Category Archives: U.S.

by Joel | 24 July 2007 · 10:16 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Bunch butter beans

At a mini family reunion at Paulette’s Place in Halifax, Virginia, my elder cousin’s husband, who’s quite an accomplished farmer, looked at the small green butter beans several of us had ordered as our vegetable side dishes and said they looked like “bunch butter beans,” not “running butter beans.” I asked him how the hell he could tell that.

Well, if I understood him right, bunch beans grow in tighter clusters and are smaller and rounder, while running beans climb along poles and get larger and flatter. They’re not different species, just different cultivars. According to GardenLad at the Heirloom Plants & Garden Forum, there are similar distinctions among green beans.

In some places, though, if you ask if it’s a pole bean they’ll look at you strange, because—particularly in the mountains of the South, and in the Ozarks, they differentiate them as stick and bunch beans, rather than as pole and bush—which, btw, are called “dwarf” in England and some parts of North America.

From this I conclude that the more space you give a bean to grow, the bigger it’ll get.

According to Japan’s NIAS Genebank, the same is true of pole and bunch cultivars of Phaseolus lunatus L., a bean of many disguises and aliases.

Pole type cultivar and wild form of P. lunatus are twining, perennial herbs, 2-4m tall, with enlarged rootstock (Purseglove, 1974). Annual and small bush forms, 30-90cm high, have been developed in cultivation.

In my experience of Southern usage, butter beans are the smaller, sweeter, greener varieties that are eaten as vegetables, while lima beans are the larger, starchier, whiter varieties that are more often found in soup. (Ochef seems to have it precisely backwards.)

The University of Melbourne has a very useful, multilingual compilation of names for different varieties of the bean genus Phaseolus. Phaseolus lunatus L. is divided into three broad groups: Lunatus, the large limas of Andean origin; Sieva, the small-seeded limas of Mesoamerican origin; and Potato, the round-seeded, Caribbean limas. The principal Japanese term for limas is ライマメ raimame, which seems to have been formed by haplology from ライママメ raima mame ‘lima bean’.

Eating Across America: Road Trip Food Stops

On the long travel days during our Great Square Route (MN – MS – GA – CT – MN) car trip in May, we would aim to get on the road early, then stop for a late breakfast at some place with local flavor, trying to avoid national chains. We might snack a bit on the road, but would not eat another meal until the evening, again trying to avoid national chains. Here are the most memorable food stops. Like my father and brothers, when I travel I tend to remember the meals above all else.

First breakfast stop – Our first breakfast stop on I-35 South out of Minneapolis was at the Perkins restaurant in Clear Lake, IA. Despite being a national chain, it offered the big plate of biscuits and gravy that I was determined to indulge in at least once on this trip.

Greasiest omelet – After a nice visit with my stepbrother and his family in Kansas City, MO, we hit the road early on I-70 East. We didn’t see much with local flavor until we got to the Midway Auto/Truck Plaza near exit 121 between the Missouri River and Columbia. Their Southwestern Omelet needed extra tabasco to cut the grease as much as to add spice.

Most filling meal – We made good time around St. Louis, whose waterfront we had each visited before, then dawdled down I-55 South on the way into Sikeston, MO, where I was determined to subject my wife and mother-in-law to regionally famous Lambert’s Cafe, “The Only Home of Throwed Rolls.” I ordered just 4 vegetables (cole slaw, green beans, turnip greens, and white beans), but helped my mother-in-law with her (very tasty) catfish and my wife (very little) with her polish sausage and kraut. Between those ample portions and the irresistible black-eyed pea and fried okra “pass-arounds,” I came away stuffed to the gills.

Tiniest restaurant – After stopping two nights in Paducah, KY, to see two brothers, a new sister-in-law, a niece, and a nephew-in-law, grand niece, and grand nephew that I hadn’t met yet, and also to pick up my wife’s sister who flew in from Minneapolis to join us for the jaunt across the South, we headed out on I-55 South, stopping for breakfast at The Grill on Main Street in New Madrid, MO. It had only three or four tables, but served a steady stream of take-out customers and had a lot of local flavor. Above the kitchen doorway was a sign honoring a local U.S. Army lieutenant killed in action.* Every table had a well-used ashtray, emptied but not washed between customers. The restroom in the kitchen contained various cosmetics used by the staff. And the steak I ordered with my eggs—on the chef’s recommendation—was very nicely marinated, very nicely grilled, and very tender.

(*The New Madrid KIA was 1st Lt. Amos C. R. Bock, 4th Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne, killed when a roadside bomb exploded near his vehicle in Baghdad, Iraq, on 23 October 2006.)

Fanciest restaurant – We found a motel in Jackson, MS, before driving over to Vicksburg. After little success finding a restaurant overlooking the Mississippi River, we ended up at Bourbon’s in the Ameristar Casino. (It was my first time in a casino.) The food and drinks were excellent and we could look out on the river when we weren’t fiddling with the wooden blinds trying to keep the glare of the sunset off the water out of the eyes of our neighbors and ourselves. I had a cup of their Seafood Gumbo (which turned out to be dirty rice, not soup) and Caribbean Steak Salad.

