Prison Labor Then and Now

Yesterday I read an article about United States federal prisoners who make parts for Patriot Missiles. These prisoners are

paid $0.23 an hour to start, and can work their way up to a maximum of $1.15 to manufacture electronics that go into the propulsion, guidance, and targeting systems of Lockheed Martin’s (LMT) PAC-3 guided missile, originally made famous in the first Persian Gulf conflict. (source: "Why are Prisoners Building Patriot Missiles?," by Justin Rohrlich, Minyanville, March 7, 2011.)

I had located the article about this prison labor via a link in another recent article in The Atlantic about a Sesame Street feature titled "Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration." This latter article reveals that the feature's main sponsor is BAE Systems , "[t]he British contractor, whose U.S. subsidiary is one of the largest suppliers to the Department of Defense, [and who] depends — like many other defense contractors — on the low-overhead labor of prisoners incarcerated at for-profit facilities." Now, I have no issue with BAE Systems' sponsoring a Sesame Street feature that is directed toward children who have a parent in prison, but the article reminded me of how huge our prison-industrial complex is and how much money corporations such as BAE Systems can make by hiring poorly paid prison labor. For-profit prison corporations have increased exponentially over the last ten years (See Appendix Table 2 in the Bureau of Justice Statistics' report of December 2011). These for-profit prison corporations lobby against reducing penalties in order to keep their prisons full and profitable (See "War on Drugs: How Private Prisons are Using the Drug War to Generate More Inmates"). It doesn't take too great a leap to see how for-profit prison corporations and corporations looking for cheap labor might have some common goals, however unacknowledged and disputed.

Since reading about black prison labor in the South in the early twentieth century, described so thoroughly in Douglas Blackmon's book Slavery by Another Name, I have been particularly interested in this issue of prison labor and its opportunities for corruption.

Under Jim Crow laws in the South, black men could be arrested for a number of reasons, for behavior that today we are appalled (one hopes) was ever considered criminal in this United States. Among these was the law against "vagrancy," a law so "vaguely defin[ed] ... that virtually any freed slave not under protection of a white man could be arrested for the crime" (Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, p. 53). At the close of the Civil War, Mississippi immediately passed a law requiring African Americans "to enter into labor contracts with white farmers by January 1 of every year or risk arrest." Other states began to pass similar laws.  African Americans in the South were not free to seek employment wherever they wished, whenever they wished. They could not leave employment without permission from their employer. If they were caught without a signed discharge paper, they could be arrested.

And they were arrested. No black man walking alone without employment papers was beyond fear of being arrested, imprisoned, and fined for any number of reasons, fines that enriched local law enforcement and prevented prisoners from being released to freedom--because they were unable to pay the fines. Then local sheriffs began loaning prisoners to mining companies or brick-making companies or turpentine camps, where the living conditions were abysmal, even though on paper companies were required to provide the prisoners with adequate food, clothing, and living quarters. For instance: 

In the first two years that Alabama leased its prisoners, nearly 20 percent of them died. In the following year, mortality rose to 35 percent. In the fourth, nearly 45 percent were killed. (Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, p. 57).

Many whites profited from black prison labor:  local law enforcement receiving payment for the loans of prisoners, companies that profited hugely by having virtually free labor, and Southern families whose names are still among those of the elite. For example, the success of Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad was due largely to prison labor. In 1907, that company was acquired by U. S. Steel, whose founding chairman, Elbert H. Gary, was "quoted as saying he was outraged when he learned that the mines he acquired in Alabama in 1907 were using slave labor" (Blackmon,  p. 335). Gary thought to abolish such slave labor, but for four more years, deep in the mines of Alabama, slave labor for U. S. Steel continued:

[I]n correspondence between company executives and state officials, U. S. Steel made it clear that despite the chairman's discomfort with the system, it realized the benefits of a captive labor workforce, particularly in thwarting efforts to unionize local labor. It was in no rush to give up the prisoners under its control. (Blackmon, p. 336).

Joel Hurt, the very successful Atlanta businessman, well-known even today for his "signature developments" in Atlanta, such as the High Victorian Inman Park and Druid Hills and the firm he hired to complete these developments, the firm of Frederick Law Olmsted, greatly profited from forced prison labor. Finally,  public outrage over the horrible conditions in Hurt's brick-making business, Chattahoochee Brick, caused the all-white Georgia electorate to abolish the prison labor system in 1908. Other Southern states followed suit. However, across the South, the prison labor system was just too profitable and resisted consistent and continued reform; it was revived by law again or morphed into the chain gang. In 1928, "the fee system and its profit motivation to encourage sheriffs to make as many arrests as possible remained in force" (Blackmon, p. 367). In Alabama, one state prison inspector wrote, "'Our jails are money-making machines,'"(Blackmon, p. 367). The profitability of prison labor and the occasions of prisoners arrested on the most trivial of charges to supply a labor need is clearly supported by records of the times:

Two Mississippi sheriffs reported making between $20,000 and $30,000 each during 1929 in extra compensation for procuring black laborers and selling them to local planters. After a plea for more cotton pickers in August 1932 [the year my father was born], police in Macon, Georgia, scoured the town's streets, arresting sixty black men on "vagrancy" charges and immediately turning them over to a plantation owner named J. H. Stroud. A year later, The New York Times reported a similar roundup in the cotton town of Helena, Arkansas. (Blackmon, p. 377)

It wasn't until the onset of World War II that the federal government made a really concerted effort to abolish the corrupt prison labor system in the South. Efforts had been made in the past, laws instituted, but the recalcitrance of Southern states stymied any real reform. After Pearl Harbor, the federal government was gearing up for mass mobilization of its citizens to the armed forces, and President Roosevelt "instinctively knew the second-class citizenship and violence imposed upon African Americans would be exploited by the enemies of the United States" (Blackmon, p. 377).  From Georgia and Alabama to Texas, the full weight of the federal government descended upon individuals and companies that profited from what the government finally officially called "Involuntary Servitude and Slavery."

