Category Archives: U.S.

by | 19 January 2007 · 5:53 pm

"Poor students need only love, idealism and martyrdom"

In today’s New York Times, a 10th-grade history teacher at a public school in
the Bronx reviews Hollywood’s latest inspirational-teacher flick.

The great misconception of these films is not that actual schools are more chaotic and decrepit — many schools in poor neighborhoods are clean and orderly yet still don’t have enough teachers or money for supplies. No, the most dangerous message such films promote is that what schools really need are heroes. This is the Myth of the Great Teacher.

Films like “Freedom Writers” portray teachers more as missionaries than professionals, eager to give up their lives and comfort for the benefit of others, without need of compensation. Ms. Gruwell sacrifices money, time and even her marriage for her job….

“Freedom Writers,” like all teacher movies this side of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” is presented as a celebration of teaching, but its message is that poor students need only love, idealism and martyrdom.

I won’t argue the need for more of the first two, but I’m always surprised at how, once a Ms. Gruwell wins over a class with clowning, tears, rewards and motivational speeches, there is nothing those kids can’t do. It is as if all the previously insurmountable obstacles students face could be erased by a 10-minute pep talk or a fancy dinner. This trivializes not only the difficulties many real students must overcome, but also the hard-earned skill and tireless effort real teachers must use to help those students succeed.

It seems to me that Hollywood takes exactly the same short-attention-span approach to foreign policy. Each international crisis is a movie project. Activists devote their attention to it for six months or so, generating media events and raising tons of cash. When that’s done, they take several months off, then they’re ready for new causes, new projects, new scripts, new locations, new casts, new marriages. Nothing can’t be solved by media events, cash, and lots of feel-good self-congratulation. Who cares if their solution bombs with the people it aims to rescue. They’re not really the audience. They’re somebody else’s responsibility. And it was all somebody else’s money to begin with.

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Filed under cinema, education, U.S.

by | 9 January 2007 · 9:52 pm

Appalachian Roots of the Klezmer Revival

Dumneazu (whom I think of as Klezmerescu) has a fascinating post about the Appalachian roots of the revival of Klezmer musical traditions in the U.S.

Like a lot of folks who play Klezmer music, I got my start playing American traditional folk music back in the 1970s. New York was a magnet for folk music, and there was a very active scene of people playing traditional Appalachian fiddle music and old-time southern music styles. One peculiarity of the New York Appalachian fiddle and bluegrass scene was that almost all of the local music enthusiasts were either Jewish or Italian…. Young New York musicians would make the pilgrimage south to North Carolina or West Virginia to learn to play at the feet of some of the old masters of traditional folk fiddling, like Tommy Jarrell of Toast, North Carolina. Tommy’s style (generally known as “Round Peak” style) became the New York City default mode for fiddling.

UPDATE: Nathanael at Rhine River sees the “Hillbilly Klezmer” pair of aces and raises the bet with a link to a current story in the Hartford Courant headlined However Unlikely, Connecticut Becomes A Center In The Ukulele’s Resurgence.

To stand in the Clinton home of Jim and Liz Beloff is to find yourself in an unofficial Ukulele Information Center.

The husband-and-wife team, both in their 50s, have carved out a rather singular niche for themselves as experts on all things to do with the plucky four-string instrument. They’re widely credited within the ukulele community (indeed, there is one) for the recent resurgence in uke activity….

Beloff figures we’re in the “third wave” of the ukulele (the first being in the early 1920s, the second in the 1950s). This new wave has produced a breed of ukuleleists, mostly from Hawaii, who defy expectations of what the ukulele can do. John King plays classical music on his uke (it sounds a lot like a harpsichord).

The current uke superstar is Jake Shimabukuro, a lightning-fast player who lists guitarists Eddie Van Halen and Yngwie Malmsteen as influences. In concert, he often uses guitar effects to manipulate the sound.

The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain has brought an avant-garde sensibility to the ukulele by deconstructing old standards. Though not so big in its namesake country, the group is popular in Japan.

“Many started taking it up for the philosophy and for the iconography that the ukulele represented,” says Bill Robertson, whose recent documentary “Rock That Uke” chronicled the punk and alternative ukulele scene (yes, there is one). “Since that time, it has become the instrument for musicians to demonstrate their virtuosity.”

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by | 29 December 2006 · 1:29 pm

A Contrarian Take on the Six-Party Talks

On Christmas Eve, the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal ran a short stocking stuffer of an op-ed by literary contrarian B. R. Myers, who wrote his dissertation on North Korean literature (reviewed here).