Emptiest restaurant – Traveling east the next day on I-20, we stopped for breakfast at a Barnhill’s restaurant in a ghost-town of a shopping center in Meridian, MS. Barnhill’s is a regional chain that mostly offers Southern-style buffets, but some branches offer breakfast buffets on the weekends. I had sausage, grits, and a good bit more. It was Sunday morning about time for Sunday school to start, so the huge dining hall was practically empty.

Strangest smell – We crossed most of Alabama on U.S. 80, passing through Selma and Montgomery on the way to visit old friends from Micronesia who now live on Ft. Benning, GA, where the father, a Sgt. 1st Class born and raised on Yap, has been teaching infantry tactics to officers ever since he returned from deployment in Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division (Light Infantry). During his 20+ years in the Army, he earned a B.A., and is now pursuing an M.A. in international relations.

After a long visit and a quick chew of betel nut, we repaired off-base to Country’s Barbecue in Columbus for a late supper. The food was tasty, but the dining room smelled more like a wet mop than a hot grill. When the party at the booth next to us left, I understood why. The waitresses not only cleared, wiped, and reset the table, they also pulled it out and mopped the floor beneath it. The wait help doubled as bus help and tripled as janitorial help. We left a good tip.

Best grits – It was slim pickings for breakfast the next morning along GA 96 through the heart of pecan and peach country. We got off course in the old railroad junction town of Fort Valley and ended up in Perry, where we settled on an outlet of the Krystal regional fastfood chain. I tried their breakfast “scrambler” with egg and sausage atop grits in a bowl. It was surprisingly tasty, billed as low-carb but plenty high in fat, salt, and cholesterol. The outlet we stopped at seemed exceptionally well managed.

Second most gimmicky (after Lambert’s Cafe) – After an afternoon exploring a bit of historic downtown Savannah, GA, we drove out to Tybee Island on U.S. 80, which ended at a sign saying “my other end is in San Diego” (an assertion that hasn’t been true for several decades). We dined that night at The Crab Shack, at an outdoor table that had a hole in the middle to discard the shells and corncobs from our heaping platter of seafood. The baby alligator pond was the gimmick that most caught my fancy. I asked the host on the way in if I could pick which one I wanted to eat. He said, “You can pick one, but we ain’t gonna cook it for you.”

Homiest atmosphere – Driving up I-95 from Savannah, we stopped for breakfast at the Olde House Cafe in Walterboro, SC. It was the only “unchained” restaurant we could find. The food was great but the architecture was more interesting. As the name suggests, the building really was built to be someone’s home. We ate in what may once have been a bedroom, and the front porch had a rocking chair on it.

Second worst chitlins – Before we arrived at my dad’s place in South Boston, VA, I had asked him to find some place in his neck of the wood that served decent chitlins (= chitterlings). A long time ago, when he lived in Roanoke, he had taken my wife and me to a mostly black restaurant that served the only good Southern-style chitlins I’ve ever tasted. They were chopped, marinated, and sauteed with vinegar and pepper. (Since then, I’ve had pretty decent Korean-style chitlins several times, both grilled and in soup.) The worst (and first) chitlins I ever tasted was when I was a kid in Winchester, VA. My mother boiled them without enough flavor to disguise the taste and they were terrible. I couldn’t get them past my tongue (or nose). I’m sure my father made a valiant effort to eat them, but we kids all turned up our noses.

Well, on this occasion, my youngest uncle and an older cousin and their respective spouses had driven over from Tidewater Virginia, so we all went out to Paulette’s Place in Halifax, which served batter-fried fish, shrimp, oysters, and chitlins. My father, my uncle, and I ordered the chitlins. Everyone else had better sense. My uncle drowned his in vinegar, and I dumped tabasco on mine, but I think my father was the only one who didn’t leave any on his plate. The rest of the menu was fine.

Oldest restaurant – The next leg of our journey ran through the Blue Ridge Mountains and up the Shenandoah Valley to Middletown, VA, where we stopped for a light snack at the historic Wayside Inn, founded in 1797, before paying respects to my aunt, who lives on a farm nearby, and my cousin’s wife and mother-in-law, who live up the road a bit in a house that dates back to the 1740s. (My cousin was off hunting big game on a South African preserve.) The four of us confused the waitress by ordering three house salads and three bowls of their signature Colonial Peanut Soup, reputed to be one of George Washington’s favorites.

Most sushi – The reason we snacked so lightly in Middletown is that we were headed for another family reunion at the other end of I-66, at the Todai [= Lighthouse] Restaurant in Fairfax with: my brother, sister-in-law, and their two kids; my sister and brother-in-law from Annapolis, MD; my father, who came up from South Boston; and my mother-in-law and sister-in-law, who were flying back to Minneapolis the next day, leaving us the car for the rest of our trip. When I eat at Todai, I concentrate on the huge variety of sushi and a few cold salads. When my brother in Fairfax turned 50, I took him to Todai for lunch and we ate 50 pieces of sushi between us.

