The Faculty Lounge

UPDATE: The Breaching of Macomb’s Dam(n) Bridge

One writing truth that I learned (relearned?) writing Naming Gotham: The Villains, Rogues, and Heroes Behind New York Place Names is that book publishers are serious about word limits. Unlike a law review article where the word limit is more of a suggestion, my publisher gave me a hard upper limit for words in the book. I ran out of space long before I ran out of words. So, I have taken to blogging because there are more stories I want to tell. This is one of them. You can read about the book project here, and the first installment of this saga here. 

When we last met, Robert Macomb had constructed his dam(n) bridge across the Harlem River . The New York legislature had granted him the right to build the dam so long as it did not impede navigation. Legislation authorizing the dam explicilty required Macomb to build and maintain a lock to ensure that the river remained navigable. 

Macomb ignored this injunction, much to the fury of the growing population of Westchester that was now cut off from New York harbor.  After Macomb’s dam was completed, boats seeking to traverse this portion of the river had to unload above the dam, haul the boat over the bridge, and then reload the boat. This was hard, dangerous work that made navigation well nigh impossible.

Enter Lewis Gouverneur Morris, scion of the wealthy Morris family that owned parts of Westchester and much of the Bronx, including the areas presently known as Port Morris and Mott Haven.  The family was extremely politically powerful. Lewis’s grandfather was Chief Judge of the New York Supreme Court, and his great-uncle Gouverneur Morris not only signed the Declaration of Independence, but also wrote the preamble to the Constitution.

Westchester landowners  drafted a Remonstrance to the State Legislature. This Remonstrance, signed by more than 100 people, averred that before the construction of Macomb’s dam the Harlem River was navigated by schooners, sloops and other vessels. Although the main thrust of this Remonstrance dealt with the High Bridge and the Croton aqueduct, it also documented and complained of the navigation problems caused by Macomb’s dam. They appointed Lewis G. Morris as their agent for addressing this problem.  Lewis brought the Remonstrance to Albany, but also took on a less orthodox role in solving the navigational challenges.

Characterizing Macomb’s dam as a public nuisance, these leading citizens of Westchester decided to take matters into their own hands. Declaring that “any person injured or incommoded by said nuisance [could] abate the same,” they deputized Lewis G. Morris and vested him with authority to remove enough of it to allow navigation. They not only agreed to pay the costs of this direct action, promised to bail out anyone who was arrested, but also advised “We recommend the employment of a strong force of men and scows, that the work may be promptly effected, and to the end of obviating opposition.” 

On August 31st 1838, Morris and his entourage boarded the Schooner Superior and sailed up to Macomb's dam. They demanded passage through the dam to deliver a load of bricks upstream.  The Bridge keeper (remember there was an illegal toll bridge atop the dam) stated the obvious—that he could not let them through because the bridge had no lock and thus there was no way for a schooner to pass.  

On September 8^th, Morris and entourage again returned in a sailboat and demanded passage through Macomb’s dam. Again they were denied, there being no lock that could afford them passage.

Finally, on the evening of September 14^th, Morris and his entourage returned once more, this time on Nonarpiel, a vessel hired to transport coal from New Jersey to Morris’s residence upriver from the dam. Morris again demanded passage through the dam.  Upon being denied passage, Morris and his men began “quietly and in a peaceable manner commence taking down part of said dam and bridge, and did take up sufficient thereof to let said vessel pass through.”

Under Morris’s direction, 63 men spent much of the next week dismantling Macomb’s dam, ultimately removing roughly three spans of the dam and demolishing one of the abutments. Through her trustee, Mary Pell Cornell Macomb sued (Robert had already died) alleging a trespass. After a trial on the merits, the judge instructed that “if the jury should find [the dam] was a public nuisance then the defendant had a right to abate it by his own act” and “that in doing so, the defendant had a right to remove so much of the dam as was necessary to make a safe and convenient passage for all vessels.”  The jury ruled for Morris on all counts. The appeals court not only affirmed but also awarded Morris roughly $400--the cost of dismantling the dam.

