As an old man, it’s easy to see I’ve had a wonderful life, filled with joy, love, and satisfaction.
At age twelve, however, things were not that rosy. Happiness sometimes seemed out of reach.
Casting a fond eye back on the 1950s, I have written a little book about a twelve-year-old boy and his hopes.
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His name is Izzy Mahler.
A secret spring: In the New England Woods (1855–65), oil on canvas, by Frederic Edwin Church (American, 1826-1900), Public Domain.
Izzy lives in Plumb—an ordinary town sprinkled with a few magical places, like Patch Pagelkopf’s basement . . . the Public Library . . . and the dark, jungly Bottoms, where lustrous minerals lurk in a secret spring of water, waiting to be discovered.
Izzy’s great hope is to be one of the gang, not stand out as the youngest and smallest of his classmates. Fifty-one percent of his brain teems with schemes to fit in, while another fifty-one percent struggles to keep his family together. At times it seems his brain must burst.
Mom and Dad, caught in the grim world of adulthood, act like people from a strange planet. Izzy’s favorite grandpa languishes in a far-away hospital. And Izzy must keep his sister, Christine, from learning how dire things are—because she’s, like, a lttle kid, you know.
Extra money might ease the strains on his family, but Izzy has made a pact with his blood brother Collum to keep mum about the gold from the secret spring.
Everything comes crashing down when the Russians launch Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. It’s a vile trick to cheat the U.S. of its proper place in Space and make aspiring spacemen Izzy and Collum live out their lives as grim adults on Planet Earth.
What can a twelve-year-old do, in 1957?
You’ll have to read the book to find out.
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An eleven-year-old boy in 1956.
Izzy Strikes Gold!is a middle-grade novel. Boys and girls from ten to fourteen will identify with Izzy and his friends—steadfast Collum, bellicose Lyle Haycock, enchanting Irma Ruger, and the mystifying Mutt-mutt Corner.
But their grandparents—folks of an age with Your New Favorite Writer—will also enjoy this serio-comic journey into the rosy land of the past.
Publication is scheduled for July. We’ll have a big launch party. If you’re in or near Madison, Wisconsin, please come help us launch this lovely book. If not, tune in by Zoom.
In the weeks leading up to publication, you’ll be able to order Izzy Strikes Gold! at a special discount. I’ll let you know when pre-orders open.
Thanks for your constant support in these endeavors.
In the Old Testament Book of Exodus, God revealed himself to a man named Moses in the semblance of a burning bush. Moses thought it odd that although the bush was aflame, it was not consumed by the fire. So he decided to take a closer look.
Landscape with Moses and the Burning Bush (1610–16) by Domenichino (Italian, 1581-1641). Public Domain.
When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!”
And he said, “Here I am.”
Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
—Exodus 3:4-5, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition
One must not go shod, you see, on holy ground.
Writing a Sermon
Dear Reader, you already know Your New Favorite Writer is . . . a writer.
I’ve written many things: Utilitarian items like training manuals, instructions, official reports, news releases, magazine articles, photo captions, even the occasional speech. Literary products like poems, screenplays, short stories, and novels. Desultory or occasional outbursts like this blog.
You may be unaware that I also write sermons. I don’t mean sermons in a figurative sense, like “Did you see Larry’s rant about civil public discourse last Tuesday? It was a regular sermon!”
No, I mean actual sermons. I sometimes preach on a Sunday morning, because I am a lay preacher in the Congregational tradition. Some denominations only allow ordained clergy to preach, but in our chuches, official credentials are not necessarily required. It’s more about being called to preach the Gospel.
A local church may be deprived of its regular preacher for a time. My name is on a list of people who may be called to fill in. This week I am readying a sermon to be preached in a small town a couple of Sundays from now.
Sermon writing is not like any other kind of writing. It’s not just that it must be from the heart; all good writing should come from one’s heart. It’s not even, exactly, that it’s informed by the Spirit of God; I like to think the Holy Spirit is there somehow in everything I do.
But mainly, this is writing produced on commission for a Very Special Customer. When writing a sermon, and when delivering it, one stands in the presence of God. One ought to go barefoot.
The Homiletic Tradition
Some preachers, taking a cue from Exodus 3, go so far as to stand barefoot, or stockingfooted, in the pulpit when preaching on Sunday morning. (They do! You could look it up.)
Some preachers don’t even write their sermons down—convinced, as a theological tenet, that when preaching, they must simply be a spontaneous instrument, tuned in to God’s frequency. The Almighty will put words in their mouths at the right time. And He always does. Almost all of those whose preaching is completely spontaneous also spend a great deal of time reading Scripture. When God gives them a message on the spur of the moment, Bible verses are automatically embedded in it.
George Whitefield. Engraved by J. Cochran, 1877. Public Domain.
Jonathan Edwards, mezzotint print from Welsh Portrait Collection. Public Domain.
Methodist evangelist George Whitefield (1714-1770) made up his sermons on the spot. Congregationalist cleric Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) mostly wrote his out in advance.
I, like Edwards, write my sermons. I write what I want to say, so that when it comes time to say it, I will remember what it was I wanted to say. A revelation is neither more nor less divine for having been written on paper before it is spoken.
Authenticity
“All well and good, O New Favorite Writer,” I hear you cry—“but how do you get the divine part in, in the first place? How do you know that you are preaching what God wants people to hear? Or are you merely an unshod charlatan, after all?”
I am glad you asked, Gentle Reader.
I think my sermons have some spiritual validity because I start from the Bible. When preachers write sermons, there are generally two different ways of “starting from the Bible”:
1. Refer to the lectionary. The lectionary is a table that associates a set of scripture passages with each Sunday of the year. It was worked out, many years ago, by clergy who wanted a systematic way for a congregation to work through large parts of the Bible over a three-year period. So the lectionary repeats itself every three years. And its pattern is complicated. But it’s all written down, so on any given Sunday, you can easily find out what the readings are. In some chuches, use of the lectionary is law; in others, it’s a respected tradition. Still others disregard the lectionary entirely.
2. Use some other method. You simply choose a Bible verse to preach about. You may pray to God for a passage of Scripture to be sent to you. You may reflect on something important the congregation ought to hear, and your reflections may put you in mind of something from the Bible. You may don a blindfold, open the Bible to a random page, put your finger down on the page, take off the blindfold, and see what you’re going to preach on. Any of these methods, or others, can work; any of them can be useful if you are preaching in a church that does not use the lectionary but prefers to leave the choice of text to the preacher.