No country today is as misunderstood as North Korea. Journalists still refer to it as a Stalinist or communist state, when in fact it espouses a race-based nationalism such as the West last confronted during the Pacific War. Pyongyang’s propaganda touts the moral superiority of the Korean race, condemns South Korea for allowing miscegenation, and stresses the need to defend the Dear Leader with kyeolsa, or dare-to-die spirit–the Korean version of the Japanese kamikaze slogan kesshi [決死]. The six-party talks are therefore less likely to replicate the successes of Cold War détente than the negotiating failures of the 1930s. According to early reports from Beijing, the North Korean delegation appears more confident than ever. It has clearly been emboldened not only by its accession to the nuclear club, but by the awareness that Seoul will continue providing food and financial support no matter what happens….

The ideological landscape of the peninsula defeats the reasoning that led to the six-party talks in the first place. North Korea is not a communist country with ideological and sentimental reasons to listen to China and Russia; it is a virulently nationalist state that distrusts all the other parties at the table. And though the rhetoric of a “concerted front” against North Korea has proved to be just that, it has sufficed to heighten South Korea’s sense of solidarity with the North. This will continue to mean plenty of aid money for Kim Jong Il with which to build weapons. The U.S. has urged Beijing to bring more pressure to bear on the North. But if America can do nothing with its own ally, it can hardly expect the Chinese to do more with theirs.

via The Marmot’s Hole

UPDATE: B. R. Myers responds to comments over at The Marmot’s Hole.

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Filed under China, Japan, Korea, nationalism, Russia, U.S.

by | 25 December 2006 · 8:54 am

Anglosphere Navies vs. Cuban Pirates, 1820s

The United States sent out a second pirate-hunting squadron in 1823, this time under the command of Commodore David Porter, a naval hero who had captured the first British warship taken in the War of 1812. There had been a debate during the winter as to the best method of combating the pirates and it was decided that, to be fully effective, the squadron ‘will require a particular kind of force, capable of pursuing them into the shallow waters to which they retire’, as President Monroe informed the Senate. And so, in addition to the ships which had sailed with Biddle in 1822, Commodore Porter was supplied with a fleet of vessels specifically tailored to the task in hand, the first time that such a sensible policy had been adopted in pirate-hunting history. These included ten fast schooners, with a draught of less than seven feet and fitted with twenty or twenty-four sweeps, and five light double-bank cutters or barges, each to row twenty oars and adapted to carry forty men, well armed with muskets, pistols, boarding pikes and cutlasses. The squadron was also graced by the presence of the US steam brig Sea Gull the first naval steamer of any country to serve in action. She was originally built as a New Jersey ferry and ‘the croakers predicted that she would founder at sea in the first blow’, as Porter told his son who later wrote his biography. But in fact the Sea Gull did good service, mainly as a mother ship to the rowing vessels, though she had a chance to use her powerful guns on occasion and in May 1825 was reported to have sunk a pirate ship after a two-hour gun battle off Matanzas.

Porter chose as his base Key West, American since 1819 and only a hundred miles from the coast of Cuba. The United States was now at last getting cooperation from the Spanish authorities in Cuba and his orders permitted him to pursue pirates ashore, having first given notice of his intentions, orders which shared the ambiguity of those given to the British commanders. American relations with these British counterparts were excellent, the British going so far as to replace the normal admiral commanding the Jamaica station by a commodore so that Porter would not be outranked and ‘we might meet on equal terms’, as the American commodore recorded with gratitude. There was a certain amount of division of labour, the British concentrating their searches on the south coast of Cuba and the Americans on the north, but men of the two navies also hunted together, as in March 1825 when the boats from the British frigate Dartmouth and the schooners Union and Lion joined up with boat crews from the Sea Gull in a successful pursuit of the pirate schooner Socorro. ‘I am happy to say,’ reported the British commodore Sir Lawrence Halsted, ‘the greatest harmony prevailed throughout the service, the men of either nation receiving orders from the officers of the other and obeying each with equal alacrity.’ This harmony was echoed by Lt. Com. McKeever of the Sea Gull who praised ‘the handsome manner in which we were seconded by the officers and crews of the boats of HMS Dartmouth. There had been a certain amount of cooperation between the British and French in previous anti-pirate campaigns, in both the Leeward Islands and West Africa, but nothing on the scale of this Anglo-American camaraderie, this being nicely epitomised by the kind and friendly treatment given to sick British sailors at Key West which included taking convalescent men for a trip round the Florida Keys in the steam brig.

Such cooperation, along with Spanish assistance and the choice of the right sort of vessels for the job, was to prove the doom of the Cuban pirates, but the service was quite incredibly arduous for the British and American sailors and marines involved. Nearly all the close-up work was done by men rowing in open boats who pursued the elusive pirates from cay to cay, through shoals and reefs and into hidden passages through the mangrove swamps, such close pursuit often being done under fire from the retreating pirates. Captain Godfrey of HMS Tyne reported a successful cruise by his men who had chased pirates ‘in open boats without any kind of shelter for thirty days and thirty nights’, a record beaten by Lieutenant Platt of the United States Navy who was employed for sixty-eight successive days in an open boat on the north-west coast of Cuba, ‘in the examination of the inlets, bays, keys, and other places of piratical resort’. A report to the House of Representatives in January 1825 stressed the perilous service being imposed on Americans engaged in anti-pirate duty, who faced disease as well as danger in vessels too small to maintain health on long cruises. But such sacrifice was justified by the result. ‘They enabled the commanders to scour the coast, to penetrate into the shoal waters of the creeks and inlets, to the very margin of the land.’ No pirate hunters in the past had ever shown such zeal, determination and courage as these truly professional British and American sailors and marines.

