The Goldwater Rule

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         The Goldwater Rule
The year 1964 was a big one for me. I had just graduated from the University of Michigan, and landed my first teaching job. I was assigned to teach American government and history to 47 senior students. This was also a presidential election year. The incumbent President Johnson who had been J.F.Kennedy's Vice President, was being challenged by the Republican  Senator Barry Goldwater.

The election took place on Tuesday November 3. I passed out an outline map of the U.S. and urged students to fill in each state as  soon as the results were known.

I should not have even bothered, as this election is the most lop-sided election in history. Johnson received 90.3 percent of the popular vote and Goldwater 9.7 percent.
Johnson carried 44 of the 50 states.

In addition to Goldwater's extreme conservative views, there was another factor which might have helped to cause him defeat. That year, "Fact" magazine published a petition signed by more than a thousand psychiatrists declaring that Goldwater was "psychologically unfit" to be President. Goldwater won a libel suit against the magazine.

This leads us to the erratic behavior of President Trump. Serious questions have been raised about his mental health and his control of nuclear weapons. We will just have to wait and see if this "Goldwater rule will be ignored. For more information see The New Yorker magazine May 22, 2017.

Also, I want to mention that two of my senior students that year, Vince Larocca and Bob Perry, following graduation enlisted in the Army, and were later killed in Vietnam.

    Aloha
    Grant

Buck v. Bell

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             Buck v. Bell

The U.S. Supreme Court has sometimes made some very bad rulings. Readers may remember for instance Dred Scott v. Sanford, Plessy v. Ferguson, and Korematsu v. United States, as prime examples. But one terrible ruling which is seldom mentioned is Buck v. Bell.

When Charles Darwin wrote about evolution and the survival of the fittest, he had no notion of what would follow. The question asked was "If this was true in the animal kingdom,must it also be true of humans as well?"The science of human improvement developed into an intellectual movement called "eugenics" from the Greek "eu" for "good" and "genes" for born. The science for improving stock.

The eugenics movement found support from the medical profession, lawyers, and journalists. Women supported the movement.
Magazines carried stories about eugenics. The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald even wrote a playful song about eugenics.

All of this took place as the Immigration Act of 1924 favored immigrants from Northern Europe and greatly reduced the number of Jews and Italians. The fear was that they would dilute our superior gene pool.

Some state institutions were already sterilizing inmates, but the State of Virginia hesitated until sterilization was proven to be lawful. A test case was needed. For the sake of brevity here, the lower courts rulings led to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The poor unlucky person for this test case was Carrie Buck, a seventeen year old girl who had born a child out of wedlock. She had been raped by the nephew of the couple she had worked for. They wanted her out of the way and in an institution where her mother was, being judged as "feeble minded." Carrie was judged a a moron and as such was placed in the same institution for epileptics and feeble-minded. Where her mother was located. Evidence of her grades in school were average and that she was promoted every year until the sixth grade when she became employed in housework. These facts never were heard in court.

Room does not permit me to relate all the details of the case but I will have to say something about the Supreme Court at that time. The Chief Justice was William Howard Taft, who had once served as President. Another well-known justice was Louis Bandeis,but the one outstanding member of the court was Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Homes was a Boston Brahmin-a member of the most rarefied social caste. His father father was a doctor and had written the famous poem "Old Ironsides," credited to saving the USS Constitution from being scrapped. Holmes attended Harvard, and through family connections, including Teddy Roosevelt, was appointed to the Supreme Court.

Holmes was admired for his wisdom and his service during the Civil War. Praise was showered upon him. But his public persona was far different from his private one.

Holmes's support for eugenics was notable for the extremity of his views. He was not a supporter of causes. He was indifferent to laws concerning child labor, antitrust laws, and other progressive goals.

As Wold War I approached Holmes supported the war, and wrote the majority opinion, upholding the ten year conviction of E  gene V. Debs, a socialist leader for giving an antiwar, anti draft speech.

Holmes wrote the majority opinion for the court declaring that Carrie Buck should be sterilized-and that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." The one dissent to the ruling came from Pierce Butler, and he wrote no dissenting opinion.

Virginia had won the case. Carrie was sterilized, as were others. She was released from the colony, later was twice married and found that she could not conceive and discovered what she thought was for an appendix operation. Her later life was one of hardship, but people who knew her said that she was highly intelligent and loved reading the daily paper, and doing crossword puzzles.

The effect of the court's ruling was felt beyond the United States. Sweden,Norway, Iceland,Estonia, and of course Germany. Following the defeat of the Nazis, and the Nuremberg war crimes trials, the defense cited Buck v, Bell arguing that the sterilizing was proper. Estimates are that Nazi leaders sterilized 375,000 people.    

Buck v. Bell is little remembered today and has never been over-turned. Of all the cases I learned about in college, this was never discussed. And it is one of the great miscarriages of justice. The pendulum has swung against eugenic sterilization, but will it swing back?

I owe a huge debt to Adam Cohen, author of
"Imbeciles, The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck." Penguin Books 2016.