Best oasis – Our worst day of driving, by far, was between Fairfax, VA, and New Haven, CT, on the Friday before Memorial Day. Even though we avoided I-95 as much as possible, we spent far too much time in bumper-to-bumper traffic until we got past Baltimore during the morning rush hour, then again after we got across the Hudson on the Tappan Zee Bridge later that afternoon. After trying a stretch of U.S. 1 between Greenwich and Stamford, we decided to break for an early supper in Stamford. After finding the food court still under construction at a brand-new downtown shopping plaza, we discovered Fiesta Atlantic, a refreshing Peruvian restaurant across Atlantic Street that was already open for dinner before 5 pm. Their Sangria had canned fruit cocktail in the bottom of the glass, but tasted quite refreshing, and the two appetizers and two side dishes we ordered were fresh, flavorful, and nicely presented. We had cebiche (ceviche) mixto, ensalada de pulpo (octopus), platano (plaintain) frito, and yuca (yucca) frita.

Most unexpected language – After a long but lovely ride through Pennsylvania on I-80, then through a rather ugly corner of Ohio, we took the North Ridgeville exit on the way to the pleasant Cleveland suburb of Avon Lake, OH, where a busy friend had invited us to stay the night. We had agreed to meet her for breakfast the next morning, so we looked for supper on our own. The Gourmé [sic] Family Restaurant (“Good Home Cooking”) on Lorain Road caught our fancy, so we sampled their fare. I had their lake perch and pierogie combination. Two things puzzled me. Why did every table have a squeeze bottle of syrup as well as ketchup on it? (If ketchup was for the fried fish, was syrup for the pierogies?) And which language was the staff speaking to each other? Their appearance and their accents were vaguely Eastern European, but I heard enough of their talk to rule out Germanic, Slavic, Romance, Hellenic, Turkic, and even Finnic and Ugric. It turned out to be Albanian. We never did solve the mystery of the syrup.

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by Joel | 18 July 2007 · 12:28 pm

Gimme That Upscale Religion

“The black upper class has most often been associated with the Episcopal Church,” says Rev. Harold T. Lewis, the author of Yet with a Steady Beat: The African American Struggle for Recognition in the Episcopal Church and rector of Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh. Despite earlier affiliations with the Baptist and Methodist denominations and the larger numbers of blacks who currently make up those congregations, the black elite have often selected the more formal high Episcopal Church or Congregational Church.

The Episcopal faith was attractive because of its formality, and both faiths were appealing because they were known for having well-educated clergy and a small number of members. Well-to-do black Americans with roots in the West Indies had natural historic ties to the Episcopal Church, which had served a major role in Jamaica and other former British colonies for several generations. The Congregational Church’s popularity among the black elite grew from the fact that it was the denomination that had given the greatest support to the American Missionary Association’s efforts in establishing secondary schools and colleges for southern blacks in the late 1800s.

And for some of the most cynical and status-conscious members of the black elite, the two denominations were particularly appealing simply because most blacks were not of that faith.

In every city where there are members of the black elite, there is an Episcopal or a Congregational Church that dominates the upper-class black religious scene: In Chicago, it is St. Edmund’s or Good Shepherd; in Detroit, St. Matthew’s; in Philadelphia, St. Thomas; in Memphis, Second Congregational; in Charleston, St. Mark’s; in Washington, St. Luke’s; in Atlanta, First Congregational; and in New York, St. Philip’s. Some say that the black upper class disdains the open display of emotions that are often shared in Baptist and AME [= African Methodist Episcopal] churches, while others say that Episcopal and Congregational denominations have better-educated church leaders.

For whatever the reason, the choice does keep the elite separated. And just as there have been special churches for the black upper class, so are there special social groups that separate men, women, and children of different classes.

SOURCE: Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, by Lawrence Otis Graham (Harper, 2000), p. 13

I believe I first became aware of the social-class correlates of religious affiliation during my junior high school years in very status-conscious Winchester, Virginia, where one of the standard pejoratives among my peers during the early 1960s was “common”: “Oh, she’s so common!” We were Baptists—common enough in those parts, in both senses. In fact I was baptized in Winchester’s First Baptist Church, my mother’s home church, where my father served as associate pastor during our extended furlough there. My two wealthier uncles belonged to Presbyterian and Lutheran churches, somewhat more upscale denominations in those parts, but not as upscale as Episcopalians, who were at the top of the denominational heap.

