Sailing on behalf of a Boston trading company, Capt. Robert Gray came upon the headwaters of the Great River of the West on May 11 and then did what earlier explorers had not: he entered.
A month after his Columbia Rediviva had become the first American vessel to sail around the world (from Boston around the Horn to the Northwest and on to Canton), Captain Gray sailed his sloop from Boston in September 1790, searching for new fur markets in the Pacific Northwest and in the belief that these markets could be linked with those of China. His expedition halted in Clayoquot Sound long enough to meet up with a second ship. Then the two vessels sailed south, and Gray’s Columbia happened on the entrance to the Great River of the West. The river had been suspected by previous explorers and implied by cartographers but, until Gray’s ship crossed the bar that day, had been mostly the secret of the Chinook Indians. In fact, a scout for the British explorer Capt. George Vancouver had surveyed his way right past the river’s entrance the month before, explaining away a change he observed in the sea water’s color as a “probable consequence of some streams falling into the bay.…”
With a relatively calm sea and sustaining wind, Gray’s ship cleared the breakers that had long masked the river’s mouth and then sailed inland twenty-two miles. The Yankee captain gratefully called this elusive discovery “Columbia’s River” for his ship, supplanting earlier, less wieldy names such as the Spaniard Bruno Heceta’s suggestion, Bahía de la Asumpsión. Gray was later honored with a bay of his own, however, a few miles north.
1867One Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
The First Grand Wizard
In May, while officially still in the insurance business, the ex-Confederate general and guerrilla leader Nathan Bedford Forrest took his place as the first Grand Wizard in the recently formed “KuKlux Klan.”
At the end of the Civil War, six young Confederate officers had returned to Pulaski, Tennessee, with little to do. The men met occasionally throughout 1866, took medieval-sounding oaths of secrecy, and made prankish night rides dressed in robes and ghostly sheets and tall, pointed hats. Pulaski was a town of around two thousand residents, nearly half of whom had been slaves before the war. After considering names like “The Jolly Six” and “Pulaski Social Club,” the group settled on the redundant but memorable “KuKlux Klan,” from the Greek word for “circle” or “band.” “What is a ‘KuKlux Klan,’” asked the Pulaski Citizen, in the first printed reference to the group, “and who is this ‘Grand Cyclops’?” The paper’s editor was himself privately a clan officer, and he published the date of the growing secret society’s next midnight meeting for those readers brave or curious enough to attend.
During their night escapades—the high hats allowed the riders to resemble giant, talking ghosts—the members delighted in terrifying the county’s black freedmen. Throughout the South, where Radical Reconstruction was being implemented, blacks were joining Union Leagues—Republican organizations that also had secret rituals—and found that they now made up the great majority in the Southern Republican party. At the same time, almost every state government in the former Confederacy, having voted against passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, was about to be replaced by Reconstruction. The exception was Tennessee, where a Republican, William G. Brownlow, was already in power, and the state’s newly enfranchised black voters promised to keep him there.
The Klan came to see itself as a defense against such blasphemies and drew up a prescript, or constitution, at a meeting in Nashville in April. As each state government was replaced with Radicals, the Invisible Empire grew throughout the South; an organization so large and deadly serious needed a proper Southern leader for its mission. Nathan Bedford Forrest was elected its first Grand Dragon, his term to begin in May.
In June the Klan held its first parade and proved something of a bewilderment even to the sympathetic Pulaski Citizen: “They conversed in dutch, hebrew, or some other language which we couldn’t comprehend. No two of them dressed alike, all having on masks and some sort of fanciful costume.”
As the 1868 elections approached, violence against freedmen hoping to vote became general throughout Tennessee. The attacks were most frequent, however, in the west of the state, where the Klan still had not penetrated. The organization revised its prescript the next spring to reflect its expansion; in addition to swearing to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution, Grand Wizard Forrest now oversaw an “empire” with toeholds in fourteen Southern states. “The remains of the Confederate armies,” surmised the English writer Robert Somers in 1871, now “flitted before the eyes of the people in this weird and midnight shape of a ‘Ku Klux Klan.’”
