All posts by Kevin Brewer

About Kevin Brewer

I am Kevin Terral Brewer, a history and government teacher in the Benton County, Tennessee public school system. I have taught history, United States government, and other social studies for over twenty years, and I hold three college degrees: a B.A. in political science and an M.S. in education curriculum and instruction, both from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, and an M.S. in history from Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky. I have a deep and abiding interest in United States political and cultural history, particularly the history of institutions, such as the presidency and the Supreme Court. I am an active follower of, and commentator on, conservative and libertarian causes. I am married, nearly fifty years old, and am the father of three children, one of whom is grown and is the mother of my only grandchild. I can also be found on Facebook.

On Trump v. Anderson and the Supreme Court’s Unanimous decision on Amendment XIV, Section 3 Disqualification

Constitutional Law

As I recently predicted (earlier, my predictions were different), the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Colorado’s effort to disqualify former President Trump from the ballot. It was a per curium ruling. Per curium means “by the Court,” speaking as a body, so there is no signed decision.

Justices Barrett, Sotomayor, Kagen, and Jackson concurred, making the decision unanimous, but all four dissented in part. Their disagreements with the decision mostly involve the idea that the court should rule as conservatively as possible and not stake out unnecessary positions.

The crux of the court’s decision appears to be that Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment vests the enforcement of the whole amendment, including Section 3, in Congress, not in the courts and not in the states. In making the latter point, the Court specified that the states are free to pass on the qualification or disqualification of state officials under Section 3, but cannot do so for federal officials. The former suggests that Congress could, through legislation, or perhaps through mere joint resolutions, declare the disqualification of individuals or entire groups of “insurrectionists” without resort to due process or the courts. This blunts the arguments of the more ignorant and self-serving of Trump apologists who claimed he could not be disqualified absent charges and a trial. As I have pointed out a dozen times, few if any of the many Confederates barred from holding office under Section 3 were declared insurrectionists at trial. This raises the interesting notion that Section 3, in essence, established an exception to the Constitution’s prohibition of bills of attainder, laws declaring individuals (or groups, presumably) guilty of crimes without court proceedings.

Some people will be thrilled with this decision on political, not on legal grounds. They will identify themselves through all manner of comments revealing that they have not read or understood the opinion just released and, sadly, revealing that they would not have cared much, or at all, how the Court interpreted the Constitution so long as Trump was not restrained by it. So much for fealty to the Constitution, I guess.

Other people will be deeply disappointed by this ruling on political, rather than legal grounds. They will probably declare that the fix was in, that the Court is corrupted, etc. They, too, won’t seem to care much whether the case was correctly decided based on the rule of law but will merely be angry that Trump will remain on the ballot, not giving much thought to the problems his disqualification might have unleashed long after Trump himself is gone or the danger inherent in allowing state officials to exercise such outsized influence in a presidential election. The state legislatures are bastions of all manner of retrograde ignorance. Do we really want people whose religion requires they shut down IVF procedures or who think it is OK to burn government buildings if you are angry enough making these kinds of decisions?

The plain truth is that this is a good day for our country and our institutions, not because Trump stays (the sooner he and those like him depart, the better), but because the entire Supreme Court stood up as one (or nearly so) for some legal principles that make a lot of sense if viewed through a legal and not a political lens. The message is clear. Until the American people stop being so vapid and ignorant, pursuing silly conspiracy theories, making up their own science, etc., we will have bad leaders. Take to the streets. Demand better leadership at every level. Stop electing left-wing, America-hating revolutionaries who detest our institutions and right-wing, religious fanatic, nutcase conspiracy theorists who love them only when they are in charge of them. The Reconstruction Era Congress is not going to get you out of this mess, and neither is the modern Supreme Court. You’re getting the government you deserve; deserve better.

Matthew Perry, “Chandler,” and the Bigger, More Terrible Thing

Memorials, Miscellany, Personal Tributes,

Last night, Leslie and I sat in our living room chatting with my cousin Steve, who was visiting from Florida. Somehow, the conversation turned to Friends star Matthew Perry. As Leslie can attest, I have been talking a lot about Perry in recent weeks. In September, I decided to move well outside my area of interest and my literary comfort zone to read his 2022 memoir, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing. I tried to describe to Steve the degree of Perry’s self-confessed addictions and the physical, mental, and emotional damage they have visited upon him. We talked of his 55 Vicodin per day habit, the corrupt people who helped him feed it, and how the opiates caused his colon to “explode,” nearly killing him and leaving him with a temporary colostomy bag. As to whether he was still using, I said that Perry wrote in the book’s closing chapter that he has stopped. I concluded on a pessimistic note, though. I didn’t see how anyone so severely addicted and with all that money could ever quit.

About 15 minutes later, our youngest child Quinn, who is a college student living on campus, sent Leslie a text message that read, “MATTHEW PERRY DEAD!”

I will state up front that I am not holding myself out as an authority on the life and career of Matthew Perry. With the exception of a handful of favorite actors and musicians, my opinions on celebrities and their usually self-imposed torments range from indifference to contempt. Until I picked up his book, my knowledge of Perry’s life and his struggles would have fit in one modest paragraph. To my surprise, I wasn’t twenty pages into this thing before I was thinking to myself, “I must write something about this book. My friends are going to be so surprised when I do.” I finished the memoir about five days ago; its author is now dead, and here I am writing something far different than what I had planned.

Like many people my age and younger, I watched Friends off and on during its original run and have occasionally watched since, though I was never a dedicated fan. I did think the writing was clever and funny and that the principal stars were immensely talented. It was light. It was breezy. The characters were lovable and quirky, and if you watched it just to laugh and relax, you would; I did, anyway. I remember the first time I saw the show. Leslie always watched it. She and I were engaged, and I happened to be at her house when it came on. It was season 2, episode five (yes, I had to look that up): “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant,” in which Ross, Monica, and Chandler, all relatively successful in professional careers, are not sensitive to the financial problems of Phoebe, Joey, and Rachel, who are struggling in dead-end jobs. This puts a strain on their friendships: a problem that seems relatable enough.

It is fashionable, today, for people to burnish their images by denouncing Friends: It was trivial. It was a series of one-liners. It was unrealistic. It belabored story arcs. It wasn’t diverse. It was insensitive. None of these is universally true of the show, but each has some validity. It is easy to forget, though, that Friends, like every other entertainment offering, was simply a reflection of its time. The show was nothing less than an entertainment phenomenon during its run, and it did feature, for those who chose to see them, themes that mattered: the angst of modern twenty-somethings trying to find their way in a complex and changing urban landscape; the search for love and acceptance; the post-modern phenomenon, often noted by sociologists, of young adults in the developed world moving beyond their birth families, not to marry and establish their own, but to cling to a new kind of “family” made up of peers: “Friends.” I can attest that Friends is not a generational relic, either. I teach in a high school. Just days ago, I saw a student wearing a T-shirt with the Friends logo, and a student-made poster hanging in the hall features “Central High” in a style obviously meant to mimic the logo of Central Perk, the coffee shop that serves as a gathering place on the show. Nearly twenty years after its final episode, Friends is hip again.

I estimate that I have seen maybe a fourth of the 236 Friends episodes. That’s just a guess. Leslie and I have divergent TV tastes, so now, in the age of streaming, we try to have something serious and something light to enjoy together. A few weeks ago, we decided, for our light fare, to begin streaming Friends. As I watched the smiling, handsome, and seemingly healthy “Chandler” who splashed in a fountain in the opening credits degenerate into the drawn, 130 pound ghost of late season 2, I decided to read Perry’s book.

I was utterly shocked by much of what I read even early in Perry’s story. His parents were numbered among the “beautiful people.” They met when his father, a musician, was performing at a beauty pageant in which his mother, the previous year’s winner, was to crown the new queen. His parents’ marriage ended early on, and little Matthew grew insecure and troubled. His mother became Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary, while his father went to California to pursue his dream of acting, which resulted in his becoming the “Old Spice Man” of advertising fame. Who knew?

