Category Archives: history

It Happened in Virginia

history, human rights,

Virginia has a very complicated history. Home to 8 presidents, all of whom owned slaves themselves or, in the case of Woodrow Wilson, came from slave-owning families. Hotbed of segregation following Board v Board, in some cases choosing to close public schools rather than integrate.

Through my book group’s September book selection, I have learned of Virginia’s leadership in another infamous chapter in US history: the eugenics movement.

The Lies They Told by Ellen Marie Wiseman is a powerful and disturbing novel. Wiseman focuses on the eugenics movement in the United States in the years between the world wars. She does so through the story of Lena, a German immigrant who arrives in Ellis Island in 1928 with her mother, brother and young daughter. We follow Lena through the often humiliating process of being admitted to the country on Ellis Island and learn more about those who are turned back from our shores.

From there, the story moves to the hollows of Virginia’s Blue Ridge. Plans for Shenandoah National Park include removing the families whose ties to the mountains go back for generations. Eugenics plays a large role as outsiders use dubious science and deceptive tactics to label the people inbred and feebleminded, institutionalizing and in many cases sterilizing them.

What makes this novel so powerful is the way Wiseman brings horrific history down to human level. The mountain people understand the injustices being done to them but are trapped in a system beyond their control, some literally imprisoned against their wills for decades. Sections of this novel were tough to read. Wiseman does not spare the reader the horror of the treatment of people who were deemed not quite human. And now, some 100 years later, we are seeing a resurgence of these repugnant ideas.

I am sad that Virginia was a leader in this movement.

Historic Cornwall

history,

I am heading to Cornwall, Pennsylvania, tomorrow to visit my parents. Their retirement community was built on land once owned by the Coleman family that operated the Cornwall Iron Furnace and includes several historic buildings related to the furnace and the family.

The greenhouses may be my favorites. They started as a grand conservatory built in the late 1800s. They’ve undergone major renovations but maintained their historic exteriors. The gardening club uses them and residents can store plants in them in the winter.

Cornwall Manor Greenhouse

Largely Forgotten

art, history, , , ,

My husband and I found a few open days and drove up to the Shenandoah Valley. We poked through small towns, chasing LOVE signs, history and apple cider along with some peace and quiet.

In Fishers Hill, just south of Strasburg, Virginia, we happened upon a new historical marker commemorating The Creative Women of Fishers Hill: Bertha Von Hillern, Maria J. C. a’ Becket, and Emma Howard Wright. The Wikipedia entry for Wight mentions the Fishers Hill studio she shared with Von Hillern.

Largerly Forgotten

The Northern Virginia Daily published an extensive story about the women and the attempts of local historians to tells their stories.

It was the comment in the first line–largely forgotten–that struck me as the story of so many women, and some men as well, even those who achieve some level of prominence in their life times. Times and preferences and fashion change and without champions to keep them alive, artists fade into the timeline.

These kinds of local history projects are perfect for involving young people. There have been several stories of students submitting historical markers for approval. Virginia’s historical marker program is the oldest in the country and the site includes a searchable database. The Historical Marker Database is more extensive as its includes all sorts of markers.

Language As Weapon

history, human rights, rhetoric

On the morning of November 29, 1864, Colonel John Chivington and nearly 700 United States soldiers attacked a village of 750 Cheyenne and Arapaho Plains Native American tribes comprised primarily of elderly, women and children. They had been placed in the big bend of Sand Creek by the military as they waited to negotiate peace. Black Kettle, one of the leaders, was known to desire peace. He was shot down as he waved an American and a white flag. If you are not familiar with the massacre, the National Park’s website has a detailed history that includes links to recently discovered and horrifying first-person accounts from soldiers who refused to participate.

Colonel Chivington is infamous for his dehumanizing language towards the Native Americans and urging his men to scalp and kill them all even as some soldiers resisted. In her essay “Deprived of Humanity: From the Sand Creek Massacre to Today“, Nellis Kennedy-Howard of The Sierra Club and a member of the Navajo Nation reflects on her 2018 visit to the massacre site and the continued use of dehumanization towards the oppressed, calling it “one of the steps on the road to genocide.” She is correct, according to the United Nations.

