Black Friday has become synonymous with the spirit of Thanksgiving and growing corn by planting fish in the ground. It’s as American as a payday.
The Rabbit Room is holding a Black Friday all month for the sheer joy of it. Of particular interest to our readers may be these first editions of author Walter Wangerin.
Not to be outdone by a warren of artists, Banner of Truth is offering good discounts on many Puritan paperbacks and other fine volumes.
I reviewed John Boessenecker’s Ride the Devil’s Herd the other day. The book is an impressive account of the deadly conflict between the Earp brothers, Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan (note how I list Virgil first – he was the oldest of the three, and I’m an oldest too. We oldests have to stick together) and the rustler gang known as the Cowboys.
The book includes many interesting anecdotes, some of them surprising, some of them shocking, some disillusioning. One story amazed me. It’s one of the weirdest western yarns I’ve ever read, and I’m amazed I’d never heard of it before.
There was a member of the Cowboys known as “Russian Bill” Tattenbaum. He was an educated man of about 30, older than most of the other cowboys. He spoke French, Russian, Spanish, and English. He dressed expensively, with gold pieces on his buckskins, a silver hat band, and silver-plated, ivory-handled six-shooters. He had a reputation as a blowhard – he bragged about his crimes and depredations, but was considered all hat and very little cattle. One of his brags was that he was a European nobleman. Nobody believed that any more than his other tall tales.
He was finally arrested by a deputy and jailed in Shakespeare, New Mexico, in an adobe hotel, along with another Cowboy named Sandy King. According to newspaper accounts, they were “loud and demonstrative in their threats against the citizens, declaring that the people of the town would have an opportunity to dance to their music inside of twenty-four hours.”
At 2:00 a.m. the next morning, a group of local citizens, faces masked, overpowered the guard, took the pair to the bar room, and hanged them from a ceiling joist. Sandy King, according to witnesses, went to his death with dignity, but Russian Bill “begged for his life,” claiming he hadn’t committed any crimes at all, and was really a Russian nobleman who’d fled his native land because of a love affair. The vigilantes, neither convinced nor impressed, let Russian Bill swing.
A coroner’s jury the next day declared their deaths “suicide.”
Here’s the payoff:
…Five months later, in April 1882…, Sheriff Harvey Whitehill received a letter from the U.S. consul in St. Petersburg, Russia. The consulate had been contacted by a Russian countess whose son was in New Mexico and had not written to her since the previous May. The consul wrote… that the missing man’s name was “Waldemar Tethenborn” and provided his photograph. It was Russian Bill. Sheriff Whitehill replied to the consul and, to spare the mother’s feelings, reported that her son had committed suicide.
Notions of personal honor aside, a clash between the Cowboys and lawmen was inevitable. Since November 1878, the Cowboys—from Bob Martin to Curly Bill to the Clantons and McLaurys—had been largely unopposed. On the border the Cowboys had bullied and raided and smuggled and robbed. They had killed anyone who dared oppose them. They had, prior to that fateful October day, murdered at least thirty-two men in New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico.
Over the years, I’ve read a number of books on the Earp brothers and the OK Corral gunfight. To be fair, plain “debunkings” of the “Earp myth” have grown rare of late. Writers tend to concentrate on the ambivalence in the historical record. The Clantons and their Cowboy allies look bad, but the Earp brothers look pretty bad themselves. Writers find it hard to take sides.
John Boessenecker, author of Ride the Devil’s’ Herd, has no such problem. He reports on the Earps’ corporate and individual transgressions with perfect candor (as far as I could tell), but makes a valuable contribution by doing a job most historians have skipped – he clearly documents the long and bloody history of the Cowboys who were the Earps’ enemies. And balanced in that scale, he has no problem siding with the Earps.
