Blog – Page 3 – Before We Were White

BWWW (Before We Were White) Answers MAGA Questions…

18 February 2025/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Detail from Mercator’s 1569 world map

Q. Hey, we’re the biggest greatest nation in the history of the world. We got coastal real estate all along The Gulf in Texas and Florida and some other states that I can’t remember right now. We have oil rigs all over the place out there. What the hell do the damn Mexicans have to do with our ocean?

A. Well, the “Gulf of America” wouldn’t be a bad name for the large body of water lying between North and South America, if it wasn’t for dipshits like yourself constantly using the term “America” to mean only “The United States of America” – which is of course just one country among 35 sovereign states in the Americas.

But let’s set that aside for now.

The indigenous peoples of the Gulf region have had their own names for this body of water for upwards of 14,000 years.

We all know that European conquerors and colonizers often gave their own names to the places they overran.

The earliest European to set eyes on the Gulf would have been Sebastián de Ocampo, when he sailed around the western end of Cuba in 1508.

The very earliest maps referred to the Gulf as “Seno Mejicano” or “Golfo de la Nueva España“. Those names are in Spanish, by the way.

By 1569, this sea was officially being referred to as the “Golfo Mexicano” on a map made by Geert Kremer, aka Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish mapmaker and geographer.

Go look up “Flemish” yourself. We haven’t got all day here.

If you can count, you will notice that the year 1569 was about 38 years before the founding of Jamestown, the first successful English colony in North America.

Which was nowhere near the Gulf, in case you’re wondering.

The placename “Gulf of Mexico” precedes the founding of The United States of America by 207 years.

Furthermore, the USA did not even control ANY land on the Gulf of Mexico until after the Louisiana “Purchase” of 1803 – a full 238 years AFTER it had first been called “The Gulf of Mexico”.

The United States’ length of coastline along the Gulf exceeds Mexico’s by about a third, but this situation was of course helped by the US war of aggression and annexation waged against Mexico during the 1840s.

Hope this helps.

The Red Curtain Falls

19 January 2025/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

David Lynch

When film director David Lynch was creating his first great works back in the 70s and 80s, it seems fairly unlikely that he envisaged an America sliding into full-blown authoritarianism or fascism in what would be his latter years.

One could argue that there exists the art of emotion, and the art of ideas. There are very, very few artists who seem to operate inside and outside of both categories.

Many if not most humans seem to prefer art, music, film which takes them by the hand and leads them on a journey with clear waymarkers, with their patient guide periodically pointing to the things they should notice.

Some artists, like David Lynch or the late author Cormac McCarthy, refused to take the reader or viewer’s hand, choosing instead to assemble an entire world out of vignettes – often horrifying – and leaving us as witnesses to navigate the meaning of it all.

One thing which seems clear (to this writer at least) is that both Lynch and McCarthy were mesmerized and possibly traumatized by a darkness at the heart of American society, in which The Truth is never spoken.

David Lynch in particular appeared to be obsessed with the dissonance between the popularly agreed perception of American society and the actual realities lurking just behind the curtains…

All of this is visible in what is arguably his masterpiece, “Blue Velvet”, in which the American myth of itself is scraped back with a metaphorical razor until reality lies exposed and bleeding.

As someone far less oblique and artistic than David Lynch, this writer is happy to blurt it right out:

The pomp which will surround the “return of a great America” tomorrow – desired largely by a very “un-great” people – is exactly the sickly-sweet ersatz shopping mall confection which caused artists like Lynch to scream and spew into the unredeeming void…

Lynch was no product of the “coastal elites” so despised by MAGA types. He was born in Montana just after WWII, the descendant of Irish and Scandinavian immigrants.

It would be his travels to both coasts of America which opened his eyes to the stark contradictions between the conjured “fluffiness” of small-town America and the lives of not-so-quiet desperation being acted-out on the streets of cities like Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Lynch did not look to the privileged classes when seeking long-term collaborators.

The people in his close circle were artists like Dennis Hopper and Sissy Spacek, heartland Americans willing to show up when he needed help – including financial help.

*****

Probably his most long-term collaborator – maybe even a “muse” if that word is appropriate – was Jack Nance.

Jack Nance played the lead in Lynch’s first feature length film – the surreal and profoundly disturbing “Eraserhead” from 1977. Nance would later show up in everything from “Blue Velvet” to “Twin Peaks”.

The year “Eraserhead” came out was also the year Elvis died, and there is no figure in American history who more embodies the Lynchian red curtain between glitzy stardom and backstage human reality than Elvis Aron Presley.

Jack Nance came from a similarly complicated background to Elvis, although falling on opposite sides of the tracks by a trick of birth.

Jack Nance with grandmother Maude

Both men had mixed-ethnic ancestors in their family trees including “free people of color” – and in Nance’s case, his ancestors included both slaveholders AND “free people of color”.

Having “free people of color” actually inside a slaveholding household in a census from the 1800s was often a sign of the “Pater familias” taking sexual liberties with his “property”.

And that’s a charitable way of describing such ugliness…

In America, two people might have common ancestors, but how the cards fall down the generations in terms of happiness, normality, and economic security is often very, very different.

The much-vaunted promise of America was dependent on whether the mixed offspring of slaveholders and their consorts were accepted by their fathers and later able to “pass as white” – the less usual scenario.

