A Liberal Dose, Oct. 14, 2021 "Witch Hunts in America"

 

A Liberal Dose

October 14, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“Witch Hunts in America”

 

It’s October, and many of us have Halloween on our minds. When I drive around town, I seem to see toy ghosts and witches in every yard. Many of us also have our minds on politics, which sometimes doesn’t seem much different. I am reminded, particularly, of the term “witch hunt” -which has been tossed around quite a bit the past few years. In the modern sense, of course, it doesn’t mean hunting for literal witches. It means raising a hew and cry of a different sort; warning the public of a nonexistent or negligible danger as a cover for persecuting your political enemies. This type of behavior is a time-honored American tradition, but seems to come in cycles. During the first Red Scare in the late 1910s-1920s, and the even larger one in the late 1940s-1950s, the “witch” was communism (or just the accusation of it). During WWII it was Japanese-Americans. After 9/11 it was terrorism; in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it was not only Muslims but even French words (since many conservatives viewed France as traitorous for not jumping wholeheartedly into a war with us).

More recently, in my opinion, critical race theory has become a witch hunt. Just as in Salem in the 1690s, the mere accusation of teaching CRT can lead to serious repercussions (admittedly with no executions, knock on wood).

It could be argued that it’s all in one’s point of view -that the mere perception of being persecuted makes one feel like the object of a witch hunt. Trump has been throwing the term around since shortly after he was elected, doubling down since he was defeated. Every piece of new evidence that comes to light about his corruption and even illegal activities leads to fresh cries of “witch hunt!” This from the man who, while in the White House, presided loudly over countless witch hunts of his own. Just to clarify, by the way, it is only a witch hunt if the charges are exaggerated or false. Trump himself has been the object, not of witch hunts, but of legitimate legal investigations.

For a little context, I am going to give some background information about the actual Salem witch trials in Massachusetts in 1692-93. You probably all know that some young girls were accused of consorting with Satan in the woods, which led to broader accusations and hysteria in the community. Before all was said and done, several people were dead (nineteen by hanging, one by being crushed to death by rocks in an attempt to make him confess) and 150 people had been arrested and tried (several dying in jail). Finally, the community started to calm down and realize what they had done.

Here’s what you probably don’t know -or didn’t connect with Salem. Puritan communities, of course, had no separation of church and state; their church WAS the state, and no one else was allowed in. Quakers and Baptists could be hanged for preaching in Massachusetts. And yet, when William and Mary ascended the English throne in the Glorious Revolution in 1689, they put an end to those practices with the Religious Toleration Act. Puritans could no longer force everyone to be Puritans. At the same time, (Catholic) France had started attacking New England settlements with their Native American allies.

To the Puritans, it seemed like the Devil was winning. Some thought it was the signs of the last days. They were very, vey scared on an existential level -and very paranoid. It was a short step to hysteria.

Just as Americans were terrified after the first Soviet atomic bomb. And 9/11. And many are scared today of recent rapid social changes, with more seemingly on the horizon. Witch hunts, then, come from fear.

When you have politicians willing to stoke that fear for their own benefit, bad things happen (see also: Hitler).

And THAT’S scary.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Oct. 7, 2021 "What Is So Bad about Columbus?"

 

A Liberal Dose

October 7, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“What’s So Bad about Columbus?”

 

Last week I wrote that it is the duty of historians to explain things honestly, not to be cheerleaders. This week, days before Columbus Day, I am going to put that in practice. Most of you are aware, I’m sure, of the controversy surrounding this holiday in 21^st century America. Some of you might understand and agree with the premise that Columbus introduced a lot of bad things to the Americas, including the beginnings of Native American genocide and the taking of their land. Many of you, on the other hand, while acknowledging the surface truth of those things, believe they are outweighed by his heroism and the impact of his actions; many of you may think that the criticisms are blown out of proportion and are one more example of “cancel culture” and an effort to revise, or rewrite, history to make Europeans out as the villains in every scenario. You may believe that it is unfair, and ahistorical, to judge someone in the past by today’s standards.

But you probably don’t really know Columbus.

I’m going to start off by acknowledging that, even though Columbus was not the first European in the New World, and even though he refused to believe he had been anywhere but India, his achievement was huge. It opened the way for colonization of the New World and its resources, quickly led to the first truly global trade network, and started the modern era.

