Shanet Clark

The forgers of the Z film had trouble getting the spectators right.

Jack

Jack

You are getting pretty good at this.

thanks for this Dallas interpretation

shanet

Scott,

Do you put any credence to Frank 'The German' Schweihs being one of the men who whacked Richard Cain?

James

Good thread

I am glad we dug back into the Chuck Giancana story.

Treacherous territory if we let certain members drive us back to a Ruby/Contract On America

interpretration. Frankly, wim dankbaar and the chicago angle is compelling.

Look at Woody harrelson's father Charles Harrelson.

Admitted murderer, dead ringer for the tall tramp, Chicago mob, etc/

Sutton Files, I am not so sure about, but information about HARRELSON and RICHARD CAIN is welcome

The right hand doesnt know what the left hand is doing

IE. the FBI doesnt' know what the CIA is doing

RICHARD CAIN AND JOHN ROSELLI

>>>> .>>>> .> >>> ...>>>

Lets

see if this loads up

fao

..............

schweihs, frank

According to one of the top scholars on this case, historian Gerald D. McKnight, in his latest book, Breach of Trust, the bullet recovered from the Walker shooting didn't ballistically match the fragments found at the scene of the JFK killing. See pages 49 and 50 for his discussion of the Heilberger report conducted for the Warren Commission.

Quoting directly from page 50: "Heilberger's report was persuasive evidence that the ammunition Oswald allegedly used to kill Kennedy could not have been invovled in the Walker shooting." And, oh, yeah---no surprise to anyone here---"Heilberger was never called as a Commission witness."

On page 51 the excellent McKnight points out that there was "no persuasive physical evidence to tie Oswald to the Walker shooting."

There's more in the next 8 pages of this chapter. There isn't much of a case on this one folks. Based on McKnight's dissection of the "evidence" against Oswald, I'd say on the night Walker was shot at, Oswald was no where near his residence.

Jim and I have agreed on some themes in the past, BUT........

I don't think Oswald ever took a shot at Edwin Walker, I think the thing was set up to make it

look like he had, to set him up as a "real" assassin...........

I think the shadowy bunch that manipulated Oswald did it and pinned it on him as part of a plot.......

There's quite a few spectators in Dealey Plaza whom have never been identified. Some of them clearly appear to have been holding cameras - as seems to be the case here. This image of the young couple is an enlarged crop from a photo taken during the aftermath - they were standing on the south side of Elm, closer to the underpass - after the Franzens and 'SOB man.' They can be seen in the z-film. Who were they, and why have they never come forward? Were they simply in the wrong place and at the wrong time, and afraid to say anything about what they had seen? Did the 'Harper fragment' whizz right past them? Did they see the guys behind the fence and behind the retaining wall? Or is it possible that they were some kind of plants?

Anyway - if anyone has any idea as to their identities, please feel free to share.

- lee

Lee

This young man has a notebook or box of some sort in his vest pocket,

and something hanging out of his back pocket, looks like a pistol or radio equipment...........

The German astronomer Johannes Kepler, working with the observational records of Tycho Brahe, established the law of elliptical planetary orbits, the theory of equal radius vectors being swept in equal time. The importance of this fundamental breakthrough in physics, astronomy and cosmology is important because it allows us to periodize the era known as the Enlightenment. Kepler overturned Ptolmaic and medieval astrophysics with this theory in 1609, and this laid the groundwork for Isaac Newton’s physical laws eighty years later. Galileo, the sixteenth century observational scientist and Copernicus, the fifteenth century Pole were then vindicated beyond dispute. Science, the revolutionary method of measured differences in real observations—the method of documented experiment—came to dominate European intellectual discourse. Aristotelian nominalism, which differentiated all individual exceptions, successfully challenged Platonic ‘realism,’ i.e. idealism. Observational science, which had crept up out of the Aristotelian scholasticism of the High Middle Ages, revolutionized astronomy and physics during the course of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth century. By the eighteenth century this method of scientific inquiry was accepted and respected throughout Europe. This rational scientific method, exemplified by the seventeenth century practitioners Kepler and Newton, empowered and propelled to prominence an unusual group of eighteenth century individuals, the Enlightenment’s philosophes.

Traditional interest in the Enlightenment valorized European scientists and social theorists of the eighteenth century, focusing on the French writers Lavoisier, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Comte de Buffon, but including the German philosopher Kant, the Swedish botanist Linnaeus, the Americans Franklin and Jefferson, with various Scottish, Italian, English and Prussian scientists and writers.

Two problems come to the surface when the Enlightenment is closely studied.

I will call these problems the modern problem and the contemporary problem.

The modern problem with the Enlightenment is the long recognized difficulty of linking the Enlightenment of France with the principal event of eighteenth century France, the French Revolution. The hagiographic valorization of many French Enlightenment figures is complicated by their presence at Versailles, Paris and in the Reign of Terror. Enlightenment figures can be found in the salons and courts of the decadent French nobility intriguing with powerful madams and courtesans, and then later as mob leaders, revolutionary censors and Directory factotums. This lingering chronic problem, known throughout the modern period of study, may be explained in part by looking into the second problem, the contemporary problem.

The contemporary problem with the Enlightenment is the distinct lack of enlightened opinion among these figures upon the value of universal humanism; equality among the various nationalities, classes, races and genders is not a developed value in the Enlightenment period. If these values are occasionally proclaimed, they are then inconsistently applied. They are plainly denied in many cases (Eze).

As stated above, understanding this acute contemporary problem helps us to understand the chronic modern problem. To shed light on the two related problems of the Enlightenment, where the shadows of enlightenment lie, we can look to three sources, Chukwudi Eze, Ottobah Cugoano and Robert Darnton.

Constrained by format requirements, I will set aside issues of gender bias, as this was synthesized earlier through the comparison of Rousseau’s thoughts on the education of women in ‘Emile,’ Linda Scheibinger’s graphic study of skewedness in eighteenth century human anatomy studies and Joan Landes’s work. A similar triangulation of Cuguano, Eze and Darnton should illuminate the acute contemporary issue of anomalous racial bias in the otherwise equalitarian pronouncements of the Enlightenment figures -- and this bias’s relationship to the chronic problem of Enlightenment authors’ participation in court, salon and the Reign of Terror.

Essentially, self-interest outstripped ideology and rhetoric outpaced action in the face of this self-interest. Inconsistent social values influenced inconsistent political behavior. Deep social, cultural and economic currents steered eighteenth century France and paradoxical positions were often claimed. A combination of loyalties to colonial ‘duty,’ masculine patriarchy and ignorance (in the form of a very imperfect observational method) guided Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, in his natural history (Eze, pp. 15-28). Linnaeus seems to derive his primitive divisions and ideas on the limitations of non-whites from a medievalist theory of hepatic and venous humors, which can only be seen as a weak platform for repeating xenophobic, Caucasian centered assumptions (Eze pp.10-15).

The construction of the category of ‘wholly other’ alien people harkens back to a medieval insecurity about the ‘unsaved,’ the heathen denizens of the Antipodes. The older Church teachings concerning the Hamitic Africans, the sons of Ham, influenced this worldview. Ham, the son of Noah who saw Noah naked was then exiled south in shame, marked like Cain. These primitive theories were adapted by Kant and Linnaeus and then bolstered by fanciful theories of excess black bile and phlegm in the African, excess Yellow bile in the Asian and the abundance of healthy red blood in the sanguine Euro-Caucasian (Eze p. 15, Cugoano, p. 32).

Because of the undeniable breakthroughs of Kepler and Newton, scientists and critical thinkers were valorized and rewarded in this period and many entered an upper class (or associated with upper class patrons), which showed many signs of anxiety and insecurity. Salon and court life was a necessary adjunct to the established writers and academy members. While they could now afford to be objective and unbiased in optics, chemistry or astronomical physics, the human sciences often lagged in critical objectivity, precisely because of this co-opting by an elite economic system.

At the salon and the table of the nobility, optics and astronomy could be discussed with great objectivity, but the discourse was skewed in other areas, repeating grotesque myths in the fields of human sociology and anthropology because of the co-opting and distorting effect of bourgeois and noble insecurities. The terms sociology and anthropology are twentieth century coinages, of course.

Montesquieu, Diderot and Jefferson could make sweeping pronouncements about general humanistic universal equality, while maintaining specific biases. Jefferson (in constant contact with the French Enlightenment figures) could write the Declaration of Independence, and still calmly travel overseas with chattel slave people in tow.

Diderot could glamorize Tahitian natives while allowing extremely racist passages into his Encyclopedia. The native noble savage of nature was celebrated in theory while the actual non-white was marginalized in practice.

The co-opting by elite patrons, the chronic inability to see beyond socially constructed xenophobic tradition, the force of lingering medieval and ecclesiastic worldviews, anxiety about Chinese wealth, Persian noble status and Turkish military power all combined to inform eighteenth century French thought. Hatred of ‘heathen, savage Indians’ in the Americas and ‘infidel Moors’ in the Mediterranean informed the thinking of all educated elites in this period.

Ottoba Cugoano was in a unique position to analyze and respond to this inconsistence. Cugoano offers up a complete and satisfying critique of the slave-holding hypocritical culture of colonial Europe. Cuguano writes:

“Who will regard the voice (of wisdom) and hearken to the cry? Not the sneaking advocates of slavery, though a little ashamed of their craft; like the monstrous crocodile weeping over their pray with fine concessions (while gorging their own rapacious appetite) to hope for universal freedom taking over the globe. Not those inebriated with avarice and infidelity who hold in defiance every regard due to the divine law, and who endeavor all they can to destroy and take away the natural and common rights and privileges of man. (Thoughts and Sentiments, p. 62)”

Here is the true enlightened voice, a black man in the white eighteenth century France, a valid critic, an observer speaking out from the margins of society.

Robert Darnton and Arlette Farge show us a class dynamic in eighteenth century France that helps separate the causation of the Revolution from the activities of the well-known Enlightenment figures. The writings of the social critics, the egalitarian and leveling pose taken by Montesquieu, Diderot (see ‘Farmer,’ Encyclopedie), were not the “cause” of the French Revolution. The salon, court and academy writers sometimes espoused a universal equality, in alternation with their biased pronouncements, but were more effective and convincing in the physical rather than the social sciences because of their participation in the dominant xenophobic milieux.

The Revolution itself stemmed rather from a deep--and difficult to recapture-- divide between the classes of France. Enlightenment authors straddled and passed back and forth over this divide, but they were not the most prominent players in the Revolutionary fervor; they were in fact relatively impotent observers of the Revolution. Darnton and Farge make the persuasive case that only a deeper cultural study of the more marginalized critics can expose the dynamics of momentum that led up to the French Revolution of 1789.

The modern problem, the overlap of Enlightenment and Revolutionary timeframes, is due to a tendency to oversimplification and to misguided assumptions concerning cause and effect. The two great events of eighteenth century France, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are not, in fact, causally related.

The case can even be made for the mediating effect of egalitarian philosophers in the court and salon, and that having Enlightened individuals in both the streets and in the Tuilleries played a moderating role, delaying the Revolution and softening its impact. In this scenario, the ambiguous figure of the philosophe helped control and mediate the Revolution from even more severe eventualities, aiding in the protection of citizen’s rights under Napoleon, etc.

Darnton and Farge bring us face to face with a class conflict. The divide between the mob in Paris and the primary Estates was broad and polarizing, and it existed independently of the Enlightenment figures. Revolutionary momentum existed without Enlightenment political theories.

Deep hatred and effective challenges to the monarchy welled up from a peasant and urban poor mentalitie. Paris was swept by regicide rumors of ‘a dog eating the Prince’s heart,’ for example, and the Bastille was full of frustrated illiterates toying with the concept of killing the King (Farge, sec. II and III).

Robert Darnton opened the way for this deeper analysis of the causation of the French Revolution by exposing the rampant frustration of Grub Street, exemplified by broadsheet libelles, unsophisticated scurrilous and ‘unenlightened’ attacks on the ancien regime, salon life and the Academy.

“Grotesque, inaccurate and simplistic as it was, this version (Morande’s) of political news should not be dismissed as merely mythical, because myth making and unmaking proved to be powerful forces in the last years of the regime, which though absolutist in theory, had become increasingly vulnerable to public opinion. To be sure, the eighteenth century French “public” did not exist in any coherent form: and insofar as it did exist, it was excluded from direct participation in politics. (Darnton, Literary Underground p. 33)”

An uprising of true lower class rage, frustrated aspirations and new public discourses like the libelles led to the French Revolution.

The problem of certain Enlightenment authors’ playing a role in the Revolution is to be understood as one of callous self-interest, as indicated by the activities of Marat, Gilbert and Sabatier. To the extent that well known pre-Revolutionary Enlightenment figures had become elites, this in fact shows their lack of participation in the current of Revolution, if one accepts Darnton’s theory.

The twin problems of the Enlightenment must be approached from a point of view that recognizes the deeper class frustrations and elite assumptions of the period. Cause and effect between revolutionary intellectual achievements and political revolution should be warily re-analyzed. The problem of the Enlightenment figures’ lack of consistent universal humanism must be approached through an immersion in the assumptions of the period, as no theorist, no matter how progressive, writes outside of the context of the times. Sadly, inconsistence and mutability existed even in these valorized individuals, and teleological assumptions have forced anachronistic expectations onto the character of these eighteenth century Enlightenment figures.

Medieval History I

“We must understand in order to believe.”

Peter Abelard was a critical thinker. His instructions for harmonizing the Fathers indicate an unusually forward-looking, critical mind.

The three critical techniques Peter Abelard developed to deal with ancient Church documents required both genius to originate and courage to implement:

“Ascertain whether texts quoted from the Fathers may be ones they themselves have retracted and corrected . . . whether they are giving the opinion of another rather that their own . . . (or have) they left them open to question rather than settled them.”

With considerable genius Abelard developed these devices and with courage he taught them, flying in the face of the rigid intellectual milieux of the early 12th century. Intellectually, he went beyond the critical compass of his contemporaries and in establishing these techniques he fearlessly went against the conservatism of Bernard and Anselm, opening up great opportunities for critical thinkers to come.

Through the letters of Innocent III and Gregory VII we have learned of the struggle to present biblical law as a new Roman law, useful in the struggle to gain “temporal power” in Britain and the Continent. A sort of Christian Talmud was posited, based upon Church decrees, the fragmentary evidence of Saints, the Eusebius rescension of the records of the pre-Constantine Church, and the various glosses, translations and versions of the writings of the ancient Church Fathers.

When the Church put this body of tradition forward as binding law, it came into conflict with the secular leaders. Minor barons who held manorial court were often trumped by this elastic form of justice, and even powerful Kings of the period like William Rufus and Henry I of England were often confronted by this papal law from beyond their realm. In this volatile secular-priestly struggle, Abelard was an appropriately forward thinking ‘referee.’

Abelard is unique within his era, an enlightened romantic poet and an outspoken individual; he foreshadows and even overshadows many of the 12th (and even 15th) century figures. Abelard was a medieval monk, resigned to a life of letters, forswearing pleasure, (although this was largely due to his brutalization at the hands of Fulbert). The castration of Abelard came to late to entirely quell his restless spirit; the brutalization refrigerated his body back into the celibacy of the monastic tradition, but only after the genius and courage of his mind had brought forth the critical devices and romantic tragedies of his life.

Specific to the readings in Tierney, Abelard was condemned for explicating the Trinity too well. His genius and his courage allowed him to skillfully show the three personalities of the ineffable being in detail and for this he was egregiously condemned as heretic.

Here is my argument – Peter Abelard was in fact orthodox and serving the critical text sources well through his genius and courage. The Church of the early twelfth century, like the Puritans of Cromwell’s age, was becoming more monotheistic. The politically ascendant and secularly invested Roman universal church was beginning to favor the terrible justice implicit in the Old Testament, reverting to dependence on the all-seeing God of the God-fearing Grecians, reverencing the God of primitive fear.

Peter Abelard, an equivocator in the fairest sense of that word (like Aquinas), could just as easily have been condemned for many of his other critiques and stances, since heresy was subjective and a judgment lightly thrown at the unconventional scholars of that era. Abelard could have just as easily been condemned as an Arian heretic, or for moral charges, for obstinacy, for insubordination, etc. His courage in confronting the paradoxical difficulties implicit in the Triune theology made his very rationality a target. Bernard’s mysticism, stressing faith, can be seen as an opposing school of thought - more timid and less confident in the rational power of the human mind than Abelard’s new school of exposition. The “calamity” of Abelard’s heresy came from strict canonical lawyers fixated on promulgating an anachronistic religious law, a papacy battling the secular power of Christian nobility (represented by the Burgundian Cluniacs, Angevins, Normans, et al.), and this Roman power was pushing their case for autocracy in religious, intellectual and political affairs.

Instead of pressing for a belief in the allegorical lessons of mercy and forgiveness found in the New Testament, which was supposedly their “Constitution,”

Church leaders in this period, distracted by their rising territorial and secular powers, preferred to stress the all-seeing God, a God of terrible justice. In pursuit of their own hegemony over princes they distorted the balance of the Trinitarian doctrine, branding orthodox (if fearless) explicators of the gospel as heretics. Bernard of Clairveaux was unable to digest the scope and methods of Abelard’s explication. Aquinas would face similar difficulties in the next century, and Galileo’s, Descartes’ and Darwin’s difficulties bring this pattern into the modern era, with lingering contemporary impact on the field of learning and critique.

In Sic et Non, Abelard not only attempted to mediate divergent scriptures, he publicized the inherent (if not insoluble) contradictions in the biblical canon and writings of the Church Fathers. Lecturing on these contradictions was of course a convenient way to get his method and new critical techniques exposed. Thomas Aquinas followed in this public path, continuing the tradition of Abelard, genius combined with courage, and this brought European intellectual tradition to new heights in the High Middle Ages. The backlash these writers generated added to the dynamic momentum of the early University scholasticism.

Abelard’s stress on the dilemmas and paradox within canon law helped to place the subjective reader

in the situation of one who had less grace, faith and spirit than the Fathers. By artfully building this context, a context consistent with humility, Abelard did not allow for heavy-handed, final, cruel and un-spiritual interpretations. Men like Bernard, less sophisticated and tolerant, took all this personally, and as an attack upon the Church.

More timid minds held that certain questions should simply not be asked. Abelard’s statement that “even the texts of divine scripture are corrupted by the errors of scribes” was an open door to the collapse of Roman papal authority, a slippery slope that could (and slowly would) lead to national and like-minded independent and regional churches.

In the field of scholastic academia, Peter Abelard holds a pivotal, catalytic importance to historians. The Church Fathers had been reticent or silent on such basic geographic questions as the shape of the Earth, the existence of the Antipodes, the heavenly waters, etc. As these issues were grappled with, the Dark Ages passed away. While we recognize the un-nuanced pejorative of the term, nevertheless historians have traditionally insisted that a Dark Age of ignorance in Europe passed away as the High Middle Ages set the stage for The Renaissance. During the period of the Germanic ascension in Europe, through the Carolingian and Angevin dynasties classical science, the philosophy of Aristotle was lost or seriously obscured.

The actual location of the Sun in relationship to the Earth and the spherical nature of the planet were better understood by Ptolemy and Pliny than by the tenth century monastic scholars in Paris or Canterbury. The Roman authorities, regional Bishops and Abbots kept a lid on scientific development, firmly resolved against the concept of the Antipodes, and clung to an extremely simplistic biblical cosmology.

Bede had held a cosmology somewhat more elastic than this, and Isidore of Seville had proposed that some ancients had believed in a round earth, but these were rare exceptions in the intellectual history of the medieval period in Europe. Constantine and Charlemagne had greatly empowered the Church within the old Empire’s borders, but, sadly, had combined it with repressive and violent secular interests. When the time came to question basic premises of geographical and astronomical fact, the Church was motivated and authorized to crush dissent.