I’d always assumed that the horrific first scene of the movie, “Tombstone,” was an example of cinematic hyperbole – like the entirely fictional opening to “Braveheart,” designed to get us to hate King Edward I from the git-go. But although the specific incident of the wedding massacre never happened, it’s entirely consistent with their habitual behavior. The Cowboys’ history as a criminal organization went back to the 1877 Salt War in Texas. The Salt War, a fight over mineral rights to salt in dry lakes, was a vicious racial conflict between Anglos and Mexicans, and the Cowboys took the opportunity to give full vent to their cravings for theft, rape, and murder. Afterward they mainly specialized in cattle rustling, primarily stealing cattle in Mexico and selling them in the US, though they were perfectly willing to do it the other way around when convenient. They also stole horses, robbed stagecoaches, and walked off with anything not nailed down. They could be charming when they wished to, but made sure to beat or kill anyone they thought might not fear them sufficiently. These were not the “rustlers” of the northern range wars, small ranchers resisting being bulldozed by the big cattle interests. They were, in fact, a terroristic organization. They scared off capital investment, and more than once they precipitated diplomatic crises between the US and Mexico.
The Earps, when they arrived in Tombstone, Arizona, were not a respectable family. They were gamblers (not above cheating), and had been confidence men, horse thieves, arsonists and pimps. A couple of them still were wanted in other states.
But (at least as author Boessenecker portrays it), they came to town intending to turn over a new leaf. Gambling was considered a respectable occupation on the frontier, and as a group they’d built a reputation as formidable police officers. Their record for courage is remarkable, and they were men with “no back-up in them,” as they used to say. They couldn’t be intimidated. They were exactly the men to take the Cowboys down. And that, they came to hope (especially Wyatt), would make them respectable at last.
The rest is history. The proximate reason for the gunfight at the corral was trivial, but the conflict was essential to the time and place. The Earps (as the author sees it) were the necessary implements of civilization to remove a deadly social cancer.
Boessenecker sees Wyatt Earp’s Vendetta Ride in much the same way, but more extreme. By now Wyatt had acquired a Deputy US Marshal’s appointment, and he possessed legal authority to arrest the men who killed his brother Morgan. Instead he chose to murder them. He didn’t trust the Cochise County sheriff, his enemy John Behan, to keep them locked up for trial (Boessenecker defends Behan’s record, however, saying he was never complicit with the Cowboys, only friendly with some of them). Wyatt’s means were illegal, immoral and “in the worst tradition of American law enforcement.’ But they were effective. When he was done, the Cowboys were broken, never to rise again.
Just like in the movies.
I enjoyed Ride the Devil’s Herd very much. The writing wasn’t of the top rank, but it did the job of communicating the narrative. There were lots of interesting anecdotes along the way, and good photographs, well placed in the text. Sources are well-cited. If you’re a Western buff, Ride the Devil’s Herd is well worth your time and money.
After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system that has an altered perception of risk and safety.
Some years back I read about a new psychiatric diagnosis called Complex PTSD. The idea is that symptoms displayed by children who’ve been subject to abuse over long periods of time are very similar to symptoms common to adults who suffer from PTSD due to trauma, as in combat. The difference is that the Complex kind is harder to treat. This is of considerable personal interest to me, for reasons I won’t detail here.
Somebody on Facebook mentioned this book, The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, and I was intrigued enough to buy the Kindle version. Turns out Dr. van der Kolk is one of the researchers who came up with the idea of Complex PTSD (which has not to date been accepted for the APA’s book of recognized diagnoses).
The major argument made in this book is that many of our psychological disorders rise from trauma, and that trauma actually makes physical changes in the brain. Current treatment tends to lean toward drug therapy, which (the author argues) only masks the problem. What we need to do is help people to retrain their brains, to reorganize the various areas of the brain to work again in a normal fashion, instead of the abnormal ways they’ve adopted in order to cope with shocks they’ve suffered.
A number of treatments are suggested and evaluated, based on Dr. van der Kolk’s extensive personal experience as a clinician and researcher. These include yoga, biofeedback, and participation in drama.
I found the book largely persuasive (as if I were qualified to judge). I absolutely agree about Complex PTSD. I’m not so sure of the author’s strong defense of Suppressed Memory – he defends it strongly, but completely ignores the numerous cases where it has been used to persecute innocent people, such as day care workers. As a Christian, I’m dubious about yoga.
And the author spoiled it to some degree, for this reader, by his political conclusions. He sees it as self-evident that what will really solve our social problems is national health care and government preschools. I am personally doubtful that bureaucracies are ever going to fill our lives with empathy and caring.
The author is also prone to fall into the refrain of, “The medical establish has never appreciated my genius.” That does raise skepticism in this reader.