     Aloha
     Grant

Nascar 101

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           NASCAR 101
I never paid much attention to NASCAR races. I figured they were a bunch of Hillbillies dressed in overalls, chugging beer while being surrounded by pretty girls with low-cut blouses, watching cars go rapidly around a track.

The reality of NASCAR is much different. Teena and I listened as her cousin Don Collins explained this racing world to us. We were watching a race at Talladega,Alabama. The oval track he explained, is two and a -half long, and the race cars run at speeds of 195 to 212 miles an hour for a distance of 500 miles. Each car has a spotter located high in the grandstands connected to the driver by a radio. The spotters job is to tell the driver if the way to the left of the car is open or to the right, so that he can move forward. This is because the driver's head is only able to move slightly, and he is unable to see either right or left without his spotter.

The driver is enclosed in a cage of steel bars for protection, and steel panels on each sides of the car. Also, cool air is fed to the driver from behind his seat. As Don continued to explain, I began to wonder about getting the driver out of the car as the only entry and exit is through the window on the driver's side. This is so different than the Formula One cars where the driver sit upright and exposed.

Don told us that there are two flaps to the rear of the driver which like flaps on an airplane, help to prevent the car from turning over.

One other very interesting fact we learned   was that a piece of paper on the track and stuck to the air intake of the car must be removed, because if not, the engine will overheat and be ruined. Another driver on the same team will pull in front of the affected car and create a draft which will cause the paper to fly away.

In the course of the 500 mile race there are frequent pit stops for the car, not the driver. The pit crew in seven seconds change tires, pour in 20 gallons of fuel, and pull away one of the plastic windshields, revealing a clear one underneath. And away goes the car.

I must admit that the race can get boring at times, it is after all 500 miles on a two and-a-half mile track. But there are crashes. Don said that near the end of the race there are often crashes, some hitting the 15 degree wall, others spinning out of control, or flipping upside down. When that happens the race stops, as the cars with their drivers are removed. Then the race resumes. Pretty damn exciting.

Thanks to Don's teaching we now have a better understanding of what NASCAR is all about. As for me in order to become a fan I already have a pretty girl, all I need now is a cold beer.

     Aloha
     Grant

Three Came Home

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          Three Came Home
Sometime after World War II, I recall seeing a motion picture titled "Three Came Home." The film told the true story of Agnes, Harry Keith, and their two year-old son George who spent over three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. I was recently given a copy of the book published in 1947, from which the movie was made.

The author Agnes Newton Keith was from Hollywood California, and married Harry Keith, a British civil servant Conservator of Forests and Director of Agriculture of North Borneo. Borneo is the 3rd largest island in the world, and is located southeast of the Malay Archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. The island rich in timber,palm oil,rubber and minerals.

The Japanese captives included civil servants,civilians, priests, nuns, doctors, and others. They were soon taught to bow correctly to their captors. Feet together, bowing at a 15 degrees from the waist, and not rising until a count of five.

Mrs. Keith was well-known to her captors as the author of "The Land Below the Wind," in a Japanese translation, very much admired.  During her captivity she took notes on scraps of paper and hid them in tin cans under the barrack, in the latrine, stuffed inside her son's teddy bear, a false bottom of her son's chair.

The men and women were kept apart in separate barracks behind barbed wire. Their diet consisted of five tablespoons of rice,a cup of rice gruel, greens, and salt per day. The need for some protein was acute. Smuggling food obtained by bartering from those outside the camp was widely practiced. An egg was better than gold, rotting fish a luxury,and a banana a treasure. When the camp was liberated in 1945, she weighed only 80 pounds.

In addition to starvation,Mrs. Keith fought off a Japanese soldier who tried to rape her. When she reported the event, she refused to sign a confession that the event never took place. She was beaten, her arm pulled out of its socket and ribs broken.

The Japanese also made some of the prisoners to dress their best and appear in propaganda films.

In spite of starvation, dysentery, malaria,  and torture, Mrs.Keith went to great lengths to see that her son remained alive.

When the camp was liberated September 11,1945, the family was at last reunited. She wrote at the end of the book "I believe that:
While we have more than we need on the continent, and others die for want of it, there can be no lasting peace.
When we work as hard in peacetime to make this world decent to live in, as in wartime we work to kill, the world will be decent, and the causes for which men fight will be gone. "

     Aloha
     Grant

Screeching In

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           Screeching In
If you are old enough to be reading this, you must remember as we all do, what took place on September 11,2001. The tragedy unfolded on television and in newspapers for all to see. But what was not seen or talked about was the rerouting of thirty-eight jets to Gander, Newfoundland stranding seven thousand passengers for up to five days.

Gander had been a refueling stop in the days before long-range jet travel. When the airport opened in 1938, it was one of the largest in the world. The town had less than a population of thirteen thousand,and five hundred hotel rooms.

The town's mayor Claude Elliot declared a state of emergency. Elementary schools housed the newcomers. the Salvation Army and the Red Cross made lunches. The hockey rink became a walk-in refrigerator. They ran out of underwear and so more came from St. John's two hundred and seven miles away. People on the planes came from ninety-five countries. Kosher meals were required, and a place for Muslim passengers to pray. The town's vet took care of animals carried on the planes.

