Mass. attorney board rushes to racialize, shun 'overseer,' ignores word's ancient, biblical usages

A proposal published for public comment would change the name of the Massachusetts Board of Bar Overseers to the "Board of Bar Oversight" to avoid connotations of slavery in the term "overseer."

The new name means the "BBO" will keep its popular initialism. The BBO was formed in 1974, so the "overseer" usage originated independently of the negative connotation. It seems what's changed in the last half century is sensitivity to language, for better and for worse.

Frederick Douglass
and grandson Joseph Douglass, 1894
Smithsonian NMAAHC

The BBO stated its reasoning:

The word "overseer" has a pernicious history in our country, tied inextricably to chattel slavery. On southern plantations, an overseer was the slaveowner's delegate in day-to-day governance, trusted to enforce order and obedience. Overseers were the most visible representatives of white supremacy. As defined in the Online Etymology Dictionary, an overseer was "one who has charge, under the owner or manager, of the work done on a plantation." In autobiographies by slaves such as Frederick Douglas [sic] and Solomon Northup ("Twelve Years a Slave"), overseers were described as heartless, brutal and cruel. They were an inevitable and indispensable product of an economy built on human chattel. As noted by University of Louisville president Neeli Bendapudi, "The term overseer is a racialized term. It hearkens back to American slavery and reminds us of the brutality of the conditions and treatment of black people during this time." We agree with this statement.

I don't. To "racialize" is "to give a racial character to: to categorize, marginalize, or regard according to race." I agree that Bendapudi racialized the term. The BBO did not, before now. But therein lies the power of a passive structure, "is ... racialized," allowing one to accuse without responsibility to prove.

The BBO moreover is almost irresponsibly selective in its sourcing. First, the Online Etymology Dictionary is a project of a Pennsylvania writer, Douglas Harper. It's good and interesting to read; I'm not meaning to denigrate Harper's labor of love. But I'm not sure any one person's internet project should be anyone else's first stop for denotation, especially in a legal context. The BBO's sourcing is on par at best with high-school-term-paper standards.

Second, "one who has charge ... of the work done on a plantation" is not exactly what the Online Etymology Dictionary says. Rather, here's the entry in full:

late 14c., "supervisor, superintendent, one who looks over," agent noun from oversee (v.). Specifically, "one who superintends workmen;" especially with reference to slavery, "one who has charge, under the owner or manager, of the work done on a plantation."

So it's not true, even in the source referenced, that "overseer" on its face is defined as, or means, a plantation supervisor. The meaning arises in the especial context of slavery.

Maybe I'm a little sensitive to the whole thing because I once served as an "overseer" in my church. The BBO doesn't mention that the word has any meaning outside of slavery, much less that it has ancient and Biblical origins.

Episkopos (ἐπίσκοπος) in Ancient Greek translates literally as onlooker, or overseer, and that's the word used in the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Bible. Epi (ἐπί) is a preposition meaning on or upon, and skopos (σκοπός) means to watch or look intently. Skopos is used variously (and in the Iliad) to refer to a lookout, a guardian, or a spy or scout.

In Ancient Greece, an episkopos referred specifically to a kind of imperial agent sent by Athens to distant municipalities to make sure they paid their taxes (Balcer 1977). (An interesting point of historical-comparative legal studies is that having a highly functional tax system is a common feature of successful ancient civilizations, from the Greeks to the Aztecs.) 

In the Iliad (22:255), A.T. Murray translation, Homer refers to the gods as witness to an agreement, using episkopoi (ἐπίσκοποι), the plural, to refer back to the gods. Murray beefed up the translation to say "witnesses and guardians of our covenant," thus articulating the added connotation of safeguarding.

In the Odyssey, also the Murray translation, below, Homer used episkopos more abstractly to indicate a role of authority:

τὸν δ᾽ αὖτ᾽ Εὐρύαλος ἀπαμείβετο νείκεσέ τ᾽ ἄντην:
‘οὐ γάρ σ᾽ οὐδέ, ξεῖνε, δαήμονι φωτὶ ἐίσκω
160ἄθλων, οἷά τε πολλὰ μετ᾽ ἀνθρώποισι πέλονται,
ἀλλὰ τῷ, ὅς θ᾽ ἅμα νηὶ πολυκλήιδι θαμίζων,
ἀρχὸς ναυτάων οἵ τε πρηκτῆρες ἔασιν,
φόρτου τε μνήμων καὶ ἐπίσκοπος ᾖσιν ὁδαίων
κερδέων θ᾽ ἁρπαλέων: οὐδ᾽ ἀθλητῆρι ἔοικας. 

Then again Euryalus made answer and taunted him to his face: "Nay verily, stranger, for I do not liken thee to a man that is skilled in contests, such as abound among men, but to one who, faring to and fro with his benched ship, is a captain of sailors who are merchantmen, one who is mindful of his freight, and has charge of a home-borne cargo, and the gains of his greed. Thou dost not look like an athlete."

In none of several English versions of this passage did I find episkopos translated directly. Poetically inclined translators such as Murray carried over the subject "captain" with either a pronoun or an implied subject. "Captain" here is "ἀρχὸς," or "chief." So it looks like Homer saw ἀρχὸς and ἐπίσκοπος as functionally equivalent in this context.

