#history – Before We Were White

Posts

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.

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.

Indians on the Run (the other kind of Indians)

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

Virginia Gazette

Williamsburg

April 15 to April 27, 1737

“RAN away…an East-Indian, belonging to Mr. Heylin, Merchant, in Gloucester:

He is a well-made, small young Fellow, wore his own Hair (which he may have cut off in order to disguise himself:)…He went away on a strong well-made Grey Stallion, branded with a Dott, belonging to his Master.

They (a black slave and the East Indian Slave) went from Col. Lewis’s to Gloucester Town, where they robb’d a House, and took a Pair of Pistols, a Horse Whip, and ’tis supposed some other Things.

They were seen on Monday going up King and Queen County.

Whoever secures either of the fore-mentioned Servants, shall receive as a Reward, Two Pistoles; for both of them, Four Pistoles, and for the Grey Stallion Two Pistoles; to be paid by John Lewis, and John Heylyn.”

*****

How many generations did it take for the children of such people to enjoy a normal childhood?

At what point were these desperate underclasses ready to join “respectable” society?

Is it really any wonder that a country which chose to bury and lie about much of its past is still dysfunctional enough that half of its people will gladly vote for a dictator, as long as he agrees to perpetuate the lies and leave the cold graves of past evil deeds undisturbed…

Tell the truth. How many readers here knew that there were slaves from India in America?

How many Americans know that such people – Hindus, vagabonds, Muslims, outlaws, Gypsies, runaway slaves, Tory Loyalists, Caribbean Jews, Malagasy sailors – were among the earliest settlers and colonizers of the Indigenous lands commonly called “The Appalachian Frontier”?

Lies by omission are still lies. History is not a science. It is an act of analysis followed by collation and curation. A thing left unwritten is often of equal or greater importance than that which is published.

Only in a country built on loud, blustering myth and carefully calculated silences could a political candidate so utterly unable to speak the truth receive the support of half the nation…

Are we witnessing a late reckoning for the sins of the past?

Blonde Bombshells and “Damaged Goods”

4 November 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

A young Marilyn Monroe

Legendary film star Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926 to a mother who was first married aged only 14.

We can only speculate what role, if any, this child marriage played in the later mental health issues which would plague Gladys Pearl Monroe.

Gladys was actually born in Mexico to railway worker Otis Monroe and his wife Della Mae Hogan, with the family moving to California around the year 1900.

Her marriage at 14 to Jasper Baker was “stormy”, with many later accounts accusing Baker of extreme domestic violence. Gladys appears to have already been pregnant at the time of her first marriage, giving birth to their first child, a son named Robert Baker, at the tender age of 15.

Gladys Monroe managed to extricate herself from this marriage at the age of 20, already a mother of two children, but her children were taken away by Jasper Baker.

Gladys Monroe married again in Los Angeles at the age of 22, this time to a man called Martin Mortenson.

The exact hows and whys are unclear, but this marriage also broke down, and Gladys became pregnant by a work colleague (and married man) named Charles Gifford in 1926.

The child of this tryst, Norma Jeane, took the surname of her mother’s still legal husband, and was officially born as “Norma Jeane Mortenson” on paper.

Norma Jeane had what can only be called a desperate and difficult childhood, with “home” a constant rotation between intermittent spells with her birth mother, and time spent with foster parents, work colleagues of her erratic mother, and in orphanages.

Norma Jeane’s mother would spend her first spell in an asylum for the insane when Norma Jeane was only nine years old, after suffering what was then called “a nervous breakdown”. Gladys Monroe would later be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia…

Norma Jeane would take various quasi-paternal surnames before settling on her mother’s maiden name – the name by which she would become famous.

While guessing ethnicity from photos is a fool’s game of phenotype analysis, I am still posting this series of photos because I have some familiarity with the Hogan and Nance families behind Marilyn Monroe‘s mother, and her mother before her.

Marilyn Monroe’s direct maternal line

They are my own distant relations (Norma Jeane is an 8th cousin). Lest this seem like a wish for fame by association, I will point out that Charles Manson is a closer 7th cousin…

We would find that we are all cousins in one way or another if we cared to dig deeply enough.

