Category: History

The Uncommon Champion of the Common Man: Henry Wallace

VP Wallace Henry Agard Wallace was born on a farm in Iowa on October 7, 1888. His father Henry Cantwell Wallace would serve as Secretary of Agriculture in the administrations of Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge. But the son would surpass his father to become a leading figure of the 1930s and 1940s, even if many do not remember him today.

Henry A. Wallace served as Vice President of the United States (1941–1945), Secretary of Agriculture (1933–1940), and Secretary of Commerce (1945–1946). After serving in those offices, he helped found the Progressive Party and served as its presidential nominee in the 1948 presidential election.

Wallace was controversial at the time for many of his views. Although he was serving as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s vice president at the time, during the 1944 Democratic National Convention, the convention attendees through a manipulated process replaced him on the ticket with Harry S. Truman in what some have called a “coup.” Of course, had Wallace stayed on the ticket with Roosevelt, he would have gone on to be president instead of Truman when Roosevelt died.

His later candidacy for president in 1948 included many positions ahead of their time. The Progressive Party platform promoted universal health insurance, voting rights for African-Americans, an end to the Cold War, and an end to segregation. But Wallace was hurt because the Communist Party endorsed him, and he only received 2.4% of the popular vote.

Many critics argue that Wallace would not have been a good president because of his idealism and some other views. But most agree some of his most important work was in the area of agricultural science, not politics. His work led to a breeding chicken that that at one point supplied most of the world’s eggs.

“Wallace ’48”

Still, many look back fondly on his idealism and his hopes for a different world, wondering what might have been. For example, many historians conclude that he would not have used the atomic bombs on Japan.

The band The Hangdogs in recent years wrote and recorded the song “Wallace ’48” in tribute to the man. One may wonder that if Wallace had this catchy song for his presidential campaign as “the uncommon champion of the common man,” might history have been different.

The Hangdogs, unfortunately, are no longer together. But the New York-based country band made some great music worth checking out.  Also, heycmdrcody recently did an interesting interview with the band’s Matthew Grimm about the history of the band.

As for Henry Wallace, he died on November 18, 1965. He was a complex man, in more ways than can be summarized in a song or a short post. But his complexity, such as the fact that he later supported Richard Nixon for president, is all the more reason to learn more about him.

Photo of Henry Wallace via public domain. Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Enjoy the History of Country Music with Cocaine & Rhinestones Podcast

    One of my favorite podcasts lately has been Cocaine & Rhinestones by Tyler Mahan Coe.  In each episode, Coe delves deep into the history of country music in the twentieth century.

    Cocaine & Rhinestones Episodes run anywhere between forty minutes and two hours, and each one may examine an artist’s career or may analyze the history behind a certain song, or both.  For example, one two-part episode centered on the relationship between Buck Owens and his guitarist Don Rich.  Another episode tells the story about how radio stations banned Loretta Lynn’s song, “The Pill.”  Another episode focused on Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Bille Joe” while also giving a fascinating overview of Gentry’s career.

    Coe does an outstanding job trying to tell the truth behind the stories behind country music.  An avid reader, Coe delves into books that tell the stories, comparing versions of events so he can explain his best estimate of what really happened.

    Coe’s goal of telling us what really happened is part of the reason why he does not use original interviews but wraps information together to tell us the stories.  And at the end of each podcast, Coe also fills us in with “liner notes,” telling us a little more about his sources and other information that might not have fit in the main tale.

    As you might guess from the title Cocaine & Rhinestones, Coe does not shy away from the darker legends of country music, such as the first episode about how Ernest Tubb once showed up in slippers to try to shoot someone.

    But Coe is most interested in the music behind these artists.  His podcasts feature excepts from important songs, and he often breaks them down to help you hear them in a new way.

    Coe recently explained to The New Yorker how one of his radio inspirations is Paul Harvey, who hosted, among other shows, The Rest of the Story.  I used to listen to those shows as a kid too, and I even bought books with written versions of Harvey’s episodes.  So, I can hear the connection, mostly in the way that Coe tells a good story that keeps you entertained while you learn something new.

