Shanet Clark

Note that the Executive Order #12036 specifically addresses assassination, and put into effect many of the conclusions of the Church Committee.

I knew he was a reconstruction man and had the strange "death" with later sightings, but this deMorenschildt/serial witness murder theme is new. You should click on the French site, their is a "button" for English translation.

Very little is out there about John Liggett, his wife Lois, his brother Malcolm and the reconstructive post mortem call he took 11/22/63. I have found this French site to be generally useful and today saw them link John Liggett to George DeMorenschildt, and thus to Ruth Paine. I hate to post in French but this is pretty self evident: John Ligget Mortician who might have been called in on November 22, 1963 to reconstruct the dead President's head. This is the opinion of John Melvin Ligget's ex-wife Loïs. Ligget was arrested in 1974 for the murder of Jay Bert Peck's widow. According to Billie Sol Estes in "JFK, le dernier témoin", John Ligget would also have killed Jay Bert Peck himself, and many other people related to John F. Kennedy's assassination. He would have been a serial killer used by an organization responsible of JFK's death. See also: George De Mohrenschildt, Jay Bert Peck A friend of Lee Harvey Oswald whom the HSCA proved to have been regularly employed by the CIA. He introduced Ruth Paine to Oswald. George De Mohrenschildt was found dead in the afternoon of the day he was to be heard by an HSCA investigator. Killed by a bullet in the mouth. The coroner declared it was a suicide. However, in "JFK, le Dernier Témoin", by William Reymond, Billie Sol Estes tells about a murder by John Ligget. One learns in the same book that there would be a film owned by a private collector in Europe in which De Mohrenschildt claims to have manipulated Oswald to make sure he would take part in John F. Kennedy's assassination. Jay Bert Peck Lyndon Johnson's double Cousin of Lyndon B. Johnson who resembled him amazingly. He has been LBJ's official double. According to Billie Sol Estes in "JFK, le dernier témoin", Jeay Bert Peck would have replaced Lyndon Johnson during the night between November 21 and 22. John Ligget » Embaumeur Spécialiste de la reconstitution faciale, que certains - dont son ex-épouse Lois - soupçonnent d'avoir reconstitué le visage de John F. Kennedy le 22 novembre 1963. Cette opération aurait eu pour but d'effacer les traces d'un tir de face sur JFK. Ligget fut arrêté en 1974 pour tentative de meurtre contre la veuve de Jay Bert Peck, sosie de Lyndon B. Johnson. Dans "JFK, le dernier témoin", Billie Sol Estes déclare que John Melvin Ligget aurait également tué Jay Bert Peck lui-même, ainsi que de nombreuses autres personnes liées à l'assassinat de John F. Kennedy. Ligget aurait été un tueur en série utilisé par une organisation responsable de la mort de JFK. Voir aussi: George De Mohrenschildt, Jay Bert Peck » Objets liés à John Ligget « George De Mohrenschildt » Ami d'Oswald Naissance: 17 avril 1911 - Mort: Mardi 29 mars 1977 Ami de Lee Harvey Oswald dont le HSCA montra qu'il était employé régulièrement par la CIA. C'est lui qui présenta Ruth Paine à Oswald. George De Mohrenschildt fut retrouvé mort l'après-midi du jour où il devait être entendu par un enquêteur du HSCA. Tué d'une balle dans la bouche. Le médecin légiste conclut qu'il s'agissait d'un suicide. Mais dans "JFK, le dernier témoin" de William Reymond, Billie Sol Estes parle d'un meurtre qui aurait été commis par John Ligget. On apprend dans le même ouvrage qu'il existerait chez un collectionneur privé en Europe un film inédit dans lequel De Mohrenschildt déclarerait avoir manipulé Lee Harvey Oswald pour s'assurer sa participation à l'assassinat de John F. Kennedy. Voir aussi: Ruth Paine « Jay Bert Peck » Sosie de Lyndon Johnson Cousin éloigné de Lyndon Johnson qui lui ressemblait étonnamment. Il a été le sosie officiel du vice-président de JFK. Dans "JFK, le dernier témoin", Billie Sol Estes déclare que Jay Bert Peck aurait remplacé Lyndon B. Johnson dans la nuit du 21 au 22 novembre 1963. Peck se serait fait passer pour LBJ à Fort Worth (lieu où a résidé officiellement Johnson la veille de l'assassinat d'après le rapport Warren) afin que le vice-président puisse se rendre incognito à Dallas pour régler les détails d'une opération visant à assassiner John F. Kennedy. Toujours selon Billie Sol Estes, Jay Bert Peck aurait été assassiné par John Ligget, qui sera plus tard arrêté pour tentative d'assassinat à l'encontre de la veuve de Peck. Voir aussi: John Ligget http://www.jfk-fr.com/bio_271.php Ligget was a suspect in DeMorenschildt's murder/