SOURCE: The Pirate Wars, by Peter Earle (Thomas Dunne Books, 2003), pp. 242-244

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Filed under anglosphere, Britain, Cuba, piracy, U.S.

by | 22 December 2006 · 4:57 pm

The Oldest Mosque in North America

Freelance journalist and journalism professor Michael Judge profiled the oldest mosque in North America in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal‘s Opinion Journal.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa–Not far from the banks of the Cedar River and the concrete silos of the Quaker Oats plant, in a working class neighborhood adorned with Christmas lights and American flags, sits the oldest mosque in North America. Founded in 1934, and admitted to the National Register of Historic Places in 1996, it’s not what you think of when you think of a mosque. There is no lofty minaret, no balcony for the muezzin to call the faithful to prayer. There is, however, a place of worship that most resembles a one-room schoolhouse–a single-story, white clapboard box with plain black shutters. If it weren’t for the crescent-topped green vinyl dome and the canopy above the entrance bearing the words “The Mother Mosque of America: Islamic Cultural & Heritage Center,” one might easily mistake it for a modest, if not meager, Pentecostal church, which indeed it was for a brief stint in its history before being abandoned altogether….

“We’ve been here for four and now five generations,” says Imam Tawil, pointing to a panoramic black-and-white photo of dozens of early settlers; the picture dates to 1936 and shows an imam and priest, both of Middle Eastern descent, proudly shaking hands in the center. “We’re as old as the oak trees in Iowa,” he continues. “We’re part of the fabric of this great state. We’re Americans with dreams and aspirations.” Many of the earliest Muslim settlers came to Cedar Rapids in the late 19th century from what is now Lebanon to work the farmland and raise crops of their own. As the community grew, it needed a permanent place to worship. Despite the hard times of the Great Depression, the local Muslim community pooled its resources and the “Mother Mosque” was dedicated on June 16, 1934. Sixteen young men from the Muslim community here served their country in World War II; two of those men never made it home. Since then, Muslim-Americans from eastern Iowa have served their country in nearly every major military conflict. “At least 20 members of the community are currently enlisted in the military,” says Imam Tawil. “Several are fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq right now.” Cedar Rapids is now home to Muslims from some 30 countries, including Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia and Iraq. After the 1991 Gulf War, dozens of Iraqi families–mainly Shiites who rose up against Saddam–found refuge here. Today, of the 700 Muslim families who call eastern Iowa home, more than 50 are from Iraq. “Nearly all of these refugees are striving to become U.S. citizens,” says Imam Tawil, who emigrated from Jerusalem in 1983 and became a U.S. citizen in 1990. A Palestinian by birth, he says, “I have never had citizenship anywhere else but America. Every time I vote I feel so proud because I didn’t have this right in my home country.” Around the same time that he became a U.S. citizen, Imam Tawil set out to renovate and restore the Mother Mosque. The building, which had gone vacant after housing a Pentecostal church and a teen center, was purchased in 1990; renovations began in 1991 and a grand opening was held in February 1992. The mosque serves mainly as a cultural and historical center since a modern Islamic Center was completed in 1971.

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Filed under Islam, migration, religion, U.S.

by | 18 December 2006 · 9:34 pm

Multiple Religious Secessions in Virginia

I can well predict the reactions of many secular progressives to the latest news about religious secession in Virginia.

The efforts of Episcopal Church leaders to bring about reconciliation within the troubled denomination suffered their biggest blow yet, as eight parishes in Virginia voted this weekend to sever ties with the church.

While the actions involved only eight of 7,200 Episcopal congregations, they showed that traditionalists in the US and Africa are intent on raising the pressure within the Anglican Communion. These pressures will likely come to a head next February, when the 38 top Communion leaders meet in Africa. Some have said the disagreement are so basic that they cannot sit down with the new US leader, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.

As the US branch of Anglicanism, the church has been a lightning rod within the global community over its 2003 consecration of a gay bishop, with traditionalists threatening schism unless the church’s convention repented its decision.

A small number of conservative US parishes had formed a network within the church – the Anglican Communion Network – to press for a return to traditional teachings. But this weekend’s actions amounted to a dramatic secession involving two of the largest and most historic congregations. (One of them can say, “George Washington worshiped here.”)

The Falls Church and Truro Church in the northern Virginia suburbs voted overwhelmingly to join the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), a group connected to Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, the most prominent and outspoken leader of traditionalists.

