A Liberal Dose, November 22, 2023 "Tennessee Wants to Reject 1.8 Billion Dollars in Education Funding"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 22, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Tennessee Wants to Reject $1.8 Billion of Education Funding”

 

 

Tennessee -where we’re always the first to jump out of the plane, because we skip the line where they’re handing out parachutes. This time we are -once again -in the news because of education. Our legislature has spent two weeks discussing the possibility of rejecting almost 2 billion dollars of federal education funding, which would make us the first state to ever do so -because federal money comes with “burdensome stipulations” such as paperwork. When educators brought before the panel were questioned about which stipulations felt burdensome to them, they couldn’t think of any. They did say that education needs more money, not less. About ten percent of students are directly affected by the federal funds under discussion, mostly low-income kids and students with disabilities. It is worth noting that no parents or local advocacy groups were allowed to speak… but two out-of-state conservative groups were.

One argument is that Tennessee has a pretty sizable treasury surplus, and could make up the difference in much of the federal funding lost if this goes through. This raises the question: what could the state accomplish if they used part of that surplus on top of the federal funding to improve education? They could pay teachers more, provide incentives for people to become teachers in the first place (which is increasingly hard to convince people in red states to do nowadays, as teachers are treated like third-class citizens), replace some of the state funding withdrawn from higher education over the last couple of decades, or maybe even replace some of the classroom libraries our laws have bullied and intimidated teachers into removing. I don’t know about you, but if I were a public-school teacher I would feel far more burdened by the oppressive and ridiculous education laws passed by our state legislature the last few years than I would by any federal mandates. Public school teachers I’ve talked to are terrified to breathe funny for fear it might hurt someone’s feelings and get them fired.

Could it be that the “burdensome stipulations” of the federal government includes things like diversity programs, academic freedom, and education standards that reflect the truth of our history (and our present) and recognizes that there are a lot of different kinds of people in America and that’s all right, rather than the politicized, propagandistic, majority wishful thinking that our Republican legislators prefer? Could it be that many Republican politicians would like to have even more power to control what teachers teach and how they teach it, and what kinds of people are benefited by various educational programs, without the federal government being able to interfere -and they’re willing to shoot themselves (and all of us, and our kids) in the foot to do so? And what happens when there is an economic downturn in Tennessee (no bubble lasts forever) and all that surplus disappears? That is a second barrel waiting to shoot their (and our) other foot.

Notice that it is not educators asking for this to be done. Educators’ voices, in fact, are being ignored -as they always are. I’ll keep saying it as long as I have breath left in my lungs: leave teachers alone and let them to their jobs, which they are trained to do (and you are not), and give them all the financial support they need to do that job effectively. Because it is the single most important job in this country -our whole future depends on it. For all the folks out there who want one political party to have absolute control of what your kids are exposed to, for fear it may be something you don’t like, consider this: one day those kids will be applying to colleges, grad schools, or jobs in other states with more opportunities… and they’ll be woefully unprepared to compete against kids from states where the teachers are supported and students are allowed to learn.

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column 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, November 16, 2023 "Civic Virtue, Duty, and Honor: The Sad Decline of the Republican Party"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 16, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Civic Virtue, Duty, and Honor: The Sad Decline of the Republican Party”

 

I write this the day after Veterans Day -and, for various reasons, service has been on my mind lately. Last week, I co-taught a class on facilitating civil discussion with visiting retired Major-General Edward Dornan, a 1983 graduate of Tennessee Tech. He asked how many of the students present had considered pursuing public service, and pointed out that there were many ways to do so without donning a military uniform. There was one half-raised hand. This motivated me to talk briefly about a subject dear to my heart, republicanism, a theme I will return to soon.

Another service-related thing that got me thinking was seeing a Nashville news station interview with my dear friend Jim Sutcliffe (age 101), decorated WWII veteran and German POW camp survivor. Jim’s story, which many of you know, is inspiring. It made me think of several other WWII vets I’ve been privileged to know and whom we’ve lost in the past few years. These were men (and there were plenty of women, too) who were willing to put their lives on hold for years, and to risk losing those lives or suffering horrible injury, to protect democracy from the threat of fascism.