Both the Nance and Hogan families of Marilyn Monroe‘s maternal lineage are mixed-ethnic, “Old Mix American” people, and it is hard to ignore the possibility that the tragic lives of Norma Jeane and her mother were at least partially the result of trans-generational trauma.

The extremely low social status of most Black and mixed-ethnic women throughout American history made the formation and development of confident, ambitious young girls from such backgrounds the exception, rather than the rule – at least until more recent times.

Monroe was found dead of an apparent barbiturate overdose in the summer of 1962, after suffering years of anxiety, bouts of depression, and low self-esteem coupled with the type of substance abuse we would now call “self-medication”.

The sheer charisma and comic genius this oft-times lost little girl managed to give the world in her 36 short years – despite her desperate family background and ruthless exploitation by various men and a deeply sexist film industry – was a miracle of human, and especially female, resilience.

Dressing-up as a Princess

7 August 2022/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Daniel Keith with wife Amelia Hayes and children, Clay County, KY circa early 1900s

We all have things we hate.

I don’t mean things like “which way to hang toilet paper”.

Real hates. Because “hate” is, after all, a strong word. Or at least it should be, used to be.

We’ll leave aside war and violence for now. Those are pretty much universally acknowledged as things worthy of hatred.

Harming or belittling of children, the wanton abuse of animals – these things, too, should be universally agreed as things worth hating.

But it is the liminal things between naivety, thoughtlessness, selfishness, and wilful ignorance which often lead me to say “God, I hate that”.

Stuff like able-bodied people using the parking place reserved for the elderly or disabled people.

Stuff like half-drunk jet-skiers destroying the peace of a blue and remote mountain lake.

Fast food bags thrown out of a car window along a country road.

But then, if you suffer from “busy head” like me, with too many random thoughts jostling for space, you might get irritated or annoyed at less obvious things.

Anyone else here notice the way so many people tend to select a “preferred reality” at some point in their 20s or 30s, and then stick to that “reality”, whatever new information might cross their path over the subsequent years?

Whether religion, politics, or taste in music?

Why do the things we like, the beliefs we hold, often become fixed for good in our 20s?

Are we lacking in curiosity? Are we mentally lazy?

If you’re like me, always walking a tightrope between admiration for humans and borderline misanthropy, a frustration with this widespread human mental inertia can distill into anger.

And if we’re not careful, anger can metastasise into hate.

Hate is not good for a person, nor is it wise or saintly. But hey. A person can’t jump over their own shadow, can they?

*****

As a writer interested in the history of colonialist violence, I find myself confronting daily the immovable monoliths of a heavily abridged “official” American history, and a pop culture and national identity mediated through a corporate-owned mass media.

I see the fetishization of militarism, the ROTC and recruiting sergeants in high schools, and the constant, pervasive insistance that people in uniform are “protecting our freedom”.

These young men and women sent to the four corners of the world, from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, are lauded in small town America, always greeted with a “thank you for your service”.

The USA spent roughly 20 years in Vietnam, and another 20+ in Afghanistan. Roughly nine years in Iraq. People remember these conflicts because of their relative recentness.

But a large section of Americans do not know, for example, why Iran hates their country. The 1950s, and the UK/USA-engineered overthrow of a sovereign, freely elected government in Iran, is largely forgotten or ignored.

“They hate our freedom” is one of the more inane reasons offered for the decades-long poor relations between the USA and Iran.

Ask these people in uniform about The Barbary Wars. The annexation of Mexican territory in 1848. The occupation of Haiti in 1915. The 1899 Moro War in the Philippines.

All of this and more is the reason that no substantive analysis- and enquiry-based history is taught in American primary and secondary schools.

Foundational myths are far more powerful than facts at binding people into a shared identity, collectively willing to sanction and support government policy.

*****

On a more local or micro level, distilled frustration also wells up and overflows whenever this writer sees the terms “Indian princess” or “Indian maiden” used to describe someone’s remote ancestor of indigenous American ethnicity.