UPDATE: Reader Aidan Kehoe wonders whether this phenomenon is as strong in any other country as it is in the U.S. In any country in which there is an established religion (or sect), there would seem to be a strong correlation between the elites and the established religion. It has at times been quite a social handicap (or worse) to be Catholic in the U.K.; Protestant in Spain, France, or Poland; Christian in Japan or Sumatra, Muslim in the Philippines or Moluccas (Maluku), Hindu in Pakistan or Sri Lanka, or Jewish almost anywhere. It’s still tough to be Shi’a (or anything but Sunni) over most of the Muslim world. Nowadays, however, secularism seems to be the creed of the elites in West; it’s at least a social faux pas to openly profess belief in any Western religion on any elite Western university campus. What makes the U.S. exceptional with regard to correlations of creed and class may be the combination of (1) perhaps the most extreme religious diversity of any current state, especially of sects within Christianity, with much regional variation; and (2) very high social mobility across boundaries of class, sect, and region.

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by Joel | 12 July 2007 · 9:33 am

Effects of the New Madrid Relief Act of 1815

On February 17, 1815 [three years after the strongest earthquakes in U.S. history], Congress passed the New Madrid Relief Act, the first federal disaster relief act in U.S. history. Unfortunately, the act itself turned out to be a disaster.

The legislation provided for residents whose land had been damaged in the earthquakes to trade their land titles for a certificate that would be good for any unclaimed government land for sale elsewhere in the Missouri Territory. The only restriction was that the new grants had to be between 160 and 640 acres, regardless of how much or little land a person had previously owned. Well-intentioned though the legislation was, it did little to help the residents of the New Madrid area.

Communications being what they were, word of the New Madrid Relief Act did not reach the New Madrid area for months. News did reach St. Louis and other places, however, and speculators were soon beating a hasty path to New Madrid and buying up land for a pittance from unsuspecting locals. Of the 516 certificates issued for redemption, only twenty were held by the original landowners. Three hundred and eighty-four certificates were held by residents of St. Louis, some of whom had as many as forty claims. Adding insult to injury, many banks in Missouri failed, making the Missouri banknotes used to pay for these claims worthless. Governor Clark himself was not above profiting from the situation, as he authorized two of his agents, Theodore Hunt and Charles Lucas, to purchase land in the New Madrid area. Meanwhile, opportunists in New Madrid caught on to what was happening and began selling their land titles many times over. Before too long, the term “New Madrid claim” came to be synonymous with fraud.

Litigation over the resulting land claims tied up the courts for over twenty years, with hundreds of fraudulent claims being pressed. Over the next three decades, Congress passed three more pieces of legislation to try and straighten out the mess. The last case stemming from the New Madrid Relief Act was finally settled in 1862, fifty years after the earthquakes of 1811–12—by which time the frontier had moved a thousand miles west.

SOURCE: When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquake, by Jay Feldman (Free Press, 2005), p. 236

Plus ça change …

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by Joel | 11 July 2007 · 5:52 pm

Media Disastermongering in 1990

OVER THE COURSE of the next century and more [after 1811–1812], the New Madrid earthquakes gradually receded from public awareness, as the New Madrid fault system produced just two shocks greater than magnitude 6.0 in the 180 years following the 1811–12 sequence—a 6.5 in 1843 and a 6.8 in 1895. An occasional magazine article would appear and several epic poems and novels using the quakes as a setting were written, but in general, the largest series of earthquakes ever to hit the North American continent faded from memory—until 1990, when a prediction by Dr. Iben Browning suddenly brought the New Madrid fault system to the forefront once again.

Browning was a climatological and business consultant who claimed to have predicted the magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta quake that struck northern California during the 1989 World Series, causing extensive damage in the San Francisco Bay area. Browning also claimed to have predicted other large earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, including the 1980 explosion of Mount St. Helens in Washington.

Addressing a business seminar in Atlanta in February 1988, Browning told his audience that an earthquake could strike the Memphis area in early December 1990. More than a year and a half later, on November 27, 1989, a short Associated Press story made the prediction public, and the following day, a longer story appeared in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Two weeks later, speaking to the Missouri Governor’s Conference on Agriculture, Browning repeated his prediction that there was a 50 percent probability that a magnitude 6.5–7.5 earthquake would hit the New Madrid area on December 3, 1990. Browning’s prognostication was based on tidal forces, which were going to be extraordinarily high on December 2 and 3.

Suddenly, people were interested in the New Madrid fault system again. The Lorna Prieta quake in October 1989 had received widespread television coverage, and the repeated viewings of the worst of the damage had created a climate in which Browning’s prediction was taken seriously by the media and the public. Despite the fact that the connection between tidal forces and earthquakes has never been proven, and despite the refutation of Browning’s prediction by several seismologists, including the Center for Earthquake Research and Information director Arch Johnston, media outlets all over the country began picking up the story and running with it.

The issue was given further apparent credence in June 1990 when David Stewart threw his support behind the Browning forecast. Stewart, a geophysicist, was then the director of the Center for Earthquake Studies at Southeast Missouri State University and one of Missouri’s leading earthquake preparedness experts. On July 21, in an article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch entitled, “Quake Prediction Taken Seriously,” Stewart was quoted as saying that Browning’s “methodology does seem to be promising and worthy of serious and thorough consideration.”

