Category Archives: U.S.

by Joel | 15 June 2007 · 8:19 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Haint Blue

In Savannah, Georgia, last month the Far Outliers toured the Telfair Museum of Art‘s Owens-Thomas House, where we saw haint blue paint on the walls and rafters of the former slave quarters that now serves as a gift shop, waiting room, and exhibit (upstairs). Such blue paint is common in areas influenced by slaves from Africa.

The blue paint is said to ward off evil spirits and, by some accounts, insects. I lean toward the more practical explanation, for reasons elaborated below, but first I want to note an odd set of sound correspondences, where one member of each pair is not just nonstandard, but highly stigmatized.

haint ~ haunt
aint ~ aunt
ain’t ~ aren’t (in r-less dialects)
cain’t ~ can’t

I don’t know anyone who pronounces every member of the set with the ai vowel. Nor do I know anyone who has the same vowel in each member of the set. Nowadays, I pronounce each with a different vowel: (roughly) hawnt, ahnt, arnt, kænt. As a kid, I used to say cain’t (as my father still does), but I made a conscious effort to expel such (self-)stigmatized regionalisms from my speech during my youth. Worse yet, I used to tease my Southern Baptist missionary kid cohorts who returned from their furlough years with their regional accents in full flower. Some of my southern Virginia relatives also pronounce aunt the way Andy Griffith did in the name of Aunt Bee on Mayberry RFD (said to be based on Mt. Airy, NC), but I don’t know anyone who pronounces haunt the same way, except in jest.

Has anyone else noticed this odd correspondence set? Are there other possible members of the set?

Enough linguistics; now back to insects. Last year in Japan, I heard that indigo dye had mosquito-repellent properties, among other magical qualities. Historian and librarian Jennifer Payne has compiled some interesting evidence for the beneficial effects of indigo plantations, not just its blue dye. Here are a few excerpts (omitting footnotes).

Agriculture, disease, and slavery were three basic and interconnected aspects of life in Colonial South Carolina. Where one existed, the other two were sure to follow within a very short time. By the mid eighteenth century, rice culture, slavery, malaria and yellow fever were well established as a self-perpetuating cycle which had an adverse effect upon the life spans of the colonists. This study examines the establishment of the “rice-slavery-disease” cycle, speculates on how this cycle was broken by the introduction of indigo, and postulates how indigo effected the yellow fever/malaria mortality rates of Colonial South Carolina….

During the very same fifty years in which indigo took hold in South Carolina, an interesting phenomenon occurred. Persons in Berkeley County near Charleston began to live longer; the number of persons dying during the malarial months [August through November] began to drop. Furthermore, the frequent outbreaks of yellow fever in Charleston began to slow down and eventually, for a time, discontinue entirely….

The most dramatic change occurred between 1760 and 1800 during the years in which indigo gained its height. Only 20% of the males died before forty and some 45% lived to be sixty or more. Moreover, only 18% of adult women died before fifty and some 70% survived beyond seventy. Those statistics involving women are especially revealing for women tended to become victims to malaria during their childbearing years. The fact that a greater percentage of the female population survived past fifty is significant. Thus, according to this evidence, something was enabling the people of Christchurch and St. Johns parishes in Berkeley county to survive malaria and malarial complications during the last forty years of the eighteenth century….

Why was there a decline in malarial mortality and a cessation of yellow fever epidemics? One medical historian jokingly suggested that perhaps the Mosquitoes simply went away for forty years. This might be true. Interestingly, the yellow fever epidemics ended just as indigo gained ground as a staple cash crop. Even more fascinating is the fact that the yellow fever epidemics resumed as indigo culture was rapidly phased out after the Revolution. Although in 1788, 833,500 pounds of indigo were being exported, in 1790, only 1694 casks of the stuff were exported. By 1796, indigo had been virtually eliminated from the agricultural economy. Conversely, the epidemics raged within three years of this decline. Thus, it is quite possible that the introduction, rise, and subsequent fall of indigo production had an effect upon mortality rates in colonial South Carolina….