The New Testament accordingly uses episkopos several times to refer to church leaders. Indeed, "bishop" in English derives from the Greek episkopos—episcopus in Latin and obispo in Spanish.

Shepherd in 1 Peter 2:25
© Saint Mary's Press, licensed for non-commercial use

The First Epistle of Peter (2:25) (NIV) uses episkopos abstractly, as a metaphor for Jesus: "For 'you were like sheep going astray,' but now you have returned to the Shepherd and Overseer of your souls" ("ἦτε γὰρ ὡς πρόβατα πλανώμενα· ἀλλ᾽ ἐπεστράφητε νῦν ἐπὶ τὸν ποιμένα καὶ ἐπίσκοπον τῶν ψυχῶν ὑμῶν").  

Other usages are more concrete. In Acts 20:28 (NIV), Paul admonishes disciples: "Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood" ("προσέχετε οὖν ἑαυτοῖς καὶ παντὶ τῷ ποιμνίῳ ἐν ᾧ ὑμᾶς τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον ἔθετο ἐπισκόπους ποιμαίνειν τὴν ἐκκλησίαν τοῦ θεοῦ ἣν περιεποιήσατο διὰ τοῦ ἰδίου αἵματος"). Similar usages appear in Philippians 1:1, 1 Timothy 3:2, 1 Titus 1:7, and Hebrews 13:17.

The BBO needs to be called out here for shoddy work (really, misspelling Frederick Douglass?) and results-oriented reasoning. The board is myopically intent on sacrificing a word on the pyre of cancel culture—a move indicative more of wanting to look righteous than of wanting to be righteous. I might rather, as a general rule, strive for education and enlightenment, at least as a first-order response.

Yet, as it happens, I agree with the BBO's conclusion and proposal. Despite the board's woke pandering, the risk is significant that "overseer" will import for some hearers a connotation that should be foreign to the board's role. For me, it's not about "racialization"; it's about relationship. 

When I moved to New England and started to learn the ropes of the local legal culture, I bristled at the term "Bar Overseers." To be fair to Massachusetts, I have had the same feeling in other jurisdictions about boards of attorney and judicial "discipline." 

"Overseer" and boy in Yazoo City, Miss., yarn mill, 1911.
U.S. Library of Congress

I fear that these words connote a top-down style of austere supervision, a system of the powerful and the powerless, that does not comport with a profession of mutually supportive equals (dare I say, a brethren, which is and should be gender encompassing). "Overseer" is suggestive of a dramatic power imbalance; the word was used not only in connection with slavery and plantations, but in the context of child labor in the early 20th century.

That doesn't mean that the time never comes when persistent or willful misconduct requires a firm response; the profession owes its highest duty to the public. But using terms such as "overseer" and "discipline" has the unintended consequence of encouraging officeholders to misunderstand their roles. Lawyering and judging are among jobs that endow persons with authority over others, whether through power, like policing, or through access to knowledge. Some people attracted to these jobs are prone to use, or abuse, their power for its own sake. Those same people might gravitate to a job such as "overseer" or arbiter of "discipline" for the wrong reasons.

I was more amenable to the term "overseer" in my church, because the biblical usage is, or should be, utterly alien to abuse of power. Similarly, a church speaks of spiritual "discipline" with only the affirmative connotation of accountability to God. As a church overseer, I felt the weight of guardianship in the term. Being an overseer was a stern reminder of my responsibilities to others and sometimes, too often, of my own duties and failures of spiritual discipline. Anyone truly called to church leadership is humbled by the call, not lured by empowerment.

Even so, when my board of overseers overhauled the church constitution, we changed to "elder" leadership. At the same time, we changed the governance model. We studied and prayed over many church governance models. The Bible says remarkably little about specifics, so the art of church governance becomes part spiritual endeavor and part sociological experiment. We designed a variation on governance that we believed would work well for our congregation, better, at least, than what we had in an aging constitution. 

"Elder" aligned better with our new model, which emphasizes biblical knowledge, experience, and mentorship. There's nothing technically deficient in the term "overseer" for our new model, and we were not afraid of "racialization." It was just semantics. Different Christian writers have committed to different terms, so those terms now carry connotations of the writers' observations and recommendations.

So connotation, like context, matters. And given the connotation of barbarism that even sometimes attaches to "overseer," especially in secular contexts, the BBO's modest proposal is sensible.

I simply would prefer that the proposal were backed by an evenhanded and honest analysis. Then we might be able to say, more modestly, that we are just pushing pause on "overseer": giving its deplorable connotation time to fade in our social consciousness, rather than committing a word of ancient import to the dustbin because of a modern-era abomination.

KTAL: Federal judge started in TV at fresh-faced age 14

Age 16, Morris S. Arnold wields a TV camera in 1954.
Photo owned by Judge Arnold.

Senior U.S. Circuit Court Judge Morris S. Arnold appeared on KTAL-TV this week (embed below) talking about his youthful career in television.

KTAL started broadcasting in Texarkana, Ark., Judge Arnold's home town, in 1953, as KCMC, using the call sign of its sister radio station that had broadcast since 1933. Born in 1941, a young Judge Arnold was captivated by the newly prevalent medium. At age 14, he got his first job at the station, a go-for for election returns. Four to five decades later, the once TV go-for and camera operator earned a reputation for libertarian interpretation of the First Amendment.