The Royal Canadian Legion Hall initiated the passengers as honorary Newfoundlanders in a ritual named "screeching in." Visitors were made to wear yellow sou'westers, eat hard bread and pickled bologna, kiss a cod on the lips, then drink the local rum, called screech, while on-lookers banged an "ugly stick" covered in bottle-beer caps. the mayor recorded that they "began with seven-thousand strangers and finished with seven-thousand family members."

This event is now a new Broadway musical, "Come from Away." The information for this article is from the New Yorker magazine March 27, 2017 written by Michael Schulman.

    Aloha
    Grant

On the Road with Harry

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         On the Road With Harry
When President Franklin Roosevelt died while in office, he left some mighty large shoes to fill. His Vice-President Harry Truman was up to the job. While he was in office he had to decide to use the Atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to end WWII. He saw to it that our armed forces became integrated. He fired the popular hero General MacArthur for wanting to carry the Korean War into mainland China. And he stood up to Stalin and the Russians.

All of the above is well known, but few Americans realized that when Harry left office,there was no fanfare, no Secret Service protection, office staff, and above all,no pension. (This was later changed.) He and his wife Bess simply jumped into their car and drove to their home in Independence. Missouri. He was the last president to return quietly to public life.

Today ex-presidents get retirement packages  that can be worth more than a million dollars a year. Harry was broke. He had taken out a loan from a Washington bank in order to make ends meet. When he took office his salary was seventy-five-thousand dollars a year, and he had to pay for all White House expenses. But before leaving office he had made a deal with Doubleday Publishers for an advance of six hundred thousand dollars on his memoirs, a huge sum in 1953, when the average worker barely made more than four thousand dollars a year. But there was a catch. The advance would be taxed as income at a rate of 67 per-cent. He said later that he gained just thirty-seven thousand dollars.

Still, Harry had enough money to take Bess on a vacation to Hawaii, and to buy a new car. His choice was a Chrysler New Yorker, and it was offered to him for free, but he chose to pay for it himself as a private citizen. Nobody knows what the car cost. It was a black four-door sedan with chrome wire wheels and whitewall tires.

 Harry planned to take a road trip from Independence to New York city. Harry packed eleven suitcases, and off they went.

Harry loved to drive fast, but his wife Bess forced him to drive at a top speed of 55mph. One time Harry was driving in the left lane of the Pennsylvania Turnpike with a string of car behind him. A state trooper ordered him to turn off the road and when he bent down to look inside he got a shock, it was Harry Truman and his wife. The trooper thought to himself "Shit, what was I gonna do now?"

Harry and Bess stopped at hotels and diners where he had eaten when he was a member of the U.S. Senate. Sometimes he was recognized and forced to pose for pictures.  He and Bess went unnoticed. They were simply having a great time.

The above information is taken from a great book "Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure," by Matthew Algeo, published in 2009 by Chicago Review Press. Mr. Algeo and his wife traced Harry's trip, staying where he had stayed, and eating in diners where Harry and Bess had eaten. It is a really fun ride for the reader.

I feel that I must insert here that while Harry was buying his Chrysler New Yorker in 1953, my father bought a new Chevrolet Bel-Air. As I was a teen driver, I was very careful with his new car. I also have a connection with Harry Truman.

Truman was known as a letter writer, and that he answered every letter sent to him. I was teaching a high school government class of 47 students, and I wrote a letter to him and he replied. He wished me well on my new career. I no longer have the letter, as one of my daughters has it.

     Aloha
     Grant
   

Good Eating

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            Good Eating

The Sunday New York Times (February 26, 2017) carried a story I thought you readers of my blog would enjoy. "Cannilbalism, A Perfectly Natural History," by Bill Schutt.

His research has revealed that people have long been eating other people. And it  is often whom you choose to eat.

I am sure that some of you remember the story of the ill-fated Donner party, snowbound in the Sierra Nevada mountains for five months in 1846. And after eating the family dogs,hides and twigs,resorted to cannibalism.

In more recent times there was the case of the soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes Mountains, and they too were forced to cannibalism in order to survive.

The author who is a biologist, drew upon ancient texts,interviews with anthropologists, and scholarly journals to provide him with fact that cannibalism has long been practiced and accepted.

In China during the Yuan or Mongol dynasty (1271-1368), royalty and upper-class citizens dined on people. So much so that the various methods of preparing human flesh-baking, roasting, broiling and smoke drying are careful noted. Children were considered the tastiest, followed by women and men.

Here in Hawaii it is a  well-known fact that the English Captain Cook was killed and eaten by the Hawaiians. The event took place on Kealakekua Bay on February 14, 1779, on the Big Island of Hawaii. A parcel was returned to his ship" Resolution," contain  a portion of partly burned flesh from one of Cook's hips.

Now skipping many years, back to China again during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960's, when the practice was widespread.

Hawaiians today no longer eat people, and the practice of cremation followed by scattering of ashes in the sea, is much more common.
 
     Aloha
     Grant