Was it simply coincidence that yellow fever and malaria experienced a decline during indigo’s rise, or are the two related in some manner[?] Whatever the connection between indigo and the mosquito is, the is little doubt that during the years of indigo’s sudden and swift rise in cultivation, the number of people dying from malaria related complications and those dying from yellow fever dropped markedly. Eliza Lucas Pinckney introduced a new cash crop which helped to make South Carolina one of England’s wealthiest colonies. However, her actions might have also helped the population of South Carolina reduce the fever mortality rates. The introduction of indigo broke the vicious cycle of rice cultivation, slavery, and fever by introducing a method of agriculture which did not rely on large amounts of standing water. Furthermore, the return of yellow fever epidemics in the mid 1790’s coincided with the rapid decline of indigo production due to the loss of the incentive of the bounty. Although the exact nature of indigo’s influence on the mosquito can only be speculated, research conducted to date indicates the probability of a connection between the two.

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by Joel | 11 June 2007 · 1:01 pm

Chicago’s Black Elite

First founded and settled by the black explorer Jean-Baptiste DuSable of [Saint Domingue =] Haiti, in 1773, Chicago was begun as a thirty-acre land parcel. DuSable, working as a fur trapper and trading-post operator, eventually owned in excess of four hundred acres. He and his new Native American wife remained in the area until 1800, when he moved to Missouri.

With an early black population that was much smaller than those of southern cities like Washington, Memphis, Atlanta, and Richmond, Chicago had a small black elite in the mid- and late 1800s—it consisted of only a few families. Most of them lived very integrated lives: They interacted while working together with liberal whites who had been abolitionists when the Underground Railroad moved black southern slaves into the North. The black elite of the period included people like physician Daniel Williams, Pullman Train Company executive Julius Avendorph, caterer Charles Smiley, and attorney Laing Williams. They were all educated people who lived, worked, and socialized among whites. “In fact,” says Travis, who also wrote the book Autobiography of Black Chicago, “at that time, there were blacks living throughout the North Side and elsewhere. Though we were small in numbers, we were represented in every census tract.”

Travis points out, however, that the total black population was still under fifteen thousand people. It was not until around World War I, the time of a major black migration from the South to the North, that a substantial black population arrived in the city. Most of these black southerners came—about seventy thousand of them between 1900 and 1920—as a result of the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper that was read in the South by educated blacks eager to escape their more rural environment. When these blacks arrived in town, the old-guard black families and their social clubs immediately decided who was “in” and who was not. Truman Gibson’s parents and Maudelle Bousfield Evans’s parents were clearly “in” as far as the black old guard was concerned. Interestingly, as old-guard blacks were busy trying to separate the “society blacks” like themselves from the new working-class arrivals, whites were making plans to ghettoize both groups together on the South Side. And they quickly did so by establishing restrictive covenants that moved blacks out of white areas.

In fact, the white community responded quite aggressively to black mobility during the early years of World War I. In the working-class and middle-class white neighborhoods that saw blacks moving in, white residents simply bombed the houses or set them afire. In more upscale neighborhoods like Hyde Park, which surrounds the University of Chicago, white residents organized a full-blown plan to preempt any sales to upwardly mobile blacks who might be able to afford homes in the well-to-do community. My Uncle Telfer, who died before the upscale neighborhood allowed blacks to buy homes there, had saved a copy of Hyde Park’s neighborhood newspaper, published in 1920, which read, “Every colored man who moves into the Hyde Park neighborhood knows that he is damaging his white neighbor’s property. Consequently … he forfeits his right to be employed by the white man…. Employers should adopt a rule of refusing to employ Negroes who persist in residing in Hyde Park.”

Soon after that time, restrictive covenants making it illegal to sell homes to blacks, regardless of their wealth, were strictly enforced.

But regardless of how violently whites reacted to the influx of poor and upwardly mobile blacks, the old-guard blacks of Chicago had their own dismal way of responding to their fellow blacks in this northern city. They were not happy to see them arriving.

“Not surprisingly, elitism was quite evident. But the rules governing black society in Chicago were always slightly different from the rules that were used in the southern cities,” explains former Chicago Defender society columnist Theresa Fambro Hooks. “In the South, black society was determined by the years your family had lived in a particular city and by their ties to one or more of the nearby black colleges like Howard or Fisk or Spelman. But the rules were different in Chicago because almost everybody was new—almost all of them had migrated from the South. There were very few old families and there were no old local black universities to be tied to.”

So the standard for black society in Chicago became, instead, financial success and, to a lesser extent, family ties to a few of the northern white universities. In both regards, the Gibson and Bousfield families were at the top. Acceptance by the right schools, the right churches, and the right clubs proved that.

