Ike's legacy

                                                History is His Story

How did “In God We Trust” end up on all our currency?  “Under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? To understand the story you have to understand where Eisenhower got his faith.  His parents were Pennsylvania Dutch Lutherans.  David and Ida moved to Hope, Kansas in the 1880s.  They had both gone to college in LeCompton.  After a brief job in Denison, TX, David Eisenhower moved to Abilene, KS, in 1892, about 150 miles north of Ponca City and 40 miles from my old KS homestead (Hope is just 20 miles away!). The family would be classified as deeply religious, attending first a Mennonite church and then joining the Jehovah Witnesses, mainly at the instigation of Ida. Dwight never joined, however, remaining more mainstream in his faith. The family held twice daily devotions. She had 7 boys, and Dwight was the 3^rd.  All were nicknamed “Ike”. Dwight (Little Ike) and his older brother Edgar (Big Ike) made a pact that they would alternate years at college, the other working to pay tuition. But Edgar wanted a second year of college right away so Dwight agreed to work another year at the creamery.  A friend had successfully applied to the Naval Academy and encouraged Little Ike to do the same. He was accepted at West Point. 

            Soon he fell very much in love with Mamie Doud and they married in 1916, soon after he graduated. Every year or so he was assigned to a different base so they never joined a church but attended the Protestant base services.  During WW I, Captain Eisenhower trained tank operators and soon joined Colonel George Patton in Texas who espoused aggressive “tank warfare”, not just using the tanks as an infantry backup. Ike got assigned to the War College and it became apparent that he was a genius for battle plans with a comprehensive brain for lining up resources and working with differing personalities. Yet he remained a major for 16 long years.  In 1941, he was promoted to Brigadier General.  He and Patton went to N. Africa and the result was a stellar campaign through Tunisia, Sicily and southern Italy until Ike was chosen to handle all the egotistical and prickly generals of the Allied Command for Operation Overlord, D-Day. He achieved this by keeping close personal control over the entire operation and letting them claim the glory of victories.  The pictures of Ike’s heartfelt conversations with troops ready to land in Normandy, knowing that half would sustain casualties, are quite real.  He was humbled by their devotion, even by those far beneath him in rank. And he often shared scripture. 

            After the war, he served as military governor of US sector of occupied Germany, General of the Army, and then in 1948 became President of Columbia University, NY. Truman suggested he run for President as his Democrat successor.  But the little secret was that though Ike could work with anybody, he disliked Columbia’s atheistic professors and the welfare state.  He chose to run as a Republican, was secretly conservative, but was also an advocate of NATO, opposed by the Republican right wing isolationists. Most of us remember President Eisenhower as a “bipartisan and relaxed”, but historians who have studied his papers say, no, he was secretly, intensely involved in every decision, a deviousness he learned from being in military command, desiring unpredictabilitiy. In 1952 Ike joined the Presbyterians and was baptized.

            But something was eating at Ike. From 1948 to 1955 television viewing went from 172,000 families to 32 million.  As the habit spread, those who ran the networks began to flex cultural muscles and openly contemplated a society in which all standards of behavior would be up for redefinition in moral relativism governed by only ratings. Ike quietly listened and decided that the character education of American youth should not follow this.  He suggested “under God” (from Lincoln’s Inaugural) be inserted into the pledge to some congressmen, and in 1954 they passed it. He is famously quoted, “Our government makes no sense unless it is founded on a deeply felt religious faith—and I don’t care what it is.” Typical Ike Talk, Mamie explained. This didn’t mean he was indifferent to the articles of faith, but sincere faith should be an important component of all Americans. Then some suggested “In God We Trust” (4^th verse of national anthem) become a national motto and be on all coins.  The media dubbed this as “Piety on the Potomac”.  Indeed it was subtle.  Mamie later said that Ike thought this was one of the more important things he had achieved.  From a guy who had defeated Hitler, blocked communist expansion, rebuilt Europe, built the Interstate Highways, NASA, and other things, this is a quite an assessment!