The shift in cosmography was incessant as Albert the Great delivered Aristotle’s works to European University masters in its original Greek. The critical methods of Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas, their questing defense of the new rational method pushed this process of re-examination forward.

As the lame cosmology of the medieval tradition gave way to classically derived truths—a spherical Earth, the existence of Antipodes, etc., the intellectual world became larger and richer.

This intellectual revolution was a slow process with many reversals and losses of momentum, but the genius and courage of Peter Abelard and Thomas Aquinas lead the way, helping lift the veil through the application of their sweeping and fearless methods.

Mediaeval History II

Colin Wilson would show us the character of Thomas Aquinas in defense of his theory of the Pre-Renaissance individual.

Thomas Aquinas synthesizes and harmonizes various schools of thought in a way considered radical by many at the time, but accepted as orthodox canon and good scholastic theory from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Aquinas is the hero, centerpiece or pivotal individual in the University of Chicago’s Great Ideas series, and Mortimer Adler’s editorial makes clear that Aquinas, more than any other single individual, embodied the potential of the Western intellectual tradition.

Thomas Aquinas, building on the groundbreaking efforts of Peter Abelard (q.v.) was a catalyst for Europe’s intellectual swing back to an Aristotelian, differentiating deductive method, away from the Neo-Platonic idealism and induction of the medieval school. In this view of the intellectual history of Europe, Albert Magnus’s rescension of the full body of The Philosopher’s works is the critical phase. Aristotle’s works are integrated into the early University system and scientific realism (nominalism) makes headway against the constraints of Neo-Platonic Idealism and the superstitious, reactionary theories of the twelfth century Church.

The Philosopher, Aristotle, had views differing from and more compelling than those of the Church, and European Cosmology took a great leap forward as Albert, Avicenna and Averroes introduced his Greek ideas salvaged from our early history by Arabic and Syriac scribes. Feudal Europe rapidly recapped the intellectual history of the ancient world as Pliny, Euripides, Thucidydes, Euclid, Ptolemy and Pythagoras re-entered the discourse. After c. 1240 these sources were considered in light of the newly re-discovered Aristotelian methods. New theories of matter, natural history and astronomy were compared with the records of travelers, navigators and ancient records. Tensions built as a new classically inspired paradigm emerged in thirteenth century Europe. In many instances Thomas Aquinas used Aristotle to clarify Aristotle.

The classic tradition of dividing knowledge between natural philosophy and metaphysics served Aquinas well. With natural philosophy (what we would call science) restricted to the visible, observable universe, metaphysics (what we would call theology) or mystical knowledge could hold its own legitimacy within its own domain. This system of separate spheres of knowledge and responsibility appealed to Church leaders and scientifically critical “natural philosophers” alike. Aquinas, by reviving and approving of a separate metaphysical domain of knowledge allowed for great critical strides to be made in botany, geography and cosmology—by removing the threat that revolutions in these fields could in any way challenge the orthodoxy of the Church.

In many habits of style and method, Aquinas follows Abelard, and Abelard certainly prepared the authorities for the rigorous rhetoric of Aquinas. Like Anselm and Abelard, Aquinas shows agility and character, attributes of a fully confident individual.

Aquinas is masterful in the good sense of that word, having control of all around him, secure and comfortable in his rhetoric.

Aquinas was ahead of his time, the greatest thinkers of the following century would move forward hardly at all from the positions of Aquinas. Duns Scotus would sink back to endless configurations on the fate of dead saints’ free will and the possibility of angels sinning. Aquinas had also dealt with such arcane “angels on the head of a pin” type of theological issues, but only within the context of his exhaustive sweep of contemporary debates. Aquinas dealt directly with the volatile issues brought into play by the renascence of Aristotelian nominalism, and he settled every church debate up to that point, easily pointing out weaknesses in the traditional arguments. Using the tools of Abelard, the method of critical comparison of apparently irreconcilable truths, Aquinas solves, resolves or lessens the paradoxes endemic in Trinitarian medieval thought.

Aquinas holds a special place in the history of Western civilization for his skepticism of the Fathers when they differ from Aristotle, and his willingness to de-emphasize the Philosopher where he was not decisive and proven out by further (Aristotelian) inquiry. The Summa Theologiae and his other writings brought a new balance to intellectual and spiritual thinking, allowing for uncertainty and tentative conclusions in the face of incomplete human knowledge. His distinction (an ancient one), between metaphysical mystical truth and objective fact, allowed the Church to regain its foundation and legitimacy in religious debates, while allowing it to insulate itself from factional and divisive debate over scientific knowledge. Admittedly, the Church was slow to take advantage of this separation of realms, but this is no fault of Aquinas’s.

Duns Scotus and Bonaventura wrote on many of the same issues and knew the terrain but too often they fell back into hairsplitting inanity, retreating into an airy philosophical pose without moral immediacy or compelling rationale.

Aquinas was rather the direct antecedent of Descartes, Newton and Samuel Clarke, defining orthodoxy as beyond the pale of negating attack, while opening up the natural world to all methods of rigorous study.

The biography of Aquinas helps reveal the temper of the times and helps us place his work in its appropriate context, socially and politically.

Aquinas was born near Naples in the year 1225, possibly late 1224. He was second cousin to the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II, and a nephew of Frederick Barbarossa. Of the Hohenstaufen dynastic family, Thomas Aquinas was seventh son of the Count of Aquino, Landulfo. His mother Teodora Carracciola was a Countess in the Sicilian branch of the Norman nobility. Aquinas’s life is closely intertwined with the earliest and greatest of Benedictine monasteries, Montecassino. His father and older brothers sacked the monastery of Montecassino for Frederick II when Thomas was four, and Thomas was intended to become the abbot when he was sent as an oblate to the monastery in 1230 and studied their until 1239, when it was again sacked.

Thomas Aquinas was no stranger to the difficulties inherent in secular power residing in Church leaders and the unsettled state of Italy and the Empire had an effect on his development. For this reason he was able to soberly delineate the respective spheres of influences appropriate to secular and religious authorities.

Aquinas enlarged upon the genius and courage of Abelard and participated in the mid thirteenth century revolution in European thought, helping grow the power of scholastic intellectual endeavors, while providing cover and legitimacy to the spiritual realm of the Church.

Medieval History III

The extreme position taken by Gregory VII in his papal bull Dictatus Papae in 1075 set the stage for the firm refusal of Henry IV of Germany to obey it.

Gregory VII, or Hildebrand, had claimed the exclusive right to depose Emperors and over-reached himself in a series of inflammatory statements, such as “his name alone shall be spoken in Churches,” “that he himself may be judged by no one,” etc. This extreme statement of papal authority was followed by a series of Papal orders that no Bishops could be invested in the office at the hands of “Emperor or King.” At this point the investiture conflict came to head as evidenced by the letter of Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor to Gregory VII, received in Rome in 1076.

Henry ruled over the unwieldy Empire through the services of a rough regional bureaucracy based on loyal Bishops. The Dictatus Papae was literally impossible for Henry IV to enforce, as his power as head of state was based largely on his ability to counter the feudal aristocracy of Germany with these loyal Bishops.

Gregory made extreme claims for the Church, but the modern reader must remember that the Church in this era was a secular principality, a large and ambitious Papal State, in relatively constant conflict with Normandy, Lombardy, France and the Empire.

Spiritual power was one thing, a moral and theological realm of authority, but the Church at this time was attempting to grow it regional secular and political power at the expense of legitimate Kings and Barons.

The Empire had preserved the Papal authority in central Italy through force of arms, much as Charlemagne had done in the ninth century. The Emperor believed he had earned certain rights to install Bishops in the unruly small principalities of Germany that made up the Empire.

Again, Bishops in this context were not Church leaders so much as they were officers of State, literate co-coordinating bureaucrats and thusly the principle of state government was challenged by the decrees of Gregory VII.

Henry IV used hostile language and a mocking tone in his letter to Gregory because he was engaged in an earthly secular debate with a powerful regional prince, a conflict over the control of his own domain. Henry’s letter led to his excommunication by Gregory and is part of the long running Investiture Conflict that raged in Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Innocent III and King John of England would engage in a similar conflict one hundred and thirty years later.

The meaning of these conflicts is clear. Europe had not settled the relationship of sacrosanct Church power when it conflicted with the rising power of Kings. Kings were busy securing their own borders, reforming law and judicial functions and forcing back the feudal power of foreign lords and domestic vassals. In this unsettled proto-national era, the Pope was rising in secular power while simultaneously declining in spiritual legitimacy. The Popes of this era are best understood as petty Kings themselves. The transition to a collaborative relationship would come later as Kings and Bishops would retreat to their respective spheres of influence.

Because of the loyalty of most Europeans to a single Universal Church, the relative weakness of Kings due to a weakly developed sense of national orientation by the subjects, and a certain superstitious and heavy handed approach to statecraft, the Church versus State conflict became a dominant motif of Medieval history.

Despite its sad and quizzical nature many historians, including Kenneth Clark, consider this conflict to be essential to the development of Western Civilization, as we know it. The conflict highlighted here provided a dynamic tension, forcing the expansion of the written legal system. The conflict countered various powerful persons and institutions against other powerful people and institutions, allowing a vitality and growth not found in many other contemporary societies.

Notes

98. A Woman Mystic: Catherine of Siena

Catherine of Siena was a romantic type, personalizing God to an unusual degree. Her style shows an extreme conviction and individuality, prefiguring the character of Joan of Arc. In her letter to the Pope she shows a dangerous familiarity and willingness to criticize and places herself at or above the spiritual level of the pontiff, prefiguring Protestant zealots and Puritans of later eras.

99. A Woman Heretic: Marguerite Porete

Marguerite Porete also exhibits the exalted self-awareness of Catherine and in this case she suffered the medieval remedy for such forward behavior, she was burned at the stake. Her literary style is strongly romantic and individualistic and her poetry reminds me of later Chansons.

44. St. Anselm: Proof of the Existence of God

On a very personal level, this is my favorite entry in the Sources. The strength of Anselm’s conviction, his rhetorical strength and philosophical style are more important than his actual logic, which is, in fact, circular and self referencing. Nevertheless, this is one of the highest points of Anglican theology. It is conclusive to believers, while it cannot prove anything to one unwilling to believe, or imagine, a divine force.

45. Peter Abelard: Sic et Non

Abelard challenged church orthodoxy by delving into paradoxical realms of faith. His methods earned him both enmity and respect and were a great influence on Aquinas. His Calamities form a romantic tragic autobiography, fully fleshing him out as an individual in a period of transition when individual characters are rare.

46. Bernard of Clairvaux: The Love of God

Bernard, Abelard’s nemesis, was the founder of the Cistercian order. His style is a strange and difficult mix of the coming romantic individualism, well larded with traditional medieval tropes. His defenses of the church are mystical and immediate, unlike Abelard and Anselm, who use logic and rhetorical force to convey spiritual truth. Bernard was a poetic and truly spiritual person, but not really a part of the intellectual revolution Abelard foreshadowed.

53. Troubadour Songs

William of Poitou was part of the revolution in literature, as entertainment became an end in itself. This is light verse, impossible to imagine being written in the tenth century, sprightly and light, foreshadowing Chaucer and the minstrel songs that would soon mark the end of medieval literature. For a Duke of France to have written such fluff is a sign of changing times, a less harsh interior world, and a refreshing change in mentalitie.

54. Goliardic Literature: Songs and Satire

The Archpoet breaks new ground with a certain earthiness and resistance to the stifling religiosity of the medieval period. I believe here we begin to find in the records an earthy traditional vernacular tradition beginning to be written down, and again entertainment and a certain lightness of heart begin to re-emerge. Church leaders would have hated these, common people would have loved them, and so we begin to creep into a more modern mindset.

55: Popular Piety: Our Lady’s Tumbler

A wandering minstrel dances and does acrobatics in the cloister to show his love for the Virgin. This is a wild and far-out story for the period and the gloomy medieval preachiness of the previous centuries seems to fall away rapidly. The individual, the entertaining, the common and the sublime mix easily. There is something definitely new in the air as this sort of literature begins to break the restrictive mentalitie.

82: University Regulations

Deans, masters, bishops and students fought for control of the new European institution, the university. Here Gregory IX in 1231 enters the fray and we get the distinct feeling that the Pope’s desires for strict Roman discipline may not be taken to heart by the various players. This is the era of the banning of Aristotle, which was ignored, and the Pope is really facing the force that will eventually break his power, the intelligentsia of Europe.

83: Student Life

This passage and the corresponding section of Tierney’s text are highly entertaining and enlightening. Like the rule of Benedict, the imagination is drawn to the implications of the dry text, and a certain modern rambunctiousness is seen below the details, a symptom of that troublesome new player in late medieval history, the dreaded individual.

84: Philosophy and Science

Aquinas is difficult for the contemporary reader to “wade through” but after some study one notices the genius and refreshing vitality of the writing. Bonaventure was not as brilliant, but built upon the Aquinas tradition in his own way, establishing a rhetorical standard, which defined the scholastic method for centuries to come.

67: Peter Waldo and the Waldensians

The Waldensians are celebrated in history as the precursors of Protestantism, the first group to openly declare their own ability to interpret and judge the Church. They certainly were anathema to good order and triggered that new phenomenon in Europe, the mendicant religious figure, the friar.

68: Albigensians

As stated in the caption, bias one way or the other often distorts records of sects. We must assume that his is not an accurate picture of the Albigensians, but the conservative Church they were opposing has distorted their message.

69: Heresy and Inquisition

The Church made stronger claims for temporal and spiritual power in this period, and a surviving first person account of the inquisitor’s catechism is chilling. When countered with the chansons, the records of the new sects and the minstrels’ frolics, we see a growing rift between orthodoxy and individualism, which would steer European history for centuries to come.

70: St. Francis

Francis is the unqualified hero of this era. Spiritual, mendicant, a true gospel believer, his legacy has been seized by high church and low sects, Francis is one character who can actually synthesize the late twelfth century, an individual and a monk, a mendicant and an orthodox church leader.

Interesting Photo of Clarence Douglas Dillon and Che Guevara, James.

You all know my views on this angle, thanks for pursuing it further.

John,

It probably should be pointed out that Eisenhower and Nixon were not keen that Dillon accept the President-elect's offer without a guarantee that Dillon be given a free hand in fiscal and monetary policies. It would certainly be interesting what JFK did indeed offer at the end of the day.

Sidebar: In August of 1960, Dillon went public with a prediction that Rafael Trujillo would suffer a serious downfall. Dillon called Trujillo a tyrant, a torturer and a murderer. At the same time, Democrat James Eastland was calling Trujillo a good friend of the United States. As we know, Trujillo was assassinated in May of 1961.

As a footnote to that, Arturo Espaillat in September of 1962, accused the United States of assisting in the assassination of Trujillo. Specifically that the CIA provided the weapons via an American liason man who was living in the Dominican Republic at the time.

The following image I post as a curiosity. Far left is Douglas Dillon. He is receiving applause after making a speech at the Inter American Ecomonic and Social Conference in Punta del Estes, Uruguay 1961. On the far right is the unimpressed Che Guevara. Moments after the image was snapped, Guevara led a Cuban walk-out.

James

SECEDING FROM SECESSION:

GEOGRAPHIC FACTORS IN THE POLITICAL HISTORY

OF FRONTIER VIRGINIA AND WEST VIRGINIA, 1798-1863

BY

D. SHANET CLARK

\\\

ATLANTA

March 2006

New England Historical Association, Regis College April 2005

West Virginia,

with its fantastic vistas, surreal vegetation, and unusual topography—

along with its bear, bobcat, fox and beaver—

is today a living relic of the American frontier.

Rare old growth forests still stand along the high Allegheny ridgeline

as they did six, eight, ten generations ago, and they remain a beautiful

yet formidable force.

Many of the rural people resist the encroachments of modernity

and urbanization, the paradox of remote poverty linked with heavy industrial industry

haunt the values and expectations of the natives, both rich and poor, common and cosmopolitan.

West Virginia’s annals of geographic and geologic history,

and the study of Greater Virginia’s frontier geography since the seventeenth century,

reveal to us the strategic importance of West Virginia and the

Allegheny Mountain Ridge to the story of American history.

Nineteenth century American U.S. strategic forces turned upon a fulcrum (or pivot)

and this fulcrum was the mountainous Allegheny ridges of West Virginia,

a highlands region that protected the south- and west-bound Ohio River from

proximate Confederate control.

The history of West Virginia has been examined by many capable writers since the Civil War,

and the nineteenth century historiography of the new State stressed the

theme of loyal citizens showing loyalty to the Federal Union, this theme is especially strong in

the major work of the period by Union veteran and historian Theodore Lang,

West Virginia from 1861-1865.

In the early twentieth century this theme remained strong,

as shown by this passage by Charles Ambler in The Mountain State (1940):

“A barrier between pro-slavery and abolition, she refused to allow either to drive her to extremes

….Loyalty to the Union [during the 1860 election] was so intense that suggestions looking to its dismemberment appeared absurd.” The Civil War, and a strong Unionist point of view,

has always predominated in the written history of West Virginia;

U.S. regimental histories, unit histories, diaries and reports of the Adjutant General

are common from the 1860s to the present.

In the twentieth century every generation saw a new standard textbook history

of West Virginia emerge, and all four of the twentieth century textbooks are excellent.

James Morton Callahan wrote one in the 1920s and then

Charles Ambler’s comprehensive 1930s work was unsurpassed until the

1940 Works Project Administration history was published by the U.S. Government, Oxford University Press and the West Virginia State Board of Education.

The WPA textbook was followed in the late 1970s by the present day standard textbook,

written by Otis Rice, a distinguished scholar of the American frontier.

Two excellent general history books appeared in 1963,

the year of the West Virginia Centennial.

However, much of the history of West Virginia is anecdotal in content and non-standard in form.

Independent publishers such as The West Virginia Hillbilly’s editor Jim Comstock

provide a wealth of colorful details and authentic voices.

Recently West Virginia’s industrial history has been interpreted by a number of authors.

Coal mining and rapid industrialization have made their mark on the people and land of West Virginia and two recent scholarly works have grappled with this.

The brother-against-brother theme of a war-torn West Virginia has proved the most

durable topic in West Virginia history, however, and good scholars continue to investigate

the political polarity of the region during the Civil War. The recent consensus is that West Virginia was even more war-torn, and had greater Confederate sympathies than the Loyalist school had acknowleged.

Western Virginia occupied the center of the national demographic map for the first

six decades of the nineteenth century, and it was a central part of the American frontier

from the early 1700’s through the late antebellum era.

The most contested U.S. domestic issue in early nineteenth century was probably the

internal improvements debate. In 1817 President James Monroe found Federal capital

investment in postal and military roads to be both constitutional and politically palatable to a new

generation of national leaders, including Kentucky’s Henry Clay, the Speaker of the House.

Congress chartered the National Road, it stretched from Cumberland, Maryland to the Ohio River

and passed through present day West Virginia. This extension of the settlers’ westbound Potomac River

route formed a strategic and developmental mainway from Baltimore and the Federal

capital city inland to the Ohio River, the Old Northwest Territory and the Mississippi Valley.

Forty-five years later, West Virginia seceded from Confederate Virginia to join the Union as a new

State, and as a result of this wartime development the Federal government gained the

strategic defense of the National Road, secured the 1853 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad along a

parallel route, and added the Potomac River itself and the western Shenandoah

waters west of the Allegheny Ridge to the Union, all essential to the safety of the capital,

Washington, D.C., on the Potomac River between Virginia and Maryland.

With West Virginia, the Union firmed up control of the Border States.

