Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Nadel's revenge against Philip Roth--See quotations in Amazon Books--and my analysis of Nadel in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

 

 

 Mark Oppenheimer in N Y TIMES:
In 2011, Roth paid over $60,000 in lawyers’ fees to force Ira Nadel, an American academic who now teaches in Canada, to delete one sentence — which said that Roth had “anxieties about being emotionally engulfed by a woman,” referring to the longtime girlfriend who was the basis for Drenka, the sexually liberated mistress in “Sabbath’s Theater” — from his “Critical Companion to Philip Roth.” Nadel was planning a biography, and Wylie informed him that he could not quote from Roth’s work, and that nobody close to Roth would ever cooperate with him.

Sick of Miller and contemptuous of Nadel — whose own Roth biography paints him as terrified of intimacy and was published last month — Roth kept up the hunt.

 

SEE in Amazon Books PHILIP ROTH: A COUNTERLIFE, by Ira Nadel.  Poor Roth--the man he was contemptuous of has published his revengeful book.

This is from my MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

1. In 1984 Ira Bruce Nadel in his Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form declared that “the biographer is akin more to the creative writer than the historian” (11) and that “in biography language alters fact and draws on fiction to clarify its form” (209). Factual biographers still dominate the field, Nadel regrets in his introduction, even though “contemporary theories of fictional form and narrative technique have clarified our awareness of order and belief, presentation and authenticity, in biographical writing” (5) so that we should be redefining “the role of the biographer, transforming him from a journeyman or manufacturer of lives into a creative writer of non-fiction” (11); the biographer should be “akin more to the creative writer than the historian” (11). Grant Webster in Biography (Summer 1986) reviewed Nadel’s book very hostilely: “Nadel’s central point is that biography ought to be more fictional . . . . Put another way, factual biographies are bad in the sense that they are dated, and so do not reflect our current understanding of reality” (277). Victoria Glendinning in “Lies and Silences” in The Troubled Face of Biography (1988) could not restrain her outrage (54): “Nadel . . . asks: ‘To what extent is fact necessary in a biography? To what extent does it hinder the artistic and literary impulse of the biographer? To what degree does the biographer alter fact to fit his theme and pattern?’ His view is that the biographer has every right to change facts in order to make a psychological or artistic point. This makes me shiver. He also believes in what I would see as the intrusion of the biographer, suggesting that ‘discovery in biography now exists equally in what the biographer reveals about himself as well as what he uncovers about his subject.’ It is probably true that compulsive biographers immerse themselves in other people’s lives as a way of obliquely investigating their own; but this is the biographer’s own business. Nadel’s ego-trip is at one remove. If [Richard Holmes’s] Footsteps were to become a model for all biographers, we should have to find a new word for the genre.” Elizabeth Longford offers “Reflections of a Biographer”: “Today in certain quarters biography has become theory without life. . . . Biography is too important to become a playground for fantasies, however ingenious; I believe its future is safe with the reading public, who will keep it human, not too solemn” (148). Nadel’s arguments may be recognized in twenty-first-century pronouncements. In a carefully hypothetical scenario in “The Biographer as Archaeologist” (2002), William St Clair’s speaker, more or less not speaking for St Clair, still frets trendily (222): “I cannot allow my narrative to be imprisoned within the confines of so-called biographical facts.” The sturdy Frederick R. Karl in his 2005 Art into Life (x) declares unambiguously: “The thread that binds most of my pieces is my belief that biography is not ‘fixed’ or set, but a contingent, almost random genre. More akin to fiction than to history, it is less than a novel, but sometimes more than history. It is linked to autobiography (of the writer), frequently full of sound and fury, but signifying significant information.” In 2009 Michael Benton made what looks like a last-ditch attempt to oppose biography and history by claiming that biography is a hybrid: “It is the verifiable facts of history crossed with the conventions of narrative” (35). I demur: the facts of history can be presented in verifiable chronological form in annals, without narrative, but otherwise the “conventions of narrative” are at play in most history just as in biography. I would write a biography of Abraham Lincoln employing precisely the conventions of narrative I employed in writing on Melville. In the last few paragraphs of chapter 8 I look at an attack on biography from within, attempts to define archives out of any resemblance to storehouses of public and private documents.

The Republican Party in 2021 reprints 1866 book: THE LOST CAUSE, by Edward A. Pollard, of Virginia

 THE LOST CAUSE--

"Comprising a full and authentic account of the rise and progress of the late Confederacy. The Campaigns, Battles, Incidents and adventures of the most gigantic struggle of the World's History."

To be followed by a book on the Intimidation of White Voters by the Military Rulers.

Tuesday, March 30, 2021

Roth on Ira Nadel and Parker on Ira Nadel in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

 Mark Oppenheimer in N Y TIMES:
In 2011, Roth paid over $60,000 in lawyers’ fees to force Ira Nadel, an American academic who now teaches in Canada, to delete one sentence — which said that Roth had “anxieties about being emotionally engulfed by a woman,” referring to the longtime girlfriend who was the basis for Drenka, the sexually liberated mistress in “Sabbath’s Theater” — from his “Critical Companion to Philip Roth.” Nadel was planning a biography, and Wylie informed him that he could not quote from Roth’s work, and that nobody close to Roth would ever cooperate with him.

Sick of Miller and contemptuous of Nadel — whose own Roth biography paints him as terrified of intimacy and was published last month — Roth kept up the hunt.

 Only 2 reviewers of MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE realized that it was a book about biography, not just a book about Melville.

Parker on Ira Nadel in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE

In the Preface I envisioned biographies as seated at a great dining hall of biographies. As for MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY, I saw “it as sitting across the room from theory-envying and theory-driven unruly, eccentric stepcousins once or twice removed like Ira Bruce Nadel’s Biography: Fiction, Fact, and Form (1984)” . . . .