Lydia Smith

                                                History is His Story

July 4, 1863, a torrential rain broke out over Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  For 3 days 180,000 Union and Confederate forces had fought the bloodiest battle of the war, and with the rain the Confederates managed to escape.  They needed to. They had suffered 28,000 casualties, 40% of Lee’s 71,000-man army.  Meade’s larger (94,000) Union force had 22,000 casualties.  10,000 men and 3000 horses lay dead on the ground. Another 23,000 men lay wounded.  

            Harrisburg, the capital, had been Lee’s objective.  But the Confederates were quick to pilfer just about anything of value they could get their hands on to ship back to Virginia.  That included slaves.  An able-bodied male slave would bring about the same price as a house.  And the ugly secret was that southern Pennsylvania was full of free blacks.  With little regard for their status, the soldiers rounded up several hundred, tied them together and put them in carts.  Seeing the wagons full of weeping women and children, white Pennsylvanians argued and taunted the occupiers but to little avail.  “They’re fugitives escaped from us,” the soldiers claimed.  One pastor boldly protested that he had baptized several children and he knew they were freeborn. The Union forces had warned blacks in the area to flee ahead of the battle, but some refused since they were protecting their farms.  The Briens had a farm on Cemetery Ridge.  It wound up being the center of Pickett’s charge. On the edge of the Brien property was the shack of Margaret Palm, a black laundress, who, having fended off an earlier kidnapping attempt in 1857, had warned her neighbors to flee before being tied up herself. Another woman, referred to as "Old Liza," "took advantage of the chaos and the crowds of soldiers and civilians and bolted" with a group to the Lutheran Church in town, R. Creighton writes. Others were forced to cook for Confederate troops.  Everywhere, the threat of capture persisted during the battle. While the confusion saved some, another witness "saw 'a number of colored people' corralled together and marched away." What more than a few blacks of Gettysburg saw and heard themselves inspired them to join the Union cause as soldiers, among them prominent citizens like Randolph Johnston and teacher Lloyd Watts of the 24th U.S. Colored Troops; both became sergeants.

             July 4.  Lydia Smith looked out over the field strewn with bodies and asked herself what Jesus would do in such a situation.  She grabbed her water buckets and saddled her horse.  Of course, half the men were confederates but when they are dying or incapacitated, does it matter if someone were to take a pot shot at her?  And so she hitched a wagon to another horse, filled more buckets and began giving drinks, binding wounds, organizing transportation for the wounded.  The Union Army had refused to let a few black militias fight, but Lydia was armed with prayers for suffering soldiers and a servant’s heart.  And it didn’t matter if the soldier was blue or gray. Observing her, one reporter that Creighton quotes said, " 'This is quite a commentary … upon Gen. Lee's army of kidnappers and horse thieves who came here and fell wounded in their bold attempt to kidnap and carry off these free people of color.' "

            Gettysburg and surrounds was 15% Afro-American.  When Lincoln gave his address in October of that year, the town was still cleaning up.  The local AME churchmen worked tirelessly in the years after the war to commemorate the battlefield.

Tony Snow's faith

Tony Snow was an American journalist, news anchor, columnist, radio host, musician and White House Press Secretary under President George W.Bush. There have been about 30 Press Secretaries in 4 decades and none came close to handling the difficult job so smoothly as Snow. His dad was a social studies teacher and after college Tony taught physics for a year, but soon began his career in journalism. He was an avid musician who played in a rock band with musicians who later played with Jethro Tull and the Doobie Brothers.  He began work for a newspaper in Greensboro, then went to Norfolk, Newport News and The Washington Times.  In 1991 he quit the Times to become a speechwriter for Pres. George H.W. Bush, an unusual move since he was a Democrat.  In the 90s Snow appeared on radio and television programs worldwide including The McLaughlin Group, The MacNeil–Lehrer NewsHour, Face the Nation, Crossfire, and Good Morning America. He was host of the PBS news specials The New Militant Center. He substituted for Rush Limbaugh and became the first host of FOX News Sunday. (He also worked for CNN)  In 2005 he was diagnosed with colon cancer and fought losing 4-year battle, yet in 2006-7 he was Bush 43’s Press Secretary.

