When Ike Went Where the Founders Would Not

 

President Dwight Eisenhower signed legislation making "In God We Trust" the official National Motto.  He surrounded himself with clergy making sure to include a Muslim, a Rabbi, and Buddhist but significantly none of the Catholic prelates who had been the motto's driving force.  The non-observant casually religious President was clearly uneasy over the implications of what he was doing.

The crest of Cold War and Anti-Communist hysteria may have passed by July 30, 1956, but there was still plenty of residual energy.  President Dwight D. Eisenhower, perhaps somewhat reluctantly, signed a bill that designated the words “In God We Trust” as the official Motto of the United States.  

The year before Congress acted to require that the phrase be put on all coins and bills. 

Of course, the U.S. had a de facto motto which had long been included on coins and currency—E Pluribus Unum, usually translated “out of many, one.”  That phrase was approved in 1792 for the Great Seal of the United States.  It did not satisfy fervid religionists. 

Indeed. the Great Seal itself, which was filled with Masonic and Deist symbolism without a hint Christian piety, had been a bone of contention since the first struggles over the proper role of religion in the Republic.  The largely Deist founders purposefully omitted any reference to God in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was silent on the subject except to prohibit Congress from the establishment of any religion or interfering with the religious observances of its citizens.  Practical men with a knowledge of history, they were concerned lest a favored religion or a defined heresy create civil discord and perhaps civil war.  

The Latin phrase E Pluribus Unum was on the ribbon in the national eagle's beak on the obverse of the Great Seal of the United States and was long considered the de facto motto of the United States.

Washington and Jefferson occasionally invoked a vague Deity, most often referred to Providence, Nature’s God, or sometimes the God of Creation, all common Deist constructions for an original moving force of the Universe.  They avoided terms like the Lord God which invoked the patriarchal deity of the Old Testament and never invoked Jesus Christ.  

John Adams, a true product of the Puritan tradition as it evolved eventually into Unitarianism, firmly believed that organized religion was necessary to constrain the “passions” of an innately sinful humanity.  Moreover, he was politically indebted for the support of the Black Legion—the clergy of the New England Standing Order—against “atheistic” Jeffersonian Republicanism.  Yet even he resisted considerable pressure to inject explicitly Christian prayer, practice, and symbolism into official use.

A complex battle between the evolving movements of Evangelical Protestantism and republican secularism see-sawed back and forth for the first decades of the nation’s existence.  Some compromises were unofficially reached, but on the whole, the government remained resolutely secular, and even Presidents were not expected to make personal religious declarations. 

During the crisis of the Civil War, however, President Abraham Lincoln needed the fervent support of the Protestant clergy, particularly its avidly abolitionist voices.  Not a personally “saved” Christian, and deeply influenced by the Founder’s secular Deism, Lincoln non-the-less was a student of the Bible as literature and was adept at echoing its cadences and invoking powerful Biblical language in his speeches.  But he was always being pressed by the clergy to make more overt religious statements.  

Secretary of the Treasury Samuel Chase put in God We Trust on a Civil War era 2 cent piece.

It was in this context that Lincoln called for national days of fasting and Thanksgiving.  He also undoubtedly approved when his Treasury Secretary, the devout Salmon P. Chase, first directed the Mint to inscribe the words “In God We Trust” on a two-cent coin issued in 1864.  The approbation of the preachers far outweighed the slight protests of Freethinkers.  Nonetheless, the idiom "not worth two cents" entered the language as a subtle protest to the inscription.

Over the next decades most—but not all—coins added the phrase as they were re-designed. 

Government issued Greenback currency, however, contained no religious declaration, just a practical promise to pay the bearer in specie upon demand. 

And so, the situation stayed until the dawn of the Cold War.  Then Catholics, who had long been reluctant to join with Protestants in any religious demands on the government because they assumed, quite rightly, that the Protestants would insist on narrow language that excluded Catholic practice, became particularly alarmed at the rise of “atheistic Communism” and the suppression of Catholic worship in the new Soviet Satellites in Eastern Europe.  Leading anti-Communist Prelates launched a campaign to require “In God We Trust” on currency as well as all coins and to make it an official motto. 