Such terminology is intended to disguise certain truths, in order to place a romantic gloss on older, darker aspects of American history.

Using the words “Indian princess” or “Indian maiden” suggests some bygone age of intercultural amity, in which a woman of equal social standing was “courted” by a “white” outsider to her community – see the various incarnations of the Captain Smith and Pocahontas myth.

These words are meant to imply a 1950s-style of courtship, in which a love-besotted man approaches the family or tribe of said “maiden”, seeking her hand in marriage from her father, who is of course always a “Chief”.

The words “maiden” or “princess” are also intended to elevate the woman in question – a way to skate over the fact that, for most of American history, indigenous peoples were in fact treated much the same way as African-Americans.

Indigenous peoples were enslaved. They were sold. They were rounded-up in concentration camps and marched at gunpoint to dry and dusty places hundreds of miles from their rightful homelands.

And of course, they were killed in wars and slaughtered during massacres.

Their children were removed and placed into industrial schools, where they were abused physically and sexually, or beaten for speaking their native tongues.

And in a patriarchal society, no one was farther down the social ladder than indigenous women/women of color.

In the violent rough and tumble of Manifest Destiny, “non-white” women were often seen as little more than a labor resource, or a sexual commodity.

Almost everyone accepts that the disease, warfare, and land grabbing of the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s saw the deaths of innumerable indigenous men.

What almost no one ever mentions is the countless number of indigenous women and children left to fend for themselves in the wake of these communal disasters, or the sheer number of children removed from their communities and sent to Indian boarding schools to be “assimilated” by force into “white” culture.

Not all indigenous women ended-up on reservations – perhaps not even the majority. Many were forced into a life of back-breaking manual labor or menial drudgery as farm hands or washerwomen. Some were forced into prostitution. The “luckier” ones might become wife or “consort” to a frontier trapper, miner, or settler, enduring a hard life of endless childbearing, cooking, sewing, washing, spinning, weaving, cleaning, etc.

This writer has in fact read first-hand accounts in which men were quite open about bringing their Indian consorts (yes, that’s plural) west, making them walk alongside an ox-wagon for days, their feet tied with rope to the woman ahead or behind them…

This is not ancient history, lost in the mists of time. Much of the foregoing (such as the Indian Boarding Schools) was still occurring in my own lifetime, and very much during the lifetime of my parents and grandparents.

*****

Everything was not horror. Some inter-ethnic pairings and marriages were based on mutually agreed trade-offs, even affection.

Many indigenous women came to be held in high regard by their wider communities, often because of their expertise and skills in pottery-making, basketry, herbal medicine and midwifery.

Anyone with deep roots in colonial-era America has one of these women in their family tree somewhere.

Modern DNA testing will rarely show it, because the DNA of one or two indigenous women during the late 1700s or early 1800s will usually have been “shuffled-out” by now.

But these woman WERE there, they were real, and they were almost never an “Indian princess”.

Please note that the use of this photo is for showing a typical Old Mix American family. It is NOT intended to imply any particular family’s direct link to the issues discussed in the above blog post.

Ghosts of The Waltons

21 May 2021/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpin

Will Geer as Grandpa Walton

America’s Underground River: Case 1, Will Geer, actor

As a child growing-up in small-town Missouri, weekends spent “out in the country” visiting grandparents were special treats.

Saturdays were spent fishing, climbing cherry trees, chasing grasshoppers and lightning bugs, or just sitting on an old rail fence beside the smokehouse, talking to “Bessie”, the ancient, blind, retired milk cow.

Sundays always began with a giant breakfast of bacon and pancakes before church, after which us kids were free to run wild again until Sunday dinner was served on the long wooden tables under the shade tree on the front lawn beside the dirt road.

After dinner, kids were sent away from the eating tables, so the older folks could talk in peace.

Once or twice a year, grandma would stand up at length from the dinner table and announce something which never failed to scare the bejeezus out of the younger kids.

They were bringing “The Table” down from the attic into the living room. Anyone interested in doing a “table rising” should head indoors now…

*****

It might seem strange to say so, but the life of Queen Victoria cast a shadow reaching deep into the heartlands of 1970s rural America.