The office of the Archbishop of Canterbury, spiritual leader of the Communion, issued a statement after the votes clarifying that CANA was “a ‘mission’ of the church of Nigeria. It is not a branch of the Anglican Communion … nor has the Archbishop of Canterbury indicated any support for its establishment.”

National churches within the Communion are autonomous, and rules prohibit one national church from interfering in the affairs of another. This tradition has been strained as US conservatives developed ever closer ties with church leaders in Africa and elsewhere. One congregation in Texas recently left the Dallas diocese and put itself informally under the bishop of Peru.

Earlier this month, the 10,000-member Diocese of San Joaquin in California took the first step toward changing its constitution to sever ties with the church.

After the June election of Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori, seven dioceses petitioned Canterbury for “alternative oversight.” Some oppose female leadership in the church; others say they cannot work with the new leader because she favors blessing same-sex unions and a role for gay bishops.

What many secular progressives (and regional bigots) may not realize is that many moderate Virginians have already seceded from the politically conservative Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) for similar reasons: an objection to the polarizing politics of their respective elites.

As the SBC moved toward religious fundamentalism during the 1980s and 1990s, many Southern Baptist congregations redirected their offerings to more moderate organizations such as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) and the Mainstream Baptist Network. After the SBC withdrew from the Baptist World Alliance (headquartered in Falls Church, VA) on the grounds that the BWA was “too liberal,” two of the most powerful of the dissident Southern Baptist state organizations, those in Virginia and Texas, applied to join the BWA.

In what would be a first for the Baptist World Alliance, state associations of Southern Baptists in Virginia and Texas–who at times assert their independence from the Southern Baptist Convention–have been recommended as full members in the Baptist World Alliance, the organization that the SBC left last year in an ideological dispute.

British Baptist Alistair Brown, who sits on the BWA membership committee, said in March that it is “the committee’s unanimous view that both be recommended” to the BWA General Council to become full member bodies of the worldwide group of Baptists.

The Baptist General Association of Virginia and the Baptist General Convention of Texas, which are already major financial contributors to the Baptist World Alliance, in January joined the North American Baptist Fellowship, one of BWA’s six regional groups.

Both state groups relate to the Southern Baptist Convention, as well as to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and other nationwide missions organizations.

But if “the recommended membership is approved by the BWA’s General Council during its meeting in July, it would mean the two state conventions would become members on the same level as CBF, the American Baptist Churches, or any of the 200-plus other national and regional Baptist groups that make up BWA’s membership. They would be the first U.S. state conventions to join.

The moves by the two conventions come after the SBC voted last year to leave the global fellowship amid charges that it was too liberal, a charge denied by BWA leaders. “Both bodies express sadness at the withdrawal from membership from the BWA of the Southern Baptist Convention,” Brown told the assembled BWA leaders. “And they said that the withdrawal from the BWA had removed from them a means of fellowship with Baptists from around the world.”

And the same goes for the Episcopal Church, whose leaders have drifted too far left, while the leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention have drifted too far right in relation to substantial numbers of their respective coreligionists. Both sets of elites are starting to feel the backlash.

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Filed under religion, U.S., Virginia

by | 12 December 2006 · 12:57 pm

Reshaping the U.S. Coal Industry

THERE MAY BE NO POLLUTANT in all of history that people have worked harder to defeat than sulfur dioxide. In the United States alone the battle against it has absorbed years of effort and billions of dollars. Although it is nowhere near won, it has already utterly transformed the coal industry. It has also created deep political fissures between states and regions, as local fortunes rise and fall and as states struggle to decide how much they are willing to sacrifice to fight this invisible foe and to stop 11 killing their downwind neighbors.

Coal provides just over half the electricity for the United States, with huge and politically important regional variations. Many states, especially in the coal-producing regions, get virtually all their electricity from coal; others, especially on the West Coast and in New England, burn next to none. They rely instead on the three power sources that make up almost all the other half of the nation’s electricity—hydroelectric dams, nuclear power, and natural gas—though sometimes they also import coal-fired electricity from other states. However, the number of people a state’s coal plants actually sicken or kill (and the amount of acid rain and lost visibility they cause) depends not just on how much coal they burn bur on the kind of coal they use and how they burn it.

People who run coal-fired power plants can cut their SO2 emissions in two ways: They can scrub, or they can switch…. It’s often cheaper and a lot easier, though, just to switch to a kind of coal containing less sulfur. This option has caused some painful changes to the traditional U.S. coal industry by wrenching much of it away from the high-sulfur coal fields of the East and moving it to the low-sulfur coal fields of the West. Western coal has always been easier to dig because it lies in thick seams near the surface; but it is younger and generally packs less of an energy punch than the older eastern coals. In 1970, before environmental laws made sulfur content so important, only a tiny, share of U.S. coal came from west of the Mississippi. Today, more than half of it does, and the growing western low-sulfur coal fields are continuing to drain business away from the suffering high-sulfur eastern fields. Wyoming, with its vast surface mines, is now the nation’s top coal-producing state. One result of the shift is that the coal industry can no longer view the environmental movement solely as a threat; the western coal fields, at least, owe much of their growth to environmental laws, and could benefit even more from stricter SO2 limits.