Kennedy-Howard warns of not ignoring this use of language:

No human being is an animal, or an insect, or an infestation to be eliminated. When people with power use it to dehumanize others — watch out. Learn from the experiences of Native peoples and other persecuted groups. This isn’t just idle talk. It’s a warning sign that we have a duty to heed.

Dehumanizing language may be used by both sides in a conflict, but as Kennedy-Howard suggests, the more powerful opponent will often control the narrative and thus the definitions.

Boston University’s Dr. Elizabeth Coppock, a linguistics expert, discusses the use of language as a weapon in war. It is a quick read and I encourage you to take a look. Her responses to two of the interviewer’s questions stood out for me:

How do we talk to one another when one side’s “terrorist” is another’s “freedom fighter?”

I think we should focus on listening to each other.

The one substantive comment to the interview makes it clear that while this sounds simple, it is a lofty potentially unattainable ideal and certainly not part of our current climate. Oh we listen but often only to those with whom we agree, taking hard lines and claiming the moral high ground. The commenter is defending his group’s definitions of terrorist that arise out of their world view, exactly as Coppock describes in her other answers.

But it is Coppock’s response to the last question that broke my heart:

Is this time unusual, in that every single word seems to carry so much weight and to be subject to scrutiny that makes some people fall silent?

There is unspeakable sorrow and trauma all around right now.

Sigh.

I was thinking about ending with a poem, maybe Wendell Berry or Mary Oliver. But, instead, I found this…Walt Whitman’s list of synonyms for sorrow that he probably used as he wrote his elegy to Lincoln. Language used to express human emotion at its rawest and deepest, not a as a weapon but as a solace.

Whitman, Walt. “sorrow.” The Walt Whitman Archive. Gen. ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, & Kenneth M. Price. Accessed 06 June 2024. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org>.

Here is the first section of Whitman’s poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d“:

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,
And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,
I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love.

Once Upon a Time

Civil Discourse, history, thinking out loud, ,

I was starting my sophomore year at The College of William and Mary in the fall of 1981 and would have, in my earnest, innocent way, identified as a feminist. That year, the annual speakers’ forum opened with a debate about the Equal Rights Amendment, featuring Phyllis Schlafly, founder of STOP ERA, and Karen DeCrow, former President of the National Organization for Women, a group which advocated for passage of the ERA, among other things.*

I have a clear memory of sitting on the bleachers in William and Mary Hall listening to these two women debate each other, something that, in and of itself was a bit unusual in my experience thus far. I suppose it was seen as “women’s issue” so women were permitted to talk about it. I don’t remember much, except being surprised to find that Schlafly was thoughtful, even compelling, in her beliefs, (despite disagreeing vehemently with everything she said) and that both women remained civil to each other throughout the evening. No name calling, no shouting over each other.

The report (see page 2) from The Flat Hat, the college paper, indicates the audience mostly sided with DeCrow, wearing ERA Now and .59¢ buttons, the latter referencing the fact that, at the time, women made 59 cents to every dollar a man made. That gap has closed, and is now, according to the US Department of Labor, 83.7 cents. I discovered that there is a “holiday” in March each year to commemorate the fact that it takes women 15 months to earn what men do in 12 months. This gap, of course, widens when it comes to women of color.

Political issues aside, I titled this post “once upon a time” because there *was* a time, in the past, when people who disagreed could be on the same stage together to describe and defend their ideas in a civil way, to give listeners a chance to hear and evaluate those ideas and use them to form their own opinions, perhaps becoming more nuanced by being exposed to the other side. Civil discourse seems to be a thing of the past, and I am not sure it is something we can get back.

*I am grateful to The College of William and Mary’s digital archive for access to The William and Mary News and The Flat Hat. I was able to confirm the date of the debate and read the follow up review to refresh my sometimes faulty memory.