Ohio, Maryland and Kentucky’s strategic security was assured and this

helped clear the Ohio River from the points north of Pittsburgh down to South Point, Ohio

and Kentucky. The Ohio River linked the Union and West Virginia completed the bloc of

loyal Border States.

West Virginia’s Allegheny Mountain watershed bears an important relationship to events

in Native American, French, and British eighteenth century history as well as to

these nineteenth century’s Union vs. Confederacy strategic realities.

The frontier, so important to U.S. history, is literally the ‘front tier,’ and the American

western frontier has deeply rooted geographic, cultural and strategic significance.

George Washington knew the crucial importance the old Virginia frontier area had

and he was familiar with the daunting aspects of trans-montagne transportation.

The French explorer known as LaSalle, or Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle (1643-1687)

developed his dreams of an empire in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, he made his way

to the Gulf from the Great Lakes and he was then named the French Governor

of greater Louisiana by the king, based on his exploits. Whether or not LaSalle

found the Ohio River in 1669 is not as important as France’s historical claim to the

Ohio Valley proper.

LaSalle, the founder of Chicago and St. Louis as European colonial outposts in the

seventeenth century, personified the sweeping frontier backdrop against which the

French and Indian and Revolutionary Wars were mapped. LaSalle’s actual routes are still

debated, but we know he ended up in Texas, and was killed in a mutiny heading north for Canada.

Because of LaSalle, the French laid claim to the Ohio Valley itself up until the Seven Years War,

when they gave it over to the British. Bienville, whose real name was Captain Pierre-Joseph Celeron de Blainville, explored the Ohio River and Ohio Valley in 1749.

He buried lead plates along the Ohio River, and these read:

A token of Renewal of possession heretofore taken of the aforesaid River Ohio, of all streams that fall into it and all lands on both sides to the source of the aforesaid streams, as the preceding kings of France have enjoyed, or ought to have enjoyed it, and which they have upheld by force of arms and by treaties, notably by those of Ryswick, Utrecht and Aix-la-Chapelle.

LaSalle’s theme of an independent southwestern American state,

essentially a brokered state with Spanish, French and possibly British and American intriguers participating, haunted the Ohio River Valley “and all streams that fall into it” for many years.

Aaron Burr developed a plot with Revolutionary War General James Wilkinson

and the Irish immigrant Harman Blennerhasset to establish rule over the old gulf coast.

This plot was hatched, deployed and snuffed out on Blennerhasset’s Island on the Ohio River,

within sight of the present day West Virginia shores.

This plot was not only a spectacular example of the strategic value of the Ohio River Valley,

but an enduring legacy of LaSalle and Bienville.

Similarly informing frontier history and geography,

the George Rogers Clark expeditions to take Kaskaskia, Cahokia and Vincennes

in the Revolutionary Was was part of this strategic history of the Ohio Valley,

and early ‘West’ Virginians participated in these efforts to secure the frontier.

General G.R. Clark and General Washington learned the importance of the

Ohio River Valley and its approaches (the related streams, trails, roads, gaps and portages)

while maintaining the integrity of Virginia and the American colonial interests.

The Early Years 1770-1784, Virginia Homesteads. " was said to have been the first white child born in Greenbriar. My father Dawson Wade, was an officer during the whole war. I think it was in 1770 that he went there. The people that first moved out into Greenbriar (sic) and spread over the western declivity of the Allegheny, took no precaution to form stations but settled all promiscuously throughout until the Indians became so bad . . ."

James Wade’s account is interesting on a number of counts,

but emphasis falls on the late date of frontier settlement in western Virginia. The Savage Grant, or

Fort Gay, on the Levisa River, was settled in 1796, and the Miami Shawnee American wars

were fought a few years later and miles farther west, in Ohio (then Northwest Territory).

Indian fighting in the trans-Allegheny was fierce in the 1780s and into the Washington Administrations.

Entire settlements, fortified homes, were destroyed by Indians and the settlers were often

sent falling back, with casualties, to the Blue Ridge valley, Staunton and the security of the Piedmont.

“Northeastern Woodsmen,” the Shawnee, the Illinois, the Miami, the Powhatan, the Delaware and the surviving Iroquois farmed, fished and hunted in the Ohio Valley.

The “Southeastern Farmers,” the Cherokee, Tuscarora, Catawba, Chickasaw and Creek Indians also farmed, fished and hunted from their towns south of the Appalachian crest. Both the Iroquois and Cherokee confederations would be found in the Kentucky and West Virginia buffer zone, but Gail Roberts and others divide the boundary between the Cherokee and the Shawnee nations right at the Allegheny Divide (in the late eighteenth century).

In 1785 the Potomac Company was incorporated to connect the Potomac River with the

Cheat River (of present day West Virginia) via a canal,

and at the same time the James River Company was incorporated to construct a canal from the James River to the Great Kanawha (this was never completed as a canal, only as a road).

George Washington was made President of both chartered companies,

he was interested in developing and securing the U.S. frontier,

then located between the Atlantic Piedmont and the Ohio Valley.

The National Road was completed from Cumberland, Maryland to Wheeling, Virginia

on the Ohio River in 1818, while the first commercial steamboat on the Ohio River dated to 1817.

The Staunton to Parkersburg Road from the Great Valley to the Ohio River was established

between 1823 and 1847. The Winchester to Parkersburg Road was completed in the 1830’s.

Germans, Scots, Irish and various pioneers migrated southwest from Baltimore, Philadelphia

or New England, and the western Virginians shared little of the Anglican Virginians’ tobacco plantation interests.

Good roads pushed through the interior hollows during the Clay-Jackson period, these developed and improved the economy. “We landed at Guyandot [Huntington] and proceded by stage the next morning to Charleston, on the Kanawha River. The road, all the way to the [White Sulfur] Springs, is marvelously good for so wild a part of the country.”

It is significant that the United States Census of 1820, 1830, 1840 and 1850 show the center of U.S. population moving west over time across present day West Virginia, like a slow wagon of popular political weight moving west from the colonial area into the Ohio Valley, and by 1860 the center of population moved into nearby Ohio and the northwest territory.

The completion of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad in the winter of 1852-1853 brought a quickening of market prosperity for the mixed agricultural families now less dependent on game. As hard pioneer conditions abated in much of western Virginia, due to new steam-powered river transports, wood- and coal-fired railroads, new roads and bridges, the region’s cultural and political establishment reached new heights. West Virginia was both made and unmade by the war.

River, rail and road transport had promised Victorian prosperity and this hope was tragically dashed in the

early 1860s.

The New River, the Kanawha River and other rivers in the Ohio-Mississippi-Gulf system;

the Cheat River, the Guyandotte, the Elk River, the Gauley River and the Greenbrier River

are all interesting for their effects on important trade, development and political boundary decisions in the French and Indian, Revolutionary and antebellum periods.

When Virginia seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy in 1861, the people of these western river valleys mobilized immediately for resistance and Union statehood. Western Virginia political leaders were recognized by the Lincoln Administration, and sat in the wartime House and Senate as loyalists, or “Reformed Virginia.” By 1863 a series of conventions and lop-sided elections had established the new state, West Virginia. Marked by its sprawling, irregular shape and mountainous terrain, West Virginia is poorly understood by many 19th century and Civil War historians, probably because no great armies ever fought there. Strategically, however, the severance of the northwest half of Virginia had great impact on the Confederacy and the Union. This minor general theater of campaign, West Virginia, had a major railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the river systems mentioned above.

As John Shaffer states:

Federal success in Western Virginia gave the north its most important victory of the first year of the war. A third of Virginia had been won to the Union, territory from which its Armies could be launched deep into the Confederacy. In the spring of 1862 the U.S. high command launched a 2-pronged attack into the Shenandoah Valley from Western Virginia.

A few battles and countless skirmishes cemented the new border, which carefully followed the high ridge of the Allegheny Mountains. For many miles the border shares its identity with the actual watershed between the Ohio River (or Mississippi Gulf-bound tributary waters) and the Chesapeake Bay (or the Atlantic Ocean-bound mountain headwaters). Here in the less populated cold and rugged hinterlands, both the Union and the Confederacy could tacitly utilize the high defensive wall of the Allegheny Ridge to their tactical and strategic advantage, or stalemate. But the Union gained more than the Confederacy. The Union gained the Ohio River itself, the Potomac River, the route of the old National Road and the 1853 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, plus the northern panhandle of old Virginia near Pittsburg, Harpers Ferry (strategic river/rail confluence) and the old buffalo cattle trail roadway across the mountains from Lewisburg into the Kanawha and Ohio Valleys, “the Midland Trail.” By November 1863 the U.S. General William A. Averell had defeated the Confederates at Droop Mountain and ended rebel control of the Greenbriar River Valley. This produced a considerable degree of harmony between the boundaries of the new state of West Virginia and the ground actually under the control of its new government.

The 20th century French historians Fernand Braudel and Marc Bloch understood that geographic factors and la longue duree might in some ways dominate human industry, culture and political behaviour. George Washington, Peter Jefferson and his son Thomas Jefferson were cartographic surveyors, and the history of the Colonial and Federal (eastern) frontier is one of competing land claims and jurisdictional issues in which an accurate knowledge of space, terrain and remote topography were of central importance. Human agency is restrained by physical factors in the environment—floating down a river is easy, climbing over a mountain is much more difficult. Braudel’s theory of geographic determinism is a good approach to the history of the trans-Allegheny region. Time passes in different cycles in the rural mountains, between rural small towns and the coal and chemical producing cities. The events horizon of recent history is formed by a longer pattern, and the Olympian (or Braudelian) view of the old frontier can show us these high mountain ridges and their swift river systems influenced history and divided the Colonial and Federal era frontier peoples, more or less neatly. Human agency is determined in some degree by forbidding or compelling geographic realities. The importance of the mountain watershed over the long term cannot be underestimated. It forms the background on which political conjunctures occur.

The Shawnee and the Cherokee are known to have used the border states of Kentucky and West Virginia as a buffer zone during the first European contact period. When the Proclamation Line of 1763 was promulgated by George III to end the westward frontier expansion into the freshly conquered northwest territories, the line followed the high ridge of the Alleghenies, from the southwest to the northeast, incorporating nearly the present border of West Virginia and Virginia. The Southern Methodists’ break from the Northern Methodists in 1844 also followed this line. The French, following up on LaSalle’s ambitious expeditions, laid claim to the Ohio tributaries from the River to their highest sources, i.e. the French claimed the West Virginia part of old Virginia in the 18th century up until 1763. One of the oldest and most simple maps of this region labels West Virginia and Kentucky simply as “Part of Florida,” showing a primitive Spanish claim. The political names Vandalia and Westsylvania were also superimposed, prematurely, on maps of western Virginia during the 18th century, these attempts at a new political entity in West Virginia failed until the Civil War made division of the Old Dominion possible.

The Ohio River is a very plain demarcation, but the high ridge is less manifest to the eye. Confronting the Allegheny massif, a forbidding front broken by gaps, western explorers were steered around present day West Virginia. The Warrior Road became the Great (Shenandoah) Valley Road and it trailed off to the southwest to pass through the Cumberland Gap as the Wilderness Road to the Bluegrass; here Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone’s route led rustic Virginians out of old Virginia, and into the Ohio Valley. The Shenandoah Valley, enduring the General Stonewall Jackson’s campaign theater, was not enrolled in the new state in 1863; the Great Valley, east of the high Allegheny watershed ridge but west of the mighty Blue Ridge, remained with the Confederacy and the Old Dominion, in its geographic and Atlantic-bound waters’ region. Just as the southwest Wilderness Road forced settlers south through the Cumberland Gap, the Allegheny massif also propelled all but the hardiest westbound explorers and frontier families north, avoiding the Alleghenies. Settlers went north through Cumberland, Maryland to Pittsburgh, where the mighty Ohio River would carry them southwest through the Ohio Valley, again bypassing western Virginia -- unless they disembarked on the left bank before reaching Kentucky, at present South Point, Ohio. The Cumberland Gap and the Wilderness Road route both worked in the other direction as well, during the Lewis and Clark expedition an envoy of Osage Indians led by Peter Choteau went “eastward from St. Louis to Vincennes, Louisville, Frankfort, Lexington, through the Cumberland Gap and then [north] down the Shenandoah to Winchester, and on to Shepherdstown [now W.Va.], Maryland, Harpers Ferry [now W.Va.] and Frederick [Md.] to Washington.”

The Potomac River was the original corridor into the ‘west,’ and by 1818 the National Road ran from Baltimore along the Potomac River to Cumberland, Maryland and on to Wheeling, on the Ohio River, in present day West Virginia. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad reached the same spot by 1853, along a similar route. Both the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky and the later National Road through Cumberland, Maryland to the Ohio Valley by-passed western Virginia and propelled settlers to points west, north and south of the trans-Allegheny Virginia hinterland. This is the central historic impact of the Allegheny High Ridge on U.S. history in the antebellum and colonial contact periods. The Allegheny ridge carried northeastern peoples southwest, where they would exhibit loyalty to the Union during the secession crisis.

Indeed, there were some early 19th century trails and a cattle roads into the trans-Allegheny, or today’s West Virginia. The Native American Midland Trail linked Staunton, in Augusta County Virginia in the southern Shenandoah Valley, with the Greenbrier and Kanawha River valleys in West Virginia. Between the Valley and the farmland near Kanawha Falls lay nearly impenetrable ravines, forested escarpments, the New River Gorge and the wild Gauley River rapids. Only animal trails, widened by cattle traders, carried frontier farmers through the southeast section of today’s West Virginia, until road building began in earnest in the 1830’s and 1840’s. Another rugged 19th century road led from Monterey to Beverly, but these were little more than trails until 1830. “The usual way of going to these lands, as well as those on the Great Kanawha as to those on the Ohio is by Fort Cumberland and thence down the Ohio River [via] Pittsburg, the distance being, by that route to the mouth of the Kanawha about 560 miles [from Mount Vernon] but of this 75 only is land transportation. The other route by Greenbrier and Kanhawa [sic] court house [route 60] to the same place, is a third shorter; and 80 miles of it water carriage – the other part is, as I am informed, a good waggon road.” So the old buffalo trail and cattle drovers’ route was passable (in summer), but Washington preferred the northern Ohio River route of 560 miles to the southern Allegheny Mountain route, which was only 370 miles or so in distance.

George Washington recognized the importance of linking the settled parts of Virginia to the rich farmland in the Ohio Valley during the late eighteenth century, “I aver, most seriously, that I wd not give my tract of 10,990 acres on the Kanawha for 50,000 acres back of it, and adjoining thereto, nor for any 50,000 acres of the common land of the country, which I have seen, back from the water and in one body.” Washington understood his river bottoms to be “extremely valuable” and worth five times the inland tracts. Washington states that common western Virginia land values in the Adams administration to be “half a dollar or less per acre.” Washington also owned large tracts of land in the Great Bend of the Ohio River and his family was prominent in the Harpers Ferry and Berkeley Springs part of what later would become West Virginia. Washington leased out lands, successfully, in the Fauquier, Loudon, Frederick and Berkeley Counties of Virginia up until his death. “[in] February 1796 George Washington advertised for sale four tracts of land on the Ohio River totaling 9,744 acres, four tracts on either bank of the Great Kanawha River just above its confluence with the Ohio, totaling 23,266 acres…”

With the completion of the National Road, then the James and Kanawha Turnpike [route 60] and finally the Staunton to Parkersburg Road the ‘west’ was settled and secured. West Virginia entered into a period of false expectations, little knowing the destruction that the 1860s would bring. A series of constitutional conventions shows that the western denizens held bitter feelings for the Richmond government long before the Confederacy Secession crisis of 1861. In the 1840s less than ten percent of University of Virginia students hailed from the western counties. Poll taxes discriminated against the low income Westerners and the tax on property included a bias in favor of slave-holding interests. “Eastern Virginia interests fought with all their power in the General Assembly to impeded [the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad from 1827-1852].” With state government offices and banks centered in Richmond the people of the west felt the sting of poor government services and high travel expenses, on top of tax and representation imbalances. The high remote hinterlands, a band of counties along and in the Allegheny highlands, sharply divided political opinion in the period before secession.

“Secession by Virginia would expose her western sections to devastation and ruin,” Waitman Willey had warned in December 1860. Soon the Governor of Virginia would lose the battle of relative character in the eyes of posterity. Governor Henry Wise, in Richmond to lead the Secession movement in Virginia “drew a pistol from his bosom and laid it before him, and proceeded to harangue the body in the most violent and denunciatory manner” on April 16, 1861. The convention on April 17, 1861 voted to dissolve the federal constitution within Virginia 85 to 55; the 47 delegates from the west voted (with four abstentions) eleven for Confederacy and thirty-two for Union, the status quo, loyalism, which was a dangerous position to take in 1861 in Richmond, Virginia.

Chester Hubbard quietly slipped out of the secession convention at Richmond and traveled warily back to Wheeling where he was chosen Colonel of the Home Guard and in a mass meeting Hubbard asked for military units to be formed. John Carlile spoke at a similar mass meeting in Clarksburg, and Campbell Tarr led a loyalist rally at Wellsburg. Tarr formed a Committee and asked U.S. Secretary of War Simon Cameron for 2,000 guns, which the committee received. A newspaper editor named Archibald Campbell, the publisher of the Wheeling Intelligencer, gained national prominence at this time. “Many historians are of the opinion that he should be termed “Father of West Virginia.” (Campbell’s speech at the 1880 Republican Convention prevented Ulysses S. Grant from being nominated for a third term, and this shows his national stature and persuasiveness). “The most influential champion of the Union in this State was the Wheeling Intelligencer which gained nation-wide attention under the editorship of Archibald Campbell.” Campbell himself is on record as stating “Northwestern Virginia will never submit to be wrenched from under the flag of the Federal Government by the secession traitors at Richmond”

In the wartime partition of Virginia into Union and Confederate halves, a constitutional contract formed between the Union government and the political leadership of the Trans-Allegheny at Wheeling. The contract extended to a region that the West Virginians could lead into statehood against the Old Dominion’s Richmond government, approximately fifty counties. The Union negotiated with the seceding Westerners, who conducted overwhelming polls against the Richmond governments. The fact that a State could not be formed without permission of its ‘mother’ State was dismissed by the reality of the Rebellion.

By the chances of war, the same men who desired to create the new State were wielding the entire political power of Virginia, and they could naturally grant permission to themselves to erect a State free from objectionable jurisdiction…the Pierpont government [the loyalist or “Reformed Virginia” government in Alexandria, near Washington, D.C.] adopted an ordinance on the 20th of August, 1861, providing ‘for the formation of a new State out of a portion of the territory of this State.

With the “Reformed Virginia” ordinance of permission, and the Convention and state electoral results in hand, the Wheeling Union loyalists met with an enthusiastic reception in wartime Washington. Congressman Benjamin Wade steered a Statehood Bill through the House, and Cabinet members William Seward, Salmon Chase and Edwin Stanton advised President Abraham Lincoln to sign it. Editor Archibald Campbell, Governor of “Reformed” Virginia Francis H. Pierpont and the eloquent U.S. Senator Waitman T. Willey are West Virginia’s native founders.

West Virginia at that time had a population of 373,321, farm values were about eight dollars an acre and there was about $12,000,000 worth of livestock (while $2,000,000 worth was annually slaughtered). One million dollars worth of wool, eight million bushels of corn, two million bushels of wheat and a million bushels of oats were also tallied. The new Constitution banned squatters and made some efforts to reform the tort and real estate laws that had retarded development and caused countless ugly lawsuits and feuds. Free public schools were started, and the new Constitution made tax and electoral policy more fair than any previous Richmond-dominated policy ever had. Voice votes were ended in favor of the paper ballot, the old county court system that had held power in eastern families’ hands was ended, “a supremely antiquated folly.”