Pat. That would be a fatal position to be in ... Are you familiar with former Prime Minister Michael manley of Jamaica's book "In the Shadow of Empire" Jamaica had the audacity and independent spirit to actually recognize and work with the neighboring island (cuba) and Henry Kissinger and the CIA caused all kinds of problems in retribution, World Bank bonds were offered and withdrawn, urban riots broke out before elections and the social left was pushed out by the old guard Commonwealth party of Seaga....

Boston’s Vietnam Era Draft Resistance Movement: The Public Memory of Draft Evasion, Card Burning and Draft Prosecutions A Book review by David Shanet Clark, Georgia State University Michael S. Foley: Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War, Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, 2003. In Confronting the War Machine, historian Michael Foley establishes his principal proposition, documenting the distinction between the draft resistance, Vietnam anti-war protesters and 1960s draft dodgers, three varieties of misunderstood and intertwined young people. In the 1960s draft dodgers gamed the system, playing tactics with their draft boards and with weak Federal draft law enforcement, to avoid fighting in Vietnam. The draft resister is entirely different, as Foley makes clear, and both are distinct from the anti-war protester. These distinctions are important and add weight to the book’s impact. Foley proves his thesis, concerning the need for us to recognize the full range of draft responses, i.e., being drafted, avoiding the draft, exile, or resistance, and what motivated and sprung from those responses. The public memory retains an image of draft age men in the Harvard, BU, and MIT area burning their draft cards. Foley points out that these were Selective Service Induction Deferrals and Exemptions being sent back to the Justice Department (only a minority burned them for the camera) and that the draft resisters took risks--based on acts of conscience--by renouncing the draft that protected them, via exemptions and deferrals. The public memory includes Dr. Benjamin Spock (the baby doc) and Reverend William Sloane Coffin being prosecuted for counseling the draft resisters who gathered in the Back Bay in Boston at the Arlington Street Church, October 16, 1967. Foley carefully analyzes the prosecution of the older, non-draft age men, and decides that moderate Attorney General Ramsey Clark chose them for a very pointed show trial in which the mass of protesters would be fairly represented by the older men. The televised altar-ceremony draft card burnings followed on the heels of March 31, 1966, when four young Boston men burned their cards in a filmed protest. Boston was home to a strong pacifism and just war critical thinkers’ tradition, most evident in H.D. Thoreau’s Concord, Massachusetts memoirs. (Many of the 1960s draft resisters also cite Gandhi in Foley’s intensive oral history interviews and documentation review). Boston is a central source for the fast growing culture of resistance to the draft in the mid 1960’s and the Resistance, as they were called, were fully aware of their romantic, anti-fascist and existential namesakes. The public memory is rich with folklore on Vietnam induction. Weight gain, weight loss, feigned and real medical exemptions, feigned and real homosexual and psychological exemptions were all employed, and the morally secure public draft resister would often counsel the high school age youth about the rules of the Vietnam avoidance game. Foley doesn’t go into all the deferment strategies used, but the 17-category 1967 U.S. draft deferment schedule is quite valuable, (4-f, 1-a, 1-w, etc.) Foley makes important clarifications and distinctions about the 1960s anti-war universe. Most importantly, he stresses that the draft resistance were college deferred, upper class students, who gave up deferral to contact the Attorney General with their cards and letters, risking retaliation. Johnson’s head of the Selective Service General Lewis Hershey did retaliate. He reclassified the resisters 1A and inducted them for Vietnam service. By 1969 the Supreme Court would rule that the punitive loss of exemptions was illegal, but that was too late if you were overseas in the jungle. Foley focuses his narrative’s periodization nicely. In the beginning, in 1966 and 1967 the draft Resistance would regularly go out to induction centers and buses for inductees and try to talk draftees out of induction. They followed a moral call to conscience and were cold to SDS organizer’s call for class struggle and revolutionary acts. This changed by Monday, July 22, 1968, when Foley’s period of “classic” Boston Vietnam era draft resistance ends. Bill Hunt, the Boston Draft Resistance Group and New England Resistance leader spoke to a rally on Boston Common for the Peace and Freedom Party, who had nominated the Black Panthers’ Eldridge Cleaver for President of the United States. Hunt spoke of the “galactic” distance of “dedication and risk” between the Oakland Black Panthers and the Boston Resistance, since the Panthers were faced with the “western genocidal technology” of the “Oakland Pigs.” The leader of the Boston draft movement saw “a new climate of insurgency…(preparing the way for) … a white revolutionary left.” Similarly, leader Alex Jack became alienated and militant, urging Boston to reject “the most monstrous and destructive society in history…. rise up and utterly destroy this universe.” Foley uses these statements to draw the curtain on the classic stage of resistance, and show its problematic assimilation into the later anti-war era, marked by the Chicago Democratic Convention, the Yippies, the Maoists of SDS and the agent provocateurs of the FBI. Deftly written, richly researched, Foley’s book straightens out the public memory on the role of draft resisters in ending the draft and in forcing the re-appraisal of the Vietnam War’s policy by the Johnson administration. With a strong narrative and case study approach, Foley succeeds in impressing us with the range of options open to draft age men in the northeast in the late 1960s. The public memory of a chaotic time is clarified and Foley enhances the dignity of draft resisters in this important addition to the history of the period. Vietnam War Period, Anti-War Protest and Draft Resistance Selected For Further Reading: Baritz, Loren Backfire: A History of How American Culture Led Us Into Vietnam N.Y., William Morrow, 1985. Davis, James Kirkpatrick Assault on the Left: the FBI and the Sixties Antiwar Movement Westport Conn., Praeger DeBenedetti, Charles The Peace Reform in American History Bloomington & London, Indiana Univ. Press, 1980 Gettleman, Marvin, Editor Vietnam and America: Most Comprehensive Documented History of the Vietnam War N.Y. Grove Press, 1995 Heineman, Kenneth J. Campus Wars: the Peace Movement of American State Universities in the Vietnam Era. London & N.Y., NYU Press, 1993. Katsiaficas, G. The Imagination of the New Left, a Global Analysis of 1968 Boston, South End Press, 1987 Lewes, James Protest and Survive: Underground GI newspapers During the Vietnam War City, Publisher, Date. Powers, Thomas The War at Home: Vietnam and the American People 1964-1968 New York, Grossman, 1973. Zaroulis, Nancy and Gerald Sullivan Who Spoke Up: American Protest against the War in Vietnam 1963-1975 N.Y. Doubleday, 1984. Zinn, Howard Disobedience and Democracy: Nine Fallacies on Law and Order Boston, South End Press, 1968,2002