The shift to the western United States has transformed this ancient industry in other ways, too. Even though coal fueled the rise of the machine in virtually every sector of the economy, the extraction of coal (as opposed to mine drainage or coal transportation) long depended far more on manual labor than on machines. Today, though, nearly two-thirds of American coal comes from surface mines, where it has been scooped up by some of the world’s most gargantuan machines. This mechanized mass production has helped make the direct cost of coal incredibly cheap by any measure.

The mechanization of mining has also devastated the work force. Because only the largest mines can afford to mechanize, the smaller mines that characterized the soft-coal industry for so much of the twentieth century have finally been driven out. More than three-quarters of the coal mines operating in the United States in 1976 have closed, and the current work force of 72,000 coal miners is less than a third of what it was a quarter century ago. The once mighty UMW now represents a mere 20,000 miners, who produce less than a fifth of American coal.

SOURCE: Coal: A Human History, by Barbara Freese (Penguin, 2003), pp. 177-180

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Filed under industry, U.S.

by | 12 November 2006 · 9:36 pm

Foreign Outliers in Kyoto 50 Years Ago

Fifty years ago, I was attending second grade at the U.S. Army Base on the grounds of the Kyoto Botanical Garden. I’m not sure whether it might have been called Camp Botanical Garden (Shokubutsuen, 植物園). I remember that some of my military-brat classmates had to ride a school bus from nearby Camp Otsu, which didn’t have its own school at the time.

It was my third school in as many years, and the next year I would enter my fourth. The previous year, while we were on furlough at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, I had attended first grade at Greathouse Elementary School in St. Matthews. The year before that, I had attended the Japanese kindergarten on the grounds of Seinan Jo Gakuin, a Baptist girls school where my father served as chaplain.

After we returned from furlough in 1956, my father became chaplain of the newly established Japan Baptist Hospital in Kyoto. The military base closed down the very next year, so the local missionaries hastily organized Kyoto Christian Day School (now KIS), using Calvert School curriculum materials.

The photo above is from a KCDS field trip to the Kyoto police headquarters, maybe in 1958. Our adult chaperone was Mr. Daub, whose eldest son Philip was in my brother’s class (a year behind me). My brother is the disgusted-looking kid in the front row, with Philip to his right. I’m the angry-looking kid in the front row, with my classmate David Thurber to my left. I don’t remember much about David except that he was somehow related to the writer, James Thurber; and that he had a wide-smile contest at his birthday party, which I thought was kind of unfair because he had the widest mouth in the class (and not just because I was such an accomplished frowner).

Behind me are two more of my classmates, Danny Hesselgrave and John Hawley. I remember riding my bike to the Hesselgraves on more than a few weekends, where Danny and I would play with his sets of little plastic cowboy and Indian figures, each of us taking one side or the other. Our games would always start with the question “Peace or War?” I once experimented—only once—with the game-killing answer, “Peace!”

John Hawley was an only child with what we imagined to be a rich grandmother back in England, who used to send him much more impressive sets of little metal figurines: legions of finely crafted toy soldiers in the colors of famous British regiments. I remember only once or twice going out to visit him in a huge mansion on a large estate in Yamashina. To us, he seemed the poor little rich kid. We envied him his toys, but not what we imagined to be his solitude.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: Such, anyway, were my childish impressions at the time. In truth, we were all poor little rich kids relative to our Japanese neighbors at the time. We lived in a large American house on a lot so big that it was later subdivided to accommodate at least half a dozen Japanese houses for employees of the Baptist Hospital. We had a Japanese maid, as did most other American missionaries at the time. And we got presents of various kinds either from relatives or churches back home or from Sears or Montgomery Ward catalogs we ordered from in time for Christmas every year.

At the time, we only knew that John’s father was a writer of some kind, but I’ve just this weekend learned what an extraordinary man he was. Frank Hawley (1906-1961) was a linguist who taught at SOAS, spent the 1930s in Japan, helped found the Japanese language section of the BBC after being repatriated to England during the war, then returned to Japan where he worked as a writer and collector of well over 20,000 books, some of which were destroyed during the war, others first confiscated then purchased by Keio University in Tokyo, and others after his death now housed at the University of Hawai‘i.

It also turns out that Danny Hesselgrave’s father was a very productive author in his own right. I had thought the Hesselgraves were Evangelical Lutheran, but now I’ve found that they belonged to a pietist, congregationalist offshoot of Scandinavian Lutheranism, the Evangelical Free Church, explained further below.

