatic, sometimes harrowing, photographs of men fighting on the front are posted that drown out those from bloggers that protest the unending sameness.

I suddenly realize, containment is also the defense of those who can’t fight within the perimeter. Our armies, whose technology and men come from urbanized environments, couldn't deal with the jungles of southeast Asia, can’t deal with the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Likewise, we justify our inability to deal with fire in the wilderness by saying our priorities are areas already domesticated by humans, the cities and their remote communication towers.

The efficiency of the public releases machine erases previous postings that suggest it always takes time to amass the equipment and organization to fight a war, time exploited by the enemy. Popular histories remember raising the flag at Iwo Jimo more than the Blitzkrieg, the burning of Atlanta more than Bull Run.

When the press release doesn’t answer questions raised by observations of the day, people become Kremlinologists, parsing every release for what’s not said. What does it mean that only progression maps are available today, not the one that shows yesterday’s hot spots? Are those realistic seeming comments just that, or are they intended to cover up something that might emerge tomorrow. What does it mean when they say “with expected ‘monsoonal’ rains, the fire may be extinguished naturally?”

As the sun goes down, heat drives those without aircontioning from their homes and they can see for themselves. Some nights the smoke rises from the nameless ridges, some nights it does not. The spots of red become fewer, and seem to appear farther away, higher up. Perhaps, at last, the fire is burning out, moving away, leaving battle scared land and destruction.

Finally, the night air cools the smoke and flames, the stars come out. The illusion that things have returned to normal is only disturbed by the smell of smoke. The stench of war is what people remember.

And the sense, that this will go on and on, repeating itself day after day with variations in smoke, but that, once started, fire and war follow their own inevitable logic. A kind a apocalyptic hope replaces the paranoia of isolation and media-induced ignorance that promises something, a great bomb, a great leader, a great storm, something will end the endless war.

Picture 1 Helicoper flying over the uplands, 9 July 2011 about 8:05pm; mountains are invisible.

Picture 2 Western mountains and uplifts hidden by smoke the day the fire flared in Gauje Canyon, 7 July 2011 about 4:10pm.

Picture 3 Helicopter spraying dry grasslands in front of the uplift, 7 July 2011 about 4:58pm; mountains are invisible.

Picture 4 Looking towards the western mountains as rain drips off the porch roof, 8 July 2011 about 7:38pm.

Picture 5 White smoke rising in the valleys before the far western mountains as the sun sets, 8 July 2011 about 7:57pm.

Picture 6 Fire reflected in smoke rising from behind, not in front of the mountains, for the first time, 9 July 2011 about 7:11pm.

Picture 7 Clouds over the uplands behind the Puye Cliffs gas station, 8 July 2011 about 8:10pm; mountains not visible.

Fire as Seen by a Wise, Old Man

2011-07-06T06:48:00.001-07:00

Light had two sons, Sun and Fire. The older was everything a father could ask, dutiful, hard working, dependable. The other, like so many younger sons, was rebellious, impulsive, easily bored. Where his brother was wise, Fire was cunning.

Sun had a chum, Water, whose childhood rages moldered into sullenness as they grew into adolescence, for Sun would sometimes get into scrapes with girls, but Water would be the one blamed. Still it was Water who married and sired children, Thunder and Lightening.

Sun could never change his ways enough to go with a woman. He drifted into a fusty bachelorhood, doing the same thing day after day, year after year, eon after eon. He never questioned life, never thought much about the women who no longer flirted with him. His routine became all he craved.

His brother Fire also had an old friend, Wind, who was even more shiftless than he, and a daughter Smoke.

No one knows where Wind and Water came from. Some say they were children of Light’s slave women. Others that they were the unrecognized offspring of Light’s sister-in-law, a woman of uncertain virtue. The half-brothers were raised with Sun and Fire, but were always aware they weren’t quite part of the family.

There was also a sister, Moon, but no one thought much about her. When they were children Sun tried to boss her, Fire teased and taunted. She moved as far from them as possible, raised her children in darkness.

This story begins soon after the solstice in New Mexico the year Water took a long trip to the Mississippi where he was thinking of moving. In his absence, the earth had grown dry. Plants suffered. Some never bloomed. Some flowered only long enough to produce seed. Some simply stayed underground.

Fire had gone to Arizona. After losing a month long war with Joe Reinarz and the Feds, he was slowly limping home. He spent a week in Pacheco Canyon near the Nambé, then went to the Bosque to recuperate.

Wind was alone and bored. Walking through the forest, he kicked an aspen out of his way. It fell against a power line. From nowhere, Fire jumped over Wind to grab the line which sent sparks flying. The tree ignited. The line melted and fell to the ground.

Wind’s spirits revived. He and Fire romped through the woods. Fire picked up glowing balls of flame and lobbed them at Wind who blew them away. One landed on a golf course where they used dead branches to drive it from tee to tee. Fire scooped handfuls of charred needles and challenged Wind to blow them across the river.

The authorities saw them, thought they had damaged maybe 9,000 aces. Later they discovered, Fire and Wind had gone through more than 43,000.

Sun was appalled. He called Water for help. Water said no. Sun reminded him of all the wonderful things his father Light had done for Water as a child. Water was in a stubborn mood, would not be convinced. He liked it in North Dakota.

Sun told him how wonderful he was, told him he alone could help. Water had heard this before. With the Missouri rising he didn’t need Sun to flatter him.

Sun insinuated his mother would be disappointed if she knew Water refused such a simple request. Water was not persuaded, but did agree to send a subordinate.

Water’s lieutenant waylaid Smoke by the river, and as their bodies mingled a heavy dew rose to hide the damage of Fire. When Sun rose in the morning, only the highest flying birds could see what havoc Fire and Wind had wrought.

As Sun plodded through the day, his heat dried water from the mist. The dust grew invisible. Smoke rose again. Men who had sent out planes to fly with the birds learned what Sun had hidden. They summoned the man who had driven Fire from Arizona.

Fire too looked over the damage and saw he couldn’t do much more to the south without effort. He saw he was hemmed in up north by the scars they called Cerro Grande. He knew anything he did to the east would rouse the Feds. The west simply wasn’t amusing.

Fire knew the power of the men he was threatening and he knew the limits of the men who were coming.

Since Water was still refusing to leave the midwest, Fire called his son Lightening. Together they found a sheep ranch in Lincoln County owned by someone with power. Not as much as the men held in Los Alamos, but someone who knew everyone who was important. They started a fire on Sam Donaldson’s land that spread to the Mescalero Apache reserve.

With three highly visible blazes threatening three sovereign nations, Fire had time to plan. He watched the men send out their planes every night to measure the widening gyre of destruction. He listened to politicians and newscasters. He saw people flee Los Alamos and herd animals into trucks in Hondo.

He could turn his attention to his brother who was so utterly predictable. When he was engaged, Fire never ceased acting, but Sun would be growing weaker and vainer every day. Fire let him have his triumphs with the morning mist and noon clarity that fooled the Feds into thinking they were in control.

Then, each day, when Sun began to tire, Fire ordered Smoke to rise. A pink glow lay along the tops of the mountains, under the blue darkened by brown soot. Above the hottest part of the fire, Smoke turned pink, her edges gilded by the light. At dusk, she stood side by side with Sun, mocking the old man with her painted finery.

As Sun stooped lower, Smoke shot wisps his way. First Sun turned yellow, then red. As he sank below the mountains, Smoke slipped behind to prance in the last light. The place he left turned more brilliant than Fire himself.

In the night she returned to Water’s lieutenant by the river.

Fire was content with his second day.

He decided to stay low, let the flames spread where they would. He knew the Feds would be too occupied compiling the reports they needed to get reinforcements to do anything. He knew Water had probably found some old friends, was likely sitting around drinking somewhere in some rundown bar.

By night of the fourth day he was ready. The conflagration was nearing the upper edge of his last adventure in the area. The Santa Clara were upset, but he knew they didn’t understand the best way to deal with a man like Joe Reinarz who only counted buildings as wealth, not acequias or herbs.

He told Wind to be ready. This time they ran through the headwaters of the Santa Clara creek they’d missed ten years ago.

Smoke in her darkest dress spread herself across the mountains. As Sun raged, she covered him in scarlet, flaunted an orange ruffle. Wind bellowed.

When Sun finally retired, a white line appeared above Los Alamos, pulsing like Moon’s son, Northern Lights. Behind a thin veil borrowed from Smoke, an orange band glowed along the ridges.

Wind eventually got bored and went to sleep. Moon’s daughters in the Big Dipper came out. Smoke went down to meet the lieutenant. In the morning, Sun saw dew again covering what had happened.

The Feds were not happy. They don’t like being told they failed to protect something significant to a sovereign nation. They had already sent a new commander. Joe Reinarz was still there, but he had to answer to Dan Oltrogge, a man the lieutenant remembered from Hurricane Rita.

And so began the long battle between the Feds and Fire.

They brought in a psychologist to study Fire and predict his ways. Then they paid men from the valley to dig great earthen works to stop him. Sometimes, Fire would get so curious he would follow them. They were delighted they had him figured out. Other times, though, Fire could not be baited, would take a look, then walk off in some other direction. He had tripled his domain.

Some nights Smoke would meet her lieutenant. Other nights she would tease her Aunt Moon by turning her as red as she had her Uncle Sun. The haughty Moon would simply ignore her, continue on her path and, when she was beyond the reach of Smoke, call out her Star daughters.

Then there were the nights Smoke would be too disgusted by the soot smirching her veils. Then she left her soiled clothing on the mountains and retreated for the night. On those nights, the lieutenant tried to amuse her by conjuring small, white clouds from water he’d stolen from the fire fighters.

When Sun woke in the morning he would see a dark band stretching from badlands into the sky, cutting off the legs of those bright white pastries.

Other nights Thunder and Lightening would prowl, sometimes with the despondent lieutenant. One time they took out the power in the valley for six hours.

The worst nights for Sun were the ones when Fire would jeer at the Feds by throwing up spots of red for Los Alamos and the valley to see. Sometimes those dots would merge into lines, sometimes would diffuse into blurs. If the Feds could catch him, they would throw their suppressing chemicals at him. Usually, he was too fast, would start another flare before they had finished with the first.

The very worst were the evenings when Fire would watch men get into their trucks and start the long drive back to the valley. As they left, he would glower in their rear view mirrors.

Sun remembered the time Light had mused someday there might appear men so smitten with their own prowess they could no longer understand someone as unruly as Fire. When those men appeared, Light warned, it would not be enough to keep up appearances. Even Fire could do that. Sun must do more. Sun must maintain his standards.

Sun would rise every morning to tidy away the messes left by Fire and Smoke. By mid-mornings, the sky would be blue, the badlands would reflect back his light. In the cities people could believe what the Feds said, that Fire was at bay.

But Water remained in his drunken stupor. Nothing was there to stop temperatures from rising when Sun toiled so hard. When air on mountains born of fire would heat, the flames would also burn hotter.

At some time, Water will waken and call Wind to come get him. They’ll meet in some dive off the gulf coast, throw up another hurricane, then Water will ride back with Wind and finally listen to Sun. Fire will leave to recuperate at one his hot springs. The Feds will rush to the hurricane zone.

When this round of battles is over and Sun again rules supreme, no one will think about the forests where they fought. Sun will go on drying the ground. Fire will destroy what’s been weakened by drought. Water will dislodge the ashes so Wind can blow them away. Men who reseed will continue to think they’re in charge.

Nature alone will pick up the pieces. What else can she do? She needs Sun to feed her leaves, Water to feed her roots, Wind to fertilize her corn and other grasses, Smoke to sprout her seeds. She even needs Fire to periodically come through and clean her debris.

The Fire That Didn't Happen

2011-07-03T12:55:00.000-07:00

What the forest service lost Thursday, June 30, when fire spread through lands of the Santa Clara pueblo, wasn’t a battle with fire. I’d learned from their own local website that all fire fighters can do with big fires is try to direct the flames away from human targets. It's always the hurricane fed monsoons that actually extinguish them.

What they lost was the trust people like me had developed last summer when their website gave honest reports on a fire in rough country in the Jemez to the north. That credibility had increased with their reports on the Wallow fire in Arizona and the Pacheco fire near Tesuque.

I wasn’t angry at any particular person, but at the display of cultural values that have been evolving in the decades since Ronald Reagan until they threaten to overwhelm any alternatives.

There was first the suspicion that the forest service was undermanned for a catastrophic fire season. Modern managers have learned to detest labor intensive enterprises and replace them with better managers of machines. Government doesn’t have to hire businessmen or business school graduates to get this attitude in their employees: it’s what the young absorb growing up.

A Congress willing to barter funds to help people whose towns were destroyed by tornados is only a culmination in a trend of budget cutting.

At its height the Wallow fire had something like 4,000 people fighting it. There were less than 800 with the Las Conchas fire Wednesday, before reinforcements arrived. That same day, there were still 1,320 people fighting the 538,049 acre Wallow fire, 530 assigned to the 10,116 acre Pacheco fire, and 326 fighting the 72,650 acre Donaldson fire started by lightening Tuesday in Lincoln county. And these weren’t the only fires burning in Arizona and New Mexico this week.

Realistically, there are only so many people the government can keep trained and ready for what is seasonal work. In the past, the National Guard would have been used as a highly disciplined additional resource. That stopped when George Bush the elder converted the National Guard into the regular army in Kuwait.

We learned the consequences of they’re not being available when hurricanes hit New Orleans in 2005, but we’ve only responded by deploying even more men overseas.

Our Tea Party supported governor has been willing to call them out, but either she or their commander can visualize no role for them greater than standing guard. That’s all they did for the first few days they were utilized when we had no power last winter. With this fire, their primary purpose seems to have been aiding the evacuation of Los Alamos. It was the sheriff and the state Livestock Board who helped move animals from dangerous juniper grasslands in Lincoln County.

The perception of modern business and modern warfare is that people can be replaced with machines, especially in situations were aereal support is more effective. The problem is various types of planes cost money to buy, require skilled crews to use and expend fuels that are sensitive to inflation.

The most recent incident reports indicate Las Conchas has18 helicopters, Donaldson has 5 helicopters and 3 air tankers, and Wallow has 2 helicopters and air tankers available if needed. The last update for Pacheco on June 28 indicated they had 9 helicopters.

It wasn’t simply the problems with not having enough resources to fight the fire that made me angry It was the outside managers who appeared to be more interested in protecting their careers than in fighting the fire, something that may have been necessary given the level of politicians and power involved when the lab feels itself in danger.

The local fire information website stopped being informative. Indeed, for a few days, we were directed to another website altogether, the national Incident Information System. At the bottom of each entry there’s a form with standard categories like Basic Information, Current Situation and Outlook. The second item includes Fire Behavior. Whoever has been updating the information has been including Fire Behavior for the Wallow, Pacheco and Donaldson fires, but not for Las Conchas.

Each day the fire fighters have been issuing maps of the fire based on the nightly infrared reconnaissance flights. One June 27 they issued both a PDF and a Jpeg (picture) version of the map. On June 28 the map was a Jpeg, on June 30 and July 1 they were PDF’s that were not readable by older versions of Adobe, and on July 2 they returned to Jpegs.

On Tuesday the 27th, the map showed the fire edge, location of previous fires, and points of intense heat where the fire was the most active and points of isolated heat where it may have been preparing to spread. Since the fire had not spread north of Los Alamos, no territory to the north was shown.

On Wednesday, the map still showed the areas of intense and isolated heat, but no longer showed the previous fire scars. At the time, the fire was active to the west of Los Alamos and so nothing to the north was included.

A later map of Wednesday added a third day’s spread and showed the boundaries of Santa Clara pueblo lands for the first time.

The map for Thursday when the fire spread north did show the footprint of the Cerro Grande fire, but gave no place names. Instead of the daily growth, it showed only the perimeter of the fire. The only way you could tell the general location of the pueblo was with the county line.

On Friday the map again showed only the fire perimeter, but this time it included the spatial organization of the fire fighters. The legend didn’t explain all the symbols used, but Santa Clara appeared to be divided between two groups by the county line.

On Sunday, the map returned to its original format, showing the growth by day with a clear indication of what was destroyed when it entered Santa Clara land. It’s useful to finally have information I can use to know what it is I’m seeing and smelling, but it appeared two days after it was needed.

Those changes in format, those omissions or delays in information suggest some blunder was made in predicting the behavior of the fire, and that ever since men have been denying an error that could easily have been made in allocating scarce resources to fight a fire growing in all directions.

At 8:30 Thursday morning the Incident Information System reported

“Firefighters are monitoring long-range spotting, which have been seen as far north as the Santa Clara Pueblo. Firefighters will also be dealing with unfavorable winds which may result in extreme fire behavior and continue to push the fire to the north. Firefighters will continue scouting for potential fire line and burnout opportunities to prevent the fire from spreading.”

At the same the local Wordpress blog said “As of Thursday morning, fire crews reported the northern finger of the blaze is extending northward toward the Santa Clara Pueblo.”

Later that same day the Santa Clara suggested that that “long-rage spotting” or “northern finger” had “exploded across the western third of the reservation” producing the smoke visible from my back porch.

That night, the fire fighters described that as short runs with “spotting less than 1 mile occurred on the north head of fire” and then said it had crossed “moved northeast past NM Hwy 144 and spread into parts of the Cerro Grande burn area.” 144 in fact is a forest road west of Los Alamos and may represent the western side of the fire’s movements, but it does not appear on the maps they publish or on many other state maps.

Once the Santa Clara issued their press release, they have not been mentioned in the daily reports, except by obscure references to forest road 144 and the Cerro Grande scar.

Indeed, once the pueblo said they had “attended briefings and given recommendations and data to the Incident Command” and “repeatedly asked that adequate resources be devoted to the north end of the fire” another cultural game began: the one that says how dare a minority claim to be a victim.

Right after they issued their press release, the lab issued one in which the lab director discussed all the real victims of the fire, those who worked for the lab and lost their homes. They still had their lives and their way of life, but the loss of a tangible private asset made them the greater victims. He even listed the communities involved. In order they were: “Cochiti, the Jemez mountains, Santa Clara and San Ildefonso Pueblos and communities to the North.”

Then, like Princess Di, the lab director stopped in at “the Santa Claran Event Center in Española and the Cities of Gold Casino in Pojoaque” to personally meet with refugees from Los Alamos. He noted “one of the messages I heard loud and clear from evacuees was that many of them are isolated from information sources and they do not have a good understanding of what is happening at the Laboratory.”

The forest service also held community meetings in Jemez Springs, Cochiti Pueblo and at Santa Clara. They said local residents “received updated information on the fire and had their questions answered.”

On Friday they also began adding that “archeologists work with our dozers, graders and hand crews to minimize damage to sensitive areas.” They now also report “All firefighting crews receive a daily briefing on sensitive historical and cultural sites within the fire area.”

However, when they list the sites that are closed they don’t mention Puye Cliffs. It was damaged by the Cerro Grande fire and only reopened in May of 2009. The nearby recreation area is still closed. When I drove by Saturday there was check point indicating only authorized people could go beyond the gas station.

I suspect the basic problem, apart from not having enough resources, managers who are under extreme political pressure from a narcissistic lab, and directives that use economic criteria to define priorities, is that many do not understand the difference between the forest as a recreational alternative to urban life and its existence as an extension of an agricultural life rooted in a migratory past.

Economic impacts are easy to define. Los Alamos has more than 12,000 people and the lab employs many more from places like the Española valley. The Pueblo is less than 1,000. Measuring the comparative social and psychological impacts is impossible.

The real shortage hasn’t simply been firefighters, money, or time to respond. The real problem is there’s been no rain, was almost no snow, and the storms we’ve had so far have been better at starting new fires and taking out power than quenching flames.

Notes: Daily postings at nmfireinfo.wordpress.com and its link to the Incident Information System. Information is updated often, even in an existing report, and old postings are discarded.

Los Alamos National Laboratory. “”LANL Director Expresses Concern for Communities Across the Region,” 30 June 2011 press release.

____. “LANL Director Visits Los Alamos Evacuees,” 1 July 2011 press release.

Santa Clara Pueblo. “”Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land,” 30 June 2011 press release.

Pictures Taken the Day after an Unrecorded Event
1. Looking towards Los Alamos, 1 July 2011 about 7:03pm.

2. Driving into the afternoon void on highway 84/285 somewhere between Tesuque and Camel Rock, 1 July 2011 about 6:03pm.

3. The air turned brown from smoke coming down from Los Alamos as the road entered Pojoque; taken at La Puebla exit, 1 July 2011 about 6:17pm.

4. Looking west towards Santa Clara lands, 1 July 2011 about 7:36pm.

5. Looking north towards Española, 1 July 2011 about 7:37pm.

6. Sun coming in the car window between Tesuque and Camel Rock, 1 July 2011 about 6:03pm.

Fire Breaks Loose

2011-07-03T05:04:00.000-07:00

Fire is a wily beast.

Anyone who dismisses that as too anthropomorphic risks being blinded to the dynamics of wind and flame by his or her material view of the universe.

On Sunday the Las Conchas fire had exploded in the Bandelier National Monument. It quickly spread to 60,740 acres, then seemed to slow down. In the next three days it grew another 36,982 acres to 92,722 acres, a sixth the pace.

To the south where it had threatened Cochiti it encountered lighter fuels that slaked its appetite. To the north it was hedged by the grassy remains of the Cerro Grande fire of 2000. It seemed content going west.

At noon on Thursday, June 30, the Los Alamos fire chief said “We’re starting to turn the corner on this fire.” The fire service’s information officer had already assured people that “fire is a science,” that a fire behaviorist could study the way a fire behaves and predict what it would do. There were even hopes it would rain.

Driving home the sky was dark and stormy. The winds were picking up. When I turned into my valley, I left the clouds behind, but I could see a rainbow to the east from whence I’d just come.

To the west there was strong plume of pink smoke rising from the Jemez.

While we were being lulled by pronouncements that the fire was held at bay at the borders of the lab, it had been inching north unheralded. When you looked at the infrared map from that morning, you could see it had entered Santa Clara land where it was already even with the scar’s northern tip.

Just as it moved north of the limiting old fire bed, the winds picked up.

While I was at work, the pueblo governor had declared a state of emergency. The fire had burned 6,000 acres in the watershed, all the land in the headwaters of the Santa Clara creek that feeds their irrigation system.

The winds continued to rise. The sun turned red. The pink plume turned dark grey, The smoke rising above turned orange in the reflection of the sun.

Then the sky grew dark. The lights of the gas station at the base of the road that leads to Puye cliffs and Santa Clara canyon came on to the right of my neighbor’s Siberian elm.

The winds were howling about the house. Dots of orange appeared above a ridge. Then the dots merged into a broad U-shaped line with a blur of red to the north where I could see shadows of bare tree trunks.

When I woke at midnight, the winds had stopped. The stars were out. The big dipper hung off the west end of the porch. Los Alamos was a white line, either from the fire or lights in town. The Santa Clara fire was a long static red line, no longer pulsing.

When I woke again at 5:45, the dew had fallen. The mountains were gone. There were no signs of smoke or fire. A half hour later, the lights of the gas station are out. The sandstone cliffs were etched in the sun. Those who had slept through the night woke reassured man could master the universe.

Notes:
Baca, Joe. Las Conchas Fire Burns More Than 6,000 acres of Santa Clara Pueblo Land,” 30 June 2011 press release.

Pitassi, Brad. United States National Forest Service, Southwest Area Type I Incident Management Team information officer. Quoted by Staci Matlock, “Los Alamos Residents Flee Growing Las Conchas Fire,” Santa Fe’s The New Mexican, 27 June 2011.

Tucker, Doug, Los Alamos fire chief. Quoted by Carol A. Clark, “Fire Battle Begins to Turn Corner,” Los Alamos Monitor, 30 June 2011.

United States National Forest Service. “Las Conchas Progression” map, 30 June 2011.

Picture 1. Smoke from the Santa Clara fire, 30 June 2011 about 7:56pm; just to the right of the Siberian elm in the center is the gas station at the base of the road to Puye cliffs.

Picture 2: Rainbow to the east, 30 June 2011 about 6:24pm.

Picture 3: Smoke from the Santa Clara fire, 30 June 2011 about 6:25pm, where the rainbow as shining to the east.

Picture 4: Santa Clara fire, 30 June 2011 about 9:19pm; the red blur is above the gas station. With the high winds and slow shutter speed, it was impossible to get a picture that doesn’t have some camera movement.
system.

When Fire Becomes Routine

2011-06-30T19:47:00.001-07:00

Wednesday, June 29, the fire had settled into a routine. The early mornings were hazy, the afternoons were stormy, the sunsets were unusual, the nights were clear enough to see the big dipper from my back porch.

The fire was measured out in daily press briefings, infrared maps of its extent and NASA photographs of its smoke. County officials jostled for their minute of fame. The lab wanted to hunker down, but the new media kept it alert.

Since the last fire, every person who comes on site has a cell phone with a camera and the ability to send instant impressions to friends. I’m sure in the more secure areas there are still many restrictions about the use of such devices, but in other areas where the fire threatened people were probably unencumbered.

I suspect the people in the area didn’t just include the essential LANL (or LANS as its now called) personnel, but the local backhoe drivers and others hired by the lab or county to dig all those defenses they’re bragging about. Everyone has a cell phone, everyone has an opinion.

Paranoia about the lab resurfaced. The Santa Fe newspaper reported the fire “was burning three miles from Area G, where barrels of radioactive waste are stored.” Those became corroding barrels by the time I talked to deliveryman in the city yesterday afternoon.

Others believed the fire was on lab grounds, despite the disclaimers.

The lab responded with a press release describing its efforts to monitor the air. No one, or not many anyway, feared the current nuclear inventory. People have always been much more concerned about what was dumped in the late 1940's and early 1950's before there were procedures to follow, or avoid.

They reported their preliminary samples “show no radioactive materials from Laboratory operations or legacy waste in smoke from the Las Conchas fire.”

Unfortunately, many will remain unconvinced. They’ve learned from things like the beryllium exposure that information that carries the potential for high liabilities is not made public.

Who believes they would tell us about anything less than a serious release? Who thinks it matters that the radioactive profile of the lab’s smoke is not different than that in the area, since most of the smoke is from the same source?

But then, most of us know this and recognize it as the price we pay for the pleasures of living in this part of the country. If it comes it will be horrendous. Otherwise, as they say, less serious than smoking cigarettes, hard drinking or doing drugs.

It’s just another hobby horse, another familiar response to crisis, trotted out with all the others.

Reporters unable to actually report on the fire fell back on the routine. They quoted the fire chief who saw the flames Sunday and thought “Oh my god, here we go again.” They talked to people in Los Alamos who were throwing out flammable materials or watering the lawn, as if either would stop a fire if it reached the town. But familiar activities are soothing.

Another reporter visited an evacuation center in Española to find an elderly woman who said “the fire was an act of God.” Her comments were posted on You Tube with the implication that this was God’s punishment.

No one checked. Her husband, Casey, is a retired lab technician who worked with the Boy Scouts for years on environmental projects. Every year he walks to Chimayó as an act of penance.

If they wanted to find panic instead of stoicism, they could have talked to my boss’s mother who left Cochiti after a spot fire burned a few miles from her house Sunday night.

If they wanted frustration, they could have talked to the Santa Clara who felt the dangers to their lands weren’t being taken seriously.

But those interviews would have broken the routines the reporters used to lull themselves into believing they are doing their jobs.

When a fire becomes routine, the danger is people’s routines are revived to shield them from the simmering crisis.

Notes:
Los Alamos National Laboratory. “No Wildfire on Laboratory Property; Active Air Monitoring Underway,” npsnmfireinfo website, 29 June 2011.

Los Angeles Times. “Miracle Of The Mud,” 16 April 1995, on Casey Stevens.

Stevens, Virginia. Quoted by KOB TV, “Los Alamos Evacuee: Fire act of God,” 28 June 2011.

Tucker, Doug. Quoted by Staci Matlock, “Los Alamos Residents Flee Growing Las Conchas Fire,” The New Mexican, 27 June 2011.

Top picture: Locust trees blowing in the wind to the east, June 29 about 8:18pm.

Middle picture: Black Mesa in front of an invisible Los Alamos, June 29 about 8:58am.

Bottom picture: Black Mesa with the trail of smoke that leads back to the fire, June 29 about 8:17pm.

Dislocations

2011-06-30T07:23:00.000-07:00

By Tuesday, June 28, the fire had ceased to exist as a living presence. It was known only by its spoor.

The smoke woke me around 3:30 in the morning. It apparently collects under the southwest facing back porch roof, then gets trapped by the fence to the southeast. As I tried to get back to sleep without an air conditioner to purify the air, I was wondering, should I go sit in the car with the air on, should I try to find a motel room, is there an evacuation site still open?

When I woke again, the mountains to the west were lost in a haze, but it was clear to the east.

Los Alamos was still a dim presence when I left for work around 9:30. I thought I could just see a white line divided into two parts where I assumed new smoke was rising.

In Santa Fe, the fire was known only by its refugees, the ones who had to leave Los Alamos yesterday. The man who delivered the bottled water was staying in Truches where the morning was cold.

At the bank the teller who’s a volunteer fireman wasn’t there. His place was taken by someone from the Los Alamos branch. Everyone was friendly, but it took three to figure out where the check orders were kept for pick-up.

The drive home was more dramatic than yesterday. Another storm was coming, but the grey was replaced by an overall wash of brown. Mountains and lower geographic features were blurs. Over that was a layer of gray that was shaped like a storm, but could be more smoke. To the west, there was a rosy hue which could be either the fire or the sun.

Everything was a shadow of itself.

The storm never came. The smell of smoke increased. The sun couldn’t break through the haze of pastel chalk.

I made up the bed in the spare bedroom but still woke at 11:45, my nose too dry to sleep. The sky was clear, the stars were visible as were the lights of the Santa Clara gas station across the river.

Still everything was dislocated. The mesa was a blur, the warning lights of Los Alamos invisible. Sleep only came when my nose cleared.

Top picture: The invisible Los Alamos behind the Black Mesa, June 28 about 7:43pm.

Middle picture the invisible Los Alamos behind a leg of the Black Mesa with a hint of smoke to the east (left), June 28 about 9:26am.

Bottom picture: The Black Mesa in front of invisible mountains, June 28 about 6:28pm.

The Fire Loses Reality

2011-06-30T06:00:00.000-07:00

Monday, June 27, I lost complete touch with the fire as it disappeared behind a fog of smoke and a dearth of information.

It wasn’t just the closing of the lab and the evacuation of Los Alamos that threw me back to the emotions of the Cerro Grande fire. It was also the combination of bureaucratic timidity and media incompetence that meant no information.