Federal authorities, who were eager to use those same Bishops to influence the heavily Catholic industrial working class against “Communist infiltration” of the labor movement, were more than glad to add religious arrows to their crusade against Reds. 

When leading Protestant Evangelicals fell into line, the movement in Congress became irresistible even for those who were squeamish.  What Congressman wanted to be painted as voting against God? 

Controversy over the motto and its use on currency and coins has never gone away.  Church and state separation advocates, civil libertarians, and increasingly vocal atheist activists have repeatedly challenged the motto and its use on coins and currency in court.  And just as routinely have lost. 

In the case of Aronow v. United States in 1970, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled, “It is quite obvious that the national motto and the slogan on coinage and currency ‘In God We Trust’ has nothing whatsoever to do with the establishment of religion. Its use is of patriotic or ceremonial character and bears no true resemblance to a governmental sponsorship of a religious exercise.”  The Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal.  In another case The Supreme Court upheld the motto in because it has “lost through rote repetition any significant religious content.”  

Increasingly vocal and organized atheists have become the leading voice for protesting In God We Trust but their atheism may have entrenched support among the MAGA crowd and Christian Denomonists.

With public support of continued use of the motto on coins and currency standing at 90% in a 2003 Gallup Poll it does not appear that the phrase will be going away any time soon.

Defeat Snatched From the Jaws of Victory--the Waste of United States Colored Troops in the Crater

  

This Battle of the Crater souvenir post card was sold for decades around the Virginia battlefield.  For all I know glossy print versions may still be available.  Like many depictions of the battle, it showed a valiant Confederate charge into the Yanks trapped in the crater.  It also minimizes the number of Black troops--only two are identifiable in this picture--despite the fact that they suffered virtual annihilation.  How history gets both the valiant Lost Cause veneer and is whitewashed. 

File this one in the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley department.  The plan was brilliant.  Its execution nearly perfect down to the last detail.  The result exactly as desired, until mere mortal men marched into the breach.

By the summer of 1864 the grim carnage of the American Civil War had ground to a stalemate.  Since Gettysburg a year earlier Confederate General Robert E. Lee and his legendary Army of Northern Virginia had been hard pressed by vastly superior Union forces of the Army of the Potomac under the command of Major General George Meade directly and personally supervised by Commanding General Ulysses S Grant. 

Once famous for his audacious and aggressive maneuvers, Lee was forced to defend the Confederate capitol of Richmond.  He erected impressive earthen work fortifications in a wide ring around the city.  The old man was proving to be just as adept at what would be the future in the Industrial Age—trench warfare. 

 

Lee dug in to defend his capitol. A war of maneuver settled into siege, stalemate, and trench warfare.  The breastworks of the Confederate Fort Mahone on the Petersburg line.

The key to Richmond was at the rail hub of Petersburg through which the city and the army could remain supplied with food, supplies, and munitions.  Grant called it the “backdoor to Richmond” and proceeded to lay siege to the city and its fortifications.

The armies faced each other along a 20 mile front from the old Cold Harbor battlefield near Richmond to areas south of Petersburg.  An attempt to take the town by assault ended in failure on June 15.  Since then, the two armies pounded each other with artillery, peppered the opposing lines with deadly fire from sharp shooters and snipers, and delicately probed each other’s lines with reconnaissance patrols.  Both commanding generals were frustrated.

 

                                Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants of the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry had an idea and commanded the perfect troops to make it happen. 

It took a mining engineer to come up with a solution to Grant’s problem—Lt. Col. Henry Pleasants, commanding the 48th Pennsylvania Infantry of Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside’s IX Corps.  His proposal was simple on paper—dig a long mineshaft from the Union siege trenches then under Confederate outer defenses until below the major fortification at the center of the Rebel lines, Elliott’s Salient.  Sappers would then plant and set off a huge explosive mine which would blow the fort away and open a breach through which Union forces could pour, smashing the Confederate I Corps and rolling up Petersburg before Lee could muster his forces from elsewhere along the lines.