My father and all three of his brothers served in uniform during the Vietnam era. They all survived, but the two who saw combat were deeply scarred by it. I myself did not follow that tradition (though many of my good friends from high school did); when I was a senior my goal was to do preaching and mission work. And I did, full-time, for three years -a little of it here in White County, but also in South Florida and New York City, serving in French-speaking congregations and working with Haitian immigrants. Neither South Florida nor New York City were very safe places in the ‘80s (heck, for that matter, neither was White County). Despite the fact I was carrying a Bible instead of a gun, my life was legitimately threatened on several occasions. I’ve stared down the barrels of guns multiple times. I’ve walked into drug deals and stumbled onto murder scenes. I did it out of a sense of duty to God and love for neighbor. So, though I did not serve in uniform, I served… and am much the better for it.

Back to republicanism, with a small “r.” That is the principle espoused by the founding generation -that a representative democratic republic cannot survive unless its citizens have civic virtue -unless they are willing to shoulder burdens that are onerous to them, but which must be done, for the greater good of the community. To provide for the general defense and promote the general welfare… in order to form a more perfect union.

And then I think of the man many Americans chose to be their president, and are seeking to return to that office, Donald Trump -a man who has never done anything that did not immediately and profoundly benefit himself. A man who has referred to our honored military dead as losers, to those who have served in uniform as saps. Who did not want to have grievously wounded veterans messing up his photo ops and making him look bad. Who did not want to honor fallen WWII heroes because of a little rain and pouted about it. And I wonder what has happened to the Republican Party.

I never fully agreed with many of the precepts of conservatism -but there were conservative politicians I respected, and trusted to be good people, and to have the greater good of the country foremost in mind, even if I disagreed with them about how. But it is now the Party of Trump -of selfishness, ego, and vanity. They never encourage you to help people -only to jealously guard your own benefit. They barely even give lip service anymore to Jesus and all the things he said were important.

 

--Troy D. Smith, a White County native, is a novelist and a history professor at Tennessee Tech and serves on the executive committee of the Tennessee Democratic Party. His words do not necessarily represent TTU.

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column 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, November 9, 2023 "The Republican Party Is Eating Itself Alive"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 9, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“The Republican Party Is Eating Itself Alive”

 

Before I go to my main topic, I want to commend John Gottlied for his article last week about depression. I have dealt with depression and anxiety issues for most of my life, and I know many people who struggle quietly and privately. It is on all of us to make such people feel safe in being human without judgment.

Now let’s talk about how jacked up the Republican Party is.

Man. The Republican Party is jacked up.

I’m serious. House Republicans tossed out their own speaker, which has never been done before, and it took them three weeks and several candidates to pick a new one. Three weeks without a Speaker -so, effectively, three weeks without a House of Representatives or any kind of funding bills, at a time when we are facing multiple crises overseas. Nothing like this has ever happened in American history. Will Rogers famously said, “I’m not a member of any organized political party -I’m a Democrat.” That was funny because it was true. For way over a century, it was Democrats who had trouble rallying together, whereas Republicans presented a united front. The sad part is, I don’t think Democrats have gotten any more organized -they just look like it when compared to the mess Republicans have devolved into.

And what a cast of characters: Matt Gaetz, implicated in sex-trafficking and, so far as I know, still under investigation for sexual misconduct; Lauren Boebert, last seen drunkenly engaging in sexual behavior at a family performance of Beetlejuice; and George Santos, who probably couldn’t even tell the truth about what day it is. Perhaps the most shocking part of it all is the fact that Republican Congressmen standing for the Speaker position were receiving death threats to their families -from Republicans who supported one of the other people for the spot. This demonstrates how badly things have devolved -after several years of promoting hatefulness and encouraging, directly or tacitly, political violence against liberals, Republicans are now receiving threats of violence from supporters of their own party.