There were also Finnish Lutheran missionaries in Kyoto at the time, and at least two Finnish MKs, John and Eva Kekkonen. Eva taught the kids of KCDS a game that we used to call Finnish Red Rover, where one kid in the middle tried to tag the other kids as they ran between the endzones, turning each person tagged into a tagger until all had been caught. (Eva was also the object of my first secret boyhood crush.)

Thanks to a random, mindful act of Internet archiving [PDF], I’ve discovered more about the first school teacher whose name I remember. Miss Pilcher was the first principal and first credentialed teacher of Kyoto Christian Day School.

Reflecting the keen interest of the denomination to which they belonged, the fledgling church [Evangelical Free Church of Walnut Creek, now known as NorthCreek Church] was very missionary-minded from the start, and this was further demonstrated when Shirley Pilcher left for Japan. Shirley’s folks, Carl and Ada, often had missionaries visit in their home thus exposing their children to the spiritual needs of the wider world.

After high school, Shirley went to Trinity College, the EFCA school in Chicago, and then to San Francisco State where she completed her teaching credential. After a second grade assignment for one year in Walnut Creek, she felt God’s call to overseas work under the Evangelical Free Church Overseas Missions Department, as it was then called. This opportunity had developed on very short notice, so a commissioning service was quickly arranged and held on the evening of July 31, 1958. About 200 people attended. A few days later, with about 100 well-wishers at the airport, Shirley left for Kyoto, Japan, where she spent four years teaching mostly missionary children plus some from U.S. Embassy families. Church records show that the stipend paid to her monthly was $1,287.

Because Shirley would spend her next birthday thousands of miles from home, all in the church family were encouraged to send her appropriate greetings. For those wishing to send money, envelopes were provided. A telephone call to her was initiated from the church during a Sunday school hour; it was probably very early morning in Kyoto. In 1962 she returned home to a public school teaching assignment in Alamo. Later, Shirley met Foster Donaldson and, after they were married, they served for many years in the Philippines with Overseas Crusade where they were engaged in a Bible correspondence ministry and provided literature resources for pastors. They also opened a couple of bookstores there. Shirley lost her life to cancer in January 2004; Fos continues to be active in the church. Following is a reproduction of the farewell program for Shirley’s departure for Japan.

I must confess that, until today, I had never heard of the Evangelical Free Church of America. Here’s a bit of its history, from the document I discovered online.

Scandinavians began streaming to the United States in the late nineteenth century, settling mainly in the East and Midwest. They brought with them all of the thinking, the implements, and the practices of the culture they knew abroad. One big difference was that there was no state church in America. Most Christian immigrants attended a Lutheran Church where their own languages were spoken, Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish. Following their experiences back home, especially where they did not find evangelical messages in the churches here, many began to meet privately for worship, Bible study, and fellowship. In 1884 a Norwegian-Danish Free Church was founded in Tacoma, Washington. It was the first church with “Free church” roots on the West coast. Shortly a group of seven persons formed the next Norwegian-Danish Church, this one in Boston. Those of this European background thus organized two conferences, one “eastern” and one “western.” In time these two joined to form the Evangelical Free Church Association….

Although there were a number of leaders in those early years, the research points to John. G. Princell as the “founder” of the Swedish Evangelical Free Church of America. His counterpart was R. A. Jernberg of the Norwegian-Danish Free Church. Princell attended the University of Chicago, majoring in Latin, Greek, and mathematics. Jernberg graduated from Yale University and the Chicago Theological Seminary. So both of these men were learned and well-trained in the American tradition that the best educated men were those “of the cloth.”

People feared becoming a denomination because that word was associated with Lutheranism in Europe….

In the early history of these Scandinavian free churches, all the preaching was done in the native tongues since the immigrants still spoke them here. But their children were learning English rapidly and so English gradually took over, first in the Sunday schools. And little by little it then followed in the preaching services despite some resistance by the “old timers.” In some churches it was necessary for lay people to provide the pastoral leadership owing to the absence of ordained and capable men. So efforts to unite the two regional Norwegian-Danish associations had taken a long time, and getting those two to agree, despite their long years of political union in Europe, was not accomplished without a lot of discussion. And then there were many further discussions before they united with the Swedes!

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Filed under education, family, Japan, religion, U.S.

by | 11 October 2006 · 5:40 pm

Betraying the Black Citizens of Greenville, MS, in 1927

On May 31 [1927], [MS Senator] LeRoy [Percy], Will [Percy], and the mayor [of Greenville, Mississippi] called an extraordinary mass meeting at City Hall, extraordinary because both races were explicitly urged to attend. A city councilman announced that the city had exhausted its financial resources buying sandbags and other materials to close the protection levee. It had no money to pay laborers. But it intended to have them if it required bayonets. The city council then voted a resolution: “We propose to close the gaps in the protection levee before the coming rise. To do this free labor is required. We hope to do the work with volunteers which will be asked for tonight. If, however, sufficient volunteers do not appear available then conscription means must be used.”