It took almost 100 years after the Civil War for African Americans to be free of involuntary servitude, of "slavery by another name," despite the fact that over those years efforts were made again and again to reform the prison labor system. The history of that system makes me wary of our prison labor system today, from which companies such as Lockheed Martin profit. Law enforcement, too, has profited from our prison-industrial complex which has expanded exponentially since the onset of the so-called "War on Drugs."

The War on Drugs introduced new disparities between the arrests of whites and blacks and other minorities. Over the years, studies showed again and again that African Americans and other minorities used crack cocaine more than whites, and whites used powder cocaine more than African Americans.  In the 1980s, "federal penalties for crack were 100 times harsher than those for powder cocaine, with African Americans disproportionately sentenced to much lengthier terms" ("Race and the Drug War, www.drugpolicy.org). As the ACLU reports, "[o]n average, under the 100:1 regime, African Americans served virtually as much time in prison for non-violent drug offenses as whites did for violent offenses." In 2010, the so-called Fairness in Sentencing Act reduced the ratio of crack cocaine penalties versus powder cocaine penalties--18:1. 

Over the years, there was no lack of information concerning these disparities in arrests and incarceration. In 1995, the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the U. S. Department of Justice published a report that found a clear racial disparity in drug arrests:

Annually, the FBI compiles statistics on persons arrested for 'drug abuse violations,' a category consisting both of drug selling and drug possession,. To learn how many arrests there were for drug abuse violations, specially tabulated data were obtained from the FBI covering the three-year period 1991 to 1993. An annual average was then taken based on the three years. Based on these arrest records, blacks constituted an average of 40% of persons arrested nationwide per year for drug abuse violations. [my emphasis] (Patrick A. Langan, Ph.D., "The Racial Disparity in U. S. Drug Arrests," Bureau of Justice Statistics, U. S. Department of Justice, 1 October 1995)

Compare these statistics of drug arrests (40% African Americans) to the statistics of illicit drug use:

To learn how many people admitted to using selected categories of illicit drugs--drugs that, if possessed, potentially subject the person to risk of arrest--any time during the 12-months prior to their interview, specially tabulated national data were obtained from SAMHSA [Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration]. The data consist of annual averages based on three years of surveying households (1991-1993) [including college dormitories and homeless shelters]. These self-reports show that blacks constitute 13% of persons who admitted using (and therefore possessing) illicit drugs each year. [my emphasis] (Langan, "The Racial Disparity in U. S. Drug Arrests, 1995)

Eighteen years after Langan's Bureau of Drug Statistics report on racial disparity in drug arrests, the ACLU has published a report, titled "The War on Marijuana in Black in White," in which it claims that "a Black person is 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though Blacks and whites use marijuana at similar rates."  In 2009, Human Rights Watch released a report that concluded that "adult African Americans were arrested on drug charges at rates that were 2.8 to 5.5 times as high as those of white adults in every year from 1980 through 2007." In 2011, the U. S. Department of Justice released these statistics f0r 2010: 678 white people were incarcerated for every 100,000 U.S. residents;  4, 347 Blacks were incarcerated for every 100,000 U. S. residents ("Correctional Populations in the United States, 2010.") The Bureau of Justice Statistics "now estimates that one in three black men can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime." 

According to The Sentencing Project, "[m]ore than 60% of the people in prison are now racial and ethnic minorities. For Black males in their thirties, 1 in every 10 is in prison or jail on any given day. These trends have been intensified by the disproportionate impact of the "war on drugs," in which two-thirds of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color. ("Racial Disparity," The Sentencing Project)

These disparities in incarceration rates of blacks and other minorities and whites indicate a real lack of justice in our justice system. Michelle Alexander connects the dots for us in her book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. This mass incarceration of African Americans is another way of controlling Black Americans, much as the old Jim Crow laws did in the years following the Civil War and into the twentieth century.  People incarcerated for a felony (such as marijuana possession) leave prison with their opportunities and civil rights vastly curtailed:

[I]n major cities wracked by the drug war, as many as 80 percent of young African American men now have criminal records and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives. These young men are part of a growing undercaste, permanently locked up and locked out of mainstream society. (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow, p. 7)

Put together the disparity between arrests of blacks and whites in the Drug War, the rise of the prison population (and particularly the minority population) as a result of the Drug War, the rise of private prisons, and the use of prisoners for labor, and you have a recipe for corruption no less worrisome than prison labor during the Jim Crow years.
--------------------------------


Oh, the victims of federally legalized pot, courtesy of Brian McFadden

See also: "Louisiana Incarcerated: How We Built the World's Prison Capital, at www.nola.com.

The Bees are Back (sort of)

honeybee on tomatillo flower

Tom and I have both noticed an absence of pollinators in our garden this year, so I've been keeping a sharp eye out for bees and butterflies. Today I saw a gulf fritillary on some of my zinnias, but when I went for a closer look, it flew away. We noticed a number of bees today, maybe five or six, steadily gathering pollen from the corn tassels, the blue-black salvia, the tomatillo flowers, and orange California poppies. However, I am still surprised (worried?) that our garden is attracting so few pollinators. The mountain mint continues to be free of bees. That's one of my biggest disappointments, as I had hoped that the mint would attract the diversity of pollinators we had encountered ten years ago when we planted mountain mint in our yard in Harris County, Georgia.

Tom noticed that our tomatoes are beginning to set more fruit. Perhaps our tapping the tomato stakes to loosen the pollen from the flowers is working.

I pulled out of one of my 8'X8' beds lettuce that was going to seed and red poppies that were past their bloom. Then I added composted horse manure to the bed, being careful not to disturb the plants remaining--bird-eye pepper plants (chili pequins), serrano pepper plants, and a zinnia plant or two. After I had worked the compost into the soil, I planted a package of Genovese basil and lettuce leaf basil. Since I usually plant all my basil seeds earlier in the season, I will be especially interested to see these seeds germinate and grow.

The garden plants and flowers along the perimeter of our property (gardenias) are blooming, but few pollinators are visiting. I will continue to monitor the presence of pollinators in our garden.