Burnside was a once promising commander nursing a badly bruised reputation.  His indecision as Army of the Potomac commander at Fredericksburg in December of 1862 threw away the best chance for a quick end to the war and led to one of the bloodiest defeats the Army was ever handed.  Busted back to a Corps commander, his lack of aggressiveness at Spotsylvania Court House earlier that year aggravated Grant.  Burnside was determined to prove that he was imaginative and aggressive.  He quickly gave the go-ahead to Pleasant’s plan.  Up the chain of command Meade and Grant also signed off on it but were not very convinced it would work.  Neither lent much logistical support to the effort.

 

A successful and proven Division commander, Major General Ambrose Burnside had been elevated to quickly to command of the Army of the Potomac after Lincoln finally got fed up with George McClellan.  His indecision at Fredericksburg led to one of the Army's worst defeats.  Demoted to a Corps commander, he was blamed for over caution at Spotsylvania Court House.  Now he was an officer desperate to salvage his reputation. 

Pleasants’ own troops, tough coal miners from the fields of western Pennsylvania, were just the men for the job.  They were maybe the only men in the Union army who would not consider the task drudgery.  In fact, for them digging in the soft Virginia soil must have seemed like a cakewalk.

Digging began in June and proceeded quickly.  The men had to scrounge lumber to shore up the tunnel and for the ingenious ventilation system which sucked fresh air from the narrow mine entrance all the way to the face of the digging via a wooden duct.  Fetid air at the end was heated by a constantly burning pit fire and vented out drawing the fresh air to fill the vacuum.  This system avoided the use of multiple air vents which could have been observed.

The miners dug by hand and removed the soil in wooden soap and ammunition boxes drawn by rope along a crude wooden plank rail. On July 17 the shaft reached under Elliott’s Salient at a depth of about fifty feet.  A perpendicular gallery about 75 feet long extended in both directions.

All of this had been accomplished un-detected by the enemy.  Confederate intelligence reported rumors of the mine to Lee about two weeks after construction began.  He didn’t believe it.  Finally, after receiving new report, he began desultory anti-mine efforts which failed to find or detect the shaft.

Confederate General John Pegram in charge of the artillery in the sector took the rumors more seriously, however, and on his own authority as a precaution had trenches and gun emplacements built to the rear of the Salient as a secondary line of defense.

Meade and Grant finally decided to go all in on the plan.  The gallery underneath the Confederate position was filled with 8,000 pounds of gunpowder in 320 kegs.  The main chamber was extended to 20 feet below the fort and was packed shut with 11 feet of earth in the side galleries and 32 feet of packed earth in the main gallery to prevent the explosion blasting out the mouth of the mine.

 

The miners' handiwork--the Union tunnel with the point of detonation of tons of explosive under the Confederate strong point. 

On July 27 Grant sent Major Generals Winfield Scott Hancock and Phil Sheridan on a combined infantry/cavalry attack along the James River southwest of Richmond and miles from the Petersburg front.  In what became known as the First Battle of Deep Bottom or New Market Road the forces were repelled in two sharp days of skirmishing around Fussell’s Mill and Bailey’s Creek.  Although Grant held out some hope that Hancock’s infantry could punch a hole in the defenses to allow Sheridan’s cavalry to pour into Richmond or failing that ride around the city severing rail connections, he was not entirely disappointed when the attacks were repulsed.   They succeeded in causing Lee to send troops from Petersburg to re-enforce the line along the James.

Grant turned his personal attention to the well-developed plans for the Petersburg mine attack. 

Weeks earlier at an officer’s call Burnside had acceded to the plea of former New York City dance master Brigadier General Edward Ferrero to use his division of United States Colored Troops (USCT) as the leading assault unit.  Burnside, who originally had other plans, agreed.  The division was fresh, well equipped, and most importantly at full strength, 4,200 men—a rarity when veteran units were often whittled away to half their original size or less through combat loss, disease, and desertion.  The division was given a rarity for the Civil War—two full weeks of specialized training and instructions for this mission.  After the mine went off, they were to move ahead in the confusion of the enemy and secure the crest of the crater on either side to allow the rest of the Corps to pass along the rim or through the crater itself. 