In 1854, the City of New York repossessed Macomb’s dam, and four years later, the New York legislature finally directed New York City and Westchester County to remove the dam and build a new toll-free bridge. To facilitate navigation, this bridge was built as a swing bridge. The bridge was landmarked in 1992. 

Check out Naming Gotham to learn more about the gossipy backstory behind New York City infrastructure.

Bonus: The multiple civil proceedings that emerged from this incident were among the earliest affirmations of the federally guaranteed freedom of navigation and an early definition of waters of the United States. These cases also framed a robust theory of public nuisance that might be of interest to environmental lawyers today.

Added Bonus for Property Professors: Robert and Mary Macomb were extremely litigious.  One of their many cases, Baker v. Lorillard, provides a remarkable tour of estates in land, including how to interpret ambiguous grants after the legislative elimination of fee tails, the consequences of partitioning estates encumbered by life estates, and the various ways vested remainders might be divested by executory interests.

Schmucker Science Center, West Chester University, Pa

Samuel C. Schmucker Science Center is getting renamed. Schmucker is a eugenicist. Schmucker is quite prolific -- The Meaning Of Evolution (Macmillan 1913) and Heredity and Parenthood (Macmillan 1929) and a number of other books and articles.  And, Henry Goddard was also on the West Chester Normal School (eventually named West Chester University). (President Fiorentino and the final committee report are here--a lot of work was done in this report.) 

A.P. Hill Monument

The last Confederate monument on Richmond, VA ...

Mathews County, Virginia: Confederate Monument

Mathews County, Virginia Confederate Monument.

West Point: Science Department and Ku Klux Klan

Odd. West Point and Science Department and Ku Klux Klan (I guessing that Klan was 1930s)....

NC Mayor Destroys Confederate Monument

North Carolina Mayor live streams destruction of Confederate monument.

Allie Mae Burroughs: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County Alabama, was featured James Agee and Walker Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Fortune magazine was schedule to publish during in 1930s. Unfortunately, they do not. Yet, in 2005 Fortune magazine was "The Most Famous Story We Never Told." 

Richmond, VA: Confederate Flags Banned at Hollywood Cemetery

No more Confederate flags at Hollywood Cemetery.

Said one visitor: “There’s an awful lot tied to the flag,” she said. “But time heals that."

Monuments after Civil War (in the last couple of weeks)

Richmond, Birmingham, and Mobile are removing (or had already moved) Civil War monuments.  Confederate General William Carter Wickham -- who wanted to stay in the Union on 1861 and was Republican post-Civil War -- has been removed in Monroe Park in Richmond.   Although Gadsden, Alabama are witnessing BLM and pro-Confederate protesters. Lots those things are going on.

Martha Vineyard: Confederate Monument

Stephen J. Carter has an article on Confederate Monument . . . on Martha Vineyard.

 

Nathan Bedford Forrest

Hmmm.... 

The Stennis Flag

In 1894 Mississippi adopted its current state flag, which prominently incorporates the Confederate battle flag saltire. Thus far every effort to remove the Confederate emblem from the state flag has failed. In 2001, for example, 65% of Mississippi voters chose to keep the current flag in a statewide referendum.

But change may be afoot. According to a Washington Post article yesterday, a new flag is gaining traction in Mississippi. Known as the “Stennis Flag,” it consists of a large blue star on a white background, surrounded by 19 smaller stars, and bordered by two large red bars. 

As explained by Laurin Stennis, the flag’s designer, the Stennis Flag incorporates four distinct symbols:

Long Shadow

Last weekend I recommended David Reynolds’s excellent documentary on the Armistice of 1918, which is available on Netflix. If you are interested, Prof. Reynolds is also host of an outstanding 3-part BBC documentary on post-war Europe called Long Shadow. It is based on his award-winning book, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century.