On February 18, 1862 the Wheeling Convention approved the new constitution by unanimous vote. Later in 1862 the convention voted on the name of the new State. Augusta, the name of much of western Virginia’s ‘mother’ county, earned one vote. Allegheny, the mountain areas regional name, earned two votes. Western Virginia, the choice of grammatical sticklers, tied with Allegheny with two votes. Kanawha, the principal interior River system in the state, was the strongest challenger, with nine votes, while West Virginia carried the day with forty-four votes.

Two “founders” in fact foundered, in the eyes of history. John Hall of Mason County, the President of the Convention, had to resign before the reconvening after shooting the editor of the Point Pleasant West Virginia newspaper in the hiatus. John Carlile also squandered his fame. John Carlile, born near Winchester, had served as a Virginia State Senator from 1847 to 1851 and had sat in the U.S. House from 1855 to 1857. He had attended the 1850 Convention as a westerner. “Although destined to be the Judas of the new state movement, Carlile was at the height of his career during the crucial months of 1861.” By 1863, Carlile had become too conservative to break with the Old Dominion, and his House bill for statehood (which included counties the Wheeling Convention had not agreed to enroll) was replaced by one agreeable to chairman Wade, Senator Waitman Willey, “Reformed Virginia” Congressmen William G. Brown and Jacob B. Blair, and the general Wheeling State Convention’s consensus. The details of the committee work that led up to this embarrassing sidetrack are complex, but the final roll of counties was firm and Carlile was evidently trying to stop Statehood by submitting the “Grossedeutsch” bill, with fifteen extra slave-holding, high African-American population counties added into it. Hall and Carlile are remembered, but not honored.

Waitman T. Willey made a number of powerful pleas for statehood and organized the overall statehood effort between Washington and Wheeling. The final state-wide vote on March 26, 1863 yielded 28,321 in favor of the new West Virginia Constitution and Statehood -- with 572 opposed. The present day West Virginia jurisdictions of Calhoun County, Greenbrier County, Logan County, McDowell County, Mercer County, Pocahontas County, Raleigh County, Webster County and Wyoming County sent no returns from the polls, and they were represented in Wheeling by refugee community leaders. The convention was recalled in February 1863 to vote on an amended Constitution, which included emancipation of slaves, and on April 20, 1863 Lincoln issued a preliminary proclamation. Within sixty days the populace held elections for Senate, House, Judges of the Supreme Court of Appeals, new Circuit Court judges and other county offices. Sixty days from the first proclamation, with the positions filled, West Virginia officially became a State, on June 20, 1863.

Here it is necessary to quote Waitman Willey on the floor of the Senate:

“I desire to correct a misapprehension . . . it seems to be supposed that this movement for a new State has been conceived since the breaking out of the Rebellion, and was a consequence of it . . . [that] the effort was prompted simply by a desire to dissolve the connection between the loyal and disloyal sections of the state. Not so, sir. The question of dividing the State of Virginia, either by the Blue Ridge Mountains or by the Alleghenies has been mooted [put about] for fifty years . . . it has frequently been agitated with such vehemence as to seriously threaten the public peace. It has been a matter of constant strife and bitterness in the legislature of the State. The animosity existing at this time between the North and South is hardly greater than what has at times distinguished the relations between east and West Virginia, arising from a diversity of interests and geographical antagonisms. Indeed, so incompatible was the union of the territory lying west of the Allegheny Mountains with the territory lying east . . . so long ago as 1781 several of the States insisted that Virginia should include in her Act of Cession all her trans-Allegheny territory, making the Allegheny Mountains her western, as they were her natural, boundary . . . [Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland] retained latent views confining Virginia to the Allegheny Mountains.

Union arms had simultaneously secured the bulk of the state to the Union militarily, and by June 23, 1863 the new State had full status in the Union. The Trans-Allegheny was joined to a secure corridor of eastern counties and a smaller northbound salient. The “Eastern Panhandle” of the new state secured the Potomac River and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad access to Washington, while the “Northern Panhandle” protected the industrialized ironworks at Weirton and Wheeling and also the Union’s southbound Ohio River. So both the eastern and northern irregularities are seen as wartime strategic corridors, essential to the Union’s transportation needs, the Ohio River, the Potomac River, The Ironworks of Wheeling/Weirton and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad beds were all secured by the new arrangement of loyal and confederate counties in what was once Virginia.

Marked by a few high mountain gaps, the new border formed a defensive wall, which was amenable to the South after they were pushed out, and it formed a defensive wall for the Union forces in West Virginia, as well. As a strategic conquest, the West Virginia counter-secession must rank with CSA General Joseph E. Johnson’s precipitous retreat from northern Virginia in 1861 or Sherman’s March in 1864.

The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad played an important part in West Virginia and Civil War history. Running from Baltimore to Wheeling, 379 miles, the B & O represented a $31,000,000 (northern) investment. It had twelve repair stations, thirty three repair shops, ninety-eight water stations, thirty telegraph stations (with three lines of wire) and 12,694 feet of tunnel inside its 14 tunnels. With 5,000 officers and employees, over 4,000 cars and 238 engines, the strategic meaning of the B & O was always on the minds of Union and Confederate commanders—most critically, the 186 bridges had to be protected (or destroyed, as the case may be).

Numerous historians have noted that the fate of the Border States decided the war, and this new Border State marked a significant strategic conquest on the part of the north, as it secured the Ohio River, its Virginia tributaries, the iron works at Wheeling, much of the Potomac River System and the Baltimore and Ohio rail beds. Of course vulnerable bridges and towns along the B&O were raided and West Virginia towns such as Martinsburg, Romney and Harper’s Ferry changed hands repeatedly, but the borders held to the Union’s advantage. Later the action came to center more on points south and east, after the Battle of Gettysburg, but in 1862 decisive battles at Rich Creek, Scary and Droop Mountain were important in clearing most Confederates from West Virginia.

The highest ridges were linked to encompass the Ohio River waters inside the new State, and that line marked the watershed of the Atlantic Ocean versus the Gulf of Mexico runoffs; south and east of the line the rainwater runs through the Greater James and Rappahannock systems, while north and west of the watershed border line the New River and the Kanawha waters rolled down to the Ohio River, then into the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. Thus, the politically stable Atlantic Northeast was joined to a massive inland Ohio Valley region. The Northeast and Old Northwest Territory States ‘enrolled’ the south bank of the Ohio River (i.e., West Virginia and Kentucky) into its Union government. Radically dissenting political forces, in the heat of an unprecedented Civil War, decided upon the watershed at the high Allegheny dividing ridge to be the ultimate extent of the new Federal State.

County by county, the Union power was strongest along the Ohio and points north and was contested more convincingly inland, upland, and to the south. The new State’s founders rejected counties lying now in Virginia, counties along the border and in the Shenandoah Valley. The West Virginia founders knew that Secessionist interest was stronger in these counties, which were closer to Richmond and had greater concentrations of pure Virginia descendants. The number of slaves and free blacks in these Valley counties were also an issue. Waitman T. Willey and the other founders limited the state to the trans-Allegheny counties with strong white majorities. Lincoln’s government sent the State bill back to the Wheeling Convention demanding an emancipation clause be placed in the new West Virginia Constitution, and this was added before the final vote then which led to Lincoln’s signature. The final settlement of emancipation, black voting and ex-Confederate’s rights was settled by the Flick Amendment to the West Virginia Constitution in 1869. By allowing blacks and ex-Confederates to vote, the Flick amendment hastened the Resurgence of the Democrats, or Redeemers to State political power in the 1870s.

Ultimately, geography determines political junctures because of strategic imperatives inherent in the topography. By late 1862 the Union could realistically lay military claim to the high ridge of the Alleghenies and the Ohio Valley of old Virginia, and the differences in settlement patterns, labor and crop approaches, informed by the terrain, reached their conclusion in the new State. As John Shaffer shows clearly, the west Virginians of 1861-1863 who joined the Confederacy as individuals had a high proportion of Virginia native ancestors, while the loyalist had northern roots.

The unique shape of West Virginia, its geometrically irregular and sprawling non-compact form actually follows from common sense geographic principles. Strategically the new State aided the Union by: securing the defense of Washington D.C. and the Potomac River; in the defense of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the National Road and the Chesapeake and Ohio canals along the old Virginia-Maryland border; it cleared the Ohio from north of Pittsburg down to South Point Ohio, while it firmed up Southern Ohio and Southern Pennsylvania’s situation, relative to Maryland and Kentucky, the true Border States, and the new State meant the loss of steel producing of Weirton/Wheeling and the Pittsburg area of north Virginia salient to the Confederacy. The southern border provided a wall of defense. The three concepts of rivers, high watersheds and strategic corridors explain the panhandles and ‘teapot’ shape. Armed with geographic, climate, elevation, rail, road and river topographic facts, the political and social events leading up to counter-secession and West Virginia statehood can be understood.

Notes on Sources

Hi James,

In reading some information Bruce Campbell Adamson published in "Oswald's Closest Friend: The George DeMohrenschildt Story", I came accross some interesting items:

• The last person to see DeM alive was a maid in the house. She witnessed him eating lunch (toast and coffee) roughly an hour before he allegedly killed himself. Apparently he didn't want to go on to the next life on an empty stomach.
  

• THe White Russian had a healthy appetite for life, his travels around the world during the Cold War were legend, he filmed in the Amazon, walked across the Yucatan........healthy guy, like John Paul I.........
  
• Neither the maid nor the cook heard a shotgun blast.
  

• there was no blast when the witness expired
  
• Apparently Adamson has heard the recording of the gunsot that is on the tape. He states that its not very loud and that it sounds like someone slapping a ruler down on a desk.
  

• rapping the knuckles
  
• Adamson also claims that several "beeps" can be heard on the tape. He has identified the beeps as coming from the home's security system as people enter and exit. Of course, these could simply be a result of the comings and goings of the staff.
  

• tape reproduction marks
  
• The shotgun was a 20-gauge with a 28" double-barrel.
  

• Epstein said DeM seemed fine at the end of their interview session and did not appear to be under any stress. The maid in the house stated that old George was acting somewhat "mad" that afternoon however, allegedly muttering the word "pussy" over and over again in reference to a cat that didn't really exist.
  

• The Baron was weird, but not suicidal in the late 1970s during the House investigation
  
• There was no exit wound, which seems odd at point-blank range. But perhaps someone more educated in such matters can comment on the liklihood of this.
  

• A 20 gauge shotgun blast at close range should have exit wounds
  
• Mary Ferrell's granddaughter married George's grandson, Curtis Lee Taylor (now if Curtis were related to Max Taylor, we'd really have something- but alas, he is not).
  If Tony Curtis married Mary Farrell his son in law would be Will Farrell, says Rip taylor
  

• Adamson states that Barry Goldwater and Walter Jenkins belonged to the same 999th Air Force Reserve Squadron. He also claims that Jenkins set up two meetings (4/18/63 and 5/20/63) between DeM and LBJ.
  

• good material
  
• Ruth Forbes Paine (Ruth Hyde Paine's mother) lived on the same street as Prescott Bush in 1924.
  

Significant texas dynasty material

Haroldson Hunt and Clint Murchison are in my copy of C Wright Mills "POWER ELITE" from 1956.......

Given DeMohrenschildt's ties to George Bush (the then DCI), Oswald, and the Intelligence community, its certainly an ironic coincidence that he committed suicide just as he was being interviewed for a book on Oswald, working on a manuscript for his own book, and about to be called to testify before the HSCA. Yep, sure are a lot of coincidences when it comes to this case.

Best to all ___

Typical thread, good stuff FLOODED OUT by reactionary nitwits.

I was under the impression that James and John refer to these historical characters

as "lookalikes" as a legal euphimism, obviously we believe these historic people were

there in Dealey, we have the photos and the internal logic of the combination of them there then.

Of course we use the term lookalikes so we dont' get sued for libel, etc..............

Great Thread

So R. G. Storey was a prosecutor at Nuremberg, an official in the

American Occupation of Germany, de-Nazification and PAPERCLIP records keeper,

his wife was H.L. Hunt's bridesmaid and he turns up in the cell with

JACK RUBY and EARL WARREN.................

No conspiracy ?

Some stuff I forgot to add regarding Storey.

He was present when Earl Warren questioned Jack Ruby in Dallas. Also Storey lived at 3525 Turtle Creek.

Someone correct me if I am wrong, but didn't Gen. Walker live at 4011 Turtle Creek? For those residents of Dallas, roughly how far apart would those addresses have been?

Warren and Storey below. This image was snapped just after the Ruby interview.

FWIW.

James

Taken from "The Dallas Morning News" Friday, June 7, 1946

page 6

BEST BIB AND TUCKER KEPT BUSY

Best bonnets and prettiest dresses are being worked overtime this week

going to parties for brides-to-be.

A rehearsal dinner will be given Friday evening by Mr. and Mrs. H. L.

Hunt, Mr. and Mrs. Al Hill and Mr. and Mrs. Loyd Sands at the Hunt home on Lawther

Drive in honor of Miss Jeanne Gannon and John Stuart Hunt, who will be married

Saturday evening.

Complimenting Miss Mary Hillman, bride-elect of Robert Heidrick, Miss

Susan Diggie will entertain with a kitchen shower Friday at her home, 5101 Swiss

Avenue. Miss Hillman has announced that her bridal attendants will be Miss

Margaret Nell Carlisle, maid of honor; Mrs. Vernon Coe, sister of the bride-elect,

matron of honor; Mrs. R. G. Storey, Jr., Mrs. Charles F. Heidrick Jr., of

Beaumont, Miss Lenora Rose and Miss Houston Tripp, bridesmaids. Mr. Heidrick's

best man will be his brother, Charles F. Heidrick Jr. Ushers will be Vernon Coe,

Thomas Hanlon of Scarsdale, N.Y., James Tollison of Amarillo, Harry Underwood of

Lubbock and Ronnie B. Cousin Jr. of Austin.

President Jimmy Carter’s 1978 Executive

Order 12036, FISA and Congressional Oversight:

Chronic Structural Issues in 20th Century U.S. Intelligence

Introduction:

Like any other discipline, the pertinent demand for History is to ask the appropriate question—pose the important problems. What is wrong with U.S. Intelligence? Is there too much congressional and public oversight? Not enough oversight? Is U.S. Intelligence too centralized? Too de-centralized? Are there too many spies? Not enough spies? Too much data? Not enough data? These are the quandaries. Who is in charge? Are they competent? Do they enjoy our confidence? If the problems are kept secret, are good answers likely to emerge? How much should people be told, and who should decide what is classified as top secret? Deep philosophical questions of political philosophy clash in this arena, in the running debate over intelligence and the U.S. national security agencies and departments. In politics the central questions are usually ‘who benefits?’ and ‘who will be held responsible?’ To probe the murky recesses of U.S. national security and intelligence history is to address these questions of public policy -- while impeded by structural walls of silence and misinformation.

Public confidence and institutional competence are the goals of the reform effort, and ideology will drive the debate. Security and public accountability will be achieved, if at all, via debate, the exposure of unpleasant facts, political leadership and ultimately electoral support for appropriate changes. Without a parliamentary system, the U.S. Executive Branch is free from many of the challenges and constraints facing a Prime Minister. The general trend of 20th century U.S. political power was the gain in executive power, the concentration of power into the White House. The secret agencies (usually cited as fifteen in number) and the classified Presidential Cabinet staff paper system emerged at the expense of the individual, local, county, state, regional, legislative and judicial prerogatives. The events of September 11th 2001 and the two subsequent wars brought urgency to the debate over U.S. intelligence reform, and while the issue is largely historical in nature, the constitutional problems are contested, contemporary and chronic. Compelling, concise and coherent approaches are called for in the interrogation of the diplomatic and intelligence records.

Body:

In the 1960s and 1970s images and texts regarding Vietnam, Watergate and secret programs like the MK-ULTRA—i.e. intelligence failures—were more tightly limited, distribution of damning information was slower, and de-classification more calcified. Nevertheless, largely through congressional action and the activities of responsible national investigative reporting, certain reforms were put forward. The failure of the 1970s reforms to address the chronic structural problems in the secret agencies becomes clearer every day. Their byzantine relationships were only complicated and no real power relationships were simplified. However, in the 1970s the Senate (and to a much lesser degree, the House) were brought into the policy-making for and oversight over the U.S. intelligence community in a more meaningful way as President Ford, the Church Select Committee and the Carter administration placed limits on the runaway U.S. intelligence.

The National Security Advisor and his staff expanded their power, the Defense Intelligence Agencies and the DIA maintained autonomy, and the National Security Agency remained autonomously linked to both the CIA and Defense Department. Executive orders limiting the activities and defining the scope of the agencies were issued by both Ford and Carter. President Carter also signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980, which then marked the end of the 1970s era of investigational oversight and relative transparency.

The historiography of recent U.S. Intelligence history falls into six categories. There are scholarly overviews, descriptive tomes, and think-tank projects, which are supplemented by more or less self serving memoirs, U.S. and foreign government documents and a large spectrum of critical non-standard works. Jeff Richelson of the National Security Archives offers a uniquely valuable descriptive digest of U.S. Intelligence. His very dry text contains a vast laundry list of secret branches and Byzantine corridors within the U.S. intelligence community. The sixteen pages of acronyms and short descriptive paragraphs gives an overview of the structures and functions occurring within U.S. Intelligence, and this is required reading in the field. His exhaustive compendium is backed by a voluminous and complete apparatus, and these notes display an annotation for almost every line of published text, comment, fact or declassified item on record which concerns U.S. intelligence. While the notes are pregnant with scandal, the text of Richelson’s book is less than critical of the status quo.

Critics abound, but legitimate academic voices are more difficult to find. Loch K. Johnson, in a series of books on U.S. intelligence, offers syllabus-quality narratives and interpretations from the point of view of the critical insider. Johnson points to “pathologies of the intelligence cycle” where analysts are severed from their sources. He outlines the chronic problem the relationship between the overseas ‘Chiefs of Mission’ (Ambassadors, i.e., State Department people) and the CIA’s own equally powerful ‘Chiefs of Station.’ Readers of Johnson become familiar with the chronic structural problems between the Intelligence Directorate and the Operations Directorate, (analysis versus espionage). Johnson looks sensitively at campus CIA connections to academics and he draws interesting graphic charts concerning the secret agencies’ public responsiveness, feedback cycles, oversight, and costs and tasking.

Memoirs are an important source of information in this field; many former CIA Directors have published autobiographies. They usually offer valuable insight into the activities of the intelligence community, and definitely show the paradox and tensions inherent in using intelligence in a representative system of government. Stansfield Turner’s book was important in my research and the writings of William Colby and Richard Helms are very valuable, as are Robert M. Gates’s and James Woolsey’s books.

I found the best single source on U.S. Intelligence policy to be Frank J. Smist’s Congress Oversees the United States Intelligence Community 1947-1989. Here is a calm but critical narrative paired with incisive analysis. Smist, a political scientist, applies an analytical model that is valuable. He distinguishes “Investigative Oversight” from “Institutional Oversight,” and shows the strengths and weaknesses of each. Georgia Democrat Richard B. Russell, who served in the Senate from 1933 until 1971, dominated the period of institutional oversight, which ran from the passing of the National Security Act of 1947 until the Church or Senate Select Committee was formed in early 1975.