When Meade reviewed the plans, he fretted that the unit which Burnside considered fresh was simply green and therefore unreliable in combat, especially in a critical role.  He also worried that if the Colored Troops failed, they would discourage commanders from accepting and fighting alongside others.  Although Colored Troops had proved themselves in other theaters, they were new to the elite Army of the Potomac.  Grant agreed and ordered Burnside to revise the order of battle less than 24 hours before the attack.

At another officer’s call Burnside conducted a lottery among his three white divisions to select the lead.  Brigadier General James F. Ledlie of the 1st Division won the draw.  The Colored Division would join the two others in the second wave of the attack.

Ledlie returned to his unit but never issued the special instructions for taking the flanking rim first.  The men were told only that they would have the honor of leading a full-frontal assault.

 

Brevet Brigadier General Edward Ferrero, a famed New York dancing master in civilian life and a veteran of several campaigns, commanded the division of U.S. Colored Troops at Petersburg. 

Meanwhile, Col. Pleasants was deep underground personally supervising the final placement of the explosives and making sure the earthen plugs in the tunnel were strong.

The mine was supposed to be detonated at 3:30 in the morning of June 30.  But the Army provided inferior fuses.  Two attempts to light it failed.  Finally, two volunteers crawled into the mine, found where the fuse had burned out had broken, and spliced a fresh fuse on the end.  It was after dawn when the mine finally blew up at 4:30, with enough light for Confederate pickets to recognize that there were large Union forces inside their lines.

The explosion itself went off flawlessly.  And impressively.  The fortifications of Elliott’s Salient were blown sky high killing most of the garrison.  The Confederate line was thrown into the anticipated confusion and panic.

Ledlie’s men at first seemed as stunned by the spectacle as the enemy.  They paused to take in the scene and had to be prodded forward by their officers and sergeants.  Ledlie himself was nowhere to be found.  He was well to the rear, completely out of line of sight of the battle in a bombproof bunker with Ferrero of the Colored Division.  Passing a bottle between them the two officers were getting quietly drunk.

 

The untrained and leaderless men of the 1st Division charged into the crater  instead of taking the rim as planned.  They were trapped.  The Turkey shoot commenced. 

When the 1st Division reached the crater instead of securing the rim, they charged directly into the pit.  At the bottom they stopped to gape at the destruction.  The delays allowed time for Brig. Gen. William Mahone to cobble together a Confederate force to rush to plug the breech.  Rebs quickly occupied the vacant rim and commenced a turkey shoot of the defenseless men in the crater.  Troops madly tried to scramble up the sides, but found the dirt gave way under them.  They were trapped.

But they were not to be alone.  Burnside, refusing to be charged once again with indecision and lack of aggression, ordered the Colored Division forward to reinforce the trapped 1st.  Denied the rim, they followed into the crater.  Their appearance enraged the Confederates who intensified fire, including round after round of intense artillery fire.

 

 Burnside ordered the Colored Division forward to reinforce the 1st.  They also pushed into the Crater and were trapped.  They were singled out by enraged Confederates and were nearly annihilated.  No prisoners were taken from them.  

The turkey shoot continued for more than two hours.  At one point some supporting troops did manage to flank the crater and advance inside the Confederate line taking trenches in brutal hand-to-hand combat. But there were not enough of them, and they could not be reinforced.  After holding out for a short while they were cleaned out of the trenches by a counterattack.

As the battle wound down, Confederate troops summarily executed Black soldiers trying to surrender.  Fearing retaliation by the Rebels, some White Union troops bayonetted the Blacks as well.  The Colored Division was virtually wiped out as an effective unit.

In all Union forces suffered 3,798 casualties including 504 killed, 1,881 wounded, and 1,413 missing or captured.  The Confederates lost 1,491—361 killed, 727 wounded, and 403 missing or captured.

 

The Crater after the battle. 

Probably the best chance of the year at an early end to the war was thrown away.  Grant reported to Army Chief of Staff Henry W. Halleck, “It was the saddest affair I have witnessed in this war…Such an opportunity for carrying fortifications I have never seen and do not expect again to have.”