In fact, Browning’s methodology was highly questionable—he had no physical model for his prediction and showed no verifiable evidence to back up his prediction. Moreover, it turned out that his “predictions” of the Lorna Prieta quake and the Mount St. Helens eruption were also suspect. Browning’s doctorate was in zoology; he was a self-taught climatologist with no scientific expertise in seismology or earthquake prediction. After Stewart joined Browning, a number of seismologists made efforts to debunk the prediction, but the cow was already out of the barn.

The Associated Press picked up the Post-Dispatch piece, and it was reprinted in newspapers throughout the New Madrid Seismic Zone region. Stories then ran in major newspapers all across the country, including the New York Times, Wall StreetJournal, Chicago Tribune, and Miami Herald. Soon the national media jumped in. Time and Newsweek published articles and USA Today ran close to a dozen stories. Browning appeared on Good Morning America. Johnston was interviewed for the Today show. World News Tonight and NOVA planned segments on the New Madrid fault system.

Earthquake and natural disaster agencies, together with organizations like the Red Cross, unwittingly exacerbated the crisis by sending out literature on earthquake preparedness without also providing a disclaimer regarding Browning’s prediction. Throughout the New Madrid Seismic Zone, agencies were inundated with requests for information. National Guard units in Missouri and Arkansas conducted earthquake drills. Department stores passed out survival-tip literature and stocked up on blankets, bottled water, and first-aid kits. Many school districts announced that schools would close on December 3. A minor 4.6 tremor near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, on September 26, made the situation that much worse, as many people interpreted the event to be a foreshock of the anticipated December quake.

Except for Stewart, the entire scientific community was aligned against the Browning prediction. “Earthquake experts across the country consider this ‘prediction’ ridiculous and unscientific,” wrote Douglas A. Wiens, a professor of earth and planetary sciences at Washington University of St. Louis, in an op-ed piece for the Post-Dispatch on September 30. “The public should disregard all predictions about the specific date that an earthquake will occur. No one can make such predictions. Though scientists have investigated many different factors that could signal an impending quake, none has proved reliable.” Nevertheless, the media continued to treat the Browning prediction as genuine news.

In mid-October, the National Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council (NEPEC) released a study that thoroughly refuted Browning’s prediction, but still the media hype went on. By the beginning of December, the New Madrid Seismic Zone region was in a state of near-hysteria.

On the weekend of December 1–2, a carnival-like atmosphere prevailed in New Madrid. More than thirty satellite trucks from television and radio networks worldwide were parked in downtown New Madrid, with its population of just over 3,300. Church marquees advertised sermons with earthquake-inspired themes like, “Preparing for the Big One? Are You Prepared for the Last One?” Cars prowled the town displaying homemade signs along the same lines: “New Madrid save your city fast and repent.” Rev. Frank McRae of the St. John’s United Methodist Church cheerfully admitted, “You don’t get breaks like this often.” Tourists roamed the streets, and the Chamber of Commerce sold “official” earthquake T-shirts and sweatshirts. Tom’s Grill offered quake burgers that were served divided down the middle by a jagged line, while McDonald’s advertised free coffee, “a price you can shake & rattle about.” Near the Mississippi River, the Faultline Express Band played earthquake songs. A California psychologist featured an Iben Browning doll that children were encouraged to pummel as a way of dealing with their fears about the earthquake prediction.

December 3 came and went with no earthquake, of course. The tourists and media crews quickly left, and after several months in the limelight, New Madrid went back to being an ordinary Mississippi River town.

The Browning prediction underscored the fact that there is only one thing certain about the New Madrid fault system, and that is that it will go off again. It could be in two hundred years. Or it could be tomorrow.

SOURCE: When the Mississippi Ran Backwards: Empire, Intrigue, Murder, and the New Madrid Earthquake, by Jay Feldman (Free Press, 2005), pp. 238-241

Plus ça change …

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by Joel | 26 June 2007 · 9:52 pm

Black Memphis vs. Black Nashville

From Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, by Lawrence Otis Graham (Harper, 2000), pp. 276-277:

I am still a devoted fan of Memphis because of my childhood memories and because of the progressive people—both black and white—who I know are working together today; but like its black elite, who were educated elsewhere, I feel it is a town trying to overcome great odds. The thriving downtown that it once had along Main Street—between Beale and Jefferson—was killed in the 1970s when the whites abandoned the increasingly black city, which now is only 44 percent white. There is not a department store within ten miles of City Hall. Big stores like Gerber’s, Lowenstein’s, and Bry’s are all gone now. The area surrounding the municipal buildings, courthouses, and county offices is littered with pawnshops, bail bondsmen, and vacant storefronts. What would have long ago been a well-developed Mississippi River waterfront in any other town is just now seeing walking paths, green grass, and trees. With the exception of a few tall buildings built by the city’s superior hospitals—Baptist and Methodist—and by First Tennessee Bank and Union Planters Bank, one gets the sense that no major company or industry calls Memphis its home. Federal Express is there—several miles out of downtown, near the airport, but the headquarters for Holiday Inn and Cook Industries left years ago.