Then you have the U.S. Senate. Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville has single-handedly kneecapped the entire U.S. military power structure at a time when, again, we are facing multiple military issues around the globe. Why? To force the military to change their insurance coverage for things he does not personally approve of. This is not to even mention all the suffering he is inflicting on military families who are losing money that should be theirs, with officers forced to do the work of two or more people until they are stretched so thin their health is threatened.

And then there is the presidential campaign. Hooboy. I can’t even keep track of all the trials and criminal charges Donald Trump is involved in -and I’m a historian! Yet he is the overwhelming choice of the Republican electorate to be their presidential candidate. Yes. The same party that castigated Bill Clinton’s sexual impropriety because “ethics matter” is continuing to support a man already found liable for sexual assault and massive fraud. A man who, as I heard someone say recently, handles a Bible like he thinks it will burn him. Their biggest arguments are that the 2020 election was rigged (which has been proven to be untrue multiple times) and… Joe Biden is old. They’re practically the same age! Trump can’t keep straight what state he’s in, or for that matter finish a thought. As Bill Barr said (and this is an understatement), “his verbal skills are limited.”

The whole apparatus seems totally incapable of solving any problems or even offering any plans to do so. The whole party has become a massive clown show, with each individual throwing their country and even their party to the winds in order to out-Trump Trump and get as much attention (and raise as much money) as possible.

Maybe it’s time for some of y’all to switch sides.

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

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column 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, November 2, 2023 "Why the True History of Slavery and Race Matters Today"

 

A Liberal Dose

November 2, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“Why the True History of Slavery and Race Matters Today”

 

I have been talking about the origins of slavery in America. In part, I’ve been doing so because there is a lot about that subject that most people don’t know -and our current political climate, especially in red states like ours, suppresses honest discussion and true understanding of the subject. You can’t understand the present without understanding the past, nor can you effectively build the future, and some people would rather you not do any of those things. Their strategy for controlling the present and shaping the future is controlling your ability to know the past.

That said. For roughly the first century of the English colonies, labor in the South was done by three groups: African slaves, white indentured servants, and American Indian slaves. For reasons discussed last week, by about 1720 it had become exclusively the task of African slaves. Southern colonies started passing laws to keep even free blacks separate from poor whites, the better to control them both and avoid a replay of Bacon’s Rebellion.

Those laws became, in fits and spurts, more and more restrictive as the eighteenth century progressed. Every time there was a failed slave revolt, or word was leaked of a planned one, Southern colonial legislatures passed more laws exerting ever more control over the black population, free and slave alike. Free blacks lost most of the rights they had possessed the previous century, and slavery became harsher and harsher. This continued after the Revolution and into the nineteenth century. Race was simultaneously defined by LAW, and shaped by custom. This was a way for the planter class -who controlled the economy and the politics -to tell poor white workers and farmers, “Hey, you may not have any money or access to education or many opportunities in life, but you are white like us and we are all on the same side. You are not like those OTHER people... so stop hanging around with them. They are inferior to US.” This was a way to both delude the white “lower classes” and keep them from turning on the powers that be, and to protect the institution of slavery which was making the elites rich.

I’ll return to the cookie analogy I’ve used often. Picture three guys sitting around a table: a black guy, a poor white guy, and a rich white guy. There are ten cookies at the table. The rich guy has eight and the other two each have one. The rich guy tells the poor white guy, “You’d better watch that black guy, he wants to steal your cookie.” And while the poor white guy and the black guy are watching each other, neither notices that the rich guy now has ALL the cookies. Or, as Lyndon Johnson put it, “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."

This was done to maintain the social status quo, and keep the empowered in power. And it worked. Thousands and thousands of poor white Southerners who had never owned a slave and never would fought and died to protect the institution that only benefited the people at the top. And when that war ended slavery in America, the same economic/political class leaned in heavier than ever on reinforcing racism in order to hold on to that control -and that worked, too.

Today many Americans -95% or more of them white, I would guess -want to gloss over all the history I have laid out these last few weeks, because they think it makes America look bad… and because they want people to stop complaining about racial injustice, because doing so is a “divisive concept.” “Let’s forget it and move on.” But “forgetting” it (or never learning it in the first place) only further cements it.