I am an adult convert to Christianity and used to feel as many of you do. However, the power of prayer and the psychic energy given by a feeling of absolved guilt is real. John knows I am among the most skeptical and hard nosed of critical thinkers, but my PERSONAL and INTERNAL mind is fed by the doctrines of the New, Old and Prayer Book testaments. I love apocrypha, Oxyrhynchus and QUMRAN writings and history....what a powerful gift we have in the levelling Christians, really so much of our peaceful civic society comes from the martyrs efforts....the Romans and the Barbarians responded to the message and it was all to the good......I believe in holy marriage, wine and bread sanctified, baptism for sins, and prayer. Of course I am disgusted with evangelical reactionary white power in the States and disappointed with the specific institutional churches (church leaders) that I am familiaar with. I am much more comfortable with a MYSTIC interpretation, but the Gospel demands social and sanctified interaction, so I keep up some nominal attendance........Episcopalian, mainly....very good for the morale, John, seriously......

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.

Good research, well presented. I read the Prince Jack paperback, and a pretty scathing examination of Prince Jack. So I am open to a more solidly based theme. What do you all think of the Duke of Clarence theme? Is it totally debunked or still a contender? The weaknesses and fictions in the paperbaack were fairly obvious, but the tie in with the letter and the royal tutor? (it has been a few years)

John Lennon, the victim of systematic and illegal harassment and terrifying espionage from the FBI and other US authorities, was murdered. His assassin had little interest in the Beatles or Salinger's Catcher in the Rye before his emergence in the media as the killer of John Lennon. The motive, opportunity, desire and ability were all with the agencies that had pursued him, the most effective and widely popular anti-war radical and counter cultural figure in the world. Mr. Chapman was unfortunately the victim of a type of experimental behavioural influence. His handlers covered their tracks in the same manner as Sirhan Sirhan's...but the influences are clear nevertheless. Chapman's sponsored gun ownership, his military firing stance, his inability to flee, his missing three days before the crime, his relationship to covert refugee plans and operations operatives, all these point to something other than a LONE NUT

Where is this going? Downhill into raving paranoia ....... Queen Elizabeth II of Britain is a heroin dealer, you see, so she influenced the junkie that killed George Harrison (stabbing him) during the home invasion DON"T YOU GET IT? [....beedie beedie beedie beedie .... Twilight Zone theme]

Interesting thread. I would be more inclined to think of the effort and the false effort as simultaneous, and part of the overall frame-up of Oswald, the Marine Intelligence Communist. I have been reading Schiem's Contract on America, a very pure version of the HSAC Blakely revisions of the late 1970s. It occurs to me that the limited hang out or exposure of the "Mafia" angle, really clings the Giancana Roselli interests, which is a very cunning game of Blame the Victim. Joe and John Kennedy's relations with unsavory Chicago, New York and Los Angeles figures was linked to the ROSELLI contracts in Cuba. For the HSAC to link Ruby to Chicago and GIancana, and Ovid Demaris to make hay with the JUDITH EXNER CAMPBELL maaterial all points back to Kennedy and blames him for his own murder. Johnson knew pretty early that this was the fallback, that some mafia figures, from the 1960 election, were angry at RFK, JFK and the District Attorney's policy .... And this is just misdirection, and blaming the victim. I think people like Harrelson and Marcello played a role, and Ruby was obviously working for Mafia figures. It may well be that Lansky and Trafficante worked with the opposition, but Roselli and Giancana were more Kennedy men.......