Which method do I use? Sometimes one, sometimes the other. Mostly it depends on the local custom of the church I’m addressing. If they love the lectionary, far be it from me to disturb their idyll; I’ll simply preach on the lectionary text. If they are lectionary-independent, I will find a verse on my own.
More important than the specific verse chosen is the approach and attitude of the preacher. This brings us back to the burning bush, and the sandals. When preaching a sermon, one stands quite consciously in the presence of God. It is presumptuous to speak a word purporting to be God’s word, when in the actual presence of God. The only approopriate attitude is humility, whether one shucks one’s oxfords or not.
So when starting to write, before I open the Book to the verse chosen, I first pray to God that a new understanding of the verse may be sent through the Holy Spirit. That’s a good approach. If you pray thus, and pray sincerely, something interesting and useful will pop off the page and into your consciousness. Then it’s just a matter of writing it down.
Chutzpah
What gives one the sheer, gosh-awful audacity to write messages on behalf of God, for delivery to God’s people?
While God was speaking to Moses from the burning bush, he commissioned Moses to go to the pharaoh of Egypt and liberate the Children of Israel held in thrall there. And Moses said, “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?” And God said, “I will be with you.”
But Moses continued to demur. His Impostor Syndrome prompted this plea: “O my Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither in the past nor even now that you have spoken to your servant, but I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” And God replied, “Who gives speech to mortals? Who makes them mute or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now go, and I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.” (Exodus 4:10-12, New Revised Standard Version, Updated Edition.)
There are many more examples of people wholly unqualified to speak for God, who have been commissioned by God to do so anyway.
The Bottom Line
I have received the gift of writing. I believe in the Triune God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and someone has to speak to his people on Sunday mornings. So here I am, Lord: Send me.
A boy named Izzy Mahler, seven years old, springs out of bed and dashes down the stairs. It is a Saturday morning in October, 1952.
The Old Philco
Barefoot and pajama’d, Izzy makes straight for the wooden Philco radio, switches it on. Izzy remembers going downtown with Dad to bring home the Philco and its fine supporting table. Ever since—through three apartments, the birth of little Christine, and now the move to this two-story house just across the alley from Grant School—the Philco has been the Mahlers’ proudest possession, and the most useful.
Moving on to the kitchen, Izzy opens the refrigerator, takes out a quart of milk, removes the round cardboard cap from the glass bottle’s neck, and pours himself a glass. Then he sits down at the kitchen table and listens as the radio set in the living room spills forth Let’s Pretend, Buster Brown, and Space Patrol. He sees every detail of each story.
Commander Buzz Corey is just cutting his way into Jelna’s spaceship with an atomic cutting torch when Mom and Dad come out in wrinkled pajamas, rubbing their heads with their knuckles. Izzy wishes he had an atomic cutting torch like Buzz Corey’s, or even just a plain old cosmic ray gun. He would give it to President Eisenhower for copying. That way, should American soldiers run into bug-eyed monsters from Planet Orkulon, they’d be ready.
Christine bangs her tin cup on the wooden tray of her high chair, but Izzy hardly hears. Why can’t you get a ray gun by sending in box-tops? he wonders. A ray gun would take more boxtops, and probably more quarters, than the usual things like the Lone Ranger decoder ring he lost while helping Buster Wiggins plant potatoes—but it would be worth it. He hopes none of the Wigginses will bite into a spud and break a tooth on his decoder ring.
Now Christine squalls to beat the band, so loud that Izzy can’t hear the radio.
“Harold,” Mom says. Dad stares into space, as usual. Mom plunks down the checkbook with a loud WHACK! Dad sighs and sits down at the kitchen table.
Izzy goes upstairs and gets dressed. When he comes down, Dad frowns over his slide rule, while Mom knits her brows over numbers scrawled on paper with a pencil.
Izzy opens the back door. Dad looks up. “Where are you going, son?”
“Out to play,” Izzy says.
“Be home for supper,” says Mom.
A fictionalized account of true events.
Out of the Ether
I was born in 1945 into a family that couldn’t, or at least didn’t, afford a television set until 1957, when everybody else had already had a set for two or three years. As a result, I was privileged to be present at the last stand of radio broadcasting as a mass entertainment medium—before TV gobbled up radio’s best shows, and most of its advertising revenue, added a few original programs of its own, and became—well, Television. As we know it.
If you did not experience those “radio days,” let me assure you: radio was great. All the action, all the drama, all the excitement, all the laughs of TV—only you could see it better, because everything played on the full color, panoramic, high-definition screen inside your mind—with all the pans, tilts, and zooms each story required.
Stan Freberg, the advertising world’s comic genius, produced a radio spot, “Stretching the Imagination,” that perfectly illustrates the vast cinematic potential of the sound-only medium. You can hear it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppZ57EeX6vE.
An Embarrassment of Riches
What kind of shows did radio offer? Besides the Saturday morning fare Izzy consumed in our fictional vignette, there were:
Westerns galore, all of the juvenile variety: Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hopalong Cassidy, Bobby Benson and the B-Bar-B Riders. But most of all, every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:30 p.m.: “In the pages of history there is no greater champion of justice than this daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains, who, with his faithful Indian companion Tonto, led the fight for law and order in the early West. . . . Return with us now to those gripping days of yesteryear—the Lone Ranger rides again!”
Northerns, starring Royal Canadian Mounted Police like Sergeant Preston of the Yukon with his famous lead dog Yukon King; and mountie Jim West, The Silver Eagle, voiced by radio legend Jim Ameche—one of the Amici boys from Kenosha, Wisconsin—on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the Lone Ranger’s 6:30 time slot.
Game shows like The Quiz Kids and The 64-Dollar Question. That’s not a misprint. Sixty-four dollars was the top prize. That was big money. When television came along, the same show was recycled, “isolation booths” added for showmanship, and three zeroes tacked on to the prizes—so it became The $64,000 Question.
Audience-participation shows like Art Linkletter’s People Are Funny or Ralph Edwards’ Truth or Consequences, in which typical Americans made fools of themselves, on the screen in your mind, for fame, glory, and small sums of money. They may have been forerunners of what is today called “reality TV.”