Richard Russell chaired both the Senate Armed Services Committee CIA subcommittee and the Senate Appropriations Committee CIA subcommittee, and he defeated a 1953 attempt by Mike Mansfield to create a joint Senate-House Intelligence Committee. U.S. Senators Margaret Chase Smith, Carl Hayden and Leverett Saltonstall also had twin CIA subcommittee seats, and Russell embodied “institutional oversight.” In the lower house a similar conservatism prevailed; the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (1949-1953 and 1955-1965) Carl Vinson and his allies “were strong advocates for the intelligence community and presidential leadership in foreign affairs … in the closed door oversight conducted by these committees, secrets did not leak” Both Loch Johnson and Frank Smist point to early 1975 as the period where investigative or oppositional oversight in Congress replaced institutional or non-critical oversight. Although Gerald Ford (and his Vice President Nelson Rockefeller) made some progress in reining in the more blatant excesses of the CIA and other intelligence agencies via Executive Order, deeper reform only came with the election of Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale in 1976 and the subsequent enactment of Church Committee recommendations within a Democratic majority House and Senate. President Gerald Ford’s progress was limited by the presence of his National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, a Nixon administration veteran who was not as eager to expose recent unconstitutional acts, or limit national security executive prerogatives.

The Carter administration’s foreign policy has a mixed record, best known for its initiation of the Panama Canal Treaty and the brokering of the Camp David Accords, and its response to the 1970’s Oil Crisis and U.S. Embassy hostage crisis in Iran. Another significant foreign policy thread runs through the mid-1970s, however. With a Democratic majority in both the House and Senate, Jimmy Carter’s Administration was able to address the intelligence agencies’ severe credibility crisis. This crisis stemmed from the exposure of some of the excesses of the Vietnam War era, including foreign assassinations, domestic spying, drug experimentation by the CIA and rampant domestic wiretapping by the FBI and NSA. Carter followed up on the work of the Senate Select Committee, the “Church Committee” where his Vice President, Walter Mondale of Minnesota, had served before the election of 1976. On January 24, 1978 Carter issued Executive Order 12036 as one of his second annual budget and State of the Union policy initiatives, and he partially re-organized the intelligence community via this executive order.

Giving a special role to his Vice-President in strengthening oversight of intelligence community, Carter followed in the steps of his immediate predecessor, Republican Gerald Ford, of Michigan. Ford had depended on his Vice President, former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, to seriously begin the executive branch intelligence community reforms demanded by the public, the courts and Congress. Rockefeller’s recommendations to Ford, grudgingly supported by Henry Kissinger, laid the groundwork for the more sweeping re-structuring of the intelligence community carried out by Jimmy Carter. There are many parallels and continuities between the Ford and Carter administration reforms in the mid-1970s. President Reagan also appears to have given intelligence portfolio functions to his Vice President, the former CIA Director G.H.W. Bush, despite his claims of being “out of the loop.” Any Vice President is statutorily linked to intelligence oversight by sitting on the National Security Council with the President, Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense.

In brief, the Carter intelligence reform was unable to solve the structural problem of the control of U.S. intelligence, and the “CIA re-chartering” bogged down in the late 1970’s, mainly on the issue of greater congressional oversight, or how many ‘outsiders’ would have access to the budgets, technology and personnel data of the fifteen secret agencies. At the time (post-Watergate and post-Vietnam) the CIA was unable to muster enough Congressional and Presidential support for the needed expansion of their powers over the NSA and the NRO satellite agency, although such changes were discussed. Certainly signals intelligence (SIGINT) ascended over human intelligence (HUMINT) in the 1970’s reforms, and ground agents were de-emphasized in favor of technical intelligence priorities. Stansfield Turner fired over 800 espionage case officers in one day. Although Carter Executive Order 12036, the FISA and the Senate Bill 400 were all important reforms, larger questions of counterintelligence sharing between the FBI, CIA and NSA were left unaddressed, and the power of the CIA director to control the other fifteen agencies remained weak, as the Carter White House and point man Lloyd Cutler retreated from investigatory oversight progressive reforms to the older Cold War institutional oversight norms.

Intelligence history, like its related discipline, diplomatic history, is a frustrating and highly restricted field. There are limited records available, they are almost all government documents, and they hide more than they divulge. Archivists at the Carter Library in Atlanta were helpful in my research, though, and they shared unmarked boxes of Presidential National Security Directives with me as well as extremely useful records originating from the Ford Presidential Library in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now, with attorney Lloyd Cutler and the CIA/NSA re-organization plans back in the national headlines, I am beginning to feel that history may indeed repeat itself.

Executive Order 12036:

The Presidential Archives at the Carter Library have de-classified files from the Ford Administration and these shed light on Carter’s Executive Order 12036 and his efforts to reign in the intelligence community. In December 1974, after four months in office, President Ford received an unprecedented letter in which his Director of Central Intelligence William Colby confirmed a story published by Seymour Hersh in the New York Times. “I have already briefed the chairman of the Armed Services Committee” CIA Director Colby states, “some CIA employees . . . misinterpreted” orders and engaged in “unauthorized entry of the premises, breaking and entering, electronic surveillance . . . telephone taps of two newspaper reporters in 1963 and physical surveillance of five reporters in 1971 and 1972.” The Seymour Hersh New York Times articles immediately served as the final catalyst for Senate Majority Leader Mansfield to force through a Senate Select Committee, and both Frist and Johnson point to January 1975 as the turning point from the institutional to the investigatory oversight model.

This Christmas Eve letter was a bombshell for the un-elected President, and it was followed on Christmas Day by a sensitive, now declassified, memo from National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger to Gerald Ford in which Kissinger briefs the President on the issue: {{{quote}}}

A program to identify possible foreign links with American dissident elements was established within the CIA’s office of Counterintelligence in August 1967 . . . to determine whether U.S. dissidents were receiving support from outside the U.S.

Later in 1967 the CIA’s activity was integrated into an interagency program. In December 1970 an Interagency Evaluation Committee was established under the coordination of John Dean. . . . CIA continued its counter intelligence interests in possible foreign links with American dissidents . . . I have discussed these activities with him [DCI Colby] and must tell you that some few of them clearly were illegal, while others – though not technically illegal – raise profound moral questions. A number, while neither illegal nor morally unsound, demonstrated very poor judgment.

The response to the Hersh article and other investigative journalism, and to the Colby and Kissinger admissions, and to the pressure from the Senate and House was all co-ordinated in the Ford White House by the Vice President, Nelson Rockefeller. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter’s two related Executive Orders both have their roots in this policy option memorandum. It is dated September 18, 1975 and signed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, James Schlesinger, Phil Buchen and James Lynn, Ford’s inner circle of West Wing advisors: {{quote}}

Background: One of the most serious consequences of Watergate was that the intelligence community became a topic for Congressional investigations, as well as public and press debate. Starting with CIA links to Watergate, the issues have expanded to: CIA involvement in domestic spying and foreign assassination plots - FBI violations of civil liberties, - NSA monitoring of the telephone conversations of American citizens . . . insufficient control by Congress of the intelligence community purse strings and insufficient knowledge of its operations . . . poor management and control of intelligence community activities and resources, and poor performance of the community in specific instances. [Ford was presented with policy options:] Where in the Executive Branch should responsibility for oversight of the propriety of intelligence activities be placed? Should you issue an Executive Order restricting the activities of the CIA or the intelligence community as a whole . . . or a more comprehensive Executive Order which also incorporates a full statement of positive duties and responsibilities for the agencies . . . what actions are appropriate at this time to improve your supervision and control of the intelligence community? . . . Option 1. Extend the role of the PFIAB [President’s Foreign Intelligence and Advisory Board] to include oversight, (or) approve Option One but rename PFIAB, . . . retain PFIAB and create a new body solely for oversight . . . Second [option], issue an Executive Order restricting the collection of information on American citizens . . . [to restrict the CIA, all agencies, or all agencies except the FBI in a] comprehensive Executive Order . . . What actions are appropriate at this time to improve your supervision and control of the Intelligence community? Option – give formal authorization of the NSC Intelligence Committee to evaluate the programs and product of the intelligence community.

The importance of this 12-page policy paper to Jimmy Carter’s efforts cannot be underestimated. Walter Mondale, Zbigniew Brezhinski and Carter’s top staff arrived at nearly identical conclusions in 1977 before issuing Executive Order 12036, imposing much more stringent controls on the agencies than Ford had done in Executive Order 11905.

Carter would have trouble in the three years following the issuance of Executive Order 12036. Although the Order carried the force of law, the parallel legislation concerning Congressional oversight of intelligence and a new CIA Charter would bog down into a sustained deadlock. Although Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 and the Intelligence Oversight law in 1980, Carter Staff Counsel Lloyd Cutler’s boxes, marked “CIA Charter” show a loss of momentum in their dedication to further reforms. Most notably, Defense Secretary Harold Brown, Admiral Turner at CIA and Admiral Inman at NSA combined to sustain the status quo in overall Defense/CIA/NSA relations.

Controlled by a moderate Republican untainted by recent assassinations, Watergate or Vietnam scandals, the Rockefeller Commission moved parallel to the Church Senate Committee to establish controls on the runaway intelligence agency. The Rockefeller Commission’s report caused Henry Kissinger to add his voice to those urging sweeping reforms on Ford. Kissinger states: {{quote}}

The Rockefeller Commission was charged with investigating and making recommendations with respect to allegations that the CIA engaged in illegal spying on American citizens . . . propose revisions in the National Security Act which would clarify CIA’s authority by explicitly limiting it to foreign intelligence matters – this could also be accomplished by Executive Order . . . to prohibit improper domestic activities of CIA concerning US citizens, legislation to strengthen CIA’s internal organization and management structure including establishing a second Deputy Director position [and] stronger penalties for violations by present or former CIA employees . . . chang[ing] Executive Branch procedures on oversight of intelligence community and white House contact with CIA and a stronger role for the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.

Ford promulgated Executive Order 11905 in the spring of 1976, and he took steps in these directions, but Carter’s election signaled that more sweeping intelligence controls were coming. David Aaron, Mondale’s staff adviser on foreign affairs and former counsel to the Church Committee organized the Carter White House reform efforts, which culminated in Executive Order 12036. (Mr. Aaron’s papers have not yet been declassified, but Carter’s revamping of the intelligence community is traceable in the Carter Library’s papers from National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezhinski and Staff Counsel Lloyd Cutler’s desks).

Although the Carter Administration would never reach consensus with the Democratic Congress on Congressional investigational oversight of the intelligence agencies or develop a new charter for the fifteen intelligence agencies, on Tuesday, January 24, the White House did issue Executive Order 12036, which placed explicit controls and limits on the intelligence community and re-organized the lines of responsibility. On Friday, January 20th, 1978 President Carter received a large package in his in-box from his National Security Advisor ‘stage-managing’ the signing of the Executive Order. This memo is a briefing for the signing ceremony for E.O. 12036. Brezhinski tells Carter:{{quote}}

This executive order is the product of the most extensive and highest-level review of our foreign intelligence activities ever conducted through the NSC system and an unprecedented dialogue with Congress. It builds on the experience under President Ford’s Executive Order 11905 and is intended to provide a foundation for the drafting and enactment by Congress of statutory charters. The Order ensures that U.S. government foreign intelligence and counterintelligence activities are conducted in full compliance with our laws and are consistent with broader national security policies. . . [it will] establish effective oversight of the direction, management and conduct of foreign intelligence activities . . . clarify the authority and responsibility of the DCI and the several departments and agencies that have foreign intelligence and counterintelligence responsibilities . . .the Senate Select Committee is proud of its significant contribution and its recently formed counterpart, the House Select Committee, while not as much involved, wants to publicly associate itself with the new Executive Order . . . Emphasize the unprecedented degree of constructive dialogue with the Congressional oversight committees. Stress the fact that in this very sensitive area the Administration and Congress are working in harmony – provide the Congressional leaders with an opportunity to make remarks for the record. (underlining in the original)

The President’s address is included in this file, and here he announces the basic changes brought by Executive Order 12036 in four parts. In part one, Carter announced that the Policy Review Committee and the Special Coordination Committee, standing committees of the National Security Council, “will, short of the President, provide the highest level review and guidance for the policies and practices of the Intelligence Community.” The PRC would henceforth be chaired by the DCI, Admiral Stansfield Turner, and the SCC would be chaired by the National Security Advisor himself, Zbigniew Brezhinski. The second part of Carter’s speech is more immediately of interest. He stated this groundbreaking doctrine, “the authorities and responsibilities of all departments, agencies and senior officials engaged in foreign intelligence and counterintelligence are being made public. Those implementing directives which must remain classified for security reasons will be made available to the appropriate Congressional oversight committee.”

Part Two of the President’s speech explained, yet glossed over, a Byzantine struggle over turf between the Secretary of Defense Harold Brown and the DCI, Stansfield Turner. Carter said, “the new Order implements my earlier decision to centralize under the DCI the most important national intelligence management functions – collection requirements, budget control, and analysis – while operational and support activities are left unchanged and decentralized.” This opaque statement only makes sense in light of the New York Times article of 1/23/78 and other secondary sources. DCI Turner, pushing for both improved organization and personal power, had pressed for day-to-day CIA control of the Defense Department’s powerful intelligence agencies, the National Reconnaissance Office (spy satellites) and the National Security Agency (signals intelligence, wire-tapping and code-breaking). Admiral Turner’s efforts ran counter to the vision of Dr. Brezhinski and Vice President Mondale. They were engineering a popular limitation on the CIA’s power, by changing its charter and its oversight boards. Carter and Admiral Turner had agreed on some additional management duties for the DCI (see Presidential Directive NSC-17, below) but the Admiral was never given control of the NRO and NSA, two major intelligence agencies under the Secretary of Defense. Turner never seemed to understand that the new Executive Order was designed to limit the CIA and control it, not to give it greater power and independent authority. The behind the scenes struggle is glossed over, but Carter summarized the final decision; the DCI was given more management and policy input, but the “operational and support activities are left unchanged and decentralized.”

In Part Three of his address, Carter expresses the dilemma of executive intelligence actions in a representative republic. {{quote}}

Our intelligence agencies have a critical role to play in collecting and analyzing information important to our national security interests and, on occasion, acting in direct support of major foreign policy objectives. It is equally important however, that the methods employed by these agencies meet the Constitutional standards protecting the privacy and civil liberties of US persons and are in full compliance with the law . . . a major section of the Executive Order is devoted entirely to setting forth detailed restrictions on intelligence collection, covert activities in support of foreign policy objectives, experimentation, contracting, assistance to law enforcement authorities, personnel assigned to other agencies, indirect participation in prohibited activities, dissemination and storage of information and a prohibition on assassinations. The FBI’s intelligence activities no longer have a blanket exception to these restrictions . . . [and there will be] a greatly enhanced role for the Attorney General.

In Part Four Carter announces the formation of an Intelligence Oversight Board and instructs the DCI “to report to the Congressional Intelligence Committees in a complete and prompt manner.” Carter concluded the speech by stating “this Executive Order . . . assur[es] the American people that their intelligence agencies will be working effectively for them and not infringing on their legal rights.”

In an attached memo, Brezhinski specifically reminds the President to call up to the podium Senate Select Committee members Daniel Inouye, Birch Bayh, Dee Huddleston and Congressmen Boland and Murphy of the House Select Committee. An unprecedented Congressional/Executive agreement on U.S. Intelligence reform was acted out that day.

One final memo in this file sheds light on the character and policies of two major intelligence community figures, Admiral Stansfield Turner and Attorney General Griffin Bell. Chief Speech Writer James Fallows and Griffin Smith wrote a memo for Carter concerning the recommendations of Turner and Bell for Carter’s speech.{{quote}}

ADMIRAL TURNER suggests –“That you acknowledge this Executive Order was produced by close cooperation between the Secretary of Defense and the DCI.” – “that you indicate your support for Admiral Turner’s management of the agency ‘which you suggested earlier’” and “that you express hope that the charter legislation will move smoothly, with Congress refraining from placing too much detail in the charters [as] ‘we need some flexibility in intelligence operations and oversight.’” [caps in original]

Turner here shows much of the problematic character he is often pictured as having. In his first request, he wants the President to re-characterize the fierce wrangling between the CIA and the DOD as “close co-operation” and then he suggests that Carter (to paraphrase) ‘remind them I’m doing a good job,’ and ‘tell Congress not to tie my hands.’ Turner was probably not the best individual to work within the new Mondale/Brezhinski/Congress re-charter program for intelligence. This note shows the pettiness of Turner, especially when contrasted to the high-mindedness of the second half of the memo, which indirectly quotes Attorney General Griffin Bell. Bell suggested that the President announce: {{quote}}

Constitutional rights of privacy and civil liberties are fully protected by this Order . . . requiring [the Attorney General] to set procedures that ensure compliance with the law, protect constitutional rights and privacy and ensure that any intelligence activity within the U.S. or directed against any U.S. person is conducted by the least intrusive means possible.

No such constitutional re-iteration of the basic premises of the Executive Order are seen in the defensive, self-serving jockeying found in the Turner proposals, and Griffin Bell stands considerably higher in historical stature than the frustrated and over-reaching Turner.

Conclusion:

Turner’s egoism and heavy-handed bearing are fully aired in his memoirs, as well.

A series of more recently de-classified Presidential Directives shed light on the struggle between Turner and the other Intelligence chiefs. An August 1977 Presidential Directive NSC-17 shows the steps Carter went through in re-defining the role of the Director of Central Intelligence relative to the other agencies such as the NRO and NSA. Admiral Turner’s role is enhanced when Carter directs that the PRC committee (under the DCI) “define and prioritize substantive intelligence requirements and evaluate analytical product performance.” The Directive states “DCI will have full tasking responsibilities [for] . . . specific intelligence collection objectives and targets and assigning these to intelligence collection agencies [to be] . . . jointly manned by civilian and military personnel.” This empowered the DCI to steer the NSA and NRO but not to oversee the Defense Department agencies. The “DCI is named as principal budget forecaster” is to be “provided adequate staff” and “continue to act as primary advisor to NSC and President and retain all other powers,” but, most importantly, “authority to hire and fire personnel and to give day to day direction (to the NRO and NSA, the satellite and wiretapping agencies) . . . will remain with the heads of the relevant departments and agencies [D.O.D]” This Directive sets the stage for Executive Order 12036 and shows the compromise Carter worked out with Turner, which gave forecasting, targeting and budget control over the NRO and the NSA to the DCI but stopped short of greatly enhancing the CIA Director’s power over the two large military intelligence agencies, the NRO and the NSA. This, of course, is the substance of today’s post 9-11 debate over intelligence authority.

After January 1978, President Carter was unable to rapidly forge a Congressional consensus on intelligence reform, even with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. The CIA Charter remained a hot internal White House issue until the Reagan inauguration and the question of Congressional oversight became the main sticking point for preventing additional legislative reform under Carter. I now believe that Lloyd Cutler, in his role as senior counselor to Bill Clinton, drew on his Carter White House experience to discourage President Clinton from attempting the difficult structural reforms which are now, in hindsight, seen to be so critical. Clinton, under the advice of Cutler, made no effort to eliminate any of the fifteen agencies or place the NRO and NSA under the DCI’s direct control, and of course, the FBI and CIA counterintelligence functions remain segregated, competitive and at cross purposes. Under Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II, the chronic structural problems which weakened U.S. intelligence co-ordination and efficacy remained, after the window of opportunity and public clamor of the 1970s had passed into quiescence.

Executive Order 12036 and the FISA were the high points for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale’s intelligence program. Following on President Ford’s Executive Order 11905, which Vice President Rockefeller had promoted, Executive Order 12036 broke new ground in publicly addressing civil rights questions and assassinations. 12036 placed very specific domestic limits on the CIA and FBI for the first time, and the FISA codified tasking and targeting norms for the fifteen agencies overseas. This progress in regulating the espionage and analysis units of the Federal government was limited by the personalities of the major players, specifically Stansfield Turner, and also by the more conservative approach to Congressional oversight of the CIA that was taken by the maturing Carter Administration in the late 1970s. The administration strayed from its 1976 mandate for investigative oversight and retreated into a milder and ineffective institutional oversight, which was further weakened by the Reagan-Casey regime. .