The Long Shadow documentary is absolutely superb and quite timely. Reynolds shows how the chaos unleashed by World War I gave rise to a high-stakes ideological competition between three diametrically-opposed systems: communism, fascism, and liberal democracy. The competition was reflected in the revealing diversity of the various national war memorials, from the Cenotaph monument in London to Mussolini’s Redipuglia memorial in northeast Italy. 

One of the documentary’s many interesting themes is how Britain managed to avoid the self-destructive ideological extremism that plagued continental Europe after World War I. Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald may not be household names today, but those two prime ministers helped Britain chart a middle course at a time when the other major European powers veered off into fascism or communism. As Prof. Reynolds explains in his book:

“Mass democracy exploded across Europe in the wake of the war, inspired in very different ways by [Vladimir] Lenin and [Woodrow] Wilson. But its destabilizing effects were soon being channeled by new political elites—the Bolshevik concept of a vanguard supposedly preparing the way for eventual proletarian control, the fascist response in the form of a ‘superman’ leader directing a dominant party. By the mid-1930s much of continental Europe was polarized between left and right, even in Britain’s co-victor, France.”  

But unlike its continental neighbors, Britain pursued a centrist path:

“In Britain, by contrast, the sudden tripling of the electorate in 1918 was successfully absorbed within parliamentary politics. The threat of a crippling general strike never materialized. Under Ramsay MacDonald the Labour Party was desperate to prove it did not pose a threat to the Constitution, the empire or pound. The party’s ideology drew less on continental Marxism than on indigenous traditions of nineteenth-century radicalism and nonconformist Protestantism. At the same the Tories, led by Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, won the support of many of the newly enfranchised women and skilled workers, attracted by policies such as a ‘property-owning democracy.’”  

The dull pragmatism of British centrism paid off in spades in the years after World War I. In foreign affairs, Britain served as a critical bulwark against Nazi fascism in World War II and Soviet communism in the Cold War. At home, Parliament’s middle-of-the-ideological-road policies gave rise to a growing economy, a stable democracy, and a diverse society, especially in the metropolis of London. The British record of achievement in the twentieth century should not be forgotten, even amid the economic uncertainty created by the impulsive Brexit vote in 2016. Now more than ever we live in an age of charismatic politicians, but boringly competent leaders in the tradition of Baldwin and MacDonald have much to recommend them.

The series is filled with fascinating insights and observations. The third episode begins with Prof. Reynolds describing how, during the 90 years between 1914 and 2004, an Upper Silesian coalfield began as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then became part of Poland, later fell under the control of Czechoslovakia, then went back to Poland, only to subsequently come under the military domination of Nazi Germany, then reverted after WWII to Soviet-occupied Czechoslovakia, and finally ended up in the new Czech Republic, and now the coalfield is part of the European Union. The tumultuous history of the twentieth century is thus encapsulated in the history of a single piece of coal. 

Long Shadow is a great series and it is available for free on YouTube (in High Definition). You can find Part I (“Remembering and Understanding”) here,  Part II (“Ballots and Bullets”) here, and Part III (“Us and Them”) here. 

Armistice 1918

The First World War ended 100 years ago today. At 11 a.m. on November 11, 1918, the devastating four-year-long conflict finally came to an end. It was at the time the bloodiest war in history, costing the lives of 9 million troops and over 10 million civilians. Only the Second World War—which cost over 65 million lives—surpassed World War I’s death toll.

Although World War II greatly overshadows World War I, the immense scale of the 1914-18 conflict should not be forgotten. Even the United States, which played a relatively small role compared to the other major powers, provides a case-in-point. After declaring war on Germany in April 1917, the United States sent 2 million troops to fight in France (most of whom arrived in the summer and fall of 1918). To put that army in context, the four American military service branches today—the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps—have a combined total active duty force of 1.3 million. Thus, the American Army in France in 1918 was 50% larger than the entire American military in 2018.

