August 6, 1945, a day that should live forever in infamy. On this date, sixty-five years ago, the United States dropped the only nuclear weapon ever used in combat on the civilians of Hiroshima, Japan. If ever there was a greater conscious act of inhumanity, I do not know. Certainly, this is on par with the intentional slaughter of Jews, Serbs, and Tutsis. The difference is that America is much more efficient in its atrocity. It required no face-to-face contact or more than one sortie to kill at least 78,000 souls (and injure or disable another 100,000). By comparison, the attacks of September 11, 2001 killed approximately 3,000 persons.

 How do Americans treat this monumental wrongdoing? Do we attempt to rationalize it? Do we own it? Are we dismissive of the act or judgment against it? My textbook treats it this way: “[Harry] Truman was torn between his awareness that the bomb was ‘the most terrible thing ever discovered’ and his hope that using it ‘would bring the war to an end’…Considering the thousands of Americans who would surely die in any conventional invasion of Japan and, on a less humane level, influenced by a desire to end the Pacific war before the Soviet Union could intervene effectively and thus claim a role in the peacemaking, the president chose to go ahead.” Yes, you read that correctly. The decision to kill thousands of unarmed non-combatants was partly due to a desire to squeeze the U.S.S.R. out of peace negotiations. I mean, you want to keep the odds stacked in your favor and you wouldn’t want an equal like the Soviets to keep you from running rough-shod over the Japanese. If they’re going to be pawns, you want them to be your pawns. The other deciding factor — the more “humane” one — was how the deaths of thousands of little children would save you from sacrificing a lesser number of grown, male soldiers. The inherent — and appalling — assumption in that statement is that American lives are more valuable and more desirable to be saved than Japanese ones (even innocent Japanese children where were in no way culpable for the war being waged around them). Drafted or not, part of the nature of military service is that there is a real potential to lose one’s life; it’s part of the code of war. Childhood does not come with the same inherent risk by definition. Yet, the American government and military intentionally assigned a higher value on U.S. soldiers than Japanese civilians — something that has always gone against the code of war. No wonder Robert McNamara said of the war on Japan: we were war criminals and had the war gone the other way, we would’ve stood trial for the things we did.

 In an effort to sidestep any civic responsibility or remorse, history textbooks in the U.S. skirt the issue like the passage cited above. Similarly, they do not include any photographs of the atrocity that might make real what we did to the people of Japan. If there are any pictures at all, these are of the rubble of buildings or scorched earth. That is more palatable than facing the horror of what we did to the actual people of Hiroshima. We still don’t want to have to look them in the face.

 Really, the historiography is offensive. I submit that perhaps our textbooks should — rather than presenting insulting justifications — just contain photo essays of the victims and let our natural guilt do its work. There is no need for words.

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The Boy Kelsey (Henry Kelsey, English) set out in 1689 to explore part of inland Canada on behalf of the Hudson Bay Company, to whom he belonged (as an indentured servant).  He took with him an Indian youth as his aide.  Kelsey may not have been more than a teen himself at the time.  The two of them set out on a brief journey of little more than a hundred miles to ascertain the opportunities available for exploitation of the land and its resources.  They met no other Indians.  The Spanish explorers in the Southwest would never travel so lightly.  Everywhere they went in North America, they were escorted by crowds of Indians in the hundreds.  They brought extensive supplies and hordes of workers/fighters on their treks.  They did not rely on the materials at hand for their endeavors;  they brought these with them.  Accordingly, these large, heavy-laden swarms traveled slowly over the many miles.  Indeed, so slowly that often the traveling sluggish masses of exploratory encroachments sent teams on ahead to reconnoiter while the herd followed at some days’ or weeks’ distances behind.  Thus is the difference between a conquistador and an explorer.

Despite my long-term commitment to the study of history, I have to say that I am often at a loss to draw any set sociological principles or truths from what I find. Each situation is so particular, and the characters so peculiar. It’s hard to make generalities. I would like to be able to answer that age old question: why is it that those who protest the most are the guiltiest, but I can’t. 

