Few Notes of Interest

Two items I found interesting in the news this past mouth I will note here.  First, the US Congress has awarded the Congressional Gold Medal-the highest civilian honor-on the code talkers of World War II fame.  They were American natives indians who used their language to create a military code the enemy-the Japanese-could not de-code.  This article says they were active in both World Wars (WWI, I am not sure of; it will need to be checked).  Thirty-three tribes made contributions to the "code talkers".

Source:  "Washington: Congress honors Code Talkers".  From wire reports in The Virginian Pilot, date in early Nov 2013.

Second, the state of Alabama has "posthumously pardoned" three black men falsely accused and convicted on rape in 1931 in the case known as the "Scottsboro Boys".  Nine young black men, riding a train thru Montgomery, Alabama, were accused, tried and convicted of the rape of two white females on the train with them.  Within three weeks of the events on that train, eight of the men were sentenced to death by the Alabama judge after a trial by an all-white jury.  The case got national attention at the time and led the US Supreme Court to overturn the convictions and order new trials.  The high court ruled that blacks should have been included on the jury and that the men did not receive "adequate legal representation".  The state re-tried four of the men, after dropping charges against five of the defendants.  They were convicted and sentenced to prison in 1937.  One of the four escaped from prison and eventually died in Michigan.  The others were finally pardoned by Governor George Wallace in 1976.  They were paroled some time before the pardon, so I don't know how long they remained in prison.  The state, with this decision, hopes the case will be put "to rest".  This article clearly states that the men were not guilty of any crime involving the events on that train in 1931.  The three men were Haywood Paterson, Charles Weems, and James A. Wright.

(Source:  "Alabama hopes to put "Scottsboro Boys" case to rest" by Alan Blinder of the New York Times.  In The Virginian Pilot on 11/22/13)

1940 US Census

On April 2, 2013 the government was to release the census from 1940, which had not been public for the last 72 years.  Historians and geneologists will be interested in what will be found there.  Some areas of interest will be, a) info on refugees from wars in Europe in the 1930's, b) info on the 100,000 Japanese Americans who were later relocated to internment camps after Pearl Harbor attack, c) info on the large migration of black Americans from the rural south to northern cities in search of jobs and a better life. Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr of Harvard University has prepared a documentary for PBS entitled "Finding Your Roots" which was to air March 2, 2012.  In the case of Japanese Americans the census will paint a clearer picture of the extent of the groups community and the amount of loss suffered by those interned.   A topic interest will be the level of income of ordinary Americans at the time.  A picture printed with the article noted below shows a census worker interviewing a family of four outside a railroad car that was converted in a home.  I note this because it seems to me to be a novel way of providing housing for some in need.  The "house cars" were part of the Mohawk and Hudson RR line and the NY Central.  (could this  be a method of housing the homeless today?)  

The web site that provide these census records "will be free and open to anyone on the Internet" but these records are not "name-searchable".  

http://1940census.archives.gov/1940 and www.the1940census.com.  

(Source:  "Details of daily life from the Great Depression" by Cristian Salazar and Randy Herschaft of the AP.  In The Virginian Pilot on 3/19/12)  

Supreme Court

The Supreme Court ruled in early June of this year that the police "are justified in taking DNA samples from anyone who's arrested".  The court rules that DNA is no different from taking fingerprints and photographs of those arrested.  These forms of search are considered reasonable under the 4th amendment to the US Constitution.  The decision was a 5 to 4 ruling with Antonin Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan writing the minority opinion.  More research will be needed on this issue.
(Source:  "Court approves DNA swabs" in The Week from June 14, 2013)

Songs and the Labor struggle

I came across this while reading a novel by Ivan Doig entitled Work Song.  It is set in the Montana copper mining fields near the town of Butte-called the "richest hill on earth"-in the time period of 1919.  The major theme is the importance of song as a way to rally the workers around a protest.  There was a book called the Little Red Songbook that was made up of labor protest songs from 1909.  One of the items was a IWW song aimed at the Salvation Army; an organization the radical workers group said were more interested in "saving souls" than in providing relief for striking workers.  That song had lyrics we have all heard before.  

         "You will eat, bye and bye,

           in that glorious land above the sky.

           Work and pray, live on hay

            you'll get pie in the sky when you die"

I an also reminded of a labor song sung in the movie Matewan that was about the West Virginia mine wars on the 1920's.  That was the song "Gathering Storm".

Cost of War in Iraq: Another estimate

"The US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $ 4 trillion to $ 6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting".  This according to a Harvard University researcher.  The researcher-Linda Bilmes-said that Washington "increased military benefits in 2001...seeking to quickly bolster its talent pool and extend its ranks".  We have spend $ 2 trillion already but the rest will be the ultimate "price tag".

(Source:  "Wars may cost public as much as $ 6 trillion" by the Washington Post.  No author noted.  Printed in The Record on 3/29/13).

US war in Iraq

Special Inspector General to Congress issue his final report on the war in Iraq and questions whether the effort and cost were "worth the cost".  Stuart Bowen's report says "the US has spent too much money in Iraq for too few results".  It would seem the problem was the "misspending of money" according to PM Nouri al-Maliki.  In March of 2003 "Congress set up a $ 2.4 billion fund to help ease the sting of war for Iraqis.  It aimed to rebuild Iraq's water and electricity systems, provide food, health care and governance for its people; and take care of those who were forced from their homes in the fighting".  Six months after this funding Bush II asked for another $ 20 billion.  To date we have spent "more than $ 60 billion in re-construction grants to help Iraq..."  That's about $ 15 million a day.  Counting all military and diplomatic costs the other aid, the US has spent at least $ 767 billion since the invasion.  A US research group-National Priorities Project-estimates that the cost is $ 811 billion.  A GOP senator-Susan Collins-says Bush II should have given the aid as a "loan instead of an outright gift".

(Source:  "Report: America's time and $ 60 billion wasn't worth it in Iraq" by Lara Jakes of The Associated Press.  In the Virginian Pilot on 3/6/13)

World War II era

I came across the following items while reading the magazine The Week.  

First, in the book review of The Girls of Atomic City: The untold story of the women who helped win World War II by Denise Kiernan by Touchstone publishers.  The women were "young secretaries, chemists, and technicians" that were part of Oak Ridge, Tenn. working on the Manhattan Project.  The women  who were technicians "monitored panels of dials and never realized that they were enriching uranium", finally received the news of the bombing of Hiroshima, some were proud of the part they played and some felt "pride often mixed with shame and guilt".  I found this line interesting and as the reviewer wish for more details.  "A brief mention of an injured black worker who became a human guinea pig for radiation's effect on the body left this reader wanting more".  (Source:  Review in The Week for 4/19/13 on page 22).

In the same issue of The Week is a note about an internment camp for Japanese Americans in Heart Mountain Wyoming that was "packed with makeshift buildings on a patch of desert here that was ringed by barbed wire", is one of only two such camps open to visitors.  There is a web site for information, heartmountain.org.  The writer of the article in The Week states "the internees faced grueling conditions.  Multiple families shared tiny barracks with communal toilets, and when winter's sub-zero temperatures arrived, gaps in the walls let in cold winds".  As the writer says the climate conditions were "...almost as cruel  to these individuals as their government".  (I have always been amazed that our government could expect draft age men to volunteer for the armed forces while their parents faced these conditions.  Also that many such men did volunteer.

The third item I came across was a note about a PBS program that stated that during WWII "British intelligence planted listening devices among German POW's netting both military secrets and a glimpse of the Nazi's dark soul" (Source:  "Secrets of the Dead: Bugging Hitler's Soldiers".  In The Week 5/3/13)