Comedies, glorious comedies of all descriptions. There was the pompous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen with his dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd; you could not even see his lips move—at least, on the radio. There were situation comedies of small-town life, like Fibber McGee and Molly and The Great Gildersleeve. Others relied on ethnic identities: The Goldbergs (not to be confused with the 2013 TV series of that name), Life with Luigi (in which Irish-American actor J. Carrol Naish played the title Italian character), and Amos ’n’ Andy (a show whose African American title characters were created and portrayed by white actors Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll). There were comedies about teenagers—Henry Aldrich, Corliss Archer, My Little Margie, and the high school denizens taught by Our Miss Brooks. And there were wholesome family shows like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Father Knows Best. (Leave It to Beaver, the classic exemplar of this kind of show, never appeared on radio; it was a creature of television only.)
And then there was The Jack Benny Show, in some ways the forerunner of modern shows like Seinfeld. To say the Benny show was comedy is true enough; but it hardly does justice to the subject. Jack Benny was an institution. Perhaps a good subject for a later blog post.
Dear Reader: This has been an encore presentation of a blog article originally posted June 18, 2019. Hope you enjoyed it!
Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
She survived the Spanish Flu of 1918 but was left with a sinus condition that plagued her for the rest of her life.
Her sinuses did not stop her, however, from becoming the first woman to make a nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean, an act for which Congress awarded her the Distinguished Flying Cross.
Lindbergh. Public Domain.
Earhart. Public Domain.
With her strong physical likeness to Charles Lindbergh, she became “Lady Lindy” to the headline writers of the Fourth Estate—or “Queen of the Air,” dubbed so by the United Press wire service.
She and navigator Fred Noonan went missing over the Pacific Ocean in July 1937, prompting a search of unprecedented scale. But the search came up empty.
Rumors of her fate still tease us, almost ninety years later.
Amelia’s Early Life
Amelia Mary Earhart was born in Acheson, Kansas, in 1897 and grew up there and in Des Moines, Iowa. She and her younger sister, Muriel, got an unconventional upbringing, as their mother had no desire to raise “nice little ladies.”
Amelia—nicknamed “Meeley” or “Millie”—sought out adventure and achievement. A voracious reader drawn to science and mechanics, she took charge of her own education. When her family moved to Chicago, she rejected the high school closest to home and instead went to Hyde Park High School, which had the best science program.
According to Wikipedia, “she kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings about successful women in predominantly male-oriented fields, including film direction and production, law, advertising, management, and mechanical engineering.”
She continually sought advancement in fields then dominated by men. After stints as a nurse’s aide, a pre-med student, a photographer, truck driver, and stenographer, she took seriously to flying. In 1921, after twelve hours of flight instruction from female aviator Neta Snook, Amelia cropped her hair short and bought a leather flying coat. Almost as soon as she took up flying, she drew up plans for an organization of female aviators.
Neta Snook, the Kinner Airster, and a young Amelia. Public Domain.
She purchased a chromium yellow Kinner Airster biplane and named it “The Canary.” In 1922, at the age of twenty-five, she flew the Canary to an altitude of 14,000 feet, a world record for female pilots. The following year she became the sixteenth woman in the United States granted a pilot’s license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale, the governing body of sports aviation.
Her life became a blur of flying, coupled with nonstop promotion of flight in general and flight by women in particular. She went ahead and started her dreamed-of female fliers’ group, which came to be known as The Ninety-nines and today has 6,500 members.
Amelia and Putnam at home.
She had a gift for promotion. Merely flying the Atlantic as a passenger in a plane flown by pilot Wilmer Stultz was enough to merit a ticker tape parade in Manhattan, followed by a reception with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. Publisher George Putnam sponsored a promotional campaign which included publishing a book she authored, arranging a series of lecture tours, and using her likeness in various product advertisements. Putnam, her senior by a decade, proposed marriage six times and eventually became her husband.
In 1932, she made her own solo crossing of the Atlantic in a Lockheed Vega 5B.
She continued to push for the acceptance of women in all aviation-related roles, from passengers to pilots and engineers. She flew in air races, served as an official of the National Aeronautic Association, and set a world altitude record of 18,415 feet at the controls of a Pitcairn PCA-2 autogyro.
In 1935 she joined Purdue University “as a visiting faculty member to counsel women on careers and as a technical advisor to its Department of Aeronautics.” In that same year she began to promote “one flight which I most wanted to attempt—a circumnavigation of the globe as near its waistline as could be.”
Circumnavigation
It took a couple of years to get the project together. In 1936, with financing from Purdue, she acquired a custom-built Lockheed Electra 10E, a twin-engined monoplane, its fuselage modified to accommodate many additional fuel tanks.
Earhart’s Lockheed Electra. Public Domain.
She chose Captain Harry Manning to accompany her on the round-the-world flight as navigator. Later, with reservations about Manning’s navigating skills, Amelia replaced him with Fred Noonan, a licensed ship’s captain and experienced marine and airline navigator. He had recently left the employ of Pan American Airlines, having laid out and pioneered most of Pan Am’s routes for flying boat service across the Pacific, as well as training the other navigators who would fly those routes regularly.
Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan. Public Domain.
After her first attempt, flying east to west, failed due to an accident on the ground in Honolulu, Earhart had the plane repaired and then took off with Noonan, this time flying west to east. They flew from Miami and after a month-long series of hops across South America, Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia, arrived at Lae, New Guinea, on June 29, 1937.
They departed from Lae on July 2, bound for Howland Island in the mid-South Pacific, some 2,500 miles away—the longest leg of the journey. The flight was expected to take about twenty hours and would use up most of the plane’s 1,100 gallons of aviation gasoline, leaving little room for navigational error.
Earhart and Noonan’s planned route, mapped by SnowFire , illustration licensed under CC BY 4.0.
USCGC Itasca. Public Domain
Besides Noonan’s vaunted skill at celestial navigation using a nautical sextant, there was a provision for radio navigation, based on a homing signal from the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Itasca, which was parked off Howland Island for that precise purpose.
At the expected arrival time, the Itasca heard Earhart’s voice in a loud, clear signal indicating she was nearby, but two-way communication could not be established. She stated she could not find the radio homing signal.
O3U-3 Corsair biplane. Public Domain.
An hour after Amelia’s last message was received, Itasca began to search north and west of the island, assuming the plane had gone down in the ocean nearby. They found nothing. Over the next three days the U.S. Navy sent other assets to the search area, finally dispatching the battleship Colorado from Hawaii, where it had been in the middle of a summer training cruise for Naval ROTC students from Washington and California. The Colorado’s three O3U-3 biplanes flew search patterns around Howland Island. They also searched the Phoenix Islands south of Howland Island, focusing on Gardner Island (now called Nikumaroro).