In very general terms, the leadership of the intelligence community (from both political parties) must be improved. The agencies and the military intelligence units must be firmly indoctrinated in constitutional law, the Bill of Rights, the Geneva Convention and universal humanist ethics. The ideology of the partisan leaders should not drive the analysts to pre-arranged and politically expedient conclusions. The programs, techniques and activities of the fifteen agencies need to be placed under rigorous and ongoing scrutiny. Programs need to be questioned by the appropriate congressional leaders, via investigational oversight, as institutional oversight has proven to be too weak to raise performance standards. Ultimately, our safety as a nation -- and as a global society -- rests on the vigorous, exhaustive and critical oversight of the various intelligence communities.

Sources Cited

We have discussed this before.

Jack White and Lee Forman are both right,

and their were two big pools of blood around the

kill zone ......... one between EMMETT HUDSON and the

NIX GUNMAN position

right near the BLACK DOG MAN, in fact,

and another where the tramps were.

This first blood has been explained to me as the

result of securing the salient between the

knoll and the headshot/braking area.

The men with EMMETT HUDSON who have

never come forward or been named were

clearing this area during the approach,

and stabbed the french "reporter"

who was there, like the others to

record, secure and even "abort" the mission

if necessary.

Some say a gunman in the book depository shot the

person in the NIX/BDM/Coke bottle area of the knoll.

One member of the team shot another member during the

triangulated fire, as part of the last minute security.

More likely is that someone stabbed a spook to clear the fence area

before the limousines came by.............

The blood around the depository "tramps" fenceline is probably

similar in origin....special ops guys using the silent knife to

remove witnesses and interlopers...........perhaps.

shanet

[ This is the core text of the WIKIPEDIA article I wrote on HUNTINGTON WV in 2005, which has now transformed completely: ]

Huntington is a city located in the U.S. State of West Virginia, along the Ohio River.

Most of the city is in Cabell County, with a small part in Wayne County. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 51,475 (47,341 in Cabell County, 4,134 in Wayne County). The city was named for Collis P. Huntington, who founded it in 1870 as a headquarters for his Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. Huntington was incorporated in 1871, but its constituent city, Guyandotte was first built upon in 1799. Huntington is the county seat of Cabell County.

A well-planned small city, Huntington, West Virginia fills the three-mile wide flood plain of the Ohio River for sixty blocks, from 30th Street East to 30th Street West and from 1st Avenue (at the River) to 13th Avenue (in Ritter Park) and somewhat beyond this range into the area's hardwood forests and suburban hills. Ritter Park runs from the dramatic WWI Memorial Arch at 6th Street West through the Whitaker Boulevard area to the open fields and tennis courts at 12th Street East. A multi-terraced rose garden and a stone-tiered reflecting pond were built by the WPA and CCC in Ritter Park in the late 1930s, making it a beautiful and popular gathering area for the entire community. Kiwanis Park and Rotary Park complement Ritter Park.

Visitors admire - and residents enjoy - the quaint brick streets, mature hardwood trees and Edwardian architecture that characterize the residential South Side. A natural bird sanctuary, Four Pole Creek, runs the entire length of Ritter Park and the creek is crossed by numerous picturesque wooden and stone foot bridges. Architect Jack Keiffer designed the very popular gravel walking paths placed in Ritter Park (c. 1980). The Huntington Galleries (now renamed Huntington Museum of Art) stand above Ritter Park on 8th Street Hill on McCoy Road. There is a rustic frontier museum and also a radio technology museum near the west end of the park. The Cabell County Courthouse Building and Carnegie Library downtown also have historical interest, and Old Main on the Marshall University campus dates to the 1840s. The tavern inn on Whitaker Boulevard and the Meek House on 2nd Street and 6th Avenue are other antebellum structures.

Because of the "rust belt" experience of losing industrial jobs (INCO, AMC, Owens-Illinois) in the the 1970s, real estate remains very affordable in Huntington. Unemployment dropped below five percent for the first time in recent memory in 2005. A regional metropolitan statistical area center for over twenty counties in the Tri-State Area of West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky; Huntington, W.Va. is structurally positioned to prosper in the 21st century. The hospitals, health industries, communications, banking, hospitality and University institutions should support moderate growth and a cosmopolitan - if unhurried - lifestyle in the next generation.

Architecturally, in the 1970s federal urban renewal programs destroyed part of the downtown (from 6th to 12th Street between 1st and 3rd Avenue, along the river) but in 2005 the Pullman Square retail and entertainment center, aided by The Transit Authority TTA revived this blighted downtown "Superblock" area, leading to rising downtown values and usages. The Harris Riverfront Park promenade is now well-attended along the Ohio River downtown, although the post- 1937 flood city floodwall tends to obscure the view of the Ohio River. Today condominiums and lofts are beginning to be re-developed in downtown Huntington, including the old Frederick Hotel and Bank Arcade area, and although only one percent of the population resides now within the commercial downtown, the Victorian downtown is growing in popularity among young urban professionals today. The Keith Albee Theater, a Vaudeville palace from the 1920s is still the architectural masterpiece of the downtown area, and 5th Avenue is noted for its many impressive church buildings. Restaurants make downtown Huntington easily one of the very best dining areas in West Virginia. Meanwhile, new home building in the suburban areas also help to keep Huntington's South Side (the area from 8th to 13th Avenue) housing stock affordable. These include yellow brick bungalows from the 1920s and 1930s. US Interstate Freeway I-64 skirts the city, and three modern bridges cross over the Ohio River. Wide boulevards make transit easy from the Marshall University district to the Downtown. Traditional "drive-in" hot dog stands like Midway, Stewart's and Frostop are still very popular and they add a 'retrospective' aspect to the city. Camden Park, a small theme park with a wooden rollercoaster is just west of town, and Camden Park is also the site of an Adena Native American burial mound. The U.S. Corps of Engineers constructed locks and dams nearby in the Ohio River and designed the large recreational lakes East Lynn Lake and Beech Fork Lake just south of Huntington in Wayne County, and Huntington's suburbs of Chesapeake, Proctorville and Burlington, Ohio, are expanding on the north shore of the Ohio River near these bridges to Huntington, West Virginia.

Historically, the old Federal Era town of Guyandotte, now within the Huntington city limits, has homes dating back to 1820 and a graveyard containing 18th century French and Colonial Revolutionary Era settlers, including the Holderby and Buffington family markers. Huntington was known as Holderby's Landing previous to 1871 and the Buffington family held the tracts of land which became the Huntington Land Company. Albert Gallatin Jenkins, a Confederate General, had his plantation home in nearby Lesage that is still standing.

Huntington's diners, restaurants and lodgings were integrated in the early 1960s following "sit-ins." There was at least one anti-war riot against the Vietnam War in the early 1970's.

Families in Huntington were shocked and saddened when on November 14, 1970 the entire Marshall University Football Team and many of its civic supporters (seventy five people in all) were killed in a plane crash near Tri-State Airport while flying back to Huntington from a football game with East Carolina. Community leaders Michael Prestera, Dr. Pete Proctor, Dr. Ray Hagley, Parker Ward Sr. and many others died that night in 1970 and they are still mourned today by their survivors in and around Huntington, who gather annually to remember the 1970 Marshall Plane Crash.

Medically, St. Mary's Hospital and The Cabell-Huntington Hospital provide health care for the larger region. The life-saving kidney Dialysis Unit at Cabell-Huntington Hospital was inaugurated in 1960 by Dr. David Sheffer Clark; an associate of Dr. Pete Proctor, Dr. Ray Hagley and Michael Prestera. Dr. Clark served as chief of staff at both the Cabell-Huntington Hospital and the St. Mary's Hospital in the 1970s and 1980s. Dr. Clark was early proponent and instructor at the Marshall University Medical School now known as the Joan C. Edwards School of Medicine.

The library at Marshall University is named for President James H. Morrow, father of American diplomat Dwight W. Morrow (1873-1931)and grandfather of Anne Morrow Lindbergh the wife of Charles Lindbergh. David Shanet Clark was William Randolph Hearst United States Senate Scholar at Marshall University and Woodruff Fellow; he addressed the OAH and New England Historical Association with papers on West Virginia History in 2005. The late West Virginia historians Jim Comstock and Mrs. Doris Miller were also Huntington natives, along with Charles Moffat, Jim Casto, Strat Douthat and Joseph Geiger Jr.. At Tufts University in Massacusetts, Huntington, West Virginia native Cliff Wulfman designed the Perseus hypertext information management system for his co-operating middle English and Shakespearean scholars. A volunteer organization, the Huntington Foundation, is active in restoring historical sites and recognizing local leaders. Mr. Hercil Gartin, Bob Bailey, Ted Barr and Ottie Adkins have recently served as County Sheriff, while Jim Tweel, Michael Prestera, William Neal, Clyde Pinson, Olin C. Nutter, Charles Polan and Dan O'Hanlon are remembered in Huntington as important 20th century political leaders. Today, William Smith is Superintendent Cabell County School System, and David Felinton is Mayor of Huntington, replacing former Mayor Jean Dean.

Families in Huntington, West Virginia have produced many national leaders in education, history, communications, political theory and civic activism. C. Bosworth Johnson, former news anchor at WSAZ TV, an NBC affiliate, served as President of the National Broadcast Journalists' Association in the 1970s and is well known to city residents, as is his wife Dr. Dottie Johnson, the former Chair of the Marshall University Speech Department and also a television personality. Robert Bosworth Johnson is now a WSAZ news anchor. Marshall University's Simon Perry, Ph.D., is one of the nation's leading political scientists and authorities on Constitutional Studies. The former Truman White House official, U.S. House of Representatives member and Secretary of State for W.Va., Mr. Ken Hechler is also affiliated with the Marshall University Political Science Department. Mrs. Betty Barrett is another widely respected community leader, her years of leadership include President of the League of Women Voters, member of both the Huntington City Council and the Cabell County School Board, as well as her tireless work to help homeless people. Her sons Kevin Barrett and Edgar Overton Barrett IV are educators, and another son John Barrett is a noted class-action environmental protection lawyer working against illegal strip mine pollution in the city of Charleston, the state Capitol of W.Va., forty-five miles east of Huntington.

Air Force Pilot Chuck Yeager is a favorite local native, as is comedian Soupy Sales and the late vaudeville performer Dagmar. Oscar-winning actor Brad Dourif (Oscar for One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, 1976) and game show announcers Chuck Woolery and 'Hollywood Squares' Peter Marshall are also from the Huntington area. The comedian Billy Crystal graduated from Marshall University, and 'flat picking' country musician Rickie Skaggs is also an area native. Huntington musicians and technicians regularly participate in the production of the syndicated radio program Mountain Stage recorded in nearby Charleston, WV. A commercial trade and communications center for the Tri-State Area, Huntington has enjoyed television since 1949 with WSAZ NBC, and later, WGNT and WOWK. A Gannett newspaper, the Herald Dispatch, is of unusually good quality for a city of this size, and the Herald Dispatch has websites. Huntingtonnews.net, published by Matthew Pinson, is a powerful online news source as well, and adds even more detail and veracity to the available internet news coming out of Huntington, W.Va. The Huntington Quarterly, a glossy magazine edited by Andy Houvouras is also popular and available online.

Enforcement of the Clean Air Act of 1970 has substantially improved the air and water quality of the industrial corridor here. The regional cities of Charleston, Nitro, Hurricane, Huntington, Kenova (WV), South Point, Ironton (Ohio), Ashland and Catlettsburg (KY) have all seen dramatic improvements in air and water quality since the pivotal 1970 federal legislation outlawed indiscriminate and wasteful chemical emissions. At the same time roads have been improved, services have been expanded and civil suits enjoined against the worst local corporate polluters. Mountain top removal, rural stream preservation and coal strip-mining policy are still hotly contested issues here. Corporate attorneys in Huntington work to defeat the grass-roots plaintiffs who challenge large industrial polluters in Huntington, West Virginia civil court. These Huntington Tri-State Area communities are sometimes called the Chemical Valley or, in more heated discussions, the Cancer Valley, and litigation about Coal, toxic emissions, mountaintop removal, and the actions of the Chemical Industry continue.

Huntington grew to nearly 100,000 in population by the 1950s thanks to a successful coal and chemical industry; as coal has since lost some of its prominence as a fuel and the city has lost much of its industrial base - including glassworks, steel, and manufacturing train parts - Huntington is now effectively a medical community (the two hospitals are the largest employers) and a university town. About 17,000 students are currently enrolled at Marshall University. In the Census of 2000, the city slipped below 50,000 and Cabell County slipped below 100,000--hurting Federal funding.

A banking and commerce center for the area between 1880 and the present, Huntington, West Virginia developed along the river's shore with its 19th century urban industry centered on today's 3rd Avenue and 7th Street. The C&O Railroad had its western terminus in Huntington and railroad tracks bifurcate the city today, along old 7th Avenue. Underpasses convey automobile traffic from the South Side to the Downtown and Marshall University parts of town via viaducts at West 14th St, 1st St., 8th St. E., 10th St. E., 16th St. (or Hal Greer) Blvd.and 20th Street East in Huntington, and substantial railroad traffic (C & O and B & O) is seen and heard daily within the Huntington city limits. Westmoreland and Central City are being revitalized with new investments in the West End of Huntington, while in the East End there is solid housing stock, suburban neighborhoods and the city's second large park, Rotary Park. The geographic logic and order of Huntington's street plan makes each sector distinct and the relation between neighborhoods easy to remember.

A thriving regional center, Huntington is a university town on the Ohio River, it is now being discovered by new visitors, investors, and other interested parties. Its economic development, new sense of historic preservation, promotion of tourism and rapid road and downtown improvements are due to the efforts of local community leaders assisted by the vision and efforts of noted United States Senators for West Virginia the Honorable John D. Rockefeller IV and his senior colleague, the Honorable Robert C. Byrd.

Contents

Education

Huntington has three public high schools; Spring Valley High School (located in Wayne county), Huntington High School and Cabell Midland High School (in Cabell county). It is also the home to Marshall University, a fully accredited research university with a medical school. Douglass High School was guided by its principal Carter G. Woodson the noted American educator, before Douglass High School was amalgamated into Huntington High School in 1960. The second largest institution of higher learning in the State of West Virginia, Marshall University, 'the Thundering Herd' is now pursuing more federal grants and high-tech foundation grants, following the example of the State's flagship university in Morgantown, West Virginia, West Virginia University, 'The Mountaineers.' President Koop has a new master plan for community involvement, and the new Simon Perry Constitutional Studies program was inaugurated in 2005.

Location of Huntington, West Virginia

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 46.6 km² (18.0 mi²). 41.2 km² (15.9 mi²) of it is land and 5.4 km² (2.1 mi²) of it is water. The total area is 11.51% water. The Guyandotte River joins the Ohio River in Huntington, about 5 mi (8 km) east of its downtown. It lies in the westernmost and lowest altitude area of West Virginia, and has a temperate four seasons, with hot (60-90 degrees) Summers and snowy (20-50 degrees) Winters. Fall and Spring tend to be cool and wet, but Huntington, West Virginia enjoys warmer and milder climate than the hilly uplands of West Virginia which are located in the Allegheny Mountains and the Appalachian Mountains. Huntington is warmed by westerly winds from the Midwest, and made humid by the Ohio River, but avoids the bitter cold and high winds of the interior of West Virginia. Culturally influenced by the Ohio Valley and Midwest cities of Columbus, Ohio; Cincinatti, Ohio and Louisville, Kentucky, it has a strong, traditional American "Norman Rockwell" visual identity, with its tree-lined streets, sidewalks, brick streets, parks, alleyways and brick homes.

Demographics

As of the censusGR2 of 2000, there are 51,475 people, 22,955 households, and 12,235 families residing in the city. The population density is 1,248.4/km² (3,234.1/mi²). There are 25,888 housing units at an average density of 627.9/km² (1,626.5/mi²). The racial makeup of the city is 89.61% White, 7.49% Black or African American, 0.20% Native American, 0.82% Asian, 0.05% Pacific Islander, 0.30% from other races, and 1.53% from two or more races. 0.85% of the population are Hispanic or Latino of any race.

There are 22,955 households out of which 0.6% have children under the age of 18 living with them, 36.9% are married couples living together, 13.1% have a female householder with no husband present, and 46.7% are non-families. 37.6% of all households are made up of individuals and 15.1% have someone living alone who is 65 years of age or older. The average household size is 2.0 and the average family size is 2.0.

The age distribution, which is strongly influenced by Marshall's presence, is 17.7% under the age of 18, 17.5% from 18 to 24, 24.9% from 25 to 44, 21.8% from 45 to 64, and 18.0% who are 65 years of age or older. The median age is 37 years. For every 100 females there are 88.7 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there are 85.8 males.

The median income for a household in the city is $23,234, and the median income for a family is $34,756. Males have a median income of $30,040 versus $21,198 for females. The per capita income for the city is $16,717. 24.7% of the population and 17.5% of families are below the poverty line. Out of the total population, 29.8% of those under the age of 18 and 12.5% of those 65 and older are living below the poverty line.

James and Penny Fletcher, Huntington natives, were embroiled in an internationally notorious incarceration and alledged murder case in the Granadine Islands of Leeward St. Vincent in the late 1990's exacerbating existing class conflicts...................

The Plame Wilson affair is still percolating.

It tells us so much about the Vice President's office

and their efforts to stand behind any PRETEXT for War in Iraq.

The yellowcake, the Niger, the aluminum tubes, the vats, none of it was REAL.

They got on Television and in front of the United Nations and

told a bunch of BIG FAT LIES...........

When Joseph Wilson had the brains to say that the papers were shoddy forgeries,

unrelated to things on the ground in Africa, Libby was given specific instructions

and classified materials

to slime Wilson and endanger his wife......and he lied about when interrogated by the special prosecutor.

Libby says he found out she was a CIA agent from the news hacks like Tim Russert,

when in fact DEAD EYE DICK CHENEY told him the story and what to do with it...............

That much is obvious, Cheney pushed Libby to out the undercover agent ........

David Shanet Clark

History

Karl Marx as a 19th Century Political Historian

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a European political theorist, strongly influenced by the events and social theories of the nineteenth century. He maintains his radical distinction by consistently opposing the Utilitarianism and the dominant moderate to conservative political approaches of the times. He historical approach places less value on the gradual amelioration of 19th century social and political grievances through representative democracy and parliamentary means, and emphasizes radical revolution. This places even his conventional political reporting, such as the “18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon” outside the pale of the accepted 19th century political consensus. The “18th Brumaire” has many strong points and does not fail utterly as political reporting, but the underlying assumptions of Marx, his militant and violent radicalism, show a bias in his work, despite his incisive wit and thoroughness of detail.

In the “18th Brumaire” Karl Marx’s political reporting is accurate without being correct. In any social discipline bias and theoretical assumptions can skew the work into misleading, if technically correct, conclusions. While Marx wrote a good narrative of the complicated sequence of events, his intellectual foundation is polluted by his desire for a violent, militant revolution of the bottom faction against all the other legitimate players. Marx’s need for the proletariat to destroy the petit-bourgeoisie, the church, the center parties, the royal legitimists, the commercial bourgeoisie, the President and the Army gives his political reporting an unreal and unrealistic tone, abruptly at odds with other commentators, both past and present.

France in the 1830s and 1840s was lurching toward representative democracy and parliamentary power sharing among its groups and individuals. The French were tentatively moving toward a balancing of civil powers between dominant factions. The National Constituent Assembly had given way to a National Legislative Assembly, which is probably a misleading term, since so much power was vested in the chief executive, Louis Napoleon. A party of Order had emerged, combining landed and industrial bourgeois interests and (significantly) tamping down Bourbon and Orleans antagonisms. Another large faction of Democrats or petite-bourgeois representatives countered this party of Order. Efforts to define the limits of Presidential prerogative and the simmering issue of control of the Cabinet secretariat are addressed by Marx in an orderly way.