There has always been a weird tension at the heart of American identity, with the nation founded on a rejection of class and nobility, while nursing a well-hidden sense of class insecurity.

This is why the American working-class insists on calling itself “middle class”.

It is also probably the reason for America’s lingering, pervasive inability to put racism behind itself once and for all. A damn good argument could be made that when Americans threw-off the yoke of aristocracy and privilege, they merely stepped into the newly available position, making themselves the “new nobility”, while lording over an indentured or enslaved underclass.

But again, behind it all, a sort of “national impostor syndrome” lay constantly lurking behind the noisy bravado.

It is why 19th century English writers like Charles Dickens could tour the USA, and be celebrated like any modern superstar.

It is why British royalty is an ongoing obsession, and “royals” like Prince Harry, and Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson (from the preceding generation), can leverage the happenstance of their birth into a fine living on the USA media circuit.

But I digress from the first point. No British royal ever left a deeper impression on America than Queen Victoria.

Almost everything used to signify social class other than money – worldliness, education, or “quality” – in 20th century America was a clumsy aping of Victorian manners, fashions, and attitudes to everything from table manners to sex.

This social and class anxiety is also why children of my generation were scolded for having our elbows on the table at eating times. It is why we were told that “ain’t” isn’t a word. It is why working-class people bought cutlery sets with special fish knives, thinking them a sign of refined gentility.

Queen Victoria’s taste (or her German husband Albert’s) is why we have Christmas trees indoors to this day.

A Victorian Anglo-Irish clergyman invented the “Rapture” idea still embraced by millions of evangelical Christian Americans today.

The Victorian obsession with spiritualism – communication with the dead – would have normally been seen as The Devil’s Work by American evangelical Christians.

But once it was embraced by Queen Victoria herself, the American desire to be in tune with upper-class trends outweighed any religious reservations.

And this is why the oldest folks in southern Missouri were still holding séances and “table knockings” in the 1960s and 1970s.

*****

Once “The Table” had revealed its secrets from The Other Side, it was put away for another few months, and the old folks would drag every chair available to a place near the sofa and TV. Children would sprawl on their bellies, chin-in-hands-elbows-on-the-floor at the feet of the grown-ups.

Time for the Sunday episode of The Waltons.

For those born later than the 1960s or 1970s, it is almost impossible to overstate the cultural significance of this TV show, which was set during The Great Depression and WWII- era rural Virginia.

The Waltons spoke to a rapidly suburbanising working-class and lower middle-class America whose parents had come from mostly rural backgrounds. The stress of The Cold War, and the strife of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the rise of feminism and the “hippy movement” had left this first truly suburban generation dreaming of a return to some simpler, mythical past.

Parents watched The Waltons to vicariously re-live what they believed had been lost, and they made their children watch it, in order that the new generation might absorb some “old timey” values and morals.

But like fish knives and table-risings, much of what we believe about our past and ourselves is shown through a lens of our own longings.

We believe what we want to believe.

It was with all of this in mind, at a remove of 50 years, that I was unsure whether to burst out laughing, crying, or cheering this week while researching the ethnic origins of the real-life family upon which The Waltons was based (the Hamner family), as well as some of the actors who portrayed the fictional Walton family.

The much-beloved Grandpa of the series was played by the late Will Geer, a gentleman of mostly German ancestry, with the usual “people of color” joining his melting-pot along the way via the Rippey family (a prize for anyone who can locate the source of that surname…?)

At this stage, I am more surprised when Americans DON’T have a family of color in their ancestry – so no particularly big deal there.

What surprised me more was that our 1970s Sunday morality hour at grandma and grandpa’s house was being performed – at least in part – courtesy of a man who had been blacklisted during the McCarthy Era for his communist leanings.

And there was even more to “Grandpa Walton” than his decades-long commitment to the American Labor Movement and other left-wing causes.

For many long years prior to marrying his eventual wife, Mr. Geer had a much-loved boyfriend.

If my folks had known, I suspect “The Table” would have ended-up in the TV screen.