More common was a situation in which mixed-ethnic children arrived into the world just a shade too dark-complected, meaning they were rejected, shunned, or even exiled or sold by their “white” family.

Whether a particular family line was seen as “colored”, “passed as white”, or worked slowly towards “passing”, the internalized shame and self-loathing became a part of America’s fabric among both the descendants of the enslaved, and the descendants of slaveholders. It is a transgenerational poison in the bloodstream of American culture.

It is difficult to know if Jack Nance was descended from the “mulatto” children of his prosperous slaveholding forefathers such as the van Dorn family. His Heathcock ancestors were certainly free people of color.

But a couple of things ARE certain. Jack Nance was a troubled man, and Jack Nance was a hardcore alcoholic. You know something has gone terribly wrong when even Dennis Hopper decides to bring you to rehab.

With a failed marriage behind him, Jack Nance managed to get dry eventually, but I guess “America” kept getting in the way.

Jack Nance and Kyle McLaughlin in Blue Velvet

He ended-up married again, this time to a porn actress named Nancee Kelly – whose real name was Kelly Jean Van Dyke – niece of that symbol of American show-biz razzmatazz and smiling good cheer, Dick Van Dyke.

In one of the most absurdly depressing stories ever, Jack Nance phoned Kelly Jean while filming a low-rent B-movie in California to say that he would break off their relationship if she continued drinking.

He tried to hang up, but Van Dyke threatened to kill herself if he did. Apparently the phone lines went down due to a passing lightning storm.

Van Dyke was found hanging, dead, shortly after.

Jack Nance went back to the bottle, and died in mysterious circumstances five years later.

*****

David Lynch set the film “Blue Velvet” in Lumberton, North Carolina – which oddly enough, is home to the largest mixed-ethnic community in the eastern USA – the Lumbee Indians of Robeson County, one of the original American communities comprised mainly of “free people of color”.

Filming actually took place in Wilmington, North Carolina, not Lumberton. Which is in some ways even more odd, as Wilmington is the picturesque and centuries-old seaport town where in 1898, white supremacist paramilitary terrorists known as “Redshirts” staged one of the most outrageous insurrections in US history.

Post-Civil War, Wilmington was one of the few bright spots for Black Americans south of the Mason-Dixon line. Through ambition and industry, African-Americans had created a thriving local economy which included the first wholly Black-owned newspaper. Elected offices were held by both “white” and Black citizens, with the latter forming a majority of the city’s population.

Southern Democrats (who were the more racist of the two mainstream political parties back then) led a 1500-strong “white” militia against the legally elected aldermen of Wilmington, murdering dozens and installing their own gang in local offices. Wilmington’s Black population never recovered following the mass exodus in the face of racist violence and new laws created specifically to disenfranchise Black voters.

I have no idea whether the darkness behind the modern gentrified and mostly “white” Wilmington, NC played any role in David Lynch‘s decision to film a tale of the violence and lies lurking just beneath the surface of white picket fence American gentility.

It doesn’t really matter. Lynch saw the weirdness at the dark and violent heart of American culture, and refused to flinch.

David Lynch never gave up on the damaged souls skirting the shadowy margins of Americana, either.

I wrote something years ago, and have found no reason to amend my thoughts:

If it weren’t for his great good fortune in being born to a wealthy, racist property developer, the man being sworn into office tomorrow has the character of a slimy traveling salesman propping up the bar after midnight in a cheap-ass Vegas motel.

The kind who keeps trying to get the woman at the table nearby to notice his fake Rolex. The kind who tells racist and misogynist jokes to the bartender in a loud voice. The guy well past his prime hitting on girls half his age, not noticing their nausea at seeing his fat, translucent, gouty feet spilling out of cheap and near-to-bursting loafers.

A villainous side character in a David Lynch film is president of the USA tomorrow.

And we get no astonishingly brilliant soundtrack to compensate…

RIP David Keith Lynch [1946-2025]

Greenland, Panama, and Orwell

11 January 2025/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Political map of the future as per George Orwell

Update to readers:

I have been keeping new podcast episodes on the backburner since the run-up to the November election.

I felt at the time that carrying-on as if everything was “normal” was just somehow frivolous and…wrong.

So for the last three months of 2024 I focussed on political posts, blogs, and essays, hoping to exert a tiny bit of positive influence from my battered old keyboard up the back of a mountain.

Unfortunately, over 75 million Americans preferred to give their vote to someone who embodies the very worst in us.

We are two weeks out from the inauguration of a man who I believe is an authoritarian at best, and an outright fascist at worst.

He is speaking of internment camps. He is speaking of the annexation of sovereign states and territories.

His campaign was funded by a multi-billionaire – an avowed technocrat – who is now interfering in European politics by supplying oxygen to the far right.

These people want to burn the whole thing down, so they can rise from the ashes as “strongmen” able to “bring order”.

Pre-election, I published and shared the information I had gathered over many years regarding the plastic identity of fake “hillbilly” J. D. Vance and his technocratic groomers.

There are no more alarm bells left to ring.

I will return to publishing podcasts this week, mainly out of respect to the Patrons who have put their money where their mouth is, and decided that independent researchers, historians, and journalists are our only hope for the foreseeable future.

Thanks are not enough, but thanks.