SOURCE: Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, by Lawrence Otis Graham (Harper, 2000), pp. 189-190

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by Joel | 10 June 2007 · 5:31 am

Paducah’s Men in Quilts

One of the artistic highlights of our recent Great Square Route around the eastern U.S. (MN – MS – GA – CT – MN) was the stunning Museum of the American Quilting Society in Paducah, Kentucky, which had just opened a special exhibit, 4 Guys & Their Quilts:

On exhibit May 16-August 12, these quilts combine the talents of four male award-winning quilters: John Flynn, Gerald E. Roy, Arturo Alonzo Sandoval and Ricky Tims. MAQS Curator of Collection Judy Schwender is proud to bring lesser known viewpoints from the quilting world to the Museum’s visitors.

“Any quilt reveals the sensibilities of its maker, and men bring perspectives to quilting that are unique to the medium,” Schwender explains. “Within the world of quilting, men are a minority, and the museum is committed to presenting quilting viewpoints of underserved populations.”

My favorite among the 4 Guys was Ricky Tims, whose work ranges from exquisite variations on traditional quilting patterns, like his Bohemian Rhapsody or New World Symphony, to renditions in fabric of depictive art that would not look out of place on a framed canvas or in stained glass, like his South Cheyenne Canyon or Glen Eyrie Castle.

Among the new quilting terms and techniques I learned about at the museum was trapunto (also called “stuffed work”), a texture-enhancing technique that Tims puts to fine use in his Rhapsody in Green.

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by Joel | 9 June 2007 · 4:52 pm

Minnesota’s Canned Corn and Carp

A 1997 Minnesota Historical Society plaque at a rest area near the state line on I-35 tells a bit about the history of Minnesota’s canneries.

Early settlers grew bumper wheat crops on Minnesota’s fertile prairies, land that today supplies produce for a thriving 270-million-dollars-a-year canning industry.

Sweet corn canneries opened in Austin and Mankato in the 1880s, followed soon thereafter by similar factories in Faribault, Owatonna, and LaSueur. Soon Minnesota’s canners were experimenting with new technologies and new products, and in 1903 the automated Big Stone Canning Company founded by F. W. Douthitt changed the industry nationwide. Douthitt’s plant in Ortonville had a conveyor system, mechanical corn husking machines, and a power driven cutter that produced the first whole kernel canned corn. The Green Giant Company, also founded in 1903 as the Minnesota Valley Canning Company, introduced golden cream-style corn in 1924 and the first vacuum packed corn in 1929.

Corn is still the major canning crop in Minnesota. The state’s more than thirty plants also freeze and can peas, beans, carrots, tomatoes, pork, beef, chicken products, and such unusual items as rutabagas. Mankato was the site of the nation’s first carp cannery in 1946.

For more on canned carp, read Dumneazu‘s well-illustrated blogpost on the Odessa Fish Market. In fact, just keep scrolling for an incomparable travelogue series on Dumneazu’s recent adventures in Ukraine.

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by Joel | 9 June 2007 · 8:00 am

Iowa’s Passing Mormons and Utopians

A State Historical Society of Iowa plaque at a pretty little welcome center off Exit 4 on I-35 in Iowa tells two interesting stories, one on each side.

The Mormon Trail

The Mormons of Nauvoo, Illinois, forced from their homes following the murder of their prophet, Joseph Smith, Jr., began their trek across Iowa in 1846 on their way to the Great Salt Lake Valley. From their first permanent campsite on Sugar Creek they travelled across southern Iowa toward Winter Quarters, near present-day Omaha. In addition to Sugar Creek, the Mormons also established permanent camps at Garden Grove in Decatur County, Mount Pisgah in Union County, and Kanesville in Pottawattamie County.

While camped by Locust Creek, near Corydon, William Clayton learned of the birth of his son in Nauvoo. On April 15, 1846, to commemorate this joyous event, he wrote the famous hymn “Come, Come, Ye Saints.” The hymn became a great rallying song of the Mormons.

In 1846, seven Mormon families became separated from the larger body of migrants. They stopped for the winter in present-day Green Bay Township, Clarke County, and established what was known as “Lost Camp.” These families remained in the area until 1854, when they resumed the trek to Utah.

