History Notes is a column I wrote for The Praire Independent, a progressive monthly published in North Dakota.  The paper is no longer publishing, but I will add the previously published columns here and will be adding new entries to the series on this blog.  Here is the first full column, originally published in The Prairie Independent, January 2012:

History Notes: The Story Behind Amidon

Amidon, North Dakota, the county seat for Slope County, is a town long known to drivers along Highway 85 for the life-sized but fake police officer who sat motionless in an old patrol car parked along the highway at the edge of town. This officer was an exceedingly compliant public employee who served for years as a low-cost speed bump.

In contrast to such a static symbol of the law, Amidon is named after Charles Fremont Amidon, a decidedly non-compliant federal judge who was born in 1856 to abolitionist parents and came to the Dakota Territory in 1882 to become the new and only high school teacher in Fargo.  Amidon soon left teaching to study law in Fargo, and was appointed Federal Judge for the District of North Dakota in 1897, serving in that capacity until 1928.  He died in 1937, with an obituary in the New York Time reminding readers that Amidon “was an ardent advocate of judicial reform, a supporter of the Constitution as a living document and a defender of the civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution.”

The Times also noted that Amidon’s “defense of free speech and free press subjected him to severe criticism during [World War One] and during A. Mitchell Palmer’s post-war “Red” drive.”   This seems an understatement, given the intensity of social ostracism and political opposition that Amidon faced during his years as a federal judge.  Readers can find much more detail in Against the Tide: The Life and Times of Federal Judge Charles F. Amidon, North Dakota Progressive, by Kenneth Smemo, retired professor of history at Minnesota State University Moorhead.

In his capacity as a federal judge in North Dakota, Amidon acted as his own kind of progressive judicial speed bump, intervening on several occasions to stop unjust prosecutions or overturn convictions that were unconstitutionally aimed to suppress anti-war speech and legitimate criticism of the government.   He pushed back firmly when sedition laws were used to curtail the free expression of political dissent.

Along with other progressives of the day he confronted the perils to constitutional democracy which can emerge during wartime and other times of severe social strain.  And while Amidon spent his judicial career based in North Dakota, he was recognized nationally as an advocate for progressive liberalism, especially for his advocacy of free speech, a free press, freedom to dissent, and the freedom of unions to organize.

Two documents illuminate those commitments in ways which will ring familiar today.  A 1919 edition of The Nation includes a letter from Amidon, written from Fargo but making no specific mention of tumultuous sedition cases in his own North Dakota courtrooms.  Instead, Amidon  rejects all use of coercive force and defends a free critical press in America, urging that the editors of The Nation “…not surrender and permit those to win who are buying up all the [media] organs through which the soul of democracy is trying to keep alive.”

Then in 1931, Amidon headed the American Civil Liberties Union Committee on Labor Injunctions, which issued a defense of workers’ rights in a report entitled “Even Adam Had a Hearing!”  Philosopher John Dewey was a fellow committee member and the report makes for good reading still, especially these days in the Red River Valley. While not addressing lockouts as a union busting tactic, the report condemns the use of injunctions to break strikes and argues strongly for the social and political legitimacy of organized labor.   Here’s the direct link to the ACLU report, one of many fascinating historical documents available at the “Debs Collection” (Eugene V. Debs) at Indiana State University:  http://debs.indstate.edu/a505e9_1931.pdf

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And here are the other previously published columns, in order of their original appearance in The Prairie Independent:

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History Notes: Minority Report (Prairie Independent, February, 2012)

One enduring national (and local) stereotype about North Dakota is that unlike the rest of the country, our state is racially homogeneous: “lily white.”

This would of course come as odd news to thousands of regional tribal members whose communities go back centuries, not to mention several thousand state residents counted in the 2010 Census as “Black,” “Asian,” “Hispanic/Latino” and “Two or More Races.” Add to this number many immigrants and political refugees arriving each year from countries all over the world, and over 76.000 people counted in the last North Dakota census should put the stereotype to rest.