But most of the book is convincing, and all of it is worth reading. Recommended, with cautions for disturbing subject matter.
Carl R. Trueman writes in a debut World Opinion article that Big Tech is working us over and we could barely care less.
“Parents who still think the educational choice they make for their children is the most critical decision they make are sadly mistaken. That they decide whether their children can have smartphones is likely of more importance. “
He doesn’t invoke Neil Postman’s name, but he does repeats ideas I heard from Postman first. We think of technology as assisting us, as doing our bidding, but when we ask our tech what it would like us to do, then we surrender to the tech in our hands and begin to live in a technopoly.
Trueman says technology “mediates reality to us, and in doing so, it reshapes how we imagine the world and our place within it.”
It is a childish game I have always played and have never been able to resist—a game of arranging life, whenever possible, in a series of scenes that make perfect first-act or third-act curtains.
Wikipedia’s biographical article on Moss Hart, author of the autobiography, Act One, includes what seems to me a very telling detail. In the book, Hart describes his relationship with his aunt Kate, an eccentric semi-delusional who fancied herself a grand dame. She shamelessly sponged off her family, dressed in an affected “fashionable” style assembled from other people’s cast-offs, and was devoted to her nephew Moss. It was she who introduced him to the theater (cheap seats, of course), and who nurtured his fascination with that world. In the book, Hart tells how Aunt Kate died, tragically, while his first produced play was in rehearsals. She never knew of it, because he’d saved it as a surprise.
In actual fact, according to Wikipedia, Aunt Kate lived on for some time, becoming increasingly eccentric. Finally she turned on her nephew, breaking in on his play rehearsals and wrecking scenery. Once she set a fire backstage.
Now that I’ve finished Act One, it seems clear why Hart “edited” this scene of his life. The whole book is a lesson in storytelling. The truth spoiled the mood of the act, so he fixed it, as a good playwright does.
Moss Hart was born into an impoverished Jewish family in New York City (not apparently a religious family – they celebrate Christmas and he speaks occasionally of his love for lobster). His immigrant grandfather had come from a prosperous English family, but broke with them and emigrated. When his profession (cigar making) fell to automation, he was left without a living, a severe humiliation. Young Moss was the child on whom he lavished his attention. After his death, Aunt Kate took his place.
Thanks to Aunt Kate, Moss knew he wanted to be part of the theater, a ticket out of the poverty he hated, though he wasn’t sure what he’d do in the business. He tried, and abandoned, acting. Eventually he and a friend took jobs as social directors at a Jewish “summer camp,” an established cultural tradition in those days. These jobs were mostly about arranging entertainment, and Moss learned a lot, eventually becoming the best paid social director in the old “Borscht Belt.” But then he came up with an idea for his first comedy. Without his knowledge, a friend sent the play to the Broadway producer Sam Harris, who amazed him by calling him to ask if he’d mind collaborating with George S. Kaufman to bring the play up to professional standards.
George S. Kaufman was like a god to Hart. The rest of the book is a journey through the writing and production process for that single play. They “fixed it,” and tried it out in Atlantic City. The audience liked the first act, but it went downhill from there. Convinced they still have a salvageable show, the pair plunge into re-write after re-write, as out-of-town audiences continue to fail to find it funny. Then Kaufman gives up. Hart despairs. And then he has an inspiration and persuades Kaufman to give it one last re-write before the New York opening in four days. Then the big payoff.
Act One is a brilliant drama, disguised as an autobiography. I’m not sure how much to trust it in terms of facts, in light of the Aunt Kate episode, but the mechanics of storytelling are exemplified beat for beat, and they work wonderfully. Act One is a fascinating, amusing, bittersweet and ultimately triumphant personal story. It’s a masterful short course in plotting for a writer in any discipline.
Highly recommended.
In short, a clear thread may connect the Viking sokemen of the Danelaw to the intellectual ferment that produced the Petition of Right of the English Parliament in 1628 and, ultimately, the Bill of Rights in America.
There seems to be something essentially un-Scandinavian about blowing one’s own horn. One hears of – and is often amused by – the Irish braggart or the German braggart. But we rarely hear of Scandinavian braggarts. Not due to any ethnic superiority, but because of our ingrained cultural habits.