The Klan led riots against black suffragists in Mississippi, burned schools whipped or lynched Northern schoolteachers, who were blamed for the freedmen’s new political interest, and sent out its now-familiar night armies to frighten former slaves back into prewar obedience. The Republican majorities grew smaller in Southern elections but were not reversed.
The federal government moved in to defend its Reconstruction experiment; the Klan, like the Confederate Army before it, spread its armies along too many fronts to survive intact. Nathan Bedford Forrest never explicitly acknowledged his membership or high office in the Klan, but he testified before Congress in 1871 that “this organization was got up to protect the weak, with no political intention at all. …” One of the original six members had said as early 1868, “If it has become a regular organization, with guerilla and ‘lynch-law’ attributes, then better the Ku Klux had never been heard of, and the sooner such organization is dissolved the better for the country at large—especially for the South.”
1942Fifty Years Ago
Home Front
By May the American war effort was thriving at home, if not yet overseas. Farmers in Brooks County, Georgia, worked their fields by electric light once the sun had gone down, while the city of Atlanta tore up six thousand tons of neglected trolley track for its steel. Across the country people were volunteering as air-raid wardens for their blocks; twenty-three thousand block captains were sworn in at one time in the Chicago Coliseum.
Before many of the wartime restrictions could be put in place, Americans were already donating their time, their blood, their scrap iron and old tires. Enthusiastic shopowners removed their handsome copper signs to melt down for bullet casings. A bond-selling campaign in Davenport, Iowa, produced two innovations: firemen sold war bonds by ladder, proceeding from one office window to another accepting pledges, and a Davenport businessman devised a scheme for selling war bonds by pushing a pretty girl in a wheelbarrow through the city’s streets until his first sale, at which point the buyer would cut in and push her along to the next patriotic citizen. Davenport raised five million dollars. Lord & Taylor, maker of the uniforms for the newly formed Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, announced a line of wartime sleepwear in May, anticipating future restrictions on materials: A “Night-n-day” pajama suit for women doubled as a blouse with slacks. Several other makers offered higher hems on nightgowns and some without sleeves as well as men’s pajamas that ended at the calf.
In May port cities like Miami began experimenting with dim-outs. These “Byrne-outs” (in honor of the director of economic stabilization James Byrnes) were partly a conservation measure but also were designed to make dimmer backdrops for the shipping stalked by German subs.
And on May 27 recruitment began for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps, later known as the Women’s Army Corps or WAC. In Washington 750 eager-to-work women overwhelmed the headquarters; 1,400 signed up in New York City; 13,000 potential WACs volunteered that day nationwide. The Navy, Coast Guard, and Marines also had female units in order to free up men from industrial and clerical jobs for service at the front. Despite initial snickering from the boys in the press corps and the warnings of many in the country against removing American women from the home even in an emergency, one year after the establishment of the WACs, 100,000 women were hard at work in the armed services.
Reversal in the Pacific
After five months of defeat and frustration from Pearl Harbor to the Philippines and then at the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Allies at last came into their own at the Battle of Midway. Between June 3 and June 6, U.S. Navy pilots destroyed some 332 Japanese planes and sank 4 of the 6 star Japanese aircraft carriers, the Kaga, Soryu, Hiryu, and Akagi. In a grim reversal of Pearl Harbor’s slaughter, 3,500 Japanese died in the fighting at Midway, to the Americans’ loss of 307. In fact, 3 of the sunken carriers had launched the planes that made the December attack.
1967Twenty-five Years Ago
Rush to Judgment
May’s Esquire offered a review of twenty-five alternative theories grown up around the assassination of President Kennedy since the Warren Commission’s report, bringing the total to sixty scenarios in all.