And the United States military was small by World War I standards. For example, Germany put over 10 million troops in arms, 2 million of whom would die in the war. The other major powers suffered appalling casualties as well. Russia lost 1.8 million dead, France lost 1.4 million dead, and Britain over 800,000 dead. Austro-Hungary, Turkey, and Italy also suffered hundreds of thousands of fatalities. Many other countries experienced horrendous casualties, including the United States, which lost 117,000 troops killed in about six months of fighting (a much greater number than the 58,000 American troops killed in Vietnam in in the 1960s and 1970s). Similarly, Canada lost 61,000 troops killed in World War I and Australia lost 60,000 troops killed, enormous numbers in any context, but particularly when one considers the fact that Canada had only 8 million people and Australia only 5 million in 1918.

None of those figures above include the millions of troops wounded, physically, emotionally, and psychologically, by the horrific carnage of industrial-sized warfare. The scars of war haunted the World War I generation for the rest of their lives. 

On this important anniversary, I recommend an outstanding documentary called Armistice 1918. The host is David Reynolds, a history professor at Cambridge University and a leading expert on World War I. As Prof. Reynolds explains, contrary to one of the most enduring myths of twentieth-century history, World War I did not end in a military stalemate. Under the weight of a massive offensive by the combined armies of France, Britain, America, Australia, and Canada, the German Army was in full collapse in the fall of 1918. If the war had lasted into 1919, Allied forces would have seized Berlin and inflicted a crushing defeat on the German Army on German soil.

But in a cynically shrewd move, the German high command capitulated before ordinary Germans understood the full, catastrophic extent of Germany’s military disasters in the fall of 1918. The sudden surrender enabled the German military to falsely blame domestic unrest for the nation’s defeat. Thus arose the ludicrous “stabbed in the back” myth that paved the way for the rise of the Nazi Party in the 1920s and 1930s, a development that in turn led to the eruption of the most devastating war in history from 1939 to 1945. 

Armistice 1918 is available on Netflix (in high definition) and it is only 55 minutes long. In addition, the original BBC version of the documentary, which is 90 minutes long, is available on YouTube here. Whichever version you watch, I think you will agree that nobody is better than Prof. Reynolds at explaining the significance of World War I and its aftermath.  

Speaking of the First World War, if you are ever in the Kansas City area, do not miss the National World War I Museum and Memorial. It is a must-see destination for any visitor to Kansas City, one of the country’s most underrated cities. So too is the Truman Presidential Library and Museum, which is located in the Kansas City suburb of Independence, Missouri. Harry Truman served as an artillery officer in World War I, and his artillery battery fired its last barrage at 10:45 a.m. on November 11, 1918. Truman would later observe, “My whole political career is based on my war service and war associates.” Over 2,700 troops died in France and Belgium on November 11, the last day of the war. The world we live in today is shaped in no small part by the events that unfolded between August 1914 and November 1918.

Teaching About Slavery in Schools

A new report issued by the Southern Poverty Law Center shows that our nation’s schools are failing at teaching the history of slavery in the United States to our children.   According to the report, “Schools are not adequately teaching the history of American slavery.  Educators are not sufficiently prepared to teach it.  Textbooks do not have enough material about it.”  Too often, slavery is romanticized and its cruelty underplayed.  Students do not learn about the centrality of slavery to our nation’s economy and overall history.  As a result, only 8 percent of 12^th graders surveyed identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War.   

As a scholar of the Reconstruction Era with a daughter currently taking AP U.S. History, this issue is especially interesting to me.  Unfortunately, I am not at all surprised.  Over the course of our history, the history of slavery and the Reconstruction Era has been heavily contested and politicized.  During the early Twentieth Century, the dominant school of history, known as the Dunning school, framed Reconstruction as northern domination and exploitation of the south.  In popular culture, the movie “Gone with the Wind” reflected this view.  Starting in the 1960s, and inspired by the Civil Rights movement, historians such as Eric Foner and Michael Les Benedict shifted the dominant narrative and showed that Reconstruction was a time when the federal government established fundamental rights for freed slaves and all people in the United States.   However, the new report shows that this historical consensus is not being adequately taught to our children.