My judgment against Columbus comes not from the fact he opened up the possibility for those who came after him to commit terrible acts. It comes from the terrible acts he himself committed. And I do not judge him by the standards of the 21^st century; I judge him by the standards of other people in his own time.

When Columbus arrived on the island he called Hispaniola (and which the natives called Ayiti, or Haiti), he was greeted by the very friendly and peaceful Taino tribe. In his own journal (which is where all the things I recount come from), after noting how peaceful they were, he remarked how easy they would therefore be to enslave. And that’s exactly what he started doing. He also noted how beautiful the Taino children were, and that there were a large number of them in the age range of 9 or 10 -the age, he pointed out, that some gentlemen in Spain like their women, because they can be trained easier. In fact, he noted the trade of young Taino girls as sex slaves among his own sailors.

He ordered the Taino to produce a certain amount of gold for him every three months or, in lieu of gold, 25 pounds of spun cotton. If any Native did not have the required goods, they were to have their hands and feet cut off. And many suffered that fate. When the Taino tried to run away or rebel, Columbus ordered attack dogs set on them to tear them to pieces. The alternative was to stay and be worked to death. Within a generation, almost all the Taino were dead. So, Columbus literally initiated genocide, slavery, and underage sex trafficking.

Queen Isabella was furious at his treatment of the Native people. He was eventually arrested for mismanagement of the colony, his brutality one of the reasons, and sent briefly to a prison in Spain. He was let out after a short time, but he never received his promised payment for his voyage.

A young soldier who had served under Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas, was so traumatized by the things he had witnessed that he became a priest and spent the rest of his life fighting -with some success- for the rights of Native Americans. Every European of the time was not like Columbus, so that excuse is invalid.

I like to think of the upcoming holiday as Taino Remembrance Day.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 30, 2021 "The Duties of a Historian Explained"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 30, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“The Duties of a Historian”

 

I am currently teaching one of my favorite classes: historical methodology. It is taken by history majors, usually in their sophomore year, to prepare them for upper division history courses. As you might imagine, no matter who teaches it, there is a lot of emphasis on how to do research, how to write papers, how to do citations, etc. I also focus on different theoretical approaches they will encounter if they go to graduate school, and the “history of history.” A lot of my approach is modeled on the professor who taught me in this same course 20 years ago, Patrick Reagan. Like him, I spend a lot of time at the beginning of the course exploring these two very important questions: what is history, and what do historians do? History is more than just studying the past, after all, because anthropology and archeology do that. Heck, so do literary and economics classes.

Short answer: History is the study of the past using written records from the time (newspapers, diaries, government reports, etc.) Historians do not just tick those things off in a list of events and names; they attempt to explain them. Not just what happened, but why, and what the consequences were. Doing that requires a deep understanding of context and connections. I also try to teach my students to be better writers, because I think that the dense nature of most academic prose makes it inaccessible to the public, which explains why most nonfiction books about history on the bestseller lists are not actually by professionally trained historians. Those authors often have many strengths, including an ability to write well, but lack the training for finding that deeper historical context and connections with things that might seem unrelated on the surface. I believe that many historians have thereby abdicated one of their important responsibilities: not just learning about the past, but explaining it to the general public in such a way that they can learn from it, too.

Historians have to look, as much as possible, at every angle. This does not mean they present everything as equal: my lectures, and my writings, do not make excuses for Nazis or for slavery, for example, nor should they, although they may include the excuses such people made for themselves. I think that historians must not only help people learn about the past, but also from the past.

I, myself, learned a lot about the potential impact of historians when I was working on my doctorate. I learned principally from the examples of my two co-advisers, Fred Hoxie and Vernon Burton, as well as the other members of my dissertation committee, Bruce Levine and David Roediger. I came in thinking I would just be learning (better) how to do research and teach, and of course I did learn those things. But my eyes were opened by serving for years as a research assistant to Hoxie (an expert in American Indian legal history) and Burton (expert on race relations in the South). I learned that both those individuals (and many others like them) also spent a lot of time writing reports for, and often testifying live in front of, state legislatures and even Congress and the Supreme Court, on behalf of oppressed groups. Because, especially where civil rights are concerned, historians play an important role.

You see, by explaining what happened in the past, and how and why, we shine a light on the present and help people understand what is happening now. We can provide warnings to avoid past disasters and, yes, a moral conscience to sway people from perpetuating past injustices.