First red salvia blooms

Green spider on mountain mint leaf

spider and egg sac on blue-black salvia blooms

probably a shield bug (stink bug)

Tom among the tomatoes

green tomato

Garden Visitors

One of the few visitors to my garden this year--is he eating a pollinator?!

As I've described in previous posts, pollinators are sadly missing from our garden this year. I have seen only the occasional bee, and the mountain mint, which attracted such a wonderfully diverse group of pollinators when we grew it ten years ago in Georgia, has abundant flowers but few visitors to those flowers. St. Tammany Parish has a mosquito spraying program; I hear the truck at night sometimes, going up and down the streets in our area, spraying pesticide. I wonder if the mosquito control program is affecting more than mosquitoes. We also had a late freeze in March.

I like to walk around my gardens to see what kinds of pollinators I can observe and photograph. The most I've seen so far this season are a few dragonflies, some unidentified spider-like creatures, a few pesky worms on my tomatoes, and the rare bee. I'll be recording my observations here in the months ahead.

I think this is a harlequin ladybird in its larval state. I discovered it skittering on a spade I had left on the patio.

What's It Worth?

A recent trip to Target with my daughter reminded me of how abysmal the retail shopping experience can be. My daughter had recently moved into another apartment and needed a toilet plunger. We quickly located the bathroom wares: there were two choices of plunger, all plastic or some kind of plastic-y material. None had the substantial wooden handles we had come to expect in a toilet plunger, and one choice of plunger, the laughingly named Evercare Toilet Plunger,  was like a cartoon idea of a plunger: the suction cup was flaccid, almost flat, with no suction strength at all. I laughed out loud when I picked it up, brandishing it like a [useless] weapon. Where was it made? In China. We chose the other one, the Clorox Bright Blue Toilet Plunger, made in Italy of Chinese components--or something like that. I'm still waiting to hear if the thing works.

More and more of the products displayed in our retail stores are crap [pardon the pun] like these plungers. Tom has frequently moaned about his inability to find a workable replacement for the blade in his bow saw. All the hardware stores now carry cheap, thin blades made in China. We have noticed over the years, also, how gardening tools have decreased in workmanship and quality.

Americans have become accustomed to cheap products made by poorly paid workers in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka who operate in appalling conditions. The availability of these products has affected our attitudes toward workmanship: we expect all products to be cheap and readily available, and we give little thought to the people slaving away in factories to provide us with those products. We have forgotten the time and effort that go into making things, especially those things that are hand made.

I have had first experience with this coarsened attitude toward hand made, crafted material. For a few years I have made things to sell at craft festivals, and I have had very different experiences. At some festivals, those attending seem to appreciate the time, effort, and creativity invested in a well-made item, and they are willing to pay appropriately. At other festivals, folks seem to think the hand-made items for sale should be as cheap as the products on the shelves in Walmart.

At one local festival, a man came by my booth to look at some scarves I had crocheted. Every scarf was different, and I had incorporated unique hand-stitched designs with buttons and felted wool in the one which interested him. He didn't purchase anything, but he returned to the booth hours later as we were packing up to leave. He picked up a scarf we had already taken down from display in order to pack it. He held up the scarf which had taken me hours (several days) to make and offered $20 for it. When I politely refused the offer, he threw the scarf down and stormed off angrily. "You could have made a sale," he sneered.

I later sold the scarf for $35-40 at another festival, in another state.

Of course, calculating the price of one's crafts by determining the hours one has spent making them is out of the question. I recently made some coasters out of beer bottle caps we had saved over a couple of years. I crocheted them together in a unique design. Perhaps someone else has come up with this same idea, but I haven't seen it. As the author of Ecclesiastes says, "There is no new thing under the sun"; crafters often come up with similar ideas independently.

Each of these coasters takes me hours to make. I first crochet around each of seven bottle caps, taking 30 minutes or more for each cap; the time depends on whether I am also watching programs on Netflix, which I often do while I am crocheting. I add a crocheted edging on the top of each cap. Then I crochet the bottle caps together. Finally, I glue a cork backing to each separate piece of the coaster. I estimate that it takes five or six hours to make each of these coasters. No one is going to pay me a minimum hourly rage to create these--the price would be exorbitant. I enjoyed making them because I get a real kick out of coming up with ways to recycle material that we usually throw away. Yet if I do try to sell these coasters at a festival, I will have to come up with a price that honors my work while also recognizing what a customer might be willing to pay. It's a delicate balance.

That balance is more difficult because we've all become used to cheap products at cheap prices--cheap products on which retailers can slap a big mark-up price because those companies aren't paying American minimum wages, aren't providing workplaces that follow OSHA regulations, and aren't paying for health insurance for their workers.

American workers' wages have remained stagnant for the past two decades, but cheap products have obscured that fact for many Americans.

Trouble in the Garden

flowering poppy in my garden

Last June (2012), my garden was being visited by a few pollinators--butterflies and bees, primarily--but I noted that the clover, the mountain mint, and my zinnias weren't attracting the pollinators I expected. Over the summer, I stalked the pollinators that appeared in my yard, taking photos to document their presence. This June, the garden is preternaturally silent of buzzing insects except the occasional wasp or tiny iridescent fly. The birds have been singing, but the pollinator harmony is missing.

Tom and I became especially aware of the absence of pollinators when the numerous flowers on our tomato plants didn't seem to be setting fruit. We were so excited that this year so many of the tomato seeds that Tom planted in February sprouted and thrived. We imagined a bountiful harvest, and Tom added composted horse manure to the garden to help the tomatoes continue to thrive. Many of the plants are now above my head in height. But the lovely growth will be for naught if no fruit result.

In all our years of gardening, we have not had such problems with barren tomato flowers--pests, of course, by the multitude. So I did a bit of quick internet research to find a remedy.

mountain mint--usually attracts a great diversity of pollinators

Tomatoes are self-pollinating but require some encouragement to shake that pollen loose. The vibration of bumblebees helps do that. The bees aren't required to spread the pollen around, just to loosen it. Wind will do, and also a little gentle shaking. One gardener describes using an old battery-powered toothbrush, held gently against the top of the flower to recreate the vibration of a honeybee. Some gardeners suggest transferring the pollen with a paintbrush; others say a gentle shaking will do.