I cannot recommend strongly enough that every believer in democracy begin making themselves fascism-resilient:

1) In terms of continued access to evidence-based journalism and education.

2) In terms of protecting their privacy, digital footprint and general internet access for community building and community preservation.

And I hope for the love of all that’s good and decent in this world, that everyone can have a good hearty laugh at my expense in four years time, as they recall my foolish and paranoid scaremongering.

Hello 2025…Get Ready to Rumble

5 January 2025/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

A candle among hundreds

I am not given to conspiracy theories.

It is my considered opinion – as a thinking 60-year-old who unashamedly claims to be reasonably well-read and well-informed – that the current spread of right wing extremist politics in North and South America, in Europe, and elsewhere, is no organic “grassroots” development.

This is being coordinated by authoritarians, billionaires, and technocrats through the organs of the mass media – which are of course owned and controlled by these people, by and large.

This is a cross-border, internationalist project.

Some will quite rightfully argue that the ever-rising cost of living – housing, food, fuel – has stoked a widespread dissatisfaction with our current institutions. This is true.

The mass movement of refugees from zones of famine, poverty, gang violence, political/religious persecution, and war (mostly in the global south) to wealthier or more stable countries (mostly in the global north) is bringing with it a sense of social and cultural flux which angers conservative – and many centrist – voters. This anger is found mostly among the underclasses who bear the brunt of large scale unskilled immigration.

This anger is being tapped-into by various opportunists only too happy to use populist rhetoric and fascist-adjacent language to stir up further “right wing” sentiment.

All of this has already been written about and published in innumerable places.

So what’s the point in repeating what many people already know?

The point is, people on both the Left and Right have allowed themselved to be divided into camps and set against one another in an endless series of carefully crafted culture and identity wars.

Why?

In order to distract the underclasses from their common foe – the ultra-wealthy, and their worldwide push for complete authoritarian, technocratic, and corporatocratic control of governmental systems.

Traditional nation state borders have become irrelevant.

But those who currently hold shocking amounts of wealth and control over basic resources – everywhere – have come to see a serious danger to their position.

So they are now in the “shoring-up the defences” phase.

*****

Consider the following social issues, and how they are framed by a corporate media, within a corporatocratic paradigm:

The REAL cause behind the cost of living crisis – corporate greed – is NEVER framed and elucidated honestly by any mainstream political candidates.

The REAL cause behind the climate emergency – corporate greed – is ignored, while blame is shifted onto consumer habits alone.

The REAL causes of war and poverty – which are driving immigration – are likewise never discussed by any mainstream political candidates.

When was the last time you heard a USA or European politician say “Our colonialist policies over the centuries have left a legacy of conflict and dysfunction in the Middle East and elsewhere. If we want to stop immigration from the Middle East and Latin America, we must get our corporatocracy to share their ill-gotten gains until we raise the living standards of people everywhere. We must stop getting rich supplying arms to conflict zones – especially the ones we created ourselves. Only then will the mass migration of refugees stop”.

Most politicians are beholden to the corporatocracy, so of course we will never hear such unvarnished truths.

With real power being held by media barons, technocrats, and the wider corporatocracy, they are the ones who get to frame the terms of political discourse and the daily news agenda.

Not the politicians, and certainly not us.

The corporate media and mega-wealthy invite us to argue stupidly and endlessly about SYMPTOMS instead of CAUSES.

Example “news item”:

Everyone is “said” to be up in arms about crime, drug gangs, and drug use.

And often, this in itself is true.

But the corporate media invites us to argue about welfare and unemployment among drug users.

The corporate media invites us to argue about a general decline in “morals” and “work ethic”.

The corporate media invites us to look at the color, religion, or immigration status of those involved in crime or drug use.

What politicians and the corporate media will never do, is discuss the shallowness and hopelessness of a society designed for Big Business and consumerism, which leaves many turning to drugs in despair.

And we are of course sometimes even allowed to turn to drugs, as long as those drugs are controlled, sold, and distributed by the corporatocracy.

Opioids, anyone?

So why are the ultra-wealthy and their political minions now “shoring-up the defences” with a coordinated push toward authoritarianism?

Because addressing the climate emergency and world overpopulation properly would require nothing less than the wholesale dismantling of current forms of multi-national capitalism.

(And yes, the world is overpopulated. Could we feed everyone with equitable wealth distribution? Sure. But just because we could feed everyone doesn’t change the fact that there are too many of us.)

At any rate, equitable distribution of wealth will not be allowed to happen…

And the consequences of refusing to address this climate emergency will include famine, mass migration, and social unrest on a scale never seen in historical times.

For the ultra-wealthy to survive this turmoil and widespread civil unrest – with their fortunes intact – requires a brutal, forced lurch away from democracy.

*****

A free media is the very heartbeat of a free society.

Over the past few of years, we have seen ceaseless attacks on the free media.

A cheerleader for authoritarianism has already taken over one major social media platform, and spent millions to get “his man” elected.

The owner of The Washington Post (the paper of Woodward and Bernstein!) no longer allows the paper to take editorial positions which might annoy the incoming government.

In an act of pre-obeisiance, Disney (the owners of ABC), have recently directed the company to settle out of court a case taken against it by DJT.

The head of Facebook has already donated $1 million to the inauguration day “celebrations” coming-up in a couple of weeks.