Little wonder, then, that some politicians today want to pass laws to keep historians, on all levels, from doing that. But it is not our job to be cheerleaders. It is our job, our duty, to explain things honestly.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

 

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 23, 2021 "Labor History in White County, Part 4"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 23, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“Labor History in White County, Part 4”

(see Part 1 HERE, Part 2 HERE, and Part 3 HERE)

 

This week I am going to conclude my series on labor history and coal mines, but will go outside the county line. I am speaking of the 1932 strike at the Wilder and Davidson mines, which employed about 600 men. The mines were located in the region where Fentress, Overton, Cumberland, and Putnam Counties come together. The Wilder and Davidson mines (and company towns) were in Fentress County, and a couple of smaller mines were across the county line in Overton. The Wilder mine, operated by the Fentress Coal and Coke Company, was named for the company’s founder, whom we mentioned in Part 1 of this series: Union general John Wilder, who was opening up mining operations in the Upper Cumberland at roughly the same time as White County’s Confederate general George Dibrell.

Like the miners in Bon Air, the Wilder-Davidson miners had formed their own local union and gone on strike in 1919 and 1924. As in White County, the miners came out of the 1924 strike worse than they had gone in. In 1931 they joined the national United Mine Workers of America and their local, 4467, negotiated a one-year contract with the owners on July 8, 1931. When it expired, the owners refused to extend it and instead cut wages for the third time, and on July 9, 1932 the miners went on strike. With the exception of one Danish immigrant, all the miners were Upper Cumberland natives, including their leader Barney Graham.

In essence, the situation got much worse than it had in White County but not as bad as in West Virginia -but, still, plenty bad enough. Workers were evicted from company housing, and new (non-union) workers were hired to take their place. Strikers, scabs, and company security clashed repeatedly over the following year. As the Tennessean put it on May 7, 1933, there were “barn-burnings, dynamitings, shootings from ambush, fights, and neighborhood coolnesses.” The national guard was called in. Relief organizations from around the country sent food, medicine, and clothing to the miners.

On April 30, 1933, Barney Graham came into the company town of Wilder to pick up medicine for his sick wife. While he was walking down the street two company guards, Shorty Green and Doc Thompson, approached him from behind and opened fire on him. Graham was shot in the back ten times, and the back of his skull was crushed by rifle butts. Doctors determined that the head injuries alone would have killed him. The killing was ruled self-defense. The murder took the wind out of the miners and their determination to continue the strike, and it soon ended- but there were unforeseen consequences.

One was that Graham became a national labor hero. His daughter wrote a song about him, “The Ballad of Barney Graham,” which was later recorded by Pete Seeger. “Although he left the union he worked so hard to build,” the song concludes, “his blood was spilled for justice, and justice guides us still.”

The other consequence was the effect Graham’s death had on his good friend Myles Horton. “If I wasn’t a radical before that,” Horton later said, “I became one then.” In 1932, Horton had established Highlander Folk School in Monteagle. He was one of the people who came to the mines bringing relief supplies, and reported on events throughout the strike. After Graham’s death, Horton redoubled his efforts to make his school a place to train union workers in nonviolent organizing. In 1955, MLK and Rosa Parks -amid efforts to start a bus boycott in Montgomery -attended Horton’s classes, and Horton became an active participant in the civil rights movement.

I’ve told you these stories to show what a long history union organizing has had here, and the struggles workers have gone through. It should never be forgotten. In my opinion, in the Upper Cumberland we should start calling Labor Day Barney Graham Day.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 16, 2021 "Labor History in White County, Part 3"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 16, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“Labor History in White County, Part 3”

(see Part 1 HERE and Part 2 HERE)

 

Let’s resume our discussion of organized labor and coal mines, which we will conclude next week.

Although booming at the turn of the century, within a decade the Bon Air Coal and Iron Company was in decline due to a significant decrease in profitability. This was, in large part, the result of a bad decision -the company invested heavily to construct two very expensive coke ovens, only to realize the coal in the area was not of high enough quality for the coke process. The company went into receivership and, in 1917, was bought by Nashville businessman William Cummins and several northern investors, including the owner of the New York Yankees and the owner of the Chicago Cubs (and chewing gum tycoon) William Wrigley. A rival coal company started in Clifty was also bought by the group, and consolidated with the Bon Air operations.