Utopian Experiments in Southern Iowa

Several utopian groups attempted to implement in southern Iowa their dreams of a better social structure. In 1839, Abner Kneeland, a pantheist, started Salubria in Van Buren County. Beset with economic problems, the experiment dissolved after Kneeland died in 1844. In 1843, followers of French socialist Charles Fourier founded Phalanx in Mahaska County, but this communal experiment lasted only two years. Followers of another Frenchman, Etienne Cabet, tried several experiments in the United States, including Icaria in Adams County, which existed from 1860 to 1895.

Led by Ladislaus Ujhazy, a group of Hungarian refugees from the Revolutions of 1848 settled in Decatur County in 1850 and founded the town of New Buda. After experiencing economic difficulties, most of these people moved to Texas in 1853.

In 1851, people from near Farmington formed a communal association called the Hopewell Colony. They moved to Clarke County later that year, and founded the town of Hopeville. Although the communal nature of the colony soon changed, the village survived and for several decades was a thriving community. It is the only one of these southern Iowa utopian experiments whose remnants lasted into the 20th century.

Wisconsin also seems to have attracted more than its share of utopians, these days confined mostly to Madison, I suspect.

The best-known communal experiment in Wisconsin was the Wisconsin Phalanx, a community based on the principles of Charles Fourier, established at Ceresco (Ripon). It was the second largest Fourierist experiment in the country, lasting from 1844 until 1850, and housed around 180 people, most of whom lived communally in the Long House. Although the Phalanx was an economic success and attract[ed] national attention, problems developed and the members agreed to dissolve their community in 1850.

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by Joel | 6 June 2007 · 8:00 pm

Wordcatcher Tales: Gum naval, Jump-butt, Stumpage value

On the road from Columbus to Savannah, Georgia, during our recent Great Square Route around the eastern U.S. (MN – MS – GA – CT – MN), we stopped at the Million Pines Visitor Center off I-16 in Soperton, Georgia. The visitor center includes the Curt Barwick House, built of wood about 1845, which houses the front desk, gift shop, restrooms, and various display items; a one-room wooden house with a tin roof that served as the post office for Blackville, Georgia, from 1888 to 1904; and a wooden shed containing tools used to produce gum naval stores.

The latter term was new to me. It bears no relation to naval jelly (phosphoric acid), which is used on iron ships. Gum naval dates back to the days of wooden ships, when Georgia played an important role in the naval stores industry, as the New Georgia Encyclopedia relates:

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Georgia was the world’s leading producer of naval stores, which are materials extracted from southern pine forests and then used in the construction and repair of sailing vessels. Typical naval stores include lumber, railroad ties, rosin, and turpentine.

The naval stores industry in North America originated in the mid-eighteenth century in North Carolina. Before 1800 the major products of the trade were raw gum, pitch, and tar. After the American Revolution (1775-83), processes were developed for distilling spirits of turpentine from gum. By 1850, 96 percent of U.S. naval stores came from North Carolina.

In the early 1870s North Carolina naval stores producers began migrating to southeast Georgia’s sandy coastal plain to take advantage of the untapped virgin pine forests in that region. They brought their equipment and black laborers and established residential villages on large turpentine farms. By the mid-1880s about seven in ten turpentine workers in southeast Georgia had been born in North Carolina.

The industry grew so rapidly that by 1890 Georgia was the national leader in naval stores production, a ranking that lasted until 1905. Florida was the leader from 1905 to 1923, after which Georgia regained its predominance and maintained it until the 1960s.

The USDA Forest Service Southern Research Station Headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina, describes some of the nitty gritty of production. Here are two photo captions from their website:

Photo caption: Improved gum naval stores extraction methods require new tools and techniques. Bark streaks 9 feet from the ground require a special long handled tool for pulling the streak and safely applying the acid. A combination bark-pulling and acid-treating tool was designed to meet this need. The laborer is shown applying 50-percent sulfuric acid to a streak 8 feet from the ground. This tool enables a laborer to stand a safe distance from the tree and reduce the hazard of acid drifting down on his head and clothes.

Photo caption: No more jump-butts and wasted timber as a result of turpentining. A turpentined tree containing both front and back faces and worked for 8 years is shown entering a German gang-saw to produce quality lumber. Developing conservative gu[m] extraction methods for the gum producer represents only half the problem, research must also prove to wood using industries that modern turpentining does not impair the stumpage value of the worked out tree.

The punctuation in the second caption sucks rather badly, but the wonderful collocations make up for it. Jump-butts in this context seems to refer to the discarded lower portion of turpentined trees. Stumpage value is the calculated value of standing timber. The butt log is the often slightly irregular log taken from the base of a tree.