The evidence has been manipulated, falsified, forged, leaked, denied and classified for too long. The only thing that can square this level of secrecy with the truth in my mind is that the whole thing was a "legal" joint agency sanction, an executive sanction of Kennedy. This would fall roughly into the parameters set by the 25th Amendment for removal of a President. The Secret Service, FBI and military intelligence had the means, motive, opportunity, training and desire to do the bidding of JFK's militant reactionary opposition. The weakness of the Lee Harvey Oswald scenario indicates that this is the case. The policy makers behind JM/WAVE , OPERATION PHOENIX and the MK/ULTRA program are perfectly capable of this, and the MOCKINGBIRD program, which flourished with the CHAOS and COINTELPRO programs show that the whole thing could have been -- and was -- covered up. The inability of the evidence after government handling to make any sense drives our speculation. The classified material may or may not come out and say he was killed for "our own good" and charges of treason against Kennedy are regularly posted. Between Ellen Romesch, Mary Meyer and the Backchannel to Moscow, the naval and civil agencies that built security clearance files on all top executive, and Kennedy was on a short leash. EXECUTIVE SANCTION, COUP D'ETAT and illegitimate succession do not only occur far in the past in far away lands. The Classifiers overthrew democratic representative government in 1963 and replaced it with their own Executive regency (Johnson....Ford....Bush...Bush) The power to classify is the power to re write history, ala George Orwell's "1984"...