Then later a long discussion which begins this way at the start of the endnotes:


 

Monday, March 29, 2021

After many months I see that the Rock is still there


 

Fragment about one Kaiser train from the Northeast-

 

On 21 December 1939, far into the reception of The Grapes of Wrath, the Abilene Reporter-News printed a new scare headline—“NEGROES COMING!” A Stanford professor had said that “a great migration of negroes from the cotton lands of the South to California is only a matter of time. When it comes, he added, the recent migration of white victims of the dustbowl—the Okies and the Arkies—will seem trifling by comparison.” (In the 1850s Oregon had tried to exclude all negroes from the state. Now, as it turned out, negroes came, and sometimes together with whites on Kaiser trains which brought workers to wartime shipyards—but in disproportion; the Portland Oregonian on 3 October 1942 said 84 negros had arrived out of 1160 men. I rode west on a mixed Kaiser-military train. Most of the Kaiser trains were from the South, carrying some poor blacks and more poor whites.
        

A little from an old piece on Vanport and East Vanport because of VANPORT MOSAIC--a 2-hour interview last weekend to get clips for a program.

 [They have located a few dozen people who remember Vanport but so far I am the only living person who remembers Vanport and East Vanport both.]

 

Just a little about Vanport and East Vanport

Authorized before Pearl Harbor, the new DuPont smokeless gunpowder plant near Pryor, Oklahoma, soon needed workers faster than anyone could provide worker housing. We spent the first months of 1942 in a tent on a plywood floor, a pot bellied stove in the center, and a hydrant sticking up from the ground outside the tent, a few hundred feet from the entrance to the plant.  I kicked and screamed as they tried to make me use the new but shit-smeared community outhouse; I was allowed to use a chamber pot after that.  In a canvass annex laced to the main tent I awakened at least once with snow on my face.  While we were in the tent my doctor found a doctor in town who would do a tonsillectomy on my sister without anesthesia.  We took a bus to school in Pryor until the cyclone on 27 April turned the sky a putrid green and blew the school open in the process of killing what Collier's later referred to as "seventy-odd Oklahomans."  I was baffled and resentful when I read that in 1947.  Why did everyone think Okies were odd, and feel free to say so in print?  At the University of Delaware after 1979 I remembered the tent and the squalor every time I signed myself as the "H. Fletcher Brown Professor," for my chair was endowed by the DuPont executive who had been in charge of smokeless gunpowder.

After the cyclone in Pryor, the mother and the children waited in half a telephone operator’s house in Wister, Oklahoma, to be summoned West to a shipyard. The house may have been built from the same plans as the house where Sissy Spacek lived in Raggedy Man. Through the late spring of 1942 my father's dark, impossibly tall granduncle John Glenn (son of a six foot five Mexican War soldier), dressed in black and wearing the only tall black stovepipe hat I ever saw in actual use, brought fresh vegetables to the door of our side of the tiny house.  Special trains, later specified as "Kaiser trains," were carrying workers from the South to work in shipyards and live in Henry J. Kaiser's instant city, Vanport ("Van" for Vancouver, Washington, and "port" for Portland). Our train was mixed, hauling troops and hauling white hillbillies and Southern blacks.  (Newspapers show the much smaller count of Kaiser workers coming from the Northeast.) Vanport in weeks had changed from empty flood plain to the second largest city in Oregon.  In late 1944 and 1945 we were in the new adjunct, East Vanport, separated from the Columbia River by a reddish loose dirt berm about 20 feet high, easy to dig into.  Part of it caved in on three bigger children I knew by sight.  One they dug out seemed OK. The other one they rescued was hollow-eyed and green afterwards, spectral.  The state, I see on the Internet, had a history of fierce prejudice against blacks dating back to the Oregon Donation Land Act of 1850, which specified that free land was only for white settlers.  My father had once lived where there was a sign on either side of town advising any black man not to let the sun go down on his head there.  In the shipbuilding plant where all the facilities were shared he looked hard at a black man who was topping a toilet seat with strip after strip of toilet paper. The man explained himself: "You never know who's been sitting on these seats."  This man's fastidiousness was a revelation to my father, who told the story on his prejudiced self for the rest of his life.  I don't know whether he ever applied it to times when he had been discriminated against because he was so obviously part Indian.  Like the shipyards, the schools in Vanport were integrated, a first for Oregon.  I didn't realize that integration was an enforced experiment there. The only prejudice I saw in Vanport was against a child whom I and the other kids taunted for being an Oregonian (but was he also Japanese?).  I was afraid of George, a black classmate. He was not mean, but he could throw a rock over the tallest tree the bulldozers had left on the banks of the Columbia and I was sure he could poke a finger right through your chest so it came out the other side.  I was not a healthy kid.

Like everyone of mixed races, the older Parkers had been alert to shades of color.  I was an old man before I learned why my Aunt Betty was always called Blanket: she came out so dark they might just as well have given her a blanket and left her off at the Reservation.  Okie humor.  It would never have occurred to me that there could be prejudices against Indians.  My best friend in East Vanport, Billy Shoemaker, was interesting not because he was Indian but because he was Kiowa, not a tribe I had kinfolks in. Around June 1945 I learned just how different other people thought all American Indians were: a cousin of a cousin arrived across the river in Washington, puffy, bloated, doughy, listless, rescued just weeks earlier from a concentration camp where German doctors had been gleeful at their luck in acquiring a genuine Red Indian to perform medical experiments on.