Even the city’s premier hotel, the Peabody—as plush as it is, by Memphis standards—seems a bit corny and anachronistic. Founded in 1869 and rebuilt in the 1920s, the imposing brick structure attracts tourists to its main lobby each morning for a ritual that began in the 1930s and continues today, seven days a week. At 11:00 A.M. sharp, an elevator door opens on the main floor, and marching in line across the carpeted floor are five trained ducks. Marching in unison to taped music that plays over the lobby speakers, the small ducks waddle toward a small, ornate fountain and pool in the middle of the floor. One by one, they hop up to the fountain and then dive into the pool. The routine is repeated in reverse at 5:00 each afternoon. Since the hotel had a policy of segregation thoughout my older relatives’ lives, it was not until we were teenagers that they permitted us to visit the building and view this amusing event.

“Memphis used to have the largest and most developed metropolitan area in Tennessee,” explained a black former city councilman who acknowledges that a fear of integration is what kept Memphis small and rather underdeveloped. “It can’t be blamed on the people who are in power today,” he says, “but those who were making decisions in the 1950s and 1960s created a problem between the races and within the corporate community that was hard to correct.”

The city’s black elite seem to be painfully aware of how much better their black counterparts are doing in Nashville—a city whose metropolitan area had once been less affluent, less respected, and less populated than that of Memphis. In fact, most of the Memphis black elite who had grown up in the city prior to the 1960s had to leave town and go to Nashville in order to get their education. Although the town had the small, all-black LeMoyne College since 1870, it lacked the truly elite black institutions that Nashville had: Fisk University and Meharry Medical College. The black Memphians also lacked Nashville’s Tennessee State University, a black public college that ran itself like an elite private school.

“Although I grew up in Memphis—a city that looked down on Nashville at the time,” explains a sixty-year-old physician who attended Fisk, “I always had the feeling that Nashville was going to catch up and then leave us behind—intellectually and racially. Memphis had no premier schools for whites or blacks, and Nashville had Vanderbilt for whites and these other top schools for us. White Memphians—and even some black Memphians—seemed to get more backward and more provincial as other cities outgrew us. So few blacks here were able to break out of the box and really gain national exposure the way that blacks in Nashville did.”

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by Joel | 21 June 2007 · 10:37 pm

Quirky Minor League Team Names

In the Montgomery, Alabama, visitor center that used to serve as the city’s Union Station, there’s a cleverly named restaurant called Lek’s Railroad Thai. It was there that I discovered that the city’s minor league (AA) baseball team is called the Biscuits (2006 Southern League Champions). What a nice bit of self-mocking regional pride! Of course, we were headed that night for the home of the Columbus, Georgia, Catfish, a name that inspires such headlines as RiverDogs fry Catfish and Braves filet Catfish. And the next day, we were headed toward the hometown of the Savannah, Georgia, Sand Gnats.

A lot of minor league team names are not only boring, but predictable. Guess whose farm teams the following are: the Richmond Braves, Iowa Cubs, Sarasota Reds, Binghamton Mets, Reading Phillies, San Jose Giants, Springfield Cardinals, Potomac Nationals, Dunedin Blue Jays, Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Yankees, Omaha Royals, Kinston Indians, and Pawtucket Red Sox.

Other team affiliations are not dead giveaways, but pretty easy derivatives of the parent team name: the Tucson Sidewinders, Delmarva Shorebirds, Aberdeen Ironbirds, Rochester Red Wings, San Antonio Missions, Memphis Redbirds, Tacoma Rainiers, and Harrisburg Senators.

But my favorite team names are those with strong local flavor, and little reflection of their parent organizations: the Augusta GreenJackets (Giants), Cedar Rapids Kernels (Angels), Chattanooga Lookouts (Reds), Lansing Lugnuts (Blue Jays), Louisville Bats (Reds), Hickory Crawdads (Pirates), Great Lakes Loons (Dodgers), Rancho Cucamonga Quakes (Angels), Albuquerque Isotopes (Marlins), Lowell Spinners (Red Sox), Tennessee Smokies (Cubs), Mahoning Valley Scrappers (Indians), Durham Bulls (Devil Rays), Norfolk Tides (Orioles), Brevard County Manatees (Brewers), and–my favorite–Modesto Nuts (Rockies).

Future team names I’d like to see are the Orange County Fruits, Gilroy Garlics, Salinas Lechuga, Monterey Squid, Madison Brats, Waukegan Wieners, Ozark Nightcrawlers, Bismarck Sugar Beets, Rapid City Rutabagas, and Smithfield (Virginia) Hams.

UPDATE: Isotopes Park in Albuquerque hosted the Triple-A All-Star Game on 11 July 2007.