The latest terms and conditions of use, and the advice to “content creators” on that platform, make clear that “political posts” are discouraged, and will be downranked by the magic invisible algorithms controlling public discourse.

In an atmosphere of zero transparency, writers seeking an audience are left second-guessing which formulation of words will find favor.

Not favor with their readers, mind you, but with an unknowable, inscrutable AI system, programmed to optimize addictive engagement.

It is already patently clear that Facebook is awash with AI-generated “content”, full of factoids and phrases scraped (stolen) from the wider internet and the scribblings of real-life writers.

This “content” has also been scraped clean of emotion and human motive, bleached of complaint or social conscience.

Actual humans – writers, poets, activists – are “guided” toward becoming low-paid producers of anodyne “content”.

“IF YOU WANT AN AUDIENCE, DO IT THIS WAY.”

You may speak of “love”, “peace”, and “social justice”, but under no circumstances will you be allowed to point to the corrupt human obstacles and institutions standing in the way of achieving those things.

*****

This writer has spent years trying building an online readership honestly. Every person who ever followed me on social media (other than trolls), found me via word of mouth or recommendation from other kind and generous booster souls elsewhere in the ether (or miasma) of the internet.

Facebook in particular, however, has a very simple and effective mechanism for shutting-down unwelcome shit-stirrers like myself.

After a person “likes” or “follows” a page, they should expect to see more from that page, right?

Wrong.

“The Platform” has three almost hidden settings behind the “liked” or “following” button – “unfollow”, “default”, and “favorite”.

It has become apparent that if a writer or content producer is “too political”, the settings on their READERS’ PAGES are toggled to “default”, rather than “favorite”.

The “default” setting means a writer’s posts are then distributed according to the platform’s internal, secret ranking system.

Most people never notice this “off-toggling”, and presume the person they once followed has simply quit posting articles.

“X” and Facebook are no longer “social media”.

On “X” and Facebook, users are now the equivalent of unfortunate French geese being force-fed grain so the ultra-wealthy can have their foie gras.

I’ll say it again. I am not given to conspiracy theories. But I’m not ready to be someone’s liver paté, either.

Maybe the standard of my writing has fallen off a cliff, and people are ignoring me in droves on Facebook.

Or maybe people who write about the things I do are being quietly ushered from the foyer there?

I’d like to believe that every one of the 7K-strong “legacy” followers of my Facebook page followed it because they had read something which informed, entertained, or touched an emotional chord.

But I cannot know for certain, because my writing there is being slowly “disappeared”.

We are entering challenging times. I fear they will be more challenging than most people imagine.

We must “gird our loins for battle”, to borrow a phrase from my long-abandoned evangelical upbringing.

I’m signing aboard the good ship Substack, with my website as a lifeboat just in case…

Feast Your Eyes on the Sound

30 December 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Panoram “Soundie” with Anita O’ Day on screen

Most people under the age of 60 might presume that the age of the music video arrived with the launch of MTV in the summer of 1981.

Not true.

Between 1940 and 1946, jukeboxes called “Panorams” became a common feature in bars, nightclubs, and restaurants in larger American towns and cities.

A “Panoram” jukebox used rear projection to show short 16mm films of music performers lip-syncing to a separate audio recording.

Films were pre-loaded and played in rotation order, so any viewer who parted with their hard-earned dime could only hope that the next film in line was worth the money.

Because “Soundies” were not covered under film censorship laws, some bars and nightclubs included short burlesque reels among the numbers on rotation – a surefire way to get soldiers on leave during WWII to take a chance and part with more coins.

Post-war prosperity saw an increase in TV ownership, and a host of new musical variety shows (like The Ed Sullivan Show) soon put paid to the brief heyday of the “Soundie”.

*****

Here is one such “Soundie” from 1942, featuring legendary jazz drummer Gene Krupa‘s band, with the astonishing, amazing Roy Eldridge on trumpet, and the criminally neglected and hyper-charismatic Anita O’ Day on vocals.

Nothing, but nothing, represents the hope and promise of the “best possible America” like jazz music.

It is a gross over-simplification, but for people new to the genre, it will work to say that jazz sprang from a sort of trinity of traditions:

First and foremost, from Black and mixed-ethnic “Creole” New Orleans music.

Second, from the popularity of military bands and marching music from the late 19th and early 20th century.

Thirdly, from an eclectic admixture of southern blues, Kansas City and Chicago blues, ragtime, boogie-woogie, Carolina Piedmont music, and Southern Appalachian old-time or “proto-country” music.

In this age of heated identity politics, it is difficult to explain any complex cultural phenomenon without someone shouting “cultural appropriation”.

It is even more difficult to explain that while every single American musical form has African-American musicians and traditions contained within its roots, we should not describe any American musical genre as “belonging” to one color of people. Music belongs to anyone who loves it or shares it.

Gene Krupa was the son of Polish immigrants from New York, who learned drums from a German/Dutch descendant of men who played the snare drum as a military instrument.

Roy Eldridge was the African-American prodigy son of a wagon teamster and a piano-playing mother from Pittsburgh.