Heat and humidity can be a problem, too. One website claims that daytime heat above 85⁰F can be a problem; another website sets the high at 90⁰F. Well, heat and humidity certainly are a faithful couple in southeast Louisiana in the summer. This has been an especially wet spring. The ground has stayed wet from February through this first week of June, and forecasts predict scattered thunderstorms for today.

Heirloom tomatoes, I've learned, can be especially problematic, some dropping their early flowers but setting fruit later in the season. One of the heirloom tomatoes we've planted, Brandywine, is among the varieties that takes the longest to mature, up to 90 days for fruit to ripen. I'm just hoping that later flowers will appear and produce. German Johnson, another heirloom tomato in our garden, is supposed to be more suitable to areas with high humidity, but its North Carolina "home" (where it was introduced by immigrants), surely doesn't hold a candle to southeast Louisiana when it comes to humidity.

Growing a garden reminds us that there still remains in Nature outcomes that we have little control over. I cannot keep the rain from falling or the heat from rising. I can plant flowers that encourage the presence of pollinators, but large scale destruction of habitat and agricultural industrial use of pesticides overpower my small efforts. Reducing the impact of habitat destruction and pesticide use calls for large-scale public push-back, and so far, the destroyers are winning--and not enough people seem to care.

banana flower in our garden

hydrangeas blooming now

For now, Tom and I are going through the garden, tapping on the tomato stakes in order to gently shake the pollen loose. We're still waiting for the pollinators to appear in larger numbers. This year, we may be even more disappointed than last year, as bumblebees and other wild and domesticated pollinators are declining in numbers across the globe.

In the May Garden

garden shed we started building last summer

We have had a wet and cool spring in southeast Louisiana. The ground was soggy so long that I couldn't weed or add compost as I had planned, but now I am catching up. Our little acre of land requires a lot more work than one might imagine. We have plans for a little pond surrounded by islands of native shrubs and flowers on the south side of our property, we just finished building and painting a garden shed, we have planted more citrus trees, and we sprouted more tomatoes than we had room in our big garden--sixty or so heirloom tomato plants altogether (German Johnson, Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Black Krim). In order to get all those tomato plants in the ground, we planted tomatoes in beds in which I had planned to plant flowers, such as the circular bed I tilled and composted around our largest fig tree (planted two years ago, so still a young tree). We also planted tomatoes in an old compost pile, having removed most of the uncomposted vegetation to another area.

Many flower seeds I planted in the early spring didn't sprout, as we had too much rain. I had to reseed, and those seeds have sprouted and are growing. Today I planted more zinnia seeds, and if we have a sunny weekend, I'll be adding compost to many of my flower and herb beds and building up a bed that I have expanded near our patio. One of the photos below is of pine cones that I piled around our crepe myrtle trees. Our cats were sharpening their claws on the trunks of both trees, though one tree was bearing the brunt of the scratching. We were afraid that the cats might girdle the trees, so I placed pine cones at the base of both of the trees near our patio to discourage the cats. This seems to have worked. However, I noticed recent cat scratches on our newly painted garden shed, on the door frame!

Gardening is my refuge from the insanity of American politics and the madness of the world.

Looking for love (on a sage flower)

very tiny pollinator on a dill flower

tomatoes planted around fig tree

California poppies and basil

pine cones around crepe myrtle trunk

tomatoes in the big garden

For the Record: Torture

The New York Times published an article today about the findings of the independent, non-partisan 11-member panel appointed by the Constitution Project to review "interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks." Those who are horrified by our country's use of torture after the 9/11 terrorist attack will feel vindicated by the review. Those who have convinced themselves that torture is justified--despite our country's repudiating torture in the past, seeking convictions of those charged with perpetrating torture, and being a signatory of the International Convention Against Torture--will probably continue to support the Bush Administration's decision to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" on prisoners. The power of propaganda lives on in the Orwellian language of the Bush Administration's torture memos.

But for the record, one more non-partisan review panel has concluded that our country did, indeed, torture people and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

The Republican leader of the panel, Asa Hutchinson, who served in the Bush Administration, said that "after the panel’s nearly two years of research . . . he had no doubts about what the United States did":

The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It questions recidivism figures published by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with independent reviews. 

It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals who helped direct and monitor them. And it reveals an internal debate at the International Committee of the Red Cross over whether the organization should speak publicly about American abuses; advocates of going public lost the fight, delaying public exposure for months, the report finds. . .  

. . . .The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.

This report may be lost in the heavy media coverage of the most recent terror attack, that of the explosions at the Boston Marathon and the horrific--and fatal--injuries resulting from that attack. As of now, no one knows who is responsible for the attack--home-grown terrorists, an individual malcontent, or international terrorists. In the midst of such horror, some people are too ready to surrender freedom to fear, just as our country surrendered its ethics to fear in adopting torture after 9/11. But as these recent attacks indicate, we can never be completely protected from harm. Losing our "moral compass" is not worth such an impossible goal.

For further information:
The Constitution Project's Report on Detainee Treatment, at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/04/16/world/16torture-report.html

Still Here

I've been absent from this blog since the end of January but not absent from my garden. Last fall, my daughter gave me snapdragons she had grown in her college greenhouse management class, and those snapdragons are still flourishing in the flower bed at the back of our house. You can see them in the photo at the left. I found the football in brush at the southern edge of our lot that runs along a neighborhood street. I'm thinking of painting it with bright colors and using it as a garden decoration. 

We had a mild winter with only light frosts until March, when we had a couple of late freezes. Most of the garden plants survived since we protected the delicate ones though we seem to have lost one of our banana plants. I planted sunflower and zinnia seeds a couple of weeks ago, thinking that temperatures would stay above 50⁰ at night. However, we had a couple of cool fronts that brought temperatures down into the thirties and forties at night, so those seeds have been slow to sprout. I'm waiting for even warmer weather before I plant basil seeds, but I did buy some purple basil sprouts and lemon basil sprouts from a vendor at the Covington Farmer's Market. I planted those last week. Also, I planted poppy seeds on February 18th; those have sprouted, and I thinned them last week. Poppy flowers enjoy cool weather, I think, so I don't know how well they will do as the weather gets hot here in southeast Louisiana.