But the stereotype persists, partly through the self-perpetuating power of repetition, but also because it’s grounded in flawed numbers logic: North Dakota’s statistical white majority means there is “no diversity.” The stereotype confuses relative numbers with relative importance – a lopsided equation for sure, and one with heavy costs, especially given the racial history of our region.

But February is Black History Month in North Dakota, a fine time (like every month) to confront the damage done by stereotypes about race. It’s also campaign season all over the country, a particularly good time to beware the distracting tactics of race-baiting and the politically dangerous notion that in a democracy –especially in issues of social justice– only majorities count.

The small stuff matters. There is a one-sentence mention of North Dakota in John D’Emilio’s biography of African American civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. In a passage from Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin, we learn that Rustin passed through Bismarck during an anti-war speaking tour in the 1940s and was warmly received by his North Dakota hosts.

This tiny detail of “African American history” sparks intriguing questions: Who invited Bayard Rustin to Bismarck in the 1940s, and why? What were the North Dakota contexts for the fuller story? By the 40s, Rustin had long experience as a pacifist, he had embraced Gandhi’s political philosophy for advancing black civil rights, and would later work in the gay rights movement. None of these stances are currently associated in popular imagination (or media images) with North Dakota, yet of course all three have their history here, and equally important, all three are embraced by current citizens of the state.

Sometimes, the stereotype can threaten to derail new knowledge about the region’s actual past. Back in 1993, a history graduate student at UND named Stephanie Roper proposed to write a Masters Thesis titled “African Americans in North Dakota: 1800-1940.” At the time, some regional historians expressed skepticism that such a project would turn up enough material for a scholarly study. Black History? In North Dakota? Fortunately, Roper persisted. Flash ahead a few months later to 141 well-researched pages, available in print and microfiche at UND’s Chester Fritz Library.

In an effort to document more recent black history in the state, Randall Kenan, an African American writer famous for works of fiction like Let the Dead Bury Their Dead and A Visitation of Spirits, cast aside his own stereotypes about our region as he traveled through North Dakota in the 1990s on a nationwide project to gather oral histories. His extensively researched non-fiction book, Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the turn of the Twenty-First Century, includes a full chapter highlighting the varied experiences among African Americans living in Grand Forks.

And 2009 brought news that surprised even some veteran civil rights activists in other parts of the country. North Dakota became the 49th state to establish a chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) when the Northern Lights Chapter was launched by longtime African American residents in North Dakota and northern Minnesota. Chapter organizers reached across lines of race, party and state to link our region with a 100-plus year old civil rights organization originally founded by progressive social activists such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

The numbers of people and pages in the “history notes” above may be relatively small, but they matter. And they point to many possible futures for the state. W.E.B. Du Bois: “There can be no perfect democracy curtailed by color, race or poverty. But with all, we accomplish all, even peace.”

Du Bois? In North Dakota? You betcha.

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History Notes: Separation of Church and State (Prairie Independent, March 2012)

Journalist Bill Moyers recently tackled the controversy over federally mandated health insurance coverage for contraception. In a piece called “Freedom of and From Religion” (http://billmoyers.com) Moyers said: “So here we are once again, arguing over how to honor religious liberty without it becoming the liberty to impose on others moral beliefs they don’t share.”

Coercive fusions of Church-State authority are prohibited under the U.S. Constitution: citizens should be “free from” state-imposed religion. At the same time, our free expression of religion is also protected under the same Constitution.

The inherent tension between these freedoms requires constant, careful and deliberative negotiation in a pluralistic democracy inhabited by millions of people. Moyers points us to the difficult problem of mediating between conflicting claims to “religious liberty” in a pluralistic society with secular and constitutional standards for law. At the same time, he clearly embraces the reality of religious pluralism.

North Dakota history illuminates the reality, complexity, and positive value of religious pluralism, including of course the right to be non-religious. Regional history also reveals the conflict that can erupt when values collide irreconcilably or when one religious community seeks to use civil law in the “public square” to forcibly impose its theological worldview on other citizens.

But even granted those conflicts, religious pluralism has always been part of the state’s history.