Perry was drinking by 14, was in California pursuing his own acting career by about 16, and had some success. Eventually, he was drinking entire bottles of vodka (“the kind with the handle”) in one night and became so hopelessly addicted to opiates that he required more than 50 per day just to function. Along the way, he used his incredible sense of comedic timing, his unique speech cadences, and his undeniable charm to win one of the most coveted acting roles in Hollywood: “Chandler Bing,” in what was then called Friends Like Us.”

In his memoir, Perry outlines how the main cast members were all warned that their lives were about to change forever and how they all became unbelievably rich. His love for his fellow members of the Friends sextet was unconditional to the end. He reveals his unrequited longing for Jennifer Aniston; how Courteney Cox demanded equal billing for all six actors, when she, with her previous sitcom success, might have demanded more than the others; and how David Schwimmer, already well-known in some circles, matched Cox’s selflessness when he insisted that all six actors negotiate for salary as a unit, rather than separately. Schwimmer, Perry asserts, made them all multi-millionaires. Matt LeBlanc, says Perry, was the cast member who had the least to lose and who grew the most on the show. Lisa Kudrow was the funniest person he ever knew.

As I read Big Terrible Thing, I grew more fond of the show and reflected more about the cult of celebrity and what it must have been like for these six young, beautiful, talented, and mostly unknown people to suddenly be caught up in this whirlwind. Perry, and probably all the rest of them, had prayed for fame and fortune, but that could not have prepared them for the magnitude of what came. I found it endearing that they clung to, and fought for, and defended each other. Never was this more the case than when the others had to close ranks to help their friend Matthew Perry, who descended into his personal hell despite (as he regularly points out) the money and the fame he had so craved.

Big Terrible Thing is not a happy book. It is the story of a talented, successful, and very rich young man who, as he implies, would have traded it all to be normal and to be able to live his life without poisoning himself. It has moments that remind the reader how different our ordinary lives are from those of the rich and famous. In one account, Perry is in a wildly expensive drug and alcohol rehabilitation center (one of many in his lifetime) in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva. The center discharged him with, he thought, an agreement that a California physician with whom they consulted would place him on a maintenance regimen of his favorite opioids. He arrived home to find that the California doctor refused to do so, saying he only had to “consult” with the doctors in Switzerland but did not have to follow their instructions. Perry made a call, put down $170,000 to charter a private jet, and flew back to Switzerland for his drugs that very night.

Not surprisingly, a man living such a life has many opportunities for reflection and to develop bitter hatreds. Perry hated people who said addicts should just “quit.” He hated the “industry” of high-end drug and alcohol rehabilitation facilities that cater to celebrities and the wealthy, considering them opportunistic scams set up to part desperate people from their money. He hated (in no uncertain terms) the manufacturers of colostomy bags because of the poor quality and humiliating failures of their products. Indeed one of the things that finally did induce him to stay clean toward the end was the fear, instilled in him by a brutally honest doctor, that if he required another colostomy it would likely be permanent.

Perry’s years of suffering also left him with sincere loves. He loved his mother and father, despite his rocky relationships with them and the undeniable truth that they often failed him when he was a child. He loved Julia Roberts, one of the most famous and beautiful women in the world, who pursued him when he was only just becoming known and became his girlfriend. He amazed her by breaking it off with her, not because he didn’t want her, but because he was terrified she would desert him. He loved Alcoholics Anonymous because it doesn’t give up on people no matter how many times they fail and because, when he was able, it allowed him to help other addicts. He loved everyone directly connected to Friends. Indeed, there were times when his love for the show and his unwillingness to let down the cast and ruin their lives was the only thing keeping him alive. He loved life. This last seems unlikely, but he said so over and over. He was, at heart, a happy person who lived to make people laugh, something he had been doing almost since he could walk.

At the end of his memoir, Matthew Perry, whom, he had written earlier, you the reader may know by “another name,” professed that he was clean and sober but physically destroyed; covered in scars, both physical and emotional; and quite alone when he might be sitting with any one of a dozen beautiful women watching his children play. Over and over, he said or implied two things: through it all he wanted to live, and money and fame don’t fix you if you’re broken, no matter how ridiculous those without money and fame might find such an assertion.

Matthew Perry, “Chandler Bing,” died last night. He embraced his own troubled life, and he dreaded death, a bigger and even more terrible thing. He drowned in a hot tub at his home. Early reports indicate there were no drugs present. A month ago, I barely would have noticed; now I find myself quite saddened by it all and wishing he could have lived to win back some of what he lost and to help more people. I guess that’s the power of the written word.

Long Shadow Revisited

Miscellany, Personal Tributes, Phi Kappa Tau Fraternity, ,

Five years have passed since I published, on American Path[o]s, “August’s Long Shadow,” a personal memoir of the the events surrounding the 1988 murder of my friend and fraternity brother Thomas Baer (kevinterralbrewer.com/baer/). Looking back, I am struck by the degree to which this one written piece has impacted my conception of who I am and certainly of who I was. My blog is a simple hobby and, admittedly, one on which I expend little energy. With retirement approaching, I daydream that someday it may yet become a going concern, but for now I repost my old research papers and pound out the occasional history-related tale, trying to bring dead presidents and others back to life using essentially the same story telling techniques that have kept me in work and, I am told, successfully so, for nearly three decades. I am content with this.

“August’s Long Shadow” is different, though. I didn’t know it at the time, but it is.

As I have said before, the piece is memoir, not history. When I first began writing, in considerable secrecy, in the spring of 2018, I wasn’t so sure. At the time, I did think someone could, perhaps should, write a history of the case. I had the training to do it, on a modest scale at least, and I had personal connections with many of the principals that would make some of the surely voluminous research easier. All of the research necessary for such an undertaking would not be easy, however, and the prospect of wading through the archives of the Knoxville papers; the Knoxville Police Department; and, God forbid, the University of Tennessee, while working a full-time job and raising children, was daunting, especially when the university, in particular, would have no incentive to cooperate with such a project and might arguably have incentives not to. There were other concerns. A history would have to be nearly perfect, scrupulously documented, and, importantly, could not be written without approaching more distant people, some of whom would surely resent the intrusion. That I was not willing to do. As I, myself, observed in the memoir, we all have uneasy relationships with the scars of August 1988. A memoir would be different. I could simply interview a few good friends who were happy to help; double-check my own recollections (several of which were proved mistaken, requiring revisions in the text) surrounding an event that I, after all, did not personally witness; and consider and then relate in prose how that event impacted my life, the lives of those closest to me, and my beloved fraternity. Self-indulgent, perhaps, but it is a blog, after all. That I, at some level, needed to write such an account never really occurred to me until it was nearly complete.

A few years ago, I sought out and wrote an old friend who was an important part of my life in those long ago days, seeking input on this project and writing, “Too many things happened to me at the same time back then (you too, I think).” I never received a reply; the past does not speak to everyone. I almost envy those it spares, because it never stops speaking to me.

So, I had written a memoir, and to my surprise, I discovered that it peeled away multiple layers of my own young adult life. Every day that I worked on the project, I realized more and more that it was, ultimately, a short, focused autobiography of sorts. It became, in the end, a story not only of a tragedy that ended the life of a friend and disrupted a beautiful part of my young world, but also of how other events—my college graduation (with no family present); my first, troubled days in law school; my brother Tim’s devastating A.L.S. diagnosis (the reason for my lonely graduation); and a new and ill-timed relationship with a much loved girlfriend—intersected that awful, empty event at 1800 Lake Avenue and upset the equilibrium of my happy life.