 In Vanport and East Vanport the older children all dropped out of school and got jobs.  My sister worked in a shipyard.  The younger brother was a waiter in a big Portland restaurant (where he served Alan Ladd once and brought home an autograph).  The older at 14 was assistant manager of a grocery store in Portland.  The Portland Oregonian printed my name in 1943 (I may yet locate the issue) because in the third grade I came closest to guessing the number of pinto beans in a goldfish bowl.  Trust an Okie, used to eyeing and prospectively dividing the available resources, to come up with a good rough estimate.  In late 1944 and then 1945 I was much on my own with a small radio (“Terry and the Pirates”), a growing collection of Wonder Woman comics, money for movies, absolutely unsupervised at least 90% of the time.  I was secretively ambitious, for I wrote in pencil on the bottom of a trophy from Jantzen Beach, a chalk Superman, "this has given me a story."  My mother and my visiting sailor cousin, Ishmael (thin like Grandpa Costner and extremely tall) turned Superman upside down but could not read my words.  I kept my secret.  Why did Ishmael have to say he had seen Mickey Rooney turn in a full circle in front of him and other sailors as he urinated on a floor?  Stories that could not be true could disturb your imagination a long time.  At nine, a month or two after FDR's death, I was put to work, riding out on the back of a flatbed truck to pick strawberries and other crops.  Older workers favored me with the vilest kind of confidential talk that I mostly did not understand.  Some of the things I was told, I believe now, were physiologically impossible as well as morally repulsive. 

After being pushed out of Pryor by a cyclone, we got out of Oregon almost three years before the catastrophe, the flood that wiped out Kaiser's whole hastily thrown up cardboard metropolis.  Somewhere in central Oregon my father discovered my cache of Wonder Woman comics under the back seat and threw all of them out the window.  What would they be worth now?  We were parked on the bank of the Snake River in Idaho where someone had left a pocket knife with broken blades and some feet of fishing line when the older ones passed around a paper with headlines about a bomb falling on Hiroshima. (In the second decade of the 21st century I learned that the pilot of the Enola Gay, Paul Tibbets, was a Warfield cousin of my father’s and the man who denounced the bombing later in 1945 was my mother’s cousin, David Dellinger.)

"GODDAMN OKIES"--Salvaging for possible use in "RACIAL ENCOUNTERS (1600s TO 2000s)"

 

"Goddamn Okies" and the Loss and Retrieval of Historical Memory

Copyright 2020 Hershel Parker 

              In the mid-1930s, journalists did not know where the refugees or migrants streaming into California were coming from. From the “Dust Bowl,” said many, not realizing that the true Dust Bowl was pretty much restricted to the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and the adjacent areas in those states and to northeast New Mexico, southeast Colorado, and southwest Kansas. Journalists did not know, either, that far from everyone who left the Dust Bowl actually went to California. On 14 July 1937 the San Bernardino County Sun under the headline “70,000 ‘Dust Bowl’ Refugees Homeless in San Joaquin Valley” identified the newcomers as from Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas, but although Arkansas had suffered drought it was not in the Dust Bowl. On 25 July 1937 the Fresno Bee reported concern about “the influx of middle westerners and dust bowl refugees”—maybe 1,000,000 of them, but did not particularize “middle westerners.” The Burlingame Times on 28 July 1937 under the heading “Cotton Crop Here Lure To Dust Bowl Refugees” declared that “many thousands of southern farmers and refugees from the midwestern ‘dust bowl’ have invaded the San Joaquin valley.” Again, “southern” and “midwestern ‘dust bowl’” were not further specified. An article by Sam Jackson in the Charleston (SC) News and Courier on 8 August 1937 said that officials were surprised that “migration from the western dust bowl has increased in 1937”—an estimated influx of 100,000 as compared to 84,000 in 1936; “western dust bowl” was not further located.  The Santa Cruz Sentinel on 8 April 1938 announced that “Dust Bowl Migrants Are Roaming State for Work” and went on to specify that the migrants had been “cut loose from their farms in Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas by disaster and mechanization of farming.” The El Paso Herald-Post on 28 July 1938 (“Dust Bowl Migrants Squat On California in Squalor”) quoted migrants’ explanations for why they had left their homes: they were not able to make a living on a farm, they staying on a farm till the dust drove them out, they stayed till the drought ran them out. The reporter continued: “These are typical answers as the inquiring visitor makes the rounds of California’s squatter tent and shack towns, inhabited by one-time share croppers, tenant farmers, independent farmers, casual[tie]s of depression in towns—nomads who have migrated here from Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Arizona and elsewhere in search of work and mild winters.”


          “Okies” had been the innocuous nickname of the Norman football team and had been current in jocular use for themselves among other Oklahomans. The term darkened as the migrants began to be identified as coming mainly from Oklahoma. On 8 August 1837 the Charleston News and Courier printed this caption to a grim illustration: “Crowding of families in ‘jungle’ tents, like this one in ‘Little Oklahoma’ near Tulare, Calif., makes authorities fearful of the health and morals of dust bowl fugitives.” The accompanying text offered a definition: “the ‘Okies,’ as the refugees are called (from Oklahoma), occupy forest service camp grounds,” but the “overflow goes into ‘jungles’ of tents and shabby shacks which authorities view as breeding places of disease, crime, immorality and general misery.” On 9 August 1938 the Riverside Daily Press printed an optimistic article, “Flow of Indigents to State Slowing Down”: “‘Okies’ from Oklahoma, and ‘Arkies’ from Arkansas are few and far between,” reported Robert Campbell,” an officer at a state plant quarantine border station in Blythe. More realistically, in a lecture reported in the Santa Cruz Sentinel for 25 August 1938, Frank Emery Cox declared, “Tobacco Road has really come to California and for the first time in history, this state has rural slums and unlike the tenements of the large cities, they are populated by ‘poor white trash’ from other states. Approximately 60 per cent of these migrants arrived from six states of the south and southwest. Oklahoma contributed almost 26 per cent, or one out of every four.” On 26 October 1938 the New Orleans Times-Picayune showed that the terms “Arkies” and “Okies” had spread across the country: “Not since the gold rush of ’49 has there been such a migration to California. So many have flocked there from Arkansas and Oklahoma they are called Arkies and Okies.” A 19 November 1938 article in the Oakland Tribune, “Bankers Would Colonize Dust Bowl Migrants on California Farms,” repeated this terminology while attaching it to a more general geographical area than Oklahoma and Arkansas: “Middle Westerners--known in California as Oakies [sic] and Arkies—trailed into the State, their meagre belongings piled high on ancient automobiles.” The financial theorist Roger W. Babson in the Brownsville Heraldo of 3 September 1939 used “Okie” to be inclusive—“During the past few years, thousands of ‘Okies’ (refugees from the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma and Colorado), the unemployed, the footlo[o]se, and the half-baked from all states have drifted to Southern California where it is warm and sunny the year round.” On 25 October 1939 the Charleston (SC) Evening Post, influenced by John Steinbeck, whose The Grapes of Wrath had been a sensation starting in April, used “Okies” as an inclusive term for all the migrants: “the thousands of ‘Okies,’ dust-bowl refugees from Oklahoma, Missouri, Arkansas and Texas, and thousands of Mexicans from southern California, sat on their heels while the sun dried out fields dampened by yesterday’s rain. Many of these are types portrayed by characters in John Steinbeck’s controversial novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath.’” The refugees from Oklahoma in fact constituted only [xxxxCheck]% of the 1930s migrants to California, but even before The Grapes of Wrath was published the two terms “Okies” and “Arkies” covered most of the migrants except when “Okies” was the catch-all term for all the migrants.  On 21 December 1939, far into the reception of The Grapes of Wrath, the Abilene Reporter-News printed a new scare headline—“NEGROES COMING!” A Stanford professor had said that “a great migration of negroes from the cotton lands of the South to California is only a matter of time. When it comes, he added, the recent migration of white victims of the dustbowl—the Okies and the Arkies—will seem trifling by comparison.” (In the 1850s Oregon had tried to exclude all negroes from the state. Now, as it turned out, negroes came, and sometimes together with whites on Kaiser trains which brought workers to wartime shipyards—but in disproportion; the Portland Oregonian on 3 October 1942 said 84 negroes had arrived out of 1160 men. I rode west on a mixed Kaiser-military train.)
        