            “Painful experiences can lead to big questions and critical insights in the state of one’s soul,” he told the usually hardened press corps at an awards gathering. “The key is to look in the mirror, stop making excuses and move forward with open eyes.” At his commencement address at Catholic University in 2007, he added, “You begin to confront the truly overwhelming question: Why am I here? And one more thing.  It’s hard to ask ultimate, eternal life-and-death questions without thinking about God.  You see, it’s trendy to reject religious reflection as a grave offense against decency.  But faith and reason are knitted together in the human soul.  Don’t leave home without either one.”  Clearly, Snow had decided long ago not to be crushed by the question of death.  His one-liners as Press Sec. were always sharp and he handled the kind of tough questions that haunt a Pres. with declining approval polls.  Contentiousness seemed to fly out the window at his conferences.  Bill Kristol summed it well in the NY Times, “His deep Christian faith combined with his natural exuberance gave him an upbeat worldview. The Jew in me came to wonder: Could it be that a stance of faith-grounded optimism is in fact superior to one of worldly pessimism or sophisticated fatalism.?” 

            In his Catholic U. speech, Snow urged the grads to take risks and to always strive to serve others.  “Religious faith is not an opiate that helps people avoid hard questions.  Instead, the ups and downs that accompany the life of faith should be seen as part of the ultimate extreme sport.” About his cancer battle he concluded, “Our maladies define a central feature of our existence.  We are fallen.  We are imperfect.  Our bodies give out.  But despite this—because of it—God offers the possibility of salvation and grace.  We don’t know how it will end, but we get to choose how to use the interval between now and the moment we meet Him face to face.”

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A Frank Lloyd Wright House

My house was designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright.  But of course the dirty little secret of designing the fifties was that people couldn’t decide between Wright’s organic architecture with its earth tones and natural materials and another style called atomic which featured wildly bright primary colors and sputnik inspired fixtures.  So, like Winnie the Pooh when asked if he wanted jam or honey said, “Both.” Hence we bought a house with pink and turquoise, gold and green  bathrooms and a hot pink kitchen.  Amazingly, after restoring and creating a lot of organic features, the modern house has made a comeback  and now people on HGTV order designers to do Wrightian stuff like “open concept” but hardly know his reasoning for this. 

            The open concept was a way to save wasted space of long hallways and to achieve a sense of large size.  Older homes had divided rooms—dining, kitchen, den, living.  Open concept usually used a dining room or family room to feed traffic through without a hallway.  The openness gave a sense of grand space to an otherwise boxy little 1000 square foot house, like  the ones built in 1950.  Moreover, Wright had a motive.  He used the idea of having low ceiling halls or entries that opened into a large, expansive space. It gives the large space even more Wow when you discover it after going through a small entry.  And the large living space often had big windows, especially floor-to-ceiling windows  that seemed to let nature come into the house. Planters outside and planters inside made the inside seem outdoors and the outside come in.  This has become a stylistic point of many homes  built today even though they may be traditional with large Palladian windows.  Wright also created the picture window, an expanse of glass surrounded by two operable windows.  In the 50s many people had no air conditioning and having the two operable windows was important.  Often he would design a repeated design into a window—stained glass or dividing wood canes. A corollary of this glass and nature idea was an atrium for plants  combined with patio outside and more plants.  People in the 50s were often in love with yards and plantings, unlike today when a lot of folks can hardly grow a tomato. But as late as the 1930s half of US population lived on farms.

            In the midst of rooms was often something of almost sculptural beauty, a divider, a light fixture from the ceiling or a bookcase.  Hence Wright designed furniture to match a house.  Everything seen has importance, a design concept used by virtually every interior designer today. Our little place has cantilevered shelves of spalted oak and a canarywood fireplace mantle over a cut-stone fireplace with niche for the wood. And in order to make the house fit the environment, stone, rough sawn woods, bamboo, and cork floors were often used. 