Last time, Washington politicians arrived. Whenever there was a press conference, the locals came out for the pictures, then scurried after the retreating bigger wigs. They had no time for their constituents, only for their own networking opportunities.

The major networks sent crews. The local reporters, hoping to be the next Dan Rather, hung around them, hoping for a bit of notice that could translate into a contract that might mean a better job. They were too intent on currying favor to actually cultivate sources who might tell them about the fire.

The local reporters who actually tried to cover the story around the barriers set by the lab were suspended. One had the temerity of using his press pass to bring family members into the evacuated town to record their responses to seeing their destroyed home. This was considered an abuse of power to favor cronies.

There was one, it may have been the same, who reported more of the rumors that were swirling outside the sterile press releases. That voice too disappeared.

Now the forest service blog has been usurped. It carries all the official press releases and describes the strategies (not the actions) of the fire fighting managers. The fire is reduced to a daily map showing its extent. It no longer is described as active or inactive, running or crowning or whatever else we’ve learned fires do.

And people I talk to complain. They don’t know what’s going on. They can’t connect the geographic references used by the media with the landmarks they know. The press is doing nothing but repeating abstracts of press releases.

And, if you live in Santa Fe, instead of down in the valley, you can’t see anything either. All you know if your throat is sore, your eyes gummy. There’s a layer of ash and charred pine needles in the yard. The sun is red, the mountains are gone. But nothing can be learned.

I grew so restive that afternoon I fled the office at 2:30 and headed north.

The sky are grey, visibility limited. You could see nothing of the fire. It felt like I was rushing to get home before a snow storm closed the road. When I made the turn west towards my house and the fire, suddenly the sky are bluer, the distance clearer.

Topography is everything here. Running parallel to the road north of Pojoaque is a geologic formation, a monocline, that’s barely visible from the road and carries a name as obscure as the many others used on maps that have been puzzling people trying to learn where the fire it.

Unnamed and unseen by most, it’s still enough to channel the weather, to keep rain away from the dry area to the east. For a storm indeed was passing through.

Around 4:40 I began to feel a few sprinkles, could see lightening to the west of the Black Mesa. Then the winds resumed and I could smell the smoke. Within twenty minutes the sounds of thunder had moved north, there was only water pocked sand in the drive.

By 6:15 the smoke was creeping out of Los Alamos, a heavy brown presence. Beneath, the grass turned dark gold. To the north, the sun turned red. The air was still.

The smoke continued to move to form an arch over my head that would turn into a skull cap when the light faded.

The sun sank behind the Jemez turning the sky red with its own reflection, more brilliant than the fire.

Then darkness. South towards Los Alamos there seemed to a narrow white line. It seemed to pulse like the northern lights, but that could have been an affect created by smoke distorting my view.

I could no longer tell mirages from reflections from reality.

Top picture: Sun setting in the Jemez, June 27 about 8:15pm.

Middle picture: Smoke to the east, June 27 about 6:55pm.

Bottom picture: The grass to the east under the cap of smoke, June 27 about 7:48pm.

The Clarity of Fire

2011-06-29T08:10:00.000-07:00

Sunday, June 26, I walked southwest into an arroyo between my house and the Black Mesa. The heat had built up so much in the past week, when the thermometer read 93 at 6pm, that the heat from the clay and sand soil burned through my shoes. For the first time it was uncomfortable to walk on what had become shallow dunes.

I also walked a quarter mile down the road to the northeast where the Pacheco Canyon fire was visible. There’s a break in the ridges of clay and gravel, and it looks like a flood might once have broken through. The area where I was standing is a flat, grassy prickly pear cactus field that edges another arroyo.

It was a normal fire morning.

The winds increased about noon. A few weeks ago I bought a portable wind gauge to learn exactly how severe they were when the locust and tamarix began to twist. Whatever it was designed for, it doesn’t work in New Mexico. I have no idea how severe they were, only that they’ve been much worse this month.

Around two I took a nap. When I awoke, the light coming through the east window of my bedroom had changed. The grass, usually brown, was silver.

I grabbed my camera to try to photograph the effects of light. When I couldn’t see enough grass from my back porch, I started to walk around the house.

That’s when I saw the huge mushroom cloud behind the Black Mesa. It looked like everyone’s worst fears of what could come from Los Alamos.

The New Mexico fire website, nmfireinfo.wordpress.com, said a fire had broken out behind the lab in the Bandelier National Forest. It didn’t have to tell me it was the most powerful fire we’ve seen - and in the 20 years I’ve lived here, they have been three large fires around Bandelier: the Dome Fire of 1996, the Cerro Grande fire of 2000, and this one. There was also one, the La Mesa, in 1977.

I talked to someone yesterday who lives in Los Alamos. He said he when we went into the local hardware store Sunday he saw the first wisps of smoke. When he came out, about 15 minutes later, the fire had grown huge.

At the time officials said the fire was 3,000 acres. When I went to bed they said 6,000 to 9,000 acres. It took the Pacheco Canyon fire a week to reach that size.

When I looked the next morning, they said it was 43,000 acres, much of it to the south and east of the hot spots near Las Conchas. It had taken the Cerro Grande fire two weeks to cover that much land.

One difference was weather. The Cerro Grande fire resulted from a controlled burn begun on May 4, in the spring of a relatively normal year, when the winds are high. This is early summer in the year of a severe drought when high winds have persisted longer than usual.

The other difference was that this fire was more visible than the Cerro Grande. The plume grew, fading to grey in the east where it mixed with whatever smoke was rising from Pacheco Canyon. To the west the edge was gilded by the sun. To the north, the sky was still clear.

When the sun went down, spots of orange became visible. They sometimes merged into a line, sometimes disappeared. Eventually the red warning lights around Los Alamos appeared below and in front of the ridge line of fire.

From where I stood on my back porch I didn’t know if I was actually seeing the fire, or just its reflection in the clouds.

On the one hand there was a sense of great clarity. For much of the day, the smoke had some form. In the night, it was reduced to a thin line of orange. Everything was visible, even if it was only effects of light and smoke I was seeing.

On the other hand there was a feeling no one yet knows what’s going on - that clarity will come in the morning after they’ve made their reconnaissance flights. Then the freefall will be stabilized.

But for now, any human in the area knew there was a fire and had a fairly good idea where it was. The rest was mystery.

Top picture: Las Conchas fire over the Black Mesa, June 26, around 4:46pm.

Middle picture: View to the east, June 26, around 4:43pm.

Bottom picture: Las Conchas fire through the lilacs, June 26, around 8:09pm.

The Invisible Made Visible; the Visible Made Invisible

2011-06-29T06:29:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, on June 18, I was driving from Albuquerque when I saw smoke to the west. I was somewhere in the flat lands of San Felipe and San Domingo where the road is moving to the northeast to rise to Santa Fe.

Just before the bypass exit for Santa Fe the state had posted a sign warning visibility was poor between Raton and the Colorado border. The fire changed from side to side, was sometimes straight ahead as the road changed directions. Without a compass, one is never quite sure where one is pointed in this mountainous land.

Then as I was headed north the fire stayed to the east, until I passed it coming down the Tesuque hill into the valleys below Santa Fe.

When I got home, I checked the local forest service website, nmfireinfo.wordpress.com, and learned there had been a fire burning for some time near Raton, and that there was a new one in Pacheco Canyon northeast of Santa Fe.

The land there is rugged with few homes to protect. The fire continued to burn, but had little impact on our lives. I could always see the smoke when I was in some high place in Española and every day I could see it from the city limits to Pojoaque where it disappeared behind the ridges.

Sometimes I could see smoke, greyish white and diffuse, from my back porch.

It settled into something like the local tame erupting volcano, sometimes active, sometimes not. There but no menace. Only regretted for destroying recreation lands familiar to people I work with in Santa Fe.

Instead of obscuring the land, the smoke made it more visible. Unless it’s foggy, I see the landscape as three colors. Near are the uplifts of sand, clay and rock along the river. Behind them, nearly the same color, are harder rock. Behind them are the Jemez to the west and the Sangre de Cristo to the east, usually dark shadowy forms.

When the smoke drifted up from the Wallow fire in Arizona, it hid the mountains, then the ridges, then the bad lands. Everywhere people commented on losing the mountains, and would take pictures of what wasn’t there.

This fire was nearer. In the mornings I could see the smoke drifting through the valleys. Because the intervening ridges were different distances from the center of the fire, the density of the smoke varied. The detail that was normally hidden was revealed.

Top picture: The Pacheco Canyon fire, June 26 about 9:35am; taken a quarter mile from my house.

Middle picture: The Black Mesa, June 6 about 7:48pm; usually one can see the mountains behind Los Alamos, the ridges in front and the badlands. Visibility is down to about 2 miles.

The Year the Sun Turned Red

2011-06-29T05:38:00.000-07:00

I’ve begun to see clouds differently.

In early June we started to get smoke from the fires in Arizona and, they said, Mexico.

At first it simply got hazy and the sun turned red. When we had dust storms when I lived in Abilene, Texas, the sun turned silver as the sky turned dark at noon.

I don’t know why the difference but suspect it’s in the particles in the air that are filtering the sun - that the dust storm is simply dirt, and all that’s picked up from the ground, while the smoke includes organic matter from burning trees as well as the chemicals used to fight the fire.

That’s when I began to question clouds. For they showed up every evening at about the same time.

I knew that no matter how regular the work of the fire fighters, we couldn’t be exactly the number of miles away from the fire that their smoke got to us at the right time to turn the sun red. I knew the fires were burning 24 hours a day, no matter how many hours the fire fighters were working.

I decided, based on no information, that the smoke was coming our way all day, but that it only became visible when the sun went down. This wasn’t just the disappearance of light, but a function of the sun itself.

During the day, its heat evaporated whatever moisture was in the smoke from the water used to fight it. When the water disappeared, the dust became lighter and fell to the earth. One day I came home to find an orange poppy petal splotched with white spots like someone had spilled bleach on it.

As the sun began dropping in the west, its heat intensity changed and more water remained in the smoke so it became visible.

The fire in Los Alamos began Sunday afternoon. The sunset was normal. Monday was the first day since Arizona filled the sky that the sun was red. The firefighters had begun work in earnest.

Top picture: Smoke from the Wallow fire in Arizona, looking west towards the Jemez, June 2 about 6:57 pm.

Middle picture: The first day of the Las Conchas fire near Los Alamos, before the firefighting began in earnest, June 26 about 8:14pm.

Bottom picture: Smoke from the Las Conchas fire near Los Alamos, looking at the Jemez a little more to the south, June 27 about 7:08pm.

Cat of the Century

2011-03-13T07:40:00.000-07:00

Murder is a crime against society, or so W. H. Auden believed.

In his much reprinted 1948 essay, “The Guilty Vicarage,” he divided crimes into those against individuals, those against society, and those against God. He then argued the mystery story was an attempt to return society to the state of innocence that existed before crime disrupted the social order.

So, what happens to the detective novel when the author doesn’t believe in the legitimacy of society, only accepts the hegemony of the individual?

You get Rita Mae Brown’s Cat of the Century.

Brown began writing mysteries after Lilian Jackson Braun had published The Cat Who Could Read Backwards in 1966 in which a pair a Siamese cats brought a journalist’s attention to oddities that led him to solve a mystery. This 2010 book features Mary Minor Haristeen, known as Harry; her dog, Tee Tucker, and two cats, Mrs. Murphy and Pewter.

Brown’s novel begins like a classic detective story with conflicts within a small group, in this case the board of the alumnae association of what had been a woman’s college in Missouri, a finishing school that had grown into a university. Two women on the board, Mariah and Flo, have been feuding since they were students. Their bickering has forced the retired chairman, Inez, to return to replace a woman, Liz, who couldn’t control the board meetings.

Flo makes clear Mariah is selling fakes in her high-end jewelry store and Mariah accuses Flo and Liz of promoting fraudulent investments. Flo is murdered and Mariah disappears.

The dog smells blood in a manure pile. If this were Lassie or Rin Tin Tin, Tucker would have continued to fuss until Mariah’s body was discovered. But there’s a blizzard and this is a description of a narcissistic society in which private knowledge is sufficient. The animals, acting more like a Greek chorus than Koko and Yum Yum, simply comment among themselves and let the humans be.

About page 149, I reached the point where I realized 17 pages had passed since the murder, that nothing was happening and there were another 127 pages to get through. Actually, nearly a hundred passed before anything more important occurred to explain the murders.

A reader of classic writers like Agatha Christie or Rex Stout would be hard pressed to keep reading the sections that seemed little more than an updated Ladies Home Journal filled with product endorsements for Fred Perry, Volvo and Trader Joe’s mixed with descriptions of houses filled with “cinnamon-scented pillar candles” and meals of poached salmon with hollandaise, “endive salad and new potatoes with parsley” or “roast chicken, crisp baby potatoes, and a light salad.”

But this is not a traditional who-done-it. This is one where characters are criticized for believing in a society of laws and where people never outgrow the values of a status conscious college, where civility is prized and a lady never speaks honestly to anyone but her trusted friends.

If one looks at the book as unraveling a crime against the individual, rather than society, it makes more sense.

To conform to Auden’s views of mysteries, this type of narrative needs to describe the bubble that envelopes the lead character, then show escalating threats against it, until the source of danger is removed and life in the bubble restored to its former tranquility.

All the words spent describing the houses and meals, the shopping trips and clothes build the details of a world we want to join, don’t wish to see destroyed. We learn to care about the people who inhabit that world, Harry; her husband’s first partner, Inez; Inez’s best friend, Tally; and, of course, their pets. After all, they are the victims, not Flo.

The real drama isn’t the murder, but the disintegration of a store keeper, Terri Kincaid. In the opening chapters, she makes Harry actually pay for a pot her dog broke. We’re told Harry always considered her to be “a pain in the neck,” “one of those benighted souls who believed laws were the answer,” and a “smarmy little social climber.”

The bickering among the women on the alumnae board is dangerous, not because it leads to murder, but because it disrupts the world of another member of the protected society by making 98-year-old Inez feel too old to handle difficult people. It also threatens to upstage a celebration honoring Tally.

The murder of Flo becomes something the small group can pass time discussing when they meet in one another’s homes in Virginia. The harassing email messages signed by the dead Mariah are less serious threats to their world than the weather, a blizzard in Missouri, sleet in Virginia.

All these seemingly trivial details that destroy the momentum of the traditional mystery story actually contribute to the feeling of a good world that exists outside society besieged by danger from contact with that society.

Kerri turns out to be a link in a chain of drug dealers who has become an addict herself. Harry realizes the situation when she returns to the store and Kerri throws a china figurine at her. She doesn’t tell her police friend, but instead repeats a private solution: it’s “best to steer clear of those people, especially if they won’t go for help.”

The master drug dealer is revealed to be Liz, who murdered both Mariah and Kerri because they threatened to expose her. None of this is figured out by the principals, but is information passed on by their policewoman friend after Liz attacks Inez and Tally to keep them quiet.

The only comment we get from Harry is that Liz was another “social climber” filled with “tawdry ambition.” Earlier another character had told Flo, Liz “suffers from attention-deficit syndrome,” meaning she always has to be the center of attention. Her crime wasn’t bilking investors or selling drugs, but not being sufficiently acclimated to Harry’s social world.

This novel, like most mysteries, has a subplot that’s supposed to serve as a red herring: the death of a heavy drinker whose wife had already left when he was run over twenty years before. In the end, the murderer is prompted to confess. He’s the black, possibly gay, store keeper whose men’s clothing store is next to Kerri’s.

Throughout Garvey is shown to be everything Liz and Kerri are not, a proper retailer who flatters his customers to make his sales, not one who presumes equality. Since he’s moved into the protected society by knowing his proper place, he’s forgiven for his youthful indiscretion, leaving the scene of an accident, and asked to serve a token number of hours of community service as punishment.

In a mystery whose purpose is to protect a good society from the chaos of the outer world, the list of likely motives changes. In the beginning, when the book still resembles a classic detective novel, Flo thinks the reason people fight is sex or money, then giggles at the thought of sex among the members of the alumnae board.

After Mariah’s disappearance, when attention is still focused on her attempt at embezzling money from the alumnae society, Liz suggests the reason is taxes. What begins as the comment of a single character is repeated in so many contexts that the view no longer differentiates individuals, but begins to characterize the authorial presence. After Kerri’s death, Garvey repeats drugs are a “nontaxable milk train.”

In a society that is perceived to be run by politicians driven by ego and financed by drugs, there is no social order, and therefore no role for logic. After their local policewoman friend explains Liz’s financial shenanigans, Harry admits “I would never have figured it out” while Inez and Tally repeat what they learned in college, “Trust your instincts and don’t expect life to be logical.”

We never learn anything more about Flo’s death than we knew when it occurred. Such details are immaterial to the core story, the description of a perfect world, threatened by deranged individuals who are removed, not by society, but by their own actions. People inside the bubble don’t need to figure out who did it, only observe, confident their particular shell of privilege will protect them.

After the outside threats are removed, we know the world has been restored to Auden’s innocence when the 100-year-old Tally says the adventure made her “suddenly felt forty again.”

Their’s is a special world where both natural and manmade laws are suspended. Tally repeatedly says she expects to outlive them all.

Vidal, Burr, Bachmann

2011-02-27T05:13:00.000-08:00

Gore Vidal’s Burr is a very bad book.

Michele Bachmann read it her senior year in college; she graduated in 1978. I was a bit older, working on my dissertation, when I bought a copy in 1973, soon after it came out in paperback.

She says his snotty treatment of the founding fathers was what offended her. I don’t remember exactly what irritated me, except it made me so angry I wanted to throw the book across the room. At the time, my generalization was that it represented a failure of imagination.

I’ve since continued to read his essays, including the most recent that could use a stronger editorial presence. However, I never read another of his serious works of fiction. Myra Breckinridge might be an important novel, but I’ll never know why.

I eventually did relent a little to read the three mysteries he published earlier as Edgar Box. They were readable, but not compelling enough to make me wish he’d continued writing them. As I recall, the failure of imagination in them was limited to the sex scenes. Following the hard-boiled detective tradition, Vidal felt it necessary to have his hero, Peter Sargeant, become involved with woman. However, he could only say, after he got them together, “and then they did it,” sounding much like an adolescent boy describing the wonders of something he didn’t yet know but needs to pretend he did.

Bachmann says her feelings about the book turned her from being a Democrat to a Republican. I don’t believe she’s ever said why she associated Burr with the Democrats, if it was the politics of Vidal which are snobbishly critical of both parties, or if the person who recommend the book to her was a Democrat.

In my case, I turned on the editorial establishment that had promoted the book as “wicked entertainment of a very high order,” a “tour de force,” a “novel of Stendhalian proportions,” to quote only blurbs from the New York Review of Books, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

I’ve rarely ever read another review of a novel since, and then only of books or authors I had never heard of, usually from foreign countries. I suspect I’ve missed a good read or two, but I’m know I missed a great deal of boredom from being trapped on the same page with whatever the claque was promoting at the moment.

Pneumonia

2011-02-20T03:14:00.000-08:00

The Affordable Health Care for America Act won’t kill the elderly, as some allege, but misrepresentations about the law and medicine in general absolutely do kill.

Recently a friend of my boss died from pneumonia. He was an uninsured alcoholic who had been sober for 15 years, ate well and spent time in the gym. He delayed going to his doctor until his temperature was rising quickly, then refused to go to the hospital. He apparently believed the antibiotics and his strong body were enough.

In the night his fever increased. His landlady saw him out in the snow, she thinks, trying to bring down his body temperature. She found him dead the following morning. As near as anyone knows, when he lay down he fell asleep and his lungs continued to fill until he couldn’t breathe.

The week before, the mother of a friend died from pneumonia in a nursing home after her father had refused treatment for her. It was bacterial in origin, possibly caused by a piece of food that had become stuck. The woman suffered from dementia and either didn’t notice the irritation or couldn’t explain it. She died less than a day after my friend heard she was sick.

Bacterial pneumonia is treatable with antibiotics. Patients with the viral form usually survive when they’re given intravenous fluids and monitored during the crisis.

As near as the daughter and my boss know, both people weren’t treated because men believed they couldn’t afford the treatment. The eighty-five-year-old woman was covered by Medicare. An emergency room would have had to treat the fifty-something man, regardless of his income or insurance status.

I don’t know if the man was uninsured because, as my boss believes, he was one of the many who have the money, but believe they’re too healthy to need insurance, or if he’d tried in the past and been refused. Perhaps being a recovering alcoholic, for Alcoholics Anonymous says you are never an ex-drinker, is itself a disqualifying pre-existing condition. The new law, with its demand for universal coverage, phases out such hurdles to medical treatment, though it can do nothing about the bitterness created by rejection.

False perceptions arise from the health care debate that emphasizes the high cost of treatment and the plight of the uninsured. We’re constantly told emergency rooms are overwhelmed as a result. The subtexts are that treatment might have become substandard and that people who use them are parasites. We certainly are told the costs are greater.

What people don’t hear is that there are new alternatives to emergency rooms, the urgent care centers. If the man had gone to one, instead of waiting to see his doctor, he would have been diagnosed faster and they probably would have begun treating him immediately because they had the necessary resources on site.

When people hear about the cost of treating the elderly who will never recover all their capacities, they don’t hear there’s a difference between treating a disease like cancer, which may kill anyway, and treating a temporary infection.

The ignorance about the dangers of out of control infections also comes from the same media sources, the ones who deny climate change and evolution. In making their arguments, they treat scientists and science with contempt. That attitude, in turn, reinforces people’s natural fear of disease and distrust of doctors who can’t treat the common cold. It makes some people less likely to listen to the medical programs that do appear on television that try to educate about diseases like pneumonia.

The media would deny its responsibility, in the same way it denied there was any relationship between its words and the actions of Jared Loughner who shot Gabrielle Gifford in Tucson on July 8. They would say they are not responsible for the individual actions of a one-time drunk or a man tired of a marriage. They would say individual actions are just that, individual, and not part of a social pattern.

They might also suggest the solution was eliminating malpractice laws. Regulations and contracts may have dictated what an institution or physician could have done in these situations.
However, I do wonder what ethics can condone a nursing home that doesn’t begin treating a treatable infection immediately or a doctor who doesn’t call the ambulance or send a nurse with a man obviously in need of treatment. I wonder what is their moral obligation to seriously inform people of their choices when they can see the people there are talking to are laboring under serious misunderstandings of medical situations.

Ideas, diffused through an atmosphere of misrepresentations and paranoia that feeds of people’s instinctive fears of the unknown or uncontrollable, indeed can kill as swiftly as the infections they abet.

Fire and Ice

2011-02-13T09:48:00.000-08:00

Here in the Española valley of northern New Mexico, we’ve now experienced serious displacements cause by fire and ice. Our reactions to each were very different.

More than a decade ago, when the Cerro Grande forest fire threatened Los Alamos, and the employment of people in the valley, people came together. The evacuated either moved to shelters or in with friends. The people responsible, the US Forest Service, held daily news conferences on the progress of putting out the fire. The individual tragedies, the lost homes, were part of a greater story, the threat to a national laboratory that contained radioactive materials.

The loss of natural gas for five or six days when morning temperatures hovered around zero isolated people. No matter how drafty the houses, people had to stay in them. There were no public areas to visit, no restaurants selling warm meals: they were all closed to conserve electricity and few employees would have come to work if they’d tried to open.

One man in Española couldn’t visit his wife in the hospital. His house varied between 30 and 35 degrees. He was trapped by the need to stay home to protect what he could from the threat of broken pipes, so his wife would have a place to return to. We all were trapped by our plumbing, and even the rich discovered they weren’t immune from poor architectural design.

The people responsible, New Mexico Gas Company, cancelled press conferences. The local media, headquartered a hundred miles to the south in Albuquerque, didn’t begin to cover the story until after the Super Bowl, and then only after people in Taos, angry the gas promised for Sunday hadn’t materialized, had begun to rebel and created something to be televised. Pictures of frozen water simply weren’t as compelling to the national media as those of a raging fire.

The greater story had no overriding national interest - the national laboratory has a different source for its natural gas. It was simply one of the compounded consequence of individual attempts to stay warm, a variation of what we now call irrational exuberance.

When cold hit Texas the week before the Super Bowl, furnaces worked longer. The utilities responded to the stress in places like Dallas by instituting rolling brown outs in the more remote areas, especially the western part of the state that produced the natural gas shipped into New Mexico.

When outside temperatures fell way below zero, as low as -18 by the Santa Fe airport on February 3rd, furnaces worked harder, and the natural gas company responded by cutting off service to more remote areas to keep urban centers warm.

Everyone felt they were the victim of someone else, and most responded by denying the reality of the problem. Instead of keeping one part of a house habitable and keeping the rest just warm enough to stop pipes from breaking, people insisted on keeping their entire houses the usual temperature and continuing their usual lives. They were upset they couldn’t have their daily hot showers.

While some people responded to the calls for conservation, my boss’s mother told me she didn’t turn down her heat because she didn’t want to get sick. Her son told me he had turned up his heat because the house had began to cool between furnace cycles.

The economy began to define the seriousness of the disaster, not nature. When the gas went out the day before a normal payday, some people in Taos bought 20 space heaters each, while one of our employees in Española didn’t have enough spare cash left to buy one while they were in stock.

The people in the gas company operations center had no awareness of the difficulty of bringing the gas back in rural areas where poverty dominates; they were only concerned with protecting the physical plant from a complete breakdown. The governor, Susana Martinez, had only been in office for a few weeks and had no staff to respond.

It’s too simple to dismiss her feeble response as that of a Tea Partier who doesn’t believe in government. When things become extreme, human responses tend to overrule ideology. During the Cerro Grande fire, a libertarian, Gary Johnson, was governor. One interview I remember was one in which he lamented his powerless to do anything about a raging wild fire - picking up a shovel and tossing some dirt simply wasn’t enough.

But things were different. It wasn’t just the differences between fire and ice, spring and deep winter. There was also a difference in our expectations.

In the intervening decade, many had become more and more isolated in media created bubbles that mediated their responses to reality. An unexpected disaster that challenged the security of that bubble was more than a discomfort, it was a threat to a whole set of cultural values, and they responded, as people often do with severe threats, with denial, with an attempt to maintain normality.

The media, who created the bubble, especially those who broadcast the more demagogic commentators, were enamored of the power of social media in Egypt. Some began to show people how to turn on their own meters after the utility company had turned them off before relighting each appliance that was safe. Meantime, other stations were showing the number of substandard furnaces the technicians couldn’t legitimately relight.

The genuine risk of an explosion or fire wasn’t part of a world that operated like a Hollywood script where real poverty doesn’t exist. My next door neighbor’s gas had no pressure. He’s a middle class engineer, but I was still thankful he was at work when the gas company arrived and wasn’t the one to troubleshoot the problem. The federal regulation on orderly relighting after a mass outage suddenly made sense, even if it didn’t fit the current political world view.

Since the gas has been restored and morning temperatures are above zero, people with money and enough education to understand the physics of heat and cold, aren’t talking about what to do to prevent another disaster. They know they can’t do anything about Texas or out-of-state utilities. They’re wondering how to protect themselves, how many space heaters to buy, if a generator is necessary, what to do to protect the pipes.

More than likely, they also live in houses and have mortgages, which means they have insurance which will pay for some of the damages and repairs.

Those living in trailers are worse off. If they have insurance, it’s probably so low the payments won’t begin to cover the damages. If they bought something used or live in an old house, there’s probably no insurance. In the next disaster, they will be dismissed as constant victims by those living in the bubble because they didn’t have the minimum assets to respond.

Between fire and ice, the sense of helplessness is different. In both cases, we were the victim of human decisions, in one case a single individual who OK’d the controlled the burn, in the other the compounded consequence of individuals responding to unprecedented cold. Only in the second was the failure of the response also seen as the deliberate failure of humans with no possibility of redemption because we now have a governor who doesn’t believe anything can or should be done and has spent her time since the heat returned placing blame on everyone else.

Notes:
Albuquerque Journal. "Frozen Out," 4 February 2011, on the purchase of space heaters in Taos.

Associated Press. "Fear of System Failure Forced Brutal Choices," 7 February 2011, on the gas company operations center.

KRQE. "Relights Start Slowly in Espanola," 7 February 11, station website, on the man in Española with the sick wife.

Third World New Mexico

2011-02-06T07:02:00.000-08:00

Paranoia flourishes where government and institutions fail.

We are living through the coldest period anyone remembers, and our heat supply was cut off on Thursday morning, soon after temperatures reached -12 here. We won’t be up until after the Super Bowl in Dallas.

The gas company has done a particularly poor job of communicating, at least through its emergency website. It blames the lowered power supply in Texas which has lowered pressure in the gas lines. The websites of the local TV stations are no better; they simply redirect you the utility company site.

There’s some news somewhere. One hears particular areas like Taos are down because of equipment or line failures. We suspect the priorities of Texas suppliers eager to leave a good impression on the wealthy visitors and provide extra power to the media crews converging in Dallas Sunday.

We look at the pattern and see outages in remote areas around Albuquerque, nothing in Santa Fe County, and then here. The pueblos, whose lines come from here, went down three hours later than we did. The utility website indicated they had separate, probably more demanding, agreements with the company.

When I walked into the post office I was asked why did I think we were singled out.

Of course I had a ready answer. We won’t squawk like the wealthy in Santa Fe. I didn’t say the obvious, because this area is poor, Hispanic, and has a long tradition of crony politics where regulations are non-existent or not respected because they were written to help family and friends.

I know some lines are good and gas exists. Every time they do a test my furnace turns on, sometimes in the middle of the night. I’m at the end of a line, several miles from the city.

A couple years ago, the local utility spun off the natural gas business to New Mexico Gas, and both suddenly used Denver addresses for their bill payments. When companies are no longer local, they don’t respond to local interests. When companies are owned by investors, they tend to out source maintenance, rather than maintain their own crews.

The thing that makes us all angry is the utility company has decided it needs to bring in crews of relighters to go house to house to turn on our appliances for us. They’ve recruited people from Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Colorado. We wonder about the quality of tradesmen who aren’t employed in those states fixing local problems caused by the cold.

As the postman said, give me my gas and I’ll handle the relighting.

The utility and the governor actually have responded to that particular distrust. They now list the utilities who are providing the technicians. Elsewhere, the police are accompanying the crews who have to test everything for safety before they put meters back in service.

In this area, they’re using the National Guard. I don’t know if that’s because there aren’t enough police, or if they’re no different than the rest of us, staying home keeping an eye on the water pipes, or if they’re so distrusted someone else needs to be used. The costs of a dysfunctional police force are hidden and high.