Of the tragedy itself, I can say that my perspective on it defies the passage of time. I can see and almost feel it all: that dreadful night of phone calls, isolated in my apartment in Memphis, cut off from my suffering and bewildered friends; the melancholy November drive across the state with Ron Powers to visit my emotionally wounded fraternity brothers, my girl, and the scene of the crime, a dim warning from F. Scott Fitzgerald—of all people—fluttering in the recesses of my mind, whispering that what I found there might not be as it was when I left it; a far later visit to the same place to confront the ghosts and to acknowledge that it was, indeed and finally, over. I have heard it said that we write to get to know ourselves. That was my experience in 2018. It wasn’t just introspection, either; a young colleague approached me after reading the memoir and said solemnly, “I feel that I understand you better after reading that.”

“That’s funny,” I thought, “I had the same experience writing it.”

My blog has few readers, and for now, at least, I don’t particularly care, but hardly a week goes by that someone, somewhere in the world doesn’t at least open “August’s Long Shadow.” Over the years, this has led to moving and sometimes chilling exchanges. It has put me in touch with Tom’s sister and, indirectly, his father. Several of Tom’s cousins and other relatives and friends have thanked me for writing about him in a way that illuminated a little of his lovely, quirky nature, and that was touching. Others, total strangers, wrote to chat and to share with me their own memories of August 20, 1988. A woman wrote that she was in the condos across Terrace Avenue on the night of the murder and watched the drama unfold from her window. She was, she said, so traumatized that she left U.T. the next day and never returned. A man named John wrote saying he could supply key information about why the murder occurred. He had been in an altercation with Underwood, the killer, the night before and, since he lived near the Phi Kappa Tau house, speculated that Underwood may have thought he was a member of our fraternity. This explained so much if true, as Tom’s assailant had asked for “John” the first time he entered our house that night. The man said he would contact me in a few days with more information and would consent to an interview. When I did not hear anything, I contacted him. He said he had changed his mind and didn’t want to be involved. Finally, a few years ago, a United States attorney for the Eastern District of Tennessee wrote me seeking contact with the Baer family. The killer, predictably, was in custody again, charged with being a felon in possession of firearms, and the government wanted the Baers to have a say in what would happen next. I passed the information on to Tom’s sister, who has become something of a social media friend, but I didn’t follow up. It had been 33 years; the shadow is long indeed.

Human memory is beautiful, painful, and essential to who and what we are. Unfortunately, it is also something of a blunt tool at times, maybe most of the time, maybe always. Reconnecting, not just with what “happened” (always a tricky proposition in academic history) but with what people felt when it happened, can hone our memories and elevate mere chronicle into something worth chronicling. Some say the more emotion we let creep into our memories the less useful they become in any historical sense. Maybe. But who cares? And do we really want to live without that? As David McCullough, a man who spent his life writing with heart about the past once said, ” No harm’s done to history by making it something that someone would want to read.” In exploring and documenting our own pasts and embracing all the happiness and pain we find there, we can discover all kinds of truths and connections that were hidden just out of sight. What better use could be made of writing? That was my experience in recounting my own memories of the death of Tom Baer—a good young man who did good things, loved everyone without judgment, and inspired love in return—and how it has coursed through so many lives over the decades, including the lives of some who, like me, were not there to witness it but nevertheless found themselves swept up in its wake.

K.T.B.
August 2023

John F. Kennedy at 100

History, Political history, Presidential History

I originally published this piece as a “note” on Facebook on the 100th anniversary of President Kennedy’s birth. Facebook has now discontinued notes and is even deleting many of them, so I am moving this edited version to American Path[o]s.

Some lines are so good that people freely use them, without apology, to adumbrate their own writings. So, I begin by stating that Don Delillo once incisively described the John F. Kennedy assassination as “seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.” I tip my hat to Mr. Delillo and to this sad, wonderful, and accurate metaphor. I use it here with gratitude, but without permission.

Tomorrow, May 29, 2017, marks the 100th birthday of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States. That Kennedy was a deeply flawed person from a deeply flawed family is now well-established. Since the rest of us do not live in the public eye, the idea that we are also deeply flawed people from deeply flawed families may escape us. As with most history, central to any effort to understand the period between January 20, 1961 and November 22, 1963 is the need to move beyond the personal. If we are to understand Kennedy and his times, we must transcend the foibles of his life and the passion of his death.

Though I have a lifetime interest in his assassination, I have never really been a Kennedy groupie, as some are. I do think, though, that the extremes—the heartbroken hagiographers (who insist on viewing his legacy through their pain) on one end, and the right-wing Kennedy haters (who insist on viewing his legacy through their love of military aggression) on the other—have done the history of his 1,036 day presidency a disservice. I have thought a great deal about the “middle ground” between the extremes over the years, and I here present a few casual conclusions.

1. Kennedy loved the United States. Today, hating the United States is almost required for entry into certain parts of the political arena and is required for entry into parts of academia. It can also ensure you a place at the best cocktail parties. Kennedy would have rejected this out of hand. There is every reason to conclude that he was deeply patriotic and that he thought the United States a worthwhile nation that had many reasons to be proud of its history.

2. Kennedy was a pragmatist. I do believe that Kennedy was more than prepared to invade Cuba to remove Soviet missiles in 1962. I also think he understood that this would have grave consequences and that he had a responsibility to prevent those consequences if possible, short of allowing the missiles to remain. We now know that the Soviet Union had tactical nuclear weapons on hand in Cuba and was prepared to use them to slaughter American invasion troops, so, (though he obviously gets no credit for acting on things he did not know) the invasion would likely have resulted in global thermonuclear war. He was, at least, thinking ahead, instead of merely trying to prove how tough he was.

3. Kennedy evolved. On civil rights, on intelligence, on containment, and on other matters, Kennedy showed a tendency to evolve in his thinking. There is evidence he took experience personally, tried to gather as much information as he could—from all sides—and, when necessary (or expedient), grew.

4. Kennedy understood television. I teach my students that it was the shaming effects of television, more than many other factors, that helped move civil rights ahead. Kennedy had an inherent feel for this. He knew how Ole Miss and Wallace and the fire hoses and the German shepherds looked to the rest of the country, and he knew that the old, oppressive systems were no longer sustainable in the television age. Understanding the power of media is not a moral trait, but it might be a desirable trait in a leader. I leave it to others of a more statistical bent to determine whether Kennedy, as president, could have secured the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but I do maintain that he was sincere, if tardy, in his support of it.

5. Kennedy was a cold warrior. When I was at the University of Tennessee, history professor Dr. Jonathan Utley (brother of one-time NBC reporter Garrick Utley) often discussed this in my classes. Today, some marginal historians and (especially) left-of-center assassination researchers, tend to portray Kennedy as a hero of world peace (or their vision of it, anyway). This is far from accurate. Kennedy believed in the projection of American power. This, of course, had good and bad results, but he believed in it. That he embraced the essential pillars of the post-war world: the Truman Doctrine, Containment, the domino theory, monolithic communism, etc., cannot be seriously challenged, though he, more so than some, had a deep aversion to blowing up the earth.

I think an honest assessment of the Kennedy years would bear out all of the above conclusions, vague as they are. I conclude, therefore, that John F Kennedy was a good president and a patriotic and effective leader. He was not a great hero, but few of our great heroes could survive the post-modern (and largely post-American) scrutiny of this age.

For two years and ten months and two days, the United States had at the helm a witty, intelligent, and surprisingly tough leader who openly embraced his learning curve and his mistakes. Whether great or not, I do believe that he aspired to greatness, and I think the thwarting of that effort is, and forever will be, one of the great tragedies of American history.

Kevin T. Brewer

May 28, 2017

President Warren G. Harding: The Search for Meaningful Historiography

History, Political history, Presidential History

I wrote this historiographical essay in 2006 in partial fulfillment of the requirements of a graduate history seminar at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky and to satisfy the terms of my status as a James Madison Fellow. I am currently transferring all such works to American Path[o]s.