          The Daily News in the Texas panhandle town of Pampa (right in the middle of the Dust Bowl) on 9 August 1939 printed three associated articles on The Grapes of Wrath, which had been a sensation since its publication in April.  The overall headline was “The R[oving] R[eporter] Probes ‘Okie’ Rumpus And Presents Two Book Reviews.” The Reporter, fresh from an exploratory trip to California, issued this call: “All right, Okies, let’s have your attention for a little while—that’s what they call you Oklahomans in some places out in California, and they don’t smile particularly when they say it, and you don’t smile either. You may not even be from Oklahoma. You may be from Texas, or Arkansas, or even from Kansas, but you’re an Okie to a certain type of Californian, and he hasn’t got much use for you if you are living from hand to mouth as some 300,000 Okies are doing right now in the San Joaquin, the Santa Clara and in other productive valleys.” In the heart of Steinbeck country the reporter had experienced a striking encounter: “Many of the migrants resent being called ‘Okies.’ In a Salinas cafe, we met a tall, strong, handsome young fellow, Tony Dehls, who by the way used to work at the Courthouse cafe in Pampa. Tony is a native of Arkansas. He said that he had been thrown in jail seven times as a result of fights with persons who had called him ‘Okie and didn’t smile.’” American men and many boys still read Owen Wister’s The Virginian, and many of those who hadn’t read the book knew the 1929 movie in which Gary Cooper (you can call up a clip in a moment now) says, “You wanta call me that, SMILE.”

          In The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck has a man at the Colorado River explain: "Well, Okie use'ta mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you're a dirty son-of-a-bitch. Okie means you're scum. Don't mean nothing itself, it's the way they say it." Until Steinbeck peppered the latter half of his book with “goddamn Okies” no one had characterized the refugees or migrants to California this way in print, and after The Grapes of Wrath it would be impossible for anyone to separate out the states from which refugees poured into California in the 1930s. Into his frequently repeated words “goddamn Okie” Steinbeck focused all the currents of contempt and hatred swirling in the 1930s. By making the man declare that the old descriptive meaning had been replaced, Steinbeck fixed “Okie” as the new inclusive term for the scum invading California. As much as he sympathized with his Joads, Steinbeck more than anyone else established “Okies” as a hate term. Born near Comanche, Oklahoma (and carried right away to the Rio Grande for five years), my mother born in Guymon, Oklahoma Territory and my father born in Wister, Indian Territory. (In 1952 when I was an apprentice telegrapher on the AT&SF Railroad in Red Rock, Oklahoma, oversupplies of tickets to IT and OT destinations were hanging on big sturdy hooks, still valid.) I am an authority on this hate term. It persists in American universities with ludicrous malice, as when a self-promoting writer on Melville regularly identifies me as, “Hershel Parker, who hails from Oklahoma.” It took an hour’s talk with Ken Kesey in the 1970s to begin to rid me of the shame I had internalized and start me toward writing about who the white (or mainly white) Indian Territory settlers were and how they got there. (I do not treat the later land-rush arrivals, who had very different histories.)


          Even before it was clear how pernicious the label “Okie” would become, anyone who knew Oklahoma recognized that Steinbeck had never been there and had no idea of its geographical or historical features. Any Oklahoman knew that Sallisaw was not in the dust bowl, although, to be fair to Steinbeck, it did not wholly escape the dust--which at times covered desks as far away as Washington, D. C.  On 6 July 1933 the Sallisaw local paper, the Democrat-American, declared that Sallisaw three days earlier had experienced a dust storm “very much like the sand storms of western Oklahoma. The winds came from the northeast blowing clouds of sand before it and breaking limbs from trees and overturning outbuildings.” The Miami (Oklahoma) News Record reported historic rainfalls in eastern Oklahoma on 21 March 1935, an inch and a half in Sallisaw. On the same day, a dust storm was so bad that the Ada News reported that a Kansas boy choked to death, and Guymon citizens could not find their way in the storm which was “the worst in memory.” The dust was so bad in parts of eastern Oklahoma “a trace of rain fell, creating a ‘mudfall.’” The Miami News Record on 27 March 1935 reported a 40 degree drop of temperature in parts of the state and new waves of silt in central towns (Enid had a “heavy dust storm”) and eastern towns (in Tulsa visibility was two miles and dust increasing).  At that time there was no dust yet in Sallisaw.  Throughout the 1930s you could, with normal luck, grow gardens and some crops in Sallisaw.