            Wright’s organic architecture used flat roofs and cantilevered rooms that were designed to blend with nature, quite the contrast to today’s homes where roofs are as high as possible in order to declare the importance of the owners.  Landscaping was vital in order to make the blend with the land work well.  Japanese house styles were mimicked with bonsai trees and stones and gravel beds to imitate nature’s stream beds.  There was also the importance of view, both small and large in every house.  People didn’t live with the drapes down.  They knew their neighbors well, but America had begun to relinquish the idea that one sits out on the porch at night until after dark. Instead the concept of patio and garden with trellis and gates replaced it.  I suppose a lot of people would think we are nuts in recreating this, slaving over a yard and garden just to be able to sit in it.  But there are times when it rains or the sun catches the wisteria or the trees thrash in the wind when it becomes magical. 

          

             My mother was an interior designer and I guess some of it rubbed off on me.  Shirley learned fast and together we have made a fortune on flipping and renting properites in this small town.  We recently remodelled a little ranch rental and the realtor was enthralled at what we had done.  He put a price on it that was nearly double what we gave a few years ago. Flabbergasted me.  "It will sell within a week," he told us.  Wrong.  It had an offer but the banker takes at least a month to get a note done. 

 

 

 

Myths of the West part I

Depending on where you grew up, you may or not realize a number of later-day myths about the West.  Many came from Hollywood.  Indians weren’t ‘bad guys’in the eyes of many settlers but of widely differing culture. Both groups struggled for existence in the wilderness.  Indians could be feared for their savagery but admired for their ethics. Ultimately, they were seen as simply impoverished neighbors in need of the Gospel.  But the Cowboy vs. Indian diorama was cast by early New York movie producers who were trying to portray the world as a larger version of NY problems, namely immigration.  East Coast Protestants after 1900 were nervous about large numbers of Catholic and Orthodox Southern Europeans invading their cities.  And eastern cities were where the nickelodeon movies (10 minute silent films) were popular. Needing a villain, the producers cast the Indians.  In actual fact, Indians had a stark choice—join the modern world of farming or stay as a tribe.  And since Indian hunter-gatherers had thin population, the government was somewhat baffled about a solution.  Let them live in a tribe on the reservation, a fly-in-amber preservation with few benefits? Or assimilate? The majority assimilated, beyond which they were not counted as Indians. The two main hurdles of assimilation were that Indians considered women to be responsible for agriculture and tribes were small fragmented groups (spawning an us-them mentality. ‘Them’ was also any other tribe.) “Religion” was often just a loose agglomeration of stories. Christianity had much appeal and the leading church that evangelized was Presbyterian, with Methodists, Catholics and Baptists close behind. Pan-Indian religion did not exist until 1918 when it was first preached in Oklahoma. Like Black Muslims, Indian religion practitioners have a ‘constructed belief.’

            How appealing was Christianity? Very.  It had social aspects too. When I ran across carefully-kept Army statistics of 79,000 killings of Indians from colonial times to 1890, compared to 2 million part-Indians in the 1890 census, it became apparent that romance overwhelmingly outdid warfare. I asked an employee, a member of the Ponca Tribal Council, if she knew any romantic Cowboy-Indian stories.  She immediately responded as if she was elated that someone finally asked.  “My Grandparents!” she said gleefully.  Grandfather was a young 15 yr-old cowhand who saw her 12 yr-old grandmother in the trading post one day.  He taught her English, to say “bacon” so she wouldn’t have to make snorting pig sounds to the grocer.  Her father and mother were delighted with the love affair and her dad gave her hand in marriage for a bride price of just 2 horses, all the young cowboy owned. When she found out, she was insulted.  Everyone should know that a good wife should bring 3 or more horses! But when Grandad told her he wanted to borrow his sister’s dress and get married at the Methodist church, she threw her arms around him and all was forgiven.  She and other girls had often hidden shyly behind bushes just to get a glimpse of the white brides coming out of the church in those fabulous gowns, treated like princesses who lived in dry and warm houses.  As it turned out, he did indeed build her a house which was just recently torn down next to US 177.  They were lovingly married over 60 years, attending that same Methodist church.

            Surely stories like this were played out all over our state, all over the United States for 400 years.  Of those who claim “white” on the census in Oklahoma, 30% have 1/16 or more Native American blood.