Anita O’ Day – who took her stage surname from the Pig Latin for “dough” – can be found on a Wikipedia page described as the daughter of Irish immigrants. Except that whoever wrote her Wikipedia bio is wrong. Anita O’ Day was born Anita Belle Colton in Kansas City, Missouri (or Chicago) to parents known to this blog as “Old Mix Americans” – people of often indeterminate or mixed-ethnic ancestry from pre-Revolutionary War Virginia, North Carolina, and Southern Appalachia in general. She left home at 14 because of “her father”. Good grief.

A long article could be written about the travails of each of these people.

Racism. Sexual abuse. Being blacklisted in some quarters for allowing a “white girl” to dance with a Black man. Alcohol and heroin addiction. Hard time just for smoking a “jazz cigarette”.

The underclasses often do what they do simply to survive living inside their own headspace in a harsh, hard world.

“Judge not lest ye be judged…”

Amid the insanity of a world at war, these Americans chose the joy of music over hatred and prejudice.

Play it loud for New Year 2025. We need a joyful soundtrack to survive what’s coming.

Ahab on a Surfboard

17 December 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Fishermen of Siasconset

By the 1790s, the institution of slavery had ended in Massachusetts, and whaling towns like Nantucket had sizable mixed-ethnic populations.

Free African-Americans intermingled with sailors from ports around the world.

Yankee ships returning from the Pacific around the treacherous Cape Horn brought back crewmen from what Europeans had called the Sandwich Islands – now more properly known as Hawai’i.

By the 1820s, Hawai’ians and other Pacific Islanders were a common sight on Nantucket Island.

By 1850, around 1 in 10 crewmen of the hundreds sailing out of Nantucket were Polynesians (known locally as “Canacks”), with some putting-down roots and marrying into the local community.

This state of affairs was immortalized in 1851 in the first truly great American novel, “Moby Dick“, in which the protagonist Ishmael signs aboard a whaling ship called the Pequod, and becomes an unlikely friend of the heavily tattooed Polynesian harpooner Queequeg.

One such real life Hawai’ian, William Owen (obviously not his birth name), helped to found a men’s social club in 1887, and a journalist from New York reported that one of Owens’ fellow club members, George W. Rogers, was already making surfboards to order by that time.

As the reporter wrote: “…Bathers rest on them either on their breasts or backs, throw them aside and take to them again, ride with them over the wave crests, sit astride of them and indulge in various antics in sporting in the water”.

The first Hawai’ian workers recorded in California only show up there in the late 1830s, years after the first Polynesians arrived in Massachusetts.

The first reliable mention of surfing in California is from an 1885 report of three Hawai’ian “princes” catching some waves there.

All of these early Polynesians in North America presented a challenge to staunch upholders of America’s absurd binary racial caste system.

As a dark-skinned people sharing some phenotypal features with sub-Saharan Africans, yet obviously coming from a place as far from Africa as it is possible to be on this planet, census enumerators seemed uncertain about where to place these people within America’s “racial” hierarchy.

Pacific Islanders were variously recorded as “white”, “black”, and “mulatto”.

Whatever about irrelevant questions of skin color and “race”, one thing seems certain.

It is entirely plausible that Massachusetts, not California, is the earliest home of surf culture outside of Hawai’i.

“Remorse”

11 December 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Photos: Grayson County, VA; a Black soldier in Vietnam; scene from “Full Metal Jacket”; McNamara with JFK and the ruthless dictator of Iran installed by UK and US intelligence in the 1950s

Private Pyle, the troubled character who goes off the deep end in Stanley Kubrick‘s Vietnam War film “Full Metal Jacket“, was based on some now largely forgotten US policy decisions from the turbulent 1960s.

Those who have seen the film will recall that Private Pyle was both emotionally disturbed and overweight – conditions which would have usually rendered him ineligible for service or the military draft.

By the late 1960s, anti-war sentiment was coming to a boil, especially among US college students and Black Rights activists.

The US administration under LBJ was ramping-up US military involvement in Southeast Asia – and Secretary of Defence Robert S. McNamara was the primary architect of the way in which US participation in and escalation of the war in Vietnam would unfold.

In 1966, the USA military-industrial complex needed more bodies, and quickly. Up to that point, young men studying at college had been able to defer being drafted into military service.

This meant of course that the burden of military duty fell on the poor and working classes who, for various reasons (mostly financial) were unable to attend college.

Needless to say, in the America of 1966, the percentage of the Black population able to attend college was tiny, compared to “white” America.

Afraid of inflaming anti-war feeling among educated “white” voters by bringing the draft numbers of <mostly white> college students and reservists forward, Robert S. McNamara came up with possibly the most blatantly classist, elitist, and racist policy in recent American history.

“Project 100,000” would attempt to get bodies on the ground in Vietnam by drastically lowering the standards and criteria for military service.

Under- or overweight? Come on in!

Little or no educational attainment? No problem!

“Minor” mental or medical issues? Can’t really be all that bad!

Sub-average scores on standardized intelligence or aptitude tests, or below average literacy or math scores? Hey, we’ll find a place for you!

In the politically incorrect language of the time, these recruits and draftees were often referred-to as “McNamara’s Morons“.

For a man who had championed the Civil Rights Act, Project 100,000 ranks as as one of Lyndon Johnson‘s moral nadirs.

The “project” was obviously a licence to turn America’s most marginalized and vulnerable groups of men into cannon fodder.