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by Joel | 12 May 2007 · 8:08 pm

Road Trip Hiatus until June

The Far Outliers will be on the road for the rest of the month. The overland portion will start in Minnesota, then head south through Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, then east through Alabama and Georgia, then north through South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York to Connecticut for our daughter’s graduation over Memorial Day weekend. Then we’ll head back west through New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

We’ll see family in Minnesota, Missouri, Kentucky, Virginia, and Wisconsin; old friends in Georgia, Ohio, and Illinois; and do some sightseeing in the Deep South, especially Natchez and Savannah. Expect little or no blogging, but a lot of new photos on my Flickr account after we return. Among the books I plan to read on the trip are the novel East Wind, Rain, by Caroline Paul (Harper, 2006) and Our Kind of People: Inside America’s Black Upper Class, by Lawrence Otis Graham (Harper, 2000).

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by Joel | 7 May 2007 · 10:22 pm

Japanese Loanwords in Pohnpeian

During the period of Japanese rule (1914–1945) the islands of the Marianas, Palau/Belau and Ponape/Pohnpei were the most intensely colonized areas of Micronesia. By 1938, about nine out of ten people in the Marianas were Japanese colonists (many of them from Okinawa or Korea), and the same was true for about two out of three in Palau and about one out of three in Ponape. As a result, Pohnpeian adopted many words from Japanese, some of which are have fallen out of use or been replaced by words from English as the prewar and wartime generation passes from the scene.

The following lists are presented in my rendition of the current standard Pohnpeian spelling. My linguistic source cites the same forms in a phonemic transcription, but I want to give my readers a feel for the workings of one of the most successful orthographies in Micronesia.

Standard Pohnpeian distinguishes 7 vowels, but only 5 are needed for the Japanese loans, and vowel length is indicated by a trailing h. (The language has no glottal consonants, neither h nor glottal stop.) Palatal glides are written with i, but labiovelar glides are written with w. Pohnpeian makes no distinction between voiced and voiceless obstruents, which are written p, d, t, s, k. Note that d is a dental stop and t is a laminal stop (which sounds a bit like ty to me).

Domestic articles

aisara ‘ashtray’
asi ‘chopsticks’
dama ‘lightbulb’
dawasi ‘Japanese brush’
dompwuri ‘bowl’
kadorsingko ‘mosquito coil’
kama ‘sickle’ or ‘pot’
manaida ‘cutting board’
parikang ‘hair clipper’
samusi ‘rice paddle’
sarasi ‘bleach’

Food items

aiskehki ‘popsicle’
ansu ‘star fruit tree’
dakuwang ‘pickled radish’
kasuwo ‘skipjack tuna’
kiarameru ‘caramel’
kiuhri ‘cucumber’
pihru ‘beer’
ramen ‘noodle soup’
ramwune ‘marble’
samma ‘mackeral’
sasimi ‘sashimi’
saida ‘soda’
soiu ‘soy sauce’
sukiaki ‘sukiyaki’

Game/Sports terms

anaire ‘marble game’ (sometimes araine)
apadopi ‘long jump’
damaski ‘pool, billiards’
deng ‘score’
iakiu ‘baseball’
iakumehda ‘hundred meter dash’
iohidong ‘ready, set, go’
iranai ‘to pass in a card game’
kesso ‘to run or swim the final lap in a race’
kurop ‘baseball glove’
lepdo ‘left field’
masuku ‘catcher’s mask’
pahsdo ‘first base’
rensuh ‘to practice for an athletic event’
sahdo ‘third base’
sakura ‘hanafuda card game’
sandangdopi ‘hop-skip-jump’
sansing ‘to strike out [in baseball]’
sensuh ‘athlete’
suhdo ‘judo’

Personal articles

angkasi ‘handkerchief’
asmaki ‘headband’
kamidome ‘barrette’
kapang ‘bag’
pwundosi ‘loincloth’
sarmada ‘underwear’ (now women’s vs. pirihp ‘men’s underwear’)
sohri ‘thongs’ [‘rubber slippers’]
depwukuro ‘gloves’