The finger pointing and blaming began immediately.  A Court of Inquiry pinned the rap on Burnside, who was relieved of command and never entrusted with another.  His reputation was ruined beyond repair.  All of his division commanders were censured, especially Ledlie and Ferrero.

One of the few to come out of the affair with an enhanced reputation was Pleasants, whose troops were not engaged in the actual fighting that day.  He was rewarded for his plan and execution with a brevet to Brigadier General.

At war’s end in 1865 the Congressional Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War opened an inquiry into the debacle.  Pleasants testified that if Burnside had been allowed to retain his original order of Battle, that the operation would have been a success.  Grant concurred.  He wrote to the Commission:

General Burnside wanted to put his colored division in front, and I believe if he had done so it would have been a success. Still I agreed with General Meade as to his objections to that plan. General Meade said that if we put the colored troops in front (we had only one division) and it should prove a failure, it would then be said and very properly, that we were shoving these people ahead to get killed because we did not care anything about them. But that could not be said if we put white troops in front.

In the end, the commission agreed, laying the blame at Meade’s feet and exonerating Burnside.  Little good did that do for the general’s already destroyed reputation.

On the Confederate side Mahone was hailed a hero and became one of Lee’s most trusted division commanders in the last year of the war.

 

Far from the battle site where they were slaughtered the 28th Regiment U.S. Colored Troops are commemorated by a marker in Indianapolis, the city where the regiment was raised.

The Siege of Petersburg ground on for months more into a new year.  Union successes elsewhere, especially William Tecumseh Sherman’s operations in the Deep South, were sealing the fate of the Confederacy.  After Grant’s bloody Wilderness Campaign offensive, Lee was finally forced out of his trenches.  Richmond fell.  Lee surrendered.  The South was defeated.

But had the operation at the Crater gone as planned, maybe a million lives might have been saved.

Chicago's Red Summer of 1919 Through Poet's Eyes--Sandburg, Brooks, and Ewing

                               

                                         A white mob attack a black home during the 1919 Race Riots.

Note--We are not yet done with the 1919 Chicago Race Riots. Viewed by three poets--the eyewitness witness reporter, the Poet Laureate, and the hip young Afro-feminist.  

The 1919 Chicago Race Riots seared the souls of the cotton field diaspora who found rough shelter in the city’s unwelcoming arms—the Great Migration. Exodus indeed.  The proper city of the gleaming towers and rah-rah civic boosters strove mightily to forget, to infuse or enforce a willful amnesia.  But the poets noticed.

Carl Sandburg was 41 that year and emerging as a poet to be noticed.  Chicago Poems shook up conventions in its sensational appearance in 1914 and later in the fatal year Cornhuskers would win the Pulitzer Prize.  But the prairie Socialist was still proud to pound a typewriter at the Chicago Daily News as a working reporter.

Things were already tense on the South Side.  Race riots had already popped up cities including East St. Louis, Illinois that summer.  In Chicago a series of bombings occurred on the fringes of the Black Belt aimed at discouraging Blacks from moving into adjacent White blocks.  White gangs occasionally cruised through the neighborhood shooting indiscriminately out car windows.  In self-defense Black veterans organized “sniping”—firing on the raiders from windows and doorways—as they sped through.  It was a practice that would be honed during the full-blown riots with the addition of using refuse and trash cans to barricade the streets and trap the cars longer under the return fire.

                    

                                    Carl Sandburg--poet and reporter.

All of the major newspapers were wringing their hands and nearly unanimously laid all the blame on “invading Negros” who were depicted variously as filthy, ignorant, lazy, violent, and criminal.  The Daily News, however, decided to put Sandburg, a reporter known to be keen on social issues and familiar with the working class streets, on the story.  He covered it as no one else would, by spending ten days in June talking to ordinary Black residents including women whose voices were seldom heard, their White neighbors, businesspeople and real estate brokers, police, preachers, and precinct level politicians.  He asked pointed questions about everything—the Black Migration and why people had come, housing conditions, work opportunities, competition for jobs including charges of strikebreaking, wildly exaggerated and sensationalized press accounts of Black crime, and primal fears of race mixing and miscegenation.