My husband successfully sprouted about sixty tomato plants, and he planted fifty-six of them. We didn't have enough room in our big garden, so I suggested he plant the remaining ones in a couple of beds that I had prepared for flowers. These are heirloom tomatoes--Cherokee Purple, Black Krim, Brandywine, German Johnson--and I am hoping that they will all produce a lot of tomatoes for canning and for making salsa. Last year our tomatoes were infested with stink bugs; I hope that this year's late freeze will have slowed down the bug population. I'm not looking forward to doing bug patrol on fifty-six tomato plants, but I'll do what I have to do.

In addition to gardening, I've taken on a few more craft projects, have become involved in some community activities, and am still scanning and transcribing Armstrong and Nugent letters. My virtual world may be dormant, but the real world continues to revolve.

I created the trellis for morning glories and purple hyacinth beans.

Last summer's parsley is now bolting.

Bad Medicine

 As I have been reading, scanning, and transcribing letters written by the Edward McCarty Armstrong family in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, I have been struck by the descriptions of disease and death. The letters are full of references to epidemics of yellow fever and scarlet fever, to the deaths of neighbors, friends, and relatives, and to medicine administered to aid the sick, the depressed, the fatigued. My husband's great-grandfather, Baker White Armstrong (Sr.), was a practicing pharmacist in the last two decades of the 1800s, and his older half-brother William Dillon Armstrong was a physician, as is noted on his tombstone. "Brother Will" was often called out to the Armstrong farm, "Edgewood," to administer aid when a family member was ill. And in our collection of family letters, clippings, and photographs is a pocket notebook of Baker Armstrong's, full of handwritten recipes for pharmaceutical concoctions. We look at those drug recipes today and may think they represent magical thinking more than medicine, but perhaps we aren't so far removed from that magical thinking ourselves.

In the summer of 1883, James (Jimmie), one of Edward's sons from his first marriage to Hannah Pancake, was very ill and went to the home of his father and stepmother for care. His wife, Agnes, pregnant with a son who was to be born three months after his father's death, was there with him. The letters of the family to Baker, who was then living in Baltimore, Maryland, reference Jimmie's illness. Louisa, Baker's mother and Jimmie's stepmother, described some of the details in a letter of June, 1883:

Jimmie is a little easier. William drove him to town for a little while on Friday. The ride did not hurt him we think but he has been much worse since Saturday -- not able to be out of bed. He suffers terribly at times & can be relieved only by Opium. To-day he had been suffering from nausea & vomiting but is somewhat relieved now. William has been with him since 2 o'clock Saturday except for a few hours yesterday evening. He is so changeable -- we do not know one hour what he will be the next. We fear he is in a critical condition; but do not say so to any one but Robert.

In the back of her Bible, Louisa Tapscott White Armstrong recorded the death of her stepson: "James A. Armstrong died July 14th, 1883, about 5 p.m."

In January of 1885, Katie Armstrong, youngest daughter of Edward and Louisa Armstrong, insisted on attending a church "protracted" meeting even though she hadn't been feeling well.  Her father describes the result in a letter of January 27, 1885, to his son Baker, then living in Bryan, Texas.

Mr. Gordon was holding a protracted meeting in Salem and [Katie] and Janie went down to attend it on Tuesday the 13th day of this month and was to return on Thursday to let Fannie and Nettie go down, but the sleet prevented, and they did not go down or get home, until Friday. Katie complained much of her headache and backache when she started to town but was so anxious to attend the meeting, that she went. She attended all the meetings but two, and came home much complaining on Friday. William saw her and gave her some medicine and thought she would be well in a day or two, but she did not get better and William sent her more medicine, and came out to see her on Tuesday the 20th. He treated her but did not think her case serious. That night he got a telegram calling him to see Mrs. Robert Glasgow, who was critically ill. He went, supposing Katie would be all right when he returned, but for fear he might be mistaken, he saw Dr. Bruffey  before leaving, and Bruffey came up in his stead (when we sent for William [the] next day). William returned Thursday night . . . . but nothing they could do seemed to arrest the disease. Delirium came on, and blood poisoning commenced and continued to the end and no remedy seemed to prove efficacious and she quietly and peacefully passed away last night . . . Her dissolution was very rapid . . . I had no idea she would pass away during the night, but her strength gave way, and she breathed her last. O so peacefully and calmly, her life seemed to ebb away, just like the going out of a candle. . .

Katie Armstrong was nineteen years old when she died. Her mother recorded her daughter's death in her Bible: "My dear Katie died Jan. 26th, 1885, at 20 min. past nine P. M. We sorrow not as those who have no hope. She had given herself to Christ some years before."

Many of the Armstrong letters also reference Louisa Armstrong's illness, which lingered for over a decade of letter-writing. What she suffered from is not clear from the descriptions, but she spent weeks at Yellow Sulphur Springs, Virginia, seeking respite from her illness in 1874, and in the years up to her death in 1887, various siblings update Baker on how well or how badly their mother is feeling.

Who knows how many of these family members would have survived their illnesses if they had had access to modern medicine, perhaps to penicillin, which wasn't distributed in significant amounts until World War II. Other illnesses might have been caused by the very medicines being prescribed by doctors and pharmacists. In her letters, Louisa Armstrong mentions the "blue mass" pill, a popular medicine at the time that was administered for illnesses ranging from depression to tuberculosis to toothache to the pains of childbirth. In a letter to her son Baker, dated July 15, 1874, Louisa writes that she is "anxious about [your Pa]" and advises Baker to tell his father "he had better take some more blue mass."