When President Warren G. Harding died in San Francisco on August 2, 1923, the country was shocked and saddened. Harding had been a popular president. Within months, however, his reputation began to deteriorate. Government investigators uncovered three major administration scandals, collectively designated “Teapot Dome,” and writers accused him of personal and official improprieties. As the years passed, Harding’s image sank so low that his two immediate successors, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, were hesitant even to dedicate his tomb.[1]

After his death, scholarly and popular writing on Harding proceeded in three phases. The first, lasting through the 1930s, consisted primarily of scurrilous popular works that condemned every facet of Harding’s life, career, and morality. Because of these writings, and the Teapot Dome scandals, by the 1940s, many historians considered Harding the worst president in American history, a designation that, for the most part, has never changed.[2]  

The first of the damaging works was Nan Britton’s The President’s Daughter.[3] Britton grew up in Marion, Ohio, Harding’s hometown. Although she was thirty years his junior, she claimed to have fallen in love with Harding when she was a teenager, a crush that she said became a love affair after she grew to adulthood.[4] According to Britton, she maintained her affair with Harding even after he entered national politics, and she conceived his child on a couch in his US Senate office.[5] After Britton’s daughter was born, Harding became president, and the affair continued, even in the White House. Britton always claimed that Harding had provided handsomely for her and the child during his lifetime. When the president died, however, Britton was penniless, and appealed to his relatives for assistance.[6] When the Hardings provided little help and tried to discredit her, Britton enlisted the support of her employer in writing a book.[7] The President’s Daughter caused a sensation. While it lauded Harding, it also portrayed him as childish and irresponsible. The release of Britton’s memoir, in the midst of the Teapot Dome investigations, did great harm to Harding’s reputation.

The President’s Daughter signaled the beginning of a series of derogatory popular accounts. One of the most critical was William Allen White’s Masks in a Pageant.[8] In Masks, White established the image of Harding as the mindless, pliable tool of big business and big oil interests, a front man maneuvered into position so that his friends could plunder the public coffers. Masks included no footnotes or other documentation. Indeed, White rarely quoted anyone, but simply opined. This lack of evidence is disturbing, considering that many of White’s allegations, such as Harding’s casual flouting of Prohibition, have become established parts of the Harding story.[9] Today, one can scarcely consult a book on Harding without finding credulous references to Masks, despite its lack of verifiability. In this respect, it is among the most important works in Harding historiography.

By 1930, so tarnished was Harding’s image that people were ready to believe almost anything about him. Sensing this, Gaston Means, a former federal agent and a brazen swindler, published The Strange Death of President Harding.[10] Means claimed that Mrs. Harding had hired him to disrupt the president’s involvement with Nan Britton and her child, and to free him from the clutches of “the gang,” members of the administration who were controlling Harding for their own purposes and destroying his presidency.[11] Though he never said it, Means implied that Florence Harding (who died in 1924) had poisoned her husband in San Francisco, to prevent the collapse of his administration and possible impeachment.[12] Like Britton’s book before it, Strange Death caused a furor. It reinforced the image, already prevalent, of a president with an out-of-control administration and personal life. Harding’s reputation sank further.

Academic historians had little to say about Harding in the first decade after his death. The sensationalist popular writers drowned out what they did say. There were occasional scholarly articles, however. In 1930, Preston Slossen became one of the first historians to consider Harding. In “Warren G. Harding: A Revised Estimate,” Slossen found that Harding was not a bad man, yet was wholly inadequate as president.[13] He credited Harding as a conciliator (a common theme among those seeking to credit him with something), but pointed out that the Teapot Dome scandals confirmed Harding’s failures of leadership.[14] A year later, Sherman Blanchard defended Harding in “President Harding: A Reappraisal.”[15] Blanchard, a rare pro-Harding voice of the time, claimed that the scandals, exaggerated in his view, had blinded people to the many accomplishments of the Harding administration. Among these were the Washington Conference, the Bureau of the Budget, and the resolution of hostilities with the Central Powers[16].

Slossen won the debate. In the same year in which Blanchard wrote his article defending Harding, Frederick Lewis Allen published Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties.[17] Although the book dealt with many issues other than Harding, Only Yesterday played an important role in Harding’s increasingly negative historiography. Allen portrayed Harding as an amiable, handsome bumbler, who was too weak-willed to resist his deceitful subordinates or his own libido.[18] Worse yet, Allen considered Gaston Means’s tales about poison to be “very plausible.”[19] Unfortunately for Harding’s image, Only Yesterday was a success, and was widely read. The book remains in print today.

In 1939, Samuel Hopkins Adams, relying on the earlier Harding “research,” along with his own, published Incredible Era: The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding.[20] Adams’s book painted a sorry picture, as the kind and well-liked Harding stumbled into national politics and into the presidency, a role for which he was woefully unprepared. Harding’s death, suggested Adams, came just in time to rescue from disgrace this man who, had he stayed at home in an environment he could grasp, would have been mourned by all who knew him.[21] Few if any books have done greater damage to Harding’s image than Adams’s did. Robert Ferrell said that it “became the accepted account of the Harding era.”[22] Likewise, Robert K. Murray stated that the work became one of the “primary transmission belt[s] by which all the various slanted accounts and oft-repeated myths were carried to later generations.”[23]

The second phase of Harding Scholarship included the years between the publication of Incredible Era, in 1939, and the mid-1960s. During those years, some historians pressed for a more scholarly appraisal of Harding, but frustrating them, initially, was the belief that Harding’s wife had burned nearly all of his papers after his death. The most important contribution during this period was Frederic L. Paxson’s treatment of the Harding administration in American Democracy and the World War.[24] Paxson implied that the qualities that made Harding a good man—loyalty, peacefulness, trust—made him a bad president.[25] He also reversed a quarter-century of caricature by asserting that Harding’s leadership was improving by the time of his death.[26] In addition, Paxson laid some of the foundation for the revisionism of the 1960s by verifying a rumor that had circulated for years that the Harding Memorial Association in Marion possessed a cache of Harding’s papers.[27]

Despite Paxson’s findings, the Harding Memorial Association continued, for many years, to deny access to the archive. However, the public revelation that the papers existed energized the historical community to take a more sophisticated view of Harding. In “The Origins of the Teapot Dome Investigation,” Historian Burl Noggle found Harding indecisive, and believed the president’s inability to sort through advice had been his undoing.[28] Five years later, as the 1965 Harding centennial approached, Noggle issued a challenge to the profession, one that presaged the third phase of Harding historiography. Conceding that the “prevailing stereotype” of Harding may have been accurate, Noggle declared that it was the job of historians to look beyond the generalizations of the past and either verify or revise that stereotype.[29] “Even Harding,” he said, should be subject to historical inquiry.[30]

A second-phase researcher who did find the stereotypes accurate was California Western professor Sidney Warren. In “Harding’s Abdication from Leadership,” Warren not only condemned Harding’s administration for graft, but also disparaged the few modest accomplishments, such as the Washington Disarmament Conference, with which others had traditionally credited him.[31] Warren also condemned the American public of the 1920s for electing such an inadequate president, and for “its perverted attitude towards the scandals,” alleging that Americans reserved their disdain for the government investigators of Teapot Dome, rather than for “the men who had dragged the nation down into the nadir of perfidy.”[32] Warren’s article, reminiscent of the works of the 1930s, was one of the most condemnatory in modern times.

In 1963, The Harding Memorial Association transferred custody of the Harding Papers to the Ohio Historical Society. The following year, the third and continuing phase of Harding scholarship began when the Society opened the papers to historians. The first major work to emerge following the opening of the archive was Andrew Sinclair’s The Available Man: The Life behind the Masks of Warren G. Harding.[33] Sinclair portrayed Harding as a wily and capable politician who understood himself but little else. He had strong points, suggested Sinclair, such as his conciliatory nature and a good personality, but he was unprepared for the White House, and thus it overwhelmed him.[34] Sinclair also echoed a conviction, common among even sympathetic scholars, that Harding should never have been president.[35]

Access to the Harding Papers emboldened historians to expose the scurrilous writings of the past. In “The Harding Muckfest,” Randolph Downes chronicled dozens of Harding portrayals that he considered unfair.[36] Lamenting that “there is much we must unlearn lest we become hypnotized with a false learning that is worse then ignorance,” Downes concluded, “It is high time for a painstakingly honest and scholarly appraisal of the life of Warren G. Harding.”[37] This strong statement came to embody the direction of most modern Harding research.