Only blacks would be conscripted. Those in attendance stiffened in protest. John McMiller, a black man who ran a burial association, rose. “The guns are the problem,” he said. “All the white folks carry guns. If you put the guns away, we’ll have a thousand colored men on the levee in the morning.”…

Sunday morning nearly 1,000 black men appeared on the levee, along with several dozen whites overseeing the work. One white man whom blacks already distrusted wore a pistol. McMiller told W. E. Elam, the engineer in charge, “I kept my promise. You didn’t keep yours.” Elam walked over to the man with the gun, pulled it out of its holster, and threw it into the water.

The blacks went to work. Every day they went to work, hundreds at a time, twenty-four hours a day, day after day. For eight days they sweated in the fetid heat, driving piling by hand, filling sandbags, building tramways to carry the sandbags to the gaps, working off two barges.

On the eighth day the levee was sealed and topped. They finished just as the water began rising. It reached four sacks high on the protection levee—two feet higher than the levee itself. But the levee held. In the long struggle of man against the river that year, the closing of the Greenville protection levee marked man’s only victory.

On June 7 the city celebrated at the Saenger Theater. Both black and white were invited. Red Cross stocks were combed for meat, flour, canned peaches, and even rare and valuable sugar, and hotel kitchens and restaurants prepared food. There was music and comedy on stage, laughter off it. It was the closest the city had come to pleasant relaxation since the flood fight began in March. Whites heaped praise on the black community. Will spoke. But he had become irrelevant. His speech went unreported in the paper even though the paper was run by one of his committee members. A resolution passed by the city council was read, thanking “our colored citizens for their very valuable services, so willingly rendered the citizens of Greenville, in their work on the Protection Levee. Their citizenship has been commendable.” Hazlewood Farish, a prominent attorney, told the blacks: “You have the undying thanks of the people of Greenville…. Here in the Delta, and especially in Washington County, there has always been perfect harmony between the races and there will never be anything else. The Mississippi Delta is the best home the negro could find. Here the white people will protect your interests and care for your homes. We want you always to have the same feeling of cooperation as has existed for the last few days.”…

BUT THE CITY had exhausted itself and the strains did not ease. Life was actually becoming harsher. L. O. Crosby, the state’s flood dictator, suggested to [Commerce Secretary and national flood czar Herbert] Hoover, “Believe food and feed rations for refugees and animals should be cut in half while water is up and no work to do.” The recommendation stunned Hoover, brought back to him that Mississippi was a different world. He vetoed cutting food for people but approved cutting feed to animals. Nonetheless, worried about having enough Red Cross money to survive the winter, rations were trimmed back. All refugee camps in Mississippi spent an average of 21 cents a day per capita on food; in Washington County camps spent 15 cents. Whites kept the good Red Cross food for themselves. Giving any to blacks, said one man, would “simply teach them a lot of expensive habits and there was no sense in giving them anything which they had not had before.”

SOURCE: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry (Touchstone, 1998), pp. 325-328

The patrician Senator Percy had until then tried to treat his black constituents decently. He had supported their right to vote, provided some of the best black schools in the South, confronted race-baiting politicians, and even defeated the Klan in Washington County (p. 308). But he needed black labor both to battle the flood and to reconstruct afterwards, so he engineered the reversal of a decision by the local Red Cross committee (headed by his own son Will) to evacuate black citizens along with the whites, keeping the former as labor conscripts guarded by armed white private citizens and National Guard troops. This was the last straw. The stream of blacks flowing upriver turned into a flood. The black population of Chicago grew from 44,103 in 1910, to 109,458 in 1920, to 233,903 in 1930 (p. 417).

UPDATE: The most recent issue of Southeastern Geographer has an article entitled “Black Homeplace Migration to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta: Ambiguous Journeys, Uncertain Outcomes” (Project Muse subscription required). Here’s the abstract:

Between 1910 and 1970, African Americans moved out of the southeastern U.S. in one of the largest movements in human history. Some estimates hold that more than 9 million black Southerners left the South for new lives in the North and West. The migration reached its peak in the 1950s, and began to slow in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, these black migrants and their descendants began coming home to the South, a trend that continues today. This study looks at one region to which many African Americans have returned, the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Regions like the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta have been largely ignored in black return migration studies. Much of the work that has been done to document the return migration of blacks to the South has focused on the South’s urban areas. What has been neglected is the fact that there is also a significant return of African Americans to the rural South, a region of chronic economic stagnation. While the U.S. Census Bureau collects information on its long forms that can lead the researcher to a better understanding of African American migration processes and place attachments, the data are imperfect and can only provide the backbone of understanding. In an attempt to dig beneath the available data, we employ ethnographic methodology in this study. We focus on the geographic life history of Mrs. Dorothy Mae Scott.

A surprising proportion of the “returnees” seem to be youths born and raised elsewhere who have ancestors or relatives from the Delta region. The primary case study involves a destitute lady who brought neither skills nor capital–only nostalgia–back with her.