The main ingredient in the blue mass pill was mercury, and, according to an article on the National Geographic News website, this pill "[i]f taken at the normally prescribed dose of the time—one pill two or three times a day—. . .would deliver nearly 9,000 times the amount of mercury that is deemed safe for people by current health standards" ["Did Mercury in 'Little Blue Pills' Make Abraham Lincoln Erratic?," Hillary Mayell, for National Geographic News, 17 July 2001]. A typical U. S. pharmaceutical recipe for the blue mass pill contained "mercury (33 parts), powdered liquorice (5 parts), althaea (root of the marshmallow)(25 parts), glycerin (3 parts), honey of rose (34 parts)" ["UK Lab Reveals Shocking Mercury Level in Lincoln's Blue Pills," Royal Society of Chemistry press release, 22 March 2010]. According to Dr. Norbert Hirschhorn, a New York medical historian, the blue mass pill was "really the Prozac-plus of the time because [doctors] used it to treat a lot of conditions . . . for anything they thought was related to the liver."  But the blue mass pill "only poisoned you," and its effects could include "decreased brain-wave activity, irritability, depression, memory loss, and impaired kidney function." [Jeremy Manier, "For Lincoln, ancient cure worse than his malady," Chicago Tribune, 17 July 2001]

Reading of how frequently such poisonous concoctions were prescribed and ingested may horrify us, but then we may wonder what medical procedures touted as effective today will be proven just as ineffective by researchers in the future. Recent studies indicate we may be at the mercy of ineffectively administered cures just as our ancestors were. In his book, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, Ben Goldacre, British physician and science writer, explores how the pharmaceutical industry manipulates the science of drug research, with a deleterious effect on the practice of medicine. In an excerpt from the book published in Salon, Goldacre describes how clinical tests supported by pharmaceutical companies usually conclude positively in favor of the method or drug that the pharmaceutical company is promoting. These positive conclusions can result from conducting faulty research, from suppressing negative results, from choosing participants who are more likely to respond favorably to the treatment being tested,  from halting research before it yields negative results, or just from failing to publish negative results.

Dr. Goldacre writes:

Because researchers are free to bury any result they please, patients are exposed to harm on a staggering scale throughout the whole of medicine, from research to practice. Doctors can have no idea about the true effects of the treatments they give. Does this drug really work best, or have I simply been deprived of half the data? Nobody can tell. Is this expensive drug worth the money, or have the data simply been massaged? No one can tell. Will this drug kill patients? Is there any evidence that it’s dangerous? No one can tell. ["Bad Pharma: Drug research riddled with half truths, omissions, and lies,", in Salon, 27 January 2013.]

The result is that doctors--with the best of intentions but unaware of the full medical research--prescribe medicines and treatments that are no more effective, and perhaps just as injurious, as the blue mass pill.

photocopy of a page from Baker Armstrong, Sr.'s pharmacy notebook

Some Consequences of the Confederacy

E. M.Armstrong, Sr.'s (partial) letter to Baker W. Armstrong, Dec. 20, 1884

Update below
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been immersed in reading letters written by Tom's great-great grandfather and his family, all of Virginia. Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., had been a prosperous merchant in Romney [now in West Virginia] before the Civil War. His father, William Armstrong, had immigrated to America from Ireland as a young boy, settled in what was then Virginia, and eventually represented Virginia in the U. S. Congress.

In 1861, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr.  was elected a delegate to the Virginia Convention of 1861, a convention in which delegates were to discuss and to vote on whether or not Virginia would secede from the Union. He was among those who voted against seceding from the Union. Both representatives of Hampshire County, Virginia--Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., and David Pugh--voted no. But the Ordinance of Secession eventually passed, and a majority of the citizens of Virginia ratified the vote.

We have no letters of the Armstrong family from before the Civil War or from during the Civil War, so I have little insight into why Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., and several of his sons from his first marriage to Hannah Pancake, decided to fight for the Confederacy. One son, Isaac Armstrong, was mortally wounded in the battle of Gaines Mill; lingering for weeks, he finally succumbed to his wounds. I suspect, though, that like many Southerners who weren't connected to the plantation system, the Armstrongs joined the war out of loyalty to their state, to their region, to a sense of place. That doesn't make the decision right--for the Civil War was about slavery--but it makes the decision more understandable to those of us on the other side of Civil Rights.

After the war and now with children from a second marriage joining those from the first marriage, Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., moved to Salem, Virginia. He was never again to be as prosperous as he had been before the War; his last years were spent farming and worrying how to support his family. He also was a board member of the Union Theological Seminary, then associated with Hampden-Sydney College, which today remains one of the few all-male liberal arts colleges.

The letters that Edward McCarty Armstrong, Sr., wrote his son Baker White Armstrong, the son who moved to Texas and who became my husband's great-grandfather, reveal the man to be kind, generous, loving, and very religious. That he fought for the Confederacy does not make him a bad man; it makes him a misguided man, misguided by the zeitgeist of the plantation economy:  the idea that some people are more equal than others, that some people deserve privileges bestowed on them by an accident of birth and the color of their skin, that some people, by that accident of birth and/or color of skin are providentially destined to be either leaders or laborers. He serves as a reminder of how good people can be persuaded to fight for bad causes--and of how religion can also be used as a tool for a bad cause.

In his letter of October 5, 1883, Edward wrote his son Baker:

I heard a splendid speech from Major Daniel last Monday. He had a full House, and many Re-Adjusters to hear him -- I think it highly probable that this country will gain a democratic majority this fall --Many of the old democrats who were enticed off by re-adjusterism have returned to the democratic fold, [and] others will follow. Mahoneism is a disgrace to our old state, and I can but hope there will be good [and] honest people enough found to throw off the party shackles and redeem the state at the Nov. elections.

The politics behind this letter are murky, the waters muddied by individual expectations and needs and the wider politics of a state that had lost the War. The politics have to do with railroads and debt and government services and the rights of poor whites and blacks freed by the defeat of the South. "Mahone" is William Mahone: he had been a slave owner, he had backed secession, he had been in charge of Virginians who massacred Union Colored Troops, and he moved up the ranks in the Confederate Army to major general. He was also a railroad tycoon, and after the Civil War, he fought to build railroads that would also provide profit for his railroad. Here is where E. M. Armstrong's personal desires probably intersected with politics, for Armstrong had bought land near Salem, hoping to profit from the Norfolk and Western Railroad's building yards, shops and a roundhouse in Salem. This didn't happen, and the family was reduced to what some call "genteel poverty." Perhaps William Mahone's financial success had something to do with E. M. Armstrong's failure to profit from his land acquisition.