It is not surprising that the dispute over the history of this era in the academy spilled over to our country’s elementary and secondary schools.  Michael Kent Curtis details this history in this marvelous essay.  In the early and mid-Twentieth Century, school children in northern states learned about the “War Between the States” and those in southern states studied the “War of Northern Aggression.”  Recent debates over the statues of confederate war heroes revealed the extent to which southern states romanticized the “lost cause” of the southern rebels.  Teaching about the brutal reality of slavery undermined this narrative, as did the indisputable fact that the confederacy was founded to protect slavery (made clear in the Confederate Constitution).  In the north, downplaying slavery implicitly justified the federal government’s failure to intervene in the Jim Crow south, and ignoring racism and segregation in the north.

Unfortunately our nation’s schools have not made much progress in the teaching of the complex and difficult subject of slavery and race in our nation’s history.  The continued failure to adequately teach about slavery is both disappointing and consequential.  The history of slavery still profoundly affects our country.  We can see echoes of slavery in the vestiges of Jim Crow, the mass incarceration of African Americans, the effective use of racism as a political rallying cry.  Misunderstanding our history also affects our law, reflected in the Supreme Court’s race blind approach to the Equal Protection Clause and restriction of voting rights laws.  The history of slavery is profoundly important, and it always will be in our racially troubled nation.

Roger Williams University -- Martin Luther King Panel

I'm delighted to say that on Thursday Martha Jones and I will be speaking about monuments at Roger Williams University as part of their celebration of Martin Luther King Day.  I'm guessing at some point we'll be talking, too, about the MLK Monument in DC.  I'll be talking a lot about monuments at courthouses, in Birmingham, on the Alabama and UNC campuses, in cemeteries, and also the Washington Equine Statute in Richmond.

Update: An article about our talk is here.

Renaming Boalt Hall?

Charles Reichmann of U.C. Berkeley makes the case in his new paper, Anti-Chinese Racism at Berkeley: The Case for Re-naming Boalt Hall.  Cribbing now from the abstract:

Those familiar with UC Berkeley School of Law know its traditional name and the name of its primary classroom building - Boalt Hall. Yet few know much about the man who gave the law school its name. A close look at John Boalt’s legacy, however, calls out for a reexamination of the law school’s continued association with Boalt, given the contrast between UC Berkeley’s stated values and Boalt’s influential views that the Chinese were an unassimilable race that ought to be excluded from the United States. Boalt's racial theories were identical to John C. Calhoun's, whose name Yale University recently removed from a residential college on the grounds that Calhoun's principles and legacy are at odds with Yale's mission and values. Through his widely-circulated and virulently racist 1877 address "The Chinese Question" and his proposal for a plebiscite on further immigration, Boalt was instrumental in catalyzing support for the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Back in 2010 I published a short paper that assesses some of the factors one ought to consider in renaming.  And if I can ever get back to work on scholarship, I will have something to say about this in the context of Saunders Hall on UNC's campus.

Reconstruction-Era Monument Trivia

Around these parts, the discussion of William Saunders is continuing.  (We used to have a building on the UNC campus named after him.)  On January 25 the Parr Center for Ethics will be hosting a discussion of him, his legacy, and the issues of building renaming here at UNC.  And on January 26 I'll be on a program at East Carolina University with Derek Alderman on renaming.  Lots to talk about, for sure.  In preparation for that, I'm working on a paper on Saunders and the issues of building renaming.  I'm interested in a fuller view of him than we had when the board of trustees removed his name from Saunders Hall.  He was "credited" by many in the early 20th century -- including the UNC Board of Trustees back in 1920 -- with leading the North Carolina Klan; and that was certainly bad enough.  The Klan was violent; their reign of terror ran from barn burnings and whippings to murder.  They helped accomplished through violence and intimidation the defeat of Reconstruction in this state and the institution of Jim Crow segregation followed.  

What I think must have been particularly galling was the self-righteousness of the Klan and its beneficiaries and supporters.  The "Conservatives" who benefited from the Klan's violence and intimidation that disfranchised African Americans told each other that they were following the law. One editorial that was likely authored by Saunders, for instance, noted that by allowing African Americans to vote if they desired, North Carolina obtained extra representation in Congress.   Northerners had put the stick in the hands of white North Carolinians.  And North Carolinians intended "to use it to beat their heads with it."  