For example, Jewish history in the region is longstanding. Synagogues in Grand Forks and Fargo remain home to diverse congregations. Over the years, local Jewish communities have faced anti-Semitic harassment as well as broad community support. B’Nai Israel in Grand Forks maintains an excellent website, including histories of regional Jewish communities: http://www.nd002.urj.net/.

“Settler narratives” by Jewish writers recount their experience in North Dakota and the upper plains. Two particularly good ones are Sophie Trupin’s Dakota Diaspora and Rachel Caloff’s Rachel Calof’s Story. The Caloff edition published in 1995 by Indiana University Press also contains an excellent essay by J. Sanford Rikoon called “Jewish Farm Settlements in America’s Heartland.”

Ross, North Dakota is home to what is still believed to be the first mosque built in the United States. First built in 1929, there is now a newer structure on the same site – a beautiful “little mosque on the prairie.” The Ross mosque was featured on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” ( September 12, 2010) when host Liane Hansen asked Aman Ali and Bassam Tariq about their “Ramadan Roadtrip” visit to Ross. The audio interview and a full transcript are still available online at: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129809833.

There are other active mosques and Islamic centers all around the state, and regional Muslims have faced the same social pressures post-9/11 as American Muslims nationwide. The Islamic Center of North Dakota sponsors a detailed website reaching out specifically to rural Muslims: http://www.alkhatoobah.net/index.html#/.

Even a cursory look at the diverse history of Christianity in our state plops us smack dab into an extensive project of “comparative religion.” To pick just one crosscurrent in regional Christian history, many North Dakota Christians, past and present, have identified as “evangelical.” Within that sphere, there has been remarkable diversity across time and place in denominational affiliation, core theology, cultural perspective, political viewpoint and related immigrant and tribal history.

In recent years, progressive evangelical Christians across several denominations have found themselves in sharp and sustained theological and political conflict with some of the more socially conservative members of their own denominations. These conflicts have revolved around basic church theology and values, around political priorities and around conflicting approaches to social ethics.

In these political times, and especially during this inflamed election season, any one person or group claiming to speak theologically or politically for “Evangelicals” or “Christian values” should be measured against the reality of this diversity.

The region is also home to diverse American Indian traditional religious communities: Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Ojibway/Chippewa, and others. Within all of these tribal communities, there have been historical changes in traditional religion, with evolving religious practices and sometimes differing or conflicting interpretations among tribal members as to the meaning of tradition and specific rituals.
Given North Dakota’s vibrant and sometimes contentious religious and philosophical pluralism, it will be interesting to track what comes next as some of our legislators in D.C. lobby for the 2012 version of a federal “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.”

Nominally aimed at protecting religious liberty and “freedom of conscience,” this effort seems quite narrowly aimed to impact only one set of issues related to federal health care mandates and is missing reference to other instances where religious liberty has been explicitly inhibited by federal law.

For example, advocates of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act have not challenged the dismal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), a federal law which uses the broad enforcement power of “the state” to sanction and protect only one form of religiously sanctioned marriage but prevents other equally religious folk from having their equally sanctified marriages equally recognized under civil law.

Maybe Congress just hasn’t gotten around to this part of the legislation yet and our representatives are crafting the “What’s Good for The Goose” amendment as we speak.

But while we wait, maybe it’s also time to shift the paradigm for these debates and more often get “the state” altogether out of the business of selectively sanctioning only some forms of religious freedom at the expense of others. We in North Dakota have some work to do along these lines.

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History Notes: The Fort Laramie Project (Prairie Independent, April 2012)

History Notes is on the road this month, looking at the Fort Laramie National Historic site in Wyoming. Like all war memorials and regional markers of shared and contested history, the physical site itself means profoundly different things to different people today.

Listen to visitors who wander the grounds and you will hear one family mourning the impact of Fort Laramie on their own tribal history, while another family celebrates Fort Laramie’s role in “settling the west.”

If you go to the Lunch Box café in nearby Guernsey, Wyoming, just west of Fort Laramie on Highway 26, you will find a gathering place for the community, including military staff stationed at nearby Camp Guernsey. You will also find a plaque on the wall thanking the café owners for their support of a recent Iraq deployment tagged “Operation Lethal Cowboy.”