Others

aikiu ‘to ration’
amimono ‘knitted object’
anapi ‘fire cracker’
apwunai ‘watch out!’
adasi ‘to go barefoot’
iddai, eddai, edai ‘ouch!’
daidowa ‘World War II, old times’
dekking ‘concrete reinforcing bar’
dempoh ‘telegram’
dengki ‘electricity, light’
denso ‘ceiling’
dendenmwosi ‘large land snail’
dopas ‘quickly, fast, speedy’
kairu ‘frog’
kakko ‘showing off’
kampio ‘to care for an invalid in the hospital’
kasdo ‘movie’
kenkang ‘porch’
kisingai ‘crazy, mad’
koiasi ‘fertilizer’
kona ‘toothpaste’
kukusuh ‘air gun’
kuruma ‘cart’
makunai ‘unskillful, not tasty’
mangnga ‘cartoon, character’
mai ‘skillful, good’
mwohso ‘appendicitis’
ompwu ‘to be carried on another’s back’
pariki ‘to go fast’
paiking ‘infection’
pangku ‘flat tire, broken slipper’
pampei ‘security guard’
pwohsdo ‘post office’
pwuhseng ‘balloon’
pwuraia ‘pliers’
rakudai ‘failure’
sahpis ‘service’
sidohsa ‘automobile’
sirangkawe ‘to ignore’
sohko ‘warehouse’
suhmwong ‘to order’

Archaic terms

dampwo ‘rice paddy’
dane ‘seed’
dengwa ‘telephone’
deriuhdang ‘hand grenade’
impiokai ‘agricultural fair’
kansohpa ‘copra drying shed’
kikansu ‘machine gun’
kinsipakudang ‘atomic bomb’
osime ‘diaper’
passai ‘to cut grass’
pwohkungko ‘air-raid shelter’
sendohki ‘fighter plane’
simpung ‘newspaper’
skohso ‘airport’
windeng ‘to drive’

SOURCES: Kimi Miyagi. 2000. Japanese loanwords in Pohnpeian: Adaptation and attrition. Japanese Linguistics 7:114–132. Mark R. Peattie. 1988. Nan’yō: The Rise and Fall of the Japanese in Micronesia, 1885–1945. Pacific Islands Monograph Series, No. 4. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press.

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by Joel | 2 May 2007 · 6:01 pm

The Tang Chinese Predecessors of Matthew C. Perry, 664

Once upon a time, residents of a fishing village in Japan watched with trepidation as a fleet of foreign warships appeared in the offing beyond their own little harbor. The main concern was their lives. What knew what strange creatures might be on board or what nefarious plans had brought them to Japan?…

The year was 1853 and the place was Uraga, situated near the tip of the Miura Peninsula at the mouth of Edo (now Tokyo) Bay.The foreign vessels were under the command of Matthew Calbraith Perry, an American naval officer charged by President Millard Fillmore to induce Japan to establish trade and diplomatic relations with the United States. (Not incidentally, Fillmore wanted Japan to open its ports to American whaling vessels, whaling being one of the great American industries of the era.)…

What few people realize is that Perry’s arrival was not the first time that such a scenario had played out upon Japanese soil. The events of 1853 were a close replay of an equally momentous occasion some twelve hundred years earlier. The year was 664, and the location was Tsushima, a mountainous isle (actually, two isles separated by a narrow strait) about 50 kilometers south of the Korean port of Pusan and 150 kilometers west of Hakata on the Kyushu mainland.

On that earlier occasion, the visitors had been Chinese, not American. Their large junks, bearing flags of the Tang empire, had first been sighted on an early summer’s day in the fourth month of the Japanese lunar calendar. The ships were slowly approaching Tsushima across the Korea Strait from the general direction of Paekche, a kingdom on the west side of the Korean Peninsula. They seemed to be making directly for the village—or more precisely, for the small harbor below, where the villagers’ fishing ships lay at anchor. Those watching the approach were worried—and with good reason….

Only the previous year—663 by the Western calendar …—a vast fleet had come from Hakata on its way to “rescue Paekche,” so they said. Woe be to them! Not long afterward, some of the tattered remnants of Yamato’s once-proud navy limped back to Tsushima. Few of the war veterans tarried long; they seemed afraid of who might follow in their wake. The same was true of the many refugees from Paekche—some of them members of the royal family—who accompanied the Japanese survivors. Before long, almost all the new arrivals had departed for the Kyushu mainland, or for Yamato.

SOURCE: Gateway to Japan: Hakata in War and Peace, 500–1300, by Bruce L. Batten (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2006), pp. 11-14

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by Joel | 24 April 2007 · 9:11 pm

Did Leopold & Loeb Inspire Myles Fukunaga?