No one’s saying yet why we lost our gas service, or why we’re the last ones to have it restored. All we know is we will endure four days without heat when morning temperatures are between 4 and 10 degrees, and the areas that vote Republican are getting service before those that traditionally vote for Democrats.

Some, of course, don’t have problems. They live in areas where they still use propane. We only got gas here about 10 years ago. At least some of my neighbors still have wood stoves, although I’ve seen little smoke coming from their chimneys. Perhaps they exhausted their wood supplies in January.

I’m lucky. I have some decent space heaters and can keep the bedroom at about 68. The rest of the house is drafty and in the low 40's at night. I keep water tricking through the hot and cold water pipes in the farthest bathroom and don’t flush the toilet in the night. Even so, it got down to 39 inside last night and the fittings on the toilet are leaking.

The biggest problem is the lack of hot water. I’ve abandoned dishes for paper plates, and now dip my cooking utensils in the large pot I keep boiling when I’m in the kitchen. I can’t go to work again until I can take a shower.

A man I work with lives in a trailer with four children. He can’t afford a space heater, if any are still available after the cold at New Year’s. Friday his wife took two kids to the emergency room because they were already sick.

There won’t be any questions asked in the state capital. The governor not only supports the Tea Party philosophy, but is widely seen to be a daughter of the Texas gas and oil interests. There’s more likely to be investigations of poor construction techniques: many multi-million dollar homes in Las Campanas have broken water pipes despite having heat. Bottled water was sold out in my Santa Fe grocery Friday afternoon.

South Carolina - Roses and Rice Redux

2011-01-30T04:48:00.000-08:00

I began by wondering how Englishmen not known for any proclivity for hard work or innovation could have made their fortunes growing exotic plants like sugar cane and rice. I ended with no simple answer, but a combination of the usual factors: necessity, unusual individuals looking to solve critical problems, unique situations.

Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys are probably as representative as any of the middling classes in South Carolina, and their fates are as symptomatic. Unlike men like Henry Laurens and John Joshua Ward, who have come to represent an idealized south of slave traders and rice planters, they have simply faded away.

In 1916, James Wood Johnson, of Johnson and Johnson, bought Mepkin, the plantation that had once been owned by Laurens, the slave trader who had criticized Champneys’ business practices. Unlike lowland planters who wanted land that was productive and the right size to be worked by a single slave crew, Johnson bought adjacent plantations to leave his daughter, Helen Rutgers, 10,000 contiguous acres in 1932. She sold to Henry Luce, and his wife Clare Booth Luce in 1936.

The playwright hired landscape architects to covert the once productive land into acres of gardens. They gave a large portion of the estate to the Trappist Order's Gethsemani Abbey in 1949. The grounds were opened to tourists in 2007.

The land where Ward once selected Carolina Gold from his great-uncle Maham’s rice has similarly been agglomerated with Plowden Weston’s Laurel Hill and other plantations once owned by the Allstons into Brookgreen Gardens by Archer Milton Huntington and his wife, Anna Hyatt Huntington, to display her sculpture. Today, visitors can examine their sculpture collection in a natural setting.

In contrast, the area where Maham lived, including the homes of Francis Marion and the Palmers, was flooded in 1941 by the Santee Cooper Hydroelectric and Navigation Project to create Lake Moultrie and provide power to local rural residents. Maham’s land survived but is owned by someone who "is not interested in the history of this area, and as a result is allowing the cemetery and monument [erected by Ward] to be destroyed by overgrowth of briars, brush, and trees."

Champneys’ two plantations similarly disappeared as Charleston expanded; neither is mentioned in the South Carolina list of plantations. In 1995, people in Ravenel planted blueberries at the end of Rose Drive, off Champneys Drive, and in 2003 opened Champneys Blueberries to let the public bring their children to pick where the noisette rose was born.

On Postell Drive, the next road off the Savannah Highway, people built McMansions in Champneys Gardens in the 1990's. In the best Charleston tradition, a $425,000 "exquisite Mediterranean style home" featuring "old English brick," marble foyer and gourmet kitchen is awaiting foreclosure.

If Champneys’ plantations have been transformed into a brand name, so too has Ward’s rice. In 1999 Merle Shepard began crossing Carolina Gold with other varieties to introduce modern disease resistence, greater yields and better wind resistence. With help from Gurdev Khush and Anna McClug, he took the most promising hybrid with an indica basmati and put it through the rigorous selection process now used to establish hybrid purity. The USDA released Charleston Gold for "restaurants using historically authentic ingredients," a market created by Richard Schultz and Glen Roberts.

The desire to recover the past that was stimulated by the Bicentennial also affected rose growers, who were interested in saving older varieties. Noisettes had nearly disappeared because they couldn’t withstand the climate of much of this country. In the late 1970's, Léonie Bell and Doug Seidel began searching for Champneys Pink Cluster, based on herbarium samples preserved in Bermuda. Eventually, Carl Cato and Peggy Cornett discovered surviving bushes in Virginia. Bell sent cuttings from Cato’s find to Joseph Schraven’s Pickering Nursuries in Ontario, to propagate for public sale.

The reason Champneys’ rose could be restored and Maham’s rice needed to be recreated is partly the result of nature, and partly changing values. A woody perennial like a rose can be cloned by cuttings so that the original is reproduced over and over. Seeds for an annual like rice must be planted every year. No matter how careful the grower, variation will persist in hybrids that haven’t been stabilized and a special variety will disappear when it’s not grown and no viable seed survives.

A perennial can come to represent the enduring values of a society like the gentility and beauty of Charleston promoted by the Luces and Huntingtons. An annual, by necessity, is dependent on the perpetuation of those cultural values, year by year, generation after generation, by planters and slaves toiling in the mosquito infested swampy low country. The one can survive abandonment to be rediscovered as a relic; the other cannot endure without effort except in memory.

Notes: Information of plantations from South Carolina Plantations website, maintained by SCIWAY.com, LLC.

South Carolina - Entrepreneurial Spirit

2011-01-23T06:02:00.000-08:00

Capitalism, by definition, exists when people can make money from their efforts, and therefore assumes a monetary economy. The right for inventors to "the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" was included in the constitution.

That expectation has been resisted by those who are expected to pay. Back in Barbados, one complaint against James Drax was that, when he had found a way to process his sugar cane, he hadn’t shared his knowledge with his neighbors, who were his competitors in the market.

One suspects one reason the slaves of Jonathan Lucas were investigated in the Denmark Vesey scare of 1823 is that Lucas not only had built mills, but opened a mill where he charged planters to process their rice. In 1810, his father’s first customer, John Bowman, still owed them $1,500.

Today Eliza Lucas is held as the ideal alternative, a woman who gave away her seed, possibly under the influence of her new husband, Charles Pinckney. Her gifts were probably less charitable than calculated. She had begun experimenting with crops on her grandfather’s plantation on the Wappo, because it was heavily mortgaged and they needed to raise money to save it. She was told she couldn’t get a bounty for her indigo until "you can in some measure supply the British Demand." The best way to reach that threshold was to give "small quantities to a great number of people," not a lot to a few who could influence the price.

The tension between innovators, who expect to profit from their labors, and public benefactors, who give away the fruit of their efforts, has increased from colonial times when men lived under the protection of Lords Proprietors and kings. In the oldest versions of rice’s origin tales described in earlier posts, the word "give" was used to indicate rice was transferred from the possession of one person to another. In the first, published in 1731, Frayer Hall simply said "It was soon dispensed over the Province."

The transformation of "give" to "gift" occurred during the American revolution which began, in part, when New England merchants protested the Mercantilist policies of Britain which hampered their ability to make money. In 1779, a tory, Alexander Hewatt, said the royal governor, Thomas Smith divided his present of rice between "Stephen Bull, Joseph Woodward, and some other friends."

David Ramsay amplified the role of Smith in 1809 when he said Smith first proved the rice would grow, then distributed his "little crop" "among his planter friends." Despite his view of what a good governor should do, Ramsay himself petitioned the first session of the House of Representatives for rights to his writings, an effort that stimulated Congress to pass the first patent law in 1790.

The same sort of transformation for indigo occurred in the years leading to the civil war. James Glen didn’t mention Eliza Lucas when he wrote about indigo in South Carolina in 1861. However, a few years earlier William Gilmore Simms had constantly referred to her son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, in his novel Woodcraft, as a rich benefactor who, one character tells his hero, "must save you from McKewn if possible. He can do so, if anybody can."

Pinckney had just died in 1825 when Simms returned to Charleston from whence his family had fled when his father failed as a merchant. His first attempt to attract the attention of the city’s elite was a poem dedicated to a man who, in a better world, might have saved his family from bankruptcy. Hezekiah Maham, on the other hand, always turned to his favorite commander, Francis Marion, for advice and help.

More recent writers emphasize the charitable motives for the gift. For instance, popular historian Rod Gragg says that Woodward "knowing the huge profits rice produced as an export to England, ... shared his discovery with his fellow colonists."

The same emphasis on giving away one’s labor characterizes some writing about John Champneys and his hybrid rose. Peggy Cornett, director of the Center for Historic Plants at Montecello, simply wanted to connect known facts when she said "Champneys shared rooted cuttings of his seedling with friends, including William Prince, Jr.," from whom he may have purchased the Parson’s Pink rose that contributed to his seedling, and that Champneys "shared another batch from his seedling with his neighbor, a Frenchman, named Philippe Noisette."

A Charleston website that promotes a romantic view of the city for tourists converts the words necessary to indicate the transfer of a plant into a act of cultural magnificence when it says Noisette gave "a local rice farmer" the China rose, and "as was the custom in the South among gardeners at the time, Champneys then presented seedlings of Champneys' pink cluster back to his friend, Philippe Noisette."

Rosarian Peter Harkness took the step from describing a gift to ascribing a motive when he wrote "The farmer was proud to own such a special rose and passed on cuttings to his friends, including Philippe Noisette."

Champneys was many things, but simple rice farmer he was not. Such a characterization is probably the result of a number of factors, not the least creative writing courses that warn would be writers to avoid the passive voice and use action words when possible. When there are no facts, or descriptions are conflicting and vague, they’re told to visualize how people would have acted in the past.

In addition to suggesting how people are taught to write, the eleemosynary versions also suggest a strong distrust of the motives of innovators, entrepreneurs and capitalists. Many prefer the John Rockefeller who gave away dimes and established a foundation to avoid taxes to the man who organized the Standard Oil cartel.

The transformation in our perceptions of innovators occurred in stages. The only first hand accounts we have are those of Eliza Lucas and Joshua John Ward. Both describe deliberate efforts over several years to develop viable plants and persistence in the face of failure, some caused by the malicious actions of others. For the gardener, both also provide insights into the ways of nature and how man has selected traits to improve it.

Their works were not commonly known in the past. Instead, writers like Hall and Cornett were forced to write narratives based on few facts. The older one left the introduction of rice to the impersonal passive voice, while the other tried to imagine human intervention in the spread of noisette roses.

Such neutral accounts were rejected in times of crises, like the revolution and the years before the civil war. Then royalists like Hewatt and federalists like Ramsey and Simms replaced traditional figures like pirates and the Swamp Fox with conservative heroes like Thomas Smith and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. More recently, slaves and a mulatto’s husband have been given the role of critical interveners in history.

Today’s writers, generally ignorant of the background of their sources, simply rewrite them to fit our current values. Gragg and Harkness describe men as unrealistic in their behavior as an earlier generations’s Lord Fauntleroy and Pollyanna. However, their popular audience is less interested in realistic tales of effort and perseverance, than in suggestions of an alternative to modern reality.

The new world colonies were founded to make money, and that’s what Drax and Eliza and Jonathan Lucas and Champneys wanted to do. That others also made fortunes imitating them may follow the logic of capitalism, but was not the primary motive for those who helped introduce sugar, indigo, rice and noisette roses.

Notes:
Campbell, Levin H. The Patent System of the United States So Far as it Relates to the Granting of Patents: A History, 1891.

Cornett, Peggy. "Champneys' Pink Cluster Comes to Monticello," Twinleaf Journal, January 1999.

Discover Charleston. "Secret Gardens: Charleston's Blooming Treasures," DiscoverCharleston website.

Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.

Gragg, Rod. Planters, Pirates, & Patriots: Historical Tales from South Carolina, 2006.

Harkness, Peter. The Rose: an Illustrated History, 2003.

Lucas, William Dollard. "Notes for Jonathon Lucas Sr.: A Lucas Memorandum," posted on-line, on the 1810 debt.

Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.

Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Historical Commission of South Carolina Bulletin 6, 1919, on Hall, Hewatt and Ramsay.

Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft, 1852, republished 1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.

Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.

South Carolina - Mercantilism

2011-01-16T05:24:00.000-08:00

No one wonders today about the market for sugar cane or tobacco. It may be the knowledge of who were the rice eaters was as obvious to planters at the time, and so wasn’t recorded. Its absence from the historic record now may be less an omission of ignorance than proof the commonplace is often too common to write down.

However, it may also be that in the mercantile economy that dominated South Carolina before the revolution, a producer didn’t need to know anything more than which products were being promoted by the government.

South Carolina was born as a grant to supporters of Charles II who expected to profit from their land with commercial crops. Increasingly, Charles saw the colonies as existing to support his goal of economic independence from countries like Holland whose merchants dominated shipping.

In 1660, he reinstituted the measures adopted by Oliver Cromwell that required all goods coming to England or its colonies be carried by British ships. He added requirements that goods like sugar, tobacco and indigo could only be shipped to England and that exporters pay a tax before exporting them to the continent.

South Carolina’s early years were spent by entrepreneurs trying to find a sellable commodity. Settlers like John Yeamans first raised cattle and hogs for the Caribbean, while Henry Woodward opened trade relations with the natives that led to the export of deerskins. In 1695, the General Assembly ruled quit rents could be paid to the proprietors in desirable products - "Indigo, Cotton, Silke, Rice, Beef or Porke" - an act that favored cattlemen over Indian traders.

In 1705, England under Anne made two changes: it added rice to the list of enumerated goods and started paying a bounty for pitch and tar to develop an alternative source to the Swedes. According to Walter Edgar, local men discovered it was more productive to use already fallen trees that they knew were rich in resin, than chopping down live trees. The navy complained the quality wasn’t the same, and in 1724, changed the law to require green trees. South Carolinians abandoned the effort.

Parliament became more powerful under George II, who acceded in 1727. In 1730 the Navigation Acts were modified to allow colonies to ship rice directly to Portugal without paying the export tax. Rice production increased, but prices were so unpredictable, some planters began looking for an alternative crop.

Eliza Lucas managed her grandfather’s three plantations in the 1730's, after her father George was forced to return to Antigua. She tried growing indigo in 1740, only to see the crop killed by frost before it was dry. She planted seed she saved, but only 100 plants grew in 1741. The following year, she planted her saved seed and more sent by her father; only her seed grew. The crop failed in 1743. She finally produced a good crop in 1744 from her selected seed.

Developing seed that would grow in South Carolina was only part of the challenge. Indigo requires processing to convert its chemicals into dye. Her father sent Nicholas Cromwell from Montserrat who, she believed, sabotaged the lot with lime. He then sent Cromwell’s brother who was no more useful. Her descendant, Harriott Horry Ravenel, says he also sent an "unidentified negro" from some French island.

George Lucas was governor of Antigua, with all the government contacts that implies. As soon as she had a good crop in 1844, she sent samples to London and published the results in the Charleston newspaper. She was told that when she could produce enough to meet British requirements, she could expect a duty to be laid on French indigo "on proper Application to Parliament."

The duty of sixpence a pound was duly offered in 1749, the same year George II adopted white trousers and dark blue jackets for the British naval uniform. Planters adopted the crop, after they realized the work schedules of the rice and indigo complemented each other and they could get more production from their existing slaves.

However, many never learned all the steps required to ferment the dye from the plant. The governor at the time, John Glen, wrote

"I am afraid that the limewater which some use to make the particles subside, contrary as I have been informed to the practice of the French, is prejudicial to it by precipitating different kinds of particles, and consequently incorporating them with the indigo."

According to Jennifer Payne, the best Carolina indigo sold for 5s 9d a pound in 1773, while dye from the French West Indies sold for a minimum of 9s and that from Guatemala fetched 13s 9d a pound.

Once planters and merchants began growing crops that depended on governmental favors, they, like Eliza Lucas, became adept at influencing Parliament. When George III needed to raise money to pay for troops stationed in the colonies, the Sugar Act was passed in 1764 to tax luxuries. Rice was exempt, but not indigo.

When the first Continental Congress met in 1774 to coordinate the colonial response to the Stamp Act, South Carolina’s representatives threatened to leave when men wanted an organized refusal to ship goods to Britain. To maintain unity, the Congress exempted rice from the boycott, but not indigo.

The bounty on indigo ended with the Treaty of Paris, as did the protected Mercantile economy. Planters were thrown into the world of nascent capitalism. The generation after the war responded with innovations in rice production or turned to cotton. The one depended, in part, on institutional buyers, the other on manufacturers.

The decline of Carolina rice after Napoléon might possibly be traced to the very success of South Carolina as a mercantile economy. When the government guaranteed the profitability of certain, strategic products, planters had no reason to learn anything about the destination for their crops. When competition appeared, as it had with tar and indigo, they changed products.

When capitalism’s quest for the cheapest supplier overtook rice planters in the 1830's, most had no idea how to find new markets and many had taken ideological stances that prevented them from adopting methods developed by northerners. They asked the government for support in foreign markets, then, in 1846, asked Congress to impose a tariff on cheaper rice coming from Java.

At the same time, a man in Virginia, Cyrus McCormick, was developing a reaper. In 1848, he left the south for Chicago to be closer to people who would buy his machines. In the 1890's, midwesterners would adapt it for rice in Louisiana.

Notes:
After the bounty was dropped on tar, some in the colony did continue supplying naval stores. For instance, John Pamor, the great uncle of Hezekiah Maham’s second wife, Mary Palmer, made his fortune from turpentine Likewise, some indigo growers produced dye that surpassed the quality of the French West Indies.

Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998; on tar, Sugar Act, Continental Congress.

Glen, James. "A Description of South Carolina," 1761, reprinted 1951 as Colonial South Carolina: Two Contemporary Descriptions by Governor James Glen and Doctor George Milligen-Johnston, edited by Chapman J. Milling.

Payne, Jennifer. "Rice, Indigo, and Fever in Colonial South Carolina," 1998, available on-line.

Pinckney, Eliza Lucas. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, edited 1997 by Elise Pinckney with research support from Marvin R. Zahniser.

Ravenel, Harriott Horry. Eliza Pinckney, 1896.

South Carolina - Rice Eaters

2011-01-09T04:45:00.000-08:00

When I was a child, the clear channel radio stations broadcast farm prices at noon. I was never sure if farmers were expected to load their animals and head for Chicago if they heard good news. However, as I ate bologna or hot dogs for lunch, I never questioned why the animals would be slaughtered. Without being told, I understood the general supply chain.

When I read about rice growing in South Carolina, I wonder who actually ate the grain. I can’t think of a single popular English or northern European rice dish, except the rice pudding and stuffed green peppers I was fed at summer camp.

Historians have traced in great detail changes in marketing between the planters and the European wholesalers, but only repeat Lewis Gray’s general information that 12% of the rice was exported to Portugal and the rest to England who kept 15% and re-exported the rest to Holland, Hamburg, Bremen, Sweden, and Denmark. The identity of the end users is left to anecdotes.

The Portuguese and Italians had adopted rice in their diets. The first were growing it in Brazil by 1587 and introduced better yielding varieties wherever they had contact in east and west Africa. Italians grew their own, or imported it from elsewhere in the Mediterranean.

In the age of sails, it may be trade itself was the biggest consumer of rice. Judith Carney has noted slave ships bought tons of rice to feed their human cargo. In the 1840's, the British defined minimum provision levels for passenger ships, which would have included those carrying Irish immigrants. Ship masters were ordered to issue to every passenger every week.

"two and a half pounds of bread or biscuit, not inferior in quality to what is usually called navy biscuit, one pound of wheaten flour, five pounds of oatmeal, two pounds of rice, two ounces of tea, half a pound of sugar and half a pound of molasses."

On ships leaving Liverpool, Ireland or Scotland ships masters could substitute oatmeal, and five pounds of potatoes could replace a pound of oatmeal or rice.

There are hints rice was used as an institutional food. Ruth Pike has found slave and convict oarsmen on Spanish galleys in the 1600's were fed moldy biscuits and stews filled with vermin. Later in the century, authorities substituted rice for beans which increased dietary deficiencies: rice and beans need to be eaten together to release the proteins in both.

In 1752 the naval arsenal at Cartagena recommend a daily ration of 24 ounces of biscuit and 7 ounces of beans or chickpeas. In 1777 a third meal was added and the daily ration changed to 24 ounces of biscuit, 11 ounces of beans and 3 ounces of rice. At La Carraca in 1777, men were still fed two meals: beans filled with worms and vermin at noon and a stew of rice and undercooked chickpeas at night.

Leander Stillwell notes Fourreau de Beauregard said Napoléon thought "rice is the best food for the soldier." He used rice in Egypt and stockpiled it when he prepared to invade Russia. During his exile at Elba, Napoléon ordered a brig be furnished with "biscuit, rice, vegetables, cheese, brandy, wine, and water, for 120 men for three months" and that the garrison at nearby Pianosa be given the same rations as sailors: "meat, biscuit, rice, and either brandy or wine."

Fernand Braudel says in France it was used in hospitals, military barracks, and on ships, and that tons were imported from Alexandria to feed the poor in 1694 and 1709. He found the French used rice as an extender to make millet bread, and that Venice mixed it with other flours to make cheap breads for the poor. Lou Edens of Rice Hope Plantation Inn believes the rice sent to northern Europe was eaten by people and livestock "during the winter when peas were scarce and barley was unavailable."

None of these uses would have endeared rice to the poor. Indeed, Stiltwell said rice was issued to his Illinois infantry unit in the civil war, and no one knew how to cook it. "The horrible messes we would make of that defy description. I know that one consequence with me was I contracted such aversion to rice that for many years afterwards, while in civil life I just couldn’t eat it in any form, no matter how temptingly it was prepared."

The upper classes in Amsterdam and London, who had some contact with the East India trade, treated rice as a luxury that didn’t spread to the rising middle classes. That failure left planters prey to a market that could change. Charleston knew demand dropped after the fall of Napoléon. As suggested by the British regulations, the introduction of the potato would easily have displaced it in northern Europe. Steam powered ships that shortened voyages would also have decreased demand.

One reason rice plantations didn’t recover after Reconstruction is that they had lost their market to cheaper rice from southeast Asia. Charleston’s response that they produced a superior grade was futile. Elite taste has always been fickle, and the poor eat what’s cheap.

Notes:
Braudel, Fernand. Les Structures du quotidien: le possible et l’impossible, 1979, translated as The Structures of Everyday Life, vol 1, 1979, translated by Sian Reynolds, 1981.

Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001.

Dodge, Theodore Ayrault. Napoleon; A History of the Art of War, volume 1, 1904; on rice in Egypt.

Edens, Lou. "History of Rice in Charleston & Georgetown," Rice Hope Plantation Inn website.

Gray, Lewis C. History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, 1933.

Greene, Robert. The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, on rice for Russian campaign.

Hunt's Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review. "British Law Regulating the Carriage of Passengers in Merchant Vessels", volume 26, 1852.

Stillwell, Leander. The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865, 1920; I could find no source for the quotation from Beauregard.

Pike, Ruth. Penal Servitude in Early Modern Spain, 1983.

Young, Norwood. Napoleon in Exile: Elba, 1914; on rice on Elba and Pianoso.

South Carolina - After the War

2011-01-02T08:12:00.000-08:00

War’s hard on farmers. Invading armies take what they need to eat and destroy what’s left to starve their enemies.

During the American revolution, the British in South Carolina sold the rice and slaves they couldn’t use, destroyed the crops they couldn’t sell and encouraged the remaining slaves to flee. Battles, occupation and neglect damaged plantation reservoirs.

During the civil war, Sherman arrived at Savannah with orders to march towards Richmond. After months of battle, his men were angry at South Carolina for precipitating the war and remaining isolated by geography from the consequences. Abolitionists demanded he handle the freedmen who flocked to his army for protection.

Sherman couldn’t pursue the war effort without dealing with the more immediate problems. On January 16, 1865, he signed Special Field Order 15 which turned the coastal land the army controlled from "the islands from Charleston, south, the abandoned rice fields along the rivers for thirty miles back from the sea, and the country bordering the St. Johns river, Florida" over to freemen to farm. Andrew Johnson rescinded the order in the fall after Appomattox and returned confiscated lands to the antebellum owners.

Sherman allowed his men to rampage as he moved north towards Columbia from Savannah. From there, he restored military discipline and primarily destroyed strategic targets as he moved toward Virginia. Newly freed slaves raided abandoned plantations where they’d once been forced to work.

Rice planters recovered from the revolution; they did not from the civil war. Many reasons are given: the loss of slave labor, the lack of credit, the death of so many able young men. What’s rarely mentioned is that after the revolution, there was, to quote Henry Laurens, a spirit to recover "their former State of happiness and Prosperity" that led men to cover "as fast as they can the marks of British cruelty, by new Buildings, Inclosures, and other Improvements."

After the civil war, planters had to confront the problem their ancestors hadn’t been able to solve in Barbados: how to motivate men with free will to work for them. Earlier, they’d abandoned the effort with indentured servants and hired help for slaves. After the civil war, planters turned sharecropping into debt peonage to serve the same purpose, maintain a cheap, subdued, available labor supply.

Slaves, like the white overseer in Charles Gilmore Simms’ Woodcraft, only accepted the need to plant and harvest crops, the steps necessary to feed themselves. They refused to help maintain or rebuild the dykes. In one case described by Robert Preston Brooks, the army intervened to force freedmen to do off-season work.

In the west the railroads used immigrants, including ones from China, to do the kind of hard manual labor freed slaves were refusing in South Carolina. For whatever reason - a surplus of hungry men, a lack of capital, a lack of willingness - the south didn’t recruit immigrants. Instead, the rice plantations south of Charleston reverted to swamps, while those untouched by the army to the north limped along.

When planters after the revolution realized they had more work than their labor could do, they turned to machinery. While Cyrus McCormick was revolutionizing farming in the west after the civil war, nothing was marketed for the south. The earth movers and levelers used today to build roads are a fairly recent invention, developed only when immigrant labor was no longer available to dig ditches and haul dirt.

Notes:
Brooks, Robert Preston. An Elementary History of Georgia, 1918.

Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998; includes quotation from Henry Laurens, letter to Edward Bridgen, 23 September 1784.

South Carolina - William Gilmore Simms

2010-12-26T06:27:00.000-08:00

The 1850's repeated the crises of the 1820's and 30's, but in a compressed time span and with more deadly consequences.

The post-Revolutionary generation in South Carolina faced the Missouri Compromise of 1820 that limited slavery in the west, the Denmark Vesey trial of 1822, and James Hamilton’s nullification threat of 1832.

The next generation had the Compromise of 1850 that included the Fugitive Slave Act and led to talk of nullification. The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 left the question of slavery in the territories to the settlers, and led to guerilla war in Kansas.

In this atmosphere, Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin and William Gilmore Simms serialized The Sword and the Distaff in the Southern Literary Gazette in 1852 . The one criticizes the inhumanity of slavery; the other anticipates the need for guerilla warfare and recalls the aftermath of the American revolution in South Carolina when, Simms said, "peace is only a name for civil war."

Simms’ intent, based on his title, had been to use a character based on Hezekiah Maham to describe the difficulties of reestablishing plantations after the war. However, as a writer, he was better at describing action than romance. The middle section that describes his hero’s courtship of a wealthy widow drags, while the opening description of highway robbery would excite the imagination of any adolescent boy. When the work was issued as a book, he renamed it Woodcraft.

Like any work of popular fiction of the time, the reader’s interest lay in events that crowded each installment. The characters were recognizable stereotypes. There was the hard-hearted widow who’d played both sides in the war; the Scots merchant villain who’d fenced stolen slaves; his agent, a double dealing squatter; an upright Christian youth who marries after the war but is willing to fight when called upon; the hero’s faithful slaves who hid in the swamp from the British and willingly returned to the fields under the orders of a man not much better than Simon Legree; and the innocent daughter of the squatter who marries the nice, but naive son of the widow.

Maham is changed into Porgy, an insouciant scion who has mortgaged his property "which had been transmitted to him through three or more careful generations" to support a life of alcoholic leisure. When the sheriff finally forecloses on the property, Porgy makes the deputy eat the paperwork. He’s saved through the intervention of Charles Coatesworth Pickney and the squatter’s deathbed confession.

While Porgy is recognizable as a type all too common in South Carolina at the time, he bears almost no resemblance to Maham. All the virtues of the latter have disappeared, and his negative traits exaggerated.

In reality, Maham was a self-made man who worked as an overseer before gaining his own land, not an indulged son like James Hamilton who was criticized in 1850 for supporting the congressional compromise because it might redeem some of his Texas debts and save him from ruin.

When Maham returned to his land he found new seed rice. Porgy’s plantation is taken over by Millhouse, a underling sergeant eager to reestablish traditional ways. He tells him "You was always a-thinking to do something better than other people, and you wouldn’t let nater [nature] alone."

At a time when tidal cultivation was being introduced by the more innovative planters, Millhouse adds "Now I’m a-thinking that the true way is to put the ground in order, and at the right time plant the seed, and then jest lie by, and look on, and see what the warm sun and rain’s guine to do for it."

He concludes his anti-innovation critique with "It ain’t reasonable to think that a man kin find new wisdom about everything"

During the war, Maham had perfected a tower for siege warfare.

The war had dwindled to the final evacuation by the British in Simms’ novel, and most of his allusions are to Francis Marion’s units in general. Maham’s bravery at Quinby Bridge is transferred to the incident of banditry that opens the novel when an outlaw shoots his horse. The incident when Maham started from sleep and believed he was under attack is turned into a joke on Millhouse who attacks a ghost.

The only specific recollections of military encounters are ones that advance Simms’ view of war as a series of harassments bordering on torture. One of Porgy’s slaves, Pomp, recalls a scrimmage with Fraser at Parker’s Ferry where the "cappin mounted a British officer," then ‘cut him clean through his skull to his chin." Porgy himself remembers "old Echars, the Dutchman, whom we dressed in tar and feathers at Moncks’ Corner, for stealing cattle."