Nothing was found.
The official search ended July 19, just five days short of Amelia’s fortieth birthday. After the Navy called off the search, her husband, George Putnam, ordered further searches with chartered boats. A year and a half after her last radio call, Amelia Earhart was declared legally dead.
And So?
There are half a million theories on what went wrong. The most prominent ones are summarized at great length by Wikipedia. What it all boils down to is . . . nobody knows.
The most recent lead comes from Deep Sea Vision, a Charleston, South Carolina company that operates unmanned underwater vehicles. Early this year, their underwater drone captured a plane-like image of the right size on the sea floor about 16,000 feet underwater, in the ocean near Howland Island. But another expedition will be required to corroborate or invalidate the find.
Tom D. Crouch, senior curator of the National Air and Space Museum, has called Amelia Earhart “our favorite missing person.”
For now, pending new updates, she remains in that role, as apostrophized in song by Red River Dave McEnery: “Farewell, First Lady of the Air.”
“Reflections” is the name of this blog. It is also the name of Your New Favorite Writer’s “author newsletter.”
In fact, the two are one. If you got here by surfing the Web and you found this site, you are reading my blog. If it arrived in your inbox, because you signed up, then you are reading my newsletter. It is the same content, only delivered by email, so you don’t have to search the Internet to find it.
If you have not yet done so, please sign up for the newsletter version, using the “Share My Journey” box at right. You’ll be glad you did.
The tagline of “Reflections”—whether you call it a blog or a newsletter—is “Seeking fresh meanings in our common past.” That’s all I write about.
In the pages of the blog/newsletter, this search for the links between present and past ranges over a vast field of ruminations. But every post has something to do with present and past. I like to think of “Reflections” as “Miscellany with a purpose.”
That purpose, simply put, is to offer us all, on a weekly basis, a fresh dash of historical perspective, from any source.
This being a newsletter and all, I really ought to share some news. Mostly what I share is random thoughts and woolgatherings. I do hope you enjoy them, but it’s necessary from time to time to toot my own horn—self-promotion being a solemn duty of the Literary Lion. That’s what I mean by “sharing news.”
You may recall that in August 2022 I published—or rather, DX Varos Publishing, Inc., published—my first novel, a compelling work of historical fiction calledPrice of Passage: A Tale of Immigration and Liberation. Since then I’ve been living the life of a published author.
It’s a life filled with glory in lieu of monetary rewards. I call it “living the dream.”
A kink appeared in the dream last July when Dan Willis, the guiding genius behind DX Varos Publishing, died unexpectedly. Without Dan’s sacrificial levels of one-man input, the corporation is failing to thrive. I have been forced to reclaim my rights in Price of Passage, meaning DX Varos will no longer publish it. There is hope, however, that a new edition will be published.
And What of Izzy?
You may also recall that I wrote a middle-grades novel, Izzy Strikes Gold!, about a twelve-year-old boy in 1957. It won the hearts of my grandson’s fifth-grade classmates and teachers when I read it aloud to them over several weeks last year. I am proud to announce, if I have not already done so, that HenschelHAUS Publishing, Inc., of Milwaukee, will publishIzzy Strikes Gold!later this year. When the publication date is set and pre-orders can be taken, I’ll announce that here.
It happens that HenschelHAUS is also interested in republishing Price of Passage, with a new cover and new subtitle. I think it’s okay to mention that here, although a contract has not yet been inked.
Work in Progress
“So, New Favorite Author, what have you done for us lately?”
I’m working hammer and tongs on a new adult historical novel about two brothers who are at odds with each other when World War II separates them. It’s the most ambitious project I’ve tackled yet, and it’s going slowly. But I’m deeply wrapped up in it. When it is finished, it will have been worth the wait.
The reason the writing goes slowly is that my brain works slowly. That’s all there is to it.
The advice of many authors is, “When writing your first draft, just write flat out. Get it down on paper as fast as you can. Don’t stop to fix anything, you can do that later.”
That’s all right for them, but I’m me.
Having written a couple of good novels, I know my process and how it works. Writing a first draft, I often follow my instincts down a blind alley. I paint myself into corners. I set up situations I cannot plot my way out of. As soon as I get a glimmer that I’m doing that, I need—absolutely need, Dear Reader—to go back to where I went wrong and find a new angle of attack. This is an essential part of the process.
Usually what saves me is research. I learn something completely unexpected while researching to verify particulars of the plot. For example, does such-and-such work in 1937?
U.S.S. Colorado, 1932.
I found out that when one of my two heroes in the new book, a Naval ROTC cadet, took a summer training cruise on the battleship Colorado, he would have unexpectedly been called to take part in the wide-ranging search for the lost aviator Amelia Earhart.
Amelia Earhart in 1937. Public Domain.
Amelia is still lost; but it excites me to find real facts of that kind that my story can tie into. It inspires me to invent new plot points. Nuggets of historical reality give me little pegs on which to hang a compelling story.
But working everything out, and narrating it in the right direction and at the right pace, takes a lot of time and effort.
So stay tuned, Gentle Reader. My entire career as a Literary Lion is a work in progress. You can’t know how glad I am to have you along for the ride.
Saint Michael and the Angels at War with the Devil, Painting, tempera on panel, by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1448–1494). Public Domain.
AN OLD FRIEND—a man I have known casually for more than fifty years, one to whom I am kindly disposed because he once did me a great service—recently posted this verbal meme:
Thought for the Day: It kills me that Christians insist everyone else honor their religious sensitivities while they stomp all over others!
A thought leapt to my mind, a mirror of the meme itself: “Atheists demand we honor their religious sensitivities, which seem to require the indiscriminate slander of Christians!”
Striving to resist a knee-jerk reaction to my old friend’s provocation, I read on. Some of his Facebook followers had added comments, most of which echoed the anti-Christian meme.
One commenter let loose a 12-gauge blast in five extended paragraphs. Pared down to its essentials: “. . . Lutheran, Baptist, ‘evangelical’, and ‘non-denominational’ were all about the same: hypocritical. . . . I believe people are intrinsically good and are sometimes made worse by religion. . . . As I saw once on a bumper sticker, ‘Religion is the Problem’.”
#
Whew.
Time to take a deep breath.