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by Joel | 20 June 2007 · 9:22 pm

The Scottsboro Boys Revisited

Today’s Opinion Journal features an editorial by John Steele Gordon that reminds us of another famous case of wrongful prosecution on the basis of race and class:

On March 25, 1931, a group of nine young black men got into a fight with a group of whites while riding a freight train near Paint Rock, Ala. All but one of the whites were forced to jump off the train. But when it reached Paint Rock, the blacks were arrested. Two white women, dressed in boys clothing, were found on the train as well, Victoria Price, 21, and Ruby Bates, 17. Unemployed mill workers, they both had worked as prostitutes in Huntsville. Apparently to avoid getting into trouble themselves, they told a tale of having been brutally gang raped by the nine blacks.

The blacks were taken to the jail in Scottsboro, the county seat. Because the circumstances of the women’s story–black men attacking and raping white women–fit the prevailing racial paradigm of the local white population, guilt was assumed and the governor was forced to call out the National Guard to prevent a lynch mob from hanging the men on the spot. The nine were indicted on March 30 and, by the end of April, all had been tried, convicted and sentenced to death (except for the one who was 13 years old, who was sentenced to life in prison).

A year later, the Alabama Supreme Court upheld the convictions of those on death row, except for one who was determined to be a juvenile. By this time, however, the “Scottsboro Boys” had become a national and even international story, with rallies taking place in many cities in the North. Thousands of letters poured into the Alabama courts and the governor’s office demanding justice.

The International Labor Defense, the legal arm of the Communist Party USA, provided competent legal help, and the convictions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court because the defendants had not received adequate counsel. Samuel Leibowitz, a highly successful New York trial lawyer (he would later serve on the state’s highest court) was hired to defend the accused in a second trial, held in Decatur, Ala. This turned out to be a tactical error, as Leibowitz was perceived by the local jury pool–all of them white, of course–as an outsider, a Jew and a communist (which he was not). Even though Ruby Bates repudiated her earlier testimony and said no rape had taken place, the accused were again convicted, this time the jury believing that Ruby Bates had been bribed to perjure herself.

Again the sentences were overturned, and in 1937–six years after the case began–four of the defendants had the charges dropped. One pleaded guilty to having assaulted the sheriff (and was sentenced to 20 years) and the other four were found guilty, once again, of rape. Eventually, as Jim Crow began to yield to the civil rights movement, they were paroled or pardoned, except for one who had escaped from prison and fled to Michigan. When he was caught in the 1950s, the governor of Michigan refused to allow his extradition to Alabama….

Here is where the real difference between the Scottsboro boys and the Duke boys kicked in: not race but money. The Scottsboro boys were destitute and spent years in jail, while the Duke boys were all from families who could afford first-class legal talent. Their lawyers quickly began blowing hole after hole in the case and releasing the facts to the media until it was obvious that a miscarriage of justice had occurred. The three Duke boys were guilty only of being white and affluent.

But former defense attorney David Feige writes in Monday’s Slate that prosecutorial misconduct is common but rarely punished.

Now that justice has prevailed in the Duke rape case, with the nice innocent boys exonerated and the prosecutor who hounded them disbarred, it is tempting to chalk the whole incident up to an unusual and terrible mistake—a zany allegation taken too seriously by a run-amok prosecutor. It would be pretty to think that Nifong’s humbling suggests that our system of justice works well, harshly punishing the few rogue prosecutors who subvert the legal process. But this is simply not true.

Prosecutors almost never face public censure or disbarment for their actions. In fact, it took a perfect storm of powerful defendants, a rapt public, and demonstrable factual innocence to produce the outcome that ended Mr. Nifong’s career. And because only a handful of prosecutors will ever face the sort of adversaries Nifong did or come close to the sort of scrutiny the former DA endured, the Duke fiasco will make little difference in how criminal law is practiced in courthouses around the country. Regardless of Nifong’s sanction, the drama leaves prosecutorial misconduct commonplace, unseen, uncorrected, and unpunished.

One could say the same for all the myopic lemmings with pitchforks of the Fourth Estate, talk radio, university campuses, and the political blogosphere, not to mention the sorry political class worldwide.

New Madrid: Spanish Influence at the Confluence

The name of New Madrid is but one indication that the Spanish once controlled the Mississippi River as far north as its confluence with the Ohio. A plaque erected by the Missouri Marquette Tercentenary Commission at Trail of Tears State Park on the river between Ste. Genevieve and Cape Girardeau reminds us of why Marquette and Joliet turned around near that point on the river.

In 1672, Louis Joliet and Father Jacques Marquette were commissioned by King Louis XIV to discover the course of the Mississippi River. On June 17, 1673, the expedition entered the Mississippi via the Wisconsin river and began their descent by canoe.

On July 4, 1673, the seven-man expedition passed the mouth of the turbulent and later observed the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi. On reaching an Arkansas Indian village near present Helena, July 17, they were certain that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico. Fearful of the Spanish if they continued southward, at this point Father Marquette and Joliet turned back.

A dedicated and gentle priest, Father Marquette first brought the Word of God into the Mississippi Valley, gave the world an account of its lands and, with Joliet, laid the basis for France’s claims to the area.