          Steinbeck knew the California migrant camps from his own investigations and from the massive documentation provided him by Tom Collins (the Tom of the dedication of Grapes of Wrath), but his dead flat Sallisaw in Sequoyah County was a joke to those who knew the Ozarks, the Ouachita’s, the San Bois and other mountain ranges in eastern Oklahoma. The Oklahoman, as quoted in the 23 October 1939 Pampa News (a town that knew the worst of the dust bowl), sneered at the idea of film crews coming to Sallisaw: “The Sallisaw angle is a bit strange, for Steinbeck was ostensibly writing about Okies from the dust bowl, not from the limestone cliffs and perch pools of Big Lee creek.” According to the Oakland Tribune on 19 August 1939 (quoting the Oklahoman), “a screen army” scouting for locations in Oklahoma for “‘dust bowl’ scenes” had their jobs cut out for them: “Fiction being fiction, it was not necessary for Steinbeck to visit Oklahoma in order to compose the year’s fictional masterpiece. His imagination could plant drainage ditches and rail fences wherever the necessities of the narrative demanded.” The film crew “had better bring along a fair assignment of ditches and fence rails when they come to shoot the Oklahoma ‘dust bowl.’”  I suspect that Steinbeck chose Sallisaw so he could have Ma Joad be acquainted with the mother of Pretty Boy Floyd and Floyd himself, who in 1934 with national publicity had been shipped in a rough pine box to Sallisaw for burial a few miles away, in Akins.

          Writers in newspapers and books did not print interviews with refugees about their ancestry, but with some frequency they pointed out that these were, for the most part, native white Americans. Journalists needed to emphasize this, once they began to realize it, because everyone knew that California agri-business had exploited a succession of darker races and was slow to adapt a crucial difference about the new influx. Carey McWilliams in Factories in the Field, which appeared August 1939, four months after The Grapes of Wrath, traced the way the great landowners in California had successively exploited “coolie and peon labor”--the Chinese, the Japanese, the Filipinos, and Mexicans. The new 1930s migrants were mainly white, a change commencing “about 1933, at the bottom of the depression.” Still, people did not focus on what was happening until “it was suddenly realized in 1937 that the bulk of the State’s migratory workers were white Americans and that the foreign racial groups were no longer a dominant factor.” One of the first and most eloquent writers on the topic was Robert Hardie. On 14 November 1937 the Fresno Bee The Republican quoted Hardie, the director of a federal camp for migratory leaders in the Wasco-Shafter district, as praising the “harvest workers of Kern County for being “in the main a healthy, industrious lot, good natured and gregarious, fond of music and dancing, highly appreciative of the simple pleasures their lives afford and possessed of a simple faith in the Deity.” “Most Are Natives,” says a subhead: “They are 98 per cent native white American people who mostly hail from Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Arizona.” Hardie had gone farther: “They are of good pioneer stock, descendants of the Scotch, Irish and English settlers who followed such men as Daniel Boone through the Cumberland Gap and settled the hill country of Kentucky and Tennessee and later the Cherokee territory.” He continued: “it is only by the barest economic accident that they go hungry and unemployed.”

          What Hardie said of the settlers who had gone with or followed Daniel Boone west did not apply to the Sooners and Boomers who had arrived in northern Oklahoma in the late 19th century land rushes. Other than not realizing that “Irish” really meant “Scotch,” what he said applied to the children and grandchildren of the whites (often part Indian) who had come earlier into the Choctaw Nation and the Cherokee Nation. Even Steinbeck, who had not done rudimentary research on the terrain of Oklahoma, had some sense of the background of a typical eastern Oklahoma family like the Joads.  He dropped in names of famous Kentucky-West Virginia feuding families, “ol Turnbull” saying he had Hatfield blood and threatening to shoot Tom Joad when he got out of prison, and Grampa Joad sending word to Turnbull, “‘Don’t mess around with no Joad. Maybe I got McCoy blood for all I know.’” One of the migrants tells a generic Indian-fighting story (“I was a recruit against Geronimo”). At one point the generalized voice of a representative migrant (not one of the Joads) says “We ain’t foreign. Seven generations back Americans, and beyond that Irish, Scotch, English, German. One of our folks in the Revolution, an’ they was lots of our folks in the Civil War—both sides. Americans.” Not until much later is there a specific detail about the ancestry of the Joad family. In her relief at being in a camp where she can have a bath, Ma praises God that “we come home to our own people.” She continues: “We’re Joads. We don’t look up to nobody. Grampa’s grampa, he fit in the Revolution.” Steinbeck had learned or guessed from the labor camps that some Okies knew something about their own history--“Seven generations back Americans.” In historical fact, however, any such family would have had far more than one ancestor and other kinsmen in the Revolution.

          Long before Steinbeck became interested in the plight of the migrant workers in California, the Bavarian immigrant Oscar Ameringer, soon after Oklahoma statehood, had seen that “comparison could not be thought of,” because the living standard of the local farmers “was so far below that of the sweatshop workers of the New York east side before the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and International Ladies’ Garment Workers Unions had mopped up that human cesspool.” Ameringer went on with the best description that had been made of the ancestry the people of eastern Oklahoma, the part which had been “almost exclusively populated by people from the Old South”:

They were Americans almost to a man. Their forefathers had been starved, driven, shipped and sold over here long before and shortly after the Revolution. They were Scotch, Irish, Scotch-Irish and English with only a few exceptions. They were more American than the population of any present-day New England town. They were Washington’s ragged, starving, shivering army at Valley Forge, pushed ever westward by beneficiaries of the Revolution. Pushed out of Tidewater Virginia, and out of the fertile Piedmont, and the river valleys of the Central Atlantic states, into the hills and mountains of the South Central States. They had followed on the heels of the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks and Seminoles, like the stragglers of routed armies. Always hoping that somewhere in their America there would be a piece of dirt for them.