Sandburg wrote to his father in-law, “I have spent 10 days in the Black Belt and am starting a series in the Chicago Daily News on why Abyssinians, Bushmen and Zulus are here.”  Some later commentators would take that sentence as proof that even a sympathetic Sandburg was tainted with racism.  No doubt like almost every White person of the time—or now—that might be true.  But it fails to take into account the bitter irony that often infused his poetry.  He was never afraid to use the blunt language he heard on the street to expose its outrageousness.

A crowd gathers on a Black Belt corner ready to defend the neighborhood from white gangs.

Among his most telling observations, which would be born out in the riots, was the significant role played by Black veterans who had served in France.  While they served in segregated units and many were assigned menial labor like loading and unloading munitions and supplies or carting the dead from the battlefield, others served in infantry regiments who fought alongside the French and earned their admiration.  All of the veterans returned with a sense that they had earned the respect of all of society.  The city’s Black Belt neighborhood sent more than 18,000 draftees to France in addition to volunteers. Sandburg reported:

In barber shop windows and in cigar stores and haberdasheries are helmets, rifles, cartridges, canteens and haversacks and photographs of negro regiments that were sent to France… So it is clear that in one neighborhood there are ... strong young men who have been talking to each other on topics more or less intimately related to the questions, “What are we ready to die for? Why do we live? What is democracy? What is the meaning of freedom; of self-determination?

He quoted Charles Duke, one of the relatively few Black officers who served:

All attempts at segregation bring only discord and resentful opposition. The bombing of the homes of colored citizens is futile. This will neither intimidate any considerable number of them nor stop their moving into a given district.

His series of articles began running daily on July 14—perhaps not entirely accidentally Bastille Day—and ran until just before the riots broke out on July 27.  If anyone wondered why or how the ultimate explosion occurred, Sandburg had already supplied the answers.

                                    

                                                      The book assembled from Sandburg's Chicago Daily News articles.

NAACP board member Joel Spingarn was in Chicago during and after the eight days of rioting.  He discovered Sandburg’s series and was so impressed that he sent it to Alfred Harcourt of the Harcourt, Brace & Howe publishers without consulting the reporter.  Harcourt was impressed and contacted Sandburg with an offer to do a book based on the series.  Sandburg, who had other projects at hand in addition to his work as a reporter, agreed with the stipulation that he did not have time for much new material including a detailed account of the actual riots.

The original articles became the core of the book with a little introductory and final commentary.  Walter Lippmann, then known as a liberal commentator, was tapped to write the forward, which gave the slender volume some literary heft.  It was quickly issued under the slightly deceptive title of The Chicago Race Riots, July 1919 despite the fact that it was mostly essential background to the actual disturbances.

In his own brief introduction Sandburg summarized his findings:

In any American city where the racial situation is critical at this moment, the radical and active factors probably are (1) housing, (2) politics and war psychology, and (3) organization of labor.

The book sold well and became an essential text for anyone studying the Red Summer in Chicago.  But the title continued to fool people.  A 50th anniversary edition was published in 1969 on the heels of a new wave of race riots.  Distinguished Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill did the new forward but despite the clear evidence of the text he was praising wrote as if Sandburg reported and wrote after the riots.  He couldn’t believe that Sandburg’s prescience was not hindsight.

Gwendolyn Brooks as a young poet about the time A Street in Bronzeville was published.

Decades later for Poet Laureate Gwendolyn Brooks the riots of the Red Summer were the background and subtext to her Bronzeville poems and the haunted roots of her turn-the-table verse of the 1968 West Side riots.

Riot

A riot is the language of the unheard.

—martin luther king

 

John Cabot, out of Wilma, once a Wycliffe,

all whitebluerose below his golden hair,

wrapped richly in right linen and right wool,

almost forgot his Jaguar and Lake Bluff;

almost forgot Grandtully (which is The

Best Thing That Ever Happened To Scotch); almost

forgot the sculpture at the Richard Gray

and Distelheim; the kidney pie at Maxim’s,

the Grenadine de Boeuf at Maison Henri.

 

Because the Negroes were coming down the street.

 

Because the Poor were sweaty and unpretty

(not like Two Dainty Negroes in Winnetka)

and they were coming toward him in rough ranks.