Even more disgusting was the cheap marketing job which attempted to characterize this scheme as part of Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, hard-selling “The Project” as an “opportunity” for unskilled and under-educated Black and poor Appalachian and rural southern “white” communities to advance their knowledge, skills, and education.

*****

The numbers tell their own story.

Perhaps 350,000 young men went to Vietnam under this scheme.

About 25% of “normal” non-project Vietnam recruits and draftees might expect to be assigned to combat roles.

With “McNamara’s Morons“, the numbers placed into combat roles rose to around 40%.

IT GETS WORSE.

About 12% of “normal” non-project Vietnam recruits and draftees were Black.

With “Project 100,000”, this number rose to around 41%.

IT GETS EVEN WORSE.

Among “Project 100,000” recruits and draftees, the death rate in combat was THREE TIMES HIGHER than among “normal” soldiers.

“Project 100,000” recruits and draftees were also far more likely to suffer PTSD, marriage breakdown, substance abuse, and post-war unemployment than mainstream recruits and draftees.

Add to all of this the fact that before 1970, African-Americans were virtually absent from the draft boards deciding who would be sent to fight overseas.

Some state draft boards (like that in Louisiana) even included high-ranking KKK members!

And does anyone really believe that middle class and elite “white” America could be relied upon to measure Black or “Hillbilly” aptitude or intelligence honestly and dispassionately in the first place?

*****

The “Before We Were White” bit…

Robert Strange McNamara.

While his father’s family came directly out of County Cork in Ireland, his mother’s family was profoundly “Old Mix American”.

Colonial America and the early USA (particularly those places which lay in a sort of Southern Appalachian no man’s land before, during, and just after the Revolutionary War era), were home to innumerable enclaves of families and communities who never quite fit into the “white” Anglo-Saxon Protestant or often imaginary “Scots-Irish” story of the American frontier.

Displaced indigenous peoples, outlaws and renegades, Tories/Loyalists, sundry free people of color from the four corners of the world – all were present in places like Western Virginia and the Carolinas, or Eastern Tennessee and Kentucky.

Robert S. McNamara should have thanked his maternal ancestors from Grayson County, VA (an Old Mix hotspot) for their judicious decision-making when selecting marriage partners over the generations.

Many of the Phipps “people of color” in McNamara’s family tree eventually crossed over into “whiteness”.

By eventually being able to “present as white”, Mr. McNamara’s family was able to access educational and employment opportunities far exceeding those available to most Black Americans and mixed-ethnic mountain people.

In Robert’s case, his education included attending the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Business School – in short, the full works…

During WWII, McNamara put his grasp of business analytics and statistics to use in the Air Force, working under General Curtis Lemay to maximize the efficiency of US B-29 bomber raids.

One such fire bombing raid over Japan in early 1945 resulted in the burning alive of over 100,000 civilians.

McNamara was later quoted recollecting these bombing campaigns:

“Lemay said, `If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.’ And I think he’s right. He – and I’d say I – WERE behaving as war criminals.”

McNamara then asked the interviewer “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”

Robert Strange McNamara. Whiz-kid and statistician who, post-WWII, helped Ford Motor Company make endless millions.

Later asked to join John F. Kennedy‘s cabinet as Secretary of Defence, he soon became the orchestrator of the USA’s inexorable military build-up in Vietnam, treating bloody warfare and napalm death with the same phlegmatic pragmatism as he once treated automotive assembly line restructuring.

The line between America’s bellicose “pragmatism” shown against Asians/Latin Americans/the Middle East, and a certain Austro-German leader’s Final Solution, is not as clear as we would like to think…

But it is worth saying again. In being able to “present as white” and gain access to an elite education, men like Robert McNamara were able to spend the Vietnam War behind a desk holding discussions with John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson – instead of being subject to and victim of his own classist and racist military draft policies.

No need to even pay-off a doctor for a diagnosis of bone spurs…

McNamara died in 2009, having reached the decent old age of 93.

Only very late in life did McNamara claim to feel some remorse for many of the decisions he took during the Vietnam War era.

Did he even know that some of his own ancestry was Black, or was this family knowledge long ago burned on the usual American pyre of lies, myth, and forgetting?

If Robert S. McNamara HAD known of his own Black and Old Mix Appalachian ancestry and history, would it have changed his willingness to sacrifice these people on the altar of efficiency and expendability?

Who knows?

But the transgenerational pain and suffering of underclass Americans and Vietnamese caused by those privileged to sit at the chess board of “white empire” requires a good bit more than “remorse” and a whimpering cry for absolution late in life…

*****

In late 2024, we are wandering ill-clothed into a propaganda blizzard the likes of which have never been seen in a supposedly “free” democracy.

The president-elect speaks openly of people with “superior genes”. His funders and cronies are fans of “race science” – a shocking new re-emergence of race eugenics which claims there is no point in funding social programs to give our underclasses a fighting chance, because any lack of attainment is due to “lower base intelligence”. Such humans are deemed fit only for wage slavery or cannon fodder.

Yet so many people of high educational attainment, people who have reached positions of privilege and power – people like Robert S. McNamara, whiz-kid, Harvard grad, and statistician – are the descendants of precisely those people seen by eugenicists as “low IQ population groups”.

Blacks. Irish. “White trash”.

Proof, as if any should be needed, that educational attainment and a place at the levers of power are related to luck, socio-economic conditions, and access to opportunities – as well as naked ambition.