According to Patrick O’Kelley, Marion left Maham in charge of unmounted men at Parker’s Ferry while he took other troops to attack. While the British were retreating, unmounted men surrounded Thomas Fraser’s troop of South Carolina loyalists and opened fire at 40 yards. After the battle, Marion returned with his prisoners to where he’d left Maham.

Monck’s Corner is more obscure, mentioned by only one man who wrote Maham "took upwards of eighty prisoners" in October of 1782, months after Maham had been paroled and two months before the defeated British evacuated Charles Town.

In Woodcraft, Porgy is a middle-aged bachelor who’s spent his life in the salons of Charleston, but has to no idea how to court a woman. Maham had been married twice and fathered two daughters. His wife died after he’d returned home from battle, but before he confronted the sheriff’s deputy.

Maham only appears in histories as an actor in events, not as a person important enough to have a portrait painted and passed through generations or one who appears in diaries and journals of society life. His physical appearance and habits are unknown.

Simms makes Porgy so fat he can’t dismount his horse, and worries his trousers will split in company. He’s a heavy drinker who surrounds himself with the detritis of war, the one-armed Millhouse, and the most degenerate forms of the Enlightenment’s arts and sciences, the fraudulent Doctor Oakenburg and George Dennison, "poet of the partisans."

What we know of Hezekiah Maham comes from histories by Frederick Porcher and Joseph Johnson, both born after Mahan died. Parson Weems’ account of Francis Marion’s war effort was based on notes by Maham’s rival, Peter Horry, and never mentions Maham; Marion is given credit for the tower.

It could well be the widowed survivor of war did become the man described by Simms. His great-nephew, Joshua John Ward, however, heard through the family, he had been much more.
Unfortunately, his virtues were held in contempt by the generation going into the civil war, who only praised the most atrocious actions as necessary in war and condemned anyone else as decadent as Porgy.

Notes:
Johnson, Joseph. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South, 1851.

O’Kelley, Patrick. Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas, 4 volumes, 2004-2005.

Porcher, Frederick A. Historical and Social Sketch of Craven County, no date.

Simms, William Gilmore. Woodcraft, 1852, republished 1961 with an introduction by Richmond Croom Beatty.

Attacks on the Rational

2010-12-19T06:16:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I think the defense of slavery has been as pernicious as slavery itself, if for no other reason than it discourages logical thinking.

Charleston in the years after the revolution included plantation owners willing to experiment with new technology. By the time of the nullification crisis around 1830 innovators still existed, but they weren’t respected for their efforts. Slaves, not machines, were the only answer for economic challenges.

Scientific thinking posits the sanctity of facts, and assumes scientists will change their theories when those theories no longer can explain observed reality. Thomas Kuhn showed men don’t always live up to that ideal, that when they’re confronted with anomalies they propose more and more absurd solutions to sustain their basic beliefs. However, he also showed that over time, the value of experience does alter theory, the underlying value holds.

One cannot support scientific thinking if one is so wedded to a practice like slavery that no contrary facts can be admitted. Once facts cannot be recognized, then they must be explained away, turned into something that supports the overarching theory. Bending reality becomes acceptable.

Today, we have people who deny the observed realities of climate change because the proposed explanation threatens some part of their world view. For some, it’s the idea that nature isn’t as rigid as suggested by Genesis. For others, it’s the concept of human responsibility and the consequences for accountability for one’s actions that’s troubling. And, of course, there are those who see an economic threat.

The result is an attack on science itself.

Recently, Mary Beard reviewed a book by Donald Kagan which she saw as attacking Thucydides for praising the behavior of Pericles in the Peloponnesian war which Kagan thinks is like that of those who wouldn’t put more resources into winning the war in Viet Nam. Since Kagan believes those actions led to unnecessary defeat, so Pericles must be redefined as leading his country to disaster.

The result is an attack on the academy itself which tries to sift evidence to develop explanations. When certain conclusions are forbidden, reality must be subverted.

Since the protests against the Vietnam war, discrimination against Blacks and abortion in the late 1960's, we have seen a growing number of people who cannot accept the validity of criticism of any kind. If schools needed to change to fit social ideals, then education must be rejected. And so, a generation developed who rejected the very tools they needed to survive in the changing economy.

Now the economy is in crisis and those who’ve been left behind are the most vehement in protesting any policy that might prevent further or repeated problems, simply because the people who propose those solutions are associated with other ideas that are unacceptable. The basic thinking seems to be, if you have the wrong idea about abortion, then you can’t be trusted with the money supply.

The final result has been an attack on the constitution itself, which distributes power among groups in the population. Since those left behind cannot change, then the constitution must be reinterpreted. The tools that come to hand are those developed by men in the south who defended slavery - nullification and the primacy of minority rights.

Elections are no longer legitimate if the wrong man wins.

Notes:
Beard, Mary. "Which Thucydides Can You Trust?," The New York Review of Books, 30 September 2010, on Donald Kagan’s Thucydides: The Reinvention of History.

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962.

Food Stamps - Part 4

2010-12-05T06:06:00.000-08:00

The biggest requirements for living on $39 a month for food are resourcefulness and a willingness to think in non-traditional ways.

My boss’s former tenant’s first thought was the familiar pinto beans. Mine was lentils and rice. I’ve seen people in the local store filling their cart when eggs were on sale for $.68 a dozen and discussed the problems of keeping peanut butter from spoiling with an older woman.

To do well, one has to go beyond what one knows, without the benefit of the internet or books or even friends.

I don’t like pinto beans, but, if forced to eat them, I would probably spend time trying to find out how to make them taste better, not with fancy spices, but by figuring out the best ratio of water to beans. I would do this because I know it took me some time to learn to cook rice, and I remember both what I did and that I succeeded.

However, I would need a clock or timer, which might be a luxury.

One would have to be willing to look at items on sale or at low prices and consider them. That was what brought my attention to the citrus punch, a pile of cartons in the aisle with an advertised special low price. When I looked at the ingredients, I realized it wasn’t the best, but might work in a tight situation.

I remember how horrified people were years ago when they heard the elderly sometimes ate dog food. I went to the pet aisle to see if the seniors might have been right. The cheapest can of dog food is $.69 and lists more nutrients than the Spam substitute that costs $2.00, the potted meat that costs $.59 and the Vienna sausages that also cost $.59.

Likewise cat food isn’t a bad choice, if you mask the smell, taste and texture. Three small cans with tuna flavoring cost a dollar and list more nutrients than a can of tuna that costs $.89. After all it has to keep an animal alive, while the tuna is only considered part of a human’s diet.

Resourcefulness isn’t the monopoly of any social class. When I asked friends how they would solve this dietary puzzle, they essentially dismissed it out of hand as impossible. They wouldn’t even speculate.

I was too polite to ask them how they think they would have survived rationing in World War II or the destruction of Sarajevo, events that touched the middle classes as much as the poor. Modern life may have removed most of us from the threat of famine that existed before modern agriculture, but natural disasters and wars always threaten to return us to that fragile world where 800 calories of dried food is a luxury.

Our renter is more resourceful than they because she’s already spending her time scouring second hand sources within walking distance. They would have to overcome their cultural pride first, then learn where to shop.

Food stamps may not signify any freedom to live without constantly thinking about one’s stomach, but they may engender more freedom to think creatively about survival. I suspect many, however, would prefer the freedom to have an extra serving without thinking about the end of the month.

Freedom from want is not the same as freedom from wanting.

Food Stamps - Part 3

2010-11-28T04:34:00.000-08:00

Living on the food stamp allotment of our renter carries many requirements, both physical and mental.

The first, and most obvious, is a stove, or at least a burner. After we asked the women to move because her rent was greater than her disability check and it became obvious she had no other income sources, she moved into one of the old motels that have been converted into efficiency apartments. The only unit available came with a microwave and bar refrigerator, but no stove.

She’s on a waiting list again and her rent will increase when a unit with a stove becomes available.

The last time I talked with her, my boss’s former tenant was searching second hand stores for a hotplate. Until then, she can’t cook her pinto beans.

For a dollar a day, she will have to eat things that require no cooking. A bag of dry cereal costs $3.00, a half jar of peanut butter is $1.00 and bread is $.88 a loaf. If she ate a third of a bag of cereal a day without milk, it would add 720 calories to the 410 she would get from peanut butter and bread.

Microwavable food isn’t an alternative. A pot pie cost $.89 in the local store, but only contains 390 calories. The cheapest frozen dinners are $1.25 and contain 260 to 280 calories. You need at least 1,000 a day to lose weight safely. 2,000 calories are recommended for most adults.

The bar refrigerator is adequate for left overs, although you can only make a couple days worth of pinto beans at a time without risking spoilage. Eggs, margarine, the citrus punch, even peanut butter, would all be fine. However, freezing food is impossible.

The choices I made for $39 a month require a larger pot for soaking and cooking beans or potatoes, and a smaller one with a lid for everything else. A frying pan is usually necessary to cook eggs. Some kind of flat metal is useful for warming bread over the burner: a toaster is a luxury. Beyond that, the woman needs a long handled serving spoon to stir the beans, a spatula for the eggs, a sharp knife to cut potatoes and avocados, a dull knife to spread peanut butter, a plate or bowl, a glass, and a fork or spoon to eat with.

One of the most critical things is a measuring cup. Although you only need to worry about proportions if you’re fussy about how your rice is cooked, you need to faithfully measure out each day’s portion of pinto beans, rice and lentils if you want them to last the time expected. That, in turn, assumes the first of the mental requirements: the ability to plan ahead and discipline oneself. Too many would eat too much too soon in the month and hope providence would provide.

The basic arithmetic requires both addition and division to divide $39 by 4 weeks. Planning for the inevitable 5-week month requires more math. Of course, one wants to end each month with nothing left on the card, and the surplus dry foods horded.

Buying the healthiest choices, and not living on pinto beans, wheat tortillas, and eggs, is trickier. Package labeling is difficult, and misleading. For instance, egg cartons carry no information. Protein isn’t mentioned on many but thiamin is, suggesting the latter is more important.

How does one sort through the deliberately obscure ingredients to know dextrose is sugar and if all forms of sodium are salt? How do you judge the benefits of what’s essentially sugar water with a dollop of juice and vitamins? How does one know riboflavin is good for you or the characteristics of potassium benzoate?

The woman is in her 50's. Even if she learned some of this in school, that was many years ago and much has changed. Xanthan gum was approved in 1968. I certainly have no idea what the food pyramid is supposed to tell me. It was invented after I graduated from high school in 1962. It was only in the late 60's that I learned protein wasn’t a simple ingredient, but required complementing sources, and that knowledge only came from a chance encounter, not much different than my meetings with our tenant.

Food Stamps - Part 2

2010-11-21T05:16:00.000-08:00

It’s possible to eat on a $39 a month food stamp allotment, but it’s only possible to do so for a short time and remain healthy.

It isn’t just the lack of calories and nutrients that’s a problem. The diet I devised is one that no diabetic could eat. In addition to the obvious sources of carbohydrates, there’s corn syrup in the citrus punch and white bread, while cheap peanut butter has another form of sugar, dextrose.

If one substituted eggs for the punch, one would add cholesterol: 62% of the daily need, based on 2,000 calories. The canned vegetables are as bad for their high sodium content. The avocado and margarine contain saturated fats.

This is a diet that could lead to obesity, heart problems and diabetes. The limited calcium and vitamin D could add bone density problems for thin women. Without the vitamin C in the citrus punch and the wide range of vitamins and minerals in the potatoes, one would be worse off.

In addition, what nutrients there are in the diet are expensive. The 128-ounce citrus punch is only 1% fruit juice. 57 ounces of regular orange juice has been on sales for months for $3.49 and is more juice. The one cost $1.50 more, but the price for ounce of juice is less.

Likewise, the cheapest peanut butter is cut with cotton seed or canola oil, which increases the actual price for the peanuts.

The other hidden price is psychological. One would spend half the day preparing food and would probably be thinking about it much of the time. If a television was broadcasting images meant to make one hungry, the cravings to eat would be worse. It’s no fun walking through a grocery store hungry without enough money.

Pinto beans aren’t just the diet of the ancestors here. They also require the lifestyle: they have to soak for eight hours and cook for four. One would have to put them in water before going to bed. While the cooking time can be shortened with a pressure cooker or lengthened with a crock pot to make it possible for someone to work, I assume such appliances aren’t available to someone living of such limited means.

The cooking time makes it impossible to have an 8-hour job, unless one gets up in the middle of the night to start the beans to cook and immediately refrigerates them for dinner or eats them for breakfast.

Lentils and rice take about 45 minutes to cook, while potatoes take at least 25 minutes to boil.

The woman is probably wrong to think the government thinks she can live on $39 a month. Food stamps are supposed to supplement income that also would include money for food. But, if there is no extra money, if one thinks like she does, then one is thrown farther back in economic times, from the time of pinto beans and subsistence agriculture, to the life of the hunter-gatherer.

To supplement this diet, one would need to search out local food banks and places that provide free meals, and hope one could qualify. Again, scavenging precludes the ability to hold a job, although an evangelistic Christian center near her house periodically advertises free food in the evenings, at the price, I suppose, of a sermon.

So, now I know the price of pinto beans, but I’m not sure I know the full costs for a child whose tastes are formed by an inadequate food stamp assignment. I can see what a treat it would be to go into a fast food restaurant and order a sandwich that contains an entire day’s calories on a single bun and leave feeling really full.

Food Stamps - Part 1

2010-11-14T05:58:00.000-08:00

Do you know the price of pinto beans?

Of course, I don’t. I don’t like them, and pass the open cartons without a glance when I’m in the produce aisle of the grocery that caters to local folks.

The question only came up when I was talking to a woman who was complaining that her food stamp allocation had been cut to $39 dollars and she wanted to know how you eat on that with the high price of pinto beans.

Since an individual’s food stamp account in New Mexico is updated once a month, I assume she was asking how do you live on $9.75 a week, $8.75 if you set aside some for five week months.

The next time I was in the local store, I checked the price. A pound of beans is $.69 and contains 12.5 servings, each a quarter cup before soaking. If one reverted to the staple diet of the region for centuries and bought a package of corn tortillas at 30 for $1.18, one would have nutritious, if boring, meals for a week.

However, judging from the quantities in the store, more people buy wheat tortillas, which are also larger. However, wheat lacks the essential proteins found in corn treated with lye, and is less nutritious with beans.

One could double the amount of pinto beans, and eat them twice a day. Instead, I would buy a bag of lentils and a bag of white rice for $1.72. I know brown rice is better, but it wasn’t available in the grocery which caters to local poor people. Like corn treated with lime and pinto beans, the two are complementary proteins.

I would also buy a five pound bag of potatoes and make it last two weeks for a cost $1.00 a week. The cheapest stick margarine was $.23 a stick, and should last a week to flavor the potato, if I was careful.

My total purchase would be $4.82 for the week. It provides 800 calories. The suggested daily intake is 2000, with 1000 the minimum for safely losing weight.

If I wanted to set aside a dollar for that five week month, I still have $3.93 to spend. People here would probably buy eggs, avocados and some kind of dried or fresh chili. When the price of each is spread out over two weeks, they cost about $3.00.

An alternative is peanut butter and white bread, another pair of complementing proteins, which would cost $1.88 a week. Again, I know wheat bread is better, but the cheapest costs $.20 more a loaf and doesn’t appear to have any more nutrients than the enriched white. Brown bread isn’t necessarily whole grain.

Since I have a limited tolerance for both eggs and peanut butter, I would probably buy a gallon of the cheapest citrus punch and possibly some avocados and canned tomato sauce to flavor the pinto beans. The first cost $2.00 a gallon and has 90 calories a serving; small avocados were being sold for 3 for $1.00 when I looked and have 227 calories; tins of tomato sauce containing 3.5 servings are $.33 and 20 calories each.

I considered canned vegetables which sell for 3 for $2.00, or $4.00 for six days. Each can is supposed to hold 3.5 servings, but it would difficult to store the left overs - this budget doesn’t allow for such luxuries as plastic wrap or aluminum foil. I could eat the whole can, even though it would contain 50% of my daily salt requirement, if I were actually eating 2000 calories. After all a can of peas would add 245 calories, corn 280, and green beans 70.

Any remaining money could also be used to buy black pepper ($2.50 for a large can) to spice the bland lentils and pinto beans, or permit more margarine on the potatoes.

Choosing the citrus punch with pinto beans, potatoes, lentils and rice, avocados and tomato sauce, my daily caloric intake would be just over 1,000. I would have 74% of the protein for an adult woman (adult men require more), but 163% of the necessary vitamin C and 132% of the fiber. Based on the recommended 2,000 calories, I would also have 19% of my sodium, 27% of my calcium, 69% of my iron, and average 15 to 25% of other necessary vitamins and trace minerals.

I could make it, but it would take a while for my stomach to adjust. It would be harder on the woman who posed the question; she weighs more than I.

The Sheriff Won

2010-11-07T01:02:00.000-07:00

More than a thousand people last Tuesday refused to vote for sheriff, nearly 10% of the Democratic voters.

I can tell you it wasn’t easy not to vote for him. The easiest thing to do was vote party line, which at least 6,800 might have done.

For various reasons the Republican candidate for governor drew more votes than usual. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate attracted 1,500 fewer votes than the man running for the Congressional district who got more than 8,300 votes.

If one split one’s ticket, it was easiest to vote for offices that mattered, the ones with two candidates, and skip the ones like sheriff with only a single candidate. Many skip the oddly worded judicial votes (do you favor keeping so and so in office) which are not part of the party line option.

To vote against the sheriff one had to stand at the card board podium and tediously ink in the circle for every other unopposed candidate, no matter how trivial sounding the post. That was the only way a voter could register a protest in the disparity in the final vote tallies.

Members of the sheriff’s department have found other methods. At least two have already left since the primary to work for the city police. In October, the outgoing sheriff recommended promoting a number of his allies within the department, a move approved by one of the new sheriff’s rivals just before the election. Other deputies are threatening to sue.

The elections may be over, but the legitimacy of the sheriff isn’t settled.

Unofficial results
Congressman - 11,404 votes cast - 8,369 D and 3,035 R
Governor - 11,510 votes cast - 6,822 D and 4,688 R
Sheriff - 7,267 votes cast, 1,102 less than the most popular D, 445 more than least popular D

Bad Choices

2010-10-31T06:19:00.000-07:00

This election year seems worse than usual in forcing voters to choose between unpalatable candidates. There seem any number of races where one’s political preferences preclude voting for the individual from one party, and the other person is so bad it’s morally debasing to vote for him or her. South Carolina, Delaware, Illinois, New York have made the headlines, but the ethical dilemma is everywhere at every level.

I live in a one-party county and our bad race is sheriff. The current man was prevented from running by term limits. Seven men ran in the Democratic primary in June, none in the Republican. The man who won earned 26% of the 8,135 votes cast. There are no run-offs.

Local newspapers provide no help. They said all the candidates had serious legal problems, but didn’t elaborate. Why they feel it cute to be coy I don’t know. No one trusts the newspapers or other local news media.

I gather the man I voted for had been convicted of state tax evasion, which I assume means our onerous and impossible to understand state gross receipts tax. I was pretty sure from my one contact with him through his business that he was incapable of managing a small office that depended on responding to emergency phone calls, and would have no ability to run two that are understaffed with 20 deputies protecting more than 40,500 people scattered over more than 5,000 square miles where heroin, cocaine and alcohol abuse are endemic.

I voted for him because my neighbor had his sign in his front yard. I wanted to vote for the man who had the best chance of defeating the one man I didn’t want to win. My choice came in second with 1,304 votes. Two others attracted similar numbers of voters.

The man I didn’t want to win was removed from his position as a Magistrate Court judge for corruption. He had personally released a friend arrested for drunk driving from jail. He was also accused of intervening in a domestic violence dispute by telling the woman she didn’t need to appear in court, even though she had been served with a subpoena.

Last spring his son was accused of theft by the owner of a local tattoo parlor. The next night his brothers went to the business to rough him up. Before the trial, all the witness’s statements were lost by the state police.

He got his office in the first place through his wife, who is the area’s state representative and the daughter of a politically powerful man.

There were no good choices running for sheriff. There are so many reports of violence, theft and general bad behavior by the deputies, I sometimes wonder if there are any decent men working in the office at all. One candidate was a former deputy had been arrested when he was young for drunk driving, and another had been investigated for protecting someone from a drunk driving charge.

The local state and city officers are no better. The candidate I opposed was investigated for fixing traffic tickets when he was a sergeant with the state police, and another was discharged for stealing evidence. Another was fired by the city police for unprofessional conduct and hired by the county, while one of the brothers involved in the tattoo incident worked as a city policeman at the time.

The problem isn’t simply our sheriff’s department. One learns to survive by avoiding any contact with them and assuming there will be no help in an emergency. Law and order depends of the values of one’s neighbors. There is no protection against gangs or intimidation.

The problem is what happens to a democracy when voters have no opportunity to choose between two good candidates. Even if one disagrees with them both, one likes to think they are at least qualified.

Instead, the act of voting has descended from picking the least bad option to playing odds on who can best prevent the worst outcome.

This leads to greater voter anger and apathy than any actions by politicians. Political parties that can’t field qualified candidates demonstrate contempt for the government they proport to represent.

With no opposition this Tuesday, I can at least abstain from voting for the man for sheriff. If the other party were running someone, I would face a serious problem - not of voting my convictions, but again of calculating the odds. Citizens should not have to ask themselves, is it safe to take a principled stand against corruption or must they vote no matter how reprehensible the outcome.

Cheap Media - A Screed

2010-10-24T06:08:00.000-07:00

William Randolph Hearst knew it - control of cheap media gives you power. Why can’t the left remember this clear lesson?

When FM radio gave better music production in the 1960's, the young and hip changed their dials. AM remained, often relying on all-news and talk shows. When laws changed, and the ownership of AM radio stations consolidated, programs like those of Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck expanded their audience. Those without the money to buy FM radios heard only one side.

When cable appeared, the young and hip changed their habits. Network TV remained for those who couldn’t afford the monthly fees. Fox defined itself as a network and was there.

Then, came digital TV, and some of us have been left with nothing, but radio. Limbaugh and Beck are still there.

Now, just as an important election is approaching, websites seem to be upgrading their technology, leaving those of us with older machines behind. Pages take longer to load, even locking up my machine. Ads cover stories, locking up my machine.

There are sites I’ve abandoned - sight obscuring ads drove me away from Salon and The Nation, registration drove me away from the New Republic and the Washington Post, locking machines threaten Salon and The Daily Beast, bad internet transfers force me out of Slate and Huffington Post.

What makes the owners of liberal websites thing advertisers like General Motors or General Electric Money really care if they destroy their web site so long as they get their message out for a few seconds. What makes them think rivals like the New York Times or The Economist really care if they survive? Don’t they think it worth while to hire someone, even in India, to constantly monitor their sites on all platforms?

Don’t they realize they’re as captivated by the market philosophy that says they’ve finally succeeded when they make money as those who brought on the mortgage crisis? That they’re no different than those who wanted to stay with an idea only until they sold the patent or issued an IPO, didn’t think it worthwhile to actually build something?

When given the choice of money or audience, they’ve been trained to think the first is the real affirmation of value.

And, then they wonder why conservatives are more effective at reaching the disenfranchised.

Even if the Drudge Report is also loading slowly and Fox is feuding with cheap cable networks, there’s still radio and Beck and Limbaugh to explain it all to the unhappy whose marginality is defined by the poor media they can afford.

If you want power, you don’t try to unify the bickering choir, you reach out to the apostate where ever they reside.

Milli Vanilli in Brighton

2010-10-17T06:24:00.000-07:00

One of the most uncomfortable hours I’ve ever spent occurred in Brighton, Michigan, in the late 1980's.

I was taking ballet classes there. Most of the students were local high school students. The assistant instructor, a dance major at the University of Michigan, wanted us to wear costumes to class on Halloween. When I didn’t, I was derided and so wore my sweats for class.

I was startled when two girls showed up dressed like hoboes in black face.

I learned from those admiring their costumes that they were supposed to be Milli Vanilli, two European-born break dancers who had some hit songs at the time. A few months later, in January 1990, they were criticized for not actually singing on their records, but simply acting as a stage presence for others.

I was shocked. No one seemed to think black face was the least bit offensive.

I looked for an exit. I didn’t want to confront them. After all, they had probably picked these costumes because they admired the way the men moved. Dancers can be particularly myopic when movement is involved.

But, I wondered, what were their mothers thinking who must have helped them apply the make-up. It wasn’t simple dark make-up, like a white would use on stage to play a Black. It was minstrel show black face.

I wondered, did they wear these costumes to school, or simply spend that much time on make-up for a dance class? If they were in school, where was the teacher or administrator who should have taken them aside, explained the realities of modern social life, and asked them to wash their faces.

What about the college student leading the class? She was so interested in celebrating Halloween, she abandoned the standard center floor work for conga lines and other forms of free expression.
I knew about the area support for the Ku Klux Klan; the local dragon, Robert Miles, was still alive. I’d seen survivalists out on weekend exercises when I drove down some county roads. Weren’t any of the adults they met at all aware of what they were seeing?

I got increasingly angry, both from by my sense of helplessness in the face of innocent bigotry and at the way the teacher was conducting the class. More and more, I wanted to walk out in protest, but was restrained by my inbred manners.

However, I soon stopped taking classes in Brighton.

Joe Klein - Right

2010-10-10T03:09:00.000-07:00

Joe Klein recently interviewed nine people in Brighton, Michigan, whose mortgages were greater than the current values of their homes.

They were mainly people dependent on municipal budgets for their income (fire fighters, policemen, emergency response workers, lawyers) and they were angry that people they knew were able to benefit from the system when they could not or would not.

Such people have been squeezed from the right for years. When cities grew, some more vocal taxpayers were unwilling to subsidize the growth. They talked about economies of scale, which meant when a community doubled in size, area or population density, the number of people who provided essential services could not double.

People had to do more work for wages that were constantly under public attack.

When people cannot alter the pressures from above, they take solace from the gradations of status that separate them from others below. They only know the rich live in Grosse Pointe and send their children to ivy-league colleges; they don’t see the differences the wealthier do between different addresses or between Yale on the one hand, and Dartmouth on the other.

The differences they see are the ones that separate those making it from those living on the edge of poverty. They could buy their homes, not rent. They could eat meat without depending on food stamps. They could occasionally provide their families with small luxuries.

These status gradations have been under attack from the left, as government programs that provided safety nets tried to do so without stigma.

The anger they expressed to Klein arose from the elimination of such status markers. One person, a lawyer, was angry at a neighbor who used a scheduled layoff as the excuse to apply successfully for mortgage relief. She complained: "It was like she got a raise. She bought her kids a swing set."

When I checked Walmart’s website, simple metal swing sets begin at $129 and nicer wooden ones start at $249 and increase quickly. When I lived near Brighton, you shopped at Meijer’s Thrifty Acres. Their website advertises a metal set with some features of the wooden ones for $139.

A hundred dollars is half a day’s pay, before taxes, if you make $25 an hour.

A cheap swing set is a luxury for a family with a mortgage. A fancy one would indeed arouse the envy and anger Klein heard.

The important point Klein is reporting is that people have not just been squeezed by the economy. They’re also losing their sense of themselves when their social markers are destroyed.

Mortgages are the clearest example, because these people know when their neighbors walk away and banks foreclose, they, not the banks, are the ones who suffer when their homes lose value. Another of his sources, a deputy fire chief, said "It’s immoral," but isn’t punished. He added:

"You've got to figure that our parents wouldn't have walked away from a mortgage. I'm not walking away from mine. But people I know well, friends, are taking a hike, and I wonder, What has happened to us as people?"

What indeed, when a man squeezed by the economy loses whatever remains that makes him feel important?

He can’t see or influence the institutions or special interests who’ve been destroying the economy, but he does see the others every day, the ones who benefit from government programs intended to help. The loss they cause is personal.

Notes:
Klein, Joe. "On the Road: Underwater in Detroit," posted on Time website 16 September 2010; there were ten at the meeting.

Joe Klein - Wrong

2010-10-03T06:38:00.001-07:00

Every once in a while, someone will write something that calls into question his or her credibility as a reporter. Joe Klein had such a moment with a September 16 blog entry that Time headlined "On the Road: Underwater in Detroit."

The article was drawn from a conversation with ten people he met in a restaurant in Brighton, described as a Detroit exurb, 40 miles from the city.

The Detroit metropolitan area is usually considered to include the city and Wayne County, along with Macomb County to the north, used by political reporters to represent auto workers, and Oakland County to the northwest, home of the more affluent.

Brighton’s in Livingston County.

When Michigan was settled, people moved to the best lands for farming. Roads and railroads followed, and with them more economic development. The state had been covered by glaciers that left moraines and swamps. Places like Livingston County were avoided as too rocky or wet.

It’s more representative of the under developed areas that exist between major metropolitan areas. It lies on the road from Detroit to Lansing, the capital and home of Oldsmobile. Similar land lies between Detroit and Flint to the north, between Detroit and Toledo to the south, and Detroit and Battle Creek to the west.

Bad lands have always nurtured malcontents. Livingston County was the home of Robert Miles, grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan. The modern militia movement thrives in Livingston County along with Lenawee County to the south and Jackson County to the west.

The opinions of people from such areas are important to understand, but they should not be considered representative of places like Detroit suffering from deindustrialization. They are from areas that never accepted large factories, even when they had them.

Not only were Klein’s sources not from the Detroit geographic area, only one was associated with industry: John McGraw, described as "the former president of a small division of a power-tool company that was closed down by its European owners." He lives in Rolling Meadows, Illinois, and was not at the meeting in Brighton. Klein met him separately.

The rest were "cops, firefighters, emergency responders and a few lawyers." These people could be found in any small town, suburb or city in the country. They represent the middling class in nineteenth century small town life displaced by factory towns. Even when they live in large cities, they do not inhabit the industrial world signified by the word "Detroit."

Klein was traveling cross country to learn more about the roots of the Tea Party anger. The success of his trip depended on the quality of the people who arranged his interviews. This one was done by Kevin Gentry, a "deputy fire chief and adjunct law professor at Michigan State" who practices law in Brighton.

The problem with Klein’s piece isn’t the sources or what he reports; it’s the context he provides, the repetition of the word Detroit in the first two paragraphs. The comments may well represent the views of people in Detroit or the auto industry, but they are not part of world he visited, and Klein doesn’t provide any quotes from such people to confirm that their experiences are shared.

Indeed, the only people he quoted were the former executive, a lawyer and a deputy police chief. If any of the people he met were commoners, or if any of them had opinions, we don’t know what they were. If they had differing views, they may not have expressed them in this gathering.