During Reconstruction, the Virginia Constitution of 1870 provided suffrage for all men, black and white, over the age of 21, and also instituted state-funded public schools. Later, however, Conservatives used the state's war debt as a way to argue for cutting social services, and thus the access of blacks to education. William Mahone used this argument over debt vs. services as a way to gain political power. He created a biracial coalition of Conservatives and Republicans, and in 1881, was elected to the U. S. Senate. This coalition led by William Mahone was known as the "Readjusters," for its focus on "readusting" the state's war debt downward; this group of uneasy alliances also passed legislation that "abolish[ed] anti-black regulations, establish[ed] Virginia State University, increas[ed] financial support to public institutions, and charter[ed] labor unions." Mahone raised the ire of many Virginia voters, however, by caucusing with the Republicans, and his leadership tended to be autocratic.

A riot in Danville, Virginia, on November 3, 1883, gave Conservative Southern Democrats--the Democrats of the Old South-- the extra fuel they needed to ignite their political campaign to re-take state offices. Some reports describe a scuffle that broke out between some black men and white men after a meeting of prominent white men who were determined to defeat the government of the Readjusters. Other reports describe the riot as having started when black residents failed to give way to white residents on the sidewalks of the town. Whatever the specifics, the riot was obviously the result of the uneasy relationship between white and black citizens, and the repugnant idea of white supremacy. Several people were shot and killed, and the Conservative Democrats used this incident to incite "the fears of white voters."

William Mahone lost the 1884 election to another former Confederate officer, John W. Daniel, the man Edward Armstrong, Sr., had mentioned in his letter of October 1883, to  his son Baker. By the election of 1884, however, Baker W. Armstrong had moved to Bryan, Texas, to seek employment as a druggist with a drug store there. His brother Robert provides the news of the 1884 election, in a letter of November 10, 1884:

"Old Va" I am glad to say went Democratic on last Tuesday, [and] I cannot but hope that Mahone is "done for."

And in a letter written the 20th of December of that same year, E. M. Armstrong, Sr., tells his son Baker:

I wrote to Major Daniel requesting him to send you a copy of his Richmond jollification speech, and, if he could conveniently, his photo which I hope you will receive and appreciate.

And so the experiments in white and black coalition governments in the South came to an end, with the stoking of racial fears. Major John W. Daniel was also to serve as a delegate to Virginia's 1901-1902 Constitutional Convention, the focus of which was to disfranchise African-Americans. Conservative Democrats had campaigned for the convention, touting the need for "electoral reform and better state government," code words then --and even now-- meant to obscure the marginalization of a minority group. But make no mistake--disfranchisement of African-Americans was the convention's main goal:

The main question for the delegates was how to eliminate the black vote without violating the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Eventually they proposed that under Virginia's new constitution, a man would be eligible to vote if he could satisfy one of the following three requirements: he could read or understand the state constitution; he had paid taxes on property worth at least $333; or he was either a U.S. or Confederate veteran or the son of a veteran. All three conditions were loopholes designed to protect white voters. Further narrowing the pool of possible voters, minimum requirements were set for age, residency, and literacy, and a poll tax requirement was also instituted.[ "Virginia's Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902", on the web site of the Virginia Historical Society]

To make sure that blacks would not be able to vote on a constitution that would disfranchise them, "the Convention instead took the unusual step of proclaiming it the law of the commonwealth." ["Virginia's Constitutional Convention of 1901-1902," on the web site of the Virginia Historical Society]

And so are good people manipulated and deceived through fear, personal interest, and a misguided sense of superiority.

Unfortunately, plantation politics continue today, and the myth of the Lost Cause obscures the horrors of slavery, of the debasement of one people to the enrichment of another.

Election "fraud" is still used as an excuse to make voting more restrictive even when the "fraud" is practically non-existent. [See "UFO Sightings are More Common than Voter Fraud," Hamed Aleaziz, Dave Gilson, and Jaeah Lee, Mother Jones, July/August 2012.]

And yesterday the politically-evenly split Virginia state senate pushed through a re-districting map while one of their Democratic colleagues (a civil rights veteran attending the presidential inauguration)  was absent and then afterward adjourned their session on Martin Luther King Day by paying tribute to Confederate General Stonewall Jackson. Perhaps there is a way to honor "good" men who fight for bad causes. This is not the way: publicly honoring a white man who fought for the enslavement of African-Americans on a holiday established to honor a black man who fought for the political and social freedom of African-Americans. This was also the day our first African-American president was inaugurated for his second term. Anyone who sees such actions as purely accidental and devoid of political motivation is willfully blind or ignorant. [For more juicy details, see: the blog of Blue Virginia, "Breaking: While Dems Distracted by Inauguration, Virgina Senate GOP Stages a Coup," in which Republican state senator Deeds is described as "rambling" on about Stonewall Jackson's love of peaches, lemons, and women.]

The poisonous fruit of the Confederacy continues to blossom. Let's hope that good men and good women are not deceived. The murky waters of politics require an alert and engaged citizenry.


UPDATE:
As one of the readers of this post has noted, although Edward McCarty Armstrong did vote against secession, he eventually did sign the ordinance to secede. The majority of the delegates elected to the convention were Unionists, and the debate'"raged on for months." You can read about that debate on the Encyclopedia Virginia website here: "Virginia Convention of 1861".

Writing for the Encyclopedia Virginia, Nelson D. Lankford describes how the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, the Fort's surrender and then Lincoln's proclamation "calling for all loyal states to send their militias to put down the Confederate rebellion" swayed many of these southern Unionists to change their vote. They had withstood months of prolonged debate and the fiery rhetoric of secessionists, but in the end:

[t]he tragedy of the Unionist majority in the convention was that, though its members loathed the thought of leaving the United States, in the end they could not countenance fighting against fellow white Southerners. [Lankford, Nelson D. "Virginia Convention of 1861." Encyclopedia Virginia. Ed. Brendan Wolfe. 23 Jan. 2013. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. 5 Apr. 2011 .]