The makes Arthur Herman’s The Viking Heart a slightly awkward book to read, at least for fellow Scandinavians. (Herman explains that after he wrote the book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, a Norwegian uncle asked why he’d ignored that side of the family, so there seem to be exceptions.)
I’d heard the author interviewed on the radio, and got the impression that this was mainly a book about the Vikings. But it’s not. Though the Vikings get much of the page count, the author goes on to describe Scandinavian history (at home and overseas) up to modern times. We read about the Normans, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, the Swedish pioneers in colonial Delaware and New York, Charles Lindbergh and Norman Borlaug. The executives of both Ford and Chevrolet who engineered US industrial mobilization in World War II were both Scandinavian-Americans. Gutzon Borglum and Carl Sandberg. The list is quite long.
The ongoing theme is the titular Viking heart (sometimes also the Viking Legacy, a title already taken. Herman might have consulted that book profitably). The Viking heart seems to be a pretty amorphous concept, but in the end he identifies it as physical courage, commitment to cultural identity, “the instinct of craftsmanship” (a phrase from Thorstein Veblen, who grew up about 10 miles from my childhood home), Christianity (after the conversion, of course), “the Lutheran work ethic,” the power of individual freedom, and “a constant willingness to strive toward unknown frontiers in order to find a place for oneself and one’s family.”
I’m not sure how different that makes the Viking heart from a lot of other ethnic groups’ hearts – the Scots-Irish, for instance, could claim a lot of those traits, and they carried them off with more flair.
As always, when it comes to a subject about which I know quite a lot, I have nitpicks. There are a lot of minor errors in the chapters on the Vikings. The author doesn’t go as far as some historians in rejecting the evidence of the sagas, but he tends to find things credible that I doubt, and doubt things I consider pretty plausible (such as the existence of King Harald Finehair of Norway).
On the plus side, he is far more positive about Christianity and its cultural influences than many current historians.
He judges it a failing of the Scandinavian countries that they never fully adopted feudalism. That’s something we Norwegians have always been pretty proud of, in point of fact.
The book is quite long. I did learn things from it, when the story moved outside my wheelhouse. I appreciated it, but I’m not entirely sure the whole exercise was necessary.
That’s probably just my Norwegian diffidence talking.
Recommended, for those interested in the subject.
A few weeks ago, I started reading 1984 as a change of pace from the Rubus novels I went through. That was when news from Cuba came out on Twitter, and Cubans had taken to the streets.
Our media, which allows claims of Cuba’s “entirely free” health care to go unchallenged, told us they were upset that COVID vaccines were in short supply. But everything has been in short supply. Farmland that could be cultivated with modern techniques is wasted by political bullies who must control everything even when there’s nothing left. Little abuelas are saying they have lived under communism for 60 years and they’re sick of it. The protests sprang up everywhere. Police have ushered hundreds of people off the streets, beating them for protesting or “disappearing” them. World reports some of the details here.
Communists blocked all or most of the country’s Internet access early on, prompting U.S. advocates to talk about deploying special Internet beacons like we did in Puerto Rico a few years ago. Doctors are now speaking up about the sorry condition of state-run hospitals. Health is not a particular care of the state.
This week, Cuba has made it illegal to complain online, so the video last month of a woman crying hysterically over her son bleeding to death under state-run care, wounds caused by police, would be a crime to record and share. Praising the all-knowing, ever-benevolent state is all that’s allowed.
With this going on, I found it difficult to read 1984. The parallels were too strong, the story too dark. It was akin to enduring my mother’s death in a hospital a couple years ago and later trying to watch a Korean TV drama set in a hospice care facility in which characters regularly pass away.
I made it through about 70-90 pages. I heard a professor (I think) say he thought the book felted dated, pulled out of history’s dustbin. I think it describes Cuba perfectly. A country at war with ideological enemies. History constantly rewritten to agree with present claims. Enthusiastic support of our dear leader is required from all. No one is interested in discussing the truth or exploring possibilities. No one wants personal risk or neighborly respect. The state speaks for the people, because the people have no voice of their own.
I don’t find that kind of fear entertaining or enlightening.
I wonder if Cuba has their own version of Newspeak.
World News Group has released the second season of its Legal Docket podcast with a compelling story of James King who was beaten up in 2014 by federal and state agents who assumed he was someone else.