With WWI over, in 1919 UMWA president John L. Lewis directed a new campaign to unionize in the South. There were work stoppages on Bon Air in 1919 and 1922. During that same time, the famous West Virginia Coal Wars were reaching a crescendo. There was a shoot-out on the streets of Matewan in 1920 (see the movie Matewan), and in 1921 the Battle of Blair Mountain played out over several days -over 10,000 WV miners, police, and strikebreakers in a pitched battle that saw over 100 men killed. Fortunately, things did not reach that point in Middle and East Tennessee.

Bon Air miners also participated in a national UMWA strike beginning in late March, 1924, with over 1,000 miners walking off the job in White County in protest of their wages being lowered to what they had been in 1917. In the middle of the strike, suspected moonshiner Ernest Price and several friends were reportedly drunk and waving guns around in Bon Air and DeRossett. They were confronted near DeRossett by A. M. Phillips (manager of the mine’s company store) and a federal revenue agent, Hugh Lowery. Price shot Lowery in the thigh, severing an artery which caused the lawman to bleed to death. Price then backed out of town, threatening to shoot anyone who got in his way, and headed up the mountain. William Cummins offered a $500 dollar reward for Price’s capture, and two thousand people joined in the chase -a large number of them striking miners. The strike, meanwhile, ended after ten weeks with the miners giving in. Around the same time, the price of coal went down significantly, and the company closed down several of the less productive mines -Carola in 1922, Clifty in 1924, and Eastland in 1926. The large mine at Ravenscroft continued production, and several smaller mines in Bon Air and Eastland were leased out to individuals. In 1926 the company merged with two out-of-town companies to reform as the Tennessee Products Corporation, with Wrigley as the Chairman of the Board.

Late 1929, of course, saw the stock market crash and the beginning of the Great Depression, and introduced even more dire financial straits for the company (and its workers). When the FDR administration guaranteed collective bargaining rights with the National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, the miners at Ravenscroft once more began to organize. In 1934 the miners and owners were unable to reach an agreement, and a strike was called. The Ravenscroft mine was shut down, and a year later the railroad tracks connecting the mines to Sparta were pulled up. As the Sparta paper put it on May 13, 1937: “The once thriving industry of coal mining in this county belongs to the past.” This was not the end of the UMWA connection to White County, though. It was UMWA organizers who would establish the (brief) union at the Sparta Shirt factory in the 1940s.

(My thanks to the Bon Air Mountain Historical Society for the wealth of information they make available to the public.)

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 9, 2021 "Labor History in White County Part 2"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 9, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“Labor History in White County, Part 2”

(see Part 1 HERE)

 

Last week, in honor of Labor Day, I started a series on labor history of White County, which is mostly going to focus on the coal mining industry. The Bon Air Coal Company was a booming business in the late 1800s, and for the first decade of its existence seems to have had no major labor disagreements. In the summer of 1898, though, Nashville newspapers were reporting that a strike was imminent at Bon Air or, by some accounts, already started. Company manager J. M. Overton, no doubt to reassure his customers, told a reporter from the Nashville American that his workers were the best paid in the state, and that things were going so well the company was about to add one hundred more workers (they already had five hundred) as soon as they finished building housing to accommodate them. They were shipping out forty train cars of coal per day, and expected to soon be shipping out sixty. When rumors persisted, and the people of Nashville stared getting nervous about having enough coal coming in, he spoke to the paper again and admitted that some of the miners had tried to form a union. Overton ascribed the organizing efforts to twenty men who had subsequently been fired, after which the remaining miners voted against having a union, after all. He said the remaining men were, “as a rule, well pleased with their treatment.”

If so, it did not last. By February, 1899, the American was receiving reports that over 400 of the men had walked off the job, and that only 25 or 30 had remained. Output shrank from forty cars per day to only three or four. The miners had two simple demands: they wanted their recent pay cut of 10% restored, and they wanted more reasonable prices at the company store. They were willing to settle for the reasonable prices. Apparently, some miners had already been fired and evicted from company housing, including a majority of leading voices in the proposed union. Company management denied that there was a strike, and said that the radical decline in production was because the miners were temporarily doing chores around the mine instead of extracting coal. Evidently a compromise was reached -most likely the requested lowering of company store prices -because by February 11 worried Nashville citizens were being assured by the American that the crisis had abated. On May 17, 1900, the Sparta paper reported that the Bon Air Coal Company had its highest payroll ever, and still struggled to meet the market demand. Soon more mines were being opened on the mountain and more tracks were being laid. Nonetheless, the 1899 incidents in White County were included in the topics for discussion at the United Mine Workers convention in Knoxville in 1901.