Though, notwithstanding three decades on the federal bench, it's "just a regular ol' tort case, like a slip and fall," in diversity or supplemental jurisdiction, that gives Judge Arnold the "most joy," he told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in a 2013 profile.

A polymath, Arnold—full disclosure: a cherished friend—studied engineering and classics and had an illustrious academic career before his appointment to the federal bench. With an S.J.D. from Harvard University, he served, inter alia, as professor and dean at the Indiana Maurer Law School and as a vice president and law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. President Ronald Reagan appointed Arnold to the district bench in his home jurisdiction of western Arkansas in 1985, and President George H.W. Bush appointed him to the Eighth Circuit in 1992.

Judge Arnold
Wikimedia Commons

Now on senior status, Judge Arnold still hears cases and occasionally writes opinions. But retirement from full-time service on the bench afforded him time to return to his passion for history. In the 2010s, he cleared his desk of works in progress with a series of articles for the quarterly journal of the Arkansas Historical Association. Here are his most recent five:

• Barthélémy Dit Charlot, a Colonial Arkansas Métis and Voyageur (2015);
• François Ménard, a Colonial Arkansas "Marchand" and "Habitant" (2015);
• Colonial Arkansas Women (2017);
• The Soldiers of Spain in Colonial Arkansas (2018); and
• The Quapaws and the American Revolution (2020).

The latter, a fascinating insight into the conflicted and delicate position into which the Revolution cast indigenous leaders in America—I caught up on my reading earlier this summer—was especially well received in critical circles.

Judge Arnold is the author of five books on American history in the once territory of the Louisiana Purchase, and he is a co-editor of Arkansas: A Narrative History (2d ed. 2013). The most critically acclaimed of Judge Arnold's books is the oft cited Rumble of a Distant Drum: The Quapaws and Old World Newcomers, 1673-1804 (2000), also focused on the Quapaw.

But the top Arnold book for me is The Arkansas Post of Louisiana (2017). When I visited Judge Arnold in the spring, he said he is most proud of The Arkansas Post because it was a collaboration with Gail K. Arnold, the judge's wife, who provided photographs and edited illustrations. As a veteran Arkansas hiker, I immensely enjoyed visiting the Arkansas Post National Memorial many years ago, armed with Judge Arnold's earlier writings on frontier settlement and the colonial period.

Judge Arnold's work on legal history is featured in my fall Torts class annually, as his 1979 law review article on the origins of common law is excerpted in my textbook, Tortz: A Study of American Tort Law, volume 1 (Lulu, SSRN 2023). In Accident, Mistake, and Rules of Liability in the Fourteenth-Century Law of Torts, Arnold challenged the conventional wisdom of the renowned Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., who had posited that modern culpability doctrine was the achievement of a gradual common law evolution dating to medieval England.

It's often struck me that Judge Arnold has earned a remarkable legacy in both author and subject indices of historical research.

Paraguay remembers Pres. Rutherford 'Baller' Hayes; still scarred by 1860s war, Paraguay nears election

RBH & I at the Museo Municipal de Villa Hayes, Paraguay.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

UPDATE, May 10: The incumbent Colorado Party prevailed in the Paraguayan presidential election on April 30.

The tie between 19th-century U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes and the distant South American nation of Paraguay endures there today, resonating at the heart of issues in the upcoming Paraguayan presidential election.

Presidential Ballers

Comedian Stephen Colbert joked in October 2022 about Rutherford B. Hayes, bringing to mind a President of curious and far-ranging legacy.

Former President Barack Obama had released a get-out-the-vote video in which he informed young voters who he is and boasted of "the best jump shot in White House history." "He has the best jump shot," Colbert conceded in his Late Show monolog. "But not the best dunk. That was President Rutherford B. Hayes. The 'B' stands for baller."

Colbert showed an amusingly doctored image of a bearded and head-banded Hayes dunking (video below via Internet Archive).

The Real Rud B.

In reality, the "B" was for Birchard, the maiden surname of Hayes's mother, Sophia. She raised Hayes and his sister as a single mom. Hayes's father died before Hayes was born.

An Ohioan, Hayes was a lawyer and abolitionist. He made a name for himself with vigorous and creative representation of fugitive slaves. Hayes was shot while fighting for the Union in the Civil War. His military service was lauded by President Ulysses S. Grant (whose 201st birthday is upcoming), whom Hayes succeeded in the presidency in the Compromise of 1877, resolving the contested election of 1876. Part of the compromise involved withdrawing federal forces from the South, which did no favor for people emancipated from slavery. Hayes can be credited, though, for appointing "the great dissenter" of the Reconstruction era, John Marshall Harlan, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The flag of Departamento de Presidente Hayes, Paraguay.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Villa Hayes

It happened, also in October 2022, that I visited a distant legacy of President Hayes, a city and department in Paraguay named for him. Departmental capital Villa Hayes, north of Asunción on the Paraguay River, is in the Gran Chaco region. The region was at the heart of the territorial conflict in the War of the Triple Alliance. The devastating and brutal guerilla conflict, the worst of its kind in Latin American history, embroiled Paraguay in war with neighbors Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.