The most famous modern work on Harding is also the most controversial. In 1963, just as the Harding papers arrived in Columbus, Massachusetts writer Francis Russell, who was in Marion to research Harding, inadvertently discovered a large collection of sexually explicit love letters written by Harding to Carrie Phillips, the wife of one of his best friends.[38] When word spread that Russell intended to quote from the letters in his planned biography, the Harding Memorial Association and the Ohio Historical Society sued him and obtained a court order enjoining the publication of the letters in any form.[39] By 1968, Russell had finished his book but remained under the injunction. In frustration, he decided to publish The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in his Times, deleting the content of the Phillips letters, and replacing it, character-by-character, with dashes.[40] This unique solution brought Shadow great publicity, though some historians, notably Robert K. Murray, saw the dashes as a cynical publicity stunt.[41]

Russell structured Shadow around “four mysteries” of Harding’s life: his alleged affairs with Nan Britton, Carrie Phillips, and other women; his alleged poisoning by his wife; the fate of his papers; and, most important to Russell, the long-standing rumor that Harding had black ancestry.[42] Russell believed that the rumor of mixed race (which surfaced in a sordid manner during the 1920 campaign), was a “shadow” that haunted Harding all his life, influencing his self-confidence and interpersonal relationships.[43] Russell’s efforts disappointed many academic historians. He portrayed Harding as a pitiable figure—a kind and lonely man who was out of his depth. There was little documentation and little evidence of the use of Harding’s papers. The book was more than 600 pages long, but scholars found that it focused too much on the tawdry aspects of Harding’s life, and ignored his policies. Robert K. Murray complained, “There was more on Nan Britton and her alleged wrigglings in a White House closet than on the nation’s South American policy.”[44] In “Historiography and Warren G. Harding,” Ohio Wesleyan Professor David Jennings added, “Readers who enjoy the center spread of Playboy will be content with the amazing amount of space devoted to sex.”[45] In the same article, Jennings called for a new Harding historiography, based solidly on the newly opened archive. He concluded, “Historians should take Harding from the bedrooms, smoke-filled rooms, card tables, golf courses, and drinking parties and give greater consideration to public policy, administration, and philosophy of government—information about which can be readily found in the Harding Papers.”[46]

As if in answer to Jennings, in the 1970s, several historians produced new biographies of Harding. The most important was Robert K. Murray’s The Harding Era. Coming two years after the publication of The Shadow of Blooming Grove, Murray sought to distance himself from Russell and all other writers who focused primarily on sex and scandal.[47] Murray concluded that Harding did a decent job as President, better in terms of accomplishments than many others did.[48] He was far from the worst President; in fact, suggested Murray, few have accomplished so much in so little time.[49] Still, Murray’s was a balanced approach, and, like others before him, he conceded that Harding probably should never have been president.[50]

In addition to biographies, the 1970s brought an increased number of scholarly Harding articles. In “Who was Warren G. Harding?” Louis W. Potts wrote a detailed survey of Harding scholarship, concluding that many historians had ignored the modern efforts at revisionism. Potts did not close on a hopeful note. “One wonders,” he wrote, “the worth of detailed studies if generalists persist in using older, more comfortable concepts, explanations, and modes of expression.”[51] He did predict, however, that historians would remain interested in Harding for as long as they continued to view the 1920s as “the dawn of modern America.”[52]

By the mid-1970s, historians were providing more Harding policy research. For years, ever since the papers controversy, many articles had focused on historiographical concerns. New articles combined historiographical commentary with substantive policy analysis. In “Was There a ‘New’ Harding?” Robert Accinelli resurrected the Paxson thesis of the late 1940s, which stated that Harding, by the time of his death, was maturing in office.[53] In the context of the debate over US involvement in the World Court, Accinelli found that Harding had, indeed, “grown in determination and initiative,” but remained conciliatory in other critical areas, notably his response to the uncooperative Senate.[54] Two years later, Howard A. DeWitt praised Accinelli’s article in “The ‘New’ Harding and American Foreign Policy.”[55] DeWitt showed that Harding was a clever and principled centrist and realist, whose pragmatism enabled him to outmaneuver, and even neutralize, the powerful isolationist Senator Hiram W. Johnson.[56] As with most modern articles about Harding, DeWitt concluded with a call for historians to dispense with “outdated stereotypes,” and to develop a new and more balanced Harding historiography.[57]

Heeding the calls for new historiography, in 1996, Robert Ferrell undertook to analyze the various deficiencies in Harding’s image, including the political scandals and myths. The result was The Strange Deaths of President Harding, its title a sardonic swipe at Gaston Means. Ferrell found that Harding was by no means the worst president, and that historians have unfairly evaluated him. “Harding has deserved better from history,” said Ferrell. “His fate does not seem at all fair.”[58] Ferrell began with a new look at Harding’s physical death. Contrary to the official finding that the president died of a stroke, Ferrell determined that Harding succumbed to heart disease, worsened by incompetent medical care.[59] He found nothing to substantiate the poisoning suggested by Gaston Means.[60] Ferrell then chronicled the demise of Harding’s reputation as a good and compassionate leader. He determined that White, Adams, Britton, and the seemingly endless string of scandals and scandalmongers all combined to cause this second, and unjustified, “death.” Ferrell seemed to ask why Harding is the only president whom historians judge solely by his failures.

In the same year in which Ferrell published Strange Deaths, Gary Alan Fine, a University of Georgia sociologist, brought a new perspective to Harding research with the publication of “Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence.”[61] One of the most innovative works in Harding historiography, “Reputational Entrepreneurs” sought to explain, from a sociological perspective, why despite his concrete achievements, people remember the humble Harding as the worst president in American history. Fine asserted that Harding’s supporters helped to destroy his reputation when they failed to rally to his posthumous defense.[62] This allowed “reputational entrepreneurs,” those with a political stake in his ruin, to seize control of his legacy.[63] Harding’s enemies then exaggerated his personal flaws, retroactively imposed that image on his policies, and cemented the image of the worst president. Fine concluded that not only celebrities and politicians are subject to this kind of social profiteering; if conditions are right, ordinary people, too, he said, can fall victim to reputational manipulation.[64]

In surveying Harding historiography, some clear themes emerge. To their discredit, Professional historians remained conspicuously silent during the early phase, abandoning the field to sensationalist amateurs. Non-historians set the agenda—to the detriment of Harding’s legacy. Thus, while some historiographies can safely ignore popular accounts, Harding historiography would be incomprehensible without an understanding of them. Opportunists such as Britton and Means, and bitter social critics such as White and Adams, so firmly established Harding’s low popular image that they shifted the burden of proof to the shoulders of any researcher who might attempt to defend Harding.

When professional historians turned their attention to Harding, after World War II, they found that they had few resources with which to work. Without access to the Harding Papers, they did little to dispel the image created in the earlier decades. Historians such as Paxson and Noggle could upbraid the profession for its shoddy neglect of an American president, but the popular press continued to repeat the old stories from the 20s, and always there were more politically motivated detractors, such as Sidney, to lend scholarly validation to them.

The modern era of Harding scholarship continues. It began with the opening of the Harding papers and with those who, like Sinclair and Russell, thought they were reconsidering Harding, only to resurrect new Harding scandals and perpetuate the old ones. Finally, however, scholarship is focusing less on professional soul-searching about past neglect of Harding, and more on his substantive successes and failures. Scholars such as Murray, Ferrell, Accinelli, and others have at least initiated a conversation that may lead to a more balanced assessment of the “worst” American president.