Mixed Music for a Mixed People, or, Why Elvis Was Not a Cultural Appropriator

5 December 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

The Maddox Family [left] and Wanda Jackson [right]

Genealogists use documents, oral histories (and latterly DNA) to trace family lines backward in time.

Tracing the origins of musical styles and genres is a lot more complicated.

Sound recording is only just over a century old.

This means if we want to know what music in a certain place, among a certain community, sounded like before the 1900s, we have to rely on educated guesswork.

Musicologists are pretty good at mapping the evolution of musical forms when historical printed lyrics or musical notation exists.

For example, an old Appalachian ballad such as “The Hangman’s Tree” can be traced back to the British Isles (and elsewhere in Europe) by comparing its similarities to ballads known from as early as the 1600s such as “The Maid Freed from the Gallows“.

An elderly slaveholding women named Elizabeth Shepherd [nee Yerby], born in 1778, had her throat slit by an enslaved girl named Pheriba in Alabama in 1848. Unusually for the time, the enslaved girl was not immediately hanged, but languished in jail for two years before “justice” ran its course, and she was taken to a large oak tree near the county courthouse for her public execution.

Hundreds travelled from far and wide to witness the spectacle, dressed in their Sunday best and laying-out their picnic blankets while peddlars and musicians worked the crowd.

It is said that people sang “The Hangman’s Tree” while a fiddler played, until a preacher stepped up to offer a final prayer and sermon.

The awful deed was then done.

“The Hangman’s Tree” ballad lived on in various forms, being eventually recorded under other names such as “The Gallows Pole” by artists from Odetta to Led Zeppelin.

*****

People born after the 1960s have a hard time imagining a social, cultural and political world overtly segregated <in law> by skin color.

And in terms of music – in a modern world where blues, rock, soul, jazz, and rap music have completely crossed “racial” and class lines – it is also easy to forget just how dangerous and alien these musical forms once seemed to white, “respectable” America.

In the 1930s and 1940s, “respectable” white folks in cities and towns mostly listened to popular music or crooners.

The less conservative among them listened to big band music, which sneaked its Black origins in through the back door (often quite literally).

In rural areas, there was still no such thing as “country music” per se – that name would only be coined by record companies a little later.

Rural white folks who “didn’t mix” tended to listen to ballads, “old-timey” or gospel music.

Anything which included drums or a heavy beat was not considered “white music”. Or to put it even more bluntly, the sound of drums and a rocking beat was The Devil’s Music.

Drums made folks want to dance in a way nothing like the formal square-dancing of country tents and barns.

Drums were for loose, lascivious people.

These color lines within music were consciously enforced – in the first instance, by the newly emerging commercial recording industry.

On one side, Bob Wills‘ western swing and hillbilly, on the other side, the jump blues of Junior Parker and the boogie-woogie of Meade Lux Lewis.

And things might have remained so, except for one pesky fact which has remained true throughout the centuries.

Poor and marginalized people have always had more in common with each other than with the people who keep them down.

This is why musical color divisions created by the privileged were never observed or respected by the people who got called “poor white trash” by ignorant outsiders.

And there is more…

*****

Only a certain class of so-called “white trash” was comfortable planting a foot firmly on both sides of this fence.

People with no high social reputation to protect, people who weren’t even “fully white” to begin with.

Enter the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia and other similar or related mixed-ethnic groups.

In almost every instance where later social commentators have pointed a finger, accusing “white folks” of appropriating “Black music” during the mid-20th century, we find a far more complex and nuanced situation, in which poor mixed-ethnic people “presenting as white” WERE MERELY PARTICIPATING IN THE MUSIC THEY ALREADY SHARED WITH THE BLACK COMMUNITY.

One of the earliest points where musical segregation was non-existent between the poor Black and White communities was in the genre called “the blues”.

Two or three decades later, poor Black and White (OR MIXED) communities were at it again – this time with new and exciting genres like rhythm & blues and rockabilly.

Of course, the people who first played it didn’t call it “rockabilly”.

From the 1930s to the 1950s, anything faintly reminiscent of “hillbilly” was seen as a slur.

“Hillbillies”, or people with complicated ethnic roots, just called it “good-time music”.

Only bigots and racists from outside these marginalized communities tried to police a line between “Black” and “White” music.

This cross-ethnic, cross-fertilization reached perhaps its ultimate station in commercial terms with the early Sun Records Memphis recordings of Elvis Presley.

In 2024, it is easy to forget that Elvis Presley‘s recording of “That’s Alright, Mama” was banned outright from airplay on “white” radio stations, for being “n***** music“.

BUT ELVIS WAS NOT CONSCIOUSLY SINGING “BLACK MUSIC”. HE WAS SIMPLY SINGING THE MUSIC WHICH SURROUNDED HIM GROWING-UP DIRT POOR IN RURAL MISSISSIPPI.

Anyone doubting this should read some old interviews with B. B. King, who was always quick to defend Presley against accusations of cultural appropriation.

Many early record companies treated Black musical contemporaries of Elvis disgracefully, that is certain.

But how Presley was marketed by record companies (and his grifter of a manager) is another argument altogether, separate from his own love of the music he grew up with.