The “Irish” were in fact mainly Scotch, and he ought to have added the Pennsylvanian Dutch (Deutsch), the Germans who went down the Great Wagon Road in the three decades before the Revolution. Nor did Ameringer point out that many of the 1930s Oklahomans had not merely followed on the heels of Indians but were blood-kin to many Indians whose people had been removed from the Old South.

          Ameringer continued with his vision of the southern whites who could not legally buy the land but who had settled “in the hills of the Indian Territory, tenants of white land hogs, Indians, squaw men and Afro-American freedmen.” He pointed to “the interesting spectacle of white, native, Protestant Americans working as the land slaves, tenants and share croppers of the aboriginal Indian.” As the White Father in Washington acted his part with his promises, “squaw men, usurers, land sharks, and Eastern insurance companies had come into possession” of the Indians’ inheritance, which was “to have been his ‘as long as water flows.’” The “position of the tenants and share croppers hit rock-bottom. So at last they pulled out onto Highway Sixty-Six on their final journey to Gethsemane.” He summed up: “burned out and tractored out, they pulled up stakes for the last time until they landed in ramshackle trucks and tin lizzies in California, as ragged, hungry and shivering as their ancestors at Valley Forge.” If You Don’t Weaken was all but completed by 1939 (Carl Sandburg’s Foreword was dated March 1940), but Ameringer was able to interpolate two references to The Grapes of Wrath. His book was published before the surviving Okies in California were helped by the xxx and the xxx and rescued by War Work.

          Many of the dispersed Okies, I know from my own experience, did not have the knowledge of their own history which Ameringer did, or even the limited knowledge that Steinbeck gave the Joads.  Three removes are as good as a fire, Franklin said.  I realized, eventually, that successive migrations were a big part in reducing the number and detail of stories any family knew. Many stories may have accompanied the first settlers from across the ocean. Families who arrived in Pennsylvania could leave some members there while part of the family united with connections for the trek down the Great Wagon Road to North Carolina, and hold together there during the Revolution.  Some of the Scotch came together or got in touch with family once they were here, and in my family kept together by marrying cousins. After the Revolution all families dispersed still faster. After 1800 sons from the Carolinas angling up across Tennessee on the Nashville-Saline Trail to pioneer on the Mississippi banks of Illinois. Sons in every generation headed west into Tennessee or Mississippi, or even Alabama, even before that area was opened for white settlement after the War of 1812.  Dispersal was cause enough for loss of connections, given the difficulties of traveling and communicating, but family lives and family history were obliterated for many by the catastrophe of the Civil War.  Illiterate people seldom found someone to write home for them, even if they were sure where home was. Ground down since the Civil War, many people simply did not have time for happy storytelling. It was no wonder that many of the Okies in what had been the Choctaw Nation and the Cherokee Nation in eastern Indian Territory, especially, had become a people without even as much family memory as Steinbeck gave the Joads.

          There were exceptions. James Webb in Born Fighting recognizes the forces that crushed family member, but he was lucky enough, despite all hardships, to witness and cherish the times on porches and firesides when kinfolk gathered and told stories:

I thirsted to hear these kin-people talk. I could sit entranced through magic hours in the stark kitchens and quiet, dusky living rooms of those who were willing to reach back like those ancient tribal elders and help me understand that my life is in some sense a continuum that began before I was born, and will carry me with it long after I am gone. Their revelations came in dribbles, sometimes coaxed and at others dropped casually into a conversation like a sly but knowing confession. The tough, enduring men and women who went through this cauldron did not speak openly or even willingly with each other about the bad times when I was growing up. It seems an unspoken axiom that people who have really had it hard are the last ones to sit around and reminisce about how hard they really had it. In fact, I know there are some who will not be happy that I’ve touched on those days here, however lightly. And I have lightly trod, for they did indeed live hard.


Webb was part of “the near-biblical storytelling tradition of the culture of the Scots who came from Ireland.” In that tradition, the “personal becomes history, and history becomes personal,” he said.

          Webb, almost miraculously, saw the “well-worn pages of family Bibles, some of those books carried from Ulster into the wilderness and treasured through the centuries, births and marriages and deaths entered carefully as the book itself was passed down over the generations into the present day.”  We know from Revolutionary pension applications that family Bibles with their records of marriages and births were often destroyed by fires (more common than now) or, as the family dispersed, left in the possession of the oldest son or at least a member of the family who could read and write. Webb saw “faded letters sent from faraway relatives recalling places and events, pooling information that might reconstruct a family’s journey.” The great historian has his maternal grandmother, a literate woman, when he was twelve “finally wrote out an amazingly accurate eleven-page summary of her family’s movement from Virginia through Tennessee, then down the Mississippi and finally into Arkansas, replete with the dates of births and deaths, marriages, and military enlistments.” She “had been carrying all of this in her head, passed down from mother to daughter through each generation in singsong verses on the narrow front porch of some latest cabin as the hot summer sun gave way to a sultry, bug-filled evening, or huddled next to the fireplace before there ever was such a thing as radio to fill the boredom of a winter night.” Webb’s father once sent him a “History of the House of Ochiltree” published by a local printer in a small Kansas town, tracing some of the family: “The book was never intended to be great literature, but like so many similar works of family genealogy, it was a means of capturing vital family information before it became lost in the frenzy of America’s obsession with the future rather than the past.” For all his sense of how precarious family history was, Webb was a lucky man.

          Many of the Okies, particularly those who had been impoverished ever since the Civil War and who were suffering more than ever in the Depression, had no leisure, ever, to hear stories or tell stories. People worked too hard during the daylight hours and had no strength for sitting telling stories. My mother had no idea that her grandfather, John Andrew Jackson Costner, had been a Confederate soldier. She had no idea when the Costners had arrived on this continent and whether it was to the colonies or the United States. One great-aunt told me that her grandmother was a “Chockie” (Choctaw) who smoked a clay pipe and pinched children. My mother knew that her Mississippi grandfather Bell liked to say, inexplicably, that he was Scotch-Irish and Damn Yankee. My father knew that his grandfather Parker had run deadfalls in the Mississippi snow, carrying a heated rock in a two sack and throwing it down to warm his feet on while he checked the trap. There were comments on the Dust Bowl, when they were in the very worst places, but no one told stories.