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by | 8 October 2006 · 8:51 pm

New Orleans Bankers vs. Trappers, 1927–28

In early September [1927], [Louisiana Governor Oramel H.] Simpson called the state legislature into special session to pass a constitutional amendment to authorize legally, if retroactively, the Reparations Commission and to govern judicial procedure for cases about the Caernarvon crevasse [officially dynamited to flood St. Bernard and Plaquemines Parishes in order to save Orleans Parish]. In the weeks since the July 25 meeting, crevasse victims had focused what political power they had on getting the legislature to force New Orleans to compensate them fairly. Immediately before the legislature convened, the St. Bernard Voice bitterly complained: “The City of New Orleans promised and pledged itself to stand the loss and to repay each individual his actual damage. But the city is not doing this. The city’s reparation committee has been cutting and slashing each claim in half and less than half, even though these claims be absolutely accurate and justified…. Not one claimant is satisfied with his ‘settlement.'” It then pleaded, “Here is an opportunity for a New Orleans newspaper, unafraid to lose some prestige with the bankers and financiers, to ascertain the true facts and publish the real story of the manner in which the city is repaying the residents of St. Bernard Parish.”

The Voice was a tiny paper, but this time its audience was state legislators. Hugh Wilkinson, a state senator, distributed a copy to every member of the legislature. The next day the New Orleans papers, far from taking up the Voice’s appeal, fired back…. New Orleans legislators made sure all these papers were widely distributed as well…. Wilkinson had his own ideas about the wording of the legislation and drafted language that said victims would be “justly, fairly and fully compensated for losses sustained.” He planned to offer his language as an amendment in committee….

That evening [Reparations Commission members] Monroe, Hecht, Phelps, and Dufour sat down with Wilkinson and [Senator William] Davey. They insisted that they wanted to avoid a fight, and be fair. Didn’t Wilkinson know he could not win? Wilkinson conceded that, though he believed he could win in committee, he did not know what would happen on the floor. If he lost there, he could work something out. Well past midnight they were still talking, and finally an agreement was struck. Wilkinson’s client, Molero’s Acme Fur Company, would get $1.5 million, as well as money to pay its debts. Individual trappers, however, would have to fend for themselves.

The next day Wilkinson did not even offer his language. Without any debate whatsoever, by voice vote, the committee passed the legislation written by Dufour and Phelps. The State Senate and House, also without debate and by voice vote, did likewise, then immediately adjourned.

A few days later, after it was too late for any harmful political repercussions, Monroe moved against the [muskrat] trappers again. Trappers actually farmed their tracts of land, bred the animals they trapped, raised them, fed them, cared for them just as a farmer cared for chickens. But Monroe and Butler had the state commissioner of conservation claim all trapping animals as the property of the state. Thus trappers could not claim any losses for them….

IN ST. BERNARD and Plaquemines Parishes, total claims, including those that Monroe refused to accept for consideration, reached $35 million. Those he did allow to be filed totaled $12,491,041. He agreed to settlements totaling $3,897,276—but then deducted nearly $1,000,000 from these settlements for feeding and housing the claimants while they were homeless, leaving roughly $2.9 million that the city paid. Of this, $1.5 million went to Molero’s company. Five other large claimants, including the Louisiana Southern Railroad, received a total of $600,000. That left roughly $800,000 to divide between 2,809 claimants, who received an average of $284 each to compensate for, in many cases, having their homes and livelihoods destroyed and having their lives disrupted for months. An additional 1,024 claimants received nothing; not a single trapper was offered any compensation for trapping losses.

The two parishes were destitute. In November 1926, trappers had gathered more than a hundred pelts a day; a year and a half after the flood, in November 1928, they were lucky to collect six. In Delacroix, the trapping center, families were literally starving….

No bank, business, or government agency ever made a voluntary payment to the victims to fulfill the self-proclaimed moral obligation, nor was there any organized charity drive to ease the burden of the trappers.

The word of honor of the gentlemen of New Orleans, the gentlemen of the fine clubs, the gentlemen of the Carnival, was “irrelevant.” J. Blanc Monroe, who belonged to the finest of those clubs, who once reigned as Comus, had declared it himself. But a reckoning would come.

Huey Long was elected governor in 1928.

LONG REPRESENTED a new kind of flood, an inundation that the city had never faced before. Butler informed Hecht, Dufour, and Monroe that he “had had a talk with Mr. Long, who seemed to have some wrong impressions about certain features both as to the facts and the law” regarding the dynamiting of the levee and the situation in St. Bernard and Plaquemines. Nothing changed regarding those payments, but the equation of power shifted. The two parishes, which shared a congressional seat with New Orleans, supported Long in everything he did and helped him wrest control even of city affairs from the city.

SOURCE: Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America, by John M. Barry (Touchstone, 1998), pp. 355-358, 360, 408

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