 

Bibliography

Accinelli, Robert D. “Was there a ‘New’ Harding? Warren G. Harding and the World Court Issue, 1920 –1923.” Ohio History 84 (Autumn 1975): 168 –81.

Adams, Samuel Hopkins. Incredible Era: The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1939.

Allen, Frederick Lewis. Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1931.

Blanchard, Sherman. “President Harding: A Reappraisal.” Current History 35 (October 1931): 41 –47.

Britton, Nan. The President’s Daughter. New York: Elizabeth Ann Guild, 1927.

DeWitt, Howard A. “The ‘New’ Harding and American Foreign Policy: Warren G. Harding, Hiram W. Johnson, and Pragmatic Diplomacy.” Ohio History 86 (Spring 1977): 96 –114.

Downes, Randolph C. “The Harding Muckfest: Warren G. Harding—Chief Victim of the Muck-for-Muck’s-Sake Writers and Readers.” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 39 (Summer 1967): 5 –37.

Ferrell, Robert. The Strange Deaths of President Harding. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1996.

Fine, Gary Alan. “Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence: Melting Supporters, Partisan Warriors, and Images of President Harding.” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 5 (1996): 1159 –93.

Jennings, David H. “Historiography and Warren G. Harding.” Ohio History 78 (Winter 1969): 46 –49.

Means, Gaston. The Strange Death of President Harding:  From the Diaries of Gaston B. Means, a Department of Justice Investigator. With May Dixon Thacker. New York: Guild Publishing, 1930.

Murray, Robert K. The Harding Era: Warren G. Harding and His Administration. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969.

Noggle, Burl. “The Origins of the Teapot Dome Investigation.” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (September 1957): 237 –56.

———. Teapot Dome: Oil and Politics in the 1920’s. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1962.

Paxson, Frederic. American Democracy and the World War. Vol. 3, Postwar Years: Normalcy, 1918 –1923. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1948.

Potts, Louis W. “Who was Warren G. Harding?” Historian 36 (August 1974): 621 –45.

Russell, Francis. The Shadow of Blooming Grove:  Warren G. Harding in His Times. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968.

Schlesinger, Arthur M. “Our Presidents: A Ranking by 75 Historians.” New York Times Magazine, 29 July 1962, 12 –13, 40 –43.

Sinclair, Andrew. The Available Man: The Life behind the Masks of Warren Gamaliel Harding. New York: Macmillan, 1965.

 Slossen, Preston W. “Warren G. Harding: A Revised Estimate.” Current History 33 (November 1930): 174 –79.

Warren, Sidney. “Harding’s Abdication from Leadership.” Current History 39 (October 1960): 203 –07, 219.

White, William Allen. Masks in a Pageant. New York: Macmillan, 1928

              [1] Francis Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times (New York:  McGraw-Hill, 1968), viii, 633, 640.

              [2] Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Our Presidents:  A Rating by 75 Historians,” New York Times Magazine, 29 July 1962, 12-13, 40-43.

              [3] Nan Britton, The President’s Daughter (New York:  Elizabeth Ann Guild, 1927).

              [4] Britton, The President’s Daughter, 5.

              [5] Britton, The President’s Daughter, 75.

              [6] Britton, The President’s Daughter, 323.

              [7] Britton, The President’s Daughter, 424.

              [8] William Allen White. Masks in a Pageant (New York:  Macmillan, 1928).

              [9] White, Masks, 408.

              [10] Gaston B. Means. The Strange Death of President Harding: From the Diaries of Gaston B. Means, A Department of Justice Investigator, With May Dixon Thacker (New York:  Guild Publishing, 1930).

              [11] Means, The Strange Death of President Harding, 130, 248.

              [12] Means, The Strange Death of President Harding, 260 –65.

              [13] Preston Slossen, “Warren G. Harding: A Revised Estimate,” Current History 33 (1930):174 –79.

              [14] Slossen, “Warren G. Harding,” 179, 177 –78.

              [15] Sherman Blanchard, “President Harding: A Reappraisal,” Current History 35 (1931): 41 –47.

              [16] Blanchard, “President Harding,” 45 –46.

              [17] Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York:  Harper & Brothers, 1931).

              [18] Allen, Only Yesterday, 105 –07.

              [19] Allen, Only Yesterday, 112.

              [20] Samuel Hopkins Adams. Incredible Era:  The Life and Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding (New York:  Houghton Mifflin, 1939).

              [21] Adams, Incredible Era, 441 –42.

              [22] Robert H. Ferrell, The Strange Deaths of President Harding   (Columbia, MO:  University of Missouri Press, 1996), 149.

              [23]Robert K. Murray, The Harding Era:  Warren G. Harding and His Administration   (Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 523.

              [24] Frederic L. Paxson, American Democracy and the World War, vol. 3, Postwar Years: Normalcy, 1918 –1923 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1948).

              [25] Paxson, American Democracy, 384 –88.

              [26] Paxson, American Democracy, 388.

              [27] Paxson, American Democracy, 371; Louis W. Potts, “Who was Warren G. Harding?” Historian 36 (August 1974): 631n37.

              [28] Burl Noggle, “The Origins of the Teapot Dome Investigation,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 44 (September 1957): 253.

              [29] Burl Noggle, Teapot Dome: Oil and Politics in the 1920’s, (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University): 224.

              [30] Noggle, Teapot Dome: Oil and Politics, 224.

              [31] Sidney Warren, “Harding’s Abdication from Leadership,” Current History 39 (October 1960): 206.

              [32] Warren, “Harding’s Abdication,” 207.

              [33] Andrew Sinclair, The Available Man: The Life behind the Masks of Warren G. Harding (New York: Macmillan, 1965).

              [34] Sinclair, The Available Man, 298 –99.

              [35] Sinclair, The Available Man, 299.

              [36] Randolph C. Downes, “The Harding Muckfest: Warren G. Harding—Chief Victim of the Muck-for-Muck’s Sake Writers and Readers,” Northwest Ohio Quarterly 39 (Summer 1967): 5 –37.

              [37] Downes, “The Harding Muckfest,” 34.

              [38] Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, 650 –53.

              [39] Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, 658.

              [40] Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, ix.

              [41] Murray, The Harding Era, 531.

              [42] Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, xiv.

              [43] Russell, The Shadow of Blooming Grove, 26, 372.

              [44] Murray, The Harding Era, 531.

              [45] David H. Jennings, “Historiography and Warren G. Harding,” Ohio History 78 (Winter 1969): 47.

              [46] Jennings, “Historiography,” 48.

              [47] Murray, The Harding Era, 531 –33.

              [48] Murray, The Harding Era, 533 –37.

              [49] Murray, The Harding Era, 536 –37.

              [50] Murray, The Harding Era, 536.

              [51] Potts, “Who was Warren G. Harding?” 645.

              [52] Potts, “Who was Warren G. Harding?” 645.

              [53] Robert D. Accinelli, “Was there a ‘New’ Harding? Warren G. Harding and the World Court Issue, 1920 –1923,” Ohio History 84 (Autumn 1975): 168, 181.

              [54] Accinelli, “Was there a ‘New’ Harding?” 181.

              [55] Howard A. DeWitt, “The ‘New’ Harding and American Foreign Policy: Warren G. Harding, Hiram W. Johnson, and Pragmatic Diplomacy,” Ohio History 86 (Spring 1977): 96.

              [56] DeWitt, “The ‘New’ Harding,” 113 –14.

              [57] DeWitt, “The ‘New’ Harding,” 114.

              [58] Ferrell, The Strange Deaths of President Harding, vii.

              [59] Ferrell, The Strange Deaths of President Harding, 4 –9.

              [60] Ferrell, The Strange Deaths of President Harding, 30 –49. Ferrell devoted an entire chapter to the poison theory.

              [61] Gary Alan Fine, “Reputational Entrepreneurs and the Memory of Incompetence: Melting Supporters, Partisan Warriors, and Images of President Harding,” American Journal of Sociology 101, no. 5 (1996): 1159 –93.