Karl Marx’s essential lack of faith in the premise of constitutional democratic representative government drives him away from appropriate and useful conclusions. Marx derides the dynamic tensions between the executive, legislative and principal factions in France’s struggling constitutional republic. On the critical question of revising the term limits to prevent a popular coup for Louis Napoleon to remain in power, Marx sneers “Had it (the parliamentary majority) not left to the democrats the antediluvian superstitious belief in the letter of the law, and castigated the democrats for it?” In a similar passage, Marx derides the small propertied interest in the Assembly as “counter-revolutionary.” Marx never perceives the ascendance of any figure or party in French political life to be a step toward legitimacy or sovereignty, and he sees all disagreements over policy as signs of a corrupt and decaying system. This bias against constitutional republican government drives Marx far from the consensus view of political historians.

Marx, in his role here as a historian of the French Assembly, often seems to be dismissive to the interests of civilized political life. Marx is an incisive political analyst with a strong literary style based on dramatic counterpoints and ironic reversals. These strengths are overwhelmed by his pessimistic view of constitutional government and his militant demands for violent overthrow of the state (by the bottommost class), which drain his political reporting of any lasting analytical value. By failing to identify with any actual players, and basing his analysis on a Utopian revolution by minor participants, Marx leaves the mainstream. The major issues of the day were constitutional revision, universal suffrage and term limits. The Bourgeoisie Republicans feared a nationalist coup of Bonapartist militant guards if term limits were not extended and the Constitution modified. Marx, despising all the players, denies us a balanced view.

One of the most important features of the “18th Brumaire” is the substantive digression late in section six. Here Marx abruptly turns from bitter and caustic fury at the combining powers of the Army, the President and the Legislative majority to an analysis of the economic factors behind the events of 1848-1851. His structural overview of the relative importance of commercial, industrial and monetary policies is compelling. Whether or not we agree with Marx’s conclusions about the inevitable future of capitalism, social scientists welcome his groundbreaking widening of the approach to political matters. Marx insists political history must include a full discussion of its economic underpinnings. It is here in the methodological use of international economic data to inform political history that Marx earns his place in the world cannon of social science, and his pioneering efforts have stood the test of time.

John Tosh grapples with the problem of historians broadening their scope to include social and cultural factors in their historical writings, and credits Marx with building the first and best theoretical model of social interaction which have been found useful by later historians. Tosh sees the critics of Marx as reading too much bleak and mechanistic determinism into Marx. Tosh explains that the basic three-tier economic-political structure Marx sees, the production technology, the relations of production and the superstructure of law and ideology has almost boundless opportunities for human agency. “It is probably closer to the spirit of Marx’s thought to see the economic structure as setting limiting conditions rather than determining the elements of the superstructure in all their particularity.” Tosh elastically interprets Marx, and different writings of Marx vary in their strict determinism. John Tosh sees Marx’s periodization of history into classical, feudal and modern bourgeois as substantially correct and is hardly critical of Marx’s view of Asian traditions. Tosh stresses the Hegelian nature of Marx’s thought and cites the passage of Marx, which spells out that changing modes of production lead to “social revolution” and “transformation of the entire superstructure.” In hindsight we can now see that Marxist predictions do not always come true, and where they do occur, Utopian intentions are rarely realized. Tosh gets to the core of Marx’s weakness when he writes of “this rather abstract conception of social change.” The dialectic of class conscious conflict over the means of production -- the theoretical groundwork of Marx -- gives us a handy language, but is a system of thought that limits agency, privileges certain values at the expense of others, and simplifies the complexity of political, economic and cultural human history. “These theories lend themselves to a simplified rigid schema” Tosh says. But Tosh is ultimately sympathetic to Marx and states,

“What Marx rejected was not historical study as such, but the method employed by the leading historians of his day. Their error, he maintained, lay in taking at face value what the historical actors said about their motives and aspirations; in so doing, Ranke and his imitators imprisoned themselves within the dominant ideology of the age in question which was merely a cloak for the real material interests of the dominant class.”

This approach distinguishes Karl Marx and the historical school following him.

The German philosopher Karl Lowith sees Marx as a student of Hegel, and he believes Marx tried to bring the Hegelian philosophy of thesis, antithesis and synthesis to bear on the material world. Karl Lowith sees Karl Marx paradoxically immersed in western, Judeo-Christian, providential and Utopian millenianism, despite Marx’s protestations against God and religion. As Lowith says:

“Since Hegel, however, identifies the history of the world with that of the Spirit, his understanding of history retains much less of its religious derivation than does Marx’s materialistic atheism. The latter, in spite of its emphasis on material conditions, maintains the original tension of transcendent faith over against the existing world, while Hegel, to whom faith was only a mode of Vernunft or Vernehmen, had, at a critical turning-point in his intellectual history, decided to reconcile himself to the world as it is: existing, real and reasonable. Compared with Marx, the greater realist is Hegel.” (Emphasis added)

So Marx succeeds is in his ability to discern that deep economic structures do drive political events; and he succeeds in his use of wit, irony and general style. As a social scientist breaking ground for later political economists, Marx is respected. He taught nineteenth and twentieth century historians to question the assumptions of power relationships found in state archives and correspondence. Marx widened the scope of historical methodology from a conservative re-telling of history’s political events toward a critical reconsideration of underlying forces

Selected Bibliography

Dicey, Albert Venn Lectures on the Relation Between Law and Public Opinion

in England During the Nineteenth Century. London, Macmillan, 1905.

Lowith, Karl Meaning in History. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1949.

Macaulay, Thomas Babington The History of England From the Accession of

James II. Boston, Phillips and Sampson, 1849.

Marx, Karl The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.

(2nd Edition;London,1869).Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1937. (csf.Colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive)

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels, Lewis S. Feuer, ed. Basic Writings on Politics

and Philosophy, New York, Anchor Books, 1959.

Tosh, John The Pursuit of History, revised Third Edition Pearson, London, 2002.

John, the Hobbit is a bit of a puzzle.

Theorists with theories to defend have a dilemma here.

Either the tiny Flores man evolved in place as an island dwarf,

becoming "human" in isolation OR

Flores man arrived in Indonesia as Homo sapiens and shrank in place,

with his brain case shrinking back to pre Erectus size..........

As you can imagine both of these possible conclusions are looked at with distaste by

anthropologists -------- developing in place thru the Homo erectus period, only in miniature,

OR RATHER shrinking down into a much smaller brain and body in more recent times..........

I think it is rather the latter, shrinking down with little loss of intelligence in say the last 100,000 years.

shanet

Brooklyn Heights Federal Era Conservatory Project

Model Grant Proposal

By

David Shanet Clark

Woodruff History Fellow

Georgia State University

Atlanta, Georgia.

January 29, 2006

A Statement of A Historical Problem by Shan Clark

New York City’s Brooklyn Heights is a unique historical site. Only a rural hamlet before the Revolutionary War (Barck, p. 12) and home to an American fort with seven cannons during the war (Abbott, p. 63), Brooklyn Heights grew rapidly in the Federal Era. As early as 1796 ferry service disputes over the New York City ferry monopoly and the rights of Brooklynites to convey themselves across the East Hudson River to Manhattan and back were well documented (Pomerantz p. 101). “The ferry lines to Jersey City, Hoboken, Williamsburg and Brooklyn were the earliest form of mass transportation, involving specially designed steam boats for commuter traffic. (Spann, p. 183)”

The ferry service allowed an elite enclave to develop in Brooklyn Heights, and a historically significant architectural area was built up on the heights facing Manhattan across the East River. In 1843, Nathaniel Parker Willis had written that “in twenty minutes from Wall Street …you may reach the elegant seclusion of a country town.”

Discussing the emergence of Washington Square’s wealthy neighborhood of

1840 in Manhattan, Edward Spann notes:

A similar, though smaller and perhaps even more intimate concentration of wealth had also developed across the East River in Brooklyn Heights ". . . which combined the elegance of a Washington Square with clean sea breezes and a glorious view of New York and its Harbor. Here lived Lewis Tappan, Samuel Sloan, James A. Leggett and other successful city men who lived quiet lives less than thirty minutes by ferry from the rush and clamor of Wall Street (Spann, p. 174)."

On November 23, 1965 Brooklyn Height became the first New York Historical District, which offered conservation protection and special status to the historical landmarks of Pierrepont Place, Montague Street, Remsen Street and the Willows. Henry Miller and Norman Mailer live there today and W.H. Auden, Willa Cather and Thomas Wolfe are just a few of the literary artists who have made this neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights their home.

Artists have been established in Brooklyn Heights for over a century because of the changes brought by the Brooklyn Bridge. When higher density hotels and apartment buildings followed opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, many of the wealthy brownstone and Federal Era homeowners moved out and re-modeled their grand homes into multiple one-bedroom rentals. Many of the imposing brownstones are today occupied by individuals and couples, and a typical Victorian-era grand home today houses five or six apartments.

On November 23rd 1965 Brooklyn Heights was officially designated a New York Historical District—the first New York neighborhood ever extended this preservation status.

“Brooklyn Heights is one of New York’s best preserved and most attractive nineteenth–century historic districts . . . It is an area of dignified brownstone and brick houses and stately churches on streets bordered by stone sidewalks and lined with trees, as well as many carriage houses preserved along picturesque and well-tended mews. Spared the constant restructuring that occurred in Manhattan, and left alone as Brooklyn expanded south, the configuration of streets and blocks in Brooklyn Heights is essentially the same as it was prior to the civil war. In 1965 Otis Pratt Pearsall leader of the historic Preservation Committee of the Brooklyn Heights Association noted that of 1,284 buildings fronting the streets of Brooklyn Heights, 684 were built before the Civil War and 1,078 before the turn of the century. There are fine buildings in the Federal, Greek Revival, Gothic Revival and Anglo-Italianate styles. The District is particularly rich in Greek Revival architecture, there are more than 400 examples including buildings by architects Richard Upjohn and Minard Lafever, two of the style’s most distinguished practitioners (Diamondstein, p. 299).”

Although protected by various historical designations, planning and zoning regulations, the historic district is, in places, less well preserved than is fitting. A number of frame houses from the 1810-1830 period are still suffering from rental remodeling and subdivision from approximately one hundred years ago. The Brooklyn Heights Federal Era Conservatory Project would take steps to map, document and research the significant structures and then take steps to procure, restore and open a Federal Era home to the public as part of a print, internet and public history program on Brooklyn Heights history.

Methods

The Project has three phases or tiers. In the first phase we should map, photograph and do research into the Brooklyn Heights Federal Era Conservatory District. The second and third stages involve selecting and purchasing an especially significant structure and then renovating it for public history purposes. This Proposal only deals with the initial research and mapping phase, concluding with a web-site presence, a map display and a limited publication booklet to document the work and stimulate further conservatory efforts.

The Brooklyn Heights Federal Era Conservatory Project is guided by a multi-disciplinary public history approach. Recognizing the historical human cultural impact of built spaces, the Project intends to document architectural design, materials, uses and relationships between various properties in the period 1800-1860.

The Project will utilize digital imaging, geographic information systems (GIS), archival and published source research resources in a public history production process. Methodology and approach can be inferred from the desired final product; a system of maps, photos, site descriptions, collected architectural and historical site records and historical references for further study will be available in a booklet form, through a public history display and on an Internet web site.

The Project will shed light on Federal and Victorian architecture and methods of living, including family spatial arrangements, the economic quantification of production and consumption in Brooklyn Heights, also inter-activity, shopping, working, leisure and sleeping places, all placed in proper historical context. Jane Jacobs’s and Lewis Mumfoord’s approaches to urban quality of life issues will be given a role in judging 19th century Brooklyn Heights’s dwellers experience, and we will follow up on C. Wright Mills and Robert Dahl’s theories of elite power congregation and the replication of aesthetic mores.

Plans and Budget Estimate

The overall time frame is ninety days, from June 1 to August 30. The Project Manager (DSClark) would manage two additional researchers, one a 19th century archival specialist, the other a GSI and Database technical specialist. We would be in residence in New York City in June and July and the postproduction, book and web pages would be in final form by the end of August.

Upon renting the living and working space in the Brooklyn area, the Project Group will then employ basic GIS techniques to develop a base map and begin to quantify the Brooklyn Heights Federal Era Conservation District. Specific questions to be answered include: What historical designations, categories, distinctions, protection areas, setbacks, business, residential and arboreal regulations apply to these properties? Are they in compliance? Maps would “zoom-in” as a New York Five Boroughs Map, a Greater Queens and Brooklyn map, a Brooklyn Map, a Brooklyn Heights Map and a Federal Era Conservation District Map would be prepared via standard GIS software. The Project Manager would take an active part in both digital and text research and production. Resources include NYU, Columbia, New York Public Library, Astor Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller University, Consolidated Edison records, the New York Historical Society and The Brooklyn Heights Association. A final wall map, with digital photos of each significant structure, a database with former owners, earliest uses, architectural style, etc., and a final written report with conclusions and recommendations would be available at the end of August. The booklet and web site highlighting the Project would be finished near the end of the ninety-day period.

Budget

Project Salaries:

Project Manager $20,000

Archival Researcher $10,000

GIS Database Specialist $10,000

Total $40,000

Technology:

Hard Drive $2,000

Digital Camera $2,000

Global Position System $1,000

Modem/wireless/internet $1,000

Printer Color, Large Format $1,000

GIS Software, cell phone $1,000

Total $8000

Rent and Travel:

Manager Work/Live Suite 60 days at $250 per day

Archival Researcher Room 60 days at $100 per day

GIS Database Researcher Room 60 days at $100 Per day

Air Fare $2000

Total $30,000

Per Diem:

Archival Researcher- 60 x $50

GSI Database Researcher- 60 x $50

Manager, petty cash- 60 x $100

Total $12,000

Products:

Wall Maps $1000

1000 books at $5.00 per $5000

Web Site Webmaster $3000

Total $9,000

Grand Total $99,000

The Brooklyn Heights Federal Era Conservatory Project is a multidisciplinary study of a historically significant neighborhood. The cultural and architectural importance of the Brooklyn Heights buildings will be examined through archival, institutional and online approaches, and the final goal would be to preserve an actual public conservatory.

Bibliography

Abbott, Wilbur

New York in the American Revolution New York, Scribners, 1929.

Andrews, Wayne

Architecture in New York, A Photographic History, New York, Atheneum, 1969.

Anonymous

New York In the Nineteenth Century 321 Engravings from Harper’s and

Contemporary Sources New York, Dover Press 1977.

Anonymous

Map of New York and Brooklyn 1850, Ithaca NY, Historic Urban Plans

Map G3804.n4 Pullen Library, GSU Atlanta.

Barck, Oscar Theodore

New York City During the War for Independence, with special reference to the

Period of British Occupation New York, Friedman, 1970.

Buttenweise, Ann

Manhattan Waterbound; Manhattan’s Waterfront from the Seventeenth Century to the Present New York, Columbia, 1977.

Benjamin, Asher

The American Builder’s Companion: or a new system of Architecture

particularly adapted to the present style of building in the United States of

America. New York, DeCapo (period reprint) 1972.

Diamondstein, Barbaralee

The Landmarks of New York New York, Abrams, 1998.

Guthrie, Kevin

The New-York Historical Society: Lessons from one Non-Profits Long Struggle

for Survival New York, NYHS, 1988.

Hershkowitz, Leo

New York City 1834-1840, a Study in Local Politics

Ann Arbor, University Microfilms, 1960.

Historic American Buildings Survey

New York City Architecture, Washington, 1969.

Lancaster, Clay

Old Brooklyn Heights: New Yorks First Suburb; including detailed

analyses of 619 century old houses New York, Dover, 1979.

Pomerantz, Sidney I.

New York, An American City 1783-1803, A Study in Urban Life

New York, Friedman, 1965.

Spann, Edward K.

The New Metropolis, New York City 1840-1857 New York, Columbia University Press, 1981.

Syrett, Harold C.

The City of Brooklyn, 1865-1898 New York, Publisher Unknown, 1944.

MODEL GRANT PROPOSAL SPECIMEN BY

DAVID SHANET CLARK

INTERNATIONAL EDUCATION FORUM

Jim Root and John Simkin

Johnson's Senate Armed Forces Committee work is germane to the enquiry.

What did Johnson have over Richard Russell?

He was single handedly carrying out ALL Constitutional intelligence oversight in 1960.

What did Rayburn and Johnson have over JFK at the convention?

This is often connected to J. Edgar Hoover, but as you know I think

the naval agencies kept close watch on JFK, his women and his Addison's treatments.

shanet

John

Well written piece.

During his first term as a Senator, Johnson was first elected minority whip then minority leader. He gained a position on the Senate Armed Services Committee and chaired several sub-committees of importance including the Senate Special Committee on Space and Astronautics.

Johnson was also involved with the Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1958 and the National Security Agency Act of 1959. All of these committee assignments as well as his position as Majority Leader of the Senate would provide Johnson with the type of intelligence briefings reserved for those at the top of the Congressional heap.

I tend to believe that the U-2 incident was an intelligence coup that was designed to disrupt the Paris Summit. If so one could also believe that it would be a good possibility that Johnson may have either been aware of or could have guessed at who or what agency was responsible for staging that event.

I have believed for years that the U-2 incident was an important event for Kennedy on his road to the White House. Being privy to the type of information that was available to Johnson in his position of power in the Senate, Johnson may have been easily led to "jump on the bandwagon" of the person (Kennedy) who had been "selected" to be the next President by the power elite. Johnson may also have realized that if Kennedy stumbled along the way this group of the "power elite" would have a reliable hand at hand to turn to.

This would be especially true if some of the same caliber of people that were suggesting him for the Vice-Presidendcy were amoung the group that had the ability to stage the U-2 incident.

Jim Root

SECEDING FROM SECESSION,

THE PARTITION OF VIRGINIA AND WEST VIRGINIA 1861–1863:

GEOGRAPHIC AND STRATEGIC FACTORS

BY

D. SHANET CLARK

ATLANTA, February 15, 2006

West Virginia, with its fantastic vistas, surreal vegetation, unusual topography, bear, bobcat, beaver and foxes is today a living relic of the American frontier. Along the high Allegheny ridgeline and the rare old growth forests stand as they did six, eight, ten generations ago, a formidable force, with many of the rural people still resisting the encroachments of modernity and urbanization. West Virginia’s annals of geographic and geologic history, the study of Greater Virginia geography since the seventeenth century, reveal the importance of the Allegheny Mountain Ridge to American history.

The history of West Virginia has been examined by capable writers, and the nineteenth century view of the new State stressed the theme of loyal citizens, showing loyalty to the Union.

Western Virginia occupied the center of the national demographic map for the first decades of the nineteenth century, and it was a central part of the American frontier from the 1700’s through the late antebellum era. The most contested U.S. domestic issue in early nineteenth century was the internal improvements debate. In 1817 President James Madison found Federal investment in post and military roads to be constitutional. The National Road he and Congress chartered stretched from Cumberland Maryland to the Ohio River and passed through present-day West Virginia. This extension of the settlers’ westbound Potomac River route formed a strategic and developmental mainway from the Federal capital city inland to the Ohio, the Old Northwest Territory and the Mississippi Valley. Forty-five years later, when West Virginia seceded from Confederate Virginia to join the Union, the Federal government gained strategic defense of the National Road, the 1853 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad along a parallel route, the Potomac River itself and the western Shenandoah waters west of the Allegheny Ridge. With West Virginia, the Union firmed up the Ohio, Maryland and Kentucky area’s strategic security and helped clear the Ohio from points north of Pittsburgh south to South Point, Ohio. The Ohio River linked the Union and completed the bloc of loyal Border States. Students of geopolitics should familiarize themselves with the High Allegheny watershed and the relationship of this massif to events in Native American, French, and British eighteenth century history as well as to the nineteenth century Union vs. Confederacy strategic realities.