Hayes exhibit at the Museo Municipal de Villa Hayes, Paraguay.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

After the war ended, in 1876, Argentina and Paraguay disputed their post-war border and asked U.S. President Hayes to arbitrate. Though Argentina had substantially prevailed in the war, Hayes sided with Paraguay in the border dispute and awarded the country the bulk of the Gran Chaco.

To the present day, the region speaks to the arbitrariness of war. Beautiful as it is, the dry and sparsely populated Chaco has struggled to achieve agricultural and economic productivity. Moreover, the region was never really controlled by any of the modern nations that contested it, rather by the indigenous people who knew how to survive there and still do.

There is a parallel between this tribute to Hayes in Paraguay and the monument to President Grant in Guinea-Bissau that I saw and last wrote about in 2020. President Joe Biden recently having marked the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement in Belfast, it occurs to me that in modern times, the custom has ended of sitting presidents being enlisted personally in dispute resolution abroad.

Paraguayan Presidency

Relative to neighboring Argentina and Brazil, Paraguay lags in development, a long lingering effect of the War of the Triple Alliance. The settlement of the conflict left Paraguay as a buffer between the two Latin American powers. 

Paraguayans are frustrated by the chronic corruption and bleak jobs market that now threaten the long-running rule of the incumbent Colorado Party in the presidential election upcoming at the end of April. Still, the party, in the person of candidate Santiago Peña, an economics professor, has a sound shot at retaining power. Long historical experience with dictatorship manifests as distrust of challengers. Primaries in the fall were marred by a suspicious fire at election headquarters in Asunción. 

Polling in late March in the plurality-takes-all contest showed a narrow and probably statistically insignificant lead by attorney Efraín Alegre, a center-left candidate representing a coalition of more than 20 parties determined to displace the Colorado Party. Apropos of my recent lamentation on Chinese influence in Latin America, Alegre pledges to cut Paraguay's diplomatic ties with Taiwan to smooth the way for Paraguayan soy and beef exports to China.

Rats reveal human history, sometimes set its course

RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

A rat extermination program is well signed on the islands of the Azores.

As a tort lawyer, I can be a little obsessed with signs, especially warnings. So I was struck by the abundance of these signs on the islands of the Azores, specifically São Miguel, Terceira, and Pico, where I spent some time this month. The signs warn not to remove bait traps loaded with lethal rodenticide and not to litter, such as might provide food for rats.

Being a key port in the European age of discovery, the Azores are inextricably bound up with the history of human exploration and expansion. A remarkably successful species, rats are a part of that history, because they go where we go. The Azorean bat is the only native land mammal of the Azores. But people long ago brought more, including hedgehogs, rabbits, cats, and the islands' iconic cows, all besides, of course, rats.

The Azorean bat is found in dry forests. In contrast,
I am found here in the much wetter Reserva Florestal
Natural Parcial do Biscoito da Ferraria, on Terceira.
(Photo © Emma Falk, licensed exclusively.)

Unfortunately, the rats are now spreading a potentially fatal pathogen, leptospira, which threatens people and animals in the Azores. So officials have set about efforts to reduce the rat population.

There's been an abundance of research sequencing rat DNA to study the history of human exploration. For example, Gabriel, Mathias, & Searle (2014) studied rats in the Azores specifically. There are books on the history that rats and people share: Anthony Barnett's The Story of Rats (2002) and the New York City-focused Rats (2005) by New Yorker contributor Robert Sullivan. As the latter book suggests, rat research also informs contemporary urban development. Canadian "rat detective" Kaylee Byers wrote a fun first-person narrative for The Conversation (2019) on the value of "23andme" for rats.

Rats have a fan club.

The signs in the Azores reminded me in particular of a superb episode of the Throughline podcast in the spring, "Of Rats and Men," which well summarized the subject.

While Pope apologizes in Canada, U.S. reckons with legacy of federal Indian boarding schools

Children at Rehoboth Mission School, New Mexico
(from DOI report p. 39, credited: Hartog, C. (1910).
Rehoboth School [Photograph]. Indian mission sketches:
Descriptions and views of Navajo life, the Rehoboth Mission School
and the Stations Tohatchi and Zuni, 22. Gallup, N.M.: The Author.
Hathi Trust Digital Library)

The Pope's visit to Canada to ask forgiveness for the role of the Church has brought the tragedy of Indian boarding schools to light, but coverage has been thin on the U.S. legacy.

In the United States, Indian boarding schools were government policy and attempted a cultural genocide no less shamefully than the Church effort in Canada. This U.S. angle on the story hasn't been mentioned in my evening news the last few nights. But it was explicated by an Interior Department (DOI) report in May just this year and is being addressed in some media outlets (e.g., NPR).

The DOI report is just volume 1 in the ongoing investigation of the Federal Boarding School Initiative, "a comprehensive review of the troubled legacy of federal boarding school policies," launched in June 2021. A transmittal letter at the front of the report explained:

This report shows for the first time that between 1819 and 1969, the United States operated or supported 408 boarding schools across 37 states (or then-territories), including 21 schools in Alaska and 7 schools in Hawaii. This report identifies each of those schools by name and location, some of which operated across multiple sites.