              [62] Fine, “Reputational Entrepreneurs,” 159, 1177 –82.

              [63] Fine, “Reputational Entrepreneurs,” 1162 –64.

              [64] Fine, “Reputational Entrepreneurs,” 1188.

An Open Letter to the People of Big Sandy, Tennessee and to All Friends and Supporters of Big Sandy School

Miscellany, Personal Tributes

Dear friends,

My earliest memory of Big Sandy School is a scary one.

When Tim, my older brother, was in the first grade, my mother brought all three of us, with Greg just a two-year-old, to the school library for a PTC meeting. Someone had the idea to take all the children who were big enough to the gym to run and play while the adults did Parent-Teacher Conference business. One of the aging, gray-haired ladies with cat-eye glasses who seemed to run everything in that long-ago time agreed to supervise. Greg stayed behind, of course, but Tim and I joined in with some other kids and went into that vast, cavernous space with the devil’s face painted in the middle of the floor. I was four and had almost never been away from my mother, except with relatives, and I was not a fan of the devil’s face (no cartoon devil he), so I protested—loudly. Concluding that I was too young to participate without being a pain, the old lady sent me back. Someone escorted me into the door of the school building and left me there. The hall lights were not even on. All good mothers can recognize their children’s shrieks, and no one had a better mother than I did, so my shrieks came loudly and clearly, and Mom came running. I was none the worse for wear, but I do remember it, and Mom told that story with a flash of anger for the next fifty years.

That was in 1969.

I suppose Big Sandy School has always been a part of me.

I was a student at Big Sandy from 1971 until I graduated in 1983. Believe me, it was no part of my plan to return. I loved living in Knoxville, and I wanted to be a lawyer, but like the protagonist in Mr. Holland’s Opus (or like Gabe Kotter, if you prefer a less ostentatious simile) I felt at times that fate was conspiring behind the scenes not just to push me into a classroom, but to push me back to my old school. My brother Tim’s long struggle with Lou Gehrig’s disease, my discovery that I did not like the law nearly as much as I liked the history of the law, and changes in my own life led to a teaching license in 1990 and, in the fall of 1995, to Big Sandy School. I didn’t seek the job; it sought me. I didn’t even apply for it. Sometimes the world works that way.

For the first three years I was a teacher at Big Sandy, I did not even have a classroom. Many of you remember what it was like there in those days, with K-12 in one building: halls so crowded between classes that you could barely move; courses meeting in dressing rooms, storage rooms, and abandoned bathrooms; teachers having to vacate their rooms during planning time so someone else could teach there. In the fall of 1998, the new high school building opened. I found my new quarters, unfurled my maps, grabbed a cup of coffee, and room 208 at the end of the hall became the nerve center of history education on the north end of Benton County.

Now, 28 years after I returned, the halls aren’t crowded anymore, there are rooms to spare, and I have been teaching two classes per day in Camden since August. Whatever accidents or designs of fate led me, all those years ago, back to where I started and into room 208, where no one else has ever taught, have changed course. On May 19, I will teach my last class at Big Sandy. Next year, along with the high school student body, I will be relocating full time to Camden Central High. I knew this day was coming, but I have heard people talk about it since the 1970s, and when you hear something discussed for that long it becomes difficult to think of it as real.

I have long cast nervous glances at the changing landscape of my workplace, with so many old friends and mentors gone and so much energy lost, and wondered how it would all turn out. In my personal daydream, Big Sandy High’s last day always came on my last day as a teacher. I would make a General MacArthur-like valedictory address to the masses, bask in their applause and adulation, and the school and I would fade away together. It wasn’t to be, though. It’s too soon to retire, and now I face a difficult task, a task complicated by my age, of which I am increasingly aware. I have to transplant what I hope was a worthwhile career, one that touched people’s hearts and minds, into a new and bigger place where the magic—and at times it did feel like magic—may not work. If the magic fails, it will not be the fault of the people of Camden Central High School, where I have good friends, some of whom were once colleagues at Big Sandy. The people there have welcomed me with warmth and support, and the administrators of both the school and the district have done everything in their power to smooth this transition.

Twenty-eight years ago, I was at the bottom of my own school’s seniority list; today I am number 25 for the entire district. For all those years moving up the list, I am indebted to many people associated with Big Sandy School, but for fear of leaving someone out I am going to name only one. It was Mrs. Diane Padgett who reached out to me and offered me this job; she always, always believed I had “it,” whatever “it” is, and she was happy to have me back. That was a life-changing phone call, and I am eternally grateful to her.

I will not lie; it is going to be painful to walk out of BSHS. I have probably spent more time in my Big Sandy School classroom than in any home I have ever lived in, and I suspect I have spent more of my life on the school’s few acres of land than in any other place. I am ambivalent as to whether that denotes success or failure on my part. I have been able to impact a lot of lives there, and I do hope that most of those people believe they have benefited from my efforts. There have been many times when I reflected that I once had “bigger” dreams, but then I look around and see people with “bigger” lives who have little to feel good about at the end of the week. I never had that problem. My work at our little school was difficult, frustrating, and sometimes infuriating, but it was work that mattered, and that, my friends, is priceless.

So, thank you, Big Sandy, for your tireless support of my efforts to teach at your—our—school. When you pause to think of it, it is quite something to have people entrust their children to you, day after day, for so many years. It was a real honor, and I learned at least as much from the students as they learned from me.

To the surprise of no one, I will close with an anecdote from history. In February 1861, with the country going to pieces, president-elect Abraham Lincoln left his adopted hometown of Springfield, Illinois to travel to the nation’s capital, “not knowing when or whether ever” he would return (he did not). He left to me a better closing line for my career at Big Sandy than I could ever write for myself:

“My friends, no one, not in my situation, can appreciate my feeling of sadness at this parting. To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything.”

K.T.B

May 2023

I had a Teacher: A Tribute to Mary Lou Marks on her Retirement

Miscellany, Personal Tributes 
I originally published this tribute in 2017 as a “note” on Facebook. Facebook no longer supports notes and has even deleted them. I narrowly managed to save this one and am publishing it here on my blog for safekeeping. Mrs. Marks has since unretired and re-retired. No matter what she does, this tribute is from the heart and will stay the same.

One Thursday night, 34 years ago this month, I stood capped and gowned in a graduation reception line at my high school. Among those who came by to congratulate my classmates and me was our English teacher for the 8th, 9th, 11th, and 12th grades. In her polished (read: non-country) delivery, she posed an unexpected question: “Mr. Brewer,” she began, employing a formality to which I was little accustomed, “have you ever seen The Graduate?” 

I had not. 

She quickly explained that in the graduation party scene at the beginning of the famous 1967 film, Mr. McGuire, a business executive of some kind, takes young Benjamin Broddock aside and gives him one cryptic word of advice for his future: “plastics.” 

“My word to you, Kevin,” she continued, “is nonfiction.” 

This woman, whom I had known for years, had admired, and had sometimes feared, went on to say, with the same candor she might use if addressing an adult peer, that I had talent, that I had gifts, that I had something to contribute. Even as an unsophisticated 18-year-old from a microscopic town, I had the discernment to realize that, in this hurried exchange in a sweltering cafeteria, I had received a special dispensation from someone whose opinion mattered—someone who did not trade in idle flattery on special occasions, or on any occasion. 

I first became aware of Mary Lou Marks as a young child. She was the “big kids’” English teacher who, each morning as I waited for the bus, passed my house in a brown Ford Pinto. She seemed intimidating, and the buzz was that she was “different.” I was not optimistic; there were few greater sins than being “different” in 1970s Benton County. I, for one, wanted no part of it. 