In contrast, if you go to another community gathering place, the website of the Standing Rock Nation, you will find a page presenting the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 in the context of tribal history: http://www.standingrock.org/history. The phrase “Operation Lethal Cowboy,” will carry quite different connotations here.

Back at the Fort Laramie site, there is a plaque commemorating the Mormon handcart migrations of the 1850s, during which several thousand immigrant Mormons, mostly poor and having only recently arrived in the United States, pulled their heavy handcarts along hundreds of miles seeking cultural, economic and religious refuge in Utah. They paused at Fort Laramie for rest and- as their diaries indicate – a sense of safety and security.

“Security” was, and is, another concept with many meanings: take a look at Fort Laramie’s crumbled jail ruins preserved from the 1850s, cells so small that one person could barely turn around. Every era compels us to ask who ends up imprisoned in jails like these, and why.

As a war memorial, Fort Laramie stands as a monument to occupation and resistance, to treaties signed and treaties betrayed. Walk across the porch boardwalk and into the reconstructed cavalry barracks from the 1870s, and you will be reminded that soldiers in all wars are preoccupied with surviving day-to-day. Stand in the grass outside the barracks, where the stark and quiet architecture of a sweat lodge marks another kind of survival.

The bookstore in the Fort Laramie visitor center features a range of books, films and posters illuminating the complex and difficult history of the northern plains: diverse views on expansionist western settlement, American Indian history, military history, immigrant experience. There are also books on the remarkable natural world that has long shaped human experience: weather, animals, birds, plants, rocks. Clearly, there has been serious effort made to offer a range of historical perspectives and interpretations.

But the official website for Fort Laramie
(http://www.nps.gov/fola/index.htm) includes a “history and culture” link with only one seriously outdated and inflammatorily biased historical account of Fort Laramie’s role in regional history. These days, the website for any historical site is often the first place that visitors “arrive,” providing key interpretation and orientation, especially for visitors from other regions of the United States and from other countries.

And in fact, people from all around the country and the world have signed the big Fort Laramie guest book, adding their commentary and thoughts, offering mostly praise for the exhibits. One summer visitor scribbled: “The South will rise again!” These days, this may reflect the actual hope of a recalcitrant American white supremacist, but it also might reflect a visitor’s ironic irritation with the romanticized “Reconstruction vibe” from some of the costumed re-enactors who wander the grounds in July. Nostalgic theater runs its own political risks.

Like all historical sites, Fort Laramie offers us an evolving physical stage for political theater, with several dramatic plotlines telling sometimes conflicting stories of our regional history. As spring weather thaws the roads, it’s a good time to visit such historical sites across our region and to look closely at how each site “stages” its stories of our shared history. There is much more collaborative work to be done in order to ensure that these monuments speak with fuller justice about the past and to the present.

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History Notes: “The S Word“ (Prairie Independent, May 2012)

Remember this scene from the 1962 movie The Manchurian Candidate?

It’s the 1950s, and right-wing Senator John Iselin is talking to his wife, a.k.a. his political handler and a secret Soviet agent (played with excellent ick by Angela Lansbury). Senator Iselin says to Evil Spouse:

“There’s just one thing, babe. I’d be a lot happier if we could just settle on the number of Communists I know there are in the Defense Department. I mean, the way you keep changing the figures on me all the time, it makes me look like some kind of nut, like…like an idiot.”

Well, we can be forgiven for checking the decade on our calendars lately, especially after Florida Representative Allen West waved around his own list of “Communists in Congress!”

Like the fictional Senator Iselin, Representative West keeps changing his number of alleged communists. When pressed to defend his fantasy, Mr. West lectured reporters about their need to “study ideologies,” but he apparently cannot distinguish between Angela Lansbury and the Progressive Congressional Caucus.

West’s ludicrous rhetoric would be funny except that his red-baiting is part of a nasty national campaign strategy. Calculated and cynical, the strategy aims to denigrate and demonize American citizens who advocate for things like universal access to health care, strong public schools, expanded civil rights, better regulation of Wall Street, stronger unions, public libraries, environmental protections, Public Broadcasting, the First Amendment, Social Security, functioning roads, bridges and infrastructure, and a democratic government that protects individual freedoms in balance with the social good.