It was the job of Klein, or the people prepping him for these interviews, to learn more about the sociology of the area he was visiting.

The unwary reader could finish the article with a wrong impression.

For those like me, who grew up in areas that bordered one of the badlands or lived near Brighton for several years, the failure to know simple facts about the community is the failure that plants a seed of doubt about Klein’s reliability.

One may dismiss this as quibbling over details, but details are the very thing we use to judge reporters.

Notes: An Anti-Defamation League website lists events sponsored in 2010 by the Lenawee Militia, the Southeast Michigan Volunteer Militia in Brighton, and a neo-Nazi group, Battalion 14, in Jackson.

South Carolina - Innovation's Losers

2010-09-26T04:30:00.000-07:00

There are none more bitter than those who see their peers or relatives do better than they, especially when those successes are rooted in something they cannot or will not do. In South Carolina, the spirit of innovation and trained observation were not universal and the willingness to work was discouraged.

The constant possibility of failure in the face of uncontrollable conditions makes people superstitious. When repetition doesn’t lead to success, the answer is often symbolic repetition. Agricultural peoples are among the most susceptible when their crops are subject to the vagaries of weather and plagues. When religion and reason preclude superstitious rituals, other more secular outlets are found to assert control over fate.

Growing rice was always risky. When the crop failed there was no income but prices were high for those who managed to harvest something. When the crop flourished, prices fell from surpluses and no one made much profit. The good years, when both the crop and price were good, were rare.

People who first succeed because they could think innovatively are sometimes able to adapt to changes more quickly than those who struggled to succeed or who always copy others and face failure by repetition with minor variations hoping to correct what they had done wrong.

None knew better than Nathaniel Heyward the need to keep changing. He had always preferred newly imported slaves. When Congress banned the importation of new slaves beginning the first of January, 1808, he and others had to confront the changed supply and cost of labor.

Peter Colclanis shows that rice planters did, indeed, adapt by improving per capita yields. The number of slaves in the low country dropped .5% between 1820 and 1830, but the production per individual increased from 241.85 pounds in 1820 to 377.53 in 1830.

When new slaves with usable skills were no longer available, planters turned to technology. Robert Allston found patents for hulling rice appeared sporadically from 1809 and increased in the 1820's, while new applications for threshers began in 1828 and culminated in a workable machine in 1830.

Unfortunately, Colclanis also shows that prices fell after the end of the Napoleonic wars in Europe. Exports from Charleston in 1818 had been worth 11 million dollars but fell to 8 million in 1819, and stayed between 7 and 8 million for most of the decade. They only rose to 11 million again in 1825, then hit that value again in the 1830's before falling to the 7-8 million range in the 1840's.

South Carolina responded to the labor and market crises by forbidding the manumission of slaves in 1820. Although the enforcement of the law varied, the population of freedmen in the low country dropped .9% in the 1820's. While there’s no clear evidence the General Assembly granted freedom to Philip Noisette’s wife and children when he died in 1835, they seem to have been left alone.

Similarly, when Plowden Weston, a merchant who had immigrated in 1757, died in 1827 he requested two of his slaves, Lydia and Anthony, be treated as freemen. The later was a millwright, who had improved the yield of a threshing machine by 1,000 bushels a day. Although his freedom wasn’t acknowledged by the state, Weston’s executors followed his wishes and let Anthony control his time.

Even so, the suspicion of freedmen grew after 1820 and culminated in the trial of Denmark Vesey in 1822. James Hamilton was intendant of Charleston when John Prioleau and John Lyde Wilson reported rumors of a slave insurrection. Hamilton appointed two judges and five jurors, including Nathaniel Heyward and William Drayton, to investigate.

After 34 men had been hung, the governor, who owned three of the executed, argued the deliberations violated the law. The attorney general, Robert Young Hayne, disagreed. Wilson, Hayne, Drayton and Hamilton all exploited their enhanced reputations for political gain, culminating in the nullification crisis of 1832.

In a small society like the Carolina low country, it was inevitable the planters would become more related with each generation. What’s interesting is that, unlike the ones who ordered mills from Jonathan Lucas who had led lives that showed they could adapt to changing circumstances, the ones who supported Hamilton were the children of the siblings who had not pioneered introducing technology into the rice fields.

Of the grandchildren of William Allston and Esther LaBruce, one, William Alston ordered a mill from Lucas, and two married men who worked with Lucas, John Bowman and Andrew Johnston. The daughters of their other son married Wilson and Hayne and did not order mills.

Among the Mottes, only Jacob’s wife, Rebecca Brewton raised daughters who were willing to invest in untried technology. Jacob’s sisters married more conventionally: Sarah was the
grandmother of Hamilton’s uncle, Thomas Lynch; Hannah was Hamilton’s grandmother, and Sarah was the mother of Hamilton’s law partner, William Drayton. Sarah’s daughter, Hannah, married Heyward’s brother William, and their daughter married the younger Drayton; they may be the ones who ridiculed Heyward when he was a young man visiting Charleston.

When faced with the problem of a more expensive labor supply, some, like Weston, responded creatively by finding ways to use their workers more effectively, and others, like Hamilton, attacked those who criticized slavery in any way. Still others, like Nathaniel Heyward, tried both.

The governor, Thomas Bennett, was not the only political opponent to have his slaves investigated. One of the banished men, Charles Drayton, was the property of William’s second cousin, John Drayton. The former governor was the son of William Henry Drayton who had rebelled against his William Bull grandfather during the revolution, while William’s father had followed the Bulls to England after the fall of Charleston.

Two slaves belonging to Jonathan Lucas’ son, Bram Lucas and Richard Lucas, were held before they were acquitted. The younger Jonathan Lucas left the country later that year, and began building mills for England, thereby hastening the loss of Carolina rice’s hegemony in world markets, a loss already foreshadowed by the lower prices.

Notes: See postings on James Hamilton and Denmark Vesey from 10 January 2010 through 7 March 2010.

Allston, William and Esther La Bruce
++ Esther marry Archibald Johnston
        Andrew Johnston marry Sarah Eliot McKewn
++ Elizabeth marry Thomas Lynch
        Sabina marry John Bowman
++ Joseph marry Charlotte Rothmahler
        William marry Mary Brewton Motte
++ William marry Mary Young
        Charlotte marry John Lyde Wilson
        Rebecca marry Robert Young Hayne

Motte, Jacob and Elizabeth Martin
++ Sarah marry Thomas Shubrick
        Elizabeth Shubrick marry Thomas Lynch Jr
++ Hannah marry Thomas Lynch
        Elizabeth Lynch marry James Hamilton
                James Hamilton marry Elizabeth Heyward
++ Jacob marry Rebecca Brewton
++ Mary marry William Drayton
        William Drayton marry Maria Miles Heyward

Drayton, Thomas
++ Thomas - Elizabeth Bull
        William - Mary Motte
                William - Maria Miles Heyward (above)
++ John Drayton - Charlotte Bull
        William Henry
                John, the governor

Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.

Coclanis, Peter A. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920, 1989, rice production statistics.

Dusinberre William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.

Egerton, Douglas R. He Shall Go out Free: the Lives of Denmark Vesey, 1999, list slaves arrested during the investigation and their owners.

Larry Koger. "Black Masters: The Misunderstood Slaveowners," Southern Quarterly 43:52–73:2006, on Plowden Weston.

South Carolina - Spirt of Innovation

2010-09-19T12:15:00.000-07:00

Once an innovation is accepted, an aura of inevitability develops around it, so one can’t imagine things having been any other way.

However, the atmosphere of innovation among South Carolina rice planters could not have been predicted: it was the fragile result of immigrants bringing in new ideas from Philadelphia and Edinburgh, and from people’s individual experiences during the war. There was nothing to say it would be perpetuated.

Ulrich B. Phillips describes Nathaniel Heyward as a man who was "was venturesome in large things, conservative in small." He had built a pounding mill, but was slow to convert it to steam. He was slower to use mechanical threshers because he wanted to keep his slaves busy in winter. And, it was his strong preference that those slaves be freshly imported from Africa.

Similarly, John Bowman was willing to gamble on an unknown millwright in 1787, but the next year actively campaigned against ratification of the constitution, even though his wife’s brother, Thomas Lynch, had signed the Declaration of Independence.

The mixture of conservative and progressive impulses, found in most of us, was perhaps more extreme in Charleston where the social ideal of the elite was still defined by the landed gentry in southwestern England who had supported the royalists in their civil war and not by the merchant entrepreneurs of London who backed parliament.

Indeed, Phillips, a post-Reconstruction southern historian believes investments in land and slaves were the "large things" and interest in labor-saving, productivity enhancing technology the "small." He believes Heyward remained active in running his many plantations, and that the "assistance rendered by his sons kept the scattered establishments in an efficient routine."

William Dusinberre has quite a different view of Heyward, that humiliated by his first entry into Charleston society, he spoiled his sons and that only one, Charles, had any interest in business.
He notes that Nathaniel’s father had been an innovator when he moved to Beaufort, but that he gave his older sons a classical education. The eldest Thomas, son of his first wife Mary Miles, signed the Declaration of Independence and was sent to Saint Augustine by the British in 1780.

The older son of Heyward’s second marriage to Jane Elizabeth Gignilliat, James, had the same European education but married an actress, Susan Cole, and died soon after. She remarried, and Nathaniel spent years discrediting her and salvaging the rice lands he’d developed.

Thomas’s son Daniel was more like his uncle James. He married a French speaking tailor, Ann Sarah Trezevant, and soon died. When she remarried, Nathaniel took over the rice lands and fought her rights in court, a battle that continued when her daughter Elizabeth married James Hamilton.

A similar pattern is found in the family of Bowman’s in-laws. His wife’s father, Thomas Lynch, was the son of Thomas Lynch, who pioneered rice on the Santee, and was raised to be a gentleman. Like Heyward, Lynch read law in England, toured the continent, and later became involved in colonial politics.

His sister Elizabeth married James Hamilton and spent more time in Newport, where she raised her son James, than Charleston. By the time the younger James married Heyward’s niece’s daughter, Elizabeth, neither had spent much time on a rice plantation and saw their patrimony as an asset to be sold not managed.

The inland rice pioneers like Daniel Heyward and Thomas Lynch raised oldest sons who were drawn into the great political fight with Great Britain, but had no interest in the source of their wealth. Daniel’s younger son, Nathaniel, pioneered tidal cultivation, but he too didn’t perpetuate his interest in his children, and saw the results of innovation and hard work frittered away by actresses and tailors.

The planters who were the first to adopt the innovations of others were a bit more successful. Walter Edgar says that in 1850, a dozen men each harvested more than 100,000 pounds of rice in Georgetown County, and they included the grandson of Plowden Weston, the grandson of Mary Izard Middleton and the stepson of Rebecca Brewton Motte’s daughter Mary.

However, the wealthy planters were better known for the way they lived their lives rather than the way they financed them. Plowden Charles Jennet Weston was a judge described as a "gentleman of most excellent education and rare ability" who published a history of the state. John Izard Middleton was Secretary of the American legation to Russia in the 1820's, before become active in the nullification crises of 1832. William Algernon Alston married his cousin Mary, the sister of the painter Washington Allston. Like any large planter, he served in the South Carolina house and owned more than one house in Charleston.

Still, according to George Rogers, those descendants who were still growing rice in Georgetown County in the 1850's, never fully relied on their overseers and never completely left the area during the growing season. They were more likely to escape malaria at inland resorts like that near Hezekiah Maham’s Pineville than go north as the Hamiltons had done. The time they spent in Charleston was the winter.

The spirit of innovation lasted two generations at most, those leading the revolution and their parents. It was difficult, though not impossible, for a family to maintain the spirit of specialized knowledge and a work ethic into the third generation in a culture of luxury.

Notes: The other signers of the Declaration of Independence were Arthur Middleton, husband of Mary Izard, and Edward Rutledge, a land speculator.

Behan, William A. A Short History of Callawassie Island, South Carolina, 2004, on Elizabeth Matthews Heyward.

Dusinberre William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.

Edgar, Walter. South Carolina, 1998; he doesn’t name all 12 men; his source was George Rogers

Miller Kerby A. Irish Immigrants in the Land of Canaan: Letters and Memoirs from Colonial and Revolutionary America, 1675-1815, 2003, on Bowman.

Phillips, Ulrich Bonnell. American Negro Slavery: A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime, 1918.

Rogers, George. The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1970, reprinted by Georgetown County Historical Society.

Smith, Henry A. M. "The Baronies of South Carolina," The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, April 1913; unattributed description of Weston.

South Carolina - Mill Acceptance

2010-09-12T06:50:00.000-07:00

Joyce Chaplin argues Jonathan Lucas gets too much credit as the inventor of the pounding mill, that other men had preceded him as other men had preceded Nathaniel Heyward in using tidal cultivation and others had introduced rice besides Henry Woodward.

She’s correct that whenever there are important inventions or scientific discoveries, there usually are many who recognize the problem and are working towards a solution. Robert Allston mentions Robert Nesbit who returned from a trip to Scotland to introduce a wind-operated threshing mill 1811 and a drill plow to simplify planting in 1812.

However, an idea must be accepted before it’s a successful innovation. Heyward was important because others followed his specific example. Nesbit was not because his neighbors abandoned his tools after he died in 1821, because they required workers have more skills than they could expect.

James Jonathan Lucas listed the people who ordered mills from his grandfather, so we know the path of diffusion for his innovation. No doubt he only mentions the most noted customers, but then those are the ones most likely to have influenced others.

Between John Bowman and Andrew Johnston he names Mrs. Thomas Middleton, Peter Horry, William Alston, Plowden Weston and Mrs. Arthur Middleton. The most important lines of communication weren’t between the Middleton brothers, but between the daughters of Rebecca Brewton and the grandchildren of William Allston.

Rebecca’s grandfather, Miles Brewton, had followed Jonathan Bryan into Georgia. She married Jacob Motte and became famous during the revolution when she helped Francis Marion burn her Congaree plantation house that the British had taken as a headquarters.

Rebecca was wealthy apart from her marriage: she inherited her brother Miles’ property when he died at sea. Laura Edwards suggests she defied convention when she settled plantations, no doubt those from Miles, on her daughters alone, and did not give her sons-in-law ownership. Her daughter Frances married Thomas Middleton, while Mary married William Alston.

Among the Middletons, both Frances Motte and Mary Izard were widows refusing to remarry at the time they ordered mills for the estates they managed. Like Frances’ mother, Mary Izard inherited property from her brother John, which is the land she developed on the Combahee with Lucas. Also like Rebecca Motte, she was left to her own devices during the war when her husband Arthur was a prisoner at Saint Augustine, and in this time, apparently, was reduced to begging from friends to feed her children.

The linkages and lines of influence may have been stronger between Rebecca and Mary, because Mary’s cousin, also Mary Izard, was the daughter of her father Walter’s brother Joseph who married Rebecca’s brother Miles.

William Allston and Esther LaBruce’s daughter Elizabeth married Thomas Lynch. Their daughter married John Bowman. Elizabeth’s sister Esther married Archibald Johnston, whose son was Andrew, while her brother Joseph’s son William married Mary Brewton Motte.

The path of diffusion then went from Elizabeth Allston Lynch’s daughter Sabina Bowman to her cousin by marriage, Frances Motte Middleton, and her cousin William Alston, married to Frances’ sister Mary. From there patronage passed to Frances’ cousin-in-law, Mary Izard Middleton.

The others, Peter Horry and Plowden Weston had plantations in the same area. Indeed, Weston’s Laurel Hill bordered land inherited by William and Esther Allston’s son John. John’s son William married Rachel Moore; when he died, she and her new husband sold the land she controlled. Her son, Washington Allston, sold Springfield to his cousin Benjamin Allston, while she sold Brook Green to Robert and Francis Withers who sold it to Joshua Ward, the husband of Benjamin Allston’s wife’s sister.

To keep himself identifiable in a family that reused names in each generation, the William who ordered the mill from Lucas changed his last name to Alston, while his uncles continued to use two L’s.

It’s rare to be able to trace diffusion so clearly. However, the Lucases’ mills might not have spread if the person who ordered one after Andrew Johnston hadn’t been Henry Laurens. The Allstons and Mottes proved the invention worked; Laurens gave it credibility with a larger market.

Notes: Mills built by Jonathon Lucas. List from James Jonathan Lucas, letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.

1787 John Bowman, Peach Island, married to Sabina Lynch, granddaughter of William Allston
      Wife Sabina Lynch
      Her mother Elizabeth Allston
      Her grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Frances Motte Middleton, Washo plantation
      Daughter of Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Peter Horry, Winyah Bay
      Wife’s sister married to Daniel Heyward
      Horry uncle of Nathaniel Heyward
* William Alston, Fairfield on Waccamaw
      Son of Joseph Allston
      Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
      Married to Mary Brewton Motte
      Her parents Rebecca Brewton and Jacob Motte
* Plowden Weston, Laurel Hill on Waccamaw
      Neighbor of William Allston’s widow Rachel Moore
      His father John Allston
      His grandparents William Allston and Esther LaBruce
* Mary Izard Middleton, Hobonny on Combahee
      Daughter of Walter Izard
      Niece of Joseph Izard, father of Mary Izard who married Miles Brewton
      Cousin-in-law of Rebecca Brewton through her brother Miles
1791-1792 Andrew Johnston, Millbrook
      Son of Esther Allston and Archibald Johnston
      Grandson of William Allston and Esther LaBruce
1793 Henry Laurens, Mepkin

Many think it was Washington Allston’s older stepbrother Benjamin who was the one who bought Springfield, not the cousin Benjamin. The brother Benjamin was supposed to have inherited Brook Green. The resolution of William Allston’s estate was apparently messy, and no one provides any strong evidence to support the claim for either Benjamin.

Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852, on Nesbit.

Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993.

Edwards Laura F. The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South, 2009.

Lane, G. Winston Jr. “Economic Power among Eighteenth-Century Women of the Carolina Lowcountry: Four Generations of Middleton Women, 1678-1800,” in Jack P. Greene, Randy J. Sparks, and Rosemary Brana-Shute, Money, Trade and Power: The Evolution of Colonial South Carolina's Plantation Society, 2000, on Frances Motte and Mary Izard.

South Carolina - Mill Invention

2010-09-05T05:08:00.000-07:00

The widespread adaption of tidal rice cultivation precipitated a crisis in the old order: more rice was produced than slaves, using African derived mortar and pestles, could process. No one was willing to buy surplus slaves to handle the harvest work load, and some, who increased the work hours, realized their slaves were getting injured from the resulting fatigue and they were losing more than a quarter of their premium crop to poor handling.

They fell into what I call the contractor’s conundrum: the more successful a builder, the greater the costs and the fewer the rewards. Henry Ford’s answer had been improved automation, a solution criticized by many but rooted in the history of our industrial revolution.

However, when improved rice yields were overwhelming traditional processes, the idea of improved tooling was new. Oliver Evans patented the gravity-fed flouring mill that simplified grinding wheat in 1790. Eli Whitney patented the cotton gin, which made the mass production of cotton in South Carolina possible, in 1794.

Jonathan Lucas built the first workable rice mill for John Bowman in 1787.

His story, as told by his grandson, includes elements of both chance and cultural deliberation. His parents were mill owners in Cumberland County on England’s northwestern boundary with Scotland who trained their son to be a millwright.

During the final year of the revolution, while the Peace of Paris was being negotiated, Lucas, then in his late 20's, emigrated to the New World. The proverbial story holds he was headed for the Caribbean when a storm damaged his ship and landed him in Charleston in 1783.

Two years later, in 1785, a Scots immigrant hired him to build a saw mill on Hog Island. While he was working on the Santee, he and Bowman apparently discussed the problems of preparing rice for market. Two years later, Lucas built an experimental rice mill at Bowman’s Peach Island plantation that imitated the pounding action of the mortar.

By 1793, Plowden Weston was complaining his horse driven mill was so slow he could only process two or three batches a day. By then, Lucas had built a mill powered by the tides at Millbrook for Andrew Johnston, the son of a Scots immigrant, Archibald Johnston.

Jonathan’s son Jonathan married Sarah Lydia Simons in 1799 and soon after built a commercial mill on her Middleburg plantation where local planters could bring their grain to be processed. They also built mills in Charleston, and, in 1817, erected a steam mill in the harbor.

When the senior Lucas died in Charleston in 1822, he had transformed the tidal rice industry. By 1843, Robert Allston observed, "almost every planter of four hundred acres and upward, is provided with a tide-water or steam-pounding mill."

Notes:
Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.

Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001, describe crisis, broken rice sold at a lower price.

Chaplin, Joyce E. An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993, quotes Weston.

Lucas, James Jonathan. Letter dated 20 April 1904 reprinted by The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer, volume 32, 1904.

South Carolina - Land

2010-08-29T05:46:00.000-07:00

Rice has specific demands that limit the land that can be used to cultivate it.

In the early years in South Carolina, rice was grown near the coast where rain irrigated the crop. In the 1720's, planters moved up the rivers into the inland swamps where they impounded water in ponds or reserves. However, they were only able to store enough to flood their fields when it was germinating; the rest of the season they depended on nature.

The land around Charleston had been developed first. Huguenots then settled north around what became Georgetown at the mouth of the Santee, Pee Dee, Waccamaw and Black rivers. Their descendants moved upstream.

Daniel Heyward introduced rice to the south at Beaufort in 1741, and planters moved up the Combahee. Farther movement across the Savannah was limited by the proprietors of Georgia who didn’t permit slavery. After much political maneuvering in London, slavery was allowed in 1751 and George II reorganized the colony in 1752. Jonathan Bryan was the first to move south with 66 slaves, followed by Miles Brewton and William Williamson.

By the time Hezekiah Maham acquired his rice land up the Santee near Pineville in 1771 people were developing marginal land plagued by floods they called freshets and younger sons like Nathaniel Heyward were inheriting poorer plantations. Heyward’s first crop on the Combahee was destroyed by too much water that flooded his fields.

He believed he was too far inland to adequately drain away the excess in 1787. Men had been considering planting the lands bordering the saline estuaries since the 1750's: Archibald Johstone used the tides at Estherville plantation on Winyah Bay in 1758. However, few could regulate the flow to allow the fresh and bar the salt water.

In 1788, when Heyward was 22, he experimented on his brother James’ tidal land and was so successful others followed his example. William Dusinberre says his primary contribution was determining when and how to let water flood the land. Others figured out how to build the embankments and canals, borrowing from the Dutch. Still others improved the sluice gates, sometimes adapting African techniques, and introduced European pumps.

The adoption of tidal irrigation took rice farming from the realm of the amateur planter and his African slaves to professionals able to invest large sums in building irrigation systems. The rewards were greater yields and less labor spent weeding because standing water suppressed their growth. The unexpected cost was the need to constantly maintain dykes and canals.

Scientific knowledge became important. Heyward told his future son-in-law, Charles Maginault, to spend the year before he married, 1824, abroad and to pay special attention to the reclamation efforts on the Humber river. Similarly, Robert Allston, the friend and distant cousin of John Joshua Ward, had gone to West Point in 1821, then applied his knowledge of port engineering to manage his rice lands.

Money or access to credit remained important because the new irrigation systems needed manual labor to build. After the revolutionary war, there was a dearth of both. The slave trade suffered during the war, but demand in the Caribbean remained. As part of their efforts to defeat the colony and finance the war, the British shipped slaves south and encouraged others to abandon plantations. Philip Morgan estimates a quarter were gone from the land when peace arrived.

Merchants were still pressing for payment of war-time debts under the Articles of Confederation, and pre-war slave traders like William Wragg were dead or in exile. The same year the constitution was ratified in 1787, the General Assembly passed laws that temporarily limited the slave trade.

Fortunately, Heyward had access to everything he needed, even though his education may have been left to chance. After his father died in 1777 when he was 11, he was left with his step-mother who had younger children. He apparently was raised in a frontier society on the Combahee that opened him to ridicule when he stayed with one of his older brothers in sophisticated Charleston. However, someone did send him to spend 18 months in Europe after the war.

He made the appropriate social contacts and, in February of 1788, married Henrietta Manigault, daughter of the richest man in Charleston. Peter Manigault had read law at the Inner Temple, then married the daughter of merchant Joseph Wragg. He preferred managing the assets of others to the courtroom. In 1763 he took over the management of his father-in-law, Ralph Izard’s rice and indigo plantations on Goose Creek.

After tidal irrigation was established, the prime land for rice shrank to a strip about 30 miles wide from Georgetown south into Florida. The inland swamps slowly reverted to nature. No one bothered to rebuild when Hezekiah Maham’s house burned. People who wanted to become rich turned to cotton.

From the 1820's until the civil war, ownership of tidal lands became concentrated in the hands of people who could make it work - a rationalization similar to that which occurs when any new industry matures. By 1850, 91 planters in northern Georgetown County each produced more than 100,000 pounds, 98% of the rice grown in the area.

When he died in 1851, Nathaniel Heyward was the largest slaveholder in the south with 2,340 slaves and 17 plantations. When Joshua John Ward died in 1860, he was the largest slave owner. He had 1,130 chattel on nine plantations.

They expanded by buying existing plantations from others while adventurers like Heyward’s grandson-in-law, James Hamilton, were pushed west to open cotton land in Alabama, then Texas.

Each of the changes in farmland, from the early coastal cultivation to the inland swamps to the tide flooded land, not only changed who could succeed but brought changes in the variety of rice that prospered. However, slaves from the rice growing areas of Africa were still valued.

Notes:
Dusinberre, William. Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps, 2000.

Rogers, George C. Junior. The History of Georgetown County, South Carolina, 1970.

Manigault, Edward Lining, Jr. The Manigault Family of South Carolina, Its Ancestors and Descendants.

Morgan, Philip D. "Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760-1810," in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, 1983 (cited by Rebecca Brannon and quoted by others without attribution)

Rowland, Lawrence Sanders, Alexander Moore, and George C. Rogers. The History of Beaufort County, South Carolina: 1514-1861, 1996.

South Carolina - Labor

2010-08-22T03:21:00.000-07:00

1738 was the year rice in South Carolina went from a reality to a dream. The price paid in London sterling per hundredweight reached a peak, 9.60, that would not be surpassed until 1772.

A few years before, in 1730, Charles Town exported 41,957 barrels and received 6.29 a hundred weight. A few years later, people believed the number of barrels doubled to 80,000 in 1740. It didn’t matter the price paid was 4.71.

Like the planters in Barbados who ignored their failures to succeed like James Drax, men believed a one-time achievement could become the norm. It had been demonstrated, rice could create a fortune. All that was needed was land, labor, seed rice and the credit to acquire them.

Attempts to produce more rice soon met with failure. Not only did the price fall when quantities increased, but crops failed between 1741 and 1746. Prices hit a low of 2.24 in the 1746.

England had joined Holland to support Austria against France, Saxony, Prussia and Bavaria in their dispute over the right of a woman, Maria Theresa, to assume the Hapsburg throne under Salic law in 1740. The War of Austrian Succession dragged on until 1748, and affected colonies on four continents, the Americas, Africa and southeast Asia.

Not only did shipping costs increase with war, but half the market for rice disappeared. Since 1730, Great Britain had allowed Charles Town to ship directly to traditionally neutral Portugal, defined as below Cape Finisterre, but not to its traditional rivals. About a quarter of the crop went there, and the rest to England, who re-exported two-thirds of what it received to Holland and northern Germany.

Labor was an equally serious problem. The Spanish, always looking for an opportunity to harm the British, were hinting any slaves who made it to Florida were welcome. Men, led by Portuguese-speaking Jemmy, started marching south towards the peninsula from the Stono river in September of 1739, after killing the storekeepers, where they got their arms, and nearby planters known to be harsh to their slaves.

The General Assembly rewrote the slave code and added a high import tax for three years, from 1741 to 1744, just as more people wanted to plant rice.

Towards the end of the war, a London syndicate of Scots born merchants bought Bence island, near modern Sierra Leone. It once had been a base for the Royal African Company, but had lapsed with the monopoly and been destroyed by Africans in 1738.

Henry Laurens became their agent in Charles Town in 1749, and grew especially close to Richard Oswald. He’d been apprenticed to a London merchant in 1744, and returned in 1747 when he was about 23. He received a 10% commission for advertising shipments of slaves, managing sales and buying rice to ship to the syndicate. By 1755, his company, Austen and Laurens, managed 25% of the city’s slave business.

Men ready to imitate the success of others are more vulnerable to advertising than those who experiment for themselves. Merchants played on their Stono Rebellion fears of Angolan or Kongo slaves and of slaves who spoke the same language to promote mixed populations from other parts of Africa. They insinuated all a planter needed was skilled labor to succeed, and advertised slaves came from rice growing areas. It hardly matters if any thing slave traders said was true: men were willing to believe.

These were the years, from 1738 to the revolution, when the argument can be made the knowledge of African slaves was critical to the success of the crop.

The demand for individuals who understood farming may have influenced how the slave trade developed on the western coast of Africa. A decade after the Austrian war ended, England took Sénégal and Gorée from France in 1758 and Bence Island developed as what Hugh Thomas called a "general rendezvous" for independent traders. In these years, nearly 60% of the slaves came from the western coast.

Captives were brought to these and other nearby islands where they were held until the season when winds made voyages west possible. During their time on the islands and in transit, they had to eat.

Judith Carney notes one trader bought 8 tons of rice in 1750 to feed 200 slaves in transit, and another believed 700 to 1,000 tons were needed for the 3,000 to 3,500 captives bought along the Sierra Leone coast. This demand stimulated the expansion of commodity agriculture in the areas near the coast, as demand by caravans had supported farming on the Niger earlier.

The Portuguese had pioneered using captives to grow their own food on Cape Verde islands in the late 1400's, and, Thomas says, the men who managed the captives at Bence island were Portuguese mulattos and Scots or other whites sent by the syndicate. They had the power to ignore the traditional division of labor that dictated women were the ones who tended and harvested the crop, while men did the hard labor of preparing fields. Both men and woman, even those from millet eating areas, arrived in the New World with some awareness of how to grow and mill rice.

The rice people grew in Africa had become more diversified when the Portuguese introduced higher yielding seed from Asian species. Both glaberrima and varieties of sativa were probably used for food in transit, and, Carney suggests, the surpluses of both infiltrated the areas being opened for rice growing in South Carolina where slaves still needed to feed themselves and new planters needed seed.

After rice was milled with mortars and pestles it was put through screens that separated the grains by size. In the 1780's, planter Timothy Ford noted the largest was sold, the middlings were eaten by the planters and the "small rice" given to slaves and livestock. The second was probably broken rice, and the third smaller pieces, Asian grains that hadn’t grown much, and possibly smaller glaberrima.