Review of Robert H. Wiebe’s Self Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy and Mary P. Ryan’s Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City During the Nineteenth Century. Perhaps these two books should exchange subtitles. Mary Ryan has given us a cultural history and Robert Wiebe addresses democracy and public life. Both books are scholarly and well-supported and employ primary documents, and both show a mastery of the secondary sources. Both works address a well established theme in American history, how democratic traditions rapidly evolved and came to prominence in the nineteenth century—a subject familiar to readers of Alexis deTocqueville, George Bancroft and almost every U.S. political historian since. A related journal article “Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A new look at the Golden Age of participatory democracy (JAH 12/97)” by Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin adds to the debate on early democracy. Neither Wiebe nor Ryan attempt to revise the accepted tradition of a democratic golden age in the sweeping way Altschuler and Blumin do, but by bringing in cultural and theoretical constructs, the two books broaden and in some ways revise our views of nineteenth-century political participation. The article adds further to our insight. The principle contribution of Altsculer is to de-bunk the myth of an energized universal polity. By studying smaller political units, they found that participation was not as great as the tradition assumes, and that elites mobilized local voters, who acted grudgingly, and perfunctory institutional engagement was more common than once thought, in democracy’s “golden age.” Many links can be found between the three works. The development of professional organizations drew upper-middle-class activists up and out of broader party activities after the Civil War, according to Altschuler, something also seen in Ryan. In a related way, municipal public service replaced volunteer civic efforts as the century wore on—as fire, road maintenance and police functions became professionalized, local political participation saw a corollary decline (Altschuler, 876). As Parties became more professionalized and only ‘represented’ the former volunteer public citizens, the public withdrew from more direct involvement, and the golden age of democracy waned. Altshuler questions the depth and engagement of the “golden age” of public democracy, and encourages us to judge participation by more critical standards. The pressure to vote, the public spectacles, and the high voter turnout are not seen as absolute markers of broad and deep political engagement. Altschuler broadens our perception through solid methodology, although their conclusions are probably overstated. Political and cultural theories of participation are used by both Ryan and Wiebe to explain the rise and fall of mass democracy in the U.S. between the 1820s and the 1880s. Mary Ryan is correct in pointing to the revolution in print (cheaply available for the first time in the Victorian mid-century) as one factor in unprecedented participation. Wiebe is on very strong grounds when he shows us the legal demolition of both indenture and apprenticeship in the 1820-1840 era as a watershed for popular political participation. Wiebe has immersed himself in theories of class and labor. His citation of J. Habermas in the evolution of public space is nicely complemented by his linking of democracy to a sense of one’s ownership of one’s own body—this gets to the roots of the change in authority and self-directed advocacy as seen in the Jacksonian period. Mary Ryan also engages cultural theories, especially control of public spaces and a new sense of self-directed advocacy, in her study of participation in three major U.S. cities of the period. Wiebe follows in the wake of Tocqueville as he shows us the leveling of American society in the post-colonial period. European travel reports showed a total breakdown in the cultural traditions of obeisance, and in ways often repellant and absurd to old world chroniclers. The rough and tumble eye-gouging, the tobacco spit, the common housing and board norms of the urban and frontier spaces certainly point to a democratic, or non-hierarchical, age. Writers who don’t fit the pattern are slyly derogated, one source, Harriet Martineau, found relatively clean and wholesome travel in the frontier areas. Her witness is graded skeptically by Wiebe, who stresses the more common “Barbarian” theme (58) presented by European visitors. While Wiebe is on solid ground for most of his exposition, his trust in new cultural theories may come at the expense of a fully-grounded traditional political understanding of things. Certainly there are weak spots in his understanding of partisan divides and party agendas. Like so many other political historians of this period (John William Ward, Richard Hofstadter, James Rourke) he tends to miss the authoritarian impetus of the Jacksonians and underplay the legitimate