Saunders' newspapers repeatedly claimed that North Carolinians were peaceful and law abiding -- at the same time that the Klan was using violence to kill or drive away leaders of the Republican opposition and to intimidate voters, too.  The more I learn about Saunders the more I think that his biggest sin was not "leadership" of the Klan -- which was really decentralized and it's hard to know what leadership meant -- but more his intellectual and public leadership of the opposition to Reconstruction through his newspapers.  Along those lines, an early twentieth century historian of Reconstruction in North Carolina -- J.G. de Roulhac Hamilton (the man for whom the UNC history department's building is named) -- "credits" Saunders as one of the two leaders of the movement against Reconstruction.

I'm going to talk a lot more about this soon, I hope.  There is a lot to say about the hypocrisy of appeals to the "rule of law."  And of course we see them in just about every despotic regime, from the beginning of time until the day before yesterday.  But right now I have a question that derives from the self-righteousness of people like Saunders: what monument to the era of Reconstruction is most galling?  Where is the gap between the person/event being memorialized and justice greatest.  Such as, what monument is to someone who was celebrated as following the law when he (almost always) was really violating principles of law/justice?  (Or you might replace someone with something in the last sentence.)

I'm thinking that one monument that should be on the short list for most galling is the one that is used as an illustration for this post.  And this takes me to my second question:  what's the monument that illustrates this post?  (H/t Gerard Magliocca, who is the person who suggested I take this picture some years back.)  Am I making this too easy by saying this will be coming down soon? H/t Adam Feibelman.

Wahlers on NC Monument Protection Act

I'm proud to report that Kasi Wahlers of UNC Law's class of 2017 has posted a note that's forthcoming in the North Carolina Law Review on the North Carolina Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act of 2015.  A lot of us are calling it the "North Carolina Heritage Protection Act" after the name given a similar statute in other states.  

Cribbing now from her abstract: 

Even in 2015, the North Carolina landscape is densely populated with Confederate monuments, appearing in more than half of the state’s one hundred counties. The state has more monuments honoring the Civil War than any other event, with five Civil War monuments for every World War II monument. Most of these structures were erected between 1890 and 1930 and many are located on public property, commonly found in and around courthouses, town squares, graveyards, and University campuses. In July of 2015, North Carolina enacted the Heritage Protection Act (“HPA”). This law severely restricts the removal, relocation, or alteration of any monument located on public property. While neutral on its face, North Carolina’s Heritage Protection Act was enacted for the purpose of protecting Confederate monuments. 

This Recent Development argues that the North Carolina Heritage Protection Act creates a lack of accountability on behalf of the N.C. General Assembly, usurps powers of local governments, and is amorphously vague as to what objects it applies to. Clarification of the statutory language by the General Assembly as well as a provision allowing for the erection of plaques that contextualize these monuments within local history is needed. Analysis proceeds in three parts. Part I of this Recent Development briefly sketches the propagation of Heritage Protection Acts across the South, outlines the North Carolina Heritage Protection Act, and highlights ways the North Carolina statute differs from other states. Part II discusses the confusing nature of this statute and analyzes legislative history to offer insight as to: (1) what role the North Carolina Historical Commission plays, if any, in deciding to permanently remove or relocate monuments; (2) whether this statute applies to county or city owned monuments; and (3) what constitutes a “display of permanent character.” Finally, Part III argues that this statute is in need of clarification and a provision that provides for plaques that contextualize these monuments within their local history. A brief conclusion follows.

The image is of the former "Confederate Memorial Library" up in Hillsborough.  I don't think the Act applies to that building, but I love the building so I thought I'd use that to illustrate this post.  Soon I hope to be joining Kasi with a short piece on the renaming of Saunders Hall here at UNC. 