    Tyler Mahan Coe’s background in country music goes back to his birth, as he is the son of country legend David Allan Coe and later played guitar in his dad’s band.  Now, he lives in Nashville as he spreads the gospel of country music through the Internet.

    So, check, out the episodes from the first season of Cocaine & Rhinestones at the show’s website.  Find an artist or topic that interests you and start with that episode.  One of my favorites was his take on The Louvin Brothers (Running Wild), which also inspired me to read one of the books Coe recommended.

    Yet, part of the joy is learning about people you do not know and the way Coe ties together a number of country music characters throughout the episodes. So, yes, start with a song or artist you think you know already.  But, like me, you probably will just give in and decide to go back and listen to all of the episodes of Cocaine & Rhinestones in order.  And then you will wait anxiously for Season Two.

    What is your favorite episode of Cocaine & Rhinestones? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    The House I Live In: Josh White’s America

    That's America to Me Josh White — who was born on February 11, 1914 — had one of the more interesting American lives during the twentieth century, even though he died at the young age of 55 on September 5, 1969.  He was a folk singer, guitarist, songwriter, civil rights activist, actor, friend to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and much more.

    He was an important figure in the century, although many people born in the last fifty years may not have heard of him.  His music influenced many of the major performers who came after him.  Allmusic calls him “one of the unquestioned linchpins of the first stirrings of the folk revival.”

    His work for civil rights and social justice made him a target of the anti-communist hysteria of the 1950s.  He testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), where he read the lyrics to one of his recordings, the anti-lynching song “Strange Fruit” that was written by Abel Meeropol.  Many twisted his words, so that for a period he was blacklisted by both the Right and the Left.

    White lived such a full life that I can’t even begin to summarize it here in a short blog post.  I encourage you to read more about him, including the long Wikipedia post about his life and this video of his son Josh White Jr. telling stories at The Bohemian Cafe in Greenville, South Carolina on August 20, 2016.

    The House I Live In (What Is America to Me?)

    White was among the first to record many songs we know today.  He had the first hit recording of “The House I Live In (What Is America to Me?).” The song, which was written during World War II by Earl Robinson and Lewis Allan (a pen name for Meeropol), captured a dream for what a post-war America might be.

    The children in the playground,
    The faces that I see,
    All races and religions,
    That’s America to me.

    You know the song, even though you may not have been around when White’s version was a hit.  But the reason you know the song is because of White.

    It was White who taught “The House I Live In” to Frank Sinatra, who became identified with the song.  After White taught it to Sinatra, Ol’ Blue Eyes sang the song in an honorary Academy Award winning short for MGM. The short was made to oppose anti-Semitism.

    As for White, I don’t know, but it seems that through all of the problems, he loved this country. Otherwise, he would not have done so much for it.

    The blacklisting by the music industry ended in 1955, and he began performing in various venues around the world. The TV blacklisting ended later in 1963, when President John F. Kennedy asked White to perform on a national civil rights program, “Dinner with the President.”

    Subsequently in that same year, he performed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington. And in January 1965, he performed at Lyndon B. Johnson’s inauguration.

    Today, the lyrics of “The House I Live In” may seem a little naive. Some might find them cheesy. I suppose, though, that most people no matter what their political party, would agree that it was a nice dream. And while White never saw the accomplishment of the dream, he reminded us that it is one still worth fighting for.

    Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Hierarchies of Hate and Healing? Thoughts on “Wind River” from Charlottesville

    Charlottesville Statue The following commentary is a Guest Post by Russ Miller, an expert on literature, film, and other things. Russ grew up in the West and currently lives in Virginia.

    I live in Charlottesville.  That used to be something I said with no small measure of satisfaction.  It is a gem of a town, tucked into the folds of the genteel Blue Ridge Mountains and warmed by the rational light of the University of Virginia.  Thomas Jefferson, whose Monticello estate is located on the outskirts of town, presides over Charlottesville like a secular saint, setting a tone of enlightenment and “civic republicanism.”  Rich in culture and community, Charlottesville really is a magical place to call home.  It is sophisticated, but on a human scale.   Most American city governments do not have to trouble with maintaining a page at the municipal website entitled “Awards and Recognition.” The recent list of honors bestowed on Charlottesville is as humbling as it is inspiring:

    But things have changed.  The rioting in August that left scores injured and one young woman dead now mean that other feelings and more painful impressions stir when I mention my home town.