Back in 1768 when Henry Laurens was criticizing John Champneys for delivering poor quality rice, his complaint had been that, when asked, Champneys refused to have the rice resieved to verify its grade. It was probably broken rice delivered by a planter who had learned how to fool a broker, but hadn’t fully learned how to process rice or hadn’t developed a plantation where the slaves were willing to produce the most marketable product.

Notes: Bence island is also called Bunce island; the War of Austrian Succession is also known as King George’s War.

Barnwell, Joseph W. "Diary of Timothy Ford 1785-1786," South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, 13 October 1912, quoted by Carney.

Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001; details on quantities in transit from Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1998.

Coclanis, Peter A. The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920, 1989; prices.

Collinson, Peter. Letter to Gentleman’s Magazine, 26 May 1766, reprinted by Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, January 2007; export quantities.

Eltis, Davd, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas," The American Historical Review 112:Dec 2007; origins on slaves between 1750 and 1775.

Thomas, Hugh. The Slave Trade, 1997.

South Carolina - Tools

2010-08-15T06:22:00.000-07:00

Settlers in Barbados and Charles Town learned to produce two tropical crops alien to English agriculture, sugar cane and rice. In each case, the first planters had problems when they used familiar methods to plant and harvest, and failed financially until they figured out how to prepare the cane and seed for market.

In the first case, James Drax apparently learned from the experience of Dutch growers from Pernambuco. In the second, scholars have taken Edward Randolph’s comment in 1700 that South Carolina had "now found the true way of raising and husking Rice" to suggest an important role for slaves from Africa in introducing the tall wooden mortar and pestle that resembles a butter churn.

At the time he was commenting on rice, Randolph was the Surveyor General of Customs keeping an eye on exports for the crown. The Charles Town economy was a satellite of the Caribbean, supplying it with cattle and meat. The islands, who shipped their cane to Bristol on England’s west coast, were the primary market for slaves.

Most of the South Carolina slaves came from the West Indies. The Portuguese had sent people from Angola who ate manioc and maize, while the Royal African Company worked the west coast of the continent from modern Sénégal to Togoland where people grew dry rice. The monopoly of the latter was not renewed by William III, who had deposed the Stuarts in 1680. The slave trade was opened in 1698 to the merchants of Bristol.

Statistically, the slave who introduced the mortar and pestle for milling rice would have come from the Caribbean and would have been a Konga, since island planters were more likely to reexport or refuse to buy such slaves. However, since the willingness to cooperate with a slave master was probably rare, the individual, probably a woman, may have been recently imported directly from an African area just being opened by the new slave traders where people grew rice.

The mortar and pestle is used for more than rice in Africa. On the east coast, where the pirates were active, women use the large wooden tool in Tanzania with millet, while it’s used with maize in modern Angola. The transfer of technology from one crop to another is the most conservative form of innovation.

Randolph gave no clue, and the adoption of the technology is not recorded in popular or folk history. Fayrer Hall simply said Henry Woodward "was ignorant for some Years how to clean it. It was soon dispensed over the Province; and by frequent Experiments and Observations they found out Ways of producing and manufacturing it to so great Perfection."

Any inferences about the first mortar and pestle drawn from material culture would probably use examples dated much later. The only suggestive thing about Randolph’s comment is the phrase "the true way." He either was using a rhetorical flourish to say "one that works," which he had been known to do, or had seen or heard about the tool elsewhere.

Randolph was a younger son who used his wife’s connections with the grandson of the first proprietor of New Hampshire, Robert Mason, to ingratiate himself with the government of Charles II after the restoration of 1660. Before he went to New Hampshire in 1676, he had read law at Gray’s Inn during the English civil war and bought lumber for the Commissioners of the Royal Navy. The last took him to Scotland for the Duke of Richmond.

Since he had been sent to New England, where he and his brothers became customs collectors, he would have been in a position to see anything on any ship in the harbor and talk with people informally who could make comments, remembered but not recorded, on customs in Africa. At the time he made his comments, he was shuttling between Charles Town and Bermuda.

We’ll probably never know more than the technology was introduced by a slave woman.

Notes:
Anonymous. "Crude and Curious Inventions at the Centennial Exhibition," The Atlantic Monthly 40:420-430:October 1877; drawings of mortars and pestles from Angola and Madagascar.

Hall, Fayrer. The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom, 1731, quoted by A. S. Salley Jr., "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Bulletin of the Historical Commission of South Carolina , no 6, 1919.

Mosha, A. C. "Sorghum and Millet Processing and Utilisation in the Southern Africa Development Coordination Conference Area," available on-line with a photograph of a women using a wooden mortar and pestle in northeast Tanzania.

Urquhart, Alvin W. Patterns of Settlement and Subsistence in Southwestern Angola, 1963; picture of mortar and pestle used to make flour from maize.

South Carolina - Drainage and Irrigation

2010-08-08T05:19:00.000-07:00

Agricultural economies are forever driven to increase production when trade and improved birth rates lead to larger urban populations. Farmers are continually confronted with managing water, and men (and women) discover and rediscover techniques for adding or removing it.

The methods developed by the Romans were lost, but when textile centers and the great trade fairs began developing in Bruges and Ghent by 1000, demand for wool brought sheep raising parts of England and Scotland into their economic sphere. Severe storms beginning in 1216 destroyed coastal communities, forcing counts in Flanders and Holland to begin protecting their existing land, then reclaiming more.

Wind driven mills appeared in the early 1200's, which D. G. Kirby and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen think may have been introduced by men returning from the Crusades against the Arabs in the near east. However, they say they didn’t become important drainage pumps until larger populations and increased storm problems led to technological innovations in 1570.

Skilled Dutchmen were lured by their neighbors to Prussia, Sweden, and Denmark, then Rochefort and LaRochelle in France. Charles I encouraged Francis, the Duke of Bedford, to drain the fens of southeast England in 1630's, a project continued by Cromwell and Francis’ son William under the direction of Cornelius Vermuyden with Dutch laborers. More projects were undertaken after William of Orange was crowned in 1680.

When Flanders was the center of the textile industry, Dinis of Portugal, who ruled between 1279 and 1325, encouraged trade with the area to create an alternative to the markets of Castile and the Moors. To secure his borders, he introduced new patterns of land ownership and encouraged men to drain the marshes and swamps, where rice was eventually grown. He also cemented a naval alliance with Genoa, who was revolutionizing trade in Bruges.

In northern Italy, landowners of the Po valley began building canals in 1127 that fostered drainage and irrigation schemes. In 1475, the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, sent the first recorded rice from the area to Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara.

According to Fernand Braudel, the crop was encouraged in Lombardy in the 1500's. They were exporting their surplus to Genoa by 1570.

In 1517, the Ottomans of Turkey had conquered Egypt and demanded rice be sent to Constantinople as part of their annual tribute. It was adopted by the elite, and used by the military on campaigns. In 1600, Venice was eating rice, which they probably bought from the Turks, along with the more traditional wheat, millet and rye.

It takes little for farmers to extrapolate solutions from fragments of information. Portugal introduced reclamation after contact with Flanders. Italy introduced rice after contacts with the levant. In Africa and Madagascar, new varieties of rice were tried, new processing technologies adopted, and new methods for dealing with water created.

When allusions and imagination weren’t enough, men took steps to import knowledge. The Abbasids went from absorbing what the Persians knew to actively saving everything they could from the ancient world. Portugal exploited its contact with Genoa to explore Africa and the world. Everyone hired Dutch engineers and laborers.

Population growth, both natural and from new market towns, created necessity. Trade simplified finding solutions because it revitalized cultures grown comfortable in isolation. Rice and the techniques to grow it expanded when dynamic responses to life replaced static ones.

Notes:
Adshead, Samuel Adrian Miles. Material Culture in Europe and China, 1400-1800: The Rise of Consumerism, 1997.

Braudel, Fernand. La Méditerrane et le Monde Méditerranéan à l’Euopque de Philippe II, 1966 edition, translated as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II by Sian Reynolds, 1972.

Dutra, Francis A. "Dinis, King of Portugal" in E. Michael Gerli and Samuel G. Armistead, Medieval Iberia: An Encyclopedia, 2003.

Kirby, D. G. and Merja-Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen. The Baltic and the North Seas, 2000. The major innovation was the movable cap that allowed the mill’s sails to follow changes in the direction of the wind.

Pregill, Philip and Nancy Volkma. Landscapes in History: Design and Planning in the Eastern and Western Traditions, 1999.

South Carolina - Trade

2010-08-01T06:33:00.000-07:00

Trade, historically, has fostered economic growth and then expanded to feed the needs it generated.

Africa was apparently a world of small communities who traded among themselves before Arab conquerors fanned out after the Sunni Umayyads deposed the established Moslem powers in 661. The Damascan caliphate spread to Egypt in 670 and across northern Africa to Spain in 711, then down to Mauritania in 734.

The Umayyads were deposed by the Shia Abbasids in 750, who moved the Moslem capital to Baghdad and eventually established a trade network that spread from the Umayyad retreat in Spain across northern Africa and the middle east through northern India to the Tarim basin of western China.

Bernard Lewis has found the earliest reference to rice comes from the conquest of the Basra area on the Persian frontier by Moslem tribesmen in the 600's. They tested the unknown grain as food after a horse that had eaten some didn’t die.

It probably became more common as a luxury among the elite after the Abbasids developed Basra as an intellectual center. At some time it was introduced to Egypt, then Spain. The Ishmali Fatimids, who deposed the Abbasids in Egypt in 909, spread north to Sicily, taking rice with them.

Arab traders began moving down the east African coast to Manda island off Kenya in the 800's. Soon after items carved from chlorite schist quarried on the northwest coast of Madagascar appeared in east Africa. The success of a Yemeni clan at Mogadishu in the middle 1100's, brought traders from Shiraz to Kilwa island off Tanzania in the late 1100's.

In the early 1300's, the Mahdali, an Ishmali clan from southern Aden, took over Kilwa and then the east African gold trade. Arab traders weren’t as interested in developing new markets as they were in redirecting the existing trade in gold; urban centers emerged as a consequence, abetted by the availability of surplus food to support urban populations and supply travelers.

Madagascar was drawn into the web of trade. Iharana, where Chinese export China was found in graves from the late 1300's, developed in the northeast as another source for three-legged bowls made from metamorphic rock. The growing port of Aden, with its community of Indian merchants from Gujarat, imported rice from Kilwa, which Richard Gray believes could only have come from Madagascar.

Mande speakers near the headwaters of the western branch of the Niger in west Africa grew glaberrima rice, which Judith Carney believes made possible the earliest sub-Saharan kingdom of Ghana.

Desert caravans, guided by the Sanhaja, linked the peoples of the Mediterranean with the savannah of the Mande, each of whom seems to have remained isolated from one another. The revitalizing Sunni Almoravids from Mauritania attacked Ghana’s main city, Awdaghost, in 1055, before they took Córdova in 1102, setting off the reconquest.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the southern Mande, the Malinke, moved along the Niger to establish the towns of Mali along the bend of the river. Timbukto became a center of learning for the Songhai empire to the northeast in the 1300's.

The exposure to Islam and the requisite trips to Mecca through Egypt, at least among the elite, provided the opportunity for people from the Sahel and savannah to travel to areas with different irrigation systems and different varieties of rice.

Notes:
Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001.

Garlake, Peter. The Kingdoms of Africa, 1978.

Gray, Richard. "Southern Africa and Madagascar" in The Cambridge History of Africa: From c.1600 to c.1790, volume 4, 1975, edited by Richard Gray.

Lewis, Bernard. The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years, 1995.

South Carolina - DNA Studies

2010-07-25T05:41:00.000-07:00

Gregor Mendel was doing his pea inheritance experiments at the same time Darwin was developing the theory of natural selection, but the monk’s work was not publicized until 1900.

Breeders already had enough experience with the variability of hybrids to recognize the statistical patterns he described, that people with blue eyes inherit their eye color from both parents because the blue allele is recessive, and that crossing a red and white pea would produce a red or white flower 25% of the time, and a pink the rest.

Rose growers confirmed his work, especially when they took a hybrid and backcrossed it with one of its parents. It’s easy for them to say Chapmneys Pink Cluster introduced a recessive gene for reblooming because their efforts produced results that confirmed their expectations.

In 1953, Francis Crick and James Watson published their work on the structure of DNA and scientists began using sophisticated instruments to determine exactly where each gene resided, and what each controlled.

Results for rice specialists have not been as satisfying as those for roses. Dormancy, that single domestication event posited by earlier researchers, was no longer simple because dormancy isn’t a physical trait like color, but either results from the structure of the outer layer of the seed or from the embryo. Its appearance isn’t tied to a single gene, but to areas of DNA that exists on several chromosomes.

A Chinese team found five quantitative trait loci have been identified on five chromosomes, and that dormancy increased in only four cases when they introduced an allele from a highly dormant indica cultivar. They learned the more genes they altered, the greater the dormancy.

A group in Korea found similar complexity when they looked at the literature on shattering, another trait hypothesized to have been central to domestication. The ability for the seed to separate easily at maturity without breaking is the consequence of hormonal processes that create a hardened abscission layer on the pedicel stem that holds the seed to the head.

They found reports that four alleles on four of rice’s twelve chromosomes have been linked to shattering, of which two are involved with the creation of the abscission layer. They also found six broader quantitative trait loci had been identified on six chromosomes.

The group created a shattering mutation by treating a non-shattering japonica variety with N-methyl-N-nitrosourea, then crossed it with five cultivars, including its parent. The results suggested the recessive sh-h gene on chromosome 7 was responsible for shattering. They noted that area was closely linked to the Rc location that controls red hull color and the qSD^s-7-1 experimentally tied to dormancy.

The level of amylose, a form of starch, is used to differentiate sticky japonica from fluffy indica rices. However, the tropical japonica javanica falls between the two.

In 1983, researchers for the Carnegie Institution discovered the Wx or waxy gene controlled amylose content in maize pollen and kernels. The gene has since been found in wheat, barley, millet and rice. In rice, the Wx^a allele is associated with dryland indica and Wx^b is found with wetland japonica.

However, a group of Japanese scientists found both existed in the two subspecies and that Wx^b predominates. The distinction between the two occurs during the encoding process when a nucleotide that follows the pattern AGGT in nirvana and rufipogon mutates to AGTT.

In other words, the causative agent isn’t the genetic allele, but something working on that allele during reproduction. Further, the change isn’t permanent, but can revert in the next generation. Another Japanese team found the same kind of change in the African glaberrima rice came from deleting and inserting a new unit in the nucleotide sequence, rather than substituting a T for a G.

Scientists now know a great deal more about rice, but without specimens with known provenance, they can’t say where Hezeiah Maham or John Joshua Ward got his seed. Richard Porcher has found the plats to Maham’s plantation and hopes to unearth some grains. Depending on the results, geneticists may be able to guess if Ward’s Carolina Gold was the direct, but mutant, offspring of Ward, or like the Blush Noisette, has another as yet unidentified parent that blew in from another field.

Researchers have, however, done something more extraordinary, unintentionally duplicated the daily experience of planters who were constantly surprised when their gold hulled rice turned white, or their white turned red. The very randomness of such traits forced them to become better observers, and thus more open to an explanation like that provided by Darwin when it became available.

Notes:
Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. “Searching the Origins of Carolina Gold,” The Rice Paper November 2009.

Ji, Hyeon-So, Sang-Ho Chu, Wenzhu Jiang, Young-Il Cho, Jang-Ho Hahn, Moo-Young Eun, Susan R. McCouch, and Hee-Jong Koh. “Characterization and Mapping of a Shattering Mutant in Rice That Corresponds to a Block of Domestication Genes,” Genetics 173: 995–1005:2006.

Shure, M., SR Wessler, N. Federoff. “Molecular Identification and Isolation of the Waxy Locus in Maize,” Cell 35:225-233, 1983.

Umeda M, H. Ohtsubo, and E. Ohtsubo. “Diversification of the Rice Waxy Gene by Insertion of Mobile DNA Elements into Introns,” The Japanese Journal of Genetics 66:569-86:1991.

Wan, J. M., L. Jiang, J.Y. Tang, C.M. Wang, M.Y. Hou, W. Jing and L.X. Zhang. “Genetic Dissection of the Seed Dormancy Trait in Cultivated Rice (Oryza sativa L.),” Plant Science 170:786-792:2006.

Yamanaka, Shinsuke, Ikuo Nakamura, Kazuo N. Watanabe, and Yo-Ichiro Sato. “Identification of SNPs in the Waxy Gene among Glutinous Rice Cultivars and Their Evolutionary Significance during the Domestication Process,” Theoretical and Applied Genetics 108:1200-124:2004.

South Carolina - Genetics

2010-07-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

The facts about Carolina Gold rice and Champneys Pink Cluster rose are sparse. However, because each was important, others have created narratives that fit their beliefs. Not surprisingly those mythic explanations have changed with circumstances to fit our changing expectations for appropriate heroes.

Originally, people gave credit to John Champneys for the hybrid pink rose, but today people prefer Philippe Noisette, not because of Champneys’ tory leanings, which are largely unknown, but because Noisette married a mulatto in Haiti and lived openly with her and their six children in Charleston.

Earlier, people accepted the view that Hezekiah Maham’s rice, and that of early South Carolina, came from Madagascar. More recently, some scholars, especially Judith Carney, have taken the facts that the early methods for milling and winnowing rice came from Africa and that many of the slaves imported in the years when Henry Laurens was active in the trade came from the rice growing regions of west Africa, to suggest that not only was seed rice imported from Africa, but the entire agricultural tool kit, including irrigation methods, was introduced by Blacks in exchange for adoption of an easier task system of labor.

Few gardeners or farmers care about the origins of their plants, except as amusing trivia. However, the facts and the way they are interpreted can be important social indicators. The differences and similarities in the way two disparate plants are treated may go farther to reveal underlying cultural patterns.

The only facts we tend to accept today come from genetics. Recently, biologists at Florida Southern College have confirmed that all the DNA found in fragment bands in Champneys Pink Cluster is found in Parson’s Pink and existing musk roses. They also confirmed that only half the DNA found in Blush Noisette is shared with Champneys Pink Cluster, and the rest is from some unknown source. They made no attempt to determine which was the pollen and which the seed parent for Champneys’ rose.

Genetic interpretations of the origin of rice are more controversial, because cultural honor is involved. Ya-Long Guo and Song Ge believe the rice genus, Oryza, diverged within the grass family about 15 million years ago during the Miocene and the African varieties separated from the Asian about 7 million years ago.

The closest relative of modern rice, Oryza sativa, is O. rufipogon, itself dervied from O. nivara, while the nearest species to domesticated African rice, O. glaberrima is O. barthii. Nivara and barthii share a common ancestor. All are all considered be part of the same AA genome, distinct from five other groups of modern rice.

The Asian rice divided into two subspecies, wetland japonica and dryland indica, as a result of domestication and the subsequent movement of rice eaters into new habitats. Some, looking at the genetics, argue the one is derived from the other; others, looking at the archaeological record, believe they resulted from separate events that occurred south of the Himalayas, one in India, Myanmar or Thailand, the other in southern China or Vietnam.

As rice moved from China through Korea to Japan and the Philippines, then southeast to Sulawesi, Borneo, Java, and Sumatra, another, more tropical, subspecies emerged, javanica, which was the one taken to Madagascar. Linguists have determined current Malagasy is closest to the Maanyan language of Borneo, while geneticists have found the DNA of modern residents owes its Asian component to Borneo.

Medieval trade with Arabs on Kilwa island, who had contact through Aden with Gujuart, may have first introduced dryland rice from India. As trade and contacts across the Indian Ocean expanded after Europeans appeared, more ways were opened for rice imports.

In 1986, Koji Tanaka discovered javanica is still grown on the southeast coast of Madagascar where it’s extracted by foot and milled with a mortar and pestle. In the uplands and west, indica dominates and animals are used to separate the rice, while the northeast grows javanica and uses animal labor.

Notes: Javanica is now treated as a subspecies of japonica.

Burney, David. "Finding the Connections between Paleoecology, Ethnobotany and Conservation in Madagascar," Ethnobotany Research and Applications 3:385-389:2005.

Carney, Judith. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, 2001.

Garlake, Peter. The Kingdoms of Africa, 1978.

Guo, Ya-Long and Song Ge. "Molecular Phylogeny of Oryzeae (Poaceae) Based on DNA Sequences from Chloroplast, Mitochondrial, and Nuclear Genomes," American Journal of Botany 92:1548-1558:2005.

Hurles, Matthew E., Bryan C. Sykes, Mark A. Jobling, and Peter Forster. "The Dual Origin of the Malagasy in Island Southeast Asia and East Africa: Evidence from Maternal and Paternal Lineages," The American Journal of Human Genetics 76:894–901:2005.

Joshi, S. P., V. S. Gupta, R. K. Aggarwal, P. K. Ranjekar, and D. S. Brar. "Genetic Diversity and Phylogenetic Relationship as Revealed by Inter Simple Sequence Repeat (ISSR) Polymorphism in the Genus Oryza," Theoretical and Applied Genetics 100:1311-1320:2000.

Tanaka, Koji. "Rice and Rice Culture in Madagascar," Tonan Ajia Kenkyu 26:367-393:1989.

_____ "Malayan Cultivated Rice and Its Expansion - Part Three," Agricultural Archaeology 97-107:1997.

South Carolina - Variants on a Tale

2010-07-11T05:06:00.000-07:00

Alexander Salley, who became state archivist for South Carolina, reprinted eight versions of Fayrer Hall’s origin tale. Each has been retold by others. Still others have tried to combine them into a single tale, emphasizing different elements. The history of the history has moved from some attempts to explain a confusing situation, the varieties of rice found in South Carolina, to syntheses that compounded the confusion.

The first person Salley mentioned was James Glen, governor between 1743 and 1756, who reprinted Hall’s version in 1761. He emphasized chance and the irrelevance of the proprietors when he added (motif 3, see notes) "it was not done with any previous Prospect of Gain, but owing to a lucky accident, and a private experiment." The (4) gift motif was expanded when he added it was done "for the benefit of Mankind."

In 1766, when conflicts between the crown and the colony were escalating after the Sugar Act of 1764, Gentleman’s Magazine of London published an account by Peter Collinson, a friend of Charles Dubois, which contained many of the same motifs as Hall.

The (1) individual responsible for introducing the rice was the treasurer of the East India company, and the recipient was (5) Thomas Marsh, a Carolina merchant, after they (3) happened to meet in a coffee house. Dubois (4) gave Marsh (6) a "money bag" of (2) East India rice.

Since the quantity was so small, (9) more rice was brought by a Portuguese slave trader who (4) gave, but actually bartered, some of the ship’s provisions for fresh produce. The (3) unexpected rice (8) made men more sure rice could be a viable commodity.

However, (9) the planters still didn’t have enough, and, in 1713, the colony paid bounties to captains who brought rice. One shipment came (2) "from the Streights, probably Egypt" or Milan. Another bounty was paid for rice that came with a slave ship from (2) Madagascar.

Salley found no record of the bounties, and believed the London writer was thinking of the gratuity paid to John Thurber. What Salley didn’t mention was that the Portuguese and Madagascar ships were probably smugglers who provided cheap goods to Charles Town the way the pirates had. He did mention rice itself was smuggled to Portugal in 1708, and sold for fish that then was sent to London.

Collinson and Du Bois were both avid gardeners, active in exploring the natural resources of the colonies. Collinson imported plants collected by John Bertram, while Du Bois helped sponsor Mark Catesby trip to Charles Town in 1722. He also grew plants sent to him by his family from India.

In 1772, as rebellion against royal authority was brewing in France, a contributor to Guillaume Thomas Raynal’s history of European trade with the two Indies emphasized that the introduction was (3) "purely fortuitous," the result of a ship returning from the (2) East Indies that (3) "happened to be cast away" and (6) "some bags" were (4) "taken from the ship." Even so, "a trial was made of sowing them, which (8) succeeded beyond expectations"

During the war, in 1779, a tory minister living in exile in London, Alexander Hewatt replaced the adventurer, Henry Woodward, with an idealized royal governor, Thomas Smith, who arrived in the colony in his mid-30's in 1684. When his wife died, he married Sabina de Vignon, the widow of Signeur D’Arssens who had connections to William and Mary and the proprietors. When Sabina died in 1689, Smith petitioned the proprietors for rights to Van Arssens’ estates.

At the time the proprietors were having problems asserting their authority over the colony, and in 1693 transferred Van Arssen’s land to Smith and appointed him governor. Before he died in 1694, he tried to suppress the pirates who competed with the East India Company. I found nothing on-line about his life between the time he was born in Devon in 1648 and he appeared in the colony.

According to Hewatt, soon after Smith became governor, (3) a "fortunate accident happened" when (1) a brigantine from (2) Madagascar (3) touched on Sullivan Island outside the Charles Town harbor. Smith met with the captain who (4) "made him a present of a (6) bag of seed rice." Smith (7) divided the rice between "Stephen Bull, Joseph Woodward, and some other friends."
Hewatt then mentioned (9) DuBois to explain (11) "the distinction of red and white rice."

The location of the accident and the identity of the planters have been elaborated. Sullivan’s Island was the location of the fort William Moultrie built that repulsed the first British attack on Charleston in 1776, while Hewatt was close to the last royal governor of the colony, William Bull, and probably heard family stories from descendants of Smith. Stephen Bull was William’s son, and his son, William’s grandson, also Stephen Bull, married Elizabeth Woodward. Salley couldn’t identify Joseph, who was not descended from Henry.

In 1798, after years of battle and intrigue to secure the French revolution, Raynal reissued his history and the current contributor said "opinions differ" on the introduction of rice, and he no longer thought it mattered if it came with a shipwreck, was sent by England, or brought by slaves, because what mattered was South Carolina was ideally suited to grow rice.

In 1802, another governor, John Drayton, published his version, which now gave "good government" a role. He said the first shipment of 1699 was an unprofitable variety, and it was only in 1696 that a larger, whiter variety was introduced The last is a trait associated with the rice of Hezekiah Maham, and Drayton may have been contrasting the rice that existed after the revolution, with that from before.

Drayton’s second introduction came when the (1) captain of a brigantine from (2) Madagascar (4) "presented" a (6) bag to the (5) governor (7) "who divided it between several gentlemen." He adds, Mr. DuBois (9) "sent another parcel" which explains "the distinction which now prevails, between white and gold rice."

In 1809, Henry Laurens’ son-in-law, David Ramsey deliberately introduced new elements. He suggested Thomas Smith "had been at Madagascar before he settled in Carolina" and that he was "an old acquaintance" of the captain of a (1) vessel from (2) Madagascar which (3) "being in distress, came to anchor near Sullivan’s Island." The (1) ship’s cook (4) "presented" Smith with (6) "a small bag of rice."

This time it’s Smith himself who (8) proved that rice could grow "luxuriantly." He (7) distributed his "little crop" "among his planter friends" Salley said Ramsey went so far as to alter Edward Crisp’s 1704 map of Charles Town to mark the spot in Smith’s garden where the rice first grew, apparently unaware that the area could not have supported rice because it only had access to salt water.

Ramsey had been an active patriot during the war, jailed in Saint Augustine by the British. His more colorful version may have been influenced by Parson Weems’ attempts to create a dramatic past for the young republic with his books on George Washington and Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox. The later was published in 1805, based on notes by Peter Horry, but had been repudiated by Horry.

Salley’s last reference was to a genealogist, Guy Mannering Fessenden, who discovered John Thurber was buried in Warren, Rhode Island, and noted he had brought the rice (2) from India between 1694 and 1607.

David Shields of the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation has since found another variant provided by John Legare in 1823. He told the South Carolina Agricultural Society (2) "the late Col. Henry Laurens " (3) "imported" a (6) "small quantity of what is called the Gold-seed Rice, soon after the revolutionary war" which was (8) found to be so far superior to the white-hulled Rice before cultivated."

Shields notd there was no evidence Laurens grew rice at Mepkin between the time he returned to Carolina after the war in 1784 and he died in 1892. Legard probably thought him as a better godfather than Maham, the way Hewatt thought the titled Thomas Smith was a more appropriate agent for change than the adventuring Henry Woodward.

Many recent writers have read some, or all of the accounts mentioned by Salley, and created their own syntheses, usually within a contemporary framework. For instance, Richard Shulze, who is growing heirloom Carolina Gold rice at his Turnbridge Plantation, has elaborated the accident:

"A Liverpool-bound brigantine sailing from (2) Madagascar was (3) badly damaged by a storm and blown off course; it set into the port of Charles Towne for repairs."

and the nature of the gift

"Dr. Henry Woodward apparently (4) befriended the captain"

From there, the modern skeptic questions the traditional facts, noting "the ship, which was of American origin, was probably not trading legally as the British law at that time forbade trade outside of the colonies and the British Isles."

He repeats Ramsay’s idea filtered through Salley that "Woodward proceeded to grow this in his garden in the city" before suggesting it was more likely he planted the seed at "the more suitable property on the Abbapoola Creek."

He then notes not enough time passed between the summer of 1685 when the ship entered port and Woodward’s trip to the frontier where he died for him to (8) "produce a very good crop, which he then (9) distributed to his friends." He concludes "he probably never had the opportunity to fully appreciate (10) the new industry that he was so instrumental in spawning."

As for Josehua John Ward’s belief that Maham’s rice came from Madagascar, it may have. There were some relations with the island where André Michaux, who had left Charleston in 1796, died collecting plants in 1802. However, it’s more likely, Maham was simply saying his rice came from the black market and the origin is deliberately unknown.

Notes:
Motifs found in origin tales that explain the introduction of rice to South Carolina
1. Someone, usually unnamed
2. From Madagascar
3. Through some accident, usually a shipwreck
4. Gave, usually as a sign of gratitude
5. To Woodward, or some other prominent person
6. A peck or some other small amount of rice
7. Which was distributed free to the other planters
8. Who proved rice could grow in the colony
9. A second introduction
10. Is responsible for the spread of the crop
11. And the visible variations in the rice

Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Historical Commission of South Carolina Bulletin 6, 1919.

Schulze, Richard. Carolina Gold Rice: the Ebb and Flow History of a Lowcountry Cash Crop, 2005.

Shields, David S. "Who first planted Carolina Gold?," The Rice Paper April 2008

South Carolina - Rice’s Origin Tale

2010-07-04T06:37:00.000-07:00

Rice was introduced at least three times into South Carolina: first in the early years of the colony, again after the revolution when planters needed to replace their lost seed grain, and then again when Joshua John Ward made his improved selection available.