See a copy of the Ordinance of 1861 here: Virginia's Ordinance of Secession.

President Obama's Inaugural Speech

I listened to President Obama's inaugural speech after the fact, because I was immersed in 1884 and forgot the time while transcribing a letter written by Edward McCarty Armstrong, Tom's great-great grandfather. Edward McCarty Armstrong was  a "good" man in many ways but a man who was on the wrong side of history and steeped in the myth of the Confederacy for which he had fought, a man who, in 1884, wrote to his son, recently moved from Virginia to Texas, about his happiness that the Democratic party of the Old South had taken back the legislature. The man elected that year, Major Daniel, mentioned by name by EMA, was later to participate in the Virginia Constitution of 1902, which instituted Jim Crow laws, disenfranchising African-Americans who had been given that right in the Virginia constitution of 1870--other Southern states were doing the same.

And so the South stood -- segregated, resistant to Lincoln's Proclamation of Emancipation with its institution of  "slavery by another name"-- until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, an act which was avidly opposed by another Democrat and segregationist from Virginia, Chairman of the Rules Committee, Howard W. Smith. But President Johnson, a Democrat, too, from the South, used the bully pulpit of the presidency to help get the votes for the act, and an unprecedented parliamentary procedure enabled the bill to be moved to the Senate floor for debate.

With the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Democratic party lost the segregationists of the Old South (and over the next few years, much of its southern support). We would do well to remember this history in our time, when certain forces are again calling for the passing of laws that would disenfranchise particular populations of our citizens, using the same language of the legislators of the Old South--ostensibly to prevent voting "fraud."

With this history so vividly called to mind by my research and my reading of old family letters, I was even more moved by the words of President Obama:

"We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths – that all of us are created equal – is the star that guides us still; just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall; just as it guided all those men and women, sung and unsung, who left footprints along this great Mall, to hear a preacher say that we cannot walk alone; to hear a King proclaim that our individual freedom is inextricably bound to the freedom of every soul on Earth."

A New Year, New [and Old] Goals

one of our cats in the middle of Christmas packaging

Two months have passed since I last wrote a post. My absence is partly due to the business of the holidays, partly due to my usual turning inward during the cold winter months--even here in not-so-cold southeast Louisiana--and partly due to my resolve not to be drawn into the poisonous rhetoric of today's politics. I'm just tired of the hatred directed toward and the conspiracy theories projected onto our first African-American president. Facts do not seem to matter to a great number of people. Other bloggers are writing more consistently and engagingly about politics than I am, so I've decided occasionally to link to a post I find interesting and to focus my writing on my own projects--or on more positive events in the world than the latest right-wing, fear-mongering topic, though I won't rule out the occasional post on politics. 

Most of my goals for the new year are the same as the past year: I will spend a great deal of time gardening, and maybe this year I will begin clearing out the brush that has grown along the fence line of this acre of land on which our hundred-year-old cottage is located. Last year my husband and I put in 8X8-foot raised garden areas for herbs and flowers behind our house, and my husband finished tilling and adding compost to a large row garden on the north side of our property for vegetables.  We began building a shed for my garden tools; the shed is almost complete, and now I have to paint it. My goal is to have the shed ready for use before spring planting.

One of my new goals for this year is to become more engaged in my community. My move here was a difficult one for many reasons--the older I get, the more stressful moving seems to be. I grew up in a community of relatives, where five or six generations of families had developed relationships, many of the ancestors of my contemporaries having migrated to that area of Texas together. My adult life, however, has been a very mobile one. When I was younger, the moves seemed much easier, the friendships more quickly established. I easily found employment teaching at local universities and colleges, joined local churches, immersed myself in work, family, community. Now I no longer attend church--and in the South, church attendance is the quickest way to establish one's self in a community. The children, also, are grown, away at universities in other states, so their activities no longer pull me out into the community. And since I decided, after over twenty-five years of college-related work, not to continue teaching, I find myself unemployed at the age of fifty-five. I have a natural tendency towards introspection and am not averse to spending a great deal of time alone, and now none of these external demands--children, church, career--temper those tendencies. I have to work against them myself.

I have already begun work on one of my goals for this year: to scan and transcribe many of the hundreds of family letters my husband and his sister inherited. The bulk of these letters were written from the middle of the 1800s to the middle of the 1900s, and they follow the movements of an educated and genteel class of Southern families after the Civil War. I began this work a few years ago on my Left for Texas blog, and am continuing that work, though with a great deal more concentration and commitment.

The work is tedious, as I am creating digital files linking documents of the transcribed letters to images of those letters. But some of the letters are fascinating, full of chatty news about the family's activities as well as historical events, and in the research that I'm doing concurrent with reading and transcribing the letters, I am learning a lot more about history, especially history of the South after the Civil War--and the attitudes of those who fought for the Confederacy. In another post, I'll write about what I perceive to be the burdens of this work--and those burdens are not restricted to the tedious work of the amanuensis.

Last year--and the year previous--I spent a lot of time making things out of recycled materials and yarn: folk art felted wool quilts and throws, necklaces and scarves of my own design, felted wool pouches, felted wool pins, etc. I sold some of these items at a couple of festivals, but at the end of the year, I gave away as presents some of my best pieces and decided that this year I would concentrate on making quilts of my own design. So when I'm not immersed in family history or gardening, I'll be stitching on quilts, some made conventionally on a quilt frame and others made out of felted wool from recycled sweaters. In late spring of last year, I finished a felted wool folk art quilt, and last summer, I finished a quilt top inspired by a friend's photograph; this year I plan to finish quilting it. 

quilt top inspired by a friend's photo--cotton and felt

 These are my goals: seeking more community involvement; digitally recording old photographs and letters with the intent of editing those letters eventually; gardening and beautifying the grounds of our "cottage"; quilting. Any personal growth will have to arise out of those activity-oriented goals. I gave up on aspiring to become a better person beyond what might be a natural outgrowth of what I do.