    The events of August 13, 2017, were triggered in part by the City Council’s decision to remove a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from a prominent park in the city’s historical old town.  The statue will be sold at auction and the park – formerly “Lee Park” – was rechristened “Emancipation Park.”

    In the months after these dramatic Council votes, right-wing racist groups converged on Charlottesville, using the Lee statue (awaiting its fate while litigation proceeded) as a platform to express a grotesque mix of race-hatred, revisionist history, scapegoating, and violence.  Suddenly, the word “Charlottesville” has become a talisman for America’s entrenched racism, political dysfunction, and irresolvable division.  In the days after the riots, AlJazeera offered the mocking lament:  “Charlottesville is America everywhere.”

    Taylor Sheridan’s well-reviewed new film Wind River quietly slipped into Charlottesville’s cinemas in the days before the riots.  Like Sheridan’s previous scripts, Wind River seeks to mix edge-of-your-seat action/drama with earnest commentary on America’s most desolate corners and hopeless populations.

    In Wind River, Sheridan leaves behind the bankrupt dirt-farmers (Hell or Highwater (2016)) and drug dealers (Sicario (2015)) that populate the borderlands of his desperate, parched, and nearly lifeless Desert Southwest.  His new tragic topography is the bone-cracking cold of the impoverished Wind River Indian Reservation in the snow-swept mountain desert of central Wyoming where the latest in a string of murders of young Native American women sets the film’s plot.

    The ensuing investigation brings together the wounded and benumbed game-tracker (Jeremy Renner) and the innocent and unsuspecting FBI agent (Elizabeth Olsen).  Sheridan wants them to stand-in for Americans’ posture towards the calamity that is devastating the Native American community generally and Native American women more specifically:  those who know something about it are mostly despairing; the rest of us simply have no idea.  When Olsen’s uninitiated agent arrives at the crime scene poorly navigating the snow-slicked roads and woefully under-dressed for a descending blizzard, Renner’s character ushers her into a new kind of nightmare on his growling snowmobile.

    The film deserves its positive buzz.  It is well-paced and features a couple of near-perfect episodes of breathtaking cinematic tension.  Sheridan’s script is full of sermonizing but delivers some unforgettable lines that land like punches.  And Renner makes a fair bid for a Best Actor Oscar.  The muted, agonized, and vulnerable manhood that he and the Native American actor Gil Birmingham express in several scenes is hauntingly effective.  Above all, the film succeeds as a “blistering expose of violence against Native American women.”

    It is this last feature that created the gnawing link between Wind River and Charlottesville for me.  I fear that the direction I am about to take is dangerous because it risks pitting the victims of unspeakable, historic crimes in an unwinnable contest for “America’s most abused.”  I am sensitive to this risk.  And I want to say as clearly as possible that I am not in the least interested in stirring up some kind of “race to the bottom of American injustice.”  But, upon seeing the film, I could not suppress the chilling realization that, just a few blocks from Charlottesville’s newly renamed Emancipation Park and the disputed statue of Robert E. Lee, another statue stands amidst the traffic at the busy intersection of Main and Ridge streets.  The bronze “Lewis & Clark and Sacagawea Statue” rises above Lewis & Clark Triangle, just a few yards from the front door of Charlottesville’s federal courthouse.

    Sacajawea statueThe statue is now referred to as the “Lewis & Clark and Sacagawea Statue” because modern sensibilities require us to acknowledge that it prominently features the entwined figures of all three of these protagonists from Lewis & Clark’s “journey of the corps of discovery.”  But the Charles Keck sculpture, commissioned by Paul McIntire, was unveiled in 1919 with the title “Their First View of the Pacific.”  It is fair to assume that the sculptor was not celebrating Sacagawea’s triumph.