Perhaps it was the 70’s. Perhaps it was the exhaustion of unending years of civil strife in America. Perhaps it’s the nature of the beast. By the end of that decade though, ultra-conservative leaders General Edwin Walker and Billy James Hargis — two of the most famous and popular anti-Communist activists of the day — found themselves awash in shame and irrelevancy. Their pro-Christian, conservative, anti-Red barnstorming days were in the past. Walker finally managed to wrangle his pension — which he had forfeited in earlier resigning his military command — from the Army after all and could live out his days, bitter in Texas. Hargis had returned to Tulsa to run a Bible college, training the next generation of patriotic Christians to continue the war against liberalism, Marxism, and rock music (not necessarily in that order). Hargis’ plans, however, were disrupted in 1974, when a couple from his school accused him of sexual misconduct. The young newlyweds discovered on their honeymoon, apparently, that both had been sexually involved with the minister. That must have been one awkward confessional. In any case, they took their story to the school trustees and it was downhill from there for Hargis. Later, a number of other students from the school (male and female) came forward with other allegations of sexual misdeeds on the part of the minister and of threats to keep them from coming forward with the truth. Hargis was forced out and he never regained his previous place in the public eye. Meanwhile, Walker got caught up in his own sex scandal. He was arrested for fondling an undercover policeman and committing a lewd act in a public bathroom in Dallas in 1976. The following year, he was again arrested for public lewdness. The smoking man died in 1993 of lung cancer. Hargis lived on, incapacitated by strokes and dementia, until 2004. 

Both men were outspoken leaders of the conservative movement during the civil rights years, and they denounced the anti-Christian influences in American society. Behind the scenes, though, they were in on some seriously sinful shenanigans. So, why is it that those who crow the loudest are those that are awash in their own sin? I am reminded of the New Testament warning about railing against the speck in your neighbor’s eye while blinded by the mote in your own. I don’t know what it is about Communism in particular that drives the promiscuous and yet sexually repressed to public crusades, but it seems to rub homosexuals (and bisexuals) particularly the wrong way.

 Incidentally, Hargis allegedly wrote a speech for Joseph McCarthy, the old Communist hunter, once. Of course, McCarthy’s comrade in arms was Roy Cohn, a closet homosexual who threatened to out others for political gain. It’s ironic, if not just, that Cohn died of AIDS-related complications in 1986. He, Walker, and Hargis make for an interesting political triumvirate, but you know what they say about strange bedfellows…or in this case, perverts in the pod.

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General Edwin Walker — decorated war veteran and West Point graduate — sat at his desk in his private home in Dallas, Texas when a shot burst through the window behind him. The bullet grazed his arm but he was otherwise unharmed. Although it was the spring, it wouldn’t be until December of that year that the police would have a lead on his assailant. At that time, documentary evidence and testimony collected by the Warren Commission would indicate that Lee Harvey Oswald, who had recently assassinated the President of the United States, had taken the shot at Walker as well.

Walker and Kennedy could not have been more politically different. Kennedy represented the modern liberal mainstream of politics, and he and Walker would be drawn into conflicts over the years. Ironically, Walker had run for Governor of Texas (surprisingly as a Democrat) but lost to John Connally, who later sat next to Kennedy in the open car where he died. Walker was an ultra-conservative and opponent of desegregation who had been forced under Eisenhower to provide support and protection to nine black students enrolling at Little Rock (Arkansas) Central High School in 1957. During his subsequent posting in Europe, the general was relieved of his command by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara (who served under Kennedy) for attempting to indoctrinate the soldiers under him with right-wing literature. Walker later resigned from the military in protest of his treatment, alleging that the government was too soft on communism. Walker became a leader in the ultra/conservative movement then. He helped organize protests in Mississippi opposing James Meredith’s enrollment at Ole Miss. After riots broke out and more than sixty federal troops and U.S. Marshals were wounded, Walker was arrested for conspiracy and inciting rebellion. The Attorney General who charged him was, of course, Robert Kennedy. One of the volunteers on Walker’s gubernatorial campaign and participant in the Mississippi protests was a man named Robert Surrey. Surrey was later responsible for the printing and distribution of a flyer accusing John Kennedy of treason and declaring him “wanted” for his crimes. These flyers were circulated in Dallas two days prior to Kennedy’s assassination. Clearly, for as different as they were politically, Walker’s and Kennedy’s lives seemed intertwined in significant ways.

