Category Archives: People

The Extravagant Transformation of Hamilton Oaks Farm

06 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Farm, Growing up, Gullibility, Learning from mistakes, People

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farm windmill

In 1955 our landlady summoned my father to fly from Illinois to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where she lived. She wanted to show him the registered Angus cattle that she planned to buy in the showplace farms of New Jersey. She planned for the farm on which we lived near Paxton, Illinois, to become such a showplace, to breed and sell registered Angus cattle. Of the sixteen farms in Illinois that she inherited from her physician husband, the 320 acre farm that we leased would be the most suitable, in a highly visible location along a busy state highway, with many acres suited to pasture and hay but not grain production. After five years of leasing, my father had proven capable of caring for a herd of a hundred beef cattle that produced many calves and a significant income every year, and he had cleaned up the farm, replacing the deteriorated fencing and taming the previously out-of-control weed population.  She would call the farm “Hamilton Oaks,” honoring her late husband and referencing the twenty-acre oak grove behind which the farm buildings sat. She wanted my father to buy a fifty percent interest in the registered cattle, as they already shared half interests in the rest of the farm production. He could not commit to that new expense, having no extra savings to spend, but she made it plain that he must agree to her proposal for the farm conversion itself, if we were going to stay there.

The next two years would see a flurry of activity. An old barn was moved about two hundred fifty yards to the west side of the bluff above the river valley, and it, along with a second old barn, was renovated with stalls for select cattle. A new pole barn, 120 by 60 feet, was built to serve as hay storage and shelter next to new concrete feedlots on the site vacated by the old barn, on the east side of the bluff that opened to the major pastures that lay in the river valley to the south and east. Large earth movers scraped topsoil from the farm lots to level the entire top of the bluff; the earth movers covered the whole area with hundreds of tons of gravel excavated from the river valley, providing plenty of mud-free parking and work areas. The banks along the entire half-mile length of the river, piled on both sides with dredging mounds left forty years earlier, were smoothed to provide additional pasture.

A new deep well was drilled, providing plenty of fresh water for the growing herd of cattle. Every building was repainted and renewed, except for the house in which we lived. Sided with asbestos shingles, the house had uneven interior walls suggesting an old story-and-a-half log cabin underneath, expanded with a turn of the century addition of a living room and a third bedroom above it, accessed through a hallway that had been more recently converted into the only interior bathroom. The outhouse still stood in a corner of the yard; it was especially useful when the plumbing and septic system balked, which was often. An oil furnace sat in the small rock cellar under part of the house. We had inside plumbing and central heat for downstairs; we could not complain.

Board fences replaced the woven wire fences around the farm lots visible from the highway, and we spent many weeks painting those new fences white. Masons built a large ornamental concrete block gateway to the farm, and the “Hamilton Oaks” sign, five by six feet, with the image of a black Angus bull prominently displayed, arose on one side of the entrance.

The registered cattle began to arrive from New Jersey in cattle trucks. The prize bull alone cost $5000, much more than our annual income. He was overly fat and barely able to move, as was fashionable in the fair judging circuits of those days. Twenty-five expensive cows came with him. We pored over their pedigree papers, impressed by the extraordinary names and titles given to each one. Naturally, as a harbinger of things to come, the surly bull had no interest in the cows that came with him.

Boxes came filled with fancy leather show halters, curry combs, brushes, and a large barley cooker. Several weeks of feeding cooked barley was supposed to add a fine sheen to the black Angus hair. (We didn’t grow barley.)

Our landlady gave me a registered Angus calf, Prince Something-or-Other, that had a misshapen head. I was ten years old and had just begun to take part in 4-H, and Prince was my project for the year. My oldest brother was working his way through college, and he took a year off to help during the year of construction. My middle brother was finishing high school, and also working to earn money to start in college, so the success of the enterprise fell to some extent on my successful competition in the fair and cattle show circuit. I attended the Farm Extension Service cattle judging school, and learned what I could about how to prepare and show my steer. For the next four years I went to the 4-H fair, earning “B” ribbons for my steers every year, a long way from the Grand Champion prizes so coveted by our landlady. She thought that two men and two boys would have plenty of time to show cattle during summer fairs, but that was not the case, nor did the registered bull cooperate, so we relied on the unregistered herd to provide the 4-H projects. Artificial insemination was becoming available, but she did not want to pay for that when she had already paid so much for an award-winning bull and everything else.

The farm looked like a showplace, not up to New Jersey standards, certainly beyond ours, but there was no market for her registered cattle in our area. After five years she was ready give up, sell the herd at rock-bottom prices, and get rid of us. After we left, no one painted the fences, no one raised cattle, and the “Hamilton Oaks” sign was taken down.

 

Churches Against Torture and Impoverishment

06 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Church, Citizenship, Faith, People, Travel

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Reaching a sabbatical year in 1987, while serving St Paul UCC in Minonk, Jan and I planned a trip to Europe that coincided with our daughter Alicia’s Spanish Club trip. Jan, Nathan, and I flew to London for a week, traveled to Amsterdam by train and ferry, and then met Alicia in Paris on Bastille Day, while she came from Madrid; we stayed in Paris for a week, traveled to Geneva for a few days and then to Frankfurt—these destinations by train. We rented an automobile for the two weeks in Germany, beginning and ending in Frankfurt. All in all it was a month, using $25 a day tour guides and a tight budget.

Western Illinois University provided a course adaptable to my sabbatical plan, which was to study church-state relationships, with a faculty consultation in Paris and Frankfurt. I made contacts for interviews in the cities we visited, mostly making appointments after arriving in the cities. My family were good sports as we moved from church to church, office to office, and museum to museum.  I surrendered a few times to their desire for McDonalds, KFC, and pizza, but we did find that the definition of pizza was often as adventurous as other local cuisine, as peas, broccoli, tuna, and squid found their way onto our pizza orders.

The vitality of churches and the means of support for church budgets and buildings varied substantially. We found worshiping groups in all sizes, in traditional and non-traditional settings, and enjoyed facilities that were as new as a Methodist Church in Chelsea that finally rebuilt and opened in 1986 after being destroyed by bombs in the Second World War, and as old as the EKU (United Protestant Church) in Trier that met in a Fourth Century Roman basilica.

Some congregations derived much of their support from state church tax formulas, that for the most part maintained traditional buildings—great cathedrals such as St. Paul’s in London and Notre Dame in Paris, and historic buildings such as Calvin’s church in Geneva. The Kirchentag met in Frankfurt and hundreds of young people from across Germany and many international guests gathered, mostly paying their own way, for a week of worship, lectures, workshops, and service opportunities. Some buildings were supported by international contributions, such as the Synagogue at Worms, where a small Hebrew congregation gathered in honor and memory of the centuries of congregational life before the Holocaust. Some places seemed to be full of worshipers every day, such as Sacre-Coeur in Paris, and others closed even on Sunday, such as the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam. Some congregations were entirely self-supporting, refusing even the offers of voluntary tax-channeled donations, in their traditions of independence.

Often we were noticed as guests and invited to join in meals, as was customary at the Third Order of Saint Francis Hospitality House and the “Pilgrim Church” in Amsterdam, and in many of the places that we visited.

Another thing that we noticed everywhere, whether it was in the active announcements in the services or the bulletin boards of buildings that we visited, even when we were not there during events, was common support for organizations and movements that oppose torture. Also, there were humanitarian efforts for community and international development, food, and disaster relief that we occasionally saw in the United States, but the opposition to torture and political imprisonment worldwide was remarkable, since at the time there was so little evidence of that kind of involvement in American churches. The support was evident in Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish congregations, in settings that otherwise appeared apolitical, conservative and liberal in their creeds.

Far from finding a lifeless church uninvolved in the issues facing people in the world, we found faithful communities actively concerned about the well-being of people throughout the world. If this was the evidence of the “post-Christian era” in Europe, then it held some lessons for self-congratulating religious life in the United States.

Which John Bell?

09 Thursday Mar 2017

Posted by in Books by Gary Chapman, Citizenship, Events, Learning from mistakes, People, Racial Prejudice

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OLOP Cover Photo 3

John Bell was such a popular name in the 1800’s that hundreds of references to that name show up in southern and Midwestern records. Many can be eliminated as related to one another because of birthdates, locations of death, and other indicators that they are not related to the John Bells that are part of our own family, but many remain single references that are unconnected to any other data.

 

We began with confidence in our own closest ancestors with that name, the great-uncles and great-great-father who are buried in the family cemetery near New Salem, Illinois. From where did that Great-great grandfather come? There were other Bells and even John Bells in the immediate vicinity and surrounding counties who could be easily disregarded because there were no plausible family connections.

 

You can imagine my excitement when I found a ‘John Francis Bell’ born in the Cherokee Nation with the same birthdate as the Grandfather John F. Bell, reported by his grandson (our Grandpa Hillmann) to be raised among the Cherokees with twenty-one siblings. Then I found a maternal uncle, James Starr, traditionally responsible for his nephews’ upbringing, with twenty-one children of his own. The name ‘John Bell’ also appeared as one of the youthful protectors (or was it a gang?) of the Cherokee Nation’s eastern border, along with Starr’s own sons and several other relatives and neighbors. These instances provided a connection to a full line of John Bells well-documented in Cherokee records. John Francis Bell also disappeared from Cherokee Nation records in 1848 just after the murder of his father, and just before our John Francis Bell appeared in the New Philadelphia-New Salem area.

 

It was not the case that the records were entirely in agreement with each other. Sometimes two John Bells in the same Bell family appeared in each generation. John Francis Bell had a younger brother named John Martin Bell. They had an uncle named John Adair Bell who had first cousins named John Bell. Often the middle names were not used in separate records.

 

John Adair Bell was the most famous among them since he and his brother Samuel Bell signed the New Echota Treaty with the Federal Government in 1835. John Adair Bell led one of the large detachments of Cherokee people in the 1837-38 Removal, usually called the Trail of Tears. Members of the Bell detachment were mostly residents of the ancient city of Coosawattee in Georgia, and John Adair’s father, and his brothers, including David Henry Bell, and David’s son, John Francis Bell, were probably among its numbers. I must add ‘probably’ because no full listing of the detachment members has been recovered, and other circumstantial information has been assembled that points to their presence.

 

The John Bell who was the grandfather of the grandfather of our grandfather, in other words the father of John Adair Bell, has often been mistakenly identified as the signer of the New Echota Treaty and the leader of the detachment, instead of his son. To add to the confusion, his middle name may or may not be the John ‘Christopher’ Bell, born in Greenville, South Carolina, in May 1, 1782, although that date seems to be firm as the grandfather’s birthdate, so I will use that name for the sake of identification. John C. Bell married Charlotte Adair, the mixed Scot and Cherokee daughter of John Adair (the founder of Adairsville, Georgia), and their children included John Adair, David, Samuel, and Devereaux Jarrett, as well as several other well-documented men and women.

 

John C. Bell’s 1842 Registered Claim clears some additional confusion about his life. He gives reasons for his 1833 move from Coosawattee to Alabama, where his brother Francis Bell was residing in that part of the Cherokee Nation, and the claim clearly indicates that John C.  Bell was ‘white,’ although his family is Indian. John C. Bell is a member of the Cherokee Nation because of his marriage to Charlotte, not because he was born into it. The Georgia legislature’s claim on John C. Bell, later declared unconstitutional by the Federal Court, was a claim on him as a white man and citizen of Georgia. This is interesting because many Cherokee records, dating from around 1900, claim that John C. Bell was half-Scot and half-Cherokee, like his wife. They often say that John C. was the half-blood son of John Bell, the Scotsman, who married a Cherokee woman of the Deer Clan.  This would make John C. commit incest, according to Cherokee tradition, when he married Charlotte Adair, who was also a member of the Deer Clan. I account for this lapse in Our Land! Our People! with the documented incidents later when families in the next generation disregarded clan membership when marrying, as the clan system was breaking down, and people were adopting the English familial system and different definitions of incest, but there was no corroboration of this with regard to John C. Bell and Charlotte Adair, and it is more likely that people later just got confused about which John Bell was which. John C. Bell, a Scot, married a woman of the Deer Clan, Charlotte Adair, and their children, observed the clan traditions and married spouses of the Wolf Clan, or other clans that were not Deer. John C. Bell’s father may have been named John Bell, or he may have been another David Bell; this is where the lines become unclear again, but neither married a Cherokee woman.

 

If I were to rewrite Our Land! Our People! I would consider John C. Bell as a full-blooded Scotsman, still with his Scot accent, who was one among several men who married Cherokee women and were adopted into the Nation. He was a well-known traveler, trader, farmer, and blacksmith who fell in love with a Cherokee woman, who was the daughter of another well-known Scot trader and traveler, John  Adair. That was enough of a challenge for their lives at the time without the additional burden of an accusation of incest.

 

It would have been a lot easier if there were not so many ‘Johns Bells’ in and out of the family.

 

 

Filling In the Aporiae

24 Friday Feb 2017

Posted by in Books by Gary Chapman, Cherokee history, Learning from mistakes, People, Words

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OLOP Cover Photo 3 OOMH TRFBWcover

A Chapman is literally and historically a peddler, often of books as well as other trifles. That is how we began anyway, and I have been continuing the tradition. The first popular books for public consumption were chapbooks. Today we would call them pamphlets or paperbacks. One of my favorite Seventeenth Century chapbooks, held in the Lowenbach Collection in Chicago when I was the curator, was titled “Cures for the Plague,” and of course none of the cures would have worked.

One of the advantages of travelling around the country peddling my books is finding out where I have made mistakes in writing them. This has got to be as true when a person writes historical fiction as when writing legitimate history, if that person is concerned about getting as close to the truth as possible, both in telling a good story and in telling an accurate one.

I have known that the stories I have written in my retirement years have been about histories that will never be totally accurate, but are important nonetheless. I have tried to write my father’s early life stories so that they would be interesting and faithful to his spirit, my son-in-law’s and his brother’s emigration from Vietnam and Cambodia so that the stories would honor the ancestors who made their lives possible, and my wife’s Cherokee ancestry so that more contemporary people would appreciate the real sacrifices that have been made in building our country and the values that we should try to serve, even when they have not been served well in the past.

Talking to other people who know some of these backgrounds can be humbling. The soldier who served in Vietnam told me that he doesn’t want to listen to someone who wasn’t there, and he doesn’t want to hear the stories of his enemies, and I can understand his reasons. The family member doesn’t want to have the privacy of her dear deceased grandparents invaded, and I sympathize with that motivation as well, although our grandparents had nothing to be ashamed of and  much to make them proud. The active member of the Cherokee Nation doesn’t need another white man making money off of his people. I can only reassure him that I am not making any money.

I am learning and correcting as I go. I am finding out much that I could not have if I had not published. I am discovering that it is good to write on matters in which you have little prior knowledge or experience, because you begin to fill the holes in your own ignorance.

 

Where Was Chicken Trotter and When?

24 Friday Feb 2017

Posted by in Books by Gary Chapman, Cherokee history, Citizenship, Death, Events, Learning from mistakes, People, Racial Prejudice, Small town life, Suffering, Travel

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Recently I was presenting Our Land! Our People! at the Talbot Library and Museum in Colcord, Oklahoma. I did not expect to find much in the little town of Colcord, Oklahoma, but I was wrong. Talbot publishes some significant works on Cherokee history, and their facsimile editions of the 1843 Claims were illuminating on the John Bell family in several respects. For the first time I could actually see the English and Cherokee handwriting of four key family members—John Bell, the father, and three of his Bell sons—John Adair, David Henry, and Devereaux Jarrett (better known as Chicken Trotter).

The 1843 Claims record unreimbursed losses prior to the Cherokee Removal in 1838-39, usually due to thefts or confiscations of property by non-Cherokee white men. They were submitted to recover those losses, and they had to be witnessed by at least two other reputable citizens. The Bells served as reporters of their own claims, witnesses to others, and, in the case of Chicken Trotter, an official recorder of several dozen claims by others.

Chicken Trotter’s reports are some of the clearest and most beautifully written in all of the volumes. Deciphering other writing was sometimes impossible, but “D. J. Bell” provided some of the best. That surprised me, because in other places he is recorded by the simple notation “his mark,” and I never found evidence that he had attended any of the Cherokee schools. It is no wonder that he didn’t sign his work “Devereaux Jarrett” but “D. J. Bell” works well, and there is no competitor for the use of those initials among the Bell family. David Henry Bell would be “D. H.” and he just signed as “David Bell.” As these claims were recorded in the first few months of the year, there was enough time for Chicken Trotter to get back to Texas in order to work with Governor Sam Houston to conclude the Treaty of Bird’s Fort on September 29, 1843, which ended the four years of conflict between the Texas government and several tribes. Conflict followed the second Texas governor, Mirabeau Lamar’s attempt to eradicate the native population. Sam Houston, the first governor, an official Cherokee himself,  had tried to grant reservation status to the Cherokees among others. From one administration to the next, the policies reversed from welcoming people of different cultures to trying to destroy them, and back again.

Chicken Trotter, according to the records of the Texas Cherokee population, had come to Texas during the mid-1830’s, when Chief Duwali (or Bowle, as he was also known), led the tribe. They were and continue to be located in Rusk, Cherokee and Smith Counties, as the areas are known today. When in 1839 Governor Lamar and the Texas militia killed Duwali and at least half of the tribe in a genocidal attack, Chicken Trotter soon became one of the remaining leaders.

Because of the Texas Cherokee account I rewrote Our Land! Our People! removing Chicken Trotter from Alabama, where his father lived, and from the Bell Detachment on the Trail of Tears, and putting him in Texas through the late 1830’s. After publishing, I found evidence that Chicken Trotter served his brothers in the Bell Detachment as a treasurer paying bills along the route. If he accompanied the group the whole way, he was travelling to Indian Territory from September 1838 through early January 1839, before returning to Texas in time to be in danger during the massacre of Duwali and the Cherokees in July.

When a group of Cherokees, including John Adair Bell and David Bell travelled to Texas in September and October of 1845, accompanied by the diarist and newspaper reporter William Quesenbury, they visited the northeast Texas Cherokee settlement, and Chicken Trotter was there leading the group, having established a community farm, including watermelons and pumpkins as Quesenbury notes, because some of their horses got loose and tore up the patch.

In 1848, Chicken Trotter was again in Indian Territory, joining his brother Sam and other Cherokees planning a journey to California to prospect for gold. Sam died on the way but Chicken Trotter and his wife Juliette got there before returning to their people in Texas a year or so later. There is no record about his success or failure in finding gold.

Chicken Trotter was a busy man, travelling back and forth quickly in days when travel was difficult. Maybe that is how he acquired his name.

A Church Embraces People with AIDS

23 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by in Caring, Church, Citizenship, Death, Faith, Health, People, Suffering

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spiral aurura

In the 1980’s and early 90’s, when AIDS was still a scandal to many people, a modern leprosy, popularly associated with promiscuous homosexual activity, although we knew it was acquired by other means as well, a church invited AIDS Burlington to use their facilities without charge for their regular and special meetings. AIDS Burlington consisted of people with AIDS, their friends, partners, and families, public health workers, and other interested and compassionate people who wanted to work together to learn how to respond personally, medically, educationally, and politically. They needed to meet regularly and have safe space to talk confidentially as well as space to present information to the public as it became available. They had no funds for these purposes, especially when medical bills were already overwhelming.

 

The church consistory discussed the possibilities. Outsiders might consider this church a sponsor of the activities associated with AIDS, instead of a giver of hospitality to people in need. We might receive threats from extremists. People might avoid our building, thinking it was contaminated. AIDS sufferers and their families might want to come to worship or take part in other activities, which could be a benefit to them, or it could drive other people away, who were afraid of contact with them. Not much helpful information was available for the first few years and misinformation was rampant. It was such a small thing to give space and to be present with the people who were trying to confront the medical and social problems that came with AIDS. Should we hide from those who needed our help?

 

The church offered space and the offer was accepted. For a few years, when several members of the community and their families were dealing with the AIDS crisis, before there was any systematic treatment or undisputed public information, AIDS Burlington were our guests, and they were both appreciative and respectful guests, who, as usual, gave at least as much to us as we gave to them. Some of those who able to survive and those who had to say farewell to their loved ones became a part of ‘us.’

We faced some of the unwelcome responses we feared, but never enough to make us regret the decision that we had made.

 

Getting the Lead Out

04 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by in Caring, Events, Farm, Gullibility, Health, House, Learning from mistakes, People

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My father was inhabiting his house by himself, after Mother’s death, and it was time to simplify things, like fancy window dressings and shelves of collectibles gathering dust. A few years passed before we arrived at a stage when my one visit a month could provide just enough time to sweep and dust and finish laundry, so that he would have an easier time doing what he needed to do by himself. Part of that process was replacing the sheer curtains and drapes with mini-blinds. My brother generously supplied the mini-blinds for sixteen large double-hung windows. They looked neat and they were versatile for providing light when needed and privacy when it was needed.

After ten years there by himself, and the loss of his driver’s license, the day finally came when he could no longer live there. It was a sad day, and we had to stop at the end of the lane for him to take a long last look, before we moved on to Burlington, where he would live at my house.

The question remained—what would we do with the property? Larry Schwing had worked with my father for years, and he had gradually assumed more of the responsibility for the farm until he was the full-time tenant farmer. The income from the farm would accumulate and provide what was needed for my father’s eventual move to assisted living and then nursing care. The house could contribute in the same way. We cleared the house of furnishings, held a sale of the items that would no longer be needed, and prepared for renters. The Larry Magelitz family arrived just when the house was ready. It would provide a comfortable home for the couple and their two little boys. Their life there went well for their first several months, until routine blood tests showed warning levels for lead in the little boys. It was a small indication, but there is no safe level for lead in children, and we were all upset that we had exposed them to danger in the old house.

We arranged for lead testing throughout the house. There were many painted surfaces, plenty of places where peeling paint and other materials could have been the source, but none of them showed a positive test for lead. Finally, the relatively new mini-blinds were tested, and the surprise came. They were saturated with lead, and the dust from their painted surfaces showed the positive results we had been searching for. The new mini-blinds from China were the source. There was no inspection or restriction of lead on anything that was being imported in the country. We quickly stripped the house of every set of blinds and sent them to the landfill. After a thorough cleaning, the Magelitz family was able to live there until a new job took them away. Another young family soon took their place, and, happily, they could enjoy the house for eleven years without fear of lead contamination. My parents always enjoyed the young families that lived nearby as their neighbors. We knew that they blessed the use of their home for these families and would want them to live there in safety.

The Nightmare of Talking Money

04 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by in Church, Citizenship, Events, guns, Learning from mistakes, People, Racial Prejudice, Words

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dock at sunset

The nightmare began when the court declared that “money is speech.” It was a variation of the old saying that “money talks.” The door opened for many wealthy people to set up and use pseudo tax-exempt non-profit organizations to take part in partisan campaigns. Then that idea spread into the churches. Individuals who wanted to endorse candidates for office funneled money through tax-exempt churches for partisan support, expanding the cash available that was unreportable and unaccountable to public interests. This was all in the name of the First Amendment.

A candidate appeared who had his own wealth, who could go where he wanted, stay where he wanted, and say what he wanted. He lied often, long, and loudly, and captured an extraordinary share of media attention with his outrageous antics, and he didn’t need to raise funds from anyone else in the ordinary course of campaigning. Wealthy people could go elsewhere and spend even more to prop up candidates who would do their bidding and who would be accountable to them personally. The singular wealthy candidate was just another form of “money speaking,” since he could not only use his own resources, but he could use his unusual platform to increase his own resources without needing to answer to anyone else, reveal his conflicts of interest, or follow the customary ethics of transparency and disclosure. His party shielded him from investigation and exposure of foreign entanglements in the hope that they could carry out their own platforms of experimental political change and revolution while he was in charge.

The candidate pretended to be the voice of common men overlooked and ignored by the rapid transformations of global economies. Wealth sought the cheapest labor and the highest rates of return without regard to the public interest where goods were manufactured or where they were sold. His decisions, once he was elected, simply cleared the way for more aggressive domination of the multitudes by moneyed interests. Money continued to talk with a louder voice. Soon it was understood that speech was not free in any form, not in the press, not in electronic media, not in the Internet, who were all controlled by a small concentration of special interests. The old principles of the First Amendment were hollow. Personal freedoms were identified with the freedom to force others to obey the conscience of the person who chooses to discriminate, instead of the freedoms of the person who is the target of discrimination. People with money had the freedom to oppress people without money.

The only Constitutional Amendment that would could not be abrogated in any form was the Second Amendment, and the more weapons and the more powerful weapons that one possessed, the more political power a person had. The resulting condition of a heavily armed population was neither “well-regulated” nor controlled by any police or military force serving the common interest. Private military units and paid bodyguards became the norm for those who could afford them. The random, careless, and accidental use of arms to injure and kill accelerated to become the leading cause of death among all people. People had developed the habit of scapegoating strangers and different ethnic groups; finally they turned on each other, neighbor against neighbor.

Society descended into chaos. The social contract was broken. What began as the security of wealth became the reinstatement of the “law of the jungle,” and life returned to being the “nasty, mean, poor, brutish, and short” life (as Thomas Hobbes had described it) of the “good old days.”

These were thoughts of the middle of the night when the mind entertains what darkness hides. The dream does not have to end this way. The creative mind can move the ending in another direction entirely as the day dawns.

Threatened with Expulsion

31 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Church, Citizenship, Events, Faith, Growing up, Learning from mistakes, People

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Appointed by the Illinois Wesleyan Student Senate in my senior year to chair the Religious Activities Commission, I presided over the committee that organized the weekly chapel series, two annual lectureships by theologians or religious leaders, two symposia on current events related to the world of religion, and coordinated several volunteer groups, including the Student Christian Movement and the Community Tutoring Program. It was my third year serving on the commission in those latter capacities, and it was turning out to be a challenging year.

 

We determined that the Fall 1967 symposium would address the issues raised by the Vietnam War, and it was customary when dealing with controversial issues to have different sides well-represented. An expert in the history of Indochina agreed to come to provide background. Several of the IWU faculty agreed to serve on discussion panels. To present the case for the continuing conduct of the war we found a U.S. Defense Department analyst, Craig Spence. The cost of bringing these experts to campus had eaten most of our available budget. I asked for more funds.

 

I began to promote the plans for the symposium, using an art student volunteer for poster design, and, among other efforts, publishing the key documents that represented the sides of the conflict, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, various statements by North and South Vietnamese leaders and assemblies, and considerations of Just War theory and applications by ethicists. These documents were left in several areas of the campus for students who were interested.

 

Four weeks until the symposium, when we still had not secured a bona fide critic of the war, the Dean of Students summoned me to her office. She informed me that I should not secure someone to present a criticism of the war, I should stop distributing propaganda representing our enemy’s viewpoints, and, if I continued to undermine the reputation of the university that she had worked so hard to maintain, I would be expelled. Anything else that she said during the minutes that followed fell on deaf ears as I prepared my case. I was not alone in planning this program; other students and faculty were just as committed to it as I was. If the university was doing its job, it would consider different positions as objectively as possible. If she thought she could threaten me into submission on this, she was mistaken.

 

The next day I learned that no additional funds would be available. I called Staughton Lynd, a well-known academic and activist, who had written and spoken extensively about the war, and explained the situation to him. We could provide a modest honorarium, and I would drive to Chicago to bring him to campus and return him to his home after the presentations and discussions. He agreed to come.

 

I confided in the college chaplain and two other faculty members about the threats from the Dean of Students, and received reassurances from them, but I didn’t see any value in alarming the other students who were involved in planning the conference until and unless they experienced the same threats.

 

The symposium occurred with high participation, full reporting by the Bloomington Pantagraph as well as the Wesleyan Argus, and Staughton Lynd made a thorough presentation to a packed ballroom at the Memorial Student Center. Craig Spence said that the war would probably last another thirty years, if we intended to win it, and an important benefit could be the destruction of China’s nuclear arsenal. If it was evaluated as a debate no one won the symposium, but as a fair representation of views it accomplished its purpose. I mostly remember the extraordinary five hours on the road between Chicago and Bloomington, learning from Staughton Lynd, who shared his experiences with the human rights crisis in the United States as well as opposition to the war in Vietnam.

 

I didn’t hear any more from the Dean of Students, but a few weeks after the symposium, the Dean of Men called me into his office, and he warned me about the dangers of the passive aggressive anger that I had displayed in the fall. He didn’t know that I had that in me.

 

Plunging Into Detroit, 1966

30 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by in Church, Citizenship, Events, Faith, Growing up, Gullibility, Innocence, People, Racial Prejudice, Travel

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In the late 1960’s the “urban plunge” was an experience recommended to those who had not lived in an urban area or who had lived in a privileged area and had no direct experience of how the “other half” lived. The Methodist Student Movement was sponsoring a conference in Detroit in the summer of 1966. I was president of the MSM chapter at Illinois Wesleyan University, a farm kid, and I decided to go to the conference and, unknown to my parents (I was 19 after all.), expand that experience with an urban plunge.

Central Methodist Church, located on Grand Circus Park, hosted the conference, and several local leaders—professors at Wayne State University, political leaders, corporate leaders, and the president of the United Auto Workers, Walter Reuther—spoke to us, addressing the urban issues of the day. Reuther was particularly impressive, laying out the challenges to the auto industry, fully integrating the workforce, and expanding the base of unions internationally; he predicted the eventual decline of domestic industry, the unions, and the urban centers in the face of global competition, since people were not preparing for it.

Outside of the conference some of us wandered around and lived on the streets of Detroit. Much of the housing in many neighborhoods sat empty and decrepit. The immense Ford Rouge Plant stood empty. Segregated housing was the rule, and public services for the older neighborhoods were often scarce. I always walked around with one or two other friends from the conference, and we slept on park benches or in abandoned houses, and went to soup kitchens and day labor hiring centers. I never had more than a few dollars on me and dressed like I didn’t have much, which, of course, I didn’t. It was one of the richest experiences of my life, meeting people on the street—the veterans who had lost their way, the guy with an armful of watches that he would sell me, the children who begged during the day and turned their money over to an adult at the end of the evening, alcoholics, drug addicts, musicians and street artists, philosophers, people of all kinds. Throughout the weeks there I perceived no threat, other than the rodents and dirt of the streets. People were friendly, curious about us (We were college students here for a few weeks of the summer just to learn what we could.), willing to talk about their own lives, frustrations, and hopes. I discovered that all of these people were a lot like me under the skin. I could learn from them, but I had little to teach. That was the summer before the Detroit riots of 1967, and I wondered how poor people managed to live in the city, knowing they had no other home to go to.

One day a female friend and I got cleaned up and dressed up and went to a new high-rise apartment building in the urban renewal area just north of the downtown. We pretended we were a newly married couple looking for an apartment. The apartments were plain, small, and uninviting, and we finally had to admit to the nice woman who showed us around that $1000 a month was above our means. I couldn’t see how or why anyone would afford such a rental. Obviously most of the people we were meeting could not. We ate that evening at a Greek restaurant, spending some of my money hard-earned from loading and unloading trucks for a couple of days. We sat and watched as people came and went, finding or leaving something hidden behind the refrigerator that sat just outside the kitchen, but not staying to eat a meal.

I searched for the church that Rev. Reinhold Niebuhr had served for 13 years that had ended forty years before—Bethel Evangelical Church, two miles west of the downtown on Grand Avenue. What would be left of the German working community he served? It had become an African-American working community, and the building continued to serve, renamed Mayflower Missionary Baptist Church. I didn’t imagine at the time that I would eventually serve old German Evangelical Churches that looked a lot like it.

It is still hard to say exactly how those days in Detroit changed me, but they did. I was humbler, needing much less, but also less confident in my own ability to find any kind of success on my own. Anything worth doing had to be done together.