This report confirms that the United States directly targeted American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children in the pursuit of a policy of cultural assimilation that coincided with Indian territorial dispossession. It identifies the Federal Indian boarding schools that were used as a means for these ends, along with at least 53 burial sites for children across this system-with more site discoveries and data expected as we continue our research.

When I say "attempted cultural genocide," or "ethnocide," this isn't just me throwing around woke words. The DOI report detailed official policy dating to President Washington to "subdue[] the Indians" by assimilation, "helping the whites acquire desirable land." An 1803 memo by President Jefferson outlined a plan to relocate native Americans and push them into farming with the express aim that they would thereby fall into debt and have to cede their land. (And, I note, today still our corporate overlords are pushing all of us into asset ownership—homes, cars, cell phones—on the debt model rather than the capital model. You don't have to be native American for the strategy to make the rich richer and you poorer.)

Hundreds of thousands of children were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools often distant from their home communities. That generations of people were so traumatized explains a lot about the fragile social and economic state of reservation communities today.

In military school fashion, the children's every 24 hours in the boarding schools were regimented. Using quotes from contemporary accounts (notes and sources omitted here), the report recounted:

"The children are improved rather in their habits than in what they learn from books." For example, to teach them "obedience and cleanliness, and give[] them a better carriage," Department records detail examples of organizing Indian male children "into companies as soldiers, and the best material selected for sergeants and corporals." "They have been uniformed and drilled in many of the movements of army tactics."

The report explained the means and ends of the boarding schools with revealing perspective:

Systematic identity-alteration methodologies employed by Federal Indian boarding schools included renaming Indian children from Indian names to different English names; cutting the hair of Indian children; requiring the use of military or other standard uniforms as clothes; and discouraging or forbidding ... Indian languages, ... cultural practices, and ... religions. "When first brought in they are a hard-looking set. Their long tangled hair is shorn close, and then they are stripped of their Indian garb thoroughly washed, and clad, in civilized clothing. The metamorphosis is wonderful, and the little savage seems quite proud of his appearance."

"No Indian is spoken[:]" "There is not an Indian pupil whose tuition and maintenance is paid for by the United States Government who is permitted to study any other language than our own vernacular—the language of the greatest, most powerful, and enterprising nationalities beneath the sun."

Then there was enforcement for violating the rules, including the prohibitions on language and religious practice. Whipping was the preferred punishment for attempted runaways.

Indian boarding school rules were often enforced through punishment, including corporal punishment, such as solitary confinement, "flogging, withholding food, ... whipping[,]" and "slapping, or cuffing." At times, rule enforcement was a group experience: "for the first offense, unless a serious one, a reprimand before the school is far better than a dozen whippings, because one can teach the whole school that the offender has done something that is wrong, and they all know it and will remember it, while it is humiliating to the offender and answers better than whipping."

Conditions for even compliant children were less than optimal. Citing prior DOI investigations in 1928 and 1969, the 2022 report stated:

The Department has acknowledged "frankly and unequivocally that the provisions for the care of the Indian children in boarding schools are grossly inadequate." Rampant physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; disease; malnourishment; overcrowding; and lack of health care in Indian boarding schools are well-documented.

Moreover, the children's labor was used to operate the schools, for example, the children's clothes were made by female students as part of their vocational training.

Lest the severity of these conditions be confused with mere norms of less gentle times, we might consider that schools, even in the 19th century, rarely had their own graveyards. DOI found 53 burial sites at Indian boarding schools, at least six unmarked.

U.S. Indian boarding schools have been examined thoughtfully in media outlets: The Atlantic, National Geographic (limited free), NPR, N.Y. Times, and Time (paywall).

There are books, too, of course: Ward Churchill's well regarded Kill the Indian, Save the Man (2004); the first-person Pipestone (2010) by Adam Fortunate Eagle; and the documentary compilation Boarding School Seasons (2000) by Brenda J. Child.

There are online resource collections at The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition and the Library of Congress.

My favorite media treatment in this area is a 2015 Radiolab segment, rebroadcast in 2018, "Ghosts of Football Past." Follow it up with a compelling reflection by Professor Justin De Leon.

Historian explores Grant statue's African odyssey

My photo from Bolama in 2020
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Martin H. "Jay" Joyce, author and my colleague in the exploration of historical curiosities, has authored a new article about the origins and winding story of the statue of U.S. President Ulysses S Grant on the island of Bolama in Guinea-Bissau and its two appearances on Bissauan postage stamps.

I have written about the Grant doppleganger's odyssey previously, in March 2020, when I got some of the facts wrong, and in November 2020, when I corrected and updated the record. Now Joyce has dived deep. He teases his piece thus:

In the March-April 2020 issue of Topical Time, Mr. George Ruppel recounted the story of why Portuguese Guinea (now Guinea-Bissau) issued stamps in 1946 and again in 1970, featuring Ulysses S. Grant. Grant was honored for arbitrating a dispute between Portugal and Great Britain during his presidential administration in favor of Portugal. The crux of the dispute involved territorial rights over the island of Bolama, just off West Africa’s coast.... In the mid-twentieth century, Bolama frequently appeared in the philatelic press because of the Pan-American Airways Clipper airmail routes, which used Bolama as a stopping point before proceeding across the South Atlantic....