Born in Laon, France, June 1, 1637, Father Marquette died April 18, 1675, on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan from the hardships of his missionary life.

The Spanish were still influential at the time of the Meriwether Lewis and William Clark expedition in 1804–1806, as a State Historical Society of Missouri signboard at the Trail of Tears State Park notes.

Writing in 1803, Nicholas de Finiel, a French military engineer, described the Shawnee villages along Apple Creek that Lewis mentioned: “These villages were more systematically and solidly constructed than the usual Indian villages. Around their villages the Indians soon cleared the land, which was securely fenced around in the American style in order to protect the harvest from animals. The first of these villages is located five or six leagues from Cape Girardeau, along the road to Ste. Genevieve…”

Shawnee presence in the area was a matter of international politics. Shawnee and Delaware Indians from Ohio were invited to Cape Girardeau in the 1780s by Spain’s district commandant, Louis Lorimier, who had traded with those tribes in Ohio. Spain, which governed the Louisiana territory then, welcomed the “Absentee Shawnee” with ulterior motives. It believed they would be a buffer against the Osage and against American ambitions to expand their borders. Coincidentally, Gen. George Rogers Clark, William Clark’s older brother, had burned Lorimier’s Ohio post because Lorimier sided with the British during the American Revolution.

An historical marker on the levee at New Madrid calls it “The first American town in Missouri”:

Founded in 1789 by George Morgan, Princeton graduate and Indian trader, on the site of Francois and Joseph Le Sieur’s trading settlement, L’Anse a la Graise (Fr. Cove of Fat). Flood and caving banks have destroyed the first town site.

Named for Madrid, Spain, the town was to be an American colony. Morgan was promised 15 million acres by the Spanish ambassador, eager to check U.S. expansion with large land grants. Spain did not confirm his grant but gave land to colonists. Morgan left but he had started American immigration to Missouri.

French and American settlers contributed to town growth. Here were founded a Catholic church, 1789; a Methodist church, 1810; and here was the southern [northern?] extent of El Camino Real or King’s Highway, 1789. There are over 160 Indian mounds in the county, two near town.

“Boot Heel” counties, including a strip of New Madrid, are said to be part of Missouri through efforts of J. H. Walker (1794-1860), planter at Little Prairie (Caruthersville), Pemiscot Co. In nearby Mississippi Co. is Big Oak Tree State Park, a notable hardwood forest.

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by Joel | 17 June 2007 · 2:06 pm

Atlanta’s Black Aristocracy

There is no major metropolitan area that has a better-organized black upper class than the city of Atlanta. Exerting its power in the worlds of politics, business and academia, Atlanta’s black elite sets the gold standard for its counterparts in other cities.

“We’ve had three black mayors with national reputations,” says my friend Janice White Sikes of the city’s Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History, the nation’s best collection of black Atlanta history documents. “We are home to the best-known historically black colleges. And in addition to hosting the Olympics we have some black-owned companies that are the oldest of their kind in the country.”

Although she has spent most of her career researching and writing about an older, more rural Georgia, it is obvious that what excites Sikes most as we sit in the dining room of the Atlanta Ritz-Carlton is talking about the new Atlanta and how the black community has played a role in making it one of the most popular destinations for elite blacks in search of a city where they are in control.

“This city produced older civil rights leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond, and Congressman John Lewis,” she adds while looking over some notes describing her uncle, a black class-of-1933 Harvard graduate, “but Atlanta has also elevated people like Andrew Young, Maynard Jackson, and Johnetta Cole to national standing in recent years.”

Unlike other cities of its size and sophistication, Atlanta has seen a black elite forge strong enough ties between blacks, whites, and the business communities of both groups to elect three consecutive black mayors. What is also interesting is that Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, and current mayor William Campbell are solidly representative of the black upper class—a characteristic that historically has not been welcome in black electoral candidates in cities like Washington, Chicago, or Detroit. In fact, when Marion Barry and Coleman Young of Washington and Detroit, respectively, were campaigning in mayoral races, they bragged about their ties to the urban working-class community. In Atlanta, good lineage, money, and top school credentials are appreciated by the black mainstream.

In addition to excelling in political clout, black Atlantans outstrip other cities’ elite in the area of college ties. Atlanta’s black academic community is larger than any other city’s because of prestigious schools like Spelman, Morehouse, Morris Brown, and Clark Atlanta. When former Spelman College president Johnetta Cole received a $20 million gift from Bill and Camille Cosby (she is a Spelman alumnus) in 1993, other cities and their black colleges took notice of the strong black university consortium that was growing on the southwest side of Atlanta.

And further reinforcing the role and place of the black elite in the city are its black-owned businesses. While it does not outnumber New York or Chicago in black entrepreneurs, the city does claim the nation’s largest black-owned insurance company (Atlanta Life), the largest black-owned real estate development firm (H. J. Russell), and some of the country’s top black-controlled investment firms, law firms, auto dealerships, and food service companies.

SOURCE: Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, by Lawrence Otis Graham (Harper, 2000), pp. 321-322

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