The first occurred before there were many written records and has become the subject of folk history; the second is remembered in family tradition, and the third, a commercial transaction, was recorded for all to know by the participants.

Alexander Salley found the only public record of what became the folk tradition was a 1715 entry in the journal of the House of Commons noting the body had agreed to pay a gratuity of one hundred pounds to John Thurber for "bringing the first Madagascar Rice into this province."

He found the first narrative explanation appeared sixteen years later in a pamphlet he attributed to Fayrer Hall, who had served in expeditions against pirates in 1718. Hall wrote the introduction of rice

"was owing to the following Accident. A Brigantine from the Island Madagascar happened to put in there; they had a little Seed Rice left, not exceeding a Peck or Quarter of a bushel, which the Captain offered and gave to a Gentlemen of the Name of Woodward. From Part of this he had a very good Crop, but was ignorant for some Years how to clean it. It was soon dispensed over the Province; and by frequent Experiments and Observations they found out Ways of producing and manufacturing it to so great Perfection, that it is thought it exceeds any other in Value. The Writer of this hath seen the Captain in Carolina, where he received a handsome gratuity from the Gentlemen of that Country."

The basic motifs of the folk narrative, told in several variants, are that:

1. Someone, usually unnamed
2. From Madagascar
3. Through some accident, usually a shipwreck
4. Gave, usually as a sign of gratitude
5. To Woodward, or some other prominent person
6. A peck or some other small amount of rice
7. Which was distributed free to the other planters
8. Who proved rice could grow in the colony

In the first retelling, the identity of Thurber was reduced to a sea captain, who was now the one from Madagascar.

Between the time Charles II granted the land to eight proprietors in 1663 and Thurber’s petition, Madagascar was not controlled by any western power. Attempts by the British had ended in 1649, while the French were massacred in 1673.

The only westerners who visited the island after that were pirates, who exploited the slave trade after they’d been driven from the Caribbean. The British finally removed them from the island about the time Thurber made his petition. By then, the Sakalava had consolidated power, and the French had established their base on the nearby island of Bourbon, now La Réunion.

Hall used the word "accident" to suggest the introduction was a chance, not deliberate act. From the first the proprietors wanted to develop a colony and listed rice as one of the crops that was both suitable to the climate and congruent with the throne’s desire to establish a completely self-sufficient mercantile economy. 1n 1672, William Jeffereys sent a barrel of rice "for the prop. acct of the Lords Proprs of Carolina" which was received by the governor.

Many of the early settlers never accepted the legitimacy of the proprietors and had thrown off their power in 1720. The use of the word "accident," like the hidden reference to pirates, may have been an attempt to suggest the proprietors had nothing to do with the introduction of rice as a crop and, by extension, the success of the colony.

The double reference to rice as a gift may have been another attempt to contrast proper behavior with that of the proprietors. The third governor of the colony, John Yeamans, shipped his surplus food to Barbados where he could make a profit rather than sell it to the settlers he’d brought with him who didn’t have enough to eat.

Woodward is assumed to have been Henry Woodward, who died sometime between 1685 and 1690. He had come to the area on the exploratory voyage of 1666 and stayed with the Cusabo on Port Royale sound. He was captured by the Spanish the next year. He escaped when Robert Searle raided Saint Augustine in 1668, and stayed with the pirates until shipwrecked on Nevis in 1669.

He returned to the area with the expedition that founded Charles Town in 1670, and explored the interior. His friendly relations with the Westbo opened trade with the Indians in 1674, an arrangement rejected by later settlers who precipitated a war that exterminated the tribe and replaced them with the Shawnee.

Disgraced, he went to London in 1682 to seek rehabilitation and returned as the official Indian agent for the proprietors with rights to a 20% commission on trade. He was in trouble again in 1685 for supporting the Yamasee and Scots settlers at Stuart Town against the proprietors.

His ambiguous loyalties to pirates, proprietors, rebellious settlers and native Americans made him a figure suspect to all. He’s the element in Hall’s narrative that became the least stable.

The quantity of rice usually struck the narrator as too small to explain the spread or variations in the crop, and so a second introduction was often mentioned, much like the story of Seth resolves problems of ancestry introduced by the fight between Cain and Abel. Hall suggested that

"Mr. Du Bois, Treasurer of the East-India Company, did send to that Country a small Bag of Seed-Rice some short Time after, from whence it is reasonable enough to suppose might come these two Sorts of that Commodity, one called Red Rice in Contradistinction to the White."

This addendum introduces the remaining motifs in the origin tale:

9. A second introduction
10. Is responsible for the spread of the crop
11. And the visible variations in the rice

Notes:
Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998, on Yeamans.

Hall, Fayrer. The Importance of the British Plantations in America to this Kingdom, 1731, quoted by Salley.

Salley, A. S. Jr "The Introduction of Rice Culture into South Carolina," Bulletin of the Historical Commission of South Carolina, no 6, 1919.

South Carolina - Rice and Roses

2010-06-27T06:01:00.000-07:00

Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys are an unlikely pair to be the ones responsible for Charleston’s antebellum wealth and beauty. It’s even odder, given South Carolina’s current reputation for fundamentalism, that the actions of the two contributed to the growing body of experience that led people to accept Charles Darwin’s 1859 suggestion that natural selection was the operative cause of evolution.

After the war, Maham needed seed rice for his Pineville area plantation. He died four years later. In the years since he had been so deeply in debt, he must have had some success, because the next year, his younger daughter, Mary’s husband, George Haig died and left the slaves he’d acquired from Maham to his wife for her life.

In 1800, Joshua John Ward was born at Brook Green plantation to Maham’s niece, Elizabeth Cook, and John Ward. Thirty-seven years later, his overseer, James C. Thompson, noticed part of a rice head that was larger than any other Ward had seen.

Ward saved the seed, and planted it the next year on the margins of an old field where it was nearly destroyed by standing water and rats. The following year, he and Thompson planted the seed they’d been able to salvage in a large tub in Thompson’s yard, only to have a slave leave the gate open and a hog eat most of the crop. They transplanted the survivors, and most of the rice was sterile.

In 1840, they took what had survived the hog and rot, and planted half an acre. The next year, Ward planted 21 acres at Brook Green, which his factor sold above the market price. In 1842, Ward tried 400 acres, and the following year planted nothing but the new large grain.

In 1844, Ward made Carolina Gold available commercially. From then until the civil war, the Brook Green rice "commanded the highest price of any rice on the world market in Paris and London."

Ward claimed his 1838 seed was descended from that planted by his great-uncle in 1785.

Sometime in the early 1800's, either 1802 or 1810 or 1811, John Champneys found a new rose growing on his plantation which appeared to be a cross between a white musk, cultivated in Europe since the Crusades, and Parson’s Pink, which had been introduced to England from China in 1759.

Philippe Noisette, a son of the head gardener to the future Louis XVIII, had moved to Charleston in 1795 with his Haitian wife after the revolution there. He experimented with the rose, now called Champneys’ Pink Cluster, and in 1814 sent either seeds or plants to his brother who had a nursery in Paris. Either Philippe or Louis Claude crossed the plant with another rose; the hybrid was introduced in Europe as Blush Noisette in 1819.

Meantime, plant stock of some kind was sent to William Price, Jr., who had the best known American nursery on Long Island, and traded plants with his English suppliers. Two years before Champneys died, the Loddiges Nursery outside London offered a new rose, Champigny, in 1818.

Noisettes were the first roses to introduce the recessive gene for reblooming isolated by the Chinese into a fragrant European species. A number of new varieties appeared in France in the 1820's and 1830's. By the 1840's, they were crossed with tea roses, which led in 1867 to La France, the first hybrid tea released by Jean-Baptiste André Guillot the younger.

At the time, Louis Claude Noisette and other French growers were becoming aware of the mechanics of plant reproduction. When Rudolph Jacob Camerarius had argued in 1694 that plants had sexual organs, and pollen was the male agent of fertilization, most ignored him.

In 1729 a 22-year-old Carl Linnaeus expanded his ides to suggest a method of classifying plants in Introduction to the Floral Nuptials. He continued his work to make reproduction the basis for his description of the natural world and external characteristics, the morphology, the criteria naturalists would use to distinguish species.

The most important work for breeders appeared in 1793, when Christian Konrad Sprengel described his practical experiments with pollination. Still, more than a generation passed before the first controlled rose hybrid was introduced by Beauregard in Angiers in 1839. Safrano, a grandparent of La France, combined a yellow China with a Bourbon, itself a spontaneous hybrid of Parson’s Pink and a damask found on La Réunion in 1823 by Edouard Perichon.

At the time Maham acquired his gold husked seed and Champneys bought his pink shrub rose, observation and selection were the only methods available to farmers to improve their crops. In 1843, Ward’s relative through his mother’s sister, Robert Allston complained that poor rice came from the "commingling of the grain" which happened when different varieties were planted in adjacent fields, and planters were "careless" in selecting their seed stock.

The year before Ward introduced Carolina Gold, Allston described the types of rice then growing in the state. His classification criteria were morphological: seed husk color, size, shape, and awns, also called beards.

The most important variety, which he attributed to Maham, had a gold shell. This coexisted with white rice, which had a creamy hull; guinea rice, which he said looked like guinea corn, a form of African sorghum or millet, and proud rice, a red grain with a white husk and awn like gold seed.

Allston contrasted these with attempts to improve the quality of the crop, either through introducing new seed or careful selection. His example of the first was a bearded variety brought from the East Indies the year before. As an illustration of "improvement" through "a long-continued, careful selection of the seed," he mentioned the long grain rice about to be introduced by Ward.

At the time Carolina Gold and Safrano were introduced in 1844 and 1839, Darwin was back in England from his five year voyage on the Beagle and working out an explanation for the endemic species he’d seen in the Galapagos islands.

It’s his name we associate with the revolution in plant breeding, even though he drew on the work of men like Sprengel. Similarly, while J. J. Ward and Louis Claude Noisette received the credit and profits for developing new plant varieties, they needed the experience of Hezekiah Maham and John Champneys, and the support of men like Robert Allston and Philipe Nosette.

Innovation can only come from a combination of shared interests and special individuals.

Notes: Mary Charlotte Cook, Ward’s maternal aunt, married Benjamin Allston Sr. Allston’s uncle was William Allston, the father of Robert Francis Withers Allston.

Allston, Robert. A Memoir of the Introduction and Planting of Rice in South Carolina, 1843, reprinted in several other publications, including James Dunwoody, The Industrial Resources, Etc., of the Southern and Western States, volume 2, 1852.

Camerarius, Rudolph Jacob. Epistolae de Sexa Plantarum, 1694.

Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. "Searching the Origins of Carolina Gold," The Rice Paper, November 2009; the "highest price" quotation.

Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species, 1859.

Hurst, C. C. "Notes on the Origin and Evolution of Our Garden Roses," 1941, reprinted in Graham Stuart Thomas, The Old Shrub Roses, 1955.

Lineaus, Carl. Praeludia Sponsaliorum Plantarum, 1730.

_____. Systema Naturae, first edition 1735.

Spengle, Christian Konrad. Das entdeckte Geheimnis der Natur im Bau und in der Befruchtung der Blumen, 1793.

Ward, Joshua John. Letter to Robert Allston, 16 November 1843, incorporated in later editions by Allston and reprinted by the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, The Rice Paper, November 2009.

South Carolina - Hazekiah Maham’s War

2010-06-20T05:41:00.000-07:00

For nearly ten years, war dominated Hazekiah Maham’s life. His easy years of promotion, and one assumes, comradery and competence peaked in April, 1781, when he built a log tower to give rebel soldiers the height necessary to fire at the otherwise impregnable Fort Watson. While others credit Thomas Taylor with devising the first temporary structure from fence rails at Fort Granby in February, Maham was the one who adapted the idea and improved the construction with logs, so that it became a tactic used the end of May at Augusta.

Four months later, in July, the nature of Maham’s war changed when Thomas Sumter led an attack on the British near Charleston. At the first skirmish at Biggin’s Church on July 16, one of Peter Horry’s troops betrayed their position with a gun that failed to fire and they retreated. A slave told the British where they went, and they were ambushed in camp.

The next day, the British attacked at Quinby Bridge near the Cooper River. Maham’s troops charged to take the howitzer. In the fierce, close combat Maham’s horse was killed. The rebels fell back to Thomas Shubrick’s plantation. Many in Francis Marion’s Brigade of Partisans were killed or wounded when Sumter failed to send artillery to support them. Of the 555 involved 30 were killed and 30 wounded. The dead were buried near where they fell.

In September, the Continental army, commanded by Nathaniel Greene, engaged the British at Eutaw Springs, to stop them from going north to join Charles Cornwallis in Virginia. Technically, Greene lost in the deadliest battle in the south, but not before neutralizing the British troops. Maham’s commander, William Henderson was wounded.

The Swamp Fox’s unit was so badly depleted he was ordered to raise two new regiments, one led by Maham, the other by Peter Horry. The two men had been feuding, and Maham refused to work with Horry.

One reason for the conflict may have been the tensions that arise when an aristocratic society is confronted by the realities of prolonged war where military talent is more widely distributed among the lower orders, and men no longer tolerate incompetent commanders. Thomas Taylor had publically refused to obey an order from the Gamecock, Thomas Sumter, after Shubrick’s plantation.

At some time, Maham was staying with friends when he woke in the night, thinking he was being attacked, grabbed his sword and began slashing clothes that hung by the window. His wife’s wealthy relatives rather thought it a funny anecdote to tell about a man who had married into their family, but modern readers will recognize a common post-combat reaction made worse by an environment where the enemy had eyes everywhere.

After Cornwallis surrendered in November, Maham’s men were attacked in January at Vidau’s Bridge and in February at Durant’s plantation and Tydiman’s plantation. In each case, the British commanders knew the numbers of men Marion commanded. In February they not only knew Marion and Maham were attending the General Assembly at Jacksonborough and that Maham and Horry were feuding, but that the man Maham left in charge had left camp.

Four were killed and 14 wounded in January; 14 were killed and 9 wounded in February. The last battle left the units of both Horry and Maham so ravaged, the governor, John Rutledge, ordered the two merged. When Marion, made Maham commander, ostensibly because he had been a colonel longer, Horry resigned in protest.

When Horry returned to the plantation he’d inherited from his father near Winyah Bay, he found his neighbor’s slaves had run away, leaving sweet potatoes and cotton they’d been growing for themselves. He asked to harvest the crops to support his own slaves.

In March, Maham returned home to see a doctor about a lingering fever. A runaway slave informed the loyalists. James Robins, a captain at Tydiman’s Plantation, appeared to force him to sign papers he wouldn’t fight any longer, and left him on parole. Greene ordered him to stay home and accept his situation.

Frederick Porcher remembers that when Maham returned the area "was full of disaster to the agriculturist." The primary crop had been indigo, which was no longer supported by British subsidies, and the Santee swamp was too prone to floods for other crops. To make matters worse, the state was refusing to pay Marion’s men, and the credit breakdown that sparked riots in Charles Town spread to the hinterland.

Maham’s wife Mary died in January, 1784. By September he was so deeply in debt, the sheriff was serving him papers. When his deputy appeared, Maham drew his sword and forced the man to eat the papers. Marion appeared to smooth over the situation, but his family says Maham continued to be "more and more irritable."

He died in 1789, only 50 years old.

Hazekiah Maham’s War:
1776
Mar Elected captain in Isaac Huger’s 1st Regiment of Riflemen

1779
Sep 24-Oct 19 Stono Ferry, captain of grenadier company under Charles Cotesworth Pinckney
Nov 8 Major in the SC 1st Regiment, resign 11/8
nd Major under Daniel Horry in SC Light Dragoons, cousin of Peter Horry

1780
Feb 18-22 Stono Ferry, major with Daniel Horry’s SC State Dragoons
Mar 6-7 Ferguson’s Plantation, major, SC State Calvary
May 12 Charleston surrender
Aug Lieutenant colonel under Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox

1781
Apr 15-23 Fort Watson, major SC State Calvary under Francis Marion
Jul 16 Biggin’s Church, Lieutenant Colonel under Thomas Sumter, SC Continentals
Jul 17 Quinby Bridge and Shubrick’s Plantation, lieutenant colonel, Maham’s Light Dragoons, under Thomas Sumter, SC Continentals
Aug 31 Parker’s Ferry under Francis Marion, SC Continentals and Militia
Sep 8 Eutaw Springs, lieutenant colonel under William Henderson, SC State Troops and Militia
Nov 10 Charles Cornwallis surrender at Yorktown
Nov Colonel and commander of SC 3rd Regiment of State Dragoon under Francis Marion
Nov 18 Fair Lawn under Francis Marion

1782
Jan 3 Vidau’s Bridge, Maham’s Light Dragoons under John Caraway Smith, SC State Troops
Feb 24 Durant’s Plantation, Strawberry Ferry, Maham’s Light Dragoons under John Caraway Smith
Feb 25 Tydiman’s Plantation, Mahan’s Dragoons under John Caraway Smith
Mar Captured by British at home, paroled
Oct 16 Monck’s Corner

nd Chase down thieves who steal his relatives prize horse

Notes:
Gordon, John W. South Carolina and the American Revolution, 2003.

Horry, Peter. Letter to Colonel Grimké, 10 June 1782, quoted by Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815, 1993; probably John Faucheraud Grimké who may have been the nominal owner of the neighbor’s land. Grimké was married to Mary Smith, a descendant of the second landgrave Thomas Smith, who bought the grant of Wiynah Bay in 1711; the Grimkés were centered to the south in Beaufort.

Johnson, Joseph. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South, 1851.

Lewis, J. D. The American Revolution website.

O’Kelley, Patrick. Nothing but Blood and Slaughter: The Revolutionary War in the Carolinas, 4 volumes, 2004-2005.

Porcher, Frederick A. Historical and Social Sketch of Craven County, no date.

South Carolina - John Champneys’ War

2010-06-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

The American Revolution was not kind to Hezekiah Maham or John Champneys, who were beyond the age of adventure when war was declared in 1776. One was 37, the other 33.

Champneys had a plantation on the banks of the Wando, between the Cooper and the Atlantic on the northeast side of Charles Town where seven to eight acres were devoted to "trees, plants, shrubs and flowers of every kind which can minister to use or ornament" and "nature is improved, but no where violated."

All changed when he refused to sign the oath of loyalty in 1777. He was given one year to sell his land and leave. The next year, when the General Assembly demanded reaffirmation of the oath from neutrals, Champneys recalled the response of the banished supporters of Parliament during the English civil war in Barbados when he published "An account of the sufferings and persecution of John Champneys: a native of Charles-town, South-Carolina; inflicted by order of Congress, for his refusal to take up arms in defence of the arbitrary proceedings carried on by the rulers of said place. Together with his protest, &c."

When the British took Charles Town in 1780, Champneys was among those who returned. The next year, the war time governor, John Rutledge, offered loyalists the opportunity to reclaim their citizenship if they served six months in the militia, but he explicitly excluded men, like Champneys, who had been banished before 1780. That same year, 1781, Champneys married Mary Harvey, the widow of William Wilson.

The fourth General Assembly met in exile in Jacksonborough in January, 1782, after the British had surrendered at Yorktown but before they had vacated Charles Town. Rutledge asked them to name the loyalists who were most noxious to the incipient state. After much wrangling, they were close to issuing a list in February when William Henry Harvey, Mary’s brother, requested the property of their brother Alexander be given to him, as the rightful heir, rather than confiscated.

Two days after Harvey’s petition, the General Assembly rejected any such diversion of loyalist property. Instead, the members agreed to defer sales of real property, but not slaves, until their next session in January 1783 to give loyalists time to appeal. Like the British before them, they wanted to work the slaves to pay their war debts.

When the assembly issued its final list of 238, it included Alexander Harvey, who had signed the official greeting welcoming Henry Clinton to Charleston, and his mother’s first cousin, Joseph Seabrook, who had accepted protection from the British.

In 1783, soon after the British withdrew, the General Assembly established the trial rights for loyalists and scheduled hearings where they could come with their supporters to show they weren’t a menace to the community.

Rebecca Brannon has suggested that many tried to establish they had helped the rebel cause by taking in orphans, secretly helping prisoners, or using their positions to soften the British treatment of their neighbors. One she mentions was Joseph Seabrook, who claimed he had been "prevailed upon by his neighbors to take a Militia Command under the British Government in order to prevent plundering."

Charles Town artisans weren’t happy to see so many well-to-do loyalists petitioning for clemency when the Treaty of Paris, that would take effect September 3, upheld the right of those merchants to collect debts assumed during the occupation when the peace severed the economic ties with Britain that had sustained the pre-war economy.

The city was rocked by riots in July and incorporated as a separate entity, Charleston, with an intendant in August.

On March 26 of the following year, 1784, the General Assembly passed a general amnesty act that removed many from the original Confiscation List and placed them on the list of those to be taxed. Alexander Harvey was not removed, but Seabrook was.

Soon after, Charleston rioted again, and a secret group warned thirteen to leave or die. Twelve were merchants who had just been removed from the Confiscation List. The other was John Champneys.

There are no on-line reports of activities by Champneys that would have made him a continuing target. The most likely reason is that his wharf made him the creditor of many. We know he had a mortgage on fifteen stores and land owned by Richardson, Wyatt, and Richardson on the wharf. When the heirs sued one another in 1791, the judge, Henry William De Saussure, discovered Champneys had overbilled the partners, and owed them money.

Champneys apparently moved to Saint Augustine, where, in 1785, he sold his property to Francis Philip Fatio, a Swiss national, with the understanding he could buy it back after the confiscation deadline. The same year, his wife petitioned again on behalf of her brother, who she said was now in England being treated for insanity, and requested safe passage for John to return to request a trial. Neither was accepted.

The Wando plantation was advertized for sale in 1786.

Champneys remained in exile, and his wife petitioned again in 1787 for his safe return to settle his affairs and remove her and their family to England. This time, the General Assembly accepted the petition but did not act until 1789 when it finally lifted his banishment, but didn’t return his wharf.

Sometime, he bought his new plantation on the south side of the city where William Williamson had established "one of the most elaborate early gardens" with six acres of water and ten acres of "pleasure grounds." Williamson had died in 1785, leaving his estate to his half sisters, one of whom, Elizabeth Grimké, was married to John Rutledge.

Why the 44-year-old Champneys was finally accepted is not clear. He may finally have found a sufficiently influential sponsor, the General Assembly may have found it no longer could refuse after it had accepted worse men like Henry Laurens’ brother-in-law, Elias Ball, or it may have realized the war crisis had dissipated when the worst offenders had left and several years passed without rioting.

Mary filed one final petition in 1790. Back when her brother was leaving, she had bought a slave nurse from him at an inflated price, and now needed to regularize the woman’s position. She claimed the mulatto had been afraid at the time of the man who wanted to purchase her and she had had to outbid him.

While the Champneys had been fighting to return to Charleston, new men had been moving there who introduced the spirit of voluntary organizations we associate with the young republic. Andrew Michaux, a botanist sent by the French, started a nursery on Goose Creek and helped organize the Agricultural Society of South Carolina in 1785. Physicians trained in Edinburgh and Philadelphia founded the Medical Society of South Carolina in 1789, while others built the Orphan House in 1790.

When Champneys returned, his name appears among these new men, not among the established planter elite. He was a commissioner of the Orphan House from 1792 and 1796. As treasurer of the agricultural society in 1797, he had trouble collecting dues, and Thomas Pickney sent him a pamphlet about new ways of cultivating rice when he was president in 1810.

The year he died, 1820, the 77-year-old man was listed as a subscriber to the history of the Episcopal church being written by Frederick Dalcho, a Mason who joined the medical society in 1801, and helped organize the botanical garden in 1805.

Champneys’ life was defined by his plantations, the one on the Wando when he was an active entrepreneur, the one to the southwest when he as a civic leader, and the time between, spent in the wilderness of north Florida.

What we know of those plantations, at least the latter, however, has been defined by his enemies. The man who attributed the gardens to Williamson was David Ramsey who had been jailed in Saint Augustine by the British and later married Laurens’ daughter Martha.

Notes:
Brannon, Rebecca Nathan. Reconciling the Revolution: Resolving Conflict and Rebuilding Community in the Wake of Civil War in South Carolina, 1775-1780, 2007; includes references to William Henry Harvey, Alexander Harvey and Joseph Seabrook.

Cothran, James R. Gardens of Historic Charleston, 1995; includes Ramsay’s description of Champneys’ second plantation.

Dalcho, Frederick. An Historical Account of the Protestant Episcopal Church in South-Carolina, 1820.

De Saussure, Henry William. Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of Chancery of the State of South-Carolina: From the Revolution to [June, 1817], 1817.

Richardson, Barnard. Will described on genealogy website by Amanda Herbert, 21 February 2001.

Rogers, George C. Charleston in the Age of the Pinckneys, 1980 second edition; provides information on oath and Champney return.

Trinkley, Michael and Debi Hacker. "A Context for the Study of Low Country Gardens" in Tranquil Hill Plantation: The Most Charming Inland Place, 2007; includes advertisement for Champneys’ first plantation, with description of garden.

South Carolina - The Revolutionary Generation

2010-06-06T16:05:00.000-07:00

V. O. Key suggested South Carolina politics in the 1940's depended more on people’s relations with their neighbors and kinfolk, than it did with class, region, or ideology. In civil wars, like the American revolution, predicting people’s behavior is impossible without knowing more about their lives than statisticians like to recognize.

Hezekiah Maham was a small planter who represented upcountry Saint Stephen’s parish in the first Provincial Congress in 1775. John Champneys was a merchant who was on the Charles Town committee formed to prepare a militia later that year.

When war threatened in 1776, Maham was elected captain in Isaac Huger’s regiment. When war became reality, Champneys refused to swear an oath of loyalty in 1777 and was banished.

The two men who ended on opposite sides of the war were self-made men who became planters by their early thirties. They differed in that the one grew up in a rural area where he could only succeed if he ingratiated himself with his neighbors, while the other worked in an urban, commercial environment that necessarily made men antagonists.

Hezekiah Maham was born in 1739 in the borderlands between the French Santee (Saint James) and the English Santee (Saint Stephen). The area became more French as Huguenots moved up river. As another generation followed the Santee’s tributaries west into Saint John’s parish, however, more names were Anglicized. His name also appears as Mayham while Pamor became Palmer.

Nothing is known about his father, Nicholas. The name Maham itself is lost in obscurity. One genealogist found it in County Clare, the same area where the Guerins stopped on their way from France to the New World, but he may have confused it with Mahon. We know Hezekiah’s one sister, Elizabeth, married John Cook and another, Ann, married Huguenot John Cahusac. Hezekiah’s first wife was Ann Guerin, who died within two years of their 1758 marriage.

Joseph Johnson says Maham worked for a while as an overseer for Mrs. Sinkler "of St Johns Parish, grand mother of Jas Sinkler, the DuBoses and Glovers." This would make her Elizabeth Mouzon, first wife of the Huguenot Peter, and the plantation was probably Lifeland Sinkler’s brother James was granted land at Belvedere, St. John’s, in 1770 and established a retreat from the threat of malaria at Pineville in 1793.

By 1771 Maham was well enough established to be granted land in the area that became Pineville, and marry Mary Palmer, daughter of Catherine Farrell and Thomas Palmer. Thomas was the nephew of the more famous brothers, John and Thomas of Gravel Hill in the Fair Forest swamp, whose sister, Catherine, was the last wife of Peter Sinkler.

Unlike the planter Maham, whose early life is now found primarily in the genealogies and plantation records of descendants of the ancien régime, the merchant Champneys appears only in legal records. I’ve found nothing between his birth in 1743 and his marriage in 1763 to Anne Livingston.

There was a John Champneys who was a free holder in Charleston in 1737, and one who served as the province’s deputy secretary. They could have been the same man, but neither is likely to have been the father of our John who was 7 when the latter died in 1750 at age 77.

There was another John Champneys born in 1743 to John Champneys and Sarah Saunders in Saint Andrews Parish, but his descendants claim he married Amarinthia Lowndes.

Our Champneys went into business with his wife’s father George as Livingston and Champneys in 1763. When the older man died in 1769, his sons were storekeepers in Indian territory, and one can assume his business was related to deerskins or other aspects of that trade.

The younger man was more ambitious and, in 1767, requested a certificate to ship indigo to Bristol under the British bounties that had existed since 1749. A year later we know he was buying rice from planters for resale to Charles Town merchants.

Henry Laurens wrote William Cowles in London in May of 1768 to explain the reason he hadn’t fulfilled his contract for 600 barrels of rice was that Champneys had tried to send him damaged goods. He noted that the man had "try’d more than one trick in delivering rice."

Later that year, Champneys struck out on his own and Livingston soon denounced him for harming his business. By then, the younger man had invested his profits into commercial real estate and owned the wharf where the older man did business.

In 1773, the overseer at his plantation, Johannes Jacob Zimmerle, was killed when he tried to capture a run-away slave. The land was on the Wando river, which empties into Charleston’s harbor between the Cooper and the ocean. The slave may have been the runaway Champneys advertised as "Banaba, of a yellowish complexion, looks like an Ebo negro."

For reasons not made clear, he asked the General Assembly to pay for damages to his plantation in 1775. They ruled his request was inflated, and he owned them more for other obligations than they owed him. It was that body’s whose oath he rejected as illegitimate two years later.

We don’t know if he was the duplicitous businessman seen by Laurens, the elder Livingston and the assembly, or if any man who tried to become a factor had to start with the worst suppliers, the ones no one else would handle, until he built a reputation that would attract better ones.

We do know that after Livingston died, his son William moved to Saint Helena, the area at the mouth of the rivers draining into the Atlantic south of Charleston, where he bought indigo to send to Champneys. When he died in 1791, William was "regretted by a numerous and valuable acquaintance" in that area.

Notes:
E. P. O. "Hans/Johannes Jacob Zimmerle (John Simerly) of SC," genealogy.com, 31 Aug 2004.

Gueri, Pat. "Some Historical Notes on the Guerin Surname in Co. Clare," clarelibrary website.

House of Names website. "Maham Coat of Arms and Name History."

Johnson, Joseph. Traditions and Reminiscences, Chiefly of the American Revolution in the South, 1851.

Key, V. O., Junior. Southern Politics in State and Nation, 1949.

Laurens, Henry. Letter to William Cowles and Company, 9 May 1768, in The Papers of Henry Laurens: September 1, 1765-July 31, 1768, 1976, edited by George C. Rogers, Jr, David R. Chesnutt, and Peggy J. Clark; includes the information on George Livingston.