An internet search for statues of American presidents around the world rarely includes this statue. Why not? As former ABC News radio commentator Paul Harvey would say, "Here's the rest of the story...."

The article is Ulysses S. Grant in Portuguese Guinea—the Rest of the Story, Topical Time, May-June 2022, at 60. Topical Time is the journal of the American Topical Association.

Joyce is a 1974 graduate of the United States Military Academy. He is the author of Postmarked West Point: A US Postal History of West Point and its Graduates, a winner of a Vermeil award at the 2021 Great American Stamp Show. His forthcoming work from La Posta Publications is The West Point Post Office: 1815-1981: Keeping It All in the Family—Nepotism, Paternalism and Political Patronage, ... and Dedication to the Corps.

West fails democracy, reembraces appeasement

The Eternal Love monument in Mariinsky Park in Kyiv commemorates an Italian POW and Ukrainian forced laborer who fell in love amid World War II, and then were separated by the Iron Curtain for 60 years.  The Guardian and DW have more.  I took this photo on a grand walkabout during my first visit to Kyiv in 2013. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

I've been away from blog duty for some weeks because of a busy presentation agenda this month.  But I have a list of items pending, and I look forward to returning to writing and sharing what I've learned. Meanwhile, I am distraught by events in Ukraine.  I have family from Kamianets-Podilskyi.

Ukrainian west comprises ethnic groups scarred by Soviet hostility; historian will lecture on Lemkos

Carpathian Range
(map by Ikonact CC BY-SA 4.0)

The Jagiellonian Law Society and the Kosciuszko Foundation are sponsoring a lecture on February 24 on Ukraine, Poland, and the Lemkos ethnic group.

The Beijing Olympics opened Friday, and conventional wisdom suggests that the chess game playing out in Eastern Europe will not heat up until the Olympics ends on Sunday, February 20. Nervous speculation abounds on what the following week might bring. Meanwhile, 3,000 American troops are deploying to Poland, Romania, and Germany.

February 24 thus seems an opportune time to learn something more about the complicated history of the region that is the focus of the world's attention.  The Lemkos ethnic group, at home in the Carpathian mountain range, sits at a curious crossroads.  With communities spanning Poland, Ukraine, and Slovakia, the Lemkos are an important piece of the region's multicultural story.  Oppressed by the Soviet Union, they are something of a mirror image of the intercultural wedge that Vladimir Putin is now driving to fragment Ukraine in the east.

Carpatho-Rusyns, including Lemkos at left, celebrate a cultural day in 2007.
(Photo by Silar CC BY-SA 3.0)

Professor Jan Pisuliński, a historian at the University of Rzeszów, will deliver the lecture, "Lemkos and Ukrainians," the fourth in a series on "Ethnic Minorities in Polish Lands."  Pisuliński is author of the book Special Operation "Vistula" (Akcja Specjalna 'Wisła') (2017) (Amazon), the definitive account of the forced resettlement by the Soviet Union in 1947 of 140,000 to 200,000 persons, mostly ethnic minorities including Lemkos, from the Carpathians to western Poland.  With the resettlement, the Soviets dismantled post-war guerilla resistance in the region.  On the northern edge of the Carpathians and in the southeast of Poland, Rzeszów is about 100km by highway form Ukraine's western border.

Registration for the Zoom lecture is free.  New members are always invited to join the Jagiellonian Law Society and Kosciuszko Foundation.  (I'm a member of the former.)  The Kosciuszko Foundation sponsors student scholarships and exchanges, among many other programs.

American soccer traces roots to textile mills

In the first pandemic summer, I watched and adored the limited TV series, The English Game, which depicted the birth of modern soccer, or association football, in the context of industrialization and labor organization in the 19th century.

Fall River Rovers, 1917

For Boston.com, sports writer Hayden Bird now reveals a similar heritage for U.S. soccer in the communities of once abundant mills in my current home region, eastern Rhode Island and the Massachusetts south coast.  Bird explains in the piece:

[T]he early 20th century boom in American soccer is intertwined with the textile industry. The exponential growth of mills in the late 19th century (following the decline of the whaling industry) led to large scale immigration as skilled laborers were funneled in....

Answering the call were people who already had textile experience: those from Lancashire and the valley of Clyde. These regions, as historian Roger Allaway points out, “in addition to being the heart of the English textile industry also was the area of England in which association football [soccer] had most taken root among working class people in those same years."

And because of this, "textiles brought immigration and immigration brought football."

Bird's coverage embedded this video, which YouTuber soccermavn describes as "[p]erhaps the oldest extant professional U.S. soccer footage—snippets from the 1924 U.S. Open Cup final, played on March 30, 1924" in St. Louis, where the Vesper Buick hosted the Fall River, Mass., Marksmen.  The Marksmen prevailed 4-2.

The article is Hayden Bird, American Menace: When Fall River Ruled U.S. Soccer, Boston.com (June 21, 2018).  Hat tip @voteunion (Aaron Wazlavek), J.D.  See also Dan Vaughn, The Ghosts of Fall River, Protagonist Soccer (Oct. 29, 2018).