democratic efforts of the Whig opposition. His conflation of the campaign of 1840 with the 1841-1845 administration confuses Harrison with Tyler—and real party conflict with an assumed hegemony that was not there at all. In a similar way, he misunderstands the relations of the Whig Party to its constituent wing, the Anti-Masons, misplacing the hostility toward Masonic secrecy (it came from the ‘aristocratic’ Whigs, not the ‘democratic’ Democrats). His references to the ‘Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men’ agenda shows a limited understanding of the economic theories of self-determination as they captured the popular mind. The Whigs absorbed large numbers of northern Democrats when this economic theory of labor emerged, and the Democrats simultaneously became the party of entrenched authority, foreign expansion, slavery and intolerance. By 1852, the post-Whig Republican Party was a stronger advocate of universal participation than the over-celebrated party of Jackson, Van Buren, Pierce and Buchanan. Wiebe is at his best when dealing with race and gender factors. His subtle and articulate theory of “Ins and Outs” shows a mastery of that aspect of nineteenth-century history. While overwhelmingly racist and sexist, the universal rhetoric of native democracy gave footholds to women and blacks, which, when rejected, point to core problems of hypocrisy and intolerance in the “Golden Age.” Wiebe brings great erudition to his analyses of the women’s demands, the free blacks’ situation and the nature of slavery in a democracy. Wiebe never forgets to caveat the essential white male aspects of the broad democracy, and he doesn’t make the time-worn mistake of seeing this era as a universally empowered polity, but rather a fractured and divided one. These three works all lead us to question the meaning of democracy and its relationship to cultural public communication. Mary Ryan shows us broadly supported civic organizations claiming public spaces (and a public voice) in New York, New Orleans and San Francisco. Her cultural approach strongly favors urban events, and is of little value in estimating the engagement of rural voters in the period. She tends to see Hofstadter-type pragmatism at work in policy making, and reveals a growing authoritarianism in the civic groups as the century wears on. Her expose of nativist vigilantism is a welcome addition to partisan theory, and her willingness to add counter-intuitive interpretations to the meaning of public parades and demonstrations shows a firm grasp of the complexities behind public political participation. All three works seem to undervalue a pertinent factor—economic standards of living. The golden age of democracy in the early mid-century is inextricably linked to rising economic conditions. The steamboat, which revolutionized rural farm markets on a riparian transport matrix, is never mentioned. The railroad, which competed with and largely replaced the steamboat by the 1850s, is equally absent. Cheap land, the great leveling factor, is mentioned but not fully stressed. The pervasiveness of self-determined work is mentioned in an abstract way that fails to fully contrast the antebellum steamboat and rail markets to the industrial ‘core-periphery’ system of the post-war era which followed. Given that real frontier families saw the period of the steamboat as a golden age (before the Civil War and its post-war depressions) the economic moment must be more firmly linked to the political moment. Literacy, enthusiasm over the new voter suffrage policies—in its first generation—and the development of canals and roadways are all ignored. While Wiebe has an interesting concept of three classes emerging, (a national class, a local middle class and a working class), I am not convinced this rises to level of class distinction as understood by sociologists. In developing class theory, demographic induction must precede conceptual deduction. By the 1850’s a golden age of universal white male political engagement, the period of rampant democracy, was waning. Although not a political historian, Mary Ryan shows the fissures best. The racism and intolerance of the nativists and vigilantes show an appalling moral vacuum in the center of the democratic fabric. Louis Hartz would point to blind and blinkered allegiance to bourgeous “liberal” norms being another flaw that would continue to undermine responsible and responsive government. Wiebe sees a vague shift toward a new national class of elites. Altschuler shows us a “a grammar of corruption” and a Barnum “humbug” emerging to tarnish American democratic traditions. Mary Ryan sees self appointed nativists and vigilantes playing a large role in the end of the ‘golden age.’ All are correct, and all have limits. Until cultural history, political partisan history and economic/geographic models are all brought to bear on the question, the mystery of how engaged the American Victorians were and what happened to slow this engagement will remain an open and unsolved question.