The review ranged from the Warren Commission member Arlen Specter’s suggestion that original autopsy pictures had been destroyed to arguments over alleged puffs of smoke, ricocheted bullet fragments, and differing numbers of shots fired on that terrible afternoon (the historian William Manchester, the late President’s biographer, claimed there had been two shots despite some hundred witnesses in Dallas who heard three).
Wilder scenarios spun by Mark Lane and seconded by Norman Mailer asserted Jack Ruby was “injected with cancer” while in jail, and a UCLA engineer advanced the imaginative theory that multiple assassins had retreated into tunnels dug beneath the famous “grassy knoll” following the shooting. The editor of Prevention magazine recalled that witnesses saw Oswald holding a Coke bottle later that day and suggested that such a “sugar drunkard” could not be held “responsible for this action.” (A variation on this argument would help defend San Francisco councilman Harvey Milk’s accused assassin more than a decade later.) The quickie conspiracy book was an established best-seller item by 1967, with writers such as Lane and Harold Weisberg the captains of this new cottage industry.
But the most spectacular theory belonged to the New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, not because his charges of conspiracy to kill the President made a wider sweep than the others but because he actually brought someone to trial. In early May, with his case against a New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw just heating up, Garrison announced grandiloquently that he was investigating the CIA and FBI for withholding evidence. Shaw, a respected native of New Orleans and recipient of the Bronze Star, had admired and voted for Kennedy. Nevertheless, he was arrested on March 1 for allegedly conspiring with David W. Ferrie, also of New Orleans, and Lee Harvey Oswald in September 1963 to murder the President. Garrison believed that Oswald’s avowed Marxism (though it dated at least to letters written when he was fifteen years old) was in reality a cover for his rightist, anti-Castro sponsors, who were vexed by Kennedy’s cooling attitude toward Cuba after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion. He also believed that David Ferrie’s “duck hunting” excursion to Houston on the day of the assassination was a cover for a day trip into Dallas to oversee Kennedy’s murder.
The district attorney’s office had arrived at Shaw as a suspect chiefly because of his first name, his address, and the fact that he spoke Spanish. Dean Andrews, Jr., a talkative New Orleans attorney, had already become well known for telling the Warren Commission that a mysterious man named Clay Bertrand had telephoned him the day after the assassination to ask him to represent Oswald. Andrews described Clay Bertrand (whom he had allegedly seen once) as six feet one or two inches but later, in his court deposition, as about five feet eight inches. Garrison arrested the six-foot-four Clay Shaw on the basis of what would have been a spectacularly unimaginative alias and because he lived in the French Quarter and spoke Spanish, like the dubious Bertrand. Bertrand—and, therefore, Shaw—was also bisexual, Andrews added, “What they call a swinging cat.” The only trouble with the connection drawn by Garrison was that Andrews would not second it in court and refused to say whether Shaw and Bertrand were the same.
Garrison’s suspicion that Ferrie had aided the now-dead Oswald became news on February 17,1967; when Ferrie died of a cerebral hemorrhage four days later, Garrison accused Clay Shaw of having conspired with the two dead men as well as with various shadowy Cubans. (At no time while Ferrie and Shaw were both alive did the district attorney confront them with each other.)
After a trial filled with ever-widening charges, homosexual innuendo, and old Southern politicking from the district attorney, Shaw was acquitted in 1969. At the time, an NBC documentary asserted that Garrison had bribed two witnesses and attempted to plant evidence in Shaw’s house. Andrews admitted to inventing one of the supposed Cuban conspirators: Manuel Garcia Gonzalez, who Garrison had claimed in April 1967 was the true assassin.
“I only know I had no part in any plot,” said Shaw when it was over. “But I do feel many people believe in a conspiracy, because when death comes to the figure of a prince, as it did to Kennedy, struck down in his prime, it should come under a panoply of great tragedy with all the resulting high court intrigue … not from some poor little psychotic loser crouched with a mail-order rifle behind a stack of cardboard boxes in a warehouse.”