In seas. In windsweep. They were black and loud.

And not detainable. And not discreet.

 

Gross. Gross. “Que tu es grossier!” John Cabot

itched instantly beneath the nourished white

that told his story of glory to the World.

“Don’t let It touch me! the blackness! Lord!” he whispered

to any handy angel in the sky.

But, in a thrilling announcement, on It drove

and breathed on him: and touched him. In that breath

the fume of pig foot, chitterling and cheap chili,

malign, mocked John. And, in terrific touch, old

averted doubt jerked forward decently,

cried, “Cabot! John! You are a desperate man,

and the desperate die expensively today.”

 

John Cabot went down in the smoke and fire

and broken glass and blood, and he cried “Lord!

Forgive these nigguhs that know not what they do.”

 

—Gwendolyn Brooks

 

The cover of Eve L. Ewing's 1919 Poems from Haymarket Books.

Evie L. Ewing is the heir to both Sandburg in Brooks.  Her amazing slender book 1919 Poems from Haymarket Books explicitly evoked both.  Ewing, a University of Chicago sociologist as well as an accomplished poet, turned to another essential book on the riots for her inspiration. 

The Negro in Chicago: A Study in Race Relations and a Race Riot was the dry, academic title of the report published in 1922 of an evenly split Black and White 12-person commission established by Illinois Governor Frank Lowden and selected by the Chicago Commission on Race Relations.  Not the kind of inspiration you would expect from a poet.

                       

                             Ewing's touchstone and inspiration.

Ewing first encountered the report in her research for a previous book, Ghosts in the School Yard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side. She was struck that:

…a view into Black life in my city a century earlier, and so many things struck me as being either radically different or completely unchanged.  And even though this was a government issued report, many of its passages immediately think about poetry.  They were so narrative, so evocative, so imagistic.  The report was like an old pastry with loose threads sticking out, and I wanted to tug on them and see what I could unravel, see what new thing I could weave.

Thus, the concept of her new book was born.  Ewing used direct quotes from the report as epigrams for each poem and then riffed on it in a wide variety of styles and in many voices as they seem appropriate.  It was all fresh.  More than that, it was liberating.

Ewing was born in Chicago in 1986 and grew up in Logan Square the daughter of a radio reporter and producer mother and an artist father.  She attended public schools and graduated from Northside College Preparatory High School before entering the University of Chicago.  She earned a master’s degree in Elementary Education from Dominican University and taught middle school science in Chicago public schools before moving to Boston where she earned an M.Ed in Education Policy and Management in 2013 and a doctorate from Harvard University's Graduate School of Education.  Ewing is currently an assistant professor at the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.

Beyond her impressive academic credentials, Ewing has been a prolific writer and poet whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, the Washington Post, The New Republic, Poetry Magazine, and the anthology American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, curated by Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United States. With Nate Marshall, she co-wrote the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, produced by Manual Cinema and commissioned by the Poetry Foundation.

On top of all of that Ewing displayed her versatility as the writer/creator of the Ironheart series for Marvel Comics and a contributor to other of their projects. She co-directed Crescendo Literary, a partnership that develops community-engaged arts events and educational resources as a form of cultural organizing.

She hosted the podcast Bughouse Square with Eve Ewing which began each episode with an excerpt from the vast archive of Studs Terkle’s radio broadcasts then interviewed a guest in a conversation with parallel themes.  She uses Terkle’s source material in ways the echo her use of The Negro in Chicago in her new collection.

Her debut literary collection, Electric Arches published in 2017 by Haymarket Books was an imaginative exploration of Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose.  The book gathered high praise and awards including the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America, the Alex Award for Young by the American Library Association Winner, National Public Radio’s list of Best Books of 2017,Top Ten Books of 2017 by the Chicago Tribune, Best Poetry Book of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books, and Top Ten Books of 2017 by the Chicago Public Library.

Ewing divided 1919 Poems into three sections--Before, What Happened, and After.  Before examines Black roots in slavery and the South and the Great Migration to Chicago.  Biblical Exodus is a recurring theme as is the Great Fire that had scorched the city.  She takes care to present individual voices as well as a mystical collective consciousness.