Boosted twice by war, then by economic catastrophe, paper money tells the story of America

Notaphilist, historian, and my uncle, Armand Shank yesterday gave a fascinating talk on the history of banking and paper currency in Maryland for the Historical Society of Baltimore County.

From Shank's collection: Currency issued in Baltimore
by the Continental Congress, 1777

The history of money is, of course, the history of America.  The British initially held strict control over currency in the colonies, Shank explained, and, lo and behold, British banking rates and policies seemed never to inure to the benefit of colonists.  Local currency, besides federal "IOUs," sometimes appeared of necessity and represented resistance.  Benjamin Franklin Bache, grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was a publisher of money and used samples his grandfather brought back from Europe as models.  Shank showed one of Bache's products.

Late in the 18th century, the Continental government issued national currency to raise millions of dollars for the Revolution.  Acceptance of the currency was expected, Shank said, for refusing it would brand one a traitor.  After independence, the First Bank of the United States was chartered in 1791, but lasted only until 1811, a casualty of Jefferson's state-centric vision of federation prevailing over Hamilton's wish for a strong central government.  State and local money came back on the scene in a big way, notwithstanding the ultimately decisive U.S. Supreme Court approval of the Second Bank of the United States in McCulloch v. Maryland, the 1819 staple of the modern constitutional law class.  Shank shared images of money from Baltimore County in the early 19th century.  Counterfeits proliferated.

Shank's first acquisition

In the 1860s, it was the need to raise money for war that again prompted the assertion and mass issue of federal currency.  The National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864 strengthened and standardized national currency and, by 1865, phased out currency issued by state banks.  Local banks continued to issue currency, but only with the imprimatur of a national charter system.  Financial crises early in the 20th century led to reforms such as the first Federal Reserve Act, in 1913.  Federal reserve notes as we recognize them today emerged from a more vigorous standardization policy at the start of the Great Depression in 1929.

Quonset-style home in 1948
(Ed Yourdon CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Shank shared images from his collection of notes issued by the National Bank of Cockeysville, the town in northern Baltimore County where Shank grew up.  A $20 note of the bank was the first in Shank's collection, coming into his possession when he was a boy.  Circa 1950, Shank's father, Armand Shank, Sr., took Armand, Jr., to see Alexander D. Brooks, a cashier whose name appeared on the currency and who lived still in Cockeysville.  Alas, Shank said, Brooks, then in his 80s, had little recollection of his work for the bank.  Brooks died in 1956.

I have fond memories of being a kid in the 1970s, playing with cousins in the backyard of Armand Shank, Sr.'s home, where Armand, Jr., grew up, in Cockeysville.  The home, built in 1950 and still standing, was of a quonset-hut style, unusual today.  Many such homes were once built in this cost-effective style to meet the demand for housing after World War II: the homestead of the Baby Boom.  I didn't know that at the time, of course; I was more interested in the vast volume of lightning bugs that populated the yard.  I remember the smell of the place, fresh cut grass with a not unpleasant hint of motor oil.  It charms me now to think of another boy in that same environment, a generation earlier, one day awakening to a passion for American history told through the lineaments of banknotes.

Armand Shank is a member of the Board of Directors of the Historical Society of Baltimore County.   He is co-author of Money and Banking in Maryland: A Brief History of Commercial Banking in the Old Line State (1996).  He has a new article forthcoming on the subject for History Trails, a publication of the society.

Comedy of Roy Wood Jr. surfaces under-appreciated contributions of real historical black figures

Roy Wood Jr.
(photo by Lisa Gansky CC BY-SA 2.0)

I'm a big fan of Roy Wood Jr., and every installment of his "CP Time" bit on The Daily Show is an instant classic.  They're always funny, but often, also, are educational.

Last year during African American History Month, Wood talked about little recognized black explorers, such as Matthew Henson, an American who journeyed to the North Pole, and Abubakari II, a Malian royal said to have set sail for the New World more than a century before Columbus.

This year, on Wednesday night, he highlighted African American spies who contributed importantly in the history of war and civil rights, including Josephine Baker and Harriet Tubman.

Baker on a German poster in 1929

The piece reminded me of two memorable experiences learning about these women.  I first learned about Josephine Baker, an American-born French resistance agent in World War II, only recently, in a seemingly unlikely place, a 2019 exhibit at the Musée d'Orsay titled Black Models: from Géricault to Matisse.  In the brilliant, wide-ranging exhibit on the intersection of black culture and French history, Baker was featured among entertainers whose work was fused into a new French cultural identity in the 20th century.

Tubman NHP in 2018 (photo by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-SA 4.0)

In 2018, my family first visited the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, which opened in Maryland in 2013.  Situated amid the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on the eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay, the museum is not on the beaten path, but it's worth every extra mile to visit.  Impassionedly curated, the exhibits comprise an encyclopedic history of civil rights of which I knew precious little, even having gone to grade school in Maryland and being schooled in constitutional law.  Tubman's vital contributions as a Union spy, as well as the real story of her military leadership, portrayed by an eponymous 2019 film, is featured among narratives every American should know about the future face of our $20 note.