    McIntire also commissioned Charlottesville’s now-infamous Robert E. Lee statue.  But, where Lee serves as a painful symbol for America’s still-unresolved racist past, the Lewis & Clark and Sacagawea Statue unambiguously depicts and embodies the racist logic of the European genocide against the New World’s Native American occupants.  In the statue Sacagawea crouches, almost animal-like, at the feet of the eponymous Anglo-European conquerors.  Wind River’s poignancy derives from the oppression, and eventual decimation, of Native Americans that flowed inexorably from the westward impulse ignited in America’s breast by Lewis and Clark.  That oppression is anticipated and endorsed – in hardened bronze – in Charlottesville’s “other” statue.

    There have been some critical murmurs aimed at the Lewis & Clark Statue over the years.  One result of the criticism was the erection, in 2009, of a small plague at the statue’s base that seeks to contextualize Sacajawea’s role in the Lewis & Clark expedition by acknowledging her “courage and bravery” and her service as “an ambassador, bridging relations among nations.”  This, the plague tells us, “earned her recognition in the chronicles of American History.”

    But in the intense, still simmering debates over our civic statuary, the Charlottesville City Council did not seriously consider acting against this explicitly racist monument.  Why is that?

    Among all the other confounding complexities that will bedevil our long-overdue reckoning with our dark past, the movie and the statue suggest that we also have to grapple with hierarchies of hate and healing in America.  Despite the current, strong appetite for victories of decency over symbols, some wounds will have to wait, even while some others have contemplated the connection between Native Americans and recent protests.

    Glenn Kenny, reviewing Wind River for the NY Times, concluded that the “film’s ultimate statement” involves “an expanded awareness that the justice done by the good guys in this film is not nearly sufficient with respect to the larger injustice done to Native Americans.”  Add that to Charlottesville’s sins, too.

    Photos courtesy of Russ Miller. Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Wonderful Redwood Tree

    Van Morrison Redwood On October 2, 1968, Pres. Lyndon B. Johnson signed the act that established Redwood National Park in California.  The law put 58,000 acres in the control of the National Park Service.  And in 1978, the government added an additional 42,000 acres to the park.

    The law making the area into a national park was a culmination of decades of work by preservationists.  In the late 1850s, loggers were harvesting many of the redwoods.  But by the early 1900’s, a Save-the-Redwoods League started buying up land to preserve the trees, and California began designating areas as state parks.

    Fortunately, we can still enjoy the massive trees at Redwood National Park, as well as see other giants at Sequoia and Kings Canyon national park (one of my favorite national parks).  Sequoia and redwood trees have many similarities, but they also have many differences, such that sequoias are the largest trees by volume while redwoods are the tallest.

    Van Morrison’s “Redwood Tree”

    The greatest song about redwood trees would have to be Van Morrison’s “Redwood Tree.”  The song first appeared on his 1972 album, Saint Dominic’s Preview, which is probably my favorite Van Morrison album.

    “Redwood Tree” begins with a boy and his dog looking for a rainbow.  And the song ends with a boy and his father looking for a lost dog, who is never found. But the song is really about memories of youth and what we learn as we age.  The redwood tree of the title provides a protective force.

    And it smells like rain,
    Maybe even thunder;
    Won’t you keep us from all harm,
    Wonderful redwood tree.

    Although “Redwood Tree” was released as a single, it only barely broke into the Billboard Top 100.  At the time, reviewer Stewart Parker in The Irish Times called the song a “simple but tuneful ditty.” Rolling Stone referred to the song as a “beautiful, sensuous cut.”

    Over time, many defenders have praised the song.  The Telegraph lists “Redwood Tree” as one of thirty Essential Van Morrison Songs.  It notes that this three-minute song about childhood is “perfection.”

    Decide for your self as you celebrate the protection of these wonderful trees with a listen to Van Morrison’s “Redwood Tree.” For a bonus, below is a demo version of the song that appeared on The Genuine Philosopher’s Stone collection.



    What do you think “Redwood Tree” is about? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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