After the President’s death, Walker continued in his work as a conservative activist. He traveled the country speaking to various groups. In 1963, he joined forces with famed evangelist Billy James Hargis (whose ministry’s headquarters were in Tulsa, Oklahoma) on an anti-communist campaign. Their tours were dubbed “midnight rides” — meant to awaken citizens to the threat of communism and anti-Christian forces at work in America. Both were noted conservative activists in the 60’s and 70’s who later fell into relative obscurity. Today in Tulsa, you hear a good deal about Oral Roberts but they don’t talk about Hargis anymore. And, Walker is certainly not the more famous of Oswald’s victims in the public consciousness. Walker’s rival, Kennedy, was brought down by the assassin’s bullet, but Walker survived, yielding finally to lung cancer in 1993.

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There’s been a lot of talk about sexism lately, and it seemed to me a good time to consider how far we’ve come. Many disparities remain, but, on the face of it, the law, at least, is now (supposed to be) neutral in its regard to the sex of the parties before it. This was not always the case. There was a time when the law was intentionally biased against women – and judges added insult to injury in applying it. I’d like to offer an example from a divorce case from North Carolina in the mid-nineteenth century. The wife filed for divorce on the grounds that her husband beat her twice (with a horsewhip once and a switch the other time), and the matter went to the state Supreme Court. I will quote at length, because I think the court’s decision speaks for itself:

“The wife must be subject to the husband. Every man must govern his household, and if by reason of an unruly temper, or an unbridled tongue, the wife persistently treats her husband with disrespect, and he submits to it, he not only loses all sense of self-respect, but loses the respect of the other members of his family, without which he cannot to expect to govern them, and forfeits the respect of his neighbors. Such have been the incidents of the marriage relation from the beginning of the human race. Unto the woman it is said: ‘Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’: Gen. iii. 16. It follows that the law gives the husband power to use such a degree of force as is necessary to make the wife behave herself and know her place.”

“It is sufficient for our purpose to state that there may be circumstances which will mitigate, excuse, and so far justify the husband in striking the wife ‘with a horse-whip on one occasion and with a switch on another, leaving several bruises on the person,’ so as not to give her a right to abandon him, and claim to be divorced. For instance, suppose a husband comes home, and his wife abuses him in the strongest terms – calls him a scoundrel, and repeatedly expresses a wish that he was dead and in torment; and being thus provoked in the furor brevis, he strikes her with the horse-whip, which he happens to have in his hands, but is afterwards willing to apologize, and expresses regret for having struck her; or suppose a man and his wife get into a discussion and have a difference of opinion as to a matter of fact, she becomes furious and gives way to her temper, so far as to tell him he lies, and upon being admonished not to repeat the word, nevertheless does so, and the husband taking up a switch, tells her if she repeats it again he will strike her, and after this notice she again repeats the insulting words, and he thereupon strikes her several blows, — these are cases in which, in our opinion, the circumstances attending the act, and giving rise to it, so far justify the conduct of the husband as to take from the wife any ground of divorce for that cause, and authorize the court to dismiss her petition, with the admonition, ‘If you will amend your manners, you may expect better treatment”…So that there are circumstances under which a husband may strike his wife with a horse-whip, or may strike her several times with a switch, so hard as to leave marks on her person, and these acts do not furnish sufficient ground for a divorce.” (Joyner v. Joyner, 59 N.C. 322 [1862])

This was the court’s finding despite the fact that there was no evidence that the wife in this case had done anything “to induce such violence on the part of the husband.” The mere fact that such justifying circumstances existed was enough for the judges (male) to dismiss the wife’s divorce petition. As long as there was the possibility that unruly, disobedient, and disrespectful wives existed, all men were excused for beating their own wives (“deserving” or not). My own ex-husband only tried to strike me once, and I guess you know who swung first.

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