Atlas Obscura fills in fuzzy history of title, 'esquire'

Squire (NYPL)

Atlas Obscura has an excellent piece on the title "Esquire" and its connection to the American legal profession.  The writer is L.A.-based freelancer Dan Nosowitz. He writes:

One of the weirder movements in modern American political action attempted to attack a title so vigorously that it would have essentially collapsed the entire history of the American government. The movement didn’t succeed, because it was both factually wrong and wildly misguided, but it was wrong in a really interesting way. It relied on the title "Esquire," which is one of the more common but most unusual ways a person can ask to be addressed.

The essay is Dan Nosowitz, What Does the Title "Esquire" Mean, Anyway?: And What Does it Have to Do with Lawyering?, Atlas Obscura, Feb. 3, 2021.

Attorney Scaturro talks monument metrics

Grant monument in Chicago (image CC BY-SA 3.0)

Attorney Frank Scaturro has written an in-depth, four-part-essay series on monument destruction for Emerging Civil War, a platform "for sharing original scholarship related to the American Civil War."  Here is part one, and here are links to all four parts.

Scaturro is president of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument Association and is working on a book about "New York City’s largely forgotten sites from the founding era."  I quoted Scaturro writing about Grant's civil rights record here on the blog back in November.  I put a couple of my own coins in the monument meter in October.

New England poli sci group announces virtual meeting, extends CFP deadline for faculty, grad students

NEPSA art

The New England Political Science Association (NEPSA) has decided that its spring 2021 annual conference will be all virtual.

The call for proposals (CFP) deadline has been extended to February 19, 2021. NEPSA will convene on April 23 and 24, 2021.  The CFP is open to faculty and graduate students.  I have tremendously enjoyed this conference in past years and found it to be a collegial, inclusive, and supportive environment for scholars both junior and senior, and both political science and interdisciplinary, including law students. 

NEPSA subject-matter sections are: American Politics, Comparative and Canadian Politics, International Relations, Political Theory, Politics and History, Public Law, Public Policy, and Technology and Politics.

Grant group investigates curious reappearance of US President in Guinea-Bissau island 'ghost town'

From GMA newsletter, vol. XVI, no. 1, fall 2020, at 4, my photo at right.

Earlier this year, I wrote about the short, strange life of statues in Guinea-Bissau, and, in particular, the strange-upon-strange birth, disappearance, and re-creation of a statue of U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant in an abandoned park in the "ghost town" of Bolama Island.

In March, I reported that, since going missing mysteriously in 2007, the Grant statue "was recovered in pieces, and authorities ultimately restored him."

Not quite so.

Grant Monument Association (GMA) President Frank J. Scaturro (Twitter), by day an attorney and historian who is vice-president and senior counsel at the Judicial Crisis Network, noticed that my March photo of the statue did not look like the original.

Your intrepid blogger visits the cane rum distillery in Quinhámel,

Guinea-Bissau, in March. (RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Scaturro and the GMA dug into the mystery of the statue's reappearance in the middle of the barren park that was once Guinea-Bissau's glorious "Praça Ulysses S. Grant."  (As to why there is a monument to a U.S. President at all on this West African island, see my March post.)  The pieces of the original statue never have been recovered.

A March 2018 photo shows a still empty pedestal.

(Helena Maria Pestana CC BY-SA 4.0)

The latest GMA newsletter (vol. XVI, no. 1, fall 2020) explains how the present likeness of Grant came to be in 2018:

This occurred at the initiative of then-Governor Quintino Rodrigues Bone. Approximately 100,000 CFA francs (roughly U.S. $180) were spent from the local government fund to obtain supplies for the work—a harness, cement, gravel, and colorless paint. With these materials, a local artist, Luizinho (Zinho) Ká, constructed a cement statue. He did not receive any compensation for his work.

....

According to the State Department, there is local interest in replacing the cement statue with a new bronze replica of the destroyed statue, but no funding to do so.

My dispatch from Guinea-Bissau came just before the cancel-culture toppling of monuments across the United States.  Sadly, the fall 2020 GMA newsletter also reported the vandalism and toppling of a Grant bust in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park in June.

Scaturro said, "It is ironic that a monument to Grant was restored in Guinea-Bissau soon before another was torn down in San Francisco. Americans who do not respect our heritage can learn a lesson from the people of Guinea-Bissau."

Anyone can join the New York-based Grant Monument Association or visit the General Grant National Memorial in New York (check for covid updates).  Scaturro wrote in a statement on Grant's civil rights record:

As the principal author of Union victory during the Civil War, Grant was the principal enforcer of the Emancipation Proclamation.  As president, he secured laws that enforced the recently ratified 13th and 14th Amendments and acted decisively to ensure the ratification of a 15th Amendment that would ban racial discrimination in voting. His achievements included five enforcement acts, the creation of the Justice Department, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which desegregated various modes of public accommodations and transportation. Grant repeatedly employed military intervention to enforce Reconstruction and crushed the 19th-century Ku Klux Klan. Among America’s top leaders, from military commanders to presidents, none has a more sweeping record on civil rights.

The GMA hosts periodic programs of interest to the public and historians.  On November 19, at 7 p.m. US EST, the GMA will host an online colloquy, "A discussion of the partnership between General Ulysses S. Grant & General William T. Sherman," featuring General David Petraeus and Ulysses S. Grant Association Executive Director John Marszalek.  GMA members receive registration information.