This blog generally avoids religion and politics, for good reasons. But Your New Favorite Writer is always concerned with the past and how it echoes in the present. My old friend’s bumptious meme fetches up undead beasts from the past that continue to haunt us today—to our great common detriment.
So, now: To the barricades!
#
First, people have a right to cast aspersions on Christianity. That right I do not contest. It is guaranteed, in our land, by the First Amendment—whether such sentiments are spurred by generous or spiteful impulses.
So, the critics have the right to criticize.
But where do they get the moral standing, the breadth of outlook, andthe depth of knowledge to swing their clubs with such casual malice?
These are questions of import, which I do not ask lightly. Thus, Kind Reader, I beg your indulgence as we explore the topic in some depth, at a leisurely pace.
We may as well begin with the grey squirrel, a shining emblem of moral deficiency.
Like a small grey
coffee-pot,
sits the squirrel.
He is not
all he should be,
kills by dozens
trees, and eats
his red-brown cousins.
The keeper on the
other hand,
who shot him, is
a Christian, and
loves his enemies,
which shows
the squirrel was not
one of those.
-- Humbert Wolfe (1885-1940)
Humbert Wolfe. Drawing by William Rothenstein, 1931. Public Domain.
It is mistaken, of course, to state that grey squirrels eat red-brown squirrels; in fact they do not. But Humbert Wolfe, a Christian poet with Jewish roots, wants us to understand that the grey squirrel, in any case, cannot measure up to a Christian standard of morality. He also points out, with wit, that a Christian may not measure up to his own standard of morality.
This goes to the question of moral hypocrisy implied by my old friend’s meme and posed explicitly by the agitated commenter.
But, wait. Why are we all today, Christians and anti-Christians alike, so obsessed with morality?
Jesus, depicted by an unknown artist on the wall of the 4th-century catacomb of Commodilla in Rome. Public Domain.
It seems to me we did not talk so urgently about morality before this fellow Jesus of Nazareth came along and made such a point of it in his teachings.
But I am digressing, I fear, into religious talk.
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Far be it from me, Dear Reader, to dwell on the theological basis of all those moral laws we have come to consider purely secular because they seem so dazzlingly self-evident. I merely mention this in passing, in case it is of any interest; for many things that are self-evident now only became so after long firing in the crucible of humanity’s tortured experience.
Rather than dwell on that, let us examine our propensity to evade morality whenever convenient.
Let me ask my old friend and his Facebook choristers: Do you suppose that in the whole sad parade of human inadequacy, it is Christians alone who have cornered the market on hypocrisy?
Must we assume that pagans, animists, Zoroastrians, Mithraists, Jews, Hindus, Confucians, Taoists, Buddhists, Shintoists, Stoics, Epicureans, pragmatists, utilitarians, agnostics, or atheists always live up to their stated ideals?
Of course not.
Hypocrisy is a human failing, not a Christian one.
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What can we take from this? That high ideals are pointless?
That’s absurd. Without moral aspirations, what will become of us?
Fair Reader, what we are left with is the fallible human animal: Someone who needs to hope to be good, yet who always falls short.
So when you fall short, do you give up?
Winston Churchill—a man well-acquainted with failure, with repeated and spectacular failure—once advised young boys as follows:
“. . . never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.”
Churchill at Harrow, 1941
Most of us, however, lack Churchill’s iron resolve.
Where shall we find the sheer chutzpah to keep going in the face of our own shortcomings?
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We need to draw from internal wells of humility.
In pursuit of that thought, I must beg to differ with the commenter who said, “people are intrinsically good and are sometimes made worse by religion.”
People may be worsened by religion, indeed. But then, we are not intrinsically good to start with.
Richard Mansfield starred in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in both New York and London. Double exposure photo by Henry Van der Weyde, 1895.
Life is not that simple. People are not wholly good nor wholly bad. Abundant experience shows that we are both good and bad: At the same time.
We are mixed beings, angels and devils at once. Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.
Good and evil so commonly appear bound together in one person that it baffles me how anyone of mature years can have failed to notice that duality.
We have various names for it. We call it inconsistency, perversity, or sheer cussedness. But by any name, its existence is undeniable.
There is so much good in the worst of us, and so much bad in the best of us, that it ill behooves any of us to find fault with the rest of us.
—James Truslow Adams
We desperately need to recognize this fact about our neighbors, and also about ourselves. It is not only the other guy who is a mixed being. As Pogo, Walt Kelly’s famous Okefenokee possum, said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
What has that to do with humility, and what has humility to do with anything?
One of the best and worst persons I ever knew was a colleague, back in the days when I exerted myself to make a living. Tim, raised a Catholic, had become a theoretical agnostic and a practical atheist. He projected the Self-Made Man, relying entirely on his own talents and exertions. This happened to be a good strategy for Tim, because he was intelligent, capable, and hard-working.
He was also curious about many topics, including American history. But it shocked him to learn that U.S. presidents, including George Washington, John Adams, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson, have called for national days of prayer and humiliation.
“How,” Tim asked me, “how can any president call for national humiliation?”
To him, “humiliation” suggested ignominy, disgrace, and something akin to unworthiness.
I’m afraid I let him down in this hour of crisis.
Given enough time, I might have stumbled through an explanation that America has always been steeped in Reform Christianity—or, in one word, Puritanism. The Founding Fathers, even those who were not Puritans, grew up in a Christian world that assumed a universal need to repent of our transgressions; to recant any claims to pride; to be brought low by prayerful introspection. And this process of becoming appropriately humble—since we all have a bit of the Devil in us—was called “humiliation.”
Given enough time, I might have explained all that. But Tim’s question was posed in passing, on a typically busy day. So he went to his grave without ever hearing my (possibly tedious and long-winded) explanation. In case you’re wondering, Dear Reader, the God I know would not hold this human lack of information against him.
And suddenly, with no warning, we have arrived at the central point.
If we think we understand everything, we are grossly mistaken. We need more humility than that.
It’s true that Christians have often fallen short of our ideals. One of the ways we fall short of our ideals is by trying to force our views on others.
It is wrong to suggest, as the meme does, that all Christians always do this. But some of us do, sometimes.
Some non-Christians, and some anti-Christians, also do this sometimes.
Even when we are at our worst, Christians are no worse than other people when they are at their worst.
A terrible frailty is part of the human condition. Puritans called it “original sin.”
If you think it does not apply to you—whatever you may like to call it—I invite you to think again.
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At the beginning of this essay I said the man who posted the bumptious anti-Christian meme on Facebook was an old friend. And so he is.