 

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

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column 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, October 26, 2023 "How America's Bloodiest Forgotten War Affected Slavery"

A Liberal Dose

October 26, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“How America’s Bloodiest Forgotten War Affected Slavery”

Last week I talked about how slavery started in the English colonies, and the fact that for much of the 1600s plantation labor was done by three groups -African slaves, white indentured servants, and American Indian captives/slaves -who not only worked closely together in the fields, but who learned from one another, interacted socially, and often intermarried. By about 1720, that had changed.

The widespread use of indentured servants on plantations ended after Bacon’s Rebellion (1676). If you recall from earlier columns, in the early 1600s most of those white indentured servants had not lived to the end of their seven-year contracts, due to disease, hardship, and Indian wars. By the late 1600s conditions had improved, and most of them did survive. Which meant that, suddenly, there were large numbers of free, unemployed, landless poor whites who now wanted the land they had been promised, and it was mostly already taken. This led to an armed uprising of -not only angry landless whites -but also angry landless free blacks who wanted the same thing. The rebels actually burned Jamestown to the ground. After that, it no longer seemed like a good idea to planters to import large numbers of indentured servants from Europe. The war also led authorities in Virginia -and soon in other Southern colonies -to start passing laws meant to prevent poor white and black workers from teaming up again. Interracial marriage was made illegal, and free blacks found their rights being whittled away to insert a wedge between the two groups.

After that, then, most of the plantation labor was done by African and Native American slaves. The latter were still being used extensively -in 1700, there were more Indian slaves than black ones in Charleston, South Carolina (the colony with the most slaves overall). From the mid-1650s to the early 1700s, the English had been at the heart of a massive Indian slave trade in the Southern colonies -the same situation that Europeans had exacerbated in West Africa. At first, English authorities and planters would buy extra captives taken by Indians raiding enemy tribes, but eventually the royal governor of South Carolina actually made contracts with certain tribes (and helped arm them), such as the Westo and the Shawnee, to provide slaves to planters. These tribes then made perpetual war on everyone around them, actually wiping out many of the tribes in northern Florida. Again, as with West Africa, this resulted in social chaos.

Incidentally, most of the founders of the Carolina colony were second or third sons of wealthy plantation owners in the English colonies of Barbados, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. They couldn’t inherit their fathers’ estates, so they set up a new colony -and brought with them the much harsher, deadlier slavery practices common in the Caribbean. The South Carolinians operated lucrative rice plantations, which required far more workers than tobacco did.

The Indians figured out that it was against the best interests of all the tribes to be set against each other in the slave trade, so in 1712 virtually all the tribes in the Southeast (except the Cherokees, who tended to stay isolated) stopped raiding each other and decided to wipe out the English colonists of South Carolina instead. In the Yamasee War, so named for one of the leading tribes, they almost succeeded. Only the fact that the English persuaded the Cherokees to come in on their side turned the tide and saved the colony.

After that, enslaving Indians also seemed like a bad idea. After all, if an African slave escaped he would have no idea where he was, whereas Indians knew the area. Africans were hardier than Indians, who lacked resistance to many diseases. Most importantly, an African slave did not have large numbers of heavily armed friends and neighbors living right down the road. Slavery became an exclusively African experience in the colonies -and laws increasingly reflected that.

 

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

 

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column 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. 19, 2023 "1619: How Slavery Started in the English Colonies"

 

A Liberal Dose

October 19, 2023

Troy D. Smith

“1619: How Slavery Started in the English Colonies”

 

In the last couple of weeks, I have talked about the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, how it started, and the role Portugal and Spain played in its expansion. This week I’m going to discuss it in the context of England and her colonies -the antecedent of the United States, so closer to home for most of us.

England was late getting into the colonizing game (if you don’t count Ireland and Scotland). The first successful English colony in the New World was Jamestown, established in 1607. As we’ve discussed before, most of the labor in the early days of that colony was performed by poor white indentured servants, who had essentially sold themselves into servitude (usually for seven years) for passage to the colony, in hopes of one day being free and owning land.