Great photo. It shows the [offensive tactical salient] the EMMETT HUDSON POSITION, from JFK's point of view. The stairs leading back to the wall, the fence, the parking lot, are clearly shown. There are about thirty five people in this photo, with 25 clustered on the curb. This is a school group, apparently, numerous adolescents, Hammerman and two older men in suits. Two confident striders walk up toward the UM/DCM position. Five or six people are clustered at the bloodstain/Nix gunman position between the retaining wall and the fence. Two people are at the Coca-Cola bottle/BDM position. The shade was not that impenetrable, and the other photos can be compared to this shot for the light levels up under the trees. This is the type of cluster one would expect at the sight, if JFK skull and bone material blew front to back, off the trunk lid and into the street, to be discovered here.... this is the immediate aftermath, maybe two to four minutes after? Can we get a better look at the Hammerman or the men behind him?

Now I see where this is going.......

Okay now I see where this is going........

Interesting theory on who is behind this.... The two posts (one popped up around 1/1/05) are very disturbing and cast a sickening pall upon our seminars and discussions: JOHN & ANDY I request that these manifestly grotesque offerings be removed and the member ousted.

Robin, once again NIX versus MOORMAN.

Robin That is a pretty credible image of someone at the top of the stairs, base of the Wall. THIS PERSON IS ALSO IN TOWNER IN THE BLACK DOG MAN POSITION. My main evidence that Moorman was forged is the whited out area where NIX FILM shows a gunman in the foreground, and dark foliage in the background... Securing this [offensive tactical salient] was the key to the assassination by ambuscade.....

Robin Yes we crossed threads. The double post was my fault, I think.. Thank you for all the great posts recently. I was forgetting the BRAY BENDIX case due to the new material. THe letter you have posted above adds a new layer to what we knew about the BRAY BENDIX case. These are primary documents, and the clipped part is Bray's original typing, I believe. In the court docs I think the film claim is only of the dry runs, the claim of a DEALEY 11/22/63 film was squelched early, as was the whole case. This is very much in line with the conventional propaganda approach represented by the film EXECUTIVE ACTION< and again due to the secrecy, classification, intimidation, misdirection, forgery and murder involved in the evidence at hand, this must survive as a mighty milestone in the case, along with Dinkins....

Bray's lawsuit against Bendix was briefly reviewed in a thread not long ago. THRESHER BENDIX BRAY these two phrases led to good search results. Mr. Bray should be taken at face value, like Sargeant Dinkin. The films, reports of preliminary and action films support Lee's view of the photo record. BENDIX was a major defense department supplier in 1963:

Note the FUZZED OUT area from frame one thru forty in ZAPRUDER, the portico connecting the county records and jail... On a larger scale they drove him into a corralled cul-de-sac, an ARCADE ... I call it the TRINITY RIVER MURDERS ....... Here you can see the tactical offensive salient, the sidewalk, retaining wall and HUDSON position

PLEASE LET THIS THREAD DIE A QUIET FADE TO BLACK