          Starting in 2002, knowing only those tiny anecdotes, I have compiled in chronological order, starting in the 1600s, vivid, detailed glimpses of some of my American ancestors who I had thought would have left almost no written record.  As of early 2021, I have a massive file called ORNERY PEOPLE (a title now too defensive to keep) and some 10,000 documents in a file called GLIMPSES--page or so looks at kinfolks at revealing--indeed, fascinating--moments in their lives and (often) of American history, usually in some of their own words (even from the 1600s and 1700s). I have found these in a great array of sources such as history books; exploration books; wills; land transfers; county records; early military records (as early as the French and Indian War and Lord Dunmore’s War); then many dozens of Revolutionary pension applications from aged patriots; military records for all later wars; other governmental records; a few family letters in county libraries and many in college or university collections; a Mexican captivity book written by a Texas Bell cousin; dozens of affidavits from ancestors and other kinfolks in the archives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs; hundreds of censuses; many hundreds, perhaps 2,000 or 3,000, of articles from newspapers in four centuries, starting before the Revolution; WPA interviews; hundreds of Fold3 items; and hundreds of Find-A-Grave photographs of tombstones and other information, even from Ancestry.com, where everything has to be verified, or other sites where you have to remember “garbage in, garbage out.” This is a unique genealogical and historical project because I bring to it all I have learned about persistent and skeptical historical research in a scholarly career spanning more than half a century. The idea behind the study is that any Depression Okie, anyone whose family had been in eastern Oklahoma since the mid-19th century, can now (like neighbors in the late 1940s, such as the Heflins and the Kuykendals) do something comparable. With the Internet anyone can retrieve lost family stories and establish new historical memories in the context of successive episodes of American history. I and others like me can understand just who the Joads would have been, the history they would have had, whether they knew it or not.

          Ameringer concluded his look at the ancestry of Okies with this paean: “I wish someone would look up the names on the roster of Washington’s army at Valley Forge and trace the bloody footprints of their descendants across the North American continent until they were washed up and washed out on the shore of the Pacific. What an all-American Odyssey it would make! And what a great history of the Rise and Fall of American Civilization.” Writing with intimate knowledge of how people were still suffering from the Great Depression, Ameringer saw the American experiment as a rise and fall. During the most corrupt Presidency in American history, it is hard to refute Ameringer. Nevertheless, there is personal triumph in discovering your family’s place in American history, in retrieving, piece by piece, your family history in relation to the great sweep of the history of the South. Scratch the ancestral records of any mainly white Indian Territory Okie and you recapitulate stories of colonization in the mid-Atlantic and the South and the thrusts westward. In retrieving my own representative family history, I contribute to what Ameringer wanted to see, an All-American Odyssey.

[In 2020 I decided I had to focus more closely, at least at first. Now in early 2021 I am working only on racial interactions, starting in the 1600s-- RACIAL ENCOUNTERS.]

 

Saturday, March 27, 2021

"What To Expect After A Leukemia Diagnosis"--message this morning on gmail.com

 Did I need this after being wrongly told I was dying of lymphoma and might lose an eye first? Maybe I needed this after being told yesterday that the suspicious cells in two tests were harmless.

Tuesday, March 23, 2021

What to make of a several line letter in the TLS after a year of devasting sicknesses

 I'm revising the chapter on Albion Tourgee vs Montford McGehee and seeing just how close the Republicans today are to the defenders of the murders and whippings (floggings, really) of the KKK in the late 1860s and early 1870s. Yesterday I took up the mail and went back down to prepare my pallet to nap on when the Caregiver used the intercom to ask if I had looked at the TLS. No. "You have a letter in it!" Up to see it. Not an important letter, but one test of whether or not a writer is alive is if you have a review or a letter in the TLS. Now, there was a wonderful review of COMPLETE POEMS in 2019 but nothing in 2020. So taking very short walks every day and getting a little letter in the TLS by late March 2021 are little good signs.

Monday, March 22, 2021

Marauders blocking Supply Subaru and returning, 25 or more--Car forced onto wrong lane



 

"First Covid, Then Psychosis: ‘The Most Terrifying Thing I’ve Ever Experienced’"

 N Y TIMES article online today. It's truly horrific because a victim can know with some part of his or her brain that the terror is imaginary. Not to trivialize what these people are suffering, but--but something like this must be going on in the brains of Trump supporters who are just now beginning to perceive the possibility that the Stolen Election was a big lie. Think about what pain glimmers of honest must create.

VOTER INTIMIDATION, VOTER INTIMIDATION, by the KKK, back then, by Trump Republicans now--just the same, same words even

 


If I have the time and strength, what I am working on now for RACIAL ENCOUNTERS is strong and timely. I just finished 2nd draft of a longish piece on how the writer Albion Tourgee and the former owner of 31 slaves, my McGehee cousin, represented the two sides in North Carolina, Radical Republicans and Democratic champion of Amnesty for the KKK. Meanwhile I have all the compiled materials for a horrific essay about Oklahoma just after statehood when some blacks descended from a slave of NC cousins were realistically trying to get away because of the fast-spreading fad of lynching blacks. (Far away, in Pennsylvania, lynching just then was becoming fun for women to watch and even participate in.) In this chapter I was helped by a multiple connection, if not a blood cousin, Robert C. Carpenter, author of a model book of its kind (and there are few of its kind) GASTON COUNTY, NORTH CAROLINA, IN THE CIVIL WAR. He's the local historian who reprinted a slightly longer version of my JOURNAL OF AMERICAN REVOLUTION article on the Tryon Resolves which is now used for annual gatherings of many of my cousins and his cousins.