Americans who advocate for social-ism, in other words.

Happily, there are potent antidotes for today’s red-baiting ick. An excellent first dose can be found in John Nichols’ recent book The “S” Word: A Short History of an American Tradition…Socialism. Here you will find Thomas Paine, Emma Lazarus, Walt Whitman, and chapters like “Reading Marx with Abraham Lincoln” or “’Simply a Stupid Piece of Despotism’: How Socialists Saved the First Amendment.”

A good regional dose can be found in Elwyn B. Robinson’s famous History of North Dakota (1966), which includes three refreshingly non-hysterical chapters entitled “The Progressive Movement,” “The Great Socialist Experiment” and “A Socialistic State in the First World War.” Robinson was a serious interpreter of North Dakota’s progressive and socialist history, and his book is still a good starting point for studying the Nonpartisan League, the Bank of North Dakota, the Socialist Party, labor history, and the emergence of various agrarian “cooperative commonwealths” in our state.

Speaking of cooperative commonwealths, it is fascinating in the current political climate to go exploring in a truly remarkable 1300+ page study called Socialism and American Life. This collaborative two-volume set, edited by Stow Persons and Donald Drew Egbert, was calmly published at Princeton University in 1952, during the height of the McCarthy red scare. It’s available in public university libraries at Minot State, Valley City State, Jamestown College, Bismarck State, Mayville State and UND.

Serious study of American socialist history offers hundreds of trails across several centuries. Just a tiny sampling of the many detail-rich sections in Socialism and American Life: The Interaction of Socialist and American Democratic Theories of History; Marxism and Music; Socialist Criticism of Communists; Literary Utopias and Utopian Socialism; The Religious Basis of Western Socialism; Socialism in American Art; The Theological Background of Christian Socialism.

In light of that last entry, it’s curious to notice that Rep. West invokes the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on his own congressional website. As Nichols reminds us in The “S” Word, King worked closely for his entire public career with democratic socialists like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. In fact, King was often accused of being a communist in his day, a tactic used frequently by those trying to discredit the civil rights movement.

Another tidbit in Volume 2 of Socialism and American Life is a section called “The Mormons.” It’s a fair guess that Mitt Romney will not soon be called a communist by members of his own party, but Socialism and American Life presents a very interesting bibliographic essay on the communitarian and cooperative nature of early Mormonism.

It is tempting to quickly dismiss demagogues who wave around lists of communists, but red-baiting theatrics are calculated to make Americans nervous about being associated with progressive politics and progressive history. “Red scare” tactics have a long and efficient history.

The best antidote for red-baiting is to put the “S” word (not to mention the beleaguered “L” word) squarely and unapologetically right up on the public table for study and democratic debate. In fact, it’s been 60 years since Socialism and American Life was published– maybe it’s time to write Volume Three.

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History Notes: Northern Lights (Prairie Independent, June 2012)

By the time you read the June [2012] issue of Prairie Independent, voters in Wisconsin will have decided whether or not to recall Governor Scott Walker in the wake of his aggressive legislative attacks on public employee unions, public education, and critical social services. The Wisconsin vote on June 5th will be historic on many levels, not least as a plumb measure of the current strength of progressive grassroots political organizing in the Midwest.

Waiting around after all the election field work is done can be nerve-wracking. Good time to watch a movie.

Northern Lights remains a deservedly famous film shaped around progressive North Dakota political history. It won the Golden Camera Best First Feature Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979 and though the movie is currently only available in VHS or 35 mm print, it’s well worth the effort to track it down. Check your public or university libraries, check the movie shelves of friends, or invite the filmmakers and their 35 mm print to town.

The movie is set in Crosby, North Dakota circa 1915-16, during the organizing heyday of the Nonpartisan League. Written and directed by John Hanson and Rob Nilsson, with stunning photography directed by Judy Irola, Northern Lights sweeps across landscape and light while framing the story of immigrant Norwegian farmers who join the Nonpartisan League and organized its early successes. The film was partially funded by the North Dakota Humanities Council, which in 1981 also put out a companion book, A Humanities Guide to Northern Lights, full of historical context, critiques of the movie, discussion questions and a complete film script.

Henry Martinson, a long-haul North Dakota activist and writer who died in 1981, narrates the opening sequence of the film, moving us back in time to a primary campaign where economically struggling North Dakota farmers fought back against exploitation by big mills and the banks. Hard economic times, but as Martinson says: “Good times, too. Almost forgotten by most folks. Times that we had the powers that be on the run.”

Clay Jenkinson edited and wrote much of the Northern Lights companion book, and he invokes the weather to set up his essay on the history of the NPL: “Like a prairie thunderstorm the Nonpartisan League burst into life in 1916, changed the face of North Dakota, then flickered away into the night, with only a low rumble and an occasional glow of lightning to remind of us its former power.” In that rumble, the NPL and other progressive organizers of the era left North Dakota with a state bank, a state mill, and better protections (at least for a time) for labor and voting rights.

Ray Sorenson is the central fictional character in Northern Lights, an uprooted farmer turned NPL organizer. At one point, he says of his brother John, another struggling farmer who has resisted joining the League: “He thought he could get along without choosing sides just as I once had.” In the plotline of the film, not to mention the plotline of actual historical events, this political reticence proved a costly mistake.

Clearly, our northland neighbors in Wisconsin know this too, as underscored by massive protests last year in Madison and by the almost one million citizens who signed the petitions supporting the recall vote.

Ray and the other NPL characters in the film confront “the powers that be” by working the ballot in order to fight back against economic practices destroying their farms, livelihoods and communities. In the film, as in Wisconsin and elsewhere around the country this year, the stakes are clear: Can citizens exert electoral power to move society toward more social fairness or less, toward more economic justice or less, toward more civil equality or less?

The struggle in the film is painted in stark and mythic brushstrokes, and some might (and did) say that Northern Lights is politically “romantic.” For example, the film doesn’t follow historical events into later implosions caused by infighting within the NPL nor does it illuminate political setbacks that followed close upon these early NPL victories.

But Robert W. Lewis, longtime literature professor at UND and intrepid citizen, offers another take in a beautifully written piece called “The Power of Northern Lights,” also available in the Humanities Council book.

Lewis starts this way: “If there is one key word to provide a thematic focus on Northern Lights, it is, for me, power. Every episode, every encounter among the characters, is informed by great or subtle struggles, and in the resolution of them, the film generates epic feelings in spite of the common origins and occupations of the characters.”

As Lewis also reminds us in his essay, struggles for political power are endless in a functioning democracy. Victories for social and economic justice can be long lasting or short lived. Defeats, the same. Either way, election results always set the stage for even more work.

At the end of Northern Lights, Ray Sorenson leaves his foreclosed farm and takes to the road, heading out to organize for the NPL in the wake of their 1916 electoral victories. His lines: “Who can say what is coming next, but win or lose, I have a part in it. I have a place.”

That’s good anti-romantic movie talk, and good anti-romantic political talk too.

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History Notes: Marking Time (Prairie Independent, August 2012)

History Notes was on summer break last month, and it’s good to be back after driving across the Dakotas: Stopped to get a fast-flattening tire fixed in Hettinger (many thanks to “Steve’s Service Plus”!), waved along the way to the lovely bovine “Salem Sue,” and returned to the Red River Valley, a.k.a. The Valley of Didactic Billboards: “Smile!” “Be Kind!”

We’re still waiting for one that says “Support Universal Access to Health Care!”

Anyway, speaking of signs and monuments along the highway, we in North Dakota are apparently not doing our part to enter historical markers in the Historical Marker Database: http://www.hmdb.org/ .

Here is how the editors at “HMDB” introduce their project:

“This website is an illustrated searchable online catalog of historical information viewed through the filter of roadside and other permanent outdoor markers, monuments, and plaques. It contains photographs, inscription transcriptions, marker locations, maps, additional information and commentary, and links to more information. Anyone can add new markers to the database and update existing marker pages with new photographs, links, information and commentary.”

A very cool idea.

We have all seen (or sped by) these markers and plaques in parks, on sidewalks and the sides of buildings, and along the roads and highways. They mark events large and small, people famous and obscure, places where remarkable things occurred, places where some specific historical moment struck someone, somewhere, at some time, as worthy of public memory.

But as of late July, 2012, if you go to the Historical Markers Database and follow the link for North Dakota, you’ll find only 13 entries, which is truly paltry compared to our neighbors in South Dakota (88 entries) and Minnesota (284), not to mention the work done in Wisconsin (1774), Texas (1886) or Virginia (5778).

HMDB entries are organized by topic and theme as well as location, and there are hundreds of entries from countries all over the world.

The database currently lists 2693 markers related to Native American and First Nations history, 359 markers for Abolitionist history and the Underground Railroad, 1147 markers all over the world under the category “Arts, Letters, Music,” 547 markers commemorating the American Civil Rights Movement, and 2980 markers under the category “Education.”

North Dakota’s marker for “Seaman” (Meriwether Lewis’s dog) is just one of 359 markers listed under “Animals.”

You will find 1277 ideologically diverse listings under “Politics,” ranging from “The First White House of the Confederacy” in Montgomery, Alabama to a monument in Brazil dedicated to Jewish refugee writer Stefan Zweig, or a plaque honoring the Cuban activist and philosopher Jose Marti in Tampa, Florida.

The category “Labor Unions” lists 140 markers around the world, the first of which is a monument in Ireland (Leinster, County Meath, Crossakiel) which honors the 19th century Irish labor organizer Jim Connell. Connell was also a journalist and a social democratic, who later joined the Independent Labour Party.

According to the database entry, this monument was “erected in 1998 by Trade Union Councils, S.I.P.T.U. N.E.C., GMB London Region, Irish Labour Party, et al.”

Here’s the inscription on the monument in Crossakiel:

Author of “The Red Flag”
which became the anthem of the
International Labour Movement
Born Rathniska, Kilskyre 1852
Died Lewisham, London 1929

Oh, grant me an ownerless corner of earth,
Or pick me a hillock of stones,
Or gather the wind wafted leaves of the trees
To cover my socialist bones,
Jim Connell

Inspired by this entry in honor of Jim Connell, History Notes took a shot at adding a new North Dakota marker to the database: “The Workers Memorial,” in Grand Forks, which was dedicated in 1996 by the Northern Valley Labor Council and Grand Forks Building and Construction Trades Council, AFL-CIO.

The monument was constructed thanks to the help of twenty regional labor unions and locals, including several locals of the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union and the North Dakota Public Employees Association/AFT.

The Workers Memorial was built to honor all workers who have died on the job, including public service workers like members of the International Association of Fire Fighters, whose members in Local 1099 also helped build the monument.

The Workers Memorial also includes a plaque honoring the social justice work of labor lawyer and ND state representative John Schneider (1945-2001), and features an inscribed dedicatory prayer by longtime regional peace and justice activist Rev. Walter Scott.

Editors of the database review each entry and we’ll see if this one meets their editorial requirements. If it does, History Notes will need to polish up some photography skills, and we’ll need a Prairie Independent reader who is handy with a GPS to add the requested geo-data.

As we might predict, there are also thousands of markers in the Historical Markers Database memorializing “War,” but you will also find 183 markers under the category “Peace.” There’s no entry –yet- for the International Peace Garden, established in 1932 on our very own northern border with Canada.

Anyone?

(Postscript: As PI goes to press, the HMDB sent a friendly note declining the Workers Memorial – because the location itself was not the site of a specific historical event. The Crossakiel monument marks a spot where Connell actually gave an important speech. Ah, ok, got it. So: we’ll let this month’s column serve as our own tribute to the Workers Memorial, and History Notes will head to the International Peace Garden and look for specific markers there that might make the HMDB cut.)

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History Notes: Old Books (Prairie Independent, September 2012)

The days are cooling, the winds shift, it’s time to rustle up some good books for fall reading.

John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, and while there are obviously differences between our time and the 1930s, there are also stark similarities, not least a crashed job market, lingering unemployment for millions of people worldwide, and the anxiety felt by those who must uproot in hope of finding work.

Grapes of Wrath remains a politically charged work of literary art, with its richly symbolic portrayal of people moving across roads and landscape, its critique of American capitalism, its New Deal “theory of good government.”

The famous third chapter, where the land turtle lumbers across a highway, is a stunning sketch of “nature” encountering “culture,” a chapter that will echo with any reader concerned about what is happening in the North Dakota oil patch.

Steinbeck provocatively casts Jim Casy as a disenchanted preacher turned labor organizer. Casy dies as an ironic Christ figure, sacrificed to repressive violence during a strike. Steinbeck’s tragic and ironic turn on the Exodus story also remains politically compelling, especially at the end of Grapes of Wrath, when he flips the “infant Moses on the river” scene into a devastating indictment of social and religious hypocrisy.

Another remarkable novel from the Depression era is Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929). Smedley was an activist and journalist who eventually left the United States to live and work in Europe and China. She creates a strongly autobiographical main character, Marie, who grows to restless adulthood in the American Midwest. Marie spends her early years in rural Missouri and in the mining camps of Colorado.

Daughter of Earth is a close study of the psychological impacts of poverty. The novel also poses a challenge to timid “parlor activists” – i.e. activists who are all theory, no action, or “all hat, no cattle,” as some say. And Daughter of Earth is also seriously concerned with international human rights. As Smedley did in her own life, the character Marie moves to New York and works to support the Indian nationalist movement. The novel does not sidestep the conflicts and difficulties facing Americans who work internationally. Exile and immigration are also themes with strong contemporary resonance.

A third great “old book” is Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, published in 1888. If you adjust for relative demographics, Looking Backward is still one of the most popular American novels ever written, but one unheard of by most people today. In its day, this explicitly socialist book sparked the 19th century equivalent Oprah’s book club, with hundreds of reading groups forming around the country to discuss the novel. These “Bellamy clubs” were explicitly political and included labor organizers, leftist social reformers, working people and middle class advocates of progressive economics.

Looking Backward is a work of utopian science fiction: Julian West, a comfortable member of the 1880s Boston bourgeoisie, sleeps through a century in a trance induced by means of “animal magnetism.” He awakes in the year 2000 to a Boston transformed into a classless utopia, relieved of all social unrest and economic strife.

Looking Backward gets a bit prose-clunky at times. Some chapters read like (and actually are) thinly re-phrased economic treatises by important progressive thinkers of Bellamy’s day such as Henry George (Progress and Poverty) and Laurence Gronlund (The Co-Operative Commonwealth). The novel completely sidesteps American conflicts over race and immigration, and this serene Anglo-Victorian utopia will most definitely not be everybody’s cup of tea.

But what remains most moving about Looking Backward is Edward Bellamy’s utterly sincere optimism that creating more equitable economic and social conditions will unleash our collective capacities for altruism and social cooperation.

In the world he projected for the year 2000, human energies are not channeled by competitive desperation or fear of poverty. In Bellamy’s utopia, every person is entitled to a basic share of the country’s wealth: a moral entitlement they earn simply by virtue of being human. Every person is granted an equal material allotment for basic needs and comforts: housing, food, and medicine. Every person is given time to pursue education and the pleasures of leisure and rest.

Every able person works, but their “fair share” is not attached to, or conditional upon, their labor. Rather these essential needs are accorded to each person, from cradle to grave, as a basic human right.

In our day, this idea in Looking Backward will no doubt strike many readers as the real “science fiction” in the novel. Bellamy’s utopian hope seems very far from our actual present. And for sure, Grapes of Wrath and Daughter of Earth offer harsher, more pessimistic, and many will argue more realistic portrayals of human nature, social reality, and the machinations of political power.

But clearly, the questions raised in these “old books” are still on our collective table, and these books make for good reading as we look forward to November.