Trace a line from the Maddox Brothers and Rose in the 1930s. Folks from northern Alabama who slept on the ground as they made their way to the fruit-picking valleys of California via Oklahoma. Singing songs about scantily-clad women named Sally who let their bangs hang down low enough to protect their modesty.

On until the 1950s, with music from Carl Perkins, Lorrie Collins and The Collins Kids, Jerry Lee Lewis, Patsy Cline, Johnny Cash, and the singular talent of Wanda Jackson.

A short blog offers insufficient space to give a genealogical breakdown of every “white” person involved in the genesis of R & B, rockabilly, and rock & roll.

But as one of my favorite writers on music and culture, Ted Gioia, constantly points out, if you want to understand the history of musical innovation, you have to look to the margins of society.

It is no coincidence that some of the most innovative and durable music in American history came out of places like New Orleans and Southern Appalachia – places where the marginalized of all colors made music together.

New Amsterdam and the Melungeons of Appalachia

3 December 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Juan Rodriguez trading with Lenape people

In 1613, the settlers at Jamestown were finally putting the “starving time” of 1609 behind them.

A new settlement was being built at Charles City, and the first tobacco crop was going into the ground.

Emboldened to confront the Powhatan head-on, they had contrived to kidnap a native girl named Matoaka or “Pocahontas” to use as leverage in what they termed “negotiations” with local indigenous communities.

Three days’ sailing to the north, another enterprising young man was setting-up his own trading post on the island later lnown as Manhattan. Although this area had been scouted for the past three or four years by Dutch expeditions, no one had actually yet attempted to plant boots on the ground.

This small trading post would later become a favoured supply stop for early pirates and sea dogs, known by 1624 as “New Amsterdam” – the town which would pass into English hands in 1664, before being re-christened “New York”.

But in 1613, this one man with his Lenape friends and family was content to trap for beaver. Beaver skins and glands fetched an exorbitant price in Europe at the time, the pelts being made into waterproof hats, the glands being used in the perfume industry.

Although this man traded on behalf of the Dutch, and the later Dutch West India Company, he was no Dutchman himself.

This man was Juan Rodriguez of Santo Domingo, the oldest city in what we now call the Dominican Republic. At that time, the population of Santo Domingo was at least 10% Portuguese, and Juan Rodriguez was born to an African mother by a Portuguese – possibly Portuguese Jewish or Romani – father.

This largely forgotten character was the first non-Native American inhabitant of what is now New York.

Some reports suggest that he lived until at least 1640, but beyond this, he and his mixed-ethnic family’s later exploits are lost to the fog of history…

But.

By the mid-1600s, we find “free people of color” named “Driggers” living in Virginia – “Driggers” being widely thought to be an Anglicized version of “Rodriguez”.

Of course, “Rodriguez” and “Rodrigues” are not rare surnames among the Portuguese and Spanish.

But it is surely tempting to wonder what happened to the children of a man willing and able to sail over 1,500 miles from the Caribbean to New York, a man valuable to traders far and wide for his fluency in the language of the Lenape. A man unafraid of the wilderness. A man only 300 miles, or 3 days sailing, from Virginia.

Whether connected to the founder of New Amsterdam or not, descendants of “Driggers” people from the 1600s can be be found in the southeastern USA in places like the Carolinas, Florida, and Georgia, while others intermarried with Melungeon families such as the Perkinses of Southern Appalachia.

Claims of Portuguese ancestry made by many Melungeon families of Southern Appalachia over the decades can be viewed in a sympathetic light when we learn about people like Juan “Jan” Rodriguez.

Neither Dutchman nor Englishman, let’s salute the multi-ethnic founder of New York City.

Suffragette City?

3 December 2024/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Louise Youngblood; against female suffrage

We are all truly products of our upbringing – until we choose to break the chain.

The young lady in the article shared here was from a long line of slaveholders bearing the surname “Youngblood“, who ultimately trace back to Dutch “Jongbloedt” families of New Amsterdam/New York – people who may have come to the Americas via Recife, in Brazil.

Very few Americans are aware that New York City was a ferocious stronghold of anti-“Patriot” sentiment during the 1770s.

Like many of their neighbors, some Youngbloods took the “Tory” side, appalled at the mob violence being perpetrated by many “Patriots”, who demanded that people publicly declare for a side, or face being burnt out of their homes, or suffer being publicly tarred-and-feathered and run out of various districts.

William Franklin – son of “the” Benjamin Franklin himself – was the royal governor of New Jersey, and unlike his father, a staunch Loyalist.

During and after the American War for Independence, many Loyalists/Tories removed to England, Canada, or British holdings in the Caribbean.

Others fled into Appalachia, the Deep South, or British-controlled Florida.

It is amusing in the extreme that many of the most fervent MAGA flag-wavers today, who see themselves as the torchbearers of nebulous ideals of “liberty” and “freedom”, are in fact the descendants of people who stood AGAINST the “patriot” cause.

By the time of the Civil War 80 years after the “Revolution”, many Patriots and Tories had set aside their grandparents’ differences to focus on accumulating land and riches.

Female collaborators like Ms. Youngblood were the product of a society with highly ritualized roles defined by wealth, racial caste and gender.

I found myself thinking of women like Louise Youngblood this month, when I studied the breakdown of votes cast by women for Trump/Vance – men with views on women’s rights and gender roles which would not have been out of place a century ago.