Webber, Mabel L. Death Notices in "The South Carolina Gazette," 1766-1774, 1954 edition, on William Livingston.

South Carolina - American Revolution

2010-05-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

The American Revolution, as I learned in high school, was a war fought by the united thirteen colonies against their British overseer to form a government whose legitimacy was derived from the voluntary agreement of its citizens.

We never thought of it as a war with Britain like that fought in 1812, nor did we see ourselves as rebels. We certainly never thought of it as a civil war fought between neighbors. In fact, it was all these things, and a revolution only after it had been won, the constitution ratified, and John Adams elected.

Like any war, people’s commitment to the cause varied by how deeply they were involved. For many on the northern frontier, it was simply an extension of the French and Indian wars, only this time the Indians were allies of the British. For people in Boston, whose livelihoods were threatened by British trade acts, the necessity to protest was greater.

South Carolina had been rebellious since it was founded, and settlers refused to accept the authority of the proprietors to establish the rules of governance. When the proprietors made grants to Huguenots to attract rent paying settlers, the people of Charles Town redefined political districts in the 1690's so they wouldn’t be represented in the House of Commons.

When the Board of Trade issued plans for inland townships in 1730, they were seen as frontier outposts whose existence would protect Charles Town from Indian attacks. When men moved into the farther frontier from Virginia and Pennsylvania in the 1740's, the people of Charles Town shrugged. The French and Indian war began in 1756 and they took the brunt of Cherokee attacks. Rice planters suffered from a decline in shipping.

The Board of Trade sent a Colleton relative, Thomas Boone, in 1761 with orders to reduce the powers the colonial House of Commons had assumed when it threw off the proprietors in favor of the king in 1720. The next year, Boone dissolved the assembly. When the assembly reconvened, it refused to work. The Board of Trade censured Boone in 1764, which left control to his lieutenant, William Bull.

The Peace of Paris in 1763 ended the war with France, but increased conflicts with England, who needed to pay war debts and believed the colonies, who benefitted from eliminating the French in North America, should contribute. The Sugar Act of 1764 taxed luxuries, including indigo, but exempted rice. The Currency Act banned colonial currencies and the money supply shrank. Henry Laurens retired from the slave trade.

A new governor appeared in Charles Town in 1766, Charles Montague, but when people in the back country asked the colony to establish courts to punish the gangs that were raiding their settlements, they were ignored. Only when the frontiersmen organized themselves and began hunting down outlaws did the Commons take note of the usurpation of its authority by the Regulators who controlled the back country by 1768. They soon degenerated into vigilantes who provided cover for some to settle old scores with what Walter Edgar called "sadistic" violence. Montague had already left Bull in charge.

Britain passed the Navigation Acts in 1767 to limit colonial shipping, and seized one of Laurens’ ships the next year. Bull tried to suppress the regulators in 1768 and dissolved the assembly for supporting Boston protests. The assembly went on strike again in 1771, refusing to pass any legislation, effectively ending any semblance of organized government. In 1772 John Colleton, the great-grand-son of the original proprietor, sold his Mepkin plantation to Henry Laurens.

Britain enacted the Tea Act in 1773, and Charles Town called a mass meeting to protest. Supporters harassed those who disagreed and banished slave trader William Wragg. According to Edgar, activists weren’t able to extort agreement from a back country that was more angry with the city than with the British.

By the time South Carolina sent five low country planters and lawyers to the Continental Congress in 1774, people were divided into competing groups that endure to this day. However, the responses to the war didn’t follow those regional patterns. Instead, there were people in every community who were loyalists and some who enlisted, and a great many, as they had in Barbados during the English civil war, who simply didn’t wish to take sides. When neighbors disagreed, there followed the demands for loyalty oaths, confiscations and banishments for those who refused, similar to the punishments seen on the Caribbean island after Humphrey Waldron migrated there.

The war had little effect on Charles Town until the British, led by Henry Clinton, appeared in 1779. Then William Moultrie, aided by a spongy walled fort, successfully repulsed the troops, who took everything of value, enticed slaves to flee and destroyed the rest as they retreated, creating enemies as they moved.

When Clinton reappeared in 1780, some were still willing to surrender if the troops could be evacuated. However, Clinton couldn’t accept those terms, and when he took the city, there were new loyalty oaths to swear, and new demands men take up arms, this time against the rebels. Charles Cornwallis ordered the sequestration of the plantations of more than 100 men who refused, including Henry Laurens. 65 of those who had actively fought the British were deported to Saint Augustine, along with leaders like Thomas Heyward, David Ramsay and William Johnson.

In the back country, the British raised troops among local loyalists, who then helped attack their neighbors. Thomas Sumter was so angry when men, commanded by Banastre Tarleton, burned his new house, he roused his neighbors to attack. The rebels finally prevailed at King’s Mountain, in October 1780. Many of the defeated loyalists were from North Carolina.

As happens when war goes on too long and exacerbates existing civil conflicts, the prisoners were mistreated, court martialed, then hung. After the war, there was no surviving political or economic order. Men refused to pay debts and attacked sheriffs and courts who tried to enforce payment. Outlaws reappeared to harass settlers and travelers. People demanded the General Assembly identify and punish any remaining loyalists with banishment and confiscation.

One of the few to protest such demands was an Irish born, Charleston lawyer, who served as a judge in the Scots-Irish Ninety Six district under the Articles of Confederation. Aedanus Burke warned they would give way "to malice, avarice, or revenge; commit more injustice and glaring partiality" than would some form of reconciliation.

To prove his point, the remaining property of the deceased Margaret Colleton, widow of the last John Colleton, was seized, divided into lots, and sold. William Moultrie was among the buyers.
By the time a meeting was held to ratify the constitution in 1788, people were so hostile to one another, Burke said "4/5 of the people" were against the document and the only reason it was ratified was chicanery by the Charleston elite.

Safety returned only after the economy revived with the adoption of cotton as a crop in the 1790's, more than fifty years after gangs first appeared in the back country. Eventually, angry men and women died, but not before a new generation came of age believing the war was fought to establish their belief an individual was not required to submit to any government.

Notes:
Burke, Aedanus. On the constitution, letter to John Lamb, 23 June 1788, much quoted; on danger of revenge, An Address to the Freemen of South Carolina, quoted by Edgar.

Edgar, Walter. South Carolina: A History, 1998.

Smith, Henry A. M. "The Baronies of South Carolina," The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 7:1911.

Middle Class

2010-04-18T12:43:00.000-07:00

Too many people are claiming the government isn’t helping middle class people like them, when I have no idea what they mean by the term "middle class."

In the early republic, people divided society into three groups - the poor who they thought were failures, the rich who they distrusted as parasites, and the middling like themselves.

When I was growing up, after the Lynds had described Middletown, we had a more nuanced view. If pushed, we would have said middle class meant a set of values about the virtue of hard work and preparing for the future. If we used any one criteria to distinguish between our neighbors, it was their expectations for their children. There were people who weren’t poor who didn’t expect their kids to go to college, and there were the well-to-do, many of them salesmen, whose teenagers were undisciplined - we knew neither was middle class.

By this criteria, Barak Obama and Joe Biden are middle class, while Sarah Palin and John McCain are not.

However, even when I was a child, advertisers were promoting a different definition. Middle class was the possession of certain items like a home and car. Where I was a child in the 1950's, many middle class people still preferred to rent a house rather than take on the debt of a mortgage, but that changed by the 1960's.

Unfortunately, when advertisers define middle class, one never quite achieves the goal. Life becomes an eternal adolescence when one must prove one self by one’s goods.

By this standard, all the candidates for president and vice-president in the last election were middle class, and Palin and McCain were more successful than their rivals.

Statisticians and the economists who interpret their numbers have reduced middle class to set income levels or averages or percentiles. Values don’t matter. A mobster is as middle class as a preacher if he reports the same numbers to the IRS.

Now the economy is in crisis, and people shift from one definition to another.

I read about one family in Memphis that was using the food kitchen where the wife had volunteered before she lost her job as a shift manager at a fast-food outlet.

Only when I read about them, my childhood definitions said, "no, you’re not middle class." Several years before, she and her truck driver husband had gotten so far into debt they declared bankruptcy, and now, here they were again, in trouble.

I sympathized with her reaction when her employer told her they were eliminating her position, but she was welcome to continue doing the same work for half the pay. I would have walked too. But, I wouldn’t have stayed home. I would have gone out and accepted the same job, at the lower wage, from some one else. My pride would have limits when I had a family to feed.

She said her teen-age son had just gotten a part-time job, but they didn’t expect him to contribute to the household expenses. She told the reporter "she'd rather he learn how to manage his own finances."

No, not middle class, even if her husband’s income qualified and they had a car and a mortgage on their house.

They were the reason food stamps were created: they were facing a temporary crises and needed help. However, their definition of helping the middle class meant preventing them from needing the food kitchen. Saving for a potential crisis was never part of their view of the world.

More recently, The New York Times and CBS News surveyed people who supported the Tea Party Movement and found they were better off than the ones who appeared at rallies. If they’re anything like the ones who send my employer their newsletters, they are the ones who benefited from the Bush tax cuts and the inflated housing and financial markets and now have problems.

They consider themselves middle class, because they haven’t achieved their goals of wealth, and now see them snatched away. When I was a child, we would have put them in that hazy group of the well-to-do who lived too recklessly, the ones who attracted Jay Gatsby.

The de-inflation of housing and stock values, no matter how slow, is still a loss. People don’t care that the decline is being managed by the government to prevent wide-scale disaster. They only know, they personally are losing status, and the government isn’t preventing that.

It can’t. Managed loss and crisis intervention are what the government can offer right now, and neither can soften the psychological effects for people who strayed from my childhood view of middle class from losing their image of themselves as making it.

When the definition of middle class becomes "not as well off as I want to be," then no one is ever satisfied unless government leaders, like Alan Greenspan, provide an illusion. When the economy crashes, our leaders have to deal in the realities that destroy illusions.

But those who live in the material view of middle class still have adolescent demands for immediate satisfaction, not utilitarian help.

They don’t want to hear that facing the consequences of decades of industrial policy that eliminated working class jobs in this country is a different problem, with a solution that requires policies and political will that will take time to take effect.

They want it now, and if it can’t happen, then the government isn’t doing enough to help them, the middle class.

Notes:
Bengali, Shashank. "Amid Recession, Memphis Becomes America's Hunger Capital," McClatchy Newspapers, 26 March 2010.

Zernike, Kate and Megan Thee-Brenan. "Poll Finds Tea Party Backers Wealthier and More Educated," The New York Times 14 April 2010.

Tax Code

2010-04-11T04:26:00.000-07:00

Each year when I do my taxes, I get a refresher course in the ways our tax code has contributed to our current economic mess.

I’ll skip my shrinking, meager W-4 for Schedule B where I must list all the interest I earned on savings accounts as it was reported by banks to the federal government. When I first deposited money with my local bank in 1999, it was paying 4.17% interest. That fell in September, 2001, to 3.69%, then dropped to 2.75% the next month. It’s been hovering around 1% since 2004 and last month fell to its all time low, .75%.

Whenever I get my bank statement I say thank you Mr. Greenspan for making money so cheap and using your power at the Federal Reserve to implement your view that savings were bad for the economy. With the rates I’ve been paid for the last decade, why would anyone save? And why does the federal government still want to tax my tiny earnings at the full income rates? Unearned capital gains on hedge fund returns are treated more gently.

Then I get to Schedule A which allows me to itemize deductions. I do the formula for medical and dental expenses, and actually now have enough to report. That’s not because I’m sicker, but because I no longer have employer paid health insurance, and deductibles and co-pays have risen.

Back when I was finishing graduate school in the early 1970's, I was paying $2.25 a month for birth control pills. I’m now paying $38.00 a month for my portion of the $56.07 paid by my insurance company for the hormone replacement that uses the same chemicals. They claim it retails for $59.60.

That constantly changing W-4 never increased that much. My highest income was less than 5 times what I made as a beginning college instructor, but the retail price of my drugs is 26 times what it was then. The fact I actually pay only 16 times more is not much consolation when my income in now only twice what it was then.

Thanks Congress for never having the guts to stand up to lobbyists.

When I complete Schedule B I realize my total is now less than the standard deduction because I now own my house. The people who benefit most are those who pay the highest interest on their mortgages. Those who pay no principal make out the best, and those are the mortgages that caused the first problems with the housing market. But, when the banks were offering those deals and the government was subsidizing the mortgage payment, why would anyone do anything more responsible? It only cost money.

If Congress wanted to encourage home ownership, there are other ways they could create this deduction that benefitted people who lived in their houses for years rather than those who moved every few. But, of course, the person who stays in a house generates no income for the mortgage lenders, and so becomes a drag on the economy.

Last year I noticed Schedule L which allows me to add some of my real estate taxes to my standard deduction. But the limit is $500. If I were able to itemize my expenses, I could deduct the whole $614.15.

To get to the final total on Schedule L, I have to wade through the section that lets me deduct the sales tax on a new vehicle up to $49,500 in value. The more I spent, the more I deduct. The more I spent, the more likely it was I bought an SUV or other vehicle that consumes more gas than my 10 year old Hundayi. Again, the fiscally conservative receives less than those who contribute to our environmental and energy problems, because their spending creates jobs and we do not.

When I got done several years ago, I discovered if I had declared zero dependents and used standard deductions, I ended owing taxes. That hadn’t been the case the year before, but politicians had started manipulating the deduction schedules to give people more money each week which could then be spent on houses and cars they couldn’t otherwise afford. At the end of the year, no one remembers the benefits, only faces the bill and curses the government and taxes.

My solution, encouraged by the tax code, was to play accounting games. I took money out of that savings account that’s paying such low interest and moved it to an IRA that pays less than I made in 1999. That sleight of hand movement of money that’s been sitting there from the time when I had a higher income, earns me a refund. Why would I save money, Mr Greenspan? To buy a refund.

So here I am, getting ready to mail a tax return that benefits those who invest in gas guzzling cars and bad mortgages, that punishes savers and people who stabilize communities by staying in their homes, that teaches tax avoidance and creates unnecessary frustration, and think no wonder we’re in the fix we’re in.

I’d say, if you want to do something serious about the economy, fix the tax code. But then I think, this Congress would only make it worse.

Economics and Biology

2010-04-05T08:22:00.000-07:00

Supply and demand is in conflict with the bell curve. The one argues demand will bring into existence supply; the other posits there are limits on supply. Gresham’s law suggests in those situations where demand outpaces supply, not only will poorer quality supply appear, but it will attack that which is genuine so it alone can flourish.

The laws of Mendel show that, if there were such a thing as a good/evil gene, then one quarter of the population would be saintly, one fourth would be devils, and the rest of us would be middling, neither one nor the other, but willing to follow the bidding of whoever was in power.

If you want good men, and the demand exceeds 25%, you’re not going to get them, no matter how hard you recruit. They simply do not exist. But, it you persist in your demand, the larger population of lesser people will put themselves forth as good, and persecute those who might expose them by comparison.

The Roman Catholic church put artificial restraints on the population of priests by demanding celibacy. Metaphorically, the ability to be a man of faith requires a different gene than the one to be asexual, but when the one trait is used as a filter to define the other, the available supply shrinks.

For centuries the two requirements for the priesthood were not a problem, although folklore and pornography are filled with stories of bawdy friars. Sometime in the last century, either the demand for priests increased with population growth, or supply declined as young men saw other opportunities to escape poverty than joining the church, and the reports of bad priests began to increase.

After Vatican II, two more factors influenced the composition of the pool from whom priests were drawn. More left the church or didn’t enter, and allegiance to a conservative ideology like that reinforced by the current pope became more important. The already skewed gene pool was further altered by social factors.

The badness we’re seeing now that’s shocking isn’t the reports of men who molested young boys, but the blindness of the church hierarchy, which was probably always filled with a combination of the good, the mendacious, and the mediocre. Now it seems the good have disappeared, and only the ambitious survive, men who don’t understand the feelings of ordinary people towards the predatory sexual problems of a few fathers and see only their personal survival, and that of the institution that supports them, as important.

We’re seeing the same dynamic in politics. Campaigns have always been ugly, and the noble few. However, since Richard Nixon’s senate campaign against Helen Gahagan Douglas in 1950, attacks grounded in ideology, not simple partisanship, have so increased in viciousness one wonders who would become a politician.

The answer isn’t nobody, but judging from the headlines, it’s the vain, the ambitious and the greedy who fill the vacuum left when honorable men are driven from the public square by men like Rush Limbaugh.

Democrats seem plagued with the vain, from FDR, who ran for a third term because he believed the country couldn’t do without him, to the easily flattered John Edwards. For many, including Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton, the vanity was associated with a refusal to recognize society’s limits on the sexual freedom of married men.

Both parties attract the ambitious who abuse power for personal ends. On the one side, there’s New York’s governor, David Patterson, who asked the state police to intervene in a domestic violence dispute to protect an aide. On the other, there’s Sarah Palin, who wanted the state police to take sides in a divorce dispute of a relative when she was governor.

The Republicans seem to have the current monopoly on men who don’t understand the boundary between personal and public money. There’s John Ensign, who’s being investigated for asking donors to hire the husband of his mistress. There’s Jim Greer in Florida, who’s accused of using party donations to a business he secretly owned. There’s the Republican National Committee that used party funds to pay for an outing at a questionable nightclub and lists alcohol as an office supply.

However, Detroit’s financial problems reveal greedy Republicans are only more visible right now, and Mark Sanford shows the Democrats aren’t the only ones who are self-centered.

Many claim Jimmy Carter was a failure, but, in retrospect, he seems to be one of the few genuinely good men who entered politics. He may have been naive about Washington, but, one suspects that that’s not why he was hounded from office. The good are an offence to the wannabe’s, and the current crop of wannabe’s are an offence to the rest of us.

Bart Stupak

2010-03-28T06:01:00.001-07:00

After Michael Moore claimed credit for changing the health care vote of his congressman, I was so confused I looked up the boundaries of Bart Stupak’s first Michigan district.

It does not include Flint, but does include the entire upper peninsula, as well as the northeast quadrant of the lower one. It has more land and more counties than any other and probably the lowest population density in the state.

Its boom times came with logging and mining, exploitive industries that moved on when the resources were gone, leaving environmental eyesores that time and the CCC reforested. The soil’s too thin to support farming, the summer’s too short. The region now lives on tourists, seasonal residents, retirees, the neighboring lakes and what natural resources are left.

As I looked at the map, I realized both health insurance and abortion are problems of areas with reasonable, if not now healthy, economies. In Stupak’s district, I imagine the major health crisis is simply finding a doctor.

A study done for the Michigan Medical Society in 2005 listed three counties Stupak represents as having the fewest number of physicians per 100,000 residents: Arenac, Keewenaw and Oscoda. The last two have only one physician. He also represents three counties with high ratios, but such small populations the numbers are probably misleading: Emmett had 32,741 people in 2003, Dickinson 27,186, and Marquette 64,616.

In contrast, Kalamazoo and Genesse counties, some of the hardest hit by the state’s deindustrailization, were still in the top ten best counties for physician availability. Both had grown on lumber, but Kalamazoo replaced the paper industry with a pharmaceutical company and Genesee includes Flint. The drug company was sold, and its operations slowly closed. Even the new research center in Washtenaw county’s Ann Arbor was shut as redundant. Moore has documented what happened to his home town.

The place where I grew up, bordering Kalamazoo and Ingham counties, home of Oldsmobile, was never as rich as Kalamazoo, Flint or Lansing, but had three factories making parts for automobiles, refrigerators and televisions, as well as a community hospital built in 1924. The hospital was sold to private investors in 1967, and closed in 2002, the same year the last large factory moved operations to Mexico.

The town is better off than Keewenaw and Oscoda counties. There are still hospitals in cities 30 miles away, and it still has physicians. The roads, including an interstate, are clear most of the year, unlike the far north, but most of the doctors have Indian sounding last names.

Stupak’s district does not include a single county with an abortion rate near the state’s 12.5 per 1,000 women of child bearing age. Some have numbers so low, they can’t be reported statistically.

With so few physicians, there may be areas with no abortion provider. Women have to go elsewhere, as the residents do for any kind of specialized medical service. Some abortions may be buried in the statistics for young people who leave the region every year, and others may use unlicensed practitioners or folk remedies.

Young, unmarried teenagers, however, aren’t the only ones who seek abortions. When you read oral histories of poor areas or descriptions of folk medicine, you realize that abortion has always existed, regardless of cultural values, among women who felt there was no way they could feed another person. In areas with no self-sustaining economies, perceptions of malnourishment and deprivation may differ, but the edge of subsistence is still there.

The areas with abortion rates above Michigan’s average are all ones that have seen their industrial economies threatened since I graduated from high school: Detroit with 29.2 per 1,000 women, the rest of Wayne County with 17.1, Genesse with 15.2, Kalamazoo with 15.0, Saginaw with 14.3, Ingham with 13.7, and my home county with 13.2.

The high abortion rates seem to reflect the sense of economic desperation of people who see their incomes falling or disappearing. The health reform bill doesn’t address that root problem, only the consequences.

People, like his primary challenger, Connie Saltonstall, ask how Stupak could be against health care reform when there are 44,000 uninsured people in his district. That’s more people than live in many of the constituent counties. The bill doesn’t address the problem of shortages of doctors and nurses, only creates more demand on the existing ones and keeps the Medicaid reimbursements lower than those paid in more affluent areas with lower doctor-patient ratios.

Stupak’s views on abortion probably not only arise from his Roman Catholic background, but from the fact one of his sons committed suicide in 2000. Anyone who’s lost a child that way is likely to have a more emotional view of the value of children.

Moore may like to take credit for helping convince Stupak that many more of his voters and contributors supported health care reform than he may have thought, but Moore’s self congratulations don’t recognize that for Stupak, more than political calculation was involved, and the benefits to his district are not as great as they are to Flint or Saginaw.

Notes:
Michigan Department of Community Health. “Abortion Rates by County of Residence, State of Michigan, Michigan Counties and Detroit City, 1998 - 2008.”

Moore, Michael. “How the People in My District Changed Stupak's Mind and Saved Health Care Reform,” Huffington Post 22 March 2010.

Public Policy Associates, Inc. “The Future Supply and Demand for Physicians in Michigan,” 2005.

Saltonstall, Connie. Campaign website.

Waiting for Godot

2010-03-21T04:02:00.000-07:00

Despite all evidence to the contrary, we’re still an achieving society.

Since each house of congress passed a health care bill and we’ve been waiting for our elected officials to find a way to create a joint bill, the media has been engaged in an increasing frenetic search for some distraction, a holiday, a scandal, a staged event, anything to avert our gaze from paralysis in the face of deliberate obstruction.

The events that have gotten the most exposure turn out to be those that celebrate achievement. The longest lasting was the winter Olympics. The media could find no celebrity to promote and looked for some way to prove we’re still the best. They settled on medal count, but at least some who watched the broadcasts were looking for stylized achievement, not instant bloopers.

The Academy Awards came next, which gave the media an abundance of glamour to inflate. While it’s hard to separate natural gifts from achievement with actors and easy to disparage peoples’ clothes, there’s never any question that honest effort is rewarded in technical areas like special effects.

We’re now left with amateur events, the basketball tournaments and American Idol, but we’re still looking for some alternative to our political impasse - some evidence that someone, somewhere can demand our attention through their ritualized demonstrations of skill.

As an alternative, we’ve been offered dramatic displays of self-destruction: a man who flies a plane into an IRS building, a man who opens fire on guards at the pentagon, young men who commit suicide. The media has kept them in the news as long as they could, but most viewers weren’t willing to romanticize such attacks on society as a substitute for positive political action.

Our longing for people to finally solve some problem may have lead many to expect too much from Obama. It will keep us watching and hoping, and increasingly nervous until something positive does happens. It the meantime, the distractions of circuses will continue to offer some reminder of what’s possible.

Mark Sanford

2010-03-14T06:59:00.000-07:00

Every now and them something happens that exposes cultural fractures we don’t even suspect exist.

In 1989, Marc Lépine opened fire on female engineering students at the École Polytechnique in Montréal. This was the first of the mass student shootings, years before Columbine and Virginia Tech. His suicide letter claimed his life had been ruined by feminists.

Men were able to distance themselves from his actions by suggesting Lépine, in fact, was not a typical man. Instead, psychologists reassured them Lépine was a disturbed Catholic, or the son of a foreigner who had left him to be raised by his mother, or an abused a child who had failed at previous attempts to learn engineering.

Women could not ignore the 28 dead or injured young women. No matter how rational the psychologists’ explanations, they were frightened for themselves and their daughters.

When couples, even those married for decades, responded differently they couldn’t ignore the fundamental differences that existed between themselves and in society. The shock of the assault could not be excised.

The recent travails of South Carolina’s Republican governor, Mark Sanford, threatened to develop into a similar rift. When he first appeared before the press to confess he had actually fallen in love with another woman, a number of male reporters, including Salon’s Gary Kamiya, were sympathetic. Women, like the Times’ Gail Collins and Maureen Dowd, were more cynical, but noted it was a nice change that he didn’t humiliate his wife by forcing her to be present and didn’t treat the other woman as an object.

We’ve all suffered enough watching the forbearance of Silda Spitzer and Hilary Clinton. We’re tired of Elizabeth Edward’s passive aggression, and may have been just a bit suspicious of Jenny Sanford’s bitter comments during the time her husband was incommunicado.

Then, Sanford spoke to the press again.

Women’s views didn’t change much, but men, especially conservatives, found the personal nature of his comments disturbing. The Republican party has become a pragmatic coalition of religious conservatives and men bent on holding wealth or power who tacitly agreed neither would reveal their abiding interests.

Mark Sanford seemed their perfect spokesman, an educated Episcopalian married to woman who left Lazard Frères for her husband and four sons. But then his refusal to accept stimulus money, invoking South Carolina’s nullification crises, led some to think his lust for power was blinding him to the necessary political compromises. Now his refusal to follow the accepted method for dealing with moral transgression suggested someone who failed to understand his world.

His fellow Republicans in South Carolina, who are primarily concerned with their own reelections and pursuing their agendas in the legislature, began suggesting he was temporarily insane. Larry Grooms said "he is coming unhinged." Larry Martin. believed he’d heard "the ramblings of a troubled man" and "that man needs help."

The deeper problem is a cultural expectation that one not become too serious about anything, that passion is the mark of the unstable. If genuine excitement should arise, it should be channeled into following a sports team. When that wasn’t sufficient in the past century, it could lead to anonymous mob violence. In this century, we’re supposed to have progressed beyond that. Respectable southerners especially do not want to be reminded that cultural outlets may fail.

Many Canadians marriages are not the same after Marc Lépine, and neither will Sanford’s political life. Genuine shocks always do isolate people, no matter how unruffled the surface remains, and only a few outsiders are willing to learn from them. Resorting to using psychologists as gatekeepers of the damned only limits the utility of our tools for coping with crisis.

Notes:
Wikipedia article on the École Polytechnique Massacre provides a good summary.

Barr, Andy and Jonathan Martin. "South Carolina GOP: Mark Sanford Must Go," Politico 1 July 2009, interviews Grooms and Martin.

Collins, Gail. "An Affair to Remember," The New York Times, 1 July 2009.

Dowd, Maureen. "Rules of the Wronged," The New York Times, 30 June 2009.

Kamiya, Gary. "The Strange Nakedness of Mark Sanford," Salon, 25 June 2009.

South Carolina - Doubt

2010-03-07T05:57:00.000-08:00

Historians are attracted to comparative history because it provides the more scientifically minded a way to look at their subject from an outsider’s point of view. The hope is that comparisons will reveal the universals of the human condition and show the points of uniqueness that our cultural blinders prevent us from seeing.

When one looks at the investigations in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 into a possible slave insurrection, the ones in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 into acts of witchcraft, and the ones described by Carlo Ginzburg in Friuli.between 1575 and 1644 one sees a similar pattern: progression from doubt to belief.

When churchmen in Friuli interviewed the first man with special powers, there was such a disjunct between the questions and answers that they dropped the case because "he told other tall tales which I did not believe, and so I did not question him further." It was only when another individual, one more knowledgeable about witchcraft, became probing that the Holy Inquisition believed it had uncovered witchcraft.

Similarly in Charleston, when James Hamilton, Jr., first interviewed Peter Poyas and Mingo Harth, their treatment of the questions with disbelief led him to think the possibility of a plot only lies. It was only when a second man, John Lyde Wilson, reported similar comments from a second slave that the Charleston city council acted.

In both cases, events moved from doubt to certainty, and once that change in attitude had occurred, there were never more questions about the existence of either the witches or the slave conspiracy.

In Salem, there appears to have been little initial doubt about the truthfulness of the early accusers: they weren’t peasants or slaves, but the daughter and niece of a respected churchman, Samuel Parris, and their accusations came after physical fits observed by several witnesses. The magistrates took protestations of innocence as proof of guilt, and meted milder sentences to those who confessed. It took the refusal of Giles Corey to go to trial to shake their confidence that they were dealing with real acts of witchcraft.

Historians have taken the final judgements to be the true ones, to question the events in Salem, but not in Charleston or Friuli. And so, we wonder what were the social, economic and psychological factors that precipitated Salem, but accept the reality of a slave mutiny and so don’t ask why Charleston in 1822, why not 1812 or 1832.

The acceptance of doubt took different forms in Charleston and Salem. The second was still a Puritan society, even if it had moderated its beliefs since 1620. People still believed in predestination, that God decided before individuals were born if they were saved, and nothing individuals could do would change their state of grace. At best, they could look for evidence of proof, as the magistrates had looked for evidence of witchcraft. However, they could never absolutely know if they were saved.

Jacobus Arminius disagreed with Puritan theology and argued God had granted man free will with which to accept or reject God. It was individuals’ decision that determined if they were saved, and if they made that decision there was no doubt about their state of grace. His beliefs informed the great Methodist revival that swept the country in the 1740's, and would influence the revivals that were to come in the next decade in the south.

Roman Catholics and Episcopalian Charlestonians, of course, would never have considered the question. They were saved by virtue of following the practices of the church. Doubt was not a concept, only certainty.

And so, the event that occurred in an environment where people lived with doubt, is treated with doubt today, and the ones that occurred where people saw doubt as proof of their failure to believe are the ones that are accepted as fact today. It may be no coincidence that the historian who felt the need to use comparative history to escape the bubble of culture, Frank Tannenbaum, was investigating the institution of slavery.

Notes:
Ginzburg, Carlo. I Bendandatti. 1966, translated as The Night Battles by John and Anne Tedeschi, 1983.

Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen, 1947.