True Stories About the Great Fire

…the sentiment was expressed that the Negro invasion of the district was the worst calamity that had struck the city since the Great Fire.  A prominent white real estate man said: “Property owners should be notified to stand together block by block and prevent such invasion.” (118-19)

 

Everything they tell you is wrong.

The Great Fire came here in a pair of worn loafers

dating its last sandwich wrapped in paper

and the Great Fire had a smell like grease and flowers.

 

The Great Fire did not come to eat up the homes,

The homes lay down at the foot of the Great Fire,

for it was godly, and it glowed.

The Great Fire blessed the rooftops.

The Great Fire danced with the lakeshore.

 

The Great Fire has an auntie who makes dresses

and the Great Fire wears a red pinafore

and dances in a cake walk.

 

The Great Fire can only move at right angles.

The Great Fire goes from block to block at night

and kisses stray cats in the moonlight

and the cats catch the Holy Ghost.

 

The Great Fire sits in the balcony and yells at the picture.

The Great Fire sings in a too-loud voice.

The Great Fire has plans for you.

The Great Fire is going to take your daughter someplace.

The Great Fire has a hoard of gold like a dragon.

 

The Great Fire already lives next door

and hides in the daytime.

The Great Fire knows that they don’t want it here.

The Great Fire is going to burn the city they built

and we will watch from the stone tower

and we will wait for it to finish

and we can wait a long time

and the Fire can too.

 

—Eve L. Ewing

In What Happened she captures snap shots of the events.

City in a Garden

After Carl Sandburg

 

The Negro crowd  from  Twenty-ninth Street got into action, and white men who came I contact with it were beaten…Further to the west, as darkness came on, white gangsters became active.  Negroes in white districts suffered severely at their hands.  From 9:00 p.m. until 2:00 a.m. twenty-seven Negroes were beaten, seven were stabbed, and four were shot.  (5)

 

o my ugly homestead,

blood-sodden prairie.

 

            Who is horto, meaning:

                        if it grows it once came from dirt.

 

o my love, why do you till the ground with iron?

o my miracle, why do you fire in the dark?

you, thief of dusk, you, captain of my sorrows. you avarice.

your ground is greedy for our children, and you take them as you please.

the babies come from you, the train car orators, and the beloved hustlers.

they die, and you send forth more, you who makes a place

in a middle land, you ruthless.  you seed ground.

you bear the best of us and the worst in equal measure.

 

o my garden, which am I.

 

—Eve L. Ewing

And in After:

April 5, 1968

 

After Gwendolyn Brooks

Our country is over, you see.  Here lies

my prettiest baby and her glass fingertips are

are all over the tar.  In the before I told

her, ‘play beloved’ and

from the storefront piano came legends

of the mountaintop and it made

me weep.  I was an ugly phoenix

but our dirt was our own.  As the sun rises

now I know what we do is right.  Unafraid

I stand before the skinny boy with the

bayonet & say ‘before I’ll be an ashen ghost, black

gone gray at your hand like our dead philosopher,

I’ll burn my own, you see, just the way I want, & you will

know it’s mine.’ Goodbye Madison.  I will remember

my country, my sun-up town.  Because there

on the mountaintop I saw the fire in the valley.  They

were coming to take you away.  They came

with cursed wat, the hurting river the used to

strike down the children of Birmingham, each life

a bad joke in their bull eyes. And

I said ‘not here.  Not never. Not Madison.  And exulted

in the shadow of the first fire, then the next, the

the heat sending sweat into my eyes, that simple salt hurt

keeping me from thinking too long of your piano gone mute.

I suspect the boy wanted to run then

but he stood shaking, gun raised, and I said, “if this is it,

if this is my last day that ever was,

man, at least I know I got over,

that the likes of you will never have us, that the

street I call my only home burned to dust

at my hand.  Let them sing of how bright the sun was as

a coward struck me down. They will tell it always, they will say

that one glorious morning, I showed hem your heart, lest they think it was settled.

 

—Eve L. Ewing

 

A youth confronts Illinois National Guardsmen during the 1968 West Side riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King.