            By coincidence, I am being interviewed on Zoom by a woman from Portland who wrote a dissertation on the Tulsa Massacre, the climax of the story I am telling about the blacks in Oklahoma Then the SMITHSONIAN arrived with the TRUTH ABOUT TULSA on the cover and a historical essay going over some of the pre-statehood ground I have gathered documents for. Luckily, my topic is not scooped by the writer, but I will draft it and put it out, next.

            Why am I being interviewed by someone from Portland, Oregon. Well, they have found a couple of dozen people who remember Vanport (as I do) but so far I am the only survivor of East Vanport they have located. You know the towns were built by Henry Kaiser of recycled cardboard in a flood zone and lasted fine until the Columbia rose a few feet (I remember the little reddish dirt of the berm that 3 boys dug a cave in and that two survived, one with a green face). The Columbia washed all the whole towns away, in 1948.

            Now, what's horrific about the Oklahoma story is INTIMIDATION OF VOTERS rampaging, then by Democrats, now by Republicans--who have absolutely no hesitation about trying to keep non-white Americans from voting. Anyhow, some of these chapters I will have to put on my blog. You learn from not one but two Portland requests for interviews that real people see blogs now . . . .

Maunderings . . . .

 

Saturday, March 20, 2021

One of my chapters in RACIAL ENCOUNTERS is on being black in Oklahoma in the first years of statehood. Today SMITHSONIAN "THE TRUTH ABOUT TULSA"

 I have not read it yet, but I see I may quote a sentence or two on hopes that the territory or the new state might be a great place for blacks to settle. The main characters in my chapter are Costners, maybe not blood kin (no M for mullato in the censuses) but family, and there was a surprising degree of affection and concern, early. My story is grim--hopes destroyed, but it's not as grim as the truth about Tulsa. However, I see that RACIAL ENCOUNTERS, if I can publish it chapter by chapter, will be the most timely book I ever wrote. I have finished the longish chapter on Albion Tourgee, the writer, and a McGehee cousin who devoted a year or two to voting amnesty to the KKK in North Carolina. Listen to that Senator from Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, to hear a vulgar version of my elegant cousin's elegantly racist language.

Friday, March 19, 2021

Trying to stop KKK from Intimidating Voters---What can we do with Republicans like Cruz, Hawley, & Ron Johnson in 2021?

 Boston NEW ENGLAND FARMER April 11, 1868:

AN IMPORTANT ORDER.--The Ku-Klux Klan, so-called, have obtained a recognition from Gen. Meade, who on Saturday issued an order which declares that certain murders and outrages of recent occurrence in Georgia were the acts of a secret organization, and warns all citizens from participation in its work of intimidation of voters. Gen. Meade includes inflammatory newspaper articles and speeches among the means employed in this business, and gives warning that the authors of such will be liable to trial and punishment by military commission.

A Rabidly Democratic Paper from 1868 on the Republican Party's Determination to stop the Intimidation of Voters (yes, yes, the parties reversed after 1964)

 This was occasioned by "An Ordinance to Prevent the Intimidation of Voters" which the Raleigh NORTH CAROLINIAN on 8 April 1868 pretends really means an official notice "Intimidating the people of North Carolina."

Be it ordained by the people of North Carolina, in Convention assembled, and it is hereby ordained as follows: 

    Section 1. Any person who shall prevent or endeavor to prevent, any qualified elector of this State, from the free exercise of the elective franchise, by violence or bribery or by threats of violence or injury to his person or property or by depriving an elector of employment, or threatening to deprive him of employment, shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction thereof shall be punished by imprisonment, for not less than one month, nor more than sex months, or by file of not less than one hundred dollars nor more than five hundred dollars for each offence, and one-half the the fine shall to to the prosecutor . . . .

The Ku Klux Klan was never a Southern Organization. No, no, it came from China, or CHY-NA (as the Georgia police spokesman says)

 The Raleigh Standard 15 April 1868

    The Richmond Whig has an article purporting to be a history of the Ku-Klux Klan, which order it describes as a "political white league which seems simultaneously to have found a foot-hold in every State of the South." The Whig says its outlandish name is not of American origin, nor the whim of an ingenious wag, but like the order, originated in China, among the foreign merchants engaged in smuggling opium into that empire . . . .

1880 Census for Calhoun County, Mississippi. My Grandfather E. L. Costner, Kevin's Great Grandfather Moses A.

 Came on this while looking for the part black Moses Costner.

Household Members

Age

Relationship

John A. Costner

48

Self (Head)

Nancy A. Costner

37

Wife

Ada E. Costner

15

Daughter

John T. Costner

13

Son

Ida T. Costner

12

Daughter

Moses A. Costner

10

Son

Edger L. Costner

8

Son

Alice Costner

6

Daughter

Nancy M. Costner

3

Daughter

James M. Costner

7/12

Son

 

Tuesday, March 16, 2021

Mississippians and Tennesseeans be on High Alert

 The Jackson Daily Mississippian 15 September 1865.

A young man named Kimber was fatally wounded by his brother a few days ago, at Pulaski, Tennessee. The young man was in a privy and his brother wanted a mark to shoot at, and fired at the privy door, not knowing his brother was in there, and shot him through the body.

Monday, March 15, 2021

The Vulgarization of Cousin Jane

 I liked EMMA very much the first time I read it, at the end of 1959, and continue to watch it in different film versions, though I may not have reread it. Some years ago I discovered that Jane Austen is a cousin of mine, descended from the same ancestor Cassandra was so proud of, so I feel not just admiration toward the author but more than a little protective of her. So when Mr. Knightly exposes his bare bony hindside it was hard to stay with the new 2020 movie but I lasted until Emma exposed her bare buttocks to the fire. A law should forbid people from writing imitations of Cousin Jane, making politically up-to-date movies from her books, and in any way vulgarizing her. In this continent Jane's cousins went from 1600s Virginians to Depression Okies, but we were never, never vulgar. Shame on money-grubbing people with no imagination of their own. Back to NETFLIX.