Twelve years later, a ship called the White Lion landed in the Virginia colony. It was an English privateer operating under a Dutch letter of marque -in other words, the ship and its sailors were English, but they had a license from the Netherlands authorizing them to attack Dutch enemies in their name. The English and Dutch were allies against the Spanish and Portuguese. The White Lion had captured a Portuguese ship and taken her cargo, which included African slaves (remember how active Portugal was in the slave trade). The White Lion’s captain traded about two dozen of these slaves to the Virginia colonists for food and supplies. This was the first incidence of the slave trade in English colonies. It is NOT correct that this was the first instance of slavery in North America, as many modern sources claim; the Spanish had been bringing African slaves to North America for a century or more by that time. It was the first slavery in an ENGLISH colony in North America.

Being new to the game, it took the Virginia colonists a while to get the hang of it. They treated these first Africans as indentured servants, freeing most of them after a few years; they and their children were the beginning of a population of free blacks in the Virginia colony. Meanwhile, starting in earnest after the bloody war with the Powhatans of 1622, the Virginians were enslaving captured Native Americans. A shipment of over a hundred more African slaves arrived in 1628, and before very long the consensus was that Africans were to be enslaved for life, not temporarily. For roughly fifty years, the forced labor in Virginia tobacco plantations was a shared experience between three groups: African slaves, poor white indentured servants, and Native American captives. They worked in the fields together, socialized together, and frequently intermarried. Free blacks, meanwhile, had many of the same rights as other colonists.

Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, the English established colonies in Barbados in 1627, the Bahamas in 1648, and had taken Jamaica from the Spanish by 1661. These colonies became home to sugar plantations, and were operated in the same way the Spanish operated theirs- with a high death rate for the African slaves due to harsh treatment.

A scholar named Gary Taylor did a fascinating study about twenty years ago, published as “Buying Whiteness.” He did a computerized search through digital copies of everything published in London in the 1600s, looking for instances of people being referred to as “white.” He found virtually no such instances in the early 1600s, then they started popping up in the mid-1600s, and by the late 1600s they were extremely common. In other words, the timeline of English people thinking of themselves as “white” (which no one, really, is) perfectly matched the timeline of the growth of slavery in English colonies. Paintings changed, too- instead of having ruddy complexions in portraits, English were painted as almost alabaster white. Did their complexion change? No. Their self-perception changed. They were now defining themselves AGAINST someone -someone they had come to view as inferior.

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

Buy the book A Liberal Dose: Communiques from the Holler by Troy D. Smith HERE

You can find all previous entries in this weekly column 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

 

Killers of the Flower Moon, by... Joe Simon and Jack Kirby?? And Alex Toth??

 

October 20th is the premiere of the newest Martin Scorsese film, Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Robert DeNiro and Leonardo DiCaprio. Described in its wikipedia entry as an "epic Western crime drama film," it is an adaptation of the bestselling 2017 nonfiction book by David Grann. The story centers around the murders of at least 20 (perhaps many more) members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the early 1920s, by unscrupulous white men after their oil money. It also happened to be the first major case investigated by the newly-formed FBI. The series of events has faded into obscurity for most Americans (except the Osage people), with most having no idea such a thing ever happened. Grann and Scorcese are not the first to tell the story, though... it was the topic of Chickasaw author Linda Hogan's debut novel, Mean Spirit, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. Long before that, in 1959, it was one of the plot threads of the movie The FBI Story, starring James Stewart. 

 

And before that... it was the subject of a 1948 story in a crime comic book, Headline Comics, by the legendary team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, who at the beginning of that decade had co-created Captain America. The story was actually an ideal comic book subject, as by 1948 superheroes had mostly fallen by the wayside and two of the biggest genres replacing them in the racks that year were crime stories and westerns. This tale was both rolled into one.

And then it was in the comics again... when Dell did a movie adaptation of The FBI Story in 1959, by another comics legend, Alex Toth, in Four Color #1069. 

Here are the pages relating to the Osage murders from that Dell comic by Toth: 

And here's the 1948 version by Simon and Kirby: