BOYS STATE, AMERICAN LEGION, AND AMERICA - PART 2

 How can I dare to compare the defeated CSA to Eastern Europe in 1945?  And worse, by implication, make the American North appear like Stalin?  Surely, the North and South had been one nation for decades, and it was soon to be united following the war.

     In the American census of 1860 the US population was 31,443,000, with approximately 19 million in the North, and 12 million in the South, of whom 4 million were slaves.  So, it was more like 19 million Yanks, to 8 million white Johnny Rebs.  So long as slaves continued to work in the fields and grow food, they were contributing to the Rebel cause, but because of the Yankee naval dominance, and its blockade of Southern ports, cotton could not be sold abroad.  In the early days of secession, some Free People of Color volunteered to serve in the army of the CSA, (including the ancestors of 2 popular TV regulars, xxx, but the leaders of the Confederacy did not want blacks in its army (though there were a few exceptions).   Xxx was rather embarrassed on the PBS television show, Finding Your Roots, when told of the FPC militia group in New Orleans' offer to serve the Confederacy.  But when New Orleans fell in 1862 to Northern ships led by Farragut, the same FPCs joined the Northern army, as would more blacks as the war wore on.  The North had more industry, could purchase with the navy necessary items, while the Union Nave left the South isolated.  The North was recognized by other nations, had more industriesm railroads, many advantages.  The South had better generalship of the army at times.  Both sides produced wonderful songs of the era.

     According to google AI, 1 in 5 of the Southern white men of military age did not survive the Civil War.  Confederate deaths were at a rate of 3 times those of the Yanks.  For the war the South lost 258,000 casualties; the North lost 360,000.  Total for both sides: 618,000 

      The population of the USA in 1910 was 92,228,000.  Our casualties in WWI were - 116,000.  In 1940 our population was 132,164,000 and our losses in WWII were 405,399. During the Great War - in the late 1930s, it was renamed, WWI, German-Americans faced ever growing hostility at home.  Indeed, to what extent was Prohibition meant to punish the German brewers and the Irish saloon owners?  In 1919 in Milwaukee, veterans had a cannon across the street from the Pabst Theater, threatening to blow up the building if it went ahead with a Schiller play in the German language.  Real hatred, but not so many Americans killed in WWI.  And in WWII, Japs, and some Germans and Italians rounded up by the American federal authorities.  War nourishes hatred.  But by far America's deadliest war was the Civil War.  Was there no hatred in that war??

     Americans died in our Civil War at the same rate as in WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam - those 4 wars added together!  That must have fostered enormous hatreds during the Civil War.  And it was not merely the deadliest war.  The North was imitating Stalin before Stalin was born.  When Pres. Abraham Lincoln announced as a war measure the Emancipation Proclamation, though it had no immediate effect, limited to the territory occupied by the South, by war's end it would become the largest confiscation of private property in American history.  Imagine 3 sons of slave owners going off to war.  One is killed, another wounded.  Returning home, former slaves are mocking them, leaving the plantation.  There is no new money coming in, little food grown.  They survive, just survive.  In 2 years one tells the other brother news he just heard, "One of out former pieces of property is running for governor on the Republican ticket."  Poverty, disease, mental depression.  "We have to do something."  Even walking in town with a young woman on the wooden version of  a sidewalk, the blacks laugh and nearly push them off!  In the past, they got out the way of the whites.  The world they knew was no more.  Could anything be done to restore "order" as it used to be??

     In both New Orleans and Memphis in 1866 whites attacked rallies of blacks and the small number of white Republicans, killing over 60 in each city.  These murders wakened the North to the possibility that the South, though having lost the war, might win the peace. President Andrew Johnson, whom Lincoln chose to replace his Republican Vice President, Lincoln believed the change was needed, as the national election of 1864 was so close, many being swayed by wins and losses on the battle field.  The North finally began to really win battles, and Lincoln was re-elected, with a Tennessee Democrat who tried not to change the South and obstructed the Radical Republicans who wanted to remake the South.  After the massacres in Louisiana and Tennessee, the Radical Republicans won heavily, and Ulyses Grant became a hard line President.  Not only were new amendments to the Constitution enaccted, like banning slavery, but Southern states would have to vote in favor of them if those states were to be returned to the Union.  However, even with Grant's election and his signing a Civil Rights Act, and occasionally using US troops to quell Southern zealots, there was a trend to a guerilla war.  When I taught in Europe, I was told that there were guerilla wars in Poland and Ukraine in the late 1940s, as large numbers of both probably preferred Hitler to Stalin.  Even to day in Ukraine, some, will wear shirts similar to those of the Nazi era.  Of course, Stalin did what he could to smash such groups in the 1940s, kept Soviet troops in most areas they had conquered.  In Arkansas, a white New Englander was elected Senator by blacks and some whites.  He was soon after assassinated.  New Orleans had a Republican mayor or 2, but by 1863 the White League defeated the Republicans, and when I was young there was a monument tot the White League at the foot of Canal St. and the Mississippi River.  With that defeat, Republicans, black or white, would cease to be a factor in free elections.  Grant was no Stalin; there was not always support in the North for crushing the Rebels again.  Called the Ku Klux Klan, or Red Shirts, or White League, or even without a name, the white South conducted guerilla war for decades.  In the Presidential election of 1876, The Democrat candidate led by 250,000 votes, and there was a dispute over the Electoral College votes.  In some areas, blacks found it safer not to vote.  A compromise reached: the Republican Hayes would become President, but he promised to withdraw all Union troops from the South.  What might happent as a result?  What might have happened had Stalin removed all Soviet troops from Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, etc?  In the South, it did not happen so quickly, but by 1898 the last black run city, Wilmington, N.C., black Republicans and the Populist Party, physically overthrown by the Democrats.  Josephus Daniels, a leader of the resurrection, declared the greatest mistake in American history was grantin the vote to blacks,  He would later become Woodrow Wilson's Sec. of the Navy; his undersecretary, a young, healthy Franklin Roosevelt.

     The last black domino had fallen.  Thereafter the Solid South, a one-party dictatorship on race.  This was reinforced when some in New Orleans hoped to reverse the trend by purposely sitting-in the white coach of train, being arrested and appealing to the US Supreme Court.  The high court settled the matter - segregation was legal.  Separate but equal was the phrase used.  But it was never really equal, South, and even North.  But now the issue was settled, the high court had ruled.  And the South could celebrate their victory in the guerilla war and beyond.

    HUGH MURRAY

Civil War Northern Casualties     360,222      WWI             116,516                                       Southern                             258,000      WWII            405,399

               Toral Civil War              618,222    Korean              36,574

                                                                     Vietnam            58,220 

                                                                Total 4 wars         616,685

MORE TO COME

WHY I AM NOT A VETERAN

 One more aspect on the amazing career of New Orleans DA Jim Garrison - he is probably the reason I was not drafted.  I originally applied to be a conscientious objector, and this is while on scholarship at Tulane.  All students who maintained a B average were exempt from the draft during the four years of undergraduate study.  Because of my application to be a CO, I did lose friends after the FBI visited them to inquire about me.  I tried to implement some of the pacifist theory when I joined CORE as it came to NO, and after training in non violent reactions, partook in the first major sit-in in NO since Plessy.  Consequently, I had to move from my parents hone due to threats on the phone - curses, theats to bomb us, etc., but the segregationists knew my folks were segs too -they were not after them, they wanted me.  I roomed with another CORE guy, white, student at Loyola, staunch Roman Catholic.  He was a year older than I, but had not finished under graduate study.  Only after sharing the flat with him did I discover he was legally blind.  One night I returned, and he had a box - I want you to learn how to use this.  I opened it, there was a weapon, a Ruger.  I did not want to do it, for there would go my pacifism.  But then, how could I make a legally blind man protect us, and me do nothing?  I realized we were not getting threatening calls, because we had no phone.  And if the racists did attack us, we could not call for help.  I learnt how to shoot, and perhaps a month later wrote my draft board, that I no requested the CO status (which it never gave me).

    At a certain point, I volunteered for the navy.  All went well till they inquired about arrests.  Because of the sit-in, I was a convicted felon (the Mayor was determined to punish us hard.)  I was told there that the federal law said no convicted felons could volunteer. but the felons  could be drafted.

    Some months later, draft notice, and I went to the large Custom's House federal building on Canal St, near the Mississippi  River.  About 60 of us quitely silent or whispering to a neighbor, but a Black Muslim going to the blacks openly urging that blacks refuse to be inducted for the white man.  Hee was ordered to stop; he refused.  Then all of the rest were ordered to an adjoining room.  The Muslim was left alon in the first room alone.  The rest of us had to fill out forms, etc. and we received chicken in a box which we were not to eat until on the bus to Fort Chafee in Arkansas.  Fill out forms, etc.  Told them I was a convicted felon, could not volunteer, but could be drafted.  They told me I would first have to talk to the FBI man when he finished interviewing the black in the next room.  I did, and t FBI agent told me he would have to get DA Garrison to drop the charge so I could be drafted.  He told me, wait for the decision, go home, and you can take the box of chicken with you.  Went home and waited, but I assume Garrison never dropped the charges.  Case eventually went to the US Supreme Court, and we won.  Never got a draft notice  to be inducted, but suspect, they did not want agitators.  

     Jackie Robinson had been judged to be court-martialed out of the army during in WWII after he refused to move to the back of an Army bus in Texas.  Because of he was doing what Rosa Parks would do a little later, some officials wanted him court marshalled.  Pressure from above and the previous convictions erased, and Robinson would eventually be honorably discharged.  The Army backed down. 

      I have wondered what would have happened had I been inducted.  Vietnam was growing as a war, so that was a possibility.  But I had learnt some German at Tulane, and might well have been assigned there, as there had recently been the crisis about the building of the Berlin Wall.  I might have enjoyed at trip to Germany.

      On the other hand, I was shocked to open page 1 of the New York Times, June 12, 1966, and read the story of Adam R. Weber, Jr. a young black from New Orleans, whom I knew casually, - he was refusing to take up his rifle against the Vietnamese people.  Would I have had such courage?  Did the Army want agitators?  Civil rights activists?  Probably, not.  But if NO DA Jim Garrison would not drop the Woolworth felony case, the buck stopped with him.

    I greatly admire Garrison for the courage to take on the CIA and other government agencies in his search for the truth about the murder in Dallas.  But Garrison was not liberal on all issues.

      HUGH MURRAY