The agents were unidentified in a black vehicle. According to King, they called him over as he was crossing the street and asked him about his wallet to see some ID. He says he thought they were going to mug him. He ran. They assaulted him, and when street cops arrived, he said, “Please God! Be real police.”
He says he would have complied with officers, had they identified themselves. The agents say they did. And they arrested him for resisting arrest.
King refused to plea bargain, which is a common tactic to avoid tying up the courts. I’m told defense lawyers have encouraged their clients to plea bargain, even though they believe in their clients’ innocence, because juries are unpredictable. King wouldn’t bargain. He wasn’t going to plead guilty to something he didn’t do, and the jury believed him.
King followed up by suing the FBI and the federal government for damages. His lawyers filed under a variety of laws, amendments, and legal rationale, which they said is standard procedure. That’s where the sticky legal issues come in. King’s suit has gone all the way to the Supreme Court, not due to the merits of his claims, but due to technical questions over his ability to sue law enforcement officers.
This isn’t the pressing news of the day, but it’s a good podcast and may take you away from the pressing news for an appropriate amount of time. All of World’s podcasts are well-produced and well-written. Not glitzy, melodramatic, or boring.
The hope is not that suffering will go away, for with Lincoln it did not ever go away. The hope is that suffering, plainly acknowledged and endured, can fit us for the surprising challenges that await.
I grew up on a farm, as I may have mentioned before. And I often got into trouble because I preferred reading books to doing my chores. When I read about a great president who grew up on a farm and also got into trouble for reading when he should have been working, I felt an immediately bond. That president, of course, was Abraham Lincoln.
Later I learned that Lincoln suffered from “melancholy” (the 19th Century term for chronic depression) all his life. This also led me to feel close to him.
I’ve learned more recently that a collateral ancestor of mine, my great-great grandfather’s half-brother, a Norwegian pioneer in Illinois, knew Lincoln through Republican Party activities. This ancestor does not appear in the book, Lincoln’s Melancholy, by Joshua Wolf Shenk (I didn’t expect him to), but I enjoyed imagining him as one of the extras in the background.
Lincoln’s Melancholy is a fascinating book for the history buff and the Lincoln fan. There are plenty of Lincoln haters out there too, and I imagine they can find fuel for their position here too, but for this reader the story was one I can empathize with. And it had a surprisingly faith-friendly conclusion.
It’s common for chronic depression to run in families, and author Shenk documents how the limited information we have on this fairly obscure clan indicates that not only depression, but plain insanity was common among the Lincolns. Young Abraham suffered the traumatic loss of his mother at a young age, but seems to have been a fairly cheerful person until his 30s, when he had two suicidal “breakdowns” in a row in 1840 and 1841. (One of these may or may not have been related to the death of the fabled Ann Rutledge.) After that he withdrew into himself; his closest friends – and certainly his wife – never felt that he entirely opened up to them. But they all agreed that he suffered from long spells of melancholy. Then he would shake himself, so to speak, and start telling jokes. Or go to work. He had found a way to manage his depression; to use it as a spur to achievement. Having given up on personal happiness, he aimed for significance. He came to believe that God had destined him for some great purpose; his challenge in life was to make himself worthy of that purpose.
Which brings us to his religious beliefs. I’ve heard more than one atheist quote Lincoln triumphantly, as a patron saint of their un-faith. But as Shenk documents, it’s more complicated than that. Raised in a fire-and-brimstone sect (unusually condemnatory even among Calvinists), Lincoln abandoned Christianity as he understood it. But years later, after his breakdowns, he went to Louisville to visit the family of his friend Joshua Speed. There Speed’s mother (a Unitarian) placed a Bible in his hands and told him gently that he’d find comfort there if he read it correctly. And by all accounts he did just that. He became a regular reader of the Bible, and it seemed to help him with his depression, though It’s impossible to know exactly what his theological beliefs were:
The Lincolns later rented a pew at Smith’s First Presbyterian Church—which reserved them space for services but did not bind them to accept the church’s creed, as membership would. This arrangement, which Lincoln repeated in Washington, nicely represented his relationship with traditional religion in his mature years. He visited, but he didn’t move in.
I found Lincoln’s Melancholy fascinating, moving, and helpful in my personal situation. I recommend it highly.