Just as the immense publicity surrounding Harris and Klebold‘s shooting rampage at Columbine in April 1999 explicitly inspired Cho Seung-hui‘s copycat massacre at Virginia Tech in April 2007, the “Trial of the Century” of Leopold and Loeb for kidnap and murder in Chicago in May 1924 seems to have inspired Myles Fukunaga‘s copycat crime in Honolulu in September 1928.

Antiquarian bookseller and publisher Patterson Smith links the two plots:

In 1924 two precocious University of Chicago students, the sons of very wealthy Chicago families, planned the perfect crime. In 1924 Richard Loeb and his close friend Nathan Leopold selected a younger boy at random from the student body of an upscale private school in their neighborhood. They lured Bobby Franks into their rented car, bludgeoned him with a chisel, suffocated him with chloroform, and left his naked body in a marsh. They notified the Franks family by telephone that their son was in their hands and would be returned unharmed if the kidnapers’ instructions were followed and the police not notified. Loeb and Leopold then sent the Franks family a special-delivery letter detailing how $10,000 in ransom should be prepared.

So far everything had gone according to plan. But the plan proved faulty. The site for disposing of the victim had been ill chosen, and the body was discovered and identified before any ransom was paid. Worse, Leopold had dropped his eyeglasses at the site. The police traced them to their owner, uncovered his connection with Loeb, and interrogated the two young men separately. Their loosely prearranged alibi fell apart and both confessed. Only ten days had passed between the commission of the perfect crime and its solution. The perpetrators were indicted on separate murder and kidnaping charges, either of which subjected them to the death penalty for which the public clamored.

Enter Clarence Darrow for the defense. He elected to have the case be heard without a jury and their guilt or innocence be decided by the judge. The prosecution had over one hundred witnesses, the confessions of the accuseds, and an airtight case. The only hope for the defense seemed to rest on an insanity plea. Darrow had his clients interviewed by psychiatrist after psychiatrist in what looked like a search for congenial experts. But Darrow had been planning an altogether different course which he kept secret until the very last moment, even from his clients. In one of the most astounding ploys in an American courtroom, Darrow changed the plea of his clients from Not Guilty to Guilty on both counts of murder and kidnaping. The prosecution was thunderstruck; as the cliché has it, reporters raced for the telephones.

Darrow’s stroke had shifted the contest from guilt or innocence to the question of the punishment. The sentence was within the judge’s discretion—death or life imprisonment. By pleading his clients guilty to both counts, Darrow had prevented the prosecutor from retrying the case on the second count should the prisoners escape hanging on the first….

Another demented kidnaper who did not escape the death penalty was Myles Fukunaga, a Japanese-American who in 1928 abducted Gill Jamieson, the ten-year-old son of a bank vice-president in Honolulu. Fukunaga, aged 19, employed the familiar call-at-the-school tactic and drove the boy away in a cab. The next day a messenger delivered to his father a rambling letter signed “The Three Kings.” It demanded $10,000 in ransom, which the father paid.

The day after that a newspaper received a note from The Three Kings saying that “Gill Jamieson, poor innocent lad, has departed for the Unknown, a forlorn Walking Shadow in the Great Beyond, where we all go when our time comes.” Shortly thereafter the body of the boy, who had beaten to death, was found in a shrubbed area. It lay on a couch formed of burlap and sand surmounted by a cross. A cardboard containing a misquotation from Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” lay on the boy’s chest.

The story of Fukunaga is told in The Snatch Racket, published by Vanguard in 1932 and written by Edward Dean Sullivan, a Depression-era author of two other crime books. In addition to dealing with the celebrated cases I have discussed above, it provides a good picture of many lesser-known abductions, including those of underworld figures preying on their own kind.

UPDATE: The photo shows Myles Fukunaga’s jarring, pseudonymous grave marker in Mo‘ili‘ili Japanese Cemetery in Honolulu. The jagged red upright stone is engraved with 因果塚 ingachou ‘karma gravemound’ or ‘heap of misfortune’. Only Fukunaga’s posthumous name is given (釈祐寛信士 Shakuyuukan shinshi lit. ‘explanation/Shakyamuni-help-leniency honorific.title’), but the date of birth and death corresponds to his own: b. Meiji 42 (1909) February 4, d. Showa 4 (1929), November 19.

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