Constitution Day in Hillsborough

I'm delighted to announce that Robert Ireland and I will be speaking at the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church on September 17 at a Constitution Day celebration sponsored with the Orange County Historical Museum.  Close readers of this blog may recall that the Orange County Historical Museum is in a building once known as the "Confederate Memorial" Library up in Hillsborough.  And that it was the subject of a renaming controversy recently.  The Historical Museum's building is on a site of much importance -- back in 1788 the North Carolina legislature met there to discuss ratification of the Constitution.  They could not agree and ratification took place later in Fayetteville.  Robert will be talking about the ratification of the Constitution and then I'm going to pick up with the current controversy over Confederate symbols and the conflicting values at stake in preserving, modifying, or removing names and monuments from public property.  The Hillsborough Presbyterian Church is a perfect place to talk about the use of exhumation in the controversies over memory.  One of the signers of the Declaration of Independence who was buried in the churchyard was exhumed and moved out to Greensboro.  This should be really interesting and if you're in the neighborhood I hope you'll join us.  It's September 17, from 7 to 8:30, 102 West Tryon Street in Hillsborough.

A Northern Civil War Monument: West Chester, Pennsylvania

Amidst all of the discussion of the future of Confederate monuments, I want to talk about a monument on the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the Civil War from my hometown of West Chester, Pennsylvania and its use by Horace Pippin.  I went out to take a picture of it after I saw Horace Pippin's painting of the Chester County Courthouse at the Brandywine River Museum's exhibit of his work.  (There's still a little time to see that wonderful exhibit, if you happen to be in the Philadelphia area.)

One of the things that was really driven home to me by seeing all those Pippins together in one place is just how much the legacy of World War and also equality infused his work.  He reminds me so much of W.E.B. DuBois' editorial, "Returning Soldiers," which warned that African American soldiers had gone to war to save democracy in Europe and that now they were returning home and they expected to save democracy here in the United States, or "know the reason why" they could not.  DuBois concluded "We return.  We return from fighting.  We return fighting."  That is a real key to understanding the actions of the veterans who went out to save Dick Rowland from lynching on May 31, 1921.  And I think it's also important context for understanding Pippin.  There are several really haunting landscapes of the war in Europe in the Pippin exhibit.  One has a wood frame adorned with carvings of war tools (including to me most hauntingly a gas mask).  The pain and emotion in that painting are palpable even decades after it was created.

And then there's a painting that I'd never seen before, Mr. Prejudice, from the Philadelphia Art Museum (you know, the one with the stairs Rocky ran up).  There's a lot to be said about this one, painted during World War II -- including that the figure who whipped a slave in one of Pippin's other paintings appears in this one.  And more importantly that there are an African American soldier and a white pilot extending their hands to each other to shake.  War and race, the contributions of African American soldiers, and the ways that prejudice threatened victory were all wrapped up in one painting.  I think this illustrates well the ideas that supported the case for an expansion of the equal protection clause in the years between World War I and Brown.

But right now I want to link Pippin to the memory of the Civil War.  He painted the Chester County Courthouse in 1940 and included in it the monument put up in 1915, "Old Glory."  (The Ten Commandments monument, which is on the Courthouse isn't visible in Pippin's painting, perhaps not entirely coincidentally.)  "Old Glory" shows a United States soldier holding the flag.  And on the left is a plaque that reads:

Erected by the County of Chester in grateful commemoration of the heroism, sacrifices and patriotism of her soldiers, sailors and marines displayed during the late war of the rebellion for the preservation of the Union and the supremacy of the flag.  Dedicated Memorial Day, 1915.

That Pippin chose to paint the courthouse with the Civil War monument suggests to me that the monument was meaningful to him and something he wanted to celebrate.  Pippin is, moreover, worthy of some more investigation as an illustration of how African Americans' contributions to both world wars was linked to the cause of equality.

The image is the Chester County Courthouse, which is worth comparing to Pippin's painting of it.  (Check out, by the way, the African American child selling newspapers.  What do you think -- is he selling one of the classic African American newspapers, like the Pittsburgh Courier?)