It was not until I appeared in her class for eighth grade English, in the fall of 1978, that I came to know her personally. My friends and I did not know what to make of her. It was true: she was not like us. We were as country as turnip greens; she, decidedly, was not. It was clear she was from the North, but she wasn’t a Yankee of the “aunt so-and-so moved up north during the war” school. I knew many of those kinds of Yankees and Yankee poseurs. They were from Akron or Detroit or Cleveland and spent much of their time there making money and pretending they were not from here, before retiring to move back here to live on the cheap among the common rabble. This was different. Her dialect was unfamiliar, rich and precise, and while she made it look easy, it always seemed as though she had chosen each word with great care. When she spoke, it seemed I was not merely hearing the words, but hearing the years of thought, education, and experience that had cultivated the words. I soon pieced together the essential facts of the story: this woman was an honest-to-God New Englander—perhaps the first I ever knew—and more than that, she was an intellectual. She was from Connecticut, for God’s sake! Were people from Connecticut? For her, New York was a real place to which one might dash for a little Christmas shopping. To us, it was dimly remembered scenes from Family Affair, or, more recently, the credits for All in the Family. 

She was not like us. 

With some exceptions, there are few more rude and worrisome creatures than middle-school age boys. This interloper with the careful diction, the big vocabulary, and the love of poetry wasn’t going to push us around! I languidly joined in the resistance, but my heart wasn’t in it. My parents did not tolerate bad behavior if they knew about it, and, in truth, I was different too. While my friends were hunting or fishing or raising hell with older kids, I was sitting at home building models, pondering time travel, and reading the World Book Encyclopedia. I had a college undergraduate’s knowledge of US presidential history by age 10 and a college graduate’s knowledge of it by age 14. I wrote stories. I loved words. My curiosity knew no bounds. In time, I began to make common cause with this scholarly young English teacher. 

And we worked. Perhaps the most shocking thing about Mrs. Marks’ class was that we were not just always occupied but were always occupied with something that mattered. This was a revelation. Once per week, we learned ten new vocabulary words. I can still remember some of them—can in fact still see her writing them on the board in that old firetrap classroom with the giant, wavy glass window. What words they were! Macabre, limn, complement (not compliment!), vapid, esoteric. Mrs. Marks would write the phonetic spelling, complete with the vowel signs, first, and we would try to pronounce them before we saw the actual spelling. This was one of my favorite activities. I found I was quite good at it, and, to my delight, she thought so too.  

The years went by. Mrs. Marks was my English teacher for both the 8th and 9th grades. She took off the 1980-1981 school year to have a child. I was not amused, but I was glad to see her back for my junior year. By then, I was confident, enthusiastic, and a devourer of books. There seemed to be a special level of understanding between us. When she instructed the class to choose a major work for our junior book report, I came to her with John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I knew of Steinbeck, but I knew nothing about the book, and she seemed concerned. After giving it some thought, she said she was going to let me report on it. East of Eden was “mature,” she said, adding, “I probably would not let any other student do it, but I’ll let you do it.” Flattered, I threw myself into this painful novel, with its tortured psyches; its notorious, fetishistic brothels; and its deeply flawed characters. As I read, and as the story became more troubling, I sensed the trust that Mrs. Marks had reposed in me with this assignment, and the risks she was taking. When the time came to write my report, I dispensed with euphemisms, boldly incorporating the word whorehouse into my text. I felt that I was taking a chance using such an offensive term in a book report for a female teacher (or any teacher), but she trusted me, so I trusted her. She never said a word about it. She treated that daring word as though she had run across it in The New Yorker, rather than in a high school junior’s book report. More than three decades later, I can still recall how it felt to be treated that way—like an adult, maybe even a budding intellectual. 

In my senior year, we did more writing, more reading, and more speaking. The latter has served me well. Here, too, I took chances because Mrs. Marks allowed it. For my spoken piece, which I was to annotate for emphasis, breathing, and inflection, I chose the ghastly shooting scene from William Manchester’s The Death of a President:  

The Lincoln continues to slow down. Its interior is a place of horror. The last bullet has torn through John Kennedy’s cerebellum, the lower part of his brain. Leaning toward her husband Jacqueline Kennedy has seen a serrated piece of his skull—flesh-colored; not white—detach itself. At first there is no blood. And then, in the very next instant, there is nothing but blood . . .  

Today, it is easy to imagine a teacher rejecting a request to work with such material. Mrs. Marks knew it mattered to me, so she allowed it. I guess that is why I still remember it so clearly. In retrospect, I can see that her test for such things was good faith. Anything worthwhile that you wanted, in good faith, to do, she encouraged. Accordingly, that spring, she signed my final yearbook:  

Kevin- 

‘The cure for boredom is curiosity.  

There is no cure for curiosity.’ 

Keep your open mind and  

inquiring spirit and the  

world will be yours. 

 

Mary Lou Marks 

 

As my final year of high school drew to its close, I knew I was well-prepared for the verbal and literary challenges of college, and I knew it was time for a change. I was ready. I guess Mrs. Marks felt the need for a change too. I was not surprised to learn that my last day as a student at Big Sandy School was to be her last there as a teacher. As I went away to college, she was settling into her new position as the librarian and media specialist at Camden Central High. She has been there ever since, compiling material, transitioning to electronic media, and—unsurprisingly—running writing workshops for the students there.  

I never became the great writer, but I write still—nonfiction, mostly—and I did become a teacher. Though not at the same school, Mrs. Marks and I have now been colleagues in the Benton County school system for 22 years. During that time, we have had many opportunities to share ideas, written passages, and social criticism; Facebook has made this easier still. Now, at long last, she has decided to retire. I know what she will do: she will travel, and raise her flowers, and visit museums and art exhibits, and watch her grandchildren grow up. And she will read, and read, and read. Behind her, she will leave several generations of men and women from a pair of small towns who will never forget what she gave to them: eyes and ears attuned to words; the ability to connect the imaginary to the concrete; the capacity to gaze across time and space through a book or a story or a poem and to feel the still-beating hearts of writers long dead. 

I hope the people of Benton County know how fortunate they have been to have, in their schools, this cultured, literate teacher, who has given selflessly to them, their children, and probably their grandchildren, for nearly four decades. A few years back, Mrs. Marks commented about my vocabulary and my love of history and words. I replied to her the only way I felt I could. I said simply, “I had a teacher who cared about words and beauty and culture and taught me to do the same.”  

I know that in this I am not alone. 

Well done, Mrs. Marks. 

Well done. 

 

 

Ten-Dollar Bills and Letters of Congratulation: The Unlikely Journey of the Sick Chicken Case

Miscellany, Political history, Presidential History

I originally wrote this as a seminar paper for a graduate level American history class at Murray State Univeristy in 2004. I presented it at the annual Phi Alpha Theta conference, held in conjunction with the American Historical Association conference, in Philadelphia in 2006. I am now publishing it to American Pathos.

When Franklin Delano Roosevelt took the oath of office as president, on a rainy March 4, 1933, and dramatically declared to a desperate public that the only thing it had to fear was “fear itself,” few could have imagined that a major cornerstone of Roosevelt’s economic plans would, or could, fall victim to legal arguments involving, in part, the manner in which chickens could be pulled from a coop. That is what happened two years later, however, when four brothers, Joseph, Alex, Martin, and Aaron Schechter, businessmen from one of the grittiest and most notoriously corrupt enterprises in New York, the “live poultry” trade, were indicted, tried, and convicted of violating codes established under Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act. The United States Supreme Court case that eventually resulted, A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corporation v. United States, was a stunning victory for the Schechters and for opponents of the New Deal. In one fell swoop, it invalidated the National Industrial Recovery Act, the hundreds of codes that had been fashioned in response to it, and the entire regulatory philosophy upon which it rested. The decision is regularly blamed—or credited—with undermining the major thrust of the New Deal and for spurring Roosevelt, in 1937, to pursue his costly “Court-Packing” initiative. Continue reading Ten-Dollar Bills and Letters of Congratulation: The Unlikely Journey of the Sick Chicken Case →