In 1908, after a consortium of Alabama mine owners cut workers’ wages by 17%, UMW initiated a massive strike throughout the south that included 18,000 coal miners. The strike -which failed after two months, weakening UMW in Alabama -did not, however, include Tennessee miners. Bon Air Coal and Iron Company president John P. Williams remarked to reporters that his workers were all content and satisfied, and it was further noted that “the mines in Tennessee are all conducted on the ‘open shop’ principle.”

There were dramatic coal strikes out west in the years just before WWI, the most famous being the Ludlow strike in Colorado in which national guard troops opened fire with machine guns on a tent city inhabited by striking miners and their families, killing over a hundred people. Strikes abated during U.S. involvement in WWI, in support of the war effort, but picked up in a big way once the war ended in November, 1918. This time Bon Air miners would be in the thick of it, and a coal strike would be the background for one of Sparta’s most famous murders.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE

A Liberal Dose, Sept. 2, 2021 "Labor History in White County, Part 1"

 

A Liberal Dose

September 2, 2021

Troy D. Smith

“Labor History in White County, Part 1”

 

Labor Day has become, for many of us, a vacation day… a go-to-the-lake day, a day to take advantage of sales. The reason it is a holiday, though, is to celebrate the Labor Movement in the U.S. I wrote a couple of columns earlier this year (April 29 and May 6) that looked at the origin of that movement, why it became a holiday, and why we celebrate it in September while almost every other country does so in May. This time, as my own celebration of Labor Day, I am going to talk about the Labor Movement in White County and the Upper Cumberland.

Early labor organizing in this region, like in the rest of Appalachia, tended to focus on coal miners. Now, the wonderful folks at the Bon Air Mountain Historical Society know a lot more about coal mining in White County than I do, and their museum is a treasure. Go check them out, and you can learn a lot. I can tell you some basics, though. For one thing, while there was a lot of coal mining in Northern Appalachia before the Civil War (Pennsylvania and Ohio, mostly), there was very little in Central and Southern Appalachia until well after that conflict. This is because there were few railroads in the area. In the antebellum period, most railway construction in the South was designed primarily to transport cotton to the coast where it could be loaded onto ships for export. Cotton doesn’t grow well in the mountains, hence no railroads; without trains, it was impractical to dig coal because, well, it’s darn heavy and hard to transport. After the Civil War, especially toward the end of Reconstruction (which officially ended in 1877), northern investors and southern businessmen started to form partnerships that led to railroads entering the region, with the opening of coal mines shortly following. For example, Sparta native and former Confederate General George Gibbs Dibrell became director and president of the Southwestern Railroad Company right after the war, and around the time that company was bought out by the Nashville and Chattanooga Company, Dibrell formed the Bon Air Coal, Land, and Lumber Company, which shipped its first coal in 1888. Over the next several years, the company imported around two dozen families from Scotland who had experience extracting coal. In later years there were also immigrants from Bohemia and other parts of Europe brought in. Meanwhile, former Union General John T. Wilder bought up large swathes of land in counties east of here and also opened up several mines.

There was unrest among Tennessee coal miners by the early 1890s. One of the biggest issues was the fact that the state of Tennessee was leasing out convicts to work in the mines, at a much lower cost than the wages of free miners, putting miners out of work. This led to violence in Anderson County, about an hour’s drive east of White County, as miners not only went on strike but burned prison stockades and mining company buildings, setting the convicts free (on the condition they leave the mines). In what became known as the Coal Creek War, miners engaged in skirmishes with the state militia, with many killed or wounded on both sides. The situation died down when the Tennessee government refrained from renewing their contracts with the mining companies- the miners had succeeded in getting their attention.

The Coal Creek War did not extend into the mines of White County, though. In 1899 the Bon Air company was able to brag it had never used anything but free labor, that their safety record was better than their competitors, and that there had never been a strike in its mines. That did not last, however. The first strike would take place that very year.

More to come.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

A complete list of Liberal Dose columns can be found HERE

A list of other historical essays that have appeared on this blog can be found HERE

Author's website: www.troyduanesmith.com

The author's historical lectures on youtube can be found HERE