George Washington knew the crucial importance of the old Virginia frontier area, in 1785 the Potomac Company incorporated to build a canal to connect the Potomac River with the Cheat River and the James River Company was incorporated to construct a canal to connect the James River with the Great Kanawha. George Washington was made President of both chartered groups. The National Road was completed from Cumberland, Md. to Wheeling, Va. in 1818, while the first commercial steamboat on the Ohio River dates to 1817. The Staunton to Parkersburg road from the Great Valley to the Ohio River was established between 1823-1847. The Winchester to Parkersburg Road was completed in the 1830’s. With settlements established, almost all after 1789, by Germans, Scots, Irish and various pioneers who had migrated southwest from Baltimore, Philadelphia or New England, western Virginia had little of the Anglican tobacco plantation interests. Good roads pushing through the interior hollows in the Clay-Jackson period developed and improved the economy. It is significant that the United States Census of 1820, 1830, 1840 and 1850 Show s the center of U.S. population moving west over time across present day West Virginia, like a slow wagon of popular political weight moving west out of the colonial area into the Ohio Valley and by 1860 into Ohio and the northwest territory. The completion of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway in the winter of 1852-1853 brought a quickening of market prosperity for the mixed agricultural families now less dependent on game. As hard pioneer conditions abated in much of western Virginia, due to steam-powered river transport, wood and coal fired railroads, new roads and bridges, the region’s cultural and political establishment reached new heights. West Virginia was both made and unmade by the war.

The New River, the Kanawha River and other rivers in the Ohio-Mississippi-Gulf system; the Cheat River, the Guyandotte, the Elk River, the Gauley River and the Greenbrier River are all interesting for their effects on important trade, development and political boundary decisions. When Virginia seceded from the Union and joined the Confederacy in 1861, the people of these western river valleys mobilized immediately for resistance and Union statehood. Western Virginia political leaders were recognized by the Lincoln Administration, and sat in the wartime House and Senate as loyalists, or Reformed Virginia. By 1863 a series of conventions and lop-sided elections had established the new state, West Virginia.

Marked by its sprawling, irregular shape and mountainous terrain, West Virginia is poorly understood by many 19th century and civil war historians, probably because no great armies ever fought there. Strategically, however, the severance of the northwest half of Virginia had great impact on the Confederacy and the Union. This minor general theater of campaign, West Virginia, had a major railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio, and the river systems mentioned above.

As John Shaffer states:

Federal success in Western Virginia gave the north its most important victory of the first year of the war. A third of Virginia had been won to the Union, territory from which its Armies could be launched deep into the Confederacy. In the spring of 1862 the U.S. high command launched a 2-pronged attack into the Shenandoah Valley from Western Virginia.

A few battles and countless skirmishes cemented the new border, which carefully follows the high ridge of the Allegheny Mountains, and for many miles the border shares its identity with the actual watershed between the Ohio River or Mississippi Gulf-bound tributary waters and the Chesapeake Bay James River and Atlantic bound mountain headwaters. Here in the less populated cold and rugged hinterlands, both the Union and the Confederacy could tacitly utilize the high defensive wall of the Allegheny Ridge to their tactical and strategic advantage, or stalemate. The Union gained the Ohio River itself, the Potomac River, the route of the old National Road and the 1853 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the northern panhandle of old Virginia near Pittsburg, plus Harpers’ Ferry (strategic river/rail confluence) and the old buffalo cattle trail road across the mountains from Lewisburg to the Kanawha and Ohio Valleys, the Midland Trail. By November 1863 U.S.A. General William A. Averell defeated the Confederates at Droop Mountain and ended rebel control of the Greenbriar River Valley. This “produced a considerable degree of congruity between territory within the boundaries of the new state of West Virginia and that actually under the control of its authorities”

The 20th century French historians Fernand Braudel and Marc Bloch understood that long duration geographic factors might in some ways dominate human industry, culture and political behaviour. George Washington, Peter Jefferson and Thomas Jefferson were cartographic surveyors, and the history of the colonial and federal (eastern) frontier is one of land claims and jurisdictional issues in which accurate knowledge of space, terrain and remote topography were of central importance. Human agency is restrained by physical factors in the environment—floating down a river is easy, climbing over a mountain is much more difficult. Braudel’s theory of la longue duree is a good approach to the history of the trans-Allegheny region. Time passes in different cycles in the rural mountains, between rural small towns and the coal and chemical producing cities. The events’ horizon of recent history is formed by a longer pattern, and the Olympian view of the old frontier can show us these high mountain ridges and their swift river systems impacting history and dividing colonial and Federal era frontier people, more or less neatly. Human agency is determined in some degree by forbidding or compelling geographic realities. The importance of the watershed over the long term cannot be underestimated.

The Shawnee and the Cherokee are known to have used the border states of Kentucky and West Virginia as a buffer zone in the first contact period. When the Proclamation Line of 1763 was promulgated by George III to end westward frontier expansion into the freshly conquered French northwest territory, the line followed the high ridge of the Alleghenies, from the southwest to the northeast, incorporating nearly the present border of West Virginia and Virginia, and the Southern Methodists’ break from the Northern Methodists in 1844 also followed this line. The French, following LaSalle’s expedition, laid claim to the Ohio tributaries from the River to the highest sources, i.e. the French claimed the west Virginia part of old Virginia in the 18th century until 1763. One of the oldest and most simple maps of this region labels West Virginia and Kentucky simply as Florida, showing a primitive Spanish claim.

The Ohio River is a very plain demarcation, but the high ridge is less manifest to the eye. Confronting the Allegheny massif, a forbidding front broken by gaps, western explorers were steered around present day West Virginia. The Warrior Road became the Great (Shenandoah) Valley Road and it trailed off to the southwest to pass through the Cumberland Gap as the Wilderness Road to the Bluegrass; here Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone’s route led rustic Virginians out of old Virginia, and into the Ohio Valley. The Shenandoah Valley, with its slaves enduring the General Stonewall Jackson’s campaign theater, was not enrolled in the new state in 1863; the Valley, east of the high Allegheny watershed ridge, but east of the mighty Blue Ridge, remained with the Confederacy and the Old Dominion, in its geographic and Atlantic-bound rivers’ region. Just as the southwest Wilderness trail through the Cumberland Gap the Allegheny massif propelled all but the hardiest explorers and frontier families to go north, through Cumberland, Maryland and north to Pittsburgh, where the mighty Ohio River carried them southwest through the Ohio Valley, again bypassing western Virginia -- unless they disembarked on the left bank before reaching Kentucky at present South Point, Ohio. The Cumberland Gap and Wilderness Road route worked in the other direction as well, during the Lewis and Clark expedition an envoy of Osage Indians led by Peter Choteau went “eastward from St. Louis to Vincennes, Louisville, Frankfort, Lexington, through the Cumberland Gap and then [north] down the Shenandoah to Winchester, and on to Shepherdstown, Maryland, Harpers Ferry and Frederick [Md.] to Washington.”

The Potomac River was the original corridor into the ‘west,’ and by 1818 the National Road ran from Baltimore along the Potomac to Cumberland, Maryland and on to Wheeling on the Ohio in present day West Virginia. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad reached the same spot by 1853, along a similar route. Both the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap to Kentucky and the later National Road through Cumberland, Maryland to the Ohio Valley by-passed western Virginia and propelled settlers to points west, north and south of the trans-Allegheny Virginia hinterland. This is the central historic impact of the Allegheny High Ridge on U.S. history in the antebellum and colonial contact periods.

Indeed, there were trails and a cattle road into the trans-Allegheny, or today’s West Virginia. The Native American Midland Trail linked Staunton, in Augusta County Virginia in the southern Shenandoah Valley, with the Greenbrier and Kanawha River valleys in West Virginia. Between the Valley and the farmland near Kanawha Falls lay nearly impenetrable ravines, forested escarpments, the New River Gorge and the wild Gauley River rapids. Only animal trails, widened by cattle traders, carried frontier farmers through the southeast section of today’s West Virginia, until road building began in earnest in the 1830’s and 1840’s. Another rugged 19th century road led from Monterey to Beverly, but these were little more than trails until 1830. George Washington recognized the importance of linking the settled parts of Virginia to the Ohio Valley in the late eighteenth century, “I aver, most seriously, that I wd not give my tract of 10,990 acres on the Kanawha for 50,000 acres back of it, and adjoining thereto, nor for any 50,000 acres of the common land of the country, which I have seen, back from the water and in one body.” Washington understood his river bottoms to be “Extremely valuable” and worth five times the inland tracts. Washington states that common western Virginia land values in the Adams administration to be “half a dollar or less per acre.” Washington also owned large tracts of land in the Great Bend of the Ohio River and his family was prominent in the Harpers Ferry and Berkeley Springs part of what later would become West Virginia.

With the completion of the National Road, then the James and Kanawha Turnpike and finally the Staunton to Parkersburg Road the ‘west’ was settled but a series of constitutional conventions show that the western denizens held bitter feelings for the Richmond government long before the confederacy crisis of 1861. Poll taxes discriminated against the low income Westerners and the tax on property included a bias in favor of slave-holding interests. With state government offices and banks centered in Richmond the people of the west felt the sting of poor government services and high travel expenses, on top of tax and representation imbalances. The high remote hinterlands, a band of counties along and in the Allegheny highlands, sharply divided political opinion in the period before secession.

In the wartime partition of Virginia into Union and Confederate halves, a constitutional contract formed between the Union government and the political leadership of the Trans-Allegheny. The contract extended to a region that the West Virginians could lead into statehood against the Old Dominion’s Richmond government. The Union negotiated with the seceding anti-secessionists, who conducted overwhelming polls against Richmond. With the results in hand, they Wheeling Union loyalists met with an enthusiastic reception in wartime Washington. Benjamin Wade squired a Statehood Bill through the House, and Cabinet members William Seward, Salmon Chase and Edwin Stanton advised Lincoln to sign it. Francis Pierpont, Governor of Reformed Virginia and U.S. Senator Waitman T. Willey are West Virginia’s native founders.

Union arms had secured the bulk of the state to the Union militarily, and by June 23, 1863 the new State had full status. The Trans-Allegheny was joined to a secure corridor of eastern counties and a smaller northbound salient. The Eastern Panhandle of the new state secured the Potomac River and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, while the Northern Panhandle protected the industrialized ironworks at Wheeling and the Union’s southbound Ohio River. So both the eastern and northern irregularities are seen as wartime strategic corridors, essential to the Union’s transportation needs, the Ohio, the Potomac and the Baltimore and Ohio rail beds were all secured by the new arrangement of loyal and confederate counties in old Virginia. Marked by a few high mountain gaps, the new border formed a defensive wall, amenable to the south, and formed a defensive wall for the Union forces in West Virginia, as well. As a strategic conquest, the West Virginia counter-secession must rank with CSA Gen. Joseph Johnson’s precipitous retreat from northern Virginia early in the war or Sherman’s March in 1864. Numerous historians have noted that the fate of the border states decided the war, and this new border state marks a significant strategic conquest on the part of the north, as it secured the Ohio River, its Virginia tributaries, the iron works at Wheeling, much of the Potomac River System and the Baltimore and Ohio rail beds. Of course vulnerable bridges and towns along the B&O were raided and West Virginia towns such as Martinsburg, Romney and Harper’s Ferry changed hands repeatedly, but the borders held to the Union’s advantage as the action came to center more on points south after the Battle of Gettysburg.

When the highest Ridges were linked to encompass the Ohio River waters into the new state, the line marked the watershed of Atlantic versus Gulf runoffs, south of the line rainwater runs through the Greater James and Rappahannock systems, while north of the line, the New River and the Kanawha waters rolled down the Ohio to the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. Thus, the politically stable Atlantic Northeast was joined to massive inland ‘western’ power. The Northeast and Old Northwest Territory states enrolled the south bank of the Ohio (West Virginia and Kentucky) into its Union government. I find it very interesting that radically dissenting political forces, in the heat of an unprecedented civil war, decided upon the watershed at the high Allegheny dividing ridge to be the ultimate extent of the new state.

County by county, the Union power was strongest along the Ohio and was contested more convincingly inland. The new state’s founders rejected counties lying now in Virginia, the counties along the border and in the Shenandoah Valley. The Founders knew that Secessionist interest was stronger in these counties closer to Richmond and the number of slaves and free blacks in these Valley counties were also at issue. Waitman T. Willey and the other founders limited the state to western Virginia counties with strong white majorities. Lincoln’s government sent the State bill back to the convention demanding an emancipation clause in the new West Virginia Constitution, which was added before the final vote which led to Lincoln’s signature.

Ultimately, geography determines political junctures because of strategic imperatives inherent in the topography. By late 1862 the Union did lay military claim to the high ridge of the Alleghenies, and the differences in settlement patterns, labor and crop approaches, informed by the terrain, reached their conclusion in the new State. As Dr. Shaffer shows clearly, the west Virginians of 1861-1863 who joined the Confederacy as individuals had a high proportion of Virginia native parents and grandparents, while Unionists had more Pennsylvania, Maryland and Northeast born ancestors.

The unique shape of West Virginia, its geometrically irregular and sprawling non-compact form actually follows from common sense geographic principles. Strategically the new State aided the Union by: securing the defense of Washington D.C. and the Potomac River; in the defense of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the National Road and the Chesapeake and Ohio canals along the old Virginia-Maryland border; cleared the Ohio from North of Pittsburg to South Point Ohio, firmed up Southern Ohio and Southern Pennsylvania’s situation relative to Maryland and Kentucky, the true border states, and meant the loss of Weirton and the Pittsburg area north Virginia salient to the Confederacy. The southern border provided a wall of defense. The three concepts of rivers, high watersheds and strategic corridors explain the panhandles and ‘teapot’ shape. Armed with geographic, climate, elevation, rail, road and river topographic facts, the political and social events leading up to counter-secession and West Virginia statehood can be understood.

Works Cited

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Chicago Press, 1910.

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Chicago Press, 1958.

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British North America. New York: Publisher, 2000.

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Blow, Michael. History of the Thirteen Colonies. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

Callahan, James Morton. History of West Virginia: Old and New. Chicago: Publisher,

1923.

Colton, Calvin. The Private Correspondence of Henry Clay. Boston: Frederick Parker,

1856.

Craf, John A. Economic Development Of The United States. New York: McGraw Hill,

1952.

Crofts, Daniel. Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis.

Chapel Hill UNC 1989.

Faulkner, Harold. American Economic History 8th Edition. New York: Harper and Row,

1960.

Hall, Granville D. The Rending of Virginia. Chicago: Publisher, 1901.

Hogan, Roseann R. “Buffaloes in the Corn: James Wade’s Account of Pioneer Kentucky”

The Register of The Kentucky Historical Society. Vol. 89, #1 Winter 1991.

Holmberg, James, ed. Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Hull, Forrest. A Forrest Hull Sampler. Richwood W.Va.: Jim Comstock,1960.

Martineau, Harriet. Society in America London. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837.

McCardell, John. The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern

Nationalism 1830-1860. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Rice, Otis. A West Virginia History. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1980.

Roberts, Gail. Atlas of Discovery. New York: Crown, 1973.

Shaffer, John. Clash of Loyalties: A Border County In the Civil War. Morgantown: WVU

Press, 2003.

Stealey, John E. The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets.

Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1993.

Stephenson, Richard W. and Marianne M. McKee. Virginia In Maps: Four Centuries of

Settlement, Growth and Development. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2000.

Twohig, Dorothy, ed. Letters of George Washington, Retirement Series. Charlottesville:

UVA Press, 1998.

Von Glahn, Richard and Paul Jakov Smith, eds. The Song Yuan Ming Transition in

Chinese History: Imagining Pre-Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2003.

West Virginia, Atlas and Gazetteer: Detailed Topographic Maps. New York:

DeLorme, 2001.

Willcox, Cornelius DeWitt. A French English Military Technical Dictionary. Washington

D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1917.

Writers’ Program of the Works Projects Administration. West Virginia: A Guide to the

Mountain State. Washington: WPA and Oxford University Press, 1941.

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Ambler, Charles Henry. Sectionalism in Virginia from 1776-1881. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1910.

----------------------------, West Virginia, The Mountain State, Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1958.

Anderson, Fred. Crucible of War: The Seven Years War and the Fate of Empire In

British North America. New York: Publisher, 2000.

Barraclough, Geoffrey. The Atlas of World History. New York: Harper Collins, 2001.

Blow, Michael. History of the Thirteen Colonies. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

Callahan, James Morton. History of West Virginia: Old and New. Chicago: Publisher,

1923.

Colton, Calvin. The Private Correspondence of Henry Clay. Boston: Frederick Parker,

1856.

Craf, John A. Economic Development Of The United States. New York: McGraw Hill,

1952.

Crofts, Daniel. Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis.

Chapel Hill UNC 1989.

Faulkner, Harold. American Economic History 8th Edition. New York: Harper and Row,

1960.

Hall, Granville D. The Rending of Virginia. Chicago: Publisher, 1901.

Hogan, Roseann R. “Buffaloes in the Corn: James Wade’s Account of Pioneer Kentucky”

The Register of The Kentucky Historical Society. Vol. 89, #1 Winter 1991.

Holmberg, James, ed. Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark.

New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002.

Hull, Forrest. A Forrest Hull Sampler. Richwood W.Va.: Jim Comstock,1960.

Martineau, Harriet. Society in America London. London: Saunders and Otley, 1837.

McCardell, John. The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern

Nationalism 1830-1860. New York: W.W. Norton, 1979.

Rice, Otis. A West Virginia History. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1980.

Roberts, Gail. Atlas of Discovery. New York: Crown, 1973.

Shaffer, John. Clash of Loyalties: A Border County In the Civil War. Morgantown: WVU

Press, 2003.

Stealey, John E. The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets.

Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1993.

Stephenson, Richard W. and Marianne M. McKee. Virginia In Maps: Four Centuries of

Settlement, Growth and Development. Richmond: Library of Virginia, 2000.

Twohig, Dorothy, ed. Letters of George Washington, Retirement Series. Charlottesville:

UVA Press, 1998.

Von Glahn, Richard and Paul Jakov Smith, eds. The Song Yuan Ming Transition in

Chinese History: Imagining Pre-Modern China. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 2003.

West Virginia, Atlas and Gazetteer: Detailed Topographic Maps. New York:

DeLorme, 2001.

Willcox, Cornelius DeWitt. A French English Military Technical Dictionary. Washington

D.C.: U.S. Government

scribners.org

photos

Copyright DS CLARK 2006 atlanta georgia.

Structural economic prejudices are and were endemic in

everyday banking, shopping, housing and opportunities

for blacks in the US

If Scalia and Alito were around in the Cold War we would have no civil rights, just redlined "white" areas

and If Bush? Cheney? and Rumsfeld? were around in the Cold War, then

you know

we would all be /dead?

Cheney admits to "one beer"......... Tim Carroll is right,

this looks like a classic juvenile cover up.......

Apologies, I think you might be right, I think it is The killing of a President. Will try and find the right page number soon. Could not upload the image, so I have uploaded it here instead

Looks like some kind of curved plastic Motorola mouthpiece, not an ATT or walkie talkie........

Libby is slowly turning on his old boss Dick Cheney.

He has now claimed that his superiors approved his use of classified information

to defend the IRAQ yellowcake ruse.

When he outed Valerie Plame Wilson he was acting under orders from "his superiors"

Cheney violated law and common sense/