How I can treasure my old friendship with one who blithely flaunts such a clouded and limited vision of the world?
Let me tell you, Fair Reader: Many years ago, this same man taught me how to ward off airsickness—a terrible occupational hazard to a young airman. That teaching was the act of an angel. Without it, I would have been condemned to great misery in the course of military duty.
I also happen to be conscious that I have made my own share of foolish declarations.
We ought to try, as best we can, to show the world our clarity and our charity, not our presumptuous hobgoblins of prejudice.
Yet we can’t always manage that.
The Season of Lent approaches, and we require humiliation, in the old sense of the word.
Unless we cultivate enough humility to cut one another a bit of slack, how shall we ever find our way to the light?
Well, not the Oracle, exactly, but the place of the Oracle—the ruins of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, Greece—which itself is often spoken of, in a modern linguistic convention, as “the Oracle of Delphi.”
Attic red-figure kylix from Vulci (Italy), 440-430 BC. Kodros Painter. Oracle of Delphi: King Aigeus in front of the Pythia. Antikensammlung Berlin, Altes Museum, F 2538. Photo by Zde, licensed under CC-BY-SA-4.0.
The actual Oracle, however, was a high priestess, conventionally named Pythia but embodied by many generations of actual women who spoke forth from at least the eighth century B.C. (but perhaps much earlier) to the late fourth century A.D.
Persons, representing themselves or their city-states, would come to Delphi—a place perched high on the slopes of Mount Parnassus, overlooking the Gulf of Corinth—with urgent questions bearing on their plans or hopes.
On the seventh day of each non-winter month, the petitioners or “consultants,” in order of priority as assigned by priests or priestesses, would present their questions, and Pythia would present her answers. A long tradition says that Pythia did so in a trance-like state, influenced by toxic vapors seeping from a chasm in the ground underneath the Temple of Apollo.
The Oracle of Delphi Entranced, engraving by Heinrich Leutemann (1824–1905). Public Domain.
Thus, the Oracle’s answers, or “oracles,” were ambiguous, easily misunderstood by the customers. Or maybe, Pythia’s utterances were pure gibberish, rearranged by the members of her subordinate priesthood into intelligible yet ambiguous formulations.
Lots of examples cited by ancient authorities such as Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diogenes Laërtius show that understanding and applying Pythia’s advice could be tricky.
For example, this demigod, Marmota monax. What are we to make of him?
Woodchucks, we have in plenty. There is only one Groundhog, one Lawgiver of February.
A rodent is only a rodent, but the Groundhog is an oracle.
He goes by many names: Punxsutawney Phil, Wiarton Willie, Jimmy the Groundhog, Dunkirk Dave, Staten Island Chuck, etc. But these are merely local avatars of the Universal Groundhog.
Wikipedia confides that the groundhog “is also referred to as a chuck, wood shock, groundpig, whistlepig, whistler, thickwood badger, Canada marmot, monax, moonack, weenusk, red monk, land beaver, and, among French Canadians in eastern Canada, siffleux.”
But clearly, those terms refer to ordinary rodents.
The Groundhog—the One and Only Groundhog—is said to control the weather. He controls it absolutely.
Stated baldly, the One Unitary Groundhog makes one unitary prediction, and we must all live with it for a whole season.
“Which season is that?”
The season of Winter-into-Spring, Dear Reader—a fraudulent season to begin with.
And how can we foretell the weather for Winter-into-Spring?
The Groundhog wakes up. Not at any old time, as a proper woodchuck would, but precisely on the second day of February. First thing in the morning.
When Groundie stumbles from his burrow, he waddles about for a while in a post-hibernial glaze. After coffee, he opens his eyes. If he sees his shadow, he goes back to bed. If he does not see his shadow, he stays up and does calisthenics.
Punxsutawney Phil, Oracle, protected and cosseted by members of his priesthood. Photo by Anthony Quintano, licnsed under CC-BY-2.0.
It’s that simple. A binary choice, ruled by a shadow.
People say if the sun is shining, the Groundhog will have a shadow and can’t miss seeing it; but if the weather is overcast, there will be no shadow, hence nothing for the Groundhog to see. This may be reading too much science into the picture. The governing myth only says, “if he sees his shadow.” Parse that how you will.
Now, here’s the corker: If he sees his shadow and re-hibernates, there will be six more weeks of winter. Holy cow.
But wait, there’s more: If he does NOT see his shadow and therefore stays out, then we shall have an early spring.
Now, Fair Reader, we have breached the Innermost Cave, the Sanctum Sanctorum, the Mystery of Mysteries. For, in any place where anybody gives two hoots about the Groundhog, six more weeks of winter IS an early spring.
Do the math. February 2 + six weeks = March 16 most years, or March 15 in a leap year. That’s six or seven days before the Vernal Equinox, the “official” start of spring. But in most temperate climates, the real spring—meteorological, vegetative, phenological spring—does not come round until days or weeks after the Equinox.
So, what can this rodentine Oracle be trying to tell us? In plain English, it’s not plain English. It’s mere gibberish, no more understandable than the virgin Pythia’s long-ago howls and whistles in ancient Delphi.
Perhaps that’s why we, like a certain film character, are doomed to repeat the whole thing over and over until we get it right.
Why does Your New Favorite Author live in the past?
You may have noticed, Fair Reader, that every one of these posts has something to do with the past. And every one ties the past in some way with the present. This is in keeping with our motto: “Seeking fresh meanings in our common past.” (See the top of this page.)
Have you not noticed my references to the future?
That can’t be it, because I haven’t made any.
Is this because I have no interest in the future? Au contraire. I am eager to see how things will work out. But I am patient.
I don’t feel competent to comment on the future. It isn’t here yet.
My ability to predict the next fifteen minutes has proven inadequate over the past seventy-eight years or so. How dare I venture a guess farther out?
I am content to wait until the future happens and then talk about it when it has become the past, as it always, eventually, does. Hindsight is better than foresight.
Confucius, the ancient Chinese sage, once said 君子欲訥於言而敏於行。It has been translated, “The superior man acts before he speaks, and afterwards speaks according to his action.”
But why go into all that? Maybe the superior man acts first and speaks later so that he will know what he did before he comments on it. It turns out the superior man is not any better at telling the future than I am.
The public media are full of inspiring things that relate to the future. E.g., “Some men see things as they are and say, why; I dream things that never were and say, why not?”
With all due respect to the late Robert F. Kennedy, and to George Bernard Shaw before him—this is balderdash.
Things that are dreamt of, or wished for, are unreal. Nothing is real until it happens.
Once it has happened—once it is in the past—a world of possibilities is suggested. That’s the world where I live.
Hope you feel comfortable joining me here sometimes. I’ll leave the light on for ya.
All through autumn there was little to suggest winter was approaching.
Now, it’s here.
After the blizzard.
On the west side of Madison, Wisconsin, we got close to a foot of snow January 9-10. Again, overnight January 10-11, we picked up three inches. On January 12-13, we hunkered down under a howling blizzard that dumped another foot of snow.
Now the temperatures have dropped below zero.
If we have a mild December, Old Man Winter is apt to unleash his cold fury in January. This is my seventy-ninth winter. One gets to know these things.
Too Much is Enough Already
Some time ago, I lost sight of all the charms of snow. The gobs of white frosting smothering the cake of our landscape, the glitter of a million snow-diamonds in the moonlight, the squeak and crunch of ice-crust beneath your boots, the clean crispness of inhaled frost—all these things were lost on me.
I had shoveled too many tons of the stuff. Dug my car out of too many drifts. Dragged out the jumper cables once too often. Watched it all polluted with carbon granules and the effluvia of wandering dogs.
Now that I’m old and pay a man with a plow to clear my driveway, Nature’s whipped cream is tasty again. Like a retired ski bum, I can wax philosophical.
Before the blizzard.
My backyard has become a thing of beauty. One of the great things about snow is that you don’t have to mow it.
I did have to unlimber the snow rake and pull a few tons off the roof to reduce the formation of ice dams that might cause leakage. Roof raking ought to be an Olympic sport. All the medals would be taken by beefy Norwegians.
My dog, the ever-adaptible Fooboo, has a high old time playing outdoors in the sub-zero sunshine. We think he is part husky.
When I was his age, I played in the snow with great vigor. So did all my friends. There was no snow fort we could not build, none we could not assail. If we were feeling physical, we could wash our smaller siblings’ faces, unwillingly, in the snow. And boys bigger than we could do the same to us.
It’s All Downhill from Here
Every hill had sledding potential, but there was one, when I was nine or ten, that was par excellence—the Snake Path. It was not only a steep hill, it was a narrow path that took a tortuous drop through trees and brush, down to the old shale road that led to the river.
In those days, sleds were steerable, but their steering was gradual. You had two steel runners under you. By pulling hard on the left or right end of a wood crossbar, you could warp the runners slightly to the side, sending you and your sled on a gentle curve down the hill.
But the curves on the Snake Path were not gentle. They were sudden and heartbreaking. You had to yank the crossbar with all your might and sink a toe off the back runner to bend around the curve. Then you had to do it the other way, more or less instantly.
All this maneuvering was hard on your knit gloves or mittens and on the toes of your four-buckle galoshes. The sudden course changes threw cold snow in your face more or less all the time—but you were expected to take it. You had to run the bends without loss of momentum, so you broke the sound barrier while approaching the final obstacle—an earthen mound that made a perfect mogul or, if you will, a ski jump for sleds.
Your reward for speed was to fly five or ten feet through space, landing with a big whomp on the old shale road. If, at that moment, you wrenched the crossbar violently and planted your right toe, you could turn ninety degrees and coast down the icy road almost a quarter mile to the litte bridge over the Stink Creek.
Then you would stand up, grab your sled, walk back to the top, and do it all again.
I haven’t had that kind of fun in almost seventy years, nor do I expect to, this side of Eternity. But that’s okay; I had the experience once upon a time.
Today I ran into a young friend who happens to be a staff member at the clinic where I had a medical appointment. My young friend said she wants to read my novel, Price of Passage, because she has developed a great interest in history. She wants to get the real story and is especially interested in African American history. She has recently been learning about Ida B. Wells.
I mentioned that she might want to look at my blog post on the Springfield, Illinois, riots of 1908. It’s not a part of our history to be proud of, but I think we should be aware of historical events that really happened, whether they make us proud or not. The Springfield riots led directly to the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a development in which Ida B. Wells had a hand. Those riots also caused the death of William Donnegan, a black Springfield shoemaker and Underground Railroad operative, who appears as a supporting character in my book.
All these reflections made me think I should repost the story, which appeared April 13, 2021, under the title, “Harry T. Loper’s Difficult Day.” So here it is.
Anarchy, Loper thought.
Crowds of men, women too, ran through the afternoon streets of Springfield. Shouted. Shook fists. Spooked horses. Snarled teams and rigs. Loper had witnessed the Cincinnati riots in 1884. Now those bloody scenes flashed back across his mind.
He frowned and crushed the horn bulb, steered his touring car through the lunatics, trying not to bump flesh. Loper’s 1906 Dorris was his pride and joy, but as a National Guard member and community leader, he knew his duty. He drove toward the county jail, the same place the mob was going, but on a different mission.
Out of nowhere, six of Springfield’s new motorized fire engines came roaring down the street. Loper swerved, nearly killing some moron walking in the gutter. Bells clanging, the fire trucks raced northward, beyond Union Square Park—and the mob in the street followed them. Loper turned down an alley between Washington and Jefferson Streets and approached the jail from the back.
“Took your time getting here,” said Sheriff Werner.
“There was a mob in the street, and by the way, the North End seems to be burning down.”
“Don’t worry about that fire. It’s a little invention of mine, to draw people away.” The sheriff barked back over his shoulder: “Come on, hustle!”
Two black men in prison stripes and handcuffs stumbled into the sunlight, surrounded by four armed lawmen.
“Harry Loper,” said the sheriff, “meet Deputies Kramer, Hanrahan, and Rhodes, and Sergeant Yanzell of the city police. The famous desperadoes climbing in behind you are Joe James and George Richardson. They may hang for their crimes next week, but by God we’ll keep them safe tonight.”
Loper turned in his seat to look at the prisoners. Both men stared bleakly at the floorboards. The Dorris was spacious, but two of the gun-wielding deputies had to stand on the running boards. Loper drove all six, prisoners and officers, five miles to Sherman, where they caught a train for Bloomington.
He drove fast on the return trip, anxious to get back to his restaurant—even though a big supper rush seemed unlikely. Decent folk would not venture out this night, even for a Friday feed at Springfield’s finest eatery.
But that was the least of it. He turned into Fifth Street only to find his place beleaguered by an ugly mob. He parked in the street and leapt from the car.
“There he is!” shouted someone as he ran in the door. “That’s Loper, the dirty nigger-lover!”
Loper made straight for his office and got the rifle he kept in case of robbers. He came out and stood in the doorway, brandishing the gun as broadly as he could.
“You hauled the negro out of town,” shouted a voice, female this time. “Now we will haul you!” The crowd surged forward.
My Grandma, Millie Marie Gunsten-not-yet-Sommers, lived in Low Point, Illinois, in 1908 and collected postcards. In her collection are two cards with no written message, no address, no stamps, no postmarks. They were never mailed. She must have been acquired them hot off the press.
These cards were printed and distributed for an urgent purpose: To get Harry Loper back in business after the riot. But theywere no doubt kept by Grandma simply as mementoes of the riot.
I remember her, from the 1940s and ’50s, as a homely old woman in a shapeless dress, who wore big button hearing aids, smiled a lot, rocked me in her rocking chair when I couldn’t sleep, and gave me a spoonful of honey when I had a cough.
In 1908, she would have been about twenty, a shy and socially awkward telephone operator still living with her parents and younger siblings in a very small town. What would she have thought of the distressing and notorious events in nearby Springfield? Did the big riot stay in her memory? She had enough things to occupy her mind in the intervening years, with marriage to a profane and pugnacious railroad telegrapher, the raising of five children, the loss of two sons in World War II. She never mentioned the riot in my hearing, and I never asked her about it, since I had never even heard of it. Long before I came along, the Springfield Race Riot of 1908 had been buried in society’s willing forgetfulness.
The Springfield Race Riot of 1908
But our haunted past has been resurrected. We now know that Springfield, Illinois—Abraham Lincoln’s home, the city from which he went to Washington to preside over a Union torn apart by slavery—was the site of one of the worst, and also most significant, race riots in the post-Reconstruction period.
On August 14, 1908, a young white woman, Mabel Hallam, charged George Richardson, a black construction worker, with raping her the night before. “I believe you are the man,” she said after hesitantly identifying him at the sheriff’s office in the Sangamon County Courthouse, “and you will have to prove that you are not.”
“Before God, I am innocent of this crime,” Richardson said. “I can explain her identification of me only by the theory that all coons look alike to her.”
An angry crowd formed outside the courthouse. Armed guards marched Richardson three blocks to the county jail and locked him up. Soon the mob re-formed at the jail.
Sheriff Charles Werner resisted using National Guard troops the governor placed at his disposal. He figured that getting the prisoner out of town would calm the mob. He telephoned Harry Loper to commandeer his car and arranged the diversionary tactic of a fake fire alarm. Perhaps as an afterthought, he added a second black prisoner to Loper’s cargo—one Joe James, languishing in jail for the July 4 murder of Clergy Ballard, a white mining engineer.
Loper and motoring friends in 1910. Loper, in light-colored suit and black hat, sits in the passenger seat. Photo courtesy Sangamon County Historical Society.
But the mob would not be placated. Learning that Loper had driven the two men out of town, hundreds converged on his restaurant, utterly destroying it and Loper’s car. The restaurateur escaped through a rear basement entrance, but Louis Johnston, a white factory worker, was hit by a stray gunshot inside the restaurant and died.
Black Districts Pillaged
The mob then turned to the Levee, a black business district, and the Badlands, a nearby neighborhood where blacks lived in mostly run-down houses. Many African American residents fled to any available refuge, although some defended themselves with revolvers and shotguns, firing from upper stories of businesses in the Levee.
The white mob lynched two black businessmen—Scott Burton, a 59-year-old barber, and William K. H. Donnegan, an 84-year-old shoemaker. Both men were beaten, slashed, and hung, their bodies mutilated.
In three days of rioting, at least thirty-five black-owned businesses were destroyed and riddled with bullets, and a four-square-block residential area was put to the torch. Local police, fire, and sheriff’s office responses were ineffective or nonexistent. Order was eventually restored by National Guard troops, deployed too late to stop the destruction and carnage. Accounts differ as to how many Springfield citizens, besides Burton and Donnegan, were killed or injured. At least several people, both black and white, died. Some estimates are higher.
Legal Penalties
Within a few days, a special grand jury “issued a total of 117 indictments and made eighty-five arrests for murder, burglary, larceny, incitement to riot, disorderly conduct, concealed weapons, and suspicion” (Something So Horrible: The Springfield Race Riot of 1908, by Carole Merritt [Springfield: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, 2008], p. 59).
However, in the trials that followed, only one person faced serious punishment for participation in the riot—Roy Young, 15, who confessed to “shooting at negroes” and helping burn 15 or 16 houses and was sentenced to the state reformatory at Pontiac. Another rioter, Kate Howard, a boardinghouse owner known to have led rioters in the destruction of Loper’s café, was released on $10,000 bond and subsequently re-arrested in connection with the lynching of Scott Burton. “Before leaving for prison, Howard secretly took poison and died at the door of the county jail.”
Negro prisoner Joe James was convicted of the murder of Clergy Ballard and was hanged October 23, 1908. However, George Richardson, the man whose alleged rape of Mabel Hallam was the actual spark for the riot, was fully exonerated and released from jail two weeks after the riot, when his accuser admitted to the grand jury that she made the story up. According to Wikipedia, “He received no restitution or apology for his time away from work or harm to his name. He went on to work as a janitor, and lived until he was 76, when he died at St. John’s Hospital. His obituary did not mention the events of 1908.”
Catalyst for Founding of the NAACP
Richardson’s vindication would seem to be the only good thing to have come out of the Springfield riot. But it was not.
W.E.B. Du Bois
Wealthy white Republican Socialist William English Walling traveled to Springfield in the aftermath of the riot, visited hard-hit areas and spoke with survivors of the riot. He penned an article, “The Race War in the North,” for a New York weekly, The Independent. Journalist and social activist Mary White Ovington read Walling’s article and wrote to him in response. They organized a January 1909 meeting in New York, attended also by Dr. Henry Moskowitz, which became the founding meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Prominent black and white leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Oswald Villard and his mother Frances Garrison Villard, Ray Baker, Mary Church Terrell, Archibald Grimké, and Ida B. Wells joined the initial organizational efforts.
Thus the Springfield riot became the catalyst that led to the formation of the NAACP early the following year.
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Blessings,
Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author
Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.
Price of Passage
Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois
