Category Archives: American History

The Past Isn’t Past

The above diagram, or other similar images frequently pop up in American history textbooks. The purpose of the image is to represent Southern society in the years up to the Civil War. A quick look reveals that this system was top down and not in any way democratic.

Small scale farmers and poor whites near the bottom pose some interesting questions regarding antebellum (before the war) social class interactions. How much authority did small farmers actually wield in this ordered system? How did customs and rules shape relations between poor whites and slaves? The most pressing question asks why would lower class whites risk all to do battle for the lofty Planter class? After all, these same aristocrats strictly associated within their own circle, and would not give the time of day to any social inferiors.

So again why did the lower rungs answer the call to battle?

One explanation must touch upon race and identity. Small land holders and poor whites, as hard as they struggled to survive somehow believed or wanted to believe they shared more in common with the aristocrats at the top. Identifying with the enslaved below, despite living in similar adversity was unthinkable.

And these sons of the South fought hard. Some 300,000 Confederate soldiers died of shot, disease, or returned home maimed to preserve a culture that held them down.

Let’s put a pin there.

Keeping in mind the above image fast forward to the 2008 victory of Barack Obama. For many of us the election of our first black president marked a high point in racial history, seemingly proof that America had finally faced and redeemed the violent legacy of injustice.

And despite President Obama’s two successful terms in office, (Obama is somewhere among the top ten presidents of all time) the persistent legacy of racial hatred roared back to life as virulent as any year in old Dixie.

Like demons summoned from the dead, the ugly ghosts of white supremacy rose, once again fueled by a latter day white aristocracy. America is witnessing in real time DJT and his plutocrats purposely riling up lower class whites to again man their battle fronts.

A black president, a very popular and effective black president united malicious forces of hubris, greed, and malignant hate.

This toxic furnace of racism has honestly emerged as something of a shock. For those of us who bore witness to the Civil Rights movement, applauded affirmative action policies, and celebrated landmark legislation in housing and voting rights, led us to believe a A More Perfect Union was underway. But we were wrong.

Stunningly wrong.

47”s first administration emboldened a Klan-style march in Charlottesville, where he remarked there were “good people on both sides.” Left unmentioned was the fate of Heather Heyer, a counter protestor, who was deliberately targeted and killed in the melee. In 2021 47 groomed his working class foot soldiers to “stand back and stand by.” When the order came, these emboldened thugs sacked the US Capitol toting Confederate and Nazi flags. Neither Robert E Lee or Hitler ever got that close to our center of government.

In both cases MAGA militia in red caps waving blue flags proved that America has made no racial progress at all. Hate, especially racial hate has been simmering all along. Forget that 47 and his GOP are gutting social safety nets and services (Medicaid and FEMA come to mind) that support many of his minions (and the rest of us). Effectively manipulated MAGA enthusiasts proudly, defiantly, swill the poison of grievance.

Planter society would easily recognize this tried and true method of cultural conditioning. Working class whites once again believe they share the same interests as the ruling elite. After all they are all white. However, that same elite has no further use for those who elected them. And this resurrected aristocracy doesn’t think much of democracy either. Utah Senator Mike Lee publicly said as much.

The 21st Century rallying cry echoes that of an earlier century. The worst white man is still better than the best man of color. (And I don’t mean Joe Biden.)

And that is how those with little to nothing are schooled to preserve those who have everything.

Gail Chumbley is the author of the two-part memoir River of January, and River of January; Figure Eight. Chumbley has authored three stage plays, Clay, a look at the life of Henry Clay, Wolf By The Ears, an examination of racism and slavery, and Peer Review, where Donald Trump meets four former presidents.

gailchumbley@ymail.com

A Scandalous Life

And I didn’t include GW Bush

A video blog. Forgive the quality, but the point is clear.

Gail Chumbley is the author of the two-part memoir “River of January,” and “River of January: Figure Eight.” Both titles available on Kindle. In addition Chumbley has complete two plays, “Clay,” on the life of Senator Henry Clay, and “Wolf By The Ears” exploring the beginnings of racism and slavery.

A Different Code

“He has created a false public sentiment, by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated but deemed of little account in man.”Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Declaration of Sentiments 1848.

Nurse Margaret Sanger related an experience that inspired her career in family planning. Called to a dilapidated tenement building, Sanger found a pre-teen immigrant girl writhing in the throes of childbirth.

Attempting to assist the child, Sanger soon recognized the girl was slipping away, bleeding out on a filthy mattress. Indifferent, the girl’s family crowded nearby in a small parlor seemingly resigned to the life and death drama in the next room. 

Soon the bloody battle ceased, as both girl and infant were no more.

A mother herself, Sanger built her life’s work in promoting a woman’s right to choose if, or when to bear a child. 

As for Sanger, she found herself under arrest in 1916 for advocating sex education and birth control through the mail. The charge sheet read that her actions were indecent. Despite that legal setback, a determined Sanger founded Planned Parenthood later that same year.

June 24th, 2022 the Supreme Court ruled women no longer have physical autonomy. The government claims an overriding interest in American women’s reproduction. Plainly females are once again set aside as second-class citizens, leaving men free of any culpability for their actions. For one moment think if men were required a reversible vasectomy at age 16. No male would tolerate such a law, and this is the same invasion of privacy women are forced to obey.

Justice Alito, in his majority opinion, stressed moral judgement over legal arguments when the issue is reproduction. 

In fact, in overturning Roe, women are stripped of the most consequential of life decisions, reinforcing Mrs Stanton’s phrase in 1848, that “a different code” is still alive and well. Women cannot be trusted with their own bodies.

That Planned Parenthood offers so many other services is not the point. That neonatal disorders portend a fatal, and agonizing death for newborns isn’t the point, either.

One of the most precious American underpinnings is the right to privacy. And remember that Prohibition, too, attempted to police private practices. That fiasco resulted in an uptick of violent crime, and corruption because like it or not, people drink. The same is true of abortion. The procedure has not been halted in the country, but made more risky.

The Supreme Court has not ended abortion in America. 

This isn’t over.

*Justice Thomas indicates he would go after birth control next. Does he realize he opens a pandora’s box that could threaten overturning Loving V. Virginia? 

A Scandalous Life

Through open doors down a long hallway, reminiscent of The Shining, a cacophony of noisy televisions competed. Soap operas, news reports, and talkshows spilled from empty uncleaned guest rooms. It was the summer of 1974 that I began a brief stint as a hotel maid in Spokane, Washington. Through the course of that summer I began to notice each maid had different approaches to their routine. Some girls stripped the beds, or beelined for the bathroom, but all, to the last dust mop, first switched on the television. 

And the biggest news that summer, outside of Expo ‘74, was the Watergate hearings. Chairman Sam Ervin, Senator Howard Baker, Congressman Pete Rodino, and others became my new favorite TV personalities. Watergate Burglar, Alexander Butterfield spilled the beans on Nixon’s White House taping system, and John Dean spoke of a ‘cancer on the presidency.” For me these hearings were riveting as I placed fresh towels on the rack, and changed toilet paper rolls.

By the end of that summer, August 9, 1974 Richard Nixon resigned the presidency. 

Fast forward 13 years later, and I had just given birth to my second baby, a girl, and she and I cuddled as the television introduced a whole new set of “off the books” operatives. This time the scandal concerned the Reagan Administration’s convoluted plot known as the Iran-Contra Affair. American arms were illegally sold to Iran, our sworn enemy, to continue their war against Iraq. The proceeds from those sales were funneled to anti-Communists fighters battling in Nicaragua. Both efforts violated the Boland Amendment, passed by Congress, explicitly prohibiting American meddling in Central America.

Reagan operatives had hoped that selling Iranians weapons would soften them up because the White House needed a favor. Would the Ayatollah Khomeini help encourage Lebanon’s jihadists to release American hostages secreted around Beirut? The Reagan people gambled that trading illegal arms would secure Tehran’s help. 

While rocking my infant I learned a litany of new names: NSA chief, Robert McFarland, Marine, Oliver North, North’s secretary, Fawn Hall, and the recently deceased mastermind, CIA director, William Casey. My take, as I patted my girl’s little back, was that the Reagan White House had privatized foreign policy in defiance of Congress through renegade agents.

In 1988 Ronald Reagan, in a video deposition, admitted he had done just that, but due to his failing memory, couldn’t recall. 

That brings me to my golden years. I tuned in to the January 6th hearings, as a retired grandma. My husband and I watched and listened to the evidence regarding the violent attack on our nation’s capitol. To say this hearing was electric would be an understatement. Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Capitol Police Officers, particularly Caroline Edwards, left me spell bound. Representative Liz Cheney owned the evening, making clear the person responsible for the attempted coup-the former guy. 

Donald Trump is the first sitting president in American History to be impeached twice.

So what element ties all three scandals together? For one, the course of a single life-from college kid, to motherhood, to grandmother. And I suppose one could conclude I’ve watched a helluva lot of television. 

But for me the message means something else. 

The modern Republican Party has undergone a long death spiral marked by greed, rot and decay. As Liz Cheney said, “there will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”

For nearly 50 years, from 1974 to 2020 the Grand Old Party has cast off its once, principled moorings, slowly imploding before our eyes. As my generation grew from young students to senior citizens the party of Lincoln silently died. 

And like Jack Nicholson’s character in The Shining, there is no redemption, nor any future, only relief these mercenaries can do no more harm.

Gail Chumbley is the author of a two-part memoir, “River of January,” and “River of January: Figure Eight.” Chumbley had also completed to historic plays, “Clay,” regarding the life of Senator Henry Clay, and “Wolf By The Ears,” an examination of slavery and racism in America.

The Little Things

If you love . . .

Protecting a dim-witted, would-be dictator from legal consequences,

Suppressing a woman’s right to self-actuation and privacy,

Expediting white, unqualified patriarchs to the Supreme Court,

Rendering the US Senate inert,

Legislating so the wealthy have no tax burden,

The open targeting of Americans of color to brutality and murder,

The whole-sale destruction of the planet, and the rape of natural resources 

Abetting political misinformation and conspiracies through social media,

Targeting those of differing sexuality 

Pushing religion into American government,

Aligning apportionment and voter suppression to disenfranchise the poor, and people of color,

Withholding health care to the few with means,

The wholesale flood of firearms into civilian hands,

Cruelty dispensed upon desperate immigrants,

Coddling of white offenders over those of color,

Predatory treatment of consumers,

Blocking legislation to meet the dangers of the above list, and otherwise accomplishing nothing,

Vote for today’s Republican Party

Gail Chumbley, frustrated American History Educator.

The Long Haul

After the 1929 Market Crash the world fell into regional, nearly feudal isolation, and international trade quickly dried up. America, too, focused inward largely due to the nation’s earlier participation in the Great War in Europe.

Across the Pacific the Japanese Empire aimed to take advantage of global disinterest promoting its own national interests. Sold to other Asian countries as the “Co-prosperity Sphere,” hyper-nationalistic Japan intended to expand across the region, especially toward vulnerable, resource rich China.

Great Britain as well, struggled alone in a financial malaise, as did the French across the channel; both nations saddled with debt to American banks from the previous war. Germany, the defeated nation struggled with their own war debt demanded by the British and French.

The shroud of economic depression hung like a millstone over Europe and the rest of the world.

As the financial, and political fallout grew wildly unstable, regimes hunkered down and hoped for better times. However the climate instead became chaotic, bringing anti-democratic demagogues to power.

The Italians were first, producing a Fascist strongman, Benito Mussolini. El Duce, as he was known suppressed political diversity, harnessed economic efficiency, and soon, like the Japanese, pursued colonial inroads into Libya, and later the conquest of Ethiopia.

Germany soon flirted with its own style of fascism, with a meaner, violent credo. In a reaction to impossible debts, and national pride, Adolf Hitler, a feckless dreamer, stood on beer hall tables, and passionately spoke of national betrayal. Hitler revealed his malicious intentions by blaming Bolsheviks, Capitalists, and Jews for the hated Armistice of 1918, and war debt owed to the Allies.

Yet America, unlike the rest of the world, clung with all their might to the national system of Constitutional norms. At the same time Germany elected Hitler in 1932, the U.S. found their champion in Franklin Roosevelt. 

A popular Roosevelt Coalition steered the country through those hard years holding America together. FDR’s New Deal and Fireside Chats broadcasts kept at bay the fears of a nation. That’s not to say there weren’t kooks, to borrow Lindsay Graham’s phrase, but Americans faced the long haul together, believing better days had to be ahead.

The current President is no Franklin Roosevelt. And his autocratic tendencies, strongly echo those in the 1930’s.

In Project 2025 Trump aims to raise tariffs, shut down borders, all done to economically and politically isolate America. Using the same playbook of past despots specific groups are targeted as the problem. The guilty include immigrants, the LGBTQ community, liberals, educators, women, and the rule of law all in the crosshairs. All done to divert and distract while he lines his pockets.

And his tactics, so far have succeeded making half of the electorate real mean.

So, here is the question. Can America survive?

Can Americans remain bound to the framework of our 238 year old republic as it did in the Great Depression? Or will this nation forsake our financial, social, and political traditions and turn to petty retribution and scapegoating?

Will we, as a nation withdraw from the world and exchange our democracy for a strong man who insists he has all the answers?

The signs are clear. When this national crisis has passed will there be enough of us left who stood resolute for our democracy? That is the question of this historic moment. 

Gail Chumbley is a writer and history educator.

Why We Try

2017 Women’s March

When I first began this essay it ripened to nearly five hundred words to share one idea. Why I am a life-long Democrat. 

The original essay discussed the New Deal, the creation of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the GI Bill, and how strengthening Labor Unions evoked a sense of common purpose; how the economy boomed, and the middle class flourished.

Now all I want to impart is that Ronald Reagan was wrong. Big government is not the problem. Big government checked by regulations works remarkably well. 

I am a Democrat because with all its flaws, we stand equal in the eyes of Constitutional Law.* People made the Constitution, and we must preserve it. In general, States’ Rights is no more than a distraction perpetrated by selfish insiders who legislate their own interests. Residents are convinced through a wink and a nod, that the enemy (Big Government) must be defied, using catch phrases like “our values,” and “real conservative.”

In truth, the Federal Government can do more for all of us than any individual state, or any individual citizen can do for themselves. As I write, Idaho’s governor has asked for, and been granted federal funds for drought aid. Talk about biting the hand that feeds the State.

I am a Democrat because I’m inspired by the nobility of America’s past champions; the persistence of General George Washington, the compassion of Abraham Lincoln, the purpose of Alice Paul, and the articulate vision of Barack Obama. I am a Democrat because James Madison instructed us to create “A More Perfect Union.” Without that persistence, compassion, purpose, and vision America cannot continue as “the world’s last best hope,” as Lincoln also described us.

At bottom I am a Democrat because I know not one of us is perfect. We just keep trying. 

*Just heard the headline regarding the reversing of the Roe decision. Time to gather 4,600,00 of my best friends (2017 Women’s March) and organize.

First Teacher

Chief Joseph

The front door opened and promptly slammed. The timing was expected, as the kids were getting home from school. Trooping through the door didn’t seem unusual-but that slamming of the front door sounded emotional. In the hallway I encountered my little fourth grader, my girl, who wouldn’t catch my eye or respond to “how was your day.”  She stomped into her bedroom, pushing her door closed. And then the crying began.

I waited a moment, finally tapping and entering her room. She didn’t want to explain, didn’t want to talk to me at all. Concerned, I sat on her bed and rubbed her back while she sobbed. After a while my girl composed herself and began her story.

In Idaho schools Fourth Grade Social Studies covers state history. From memorizing all the names of counties, to mapping locations, to learning “Here We Have Idaho,” the state song; 9-years-olds learned it all. On that day the lesson covered Native American tribes in the state. 

The teacher read Chief Joseph’s “I Will Fight No More Forever,” speech, the one Joseph declared when his people, the Nez Perce, surrendered to the Army just short of the Canadian border. 

My little girl understood, perhaps for the first time, the power of compassion and of tragedy. Watching as her heart absorbed a tough, American injustice, my heart filled as well. This kid sensed something deep, an empathy that still alludes many. In that moment we shared a thoughtful, teachable chapter in American History.

I didn’t accost the principal, nor complain to the school board. To those who do, railing to  ban books, or challenge curriculum, remember that your children are watching. Honest concerns are one matter, but raising hell in public meetings frightens your grade schoolers, confuses your middle schoolers, and mortifies your high schoolers.

Besides, as a child’s first teacher, parents are demonstrating that raging and bullying in public is acceptable as a means to solve disagreements.

Leave schools alone, leave libraries alone. Get to know the teachers, volunteer in the classroom. You’ll find American schools do a tremendous job, much better than we could do ourselves. 

As for Chief Joseph, my daughter grew from that experience. Maybe parents should do likewise.

Gail Chumbley is the author of the two-part memoir, “River of January,” and “River of January: Figure Eight.” Chumbley has also written two plays, “Clay,” about the life of Henry Clay, and “Wolf By The Ears,” examining the beginnings of American